“What I will do is taxi halfway to the terminal,” Martín interrupted him. “Then I will stop, get out, and raise my hands . . .”
“And that’s when they’ll shoot you,” Clete said.
“. . . and do whatever I can to stall the Horse Soldiers. The priority is to keep el Coronel Perón alive. The more time you have to get in the Lodestar, start the engines, taxi to the runway—”
“So long, Bernardo. It’s been nice to know you.”
“God be with you, Cletus,” Martín said.
“You sonofabitch,” Clete said.
—
The runway lights came on. There was no time to argue with General Martín.
Clete moved the stick hard over, stood the Storch on its left wingtip, straightened out, dropped the nose, and put the flaps down.
With a little bit of luck, I can get this onto the ground before those bastards figure out what’s going on.
—
Enrico was standing by the open door of the Lodestar when Clete taxied the Storch up to it.
Clete jumped out, ran to Rodríguez, and grabbed his arm.
“Get el Coronel into the airplane and close the door.”
“Sí, Don Cletus.”
Clete got into the Lodestar, made his way to the cockpit, and threw the MASTER BUSS switch. The instrument panel lit up.
Clete was vaguely aware that the Storch was moving past him, onto the taxiway.
He looked back and saw Enrico boarding with Tío Juan.
The port engine hesitated, belched flame, shook, and started to run very roughly. Clete moved the throttle forward and the Lodestar began to move. By the time he reached the runway, he had the starboard engine running.
Clete got the Lodestar to the end of the runway and turned around. He saw that not one of the engine gauges was in the green. He didn’t know what would happen when he moved the throttles to TAKEOFF POWER, but there were a number of possibilities, most of them unpleasant.
He put his hand on the throttles and shoved them to TAKEOFF POWER.
The Lodestar began to roll.
When he passed the taxiway, he had a moment’s glance at General Martín, who was standing by the Storch with his arms raised in the universal sign of surrender.
And he saw something else he hadn’t seen in a very long time: the muzzle flashes of machine guns, at least three of them, maybe more.
And then he was past the taxiway.
“So long, Bernardo,” he said softly. “It’s been nice to know you. Vaya con Dios.”
He inched the yoke forward and sensed the tail-dragger wheel leaving the runway.
He felt life come into the controls, eased the yoke back, and a moment later the rumble of the landing gear stopped.
He reached for the landing gear retract lever, pulled it, and when he got a green light, pulled a little farther back on the yoke and made a shallow climbing turn away from the airfield.
The last thing he saw as he took off—and he was flying low enough and slow enough to see it clearly—was a silver Lockheed Constellation parked out of the way near the end of the runway. There was an American flag painted on each of the three vertical stabilizers, and the legend HOWELL PETROLEUM CORPORATION painted across the fuselage.
The old man’s right. If I had any sense at all, I would be in the States.
Tending to the family business instead of being here, getting shot at.
—
Enrico came into the cockpit five minutes later, just as Clete thought he might have solved a problem he hadn’t thought of at all until he’d begun his climb to cruising altitude: How do I navigate to Mendoza without charts?
Every SAA pilot of course had his own set of charts, consisting of maps of wherever he might be expected to fly, the radio frequencies of the control towers at airports to which he might fly, plus the frequencies of the rare Radio Direction Finding transmitters he might encounter en route to wherever he was going, as well as all sorts of other interesting and necessary information.
Clete’s charts were in his office at Aeropuerto Coronel Jorge Frade, where he had expected to pick them up before flying to Berlin at nine.
There of course had been no opportunity to pick up his charts during this brief visit to Aeropuerto Coronel Jorge G. Frade.
All he had was his memory of many flights to Mendoza.
He knew, for example, that Mendoza was to the west of Buenos Aires.
He knew the only Radio Direction Finder transmitter en route to Mendoza was in San Luis, which was, give or take, five hundred miles from Buenos Aires, and that it had a range of no more than fifty miles—when it worked.
But there were roads, masquerading as highways, leading to Mendoza. National Route 8 and National Route 7, which ran more or less parallel across Argentina from Buenos Aires. After passing through Rio Cuarto, Route 8 jogged to the south and joined Route 7 about a hundred miles east of San Luis.
Clete was reasonably—not absolutely—sure he could simply follow the highways.
He had just found what probably was Route 8, and had turned the Lodestar so that he would be flying to the left of it, when Enrico came into the cockpit.
Frade motioned him into the co-pilot’s seat. When Enrico had put on the headset, he said, “I wondered where you were.”
“Putting a bandage on el Coronel.”
“A bandage? What happened to him?”
“He’s got a cut on his face.”
Enrico drew his index finger across his cheek to show where. Clete saw dried blood on Enrico’s fingers.
“Is it serious? What happened?”
“It’s not as serious as he thinks it is. He was squealing like a stuck pig.”
“What happened?”
“We took at least nine hits from those machine guns,” Rodríguez said matter-of-factly. “Five of them went straight through the plane, in the right side and out the other. One of them took out the window where el Coronel was sitting. A piece of that artificial glass . . .”
“Plexiglas,” Clete furnished.
“. . . got him here.” He drew his index finger across his face from his right ear to the chin. “Sliced him open pretty good, but I don’t think it got any muscles. There’s always a lot of blood with head wounds.”
“But you’ve bandaged him?”
“Sort of, Don Cletus.”
“What does that mean?”
“When I went to the first aid kit by the door, it was gone. Somebody must have stolen it.”
“So?”
“So I went to the toilet. You know those pads women use, Don Cletus?”
Frade nodded.
“I used one of those.”
If I laughed, or even smiled broadly, at the mental image of the vice president of the Argentine Republic sitting there feeling sorry for himself while holding against his face whatever they call a Kotex down here, I would really be a sonofabitch, wouldn’t I?
That thought was immediately replaced by a far more sober one: Would you be laughing, Red Skelton, if one of those bullets had hit him in the head?
[FOUR]
Aeropuerto Coronel Jorge G. Frade
Morón, Buenos Aires Province, Argentina
1915 16 October 1945
“I regret that you have been wounded, mi General,” the major of the Horse Rifles said, looking down at General de Brigada Bernardo Martín. “I have sent for a surgeon.”
Martín, who was lying on the taxiway ten meters from the Storch, raised himself on his elbow and looked down at his left leg. There was a lot of blood, but he saw that he had been lucky. The machine gun bullet had gone into the fleshy part of his thigh and he didn’t think it had hit either artery or bone.
“Not as much as you will later,” Martín snapped, and immediately thought, That was not smart, Bernardo. He has a gun.
And is apparently so shaken by this that he hasn’t taken mine.
Another major appeared, this one a cirujano mayor, a doctor.
“I’ll put a quick tour
niquet on your leg, mi General, and then give you something for the pain.”
Good. It’s starting to throb. That will soon be followed by pain.
But I can’t take any morphine; I need to think.
“No morphine,” Martín ordered.
“Let’s get your trousers off,” the cirujano mayor said.
The Horse Rifles major suddenly raised his hands in the universal sign of surrender.
Martín looked toward the terminal building.
Major Habanzo and Captain Garcia of the BIS, pistols drawn, were running toward them, followed by what looked like an entire company of Patricios.
The Horse Rifles major dropped his pistol onto the taxiway.
Martín immediately thought how that could have been reported: “General Bernardo Martín died of a second wound suffered when his captor, who never should have been allowed to get near anything more lethal than a water pistol, dropped his pistol onto the taxiway, whereupon it went off.”
“You’ll be shot,” Habanzo said to the Horse Rifles major.
“Not by you,” Martín said.
“How bad is el General?” Habanzo demanded of the cirujano mayor.
“He is in no immediate danger, and we can have him at the hospital in twenty minutes,” the doctor said.
“I’m not going to the hospital,” Martín announced.
“Mi General, you’re wounded!” Captain Garcia said.
“I noticed,” Martín said. “Garcia, get a stretcher and bearers and take me to Señor Frade’s office in the terminal building.”
“And the cirujano mayor?” Habanzo asked. “What do we do with him?”
“You don’t do anything with him. But what you do now is seal off the airport. Nobody in or out.”
“Including the passengers who were going to fly to Berlin?”
“Including everybody,” Martín said.
“Mi General, you really should go to the hospital,” the cirujano mayor said.
“Do what you’re told, Major,” Martín said. “Get me on a stretcher and get me to Don Cletus’s office!”
—
“Aside from what you did to my trousers, which were nearly new, what’s the damage?” Martín, after finding Frade’s bottle of Rémy Martin and taking a long swig, inquired of the cirujano mayor.
“You were lucky, mi General. There is simply a good deal of muscle damage. You will be on crutches for six weeks or so. But there is no bone damage, no arterial damage. I repeat, you belong in the hospital. You should be x-rayed and you should have a couple of liters of blood. And you should not be drinking that.”
“It has reduced the pain from excruciating to barely tolerable,” Martín said. “And with that in mind, I think I will have another little taste of the Rémy Martin before you admit the people waiting to see me. I would not want them to see me, as the senior officer present, drinking on duty.”
Martín picked up the bottle of cognac again and took another healthy swallow.
“Please let my people in, Cirujano Mayor,” he then said.
Major Habanzo and Captain Garcia came into the office followed by a teniente coronel of the Patricios—whose face Martín knew but whose name would not come—and Hans-Peter von Wachtstein, who now was wearing the uniform of an SAA first officer.
“You first, please, el Coronel,” Martín said. “What’s the situation?”
“The airfield is secure, mi General. The press is at the gates demanding entrance and to know what’s going on. I have told them nothing except that they will be arrested if they try to force their way in.”
“And the Horse Rifles?”
“They have been disarmed and placed in Hangar Two, mi General.”
“Habanzo, what about the passengers for the Berlin flight? Where are they?”
“In the passenger terminal, mi General. And they demand to know what’s going on.”
Flight 2230 was scheduled to depart at nine P.M. It would fly across the Atlantic Ocean to Dakar, and then to Lisbon, Portugal, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, and ultimately Berlin. Its passengers would include a half-dozen senior Argentine diplomats and other government officials; three priests, one of them a Jesuit; and seven prominent Argentine businessmen. The pilot-in-command was supposed to be SAA Captain Cletus Frade.
“What happens now, Peter, without Cletus?” Martín asked. “Can you go without him?”
“No,” von Wachtstein said simply.
“Why not? He’s not the only SAA pilot.”
“The four pilots here now are qualified to fly the airplane, but none is certified for Berlin. During the flight we were going to teach them how to fly across the Russian Zone into Berlin.”
“You and Frade were to teach them, you mean.”
“Right.”
“Why can’t you do that yourself?”
“Because it has to be done by the pilot-in-command, and the pilot-in-command has to be a captain. I am only a first officer.”
“SAA has other captains certified to fly into Berlin, right?”
“Five other captains.”
“Why can’t we use one of them?”
“We need two. We’d have to find them and get them out here to the field. That would take at least two hours. Is that what you want me to do?”
Martín bit off the reply that came to his lips.
You’re more than a little drunk, Bernardo. Your mind is not as badly muddled by all that Rémy Martin as it would have been by morphine. But there’s no question that while the four ounces—at least—of the cognac you gulped down took some edge off my pain, it was at the price of at least partial intoxication.
Which is probably why I think I am facing a Kasidah situation.
And almost certainly why I suddenly clearly remember discussing the Kasidah with Frade, when both of us sat in his library suffering the effects of having consumed most of a bottle of Rémy Martin . . .
—
“Cletus,” Martín had said, “have you ever heard of the Kasidah?”
“The what?”
“I think of it as a splendid one-sentence philosophy for people in our profession.”
“We say, ‘Don’t look in the mirror,’” Frade said.
“Meaning, ‘Never forget your enemy doesn’t think like you do’?”
“Precisely.”
“The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi says, ‘The truth is a shattered mirror strewn in myriad bits and each believes his little bit the whole to own.’”
Frade had considered that for a moment, and then replied, just a little thickly: “I like that. I adopt it herewith. ‘The truth is a shattered mirror,’ et cetera—whatever you said—‘so don’t look in the mirror.’”
“Better yet,” Martín had replied, “‘don’t look in the mirror, because the truth,’ et cetera, et cetera.”
“Okay. Who was the genius who thought this up? Some Arab?”
“Actually, Haji Abdu El-Yezdi was the pen name of an Englishman, Sir Richard Francis Burton.”
“The dirty book guy?”
“I gather you’re familiar with the Kama Sutra?”
“I was thinking of the translation of One Thousand and One Nights with all the dirty parts left in it. What’s the Kama Sutra?”
“An ancient Hindu book offering illustrated practical instructions on how to perform sexual intercourse.”
“How did I miss that?”
“I can’t imagine.”
“Wait. I know,” Cletus had said. “I’m a Texan. We don’t need practical instructions on sexual intercourse. It comes to us naturally. But I’m not surprised you Argentines need an illustrated ‘How to Screw’ manual.”
Before Martín could reply to that, Doña Dorotea Mallín de Frade had come into the library, causing a change of subject.
—
. . . The situation here at Aeropuerto Coronel Jorge G. Frade, Martín now thought, is like a broken mirror. And not only do all the players believe they have the truth, but they are determined that no one else learn any
thing about their truth.
The official purpose of the Argentine diplomats and other government officials going to Germany was to facilitate the return of Argentine nationals who had been trapped in Germany to their homeland.
Martín was deeply suspicious of this on-the-surface noble purpose, wondering why so many of his countrymen had been trapped there in the first place. Until Argentina had declared war on Germany on March 27, 1945, not quite six weeks before the Germans surrendered unconditionally on May 7, Argentines, as neutrals, had been perfectly free to leave Germany simply by taking a train to Sweden or Switzerland.
The stated purpose of the Argentine businessmen in going to Germany was to protect their business interests in what had been the Thousand-Year Reich.
Commerce between Germany and Argentina had been one-way since 1940. The Germans had bought all the Argentine foodstuffs, leather, and wool that they could. But nothing had gone the other way because the Germans had nothing to sell. And what the Germans had bought they paid for with U.S. dollars, British pounds, and Swiss francs. The reichsmark, for all practical purposes, was worthless. And now all that remained of foreign currency in what had been the Reichsbank was controlled by the Allies, who were holding it for reparations. Germany could not buy anything from anyone, and had nothing to sell to anyone.
So why did just about every SAA flight to Germany carry Argentine businessmen?
The answer to this question, in Martín’s mind, also applied to the question of why the government was so interested in repatriating its citizens from Germany.
It was one word: corruption.
He didn’t know for sure—although he had come up with a number of pretty good scenarios—how the businessmen or the government officials were enriching themselves illegally by traveling to Germany, or repatriating Argentines, but there was no question in his mind that they were.
He didn’t care.
Protection of the Argentine Republic was his business, not corruption. There had been corruption in Argentina from its beginnings. The army and the navy—usually—stood aloof from it, and generally military officers lived by a Code of Honor. Martín tried to.
The three priests on Flight 2230 were something else. He knew that the Jesuit answered to Father Welner, and at least one—probably both—of the others also did. What they were doing—arranging for Nazis and their families to find refuge in Argentina—was illegal, but the priests were serving Holy Mother Church, not enriching themselves personally.
Empire and Honor Page 27
