The Honor of Spies

by W. E. B Griffin

  “You’re a soldier, mi coronel. You know as well as I do that things sometimes get out of hand. The SS officer who let things get out of hand at Tandil paid for it with his life.”

  “I almost paid for his letting ‘things get out of hand’ with my life,” Perón said.

  “It was a very bad situation, mi coronel. We cannot ever let something like that happen again.”

  “No, we can’t. If you came here to suggest that I be anywhere near where the special shipment will be landed, or have anything to do with it, I must disappoint you.”

  “Mi coronel, it was not my intention—everyone recognizes how important you are to all those things we are trying to do, and that we would be lost without you—to suggest that you go to Samborombón Bay, or that the Mountain Troops go to the beach. We are prepared to handle the landing operation ourselves.

  “But what I was hoping is that you would see the wisdom of authorizing another ‘road march exercise’ for Schmidt’s Mountain Troops. In addition to the special shipment, there will be another SS security detachment. An officer and ten other ranks—”

  “To be taken to San Martín de los Andes, you mean?”

  “And we realize that both you and el Coronel Schmidt have expenses”—Cranz took a business-size envelope from his pocket and extended it to Perón—“which we of course are happy to take care of.”

  After a moment, Perón took the envelope and glanced inside. It was stuffed with U.S. one-hundred-dollar bills.

  There were 250 of them, none of them new. They had come from the currency in the special shipments. The $25,000 in American currency was equivalent to almost 100,000 Argentine pesos, a very substantial amount of money. And American dollars were in demand. German Realm Marks had virtually no value in the international market.

  For a moment, Perón appeared to be on the verge of handing the dollar-stuffed envelope back to Cranz.

  “You will handle the landing operation itself?” Perón asked. “You can do that?”

  “I believe we can, mi coronel. But looking at the worst-case scenario: Even if something went terribly wrong on the beach, this would not involve the Mountain Troops at all. They wouldn’t be anywhere near the beach.”

  Perón considered that for a moment.

  Then he slipped the envelope into his right lower tunic pocket. The deal had been struck. The Mountain Troops would take the special shipment and the SS men to San Martín de los Andes.

  Cranz wondered how much—if any—of the $25,000 Perón would share with Oberst Schmidt.

  Probably none.

  “Tell me about the kidnapping planned for Señor Mallín,” Perón said. “I should have heard about that; I should not find myself in the position of having to ask.”

  “Excuse me, mi coronel?”

  “I think you heard me, Cranz.”

  “I don’t know a Señor Mallín.”

  “He is Cletus Frade’s father-in-law,” Perón said. “And Don Cletus apparently believes that someone is planning to kidnap him.”

  “Mi coronel,” Cranz said after a just-perceptible hesitation, “I know nothing of an attempt to kidnap anyone.”

  Perón’s eyes tightened; it was obvious to Cranz that Perón didn’t believe him.

  “I give you my word of honor as a German officer, mi coronel.”

  Perón looked into his eyes for a long moment.

  “For lunch today, I went to the Yacht Club,” Perón said. “As we drove up, I saw Señor Mallín’s car. He drives a Rolls-Royce drop-head coupe—”

  “Excuse me, a what?”

  “Canvas roof,” Perón explained impatiently. “It was parked on the curving drive leading up to the main entrance of the Yacht Club. Behind it was a Ford station wagon, of the Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo. In it were three men whom I recognized as former soldiers of the Húsares de Pueyrredón. Inside the foyer, at the door to the main dining room, there was another. He recognized me from our service together. I asked him what he and the others were up to. He said, ‘Don Cletus believes the goddamn Nazis are going to try to kidnap Don Enrico Mallín. If they try it, we will kill them.’ ”

  “ ‘The goddamn Nazis’?” Cranz blurted.

  “They believe ‘the goddamn Nazis’ assassinated el Coronel Frade,” Perón said pointedly. He paused, then added, “As you well know, Cranz.”

  “Mi coronel, all I can do is repeat, again on my officer’s honor: I know nothing of a planned kidnapping.”

  “Has it occurred to you, Cranz, has it occurred to anyone, that if something like that happened, Cletus Frade would certainly make good on his threat to ensure that the photographs taken of me at Tandil would be published?”

  “Of course it has, mi coronel. And we will do nothing that would cause that to happen.”

  “If those photographs came out—and/or the photograph Cletus Frade has of the map of the South American continent after the Final Victory, which Brigadeführer von Deitzberg was kind enough to give me—not only would my usefulness to the cause end, but General Rawson would be inclined—almost be forced—to seriously consider declaring war on the Axis.”

  “Mi coronel, again, on my word of honor . . .”

  “I don’t think this kidnapping is a product of my godson’s feverish imagination, Cranz. As we have learned, he is a very capable intelligence officer. He didn’t move his wife to Mendoza so she could take in the mountain air.”

  “Well, I’ll get to the bottom of this. You have—”

  “I know, your word,” Perón interrupted. “And tell Ambassador von Lutzenberger this, Cranz. I have taken certain actions to protect myself in the event something like this happens. The result of that would be more than a little embarrassing to everyone in the German Embassy. Understand this: Juan Domingo Perón is not expendable.”

  “I will get to the bottom of this.”

  “Once you tell me the date of the arrival of the special shipment, I will get word to you when and where the Mountain Troop convoy will be.”

  Perón pushed open the door to the elevator foyer and gestured for Cranz to go through it.

  “Buenas noches, Señor Cranz. I will expect to hear from you shortly.”

  [FOUR]

  Aeropuerto Coronel Jorge G. Frade

  Morón, Buenos Aires Province, Argentina

  1205 27 September 1943

  Cletus Frade was pleased but not really surprised to see SAA’s Lodestar Ciudad de Mar del Plata taxi up to the terminal. Flight 107, daily nonstop service from Mendoza, was right on schedule; it was due at noon.

  Five minutes one way or the other really cuts the mustard.

  Neither, three minutes later, was he really surprised to see a visibly pregnant, truly beautiful blond young woman carefully exit the aircraft as the first deplaning passenger.

  Now that he had time to think about it, when he had spoken with Dorotea on the Collins late the night before, she hadn’t protested at all when he said there was really no reason for her to come to Buenos Aires to see him off. That should have told him she intended to come to Buenos Aires to see him off and was not interested in his opinion on the subject.

  He stepped out of the passenger terminal as she walked to it.

  “My God, you’re beautiful!” his wife greeted him. “Now I’m really glad I came!”

  Frade was wearing the uniform of an SAA captain.

  “Humberto’s idea,” Clete said, kissing Dorotea. “They’re going to take pictures. I feel like the driver of one of those sightseeing whatchacallums. . . .”

  “What?”

  “At the New York World’s Fair, 1939-40, they had little sightseeing trains that ran all over. The drivers had uniforms just like these. Powder blue with gold buttons and stripes. They’d announce things like, ‘And to your left, ladies and gentlemen, is the General Motors Pavilion.’ ”

  “You’re right,” Dorotea said, and giggled. “They did. God, don’t tell anyone.”

  “You were there?” he asked, surprised.

  “Daddy took
us,” she said. “We could have met.”

  “In 1939, you were fourteen years old.”

  “We went in 1940, I was fifteen.”

  “In 1940, I was a Naval Aviation cadet en route to Pensacola. I wasn’t interested in fifteen-year-old girls.”

  “Only because you hadn’t met this one.”

  “Possibly,” he agreed.

  “When do you go?” she asked.

  He looked at his wristwatch.

  “Seventeen minutes,” he said. “Time and SAA wait for no man. Even General Rawson.”

  “He’s coming?”

  “He’s supposed to be coming. And so, if we’re really lucky, is my Tío Juan.”

  “If he does, behave.”

  “I will, if you promise to be on the three-thirty flight back to Mendoza.”

  “I’ll be all right, don’t worry about me.” Dorotea looked past Clete and nodded toward a convoy of cars driving onto the tarmac. “Here’s the president.”

  “And there’s God’s representative,” Clete said, pointing to the terminal, from which the Reverend Kurt Welner, S.J., had just emerged. “If he tries to sprinkle my airplane with holy water, I’ll have Enrico shoot him.”

  “Don Cletus, you should not say things like that,” Enrico said, genuinely shocked.

  “He’s coming over here,” Dorotea said.

  “He’s seen my uniform.”

  “Good afternoon, Father,” Dorotea and Enrico said almost in unison.

  “I need to talk to you, Cletus,” Welner said with no other preliminaries.

  “About what?” Clete asked.

  “It’s a good thing he loves you,” Dorotea said. “Otherwise, your tone of voice would make him angry.”

  “I need a favor,” the priest said.

  “Oh?”

  “More than that, to use your phrase, I’m calling in all my favors.”

  “What do you want?” Frade asked.

  “Have you got room for one more?”

  “You want to go to Portugal?” Frade asked incredulously.

  “And if you don’t have room, start deciding who really doesn’t need to be aboard,” the priest said.

  “What the hell is going on?”

  “I’d rather tell you privately.”

  “I have no secrets from these two, as you damned well know. What’s going on?”

  “I have heard from Rome . . . ,” Welner said.

  “By telegraph, or a voice from a burning bush?”

  “Cletus!” Dorotea snapped. “For God’s sake!”

  Welner put up a hand to silence her.

  “The Vatican . . . perhaps the Holy Father himself . . . has a message for the cardinal-archbishop they both don’t wish to entrust to the usual means of communication, and also wish to get to the cardinal-archbishop as soon as possible.”

  “And you just happened to mention in passing to the cardinal-archbishop that you just happen to have a friend who just happens to be going to Portugal and then coming right back?”

  Welner nodded.

  “What’s the message, I wonder?” Clete said more than a little unpleasantly. “ ‘Hey, Archbishop, you got a spare room?’ ”

  “Clete, what are you talking about?” Dorotea snapped, both in confusion and in anger.

  “Maybe the Holy Father has decided it’s time to get out of Dodge,” Clete said. “The Germans are occupying Rome, except for Vatican City, and the only thing keeping them out of Vatican City are maybe one hundred—maybe a few more—Swiss Guards wearing medieval uniforms and armed with pikes.”

  “I can’t imagine any circumstance under which the Holy Father would leave the Vatican at this time,” Welner said. “And what’s keeping the Nazis out of the Holy City is world opinion.”

  “‘World opinion’?” Clete parroted. “Wow! Now, that should really scare Hitler.”

  “I won’t beg you, Cletus,” Welner said.

  Frade met the priest’s eyes for a long moment.

  “Enrico, take his bag and put it, and him, on the airplane,” Frade said. “And then you stay on it.”

  “Thank you,” Father Welner said.

  “De nada,” Clete said sarcastically, the Spanish expression for “It is nothing.”

  Capitán Roberto Lauffer, the heavy golden aiguillettes of a presidential aide-de-camp hanging from each shoulder, quickly walked up to them. He kissed Dorotea, and quickly shook hands with Father Welner and Cletus, and then announced, “Cletus, the president wants to wish you luck.”

  Dorotea went to the stairway—now draped in bunting—with him.

  “Behave yourself,” Clete said. “I’ll be back in a week.”

  “What was all that about with Father Welner?”

  This may be the last thing I’ll ever say to my wife; I’m not going to lie to her.

  “He was lying to me, sweetheart. I don’t know why, or what about, but he was lying to me.”

  “Then why are you taking him?”

  “I owed him, and he called the debt.”

  She laid her hand on his cheek.

  “When you get to the top of the stairs, remember to turn, smile, and wave at the people.”

  “Take care of our baby.”

  “Take care of our baby’s father.”

  He kissed her very gently on the forehead. She squeezed his hand, and then he quickly went up the stairs.

  At the top, he turned and waved at the crowd on the tarmac.

  There was applause and cheers.

  Undeserved.

  I am really not qualified to fly this thing across the Atlantic Ocean.

  What’s probably going to happen is that I’m going to dump this thing somewhere in the ocean and take all these people with me.

  On the way to the cockpit, he stopped by Father Welner’s chair.

  “Start praying. We’re going to need it.”

  The copilot—What the hell is his name?—was already strapped into his seat and wearing headphones.

  “Add 150 kilos to our gross weight,” Clete ordered as he sat down. “We have an unexpected extra passenger.”

  “Sí, Señor.”

  Gonzalo Delgano had naturally—he was, after all, SAA’s chief pilot—wanted to sit in the left seat. Or failing that, if SAA’s managing director pulled rank and wanted to be pilot-in-command, to at least be copilot on the first transatlantic flight.

  Clete had told him that it just didn’t make sense for both of them to be on the same flight, which stood a fairly good chance of winding up in the drink. Clete promised Delgano he would be pilot-in-command on the first paying-passenger flight.

  There was a seed of truth in Clete’s position. It was also true that Clete believed a commanding officer should not order anyone to do anything he was not willing to do himself.

  But the real reason was that there were some things about the flight Clete did not want Delgano to know. Not that Delgano was going to run off at the mouth. But he probably would have told el Coronel Martín that Clete expected to be met off the coast of North Africa by U.S. Army Air Force P-38 fighters flying off the Sidi Slimane U.S. Army Air Force Base in Morocco.

  Word of the Connie’s departure from Buenos Aires would reach Spain long before the airplane did. Colonel Graham—and Allen Dulles, which made it twice as credible—thought that there would be a genuine risk of the Germans sending fighters to shoot down the Constellation—possibly, maybe even probably, from Spanish airfields that they secretly were using.

  “The Argentine brave, but foolhardy, attempt to emulate German TransOceanic commercial air service, sadly, but predictably, ended in tragedy. Their airplane simply vanished somewhere in the Atlantic.”

  The American fighters would be guided to the rendezvous point by the Collins radio. They would home in on the airplane much as an airplane would home in on a landing field.

  Once the rendezvous had been made, SAA Flight 1002 would home in on a radio-direction-finding signal from another Collins radio secretly installed in the U.S. Embassy building in Lisb
on, which was conveniently located less than a mile from Lisbon’s Portela Airport.

  The P-38s would linger over the Portuguese coast long enough to ensure that the Constellation had landed safely. If Allen Dulles suspected that all was not as it should be at the Portela Airport, the radio in the embassy would order the Constellation to divert to Sidi Slimane, to which it would be escorted by the American fighter planes.

  Clete stuck his head out the window and saw that the bunting-draped stairway had been pulled back.

  He fastened his shoulder harness, put his headset over his ears, and pushed the switch activating the public address system.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” he announced, “this is your captain. Welcome aboard SAA Flight 1002, one-stop service to Lisbon, Portugal. We are about to take off. Please fasten your seat belts.”

  He paused, then smiled and went on. “Then place your head between your knees and kiss your ass good-bye.”

  The copilot looked at him in shock.

  Clete repeated the message in Spanish.

  The copilot first smiled, then giggled, then laughed almost hysterically.

  “Get on the horn and get us taxi and takeoff,” Clete ordered.

  Still laughing, the copilot reached for his microphone.

  “Flight engineer, you awake?” Clete asked over his microphone.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well, let’s wind up the rubber bands and see if we can get this big sonofabitch off the ground.”

  “Starting Number Three, sir.”

  There was the whine of the starters and then the sound of an engine—somewhat reluctantly—coming to life. The aircraft trembled with the vibration of a 3,250-horsepower Wright R-3350-DA3 engine running a little rough.

  In a moment, it smoothed out.

  “Starting Number Four.”

  The second engine started more easily.

  “I have Three and Four running and moving into the green,” Clete said.

  “Confirmed, Captain.”

  “We are cleared to taxi, Captain,” the copilot reported. “We are Number One for taxi-off.”

  “Thank you. Disconnect auxiliary power.”

  “Disconnecting auxiliary power.”