Nothing predicted it in El Pardo either, a few kilometres from Madrid, where the headquarters of the Brunete Armoured Division were located, the most powerful, modern and battle-hardened unit of the Army, and also the closest to the capital. Nothing predicted it in any case until about five in the afternoon, at the moment when, almost at the same time that Lieutenant Colonel Tejero overcame with the help of Captain Gómez Iglesias the suspicions of the officers recruited to accompany him to the Cortes and that General Milans informed his subordinates of the imminence of the coup, an anomalous meeting was taking place in the office of the commander of the division, General José Juste. The meeting was anomalous for several reasons, the first of which is that it had been called in a great rush by a mere major, Ricardo Pardo Zancada, whom the previous day General Milans had put in charge of inciting the Brunete Division to join the rebellion and occupy the streets of Madrid. Pardo Zancada was then a prestigious commissioned officer who had participated in agitation against the government and was close to the colonels’ plot or kept close relations with some of them, especially with Colonel San Martín, his immediate superior and chief of staff of the division; his ideological and personal connection with Milans has also been close ever since the general commanded the Brunete Division in the second half of the 1970s. This explains how on Sunday morning Milans had summoned him urgently and that, without asking for clarifications or hesitating for an instant, after giving Colonel San Martín an account of that untimely phone call, Pardo Zancada jumps in his car and leaves for Valencia. Upon the major’s arrival in the city after an almost four-hour drive, Milans tells him the plan for the following day just as the following day he’ll tell his generals, and he entrusts him with the mission of inciting his unit to rebellion with the help of San Martín and Luis Torres Rojas, a general who had taken part in preparatory meetings for the coup and had held the command of Brunete before being removed from his post for a threat of rebellion and assigned to the military government of La Coruña; although he was confident that to incite the division to rebellion he’d need only the halo of an undefeated warrior that surrounded him and the insurrectional air they breathed there, as in almost all Army units, Milans also made Pardo Zancada listen to a telephone conversation with General Armada from which the major deduced that the King was informed of the coup. Pardo Zancada paid attention with all five senses and, in spite of the uncertainty he was plunged into by Milans’ words and the dialogue between Milans and Armada — the plan struck him as poor, disjointed and unripe — he enthusiastically accepted the assignment; his questions had not cleared when at midnight, back in Madrid, he informed San Martín, but his enthusiasm had not waned either: both had been waiting for this moment for years, and both agreed that the clumsiness and improvisation with which the coup seemed to have been prepared did not authorize them to back out and prevent the triumph they undoubtedly considered certain.
The following morning was the most frenetic of Major Pardo Zancada’s life: almost single-handedly, without the help of Torres Rojas — whom he tried to phone over and over again at his military government office in La Coruña — without the help of San Martín — who had left first thing for a training camp near Zaragoza to supervise tactical exercises in the company of General Juste — Pardo Zancada prepared the Brunete Armoured Division for a mission that he still didn’t know and sketched out a programme of operations that each of its units should carry out: seizing the radio and television stations, taking up advance positions in strategic locations in Madrid — in the Campo del Moro, the Retiro, the Casa de Campo and the Parque del Oeste — their subsequent deployment in the city. Mid-morning he finally managed to speak with Torres Rojas, who rushed to catch a regular flight to Madrid dressed in his combat uniform and tank-driver beret, ready to stir his former unit to rebellion with his reputation as a tough leader loyal to his officers built up during his recent years in command. Pardo Zancada picked up Torres Rojas at Barajas airport just after two in the afternoon, and shortly afterwards had lunch with him in the headquarters canteen in the company of other commanders and officers surprised by the unexpected visit by their former general, at the same time that, in the Santa María de la Huerta parador, where he was lunching with General Juste on their way to Zaragoza, Colonel San Martín received a prearranged warning from Pardo Zancada according to which everything in the division was ready for the coup. At this moment San Martín must have hesitated: to return with Juste to headquarters meant risking that the commander of the Brunete might abort the plot; not to return meant perhaps excluding himself from the glory and yields of the triumph: the ambition to enjoy those, allied to the arrogance of the once all-powerful head of the Francoist intelligence services and his knowledge of the difficulties inherent in moving a division if the one doing it is not its natural commander, he convinced himself he could handle Juste and that he should return to his command post at El Pardo, which would eventually turn out to be one of the causes of the failure of the coup. This is how at half past four in the afternoon Juste and San Martín make a surprise reappearance at headquarters and this is how a few minutes before five, after troops have been confined to barracks, Major Pardo Zancada finally takes the floor to address the commanders and officers of all ranks he himself has summoned to that anomalous meeting and who now pack Juste’s office. Pardo Zancada’s speech is brief: the major announces that in a matter of minutes an event of great significance will occur in Madrid; he explains that this event will be followed by the occupation of Valencia by General Milans; he also explains that Milans is counting on the Brunete Division to occupy the capital; also, that the operation is directed from the Zarzuela Palace by General Armada with the consent of the King. The reaction of the majority of the meeting to Pardo Zancada’s words wavers between repressed joy and expectant but not dissatisfied seriousness; the commanders and officers await the verdict of Juste, whom Torres Rojas and San Martín try to win over to the cause of the coup with calming words and appeals to the King, Armada and Milans, and whom San Martín convinces not to call his immediate superior, General Quintana Lacaci, Captain General of Madrid, who is not aware of anything. After a few minutes of anguished hesitation, during which the uprising of 1936 goes through Juste’s head and the possibility that, if he opposes the coup, his officers might wrest away his command of the division and execute him then and there, at ten past five in the afternoon the commander of the Brunete Armoured Division makes an anodyne gesture — some of those present interpret it as a frustrated attempt to adjust his tortoiseshell glasses or to smooth his meagre grey moustache, others as a gesture of consent or resignation — pulls his chair up to his desk and pronounces three words that seem to be the penultimate sign that the coup will triumph: ‘Well, carry on.’
At the very same time, barely five hundred metres from the Cortes, at Army General Headquarters in the Buenavista Palace, everything is ready for the final signal to occur. There, in his new office as Deputy Chief of the Army General Staff, General Alfonso Armada has just arrived from Alcalá de Henares, where that morning he had participated in a celebration commemorating the foundation of the Parachute Brigade, has changed out of his ceremonial uniform and into his everyday one and waits but not impatiently, without even turning on the radio to listen to the debate of investiture of the new Prime Minister, for some subordinate to burst in and tell him of the assault on the Cortes. But what Armada — perhaps the most monarchist military man in the Spanish Army, until four years ago the King’s secretary, for the last several months many people’s candidate in the political village of Madrid to lead a coalition or interim or unity government — is especially waiting for is the subsequent call from the King asking him to come to the Zarzuela and explain what’s going on in the Cortes. Armada has good reasons to expect it: not only because he’s sure that, after almost a decade and a half of being his most dependable confidant, the King trusts him more than anyone else or almost anyone, but also because after his painful exit from the Zarzuela the two had reconciled and in recent weeks he has warned the monarch on a great many occasions about the risk of a coup and insinuated that he knows its ins and outs and if it finally occurs he could control it. Then, once in the Zarzuela, Armada will take charge of the problem, just like he used to do in the old days: backed by the King, backed by the King’s Army, he will go to the Cortes and, without having to make too much of an effort to convince the political parties to accept a solution that in any case the majority of them already considered reasonable long before the military took to the streets, he’ll liberate the deputies, form a coalition or interim or unity government under his leadership and bring tranquillity back to the Army and the nation. That’s what Armada expects will happen and that’s what, according to the golpistas’ predictions, will inevitably end up happening.