“So, what’s this, Colonel?” Bendick asked, holding up the spurious OSS credentials. “I never saw anything like this before. What’s an OSS area commander? And this makes you area commander of exactly what area?”
“Argentina and Uruguay, primarily.”
Bendick’s eyes showed he wasn’t satisfied with that answer.
Bendick said: “Let’s go back down Memory Lane, Colonel. What did Colonel Dawkins’s officers call him?”
“‘Sir,’” Clete blurted.
Clete thought he saw the hint of a smile on Bendick’s lips.
“And behind his back?”
“‘The Dawk,’ sir.”
“And so they did,” Bendick said, “something that would be known only to his officers.”
He handed Frade the spurious OSS credentials.
“We had been briefed, of course,” he said, “on using Henderson Field in an emergency. We had also been briefed on Fighter One, and told it was not suitable for emergency landings of B-17 aircraft. As I approached Guadalcanal, I came to the reluctant conclusion that I had neither the altitude nor the controls to make Henderson, so I put it down on Fighter One.
“I was a pretty good B-17 pilot, but not good enough to land on only one main gear, so shortly thereafter I found myself sitting at the side of the runway with, thank God, all of my crew. We were watching my aircraft burn when a feisty tall drink of water showed up. He was wearing shorts and shoes—no shirt, no cap—and in each hand he had four of those little bottles of medicinal bourbon.”
Bendick met Frade’s eyes. Frade nodded.
Bendick went on: “I shall never forget what he said to me on that memorable occasion: ‘When we saw you coming in, son, the odds were ten-to-one that nobody was going to walk away from your landing. You do know this isn’t Henderson Field?’”
“That sounds like The Dawk,” Clete said, smiling. “And fists full of medicinal bourbon bottles? Getting more than one little bottle from Colonel Dawkins meant he thought you had done good.”
“So I later learned,” General Bendick said. “So, welcome, welcome to Val de Cans. What do I call you?”
Colonel Dawkins, wherever you are, you have just saved my ass again.
How many times does that make?
“My name is Cletus Frade. My friends call me Clete. I wish you would.”
The general offered his hand. “Bob Bendick, Clete.”
Clete, pointing to them as he did so, said, “Peter von Wachtstein, Karl Boltitz, Enrico Rodríguez. My commo guy, Siggie Stein, is already in your radio shack; we have a Collins 7.2 aboard that needs fixing.”
“An airborne Collins 7.2?”
“Siggie Stein is an amazing commo guy,” Clete said.
“So, what can I do for you?”
“Tell me about the other Connie.”
“It’s classified Top Secret,” General Bendick replied.
“Manhattan Project?”
“Excuse me?”
“Excuse me, but are you saying ‘Excuse me’ because you don’t want to admit knowledge of the Manhattan Project?” Clete asked with a smile.
“I never heard of it,” General Bendick said. “What is it?”
“I can’t tell you. But it’s the only thing I know that would justify classifying a passenger flight Top Secret.”
General Bendick looked at Frade for a long moment.
“How about a planeload of Secret Service agents bound for Frankfurt?” he asked finally.
“Is that what it is?”
Bendick nodded.
“What would be so secret about that?” Clete asked.
“President Truman going to Germany?”
“I don’t think that’s very likely,” Clete said. “Why?”
Bendick shrugged.
“The Secret Service is under the Treasury Department,” Clete then said. “And the secretary of the Treasury suspects that Nazis are being smuggled out of Germany to Argentina.”
“I know,” Bendick said.
“You know that Nazis are being smuggled out of Germany, or that Morgenthau thinks they are?”
“These Secret Service agents have been nosing around the base flashing their badges and asking my junior officers and enlisted men if they know anything about Nazis being smuggled through here. Or even of mysterious airplanes passing through here. They are even threatening them with what happens when you lie to a Secret Service agent.” He chuckled, and added: “I wonder what they’re going to think about your mysterious airplane.”
“If they ask, what will they be told?”
“Same that we were told. That it’s a charter flight to rescue Argentine diplomats from Germany. Unless . . .”
“No. That’s fine. And it has the advantage of being the truth. Did these Secret Service people talk to you, tell you what they’re looking for?”
“No. I must look like somebody who would smuggle Nazis.”
“If they had asked you, General—”
“I thought we were on a first-name basis.”
“Sorry. Bob, if they had asked you . . .”
“What would I have told them? The truth. I’ve heard the rumors, and I think there’s something to them, but I don’t have any personal knowledge, and my counterintelligence people haven’t come up with anything concrete.”
“The rumors are true. One of my jobs is to try to stop fleeing Nazis trying to get to South America from getting there, or catch them. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. But before I get into that, how long has this planeload of Secret Service agents been here?”
“About forty-eight hours. All they were supposed to do was take on fuel, but there was a message saying ‘delay departure until further notice.’”
“Which conveniently provided time for their people to ask questions of your people.”
“That thought ran through my mind. What the hell is that all about?”
“I don’t know,” Clete said. “Maybe we’ll find out when we get to Germany. Let’s get back to the reason I wanted to see you. We have some pretty good intelligence that a number of German submarines are headed for Argentina. The number ranges from three we’re very sure about, to a fleet—as many as twenty-odd. A fleet seems unlikely but can’t be dismissed out of hand. The Nazis have a program called the Phoenix Project—”
“That’s real?” Bendick asked.
“I don’t know what you heard about it, so let me tell you what I know about it. Starting in 1943, the Nazis started sending money and things that can be easily converted to money—gold, diamonds, other precious stones, et cetera—to Argentina. The idea was to set up sanctuaries in Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Brazil to which senior officers could flee, both escaping the trials we plan for them and using their new home as a base from which they can rise, rested and with large amounts of money, phoenix-like, and keep National Socialism going. Or bring it back to life.”
“That’s pretty much what I heard, but it sounded like the plot for a bad movie,” Bendick said.
“They sent a lot of money—hundreds of millions of dollars—to Argentina, plus some senior SS officers to run the program. We’ve managed to stop a lot of it, but by no means all.”
“What kind of senior SS officers?”
“Himmler’s adjutant, for one. Actually, the Reichsführer-SS’s First Deputy Adjutant. SS-Brigadeführer Ritter Manfred von Deitzberg. He came by submarine.”
“And this guy is already in Argentina?” Bendick asked incredulously.
“Yeah, but he’s no longer a problem,” Clete said.
“How so?”
“He was taking a leak in the men’s room of a charming little hotel in the charming little village of San Martín de los Andes, when someone blew his brains all over the urinal with a Ballester-Molina—an Argentine copy of our .45.”
“You wouldn’t happen to know who did that, would you, Clete?”
“Of course not,” Clete replied not very convincingly.
“And what are the Argentines doing
about all these Nazis running loose in Argentina? Looking the other way?”
“You ever hear that money talks, Bob?”
“Is that what it is?”
“There is also an element—perfectly serious people—who feel the Nazis were a Christian bulwark against the Communist Antichrist. Unfortunately, to some odd degree, I’m afraid they may be right.”
“You think the Communists are going to be a threat?”
It took Clete a moment to consider the wisdom of what he wanted to say. In the end, he decided to say it.
“I’m reliably informed that J. Edgar Hoover thinks they’re the new enemy.”
“And you agree with Hoover?”
“Yeah, I guess I do. I never was able to regard Stalin as Friendly Uncle Joe, and I know for a fact the Russians are trying very hard to break into the . . . one of our most important secrets.”
“Which secret would that be?”
“Sorry, I just can’t tell you.”
“Which brings us back, I suppose, to why you wanted to see me.”
“I don’t know this for sure, but I have the feeling that just as soon as I get to Germany, there will be a meeting about the submarines headed this way.”
“A meeting between whom?” Bendick asked.
“It will be under Eisenhower—probably under his G-2—but it won’t all be under SHAEF. Someone from General Marshall’s staff will probably be there, and certainly someone from Army Intelligence. And the Office of Naval Intelligence. And, of course, the OSS. And probably, come to think of it, the Secret Service agents here.”
Clete then said: “Whatever intelligence is available about the German submarines will be presented, discussed, and it will be agreed that something has to be done about them. And, finally, it will be decided who exactly will have to do something about them.
“The one thing senior brass hates to do is take on a mission that will probably end in failure. Or about which they know very little, which would cause them to fail. So they will look around for someone who is an expert in the area of dealing with German submarines in South America. There are only two people who meet that criterion, Bob. You and me.”
“I think I know where you’re going, Clete,” Bendick said, “but there is one flaw in your argument. I don’t have any idea how to find these German submarines.”
“You and I have something else in common,” Frade said. “If we can’t find the submarines, that’s not the fault of G-2, or Naval Intelligence—it’s our fault. ‘What do you expect? While we’ve been fighting the Wehrmacht across Europe, Bendick and Frade have been sitting in beautiful South America drinking rum and Coca-Cola and chasing senoritas.’”
“Do you know how many aircraft we’ve lost over the South Atlantic?” Bendick asked.
“How many were actually shot down?”
“I take your point,” Bendick said after a moment.
“I think they call that ‘pilot error,’” Clete said. “You don’t get no Air Medals or Distinguished Flying Crosses for pilot error.”
Bendick shook his head.
“Here’s how I see it,” Frade went on. “OSS will be given the mission, and your wing will be among our many assets.”
“As I said, this particular asset doesn’t have a clue where to look for these submarines.”
“Maybe we can give you a little help there. Out of school.”
“Out of school? I don’t understand.”
“I have some intel that I know is reliable, and when we get to Germany and start to talk to the crews of U-boats, I think we’re going to have some more intel, maybe a good deal more. The problem is I can’t tell G-2, or Naval Intelligence, and certainly not the Secret Service about it, because they will want to know where it came from, and I can’t do that.”
“Why not?” Bendick asked almost automatically, and then, before Frade had a chance to answer, said, “You have spies in Germany, is that what you’re saying?”
“Not spies, General,” Boltitz offered. “One is an anti-Nazi former U-boat officer.”
Bendick looked at Boltitz, then back at Frade. “And you’re going to see this anti-Nazi U-boat officer in Germany? Is that what you’re saying? And he’s going to help you find these submarines?”
“What this anti-Nazi U-boat officer is going to do, Bob, is tell you all he knows about how U-boat crews are trained to cross the South Atlantic, what courses they followed in the past and presumably will follow now, their schedules of on-the-surface and submerged operations—that sort of thing. And then, when we get to Germany, he’ll see what he can find out from U-boat crews now in POW cages.”
“I’m a little slow sometimes,” Bendick said. Then he looked at Boltitz. “Why should I trust you?”
Frade answered for him: “You’ve heard of the failed attempt by Colonel Graf von Stauffenberg to kill Adolf Hitler?”
Bendick looked at Frade, nodded, but said nothing.
“At the time, Kapitän zur See Boltitz was the German naval attaché in Buenos Aires and”—he gestured at Peter—“Major von Wachtstein was the assistant military attaché for air. The day after the bomb failed to kill Hitler, the embassy got a radio message ordering their arrest for high treason.”
“They were involved in the bombing?”
“In the plot of the bombing,” Frade explained, “as were Peter’s father, Generalleutnant Graf Karl-Friedrich von Wachtstein, and Karl’s father, Vizeadmiral Kurt Boltitz. General von Wachtstein was arrested, tried by a people’s court, and hung from a butcher’s hook.”
“My God!”
“Vizeadmiral Boltitz, who worked for Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the chief of German Military Intelligence, was not immediately arrested, nor was Admiral Canaris. We don’t know where Vizeadmiral Boltitz is, only that the SS was looking for him until the last day of the war.”
“He ran?” Bendick asked.
Frade nodded.
“On April twenty-third—just over two weeks ago—the 97th Infantry Division of the Third U.S. Army liberated the Flossenberg Concentration Camp in Bavaria. They found Admiral Canaris’s naked, decomposing body hanging from a gallows. It had been left there as a gesture of contempt following the admiral’s execution on April ninth for his role in the failed attempt to kill Hitler.”
“Jesus Christ!” Bendick said, then asked, “And these two German officers ran from the arrest order to Argentina?”
“No. What happened—both had been working for me—was that I flew them to Canoas, where they surrendered to the commanding officer. They were then flown to the senior enemy officer interrogation facility at Fort Hunt, outside Washington.”
“If they had been working for you, why didn’t you just keep them in Argentina?”
“Argentina was then neutral. Leaning strongly toward the Axis, but neutral. If von Wachtstein and Boltitz had stayed there, there was a good chance that some Argentine Nazi would learn where they were, tell the German Embassy, and the SS would go after them. Try to kill them.”
“They’d actually do something like that?”
“They already had done something like that. They tried to kill the commercial attaché of the German Embassy, who had deserted his post. Boltitz and von Wachtstein were no longer of any use to me inside the German Embassy, so getting them into a POW enclosure in the States seemed to be the right thing to do.”
“But they’re not in a POW enclosure, are they?”
“No. They are now OSS special agents—show him your ID, Hansel.”
Peter did.
Bendick nodded his acceptance.
Frade went on: “I knew I was going to need them, so last week—on May tenth—I flew to Washington and got them.”
General Bendick looked at von Wachtstein and, shaking his head in disbelief, asked, “And you were the air attaché of the German Embassy?”
“Tell him, Hansel,” Frade ordered.
“Before that,” von Wachtstein said, “I was commanding officer of Jagdstaffel 232—Focke-Wulf 190s—defending Berlin aga
inst B-17s.”
Bendick shook his head again and then asked Frade, “They were turned over to you—is that what you’re saying?”
“No, what I said was that I needed them, so I went and got them. I didn’t have the time to deal with the bureaucracy.”
“You just took them from a POW camp on your own authority?”
Frade nodded.
Bendick again shook his head in disbelief.
Frade said: “Your original question, Bob, was something like ‘Why should I trust Boltitz?’”
Bendick met Frade’s eyes. “Has it occurred to you, Colonel Frade, that the smart thing for me to do is pick up that telephone and tell my provost marshal to come running? That two escaped German POWs and the guy who helped them escape are in flight planning?”
Frade held the gaze and said, “You could do that, General. It’s known as ‘covering your ass.’ But you won’t.”
“And why won’t I?”
“Two reasons. One is that you know that if you did, you’d be helping the Nazis get away with sending their submarines to South America, and you don’t want to do that. Two, you’re not that kind—the CYA kind—of an officer.”
“How do you know? Was telling me all this smart?”
“Probably not. But in my business, every once in a while you have to take a chance. I took it. I’d take it again.”
“Taking a chance like putting a shot-up B-17 down on a fighter strip? Because it wasn’t really an option?”
“Yes, sir.”
General Bendick turned to his aide-de-camp.
“Jimmy,” he ordered, “get on the horn and get Colonel DuBois and Colonel Nathan down here. Tell them I’m running a middle-of-the-night training program in how to find submarines.”
[TWO]
Transient Mess Val de Cans Airfield Belém do Pará, Brazil 0405 17 May 1945
SAA Chief Pilot Gonzalo Delgano, Captain Mario Peralta, and a flight engineer whose name Clete could never remember—he thought of him as “the chubby flight engineer, who, three-to-one, also works for the BIS”—were sitting over coffee at a table near the door when Clete and the others walked in.
The diplomats were sitting at various tables around the nearly empty mess.
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