Why the Vatican was spiriting Nazis—and Hungarian, French, Belgian, Norwegian, Danish, Austrian, and other collaborators with the Thousand-Year Reich—out of Europe so they could escape the justified wrath of the Allies wasn’t clear. Except that it had to do with the Vatican’s war against the Communists, who they believed were the Antichrist.
Just about everyone in Argentina was Roman Catholic and, if asked, would agree with Holy Mother Church that the Communists were the Antichrist. After all, that’s what the Pope had said.
But virtually none of his countrymen thought of the Antichrist as a real threat to Argentina. Russia was a long way away, and the Soviet Union didn’t even maintain diplomatic relations with the Argentine Republic. And besides, the Germans had really bloodied the Russian Bear’s nose. They would be too busy rebuilding their own country to even be thinking about turning Argentina into one more Soviet Socialist Republic.
Frade—and the reports he had received from a BIS officer he had had in the Argentine embassy in Berlin, and from the SAA pilots who worked for the BIS and had been to Germany—had convinced him that the Soviet Union posed a real and immediate threat to Argentina.
Martín knew enough about the Soviets to know how skillful they were in taking advantage of chaos. He didn’t think they had anything at all to do with the plot to assassinate Juan Domingo Perón, but if it succeeded or the stopping of it resulted in a civil war—that would really play into their hands.
And of course Martín knew all about OPERATION OST, Frade’s smuggling into Argentina—often assisted by the Vatican—former officers, some of them Nazis, of General Gehlen’s Abwehr Ost.
Frade had promised, and Martín believed him, to share his intelligence vis-à-vis the Soviets with him. Martín knew there was no other way he could get such intelligence. In this connection, Frade had told him that when he returned from his next flight to Berlin, he was going to have a good deal of intelligence to share with him.
“Conclusions to be logically drawn”—in the terminology of an intelligence analysis—from all he knew and believed were that his first priority was to keep Juan Domingo Perón alive. Failing to do so would result in chaos and possibly civil war.
For the moment, Cletus Frade had Perón safe in Mendoza.
If Flight 2230 did not depart for Germany, all the government officials, diplomats, businessmen, and priests would have to be permitted to leave Aeropuerto Coronel Jorge G. Frade. And once they got back to wherever, they would report what they had seen at the airport.
The news that an attempt to assassinate Perón had been made would be all over Argentina within an hour. Martín realized he could not permit that to happen.
And he understood that he could not present the problem to General Farrell, asking for permission to do what he knew should be done. He knew what Farrell’s reaction to that would be: “Let’s not act in haste. Let’s see how this looks tomorrow.”
Martín thus saw it as his duty to do what he thought should be done, and to worry about President Farrell’s reaction to it later.
—
“Who are the four captains scheduled to make this flight, Peter?” Martín now asked.
Von Wachtstein recited their names.
God is with me, Martín decided, and ordered, “Get Captain Lopez in here, please.”
SAA Captain Paolo Lopez, like a half-dozen other SAA captains, was an officer of the Bureau of Internal Security.
Lopez appeared within minutes.
“How are you, mi General?” he asked.
Martín did not reply, but he addressed Lopez by his military rank.
“Major Lopez, you are aware that Captain Frade cannot take Flight 2230 to Berlin. My solution to that problem is to designate First Officer von Wachtstein as pilot-in-command. Do you have any problem with that?”
After a long moment, Lopez said, “No, mi General.”
“Advise the other pilots of my decision. It is not open for discussion. The only option they have is to go, or not go. In the latter case—don’t tell them this until they indicate what they are going to do—they will be confined in Hangar Two with the Horse Rifles until I decide what to do with them.”
“Sí, mi General.”
“Peter, how soon can you take off?”
“As soon as we load the passengers and dinner.”
“Have a nice flight,” Martín said.
[FIVE]
Above Provincial Route 60
Mendoza Province, Argentina
2305 16 October 1945
It wasn’t hard to find Casa Montagna on Estancia Don Guillermo. Clete Frade had come to think of it as Fort Leavenworth South; he had converted what had been a romantic retreat looking down at an enormous vineyard until it was, like Leavenworth, both a fort and a prison. The floodlights shining down from it made it stand out like a beacon on the hilltop—elsewhere it would be called a mountaintop—in the foothills of the Andes mountain range.
“What do you say we wake everybody up, Enrico?” Frade said, pushing the yoke forward and pointing the nose of the Lodestar at Casa Montagna. “Put a little excitement into their lives?”
“El Coronel?” Rodríguez asked.
“My Tío Juan needs a little excitement, too, to take his mind off”—in the last moment, he stopped himself from saying “the Kotex on his face” and instead said—“his many other problems.”
Frade buzzed Casa Montagna twice, flashing over the hilltop enclave at no more than two hundred feet, first from the north and then from the south, and then he turned the Lodestar toward the Mendoza Airfield.
He had to buzz that three times after he learned that he had no air-to-ground communications over which he could order the runway lights be turned on. Obviously, some of those machine-gun bullets, if they hadn’t hit the radio compartment itself, had taken out the antenna, or at least one of the antenna supports.
The runway lights finally came on, and he lined up with the runway with plenty of time to consider yet another unpleasant set of possibilities.
Had machine-gun bullets taken out the hydraulics necessary to lower the landing gear?
And/or punctured the tires?
He had no choice but to land. He wasn’t sure he had enough fuel to make it through the Andes to Chile. Even if he was able to pull that off, he didn’t want to land in Santiago in a bullet-riddled airplane carrying the vice president of the Argentine Republic. There would be questions.
The green GEAR DOWN AND LOCKED light came on five seconds before he got to the threshold of the runway. Ten seconds after that, as the Lodestar had not swerved out of control off the runway, he was able to draw the reasonable conclusion that there was air in the landing gear tires.
He taxied to an SAA hangar and shut down the engines.
He went into the passenger compartment.
El Coronel Juan D. Perón was nothing to smile over, much less laugh at. His uniform was black with blood and so was the leather of his seat. His face was pale from loss of blood.
Jesus Christ!
Next step is shock. I’ve got to get him to a doctor!
“We’ll have you out of here in just a minute, Tío Juan. Hang on. Try to stay awake.”
Perón grasped Clete’s arm.
“God bless you, Cletus,” he said emotionally.
Enrico had the door open by the time Clete got there. When he went through it and jumped to the ground, Clete found himself facing the headlights of three Ford pickup trucks. On the roof of one was an air-cooled .30 caliber machine gun.
Have we gone through all this only to get blown away the minute we land?
“My God, Don Cletus!” a voice called. “What happened?”
Clete couldn’t see who it was.
“It’s a long story,” Clete said. “I need one of the pickups to go to the Little Sisters’ Hospital, and one of the others to go with us. Then get this airplane into a hangar, close the door, and don’t let anybody get near it.”
“How many injured, mi Coronel?” the
same voice asked.
Clete still couldn’t see who it was.
“Just one,” he said, and after a moment added: “El Coronel Perón. And no one is to know.”
While flying to Mendoza, Frade had thought that the Horse Rifles commander and others involved in the plot would probably think he had flown Perón to Uruguay, which was sort of the traditional destination for Argentine leaders who had to get out of the country in a hurry. He knew he had to keep them thinking that as long as possible.
“Understood, mi Coronel.”
“I buzzed Casa Montagna before I came here. Major Ashton will probably be here shortly. When he—or whoever—shows up, send them to the Little Sisters’ Hospital.”
“Sí, mi Coronel.”
“Enrico, let’s get el Coronel out of the plane and into the front seat of that pickup.”
Clete then pointed to the men standing by the pickup.
“You get in the back,” he ordered. “I’ll drive.”
[SIX]
The Little Sisters of Santa María del Pilar Convent
Mendoza, Mendoza Province Argentina
0005 17 October 1945
Halfway to the hospital, Clete realized that the worst way to keep the presence of the blood-soaked vice president of the Argentine Republic in Mendoza from becoming public knowledge would be to take him to a hospital. So he drove instead to the convent, jumped out of the pickup, and pounded on the door.
The Mother Superior of the Mendoza Chapter of the Order of the Little Sisters of Santa María del Pilar finally came to the door. She was leathery-skinned, tiny, and of indeterminate age.
“What’s going on, Cletus?” she demanded. “God help you if you’ve been drinking!”
“I really need your help. I’ve got an injured man in the pickup.”
“This is the convent, not the hospital,” she snapped.
“Please take a look.”
She walked to the pickup.
“Get out of there, Enrico,” she ordered.
Rodríguez propped up Perón as well as he could and got out. The nun climbed into the cab, and immediately recognized Perón.
“Who did this to you, Juan Domingo?” she demanded.
“They’re trying to kill me, Mother Superior,” Perón said weakly.
“You don’t mean Cletus and Enrico, I hope.”
“No. They’re the only reason I’m alive.”
“What’s your blood type?” she demanded.
He called it forth from memory: “AB.”
“Well, that’s one problem solved,” she said.
“For obvious reasons, I didn’t want to take him to the hospital,” Clete said. “No one must know he’s here. And in that condition.”
“Really?” she said sarcastically, then looked at Perón. “Put your head between your knees, Juan Domingo. We don’t want you passing out.”
She backed out of the cab.
“Don’t just stand there, Enrico,” she ordered. “Get back in there!”
She turned to Clete. “Take Juan Domingo to Casa Montagna. Put him in a bed in the infirmary. Cover him with blankets. See if you can get some liquid in him. I’ll get my bag and be there as soon as I can.”
“You can’t come with us?”
“I’m too old, Cletus, to ride in the bed of a truck. Now get going!”
[SEVEN]
Casa Montagna
Estancia Don Guillermo
Kilometer 40.4, Provincial Route 60
Mendoza Province, Argentina
0115 17 October 1945
About ten kilometers down Provincial Route 60, which was deserted at this time of morning, Clete saw unusually bright headlights. A vehicle was coming down the road in the direction of Mendoza at a high rate of speed.
That’s probably Ashton.
Confirmation of the guess came a moment later when an unusual automobile flashed past the pickup. It was a 1940 Lincoln Continental, unusual in its own right, but in this case more unusual because it was custom bodied.
—
The Lincoln had been shipped from the States as a birthday present from Clete’s uncle, Humberto Duarte, to his wife, Beatrice, who was Clete’s father’s sister. At the time of course Clete had never laid eyes on el Coronel Jorge G. Frade and had no idea he had an aunt and an uncle and a cousin his own age named Jorge.
He learned of this only when he first went to Argentina and coincidentally arrived just before his cousin Jorge returned to his homeland in a lead-lined casket from Stalingrad. Jorge had been an Ejército Argentino captain serving as an observer when the Russians shot down the Storch he was in.
For this act of heroism—Clete thought that voluntarily exposing oneself to enemy fire was absolute stupidity—it was decided at the highest levels of the Thousand-Year Reich to award the fallen Argentine the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross, a decoration on a par with the American Distinguished Service Cross. Doing so, Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Propaganda Minister, had successfully argued, would remind the Argentines that Germany was fighting the godless Communists who had killed Captain Jorge Duarte.
By the time the body of Jorge arrived—accompanied by a bona fide German hero, Captain Hans-Peter Ritter von Wachtstein, who had received his Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross from the hands of Adolf Hitler himself for his service as a fighter pilot—Clete’s Aunt Beatrice had been literally driven out of her mind by the death of her son.
She clearly belonged in a mental institution. But she was a Frade, married to a Duarte, and Clete learned that Argentines of that class simply are not carted off to a funny farm just because they were as bonkers as a March hare.
To solve the problem, el Coronel Frade had turned over his Estancia Don Guillermo to his brother-in-law. He had not returned to the place since the last time he had been there with his wife, Clete’s mother, shortly before she had died in childbirth.
Following a generous donation to the Little Sisters of Santa María del Pilar, which permitted them to add a wing to their Mendoza hospital, the nursing order took over the care of Beatrice Frade de Duarte with the understanding they would do so for the rest of her life. A sort of one-room psychiatric hospital was constructed for her in a wing of Casa Montagna. She was driven there in her Lincoln.
Aunt Beatrice surprised everyone by regaining enough of her mental health to the point where, suitably drugged, she could resume her role in society and return to Buenos Aires. The Lincoln stayed in Mendoza. It triggered unpleasant memories for Aunt Beatrice.
Clete had known nothing of Estancia Don Guillermo, even after his father had been murdered and it—and everything else his father had owned—became his. It was brought to his attention when he needed a place to hide the Froggers, after Herr Frogger deserted his post in the German embassy. Enrico had matter-of-factly suggested that since “the Nazi woman was crazy,” housing her at Casa Montagna would solve that problem. Clete then learned that his father had charged the old soldier with keeping an eye on the place after he had left it for the last time.
When Clete and Dorotea visited Casa Montagna, they became the first to be in the master suite since the day Clete’s mother and father had left there. No one, in fact, had been in the house at all, save for the period during which his Aunt Beatrice was being nursed in what was euphemistically called “the Infirmary” by the nuns of the Little Sisters of Santa María del Pilar.
In a room off the master bedroom, Dorotea found a bassinet, baby powder, a stack of diapers, and a stuffed toy tiger waiting for a baby. She wept when she realized a moment later that that baby was now her husband.
Dorotea had immediately fallen in love with Casa Montagna and shortly thereafter was using Clete’s bassinet and other items for their firstborn, Jorge Howell Frade, who was delivered in the Infirmary under the care of the Mother Superior of the Order of the Little Sisters of Santa María del Pilar.
—
After the Lincoln flashed past the pickup, its taillights quickly disappeared from Clete’s rearview mirror. He w
as afraid that, after being directed to the Little Sisters’ Hospital from the airfield and then not finding Clete there, Ashton would draw unwelcome attention to his presence simply by asking questions.
But shortly afterward, the bright headlights appeared in Clete’s rearview mirror. They grew, and moments later the Lincoln pulled alongside the pickup and Clete found himself looking at Major Maxwell Ashton III.
Clete gestured toward the estancia. Ashton nodded and pulled ahead of the pickup.
Clete followed him to the vineyards of the estancia, through them, and then up the steep road to the house enclave.
The gates were open when he got there, but there were machine guns trained on them, just in case.
—
They helped el Coronel Perón from the pickup truck and into the infirmary and into a bed.
Clete and Enrico, not without difficulty, had just finished getting Perón out of his blood-soaked uniform when Mother Superior, trailed by two nursing sisters, came into the room.
“Lie down, Juan Domingo,” the tiny nun ordered, “and let me have a look at that.”
He docilely obeyed.
She pulled the pad from his face.
“There are a lot of blood vessels in the face, and whatever did that to you cut many of them,” she announced. “You’ll live, and there won’t be much of a scar; jagged wounds leave less scar than neat ones. But before I sew you up, we’re going to get some of Cletus’s blood in you. You lost a lot.”
Frade thought, Cletus’s blood?
Mother Superior turned to one of the nuns. “We need another pressure pack on that. Get one. A proper one.” She considered what she had said. “But that one did a pretty good job, I must admit.”
Then she turned to Enrico.
“Drag that bed next to this one,” she ordered. “And you, Cletus, take your jacket and shirt off and get in it.”
“How do you know I have the right kind of blood?” Cletus asked.
“Because when you were an adorable baby I typed it. And then when your son was born, and I thought your poor wife might need a little blood, I went to your records and there it was. Any other questions, or have I your kind permission to get on with this?”
Empire and Honor Page 28
