CHAPTER FOURTEEN
INTERRUPTED PERFORMANCE
They spent a good part of the next day sleeping, although they still had plenty of time to talk over their plans. They found it more difficult than ever to sit in front of the cave doing nothing when they knew so many things must be going on elsewhere. They wondered if the local tenor would succeed with his scheme of wrecking the dynamo. They asked each other a dozen times if old Tomaso would really be able to steal that Gestapo colonel’s uniform. Max even spent some time practising his German, trying to get a note of authority and command into it.
“If I can just try to be as tough and nasty and mean as possible,” he said, “then I may begin to sound a little bit like a Gestapo colonel.”
“Well, you’ll be talking to German soldiers,” Scotti put in, “and you ought to find it easy to act nasty to them.”
The lieutenant was much better now, and he could talk almost normally. There was a throbbing pain in his head regularly, and his broken leg was uncomfortable, but the thing that bothered him most was his inability to take any active part in the proceedings.
“You don’t let me do anything, Dick,” he protested. “It’s you who figured out every plan so far, as well as carrying them through. I needn’t have come along on this trip at all.”
But Dick was relieved to be able to have the advice and counsel of his lieutenant in his complicated plans. Each one of them was a long gamble, and he knew it. He wanted the benefit of every bit of advice he could get. And it was Lieutenant Scotti who figured out the method Max was later to use in diverting the attention of the guards at the dam so that Slade could get in to place his dynamite.
That action was planned for that night—the fifth night of their stay behind the enemy lines. At dawn of the sixth night the dam was scheduled to be blown up, and they wanted to get their dynamite in place twenty-four hours ahead of time. Slade had figured that he could place the dynamite, run a wire down the pipe so that it extended about one inch from a hatch opening. Then, on the last night, he could hook up another length of wire to that, lead it away to his detonator, and set it off.
But they did not know that the Germans had decided there were Americans in the neighborhood. The decoding experts had not been able to decipher completely the radio messages which Tony had sent, but they had gotten enough of a hint to know that they were reports on German troop and supply movements through Maletta. And they felt sure that military men were making those reports.