Empire and Honor
Page 34
Von Wachtstein—whom Jimmy thought of as Elsa’s brother-in-law—was resting his rear end on the small table. In the seats were three men he didn’t know.
“Hello, Cronley,” von Wachtstein said in German. “I guess I should have told the steward to seat you up here, but I didn’t. Sorry. Anyway, you’re here.” He turned to the crew. “Gentlemen, this is Lieutenant Cronley, who found our Elsa for us. His mother is a Strasbourger, which explains why he speaks German like a Strasbourger.” He turned back. “Colonel Frade calls you Jimmy. Any objections if I do?”
“No.”
“Jimmy, these people”—he pointed to them as he named them—“are Karl Boltitz, Willi Grüner, and Dieter von und zu Aschenburg. Willi and I used to fly under Dieter when we were in the Luftwaffe. I just showed them around the cockpit, which I thought I had better do first, as otherwise they wouldn’t have paid attention to what I have to say now.
“Jimmy,” von Wachtstein went on, as Cronley went to each of the men and shook hands, “is on a mission that Colonel Mattingly tells me is none of my business. So we can’t get into that. What we can get into—what I did not get into with Colonel Mattingly—is what’s going on, and what may be going on in Argentina.
“The last time I saw Cletus Frade, who not only is my best friend, and Jimmy’s sort of big brother, but used to be the OSS’s man in Argentina—”
He interrupted himself.
“I’m getting ahead of myself,” he said. “Okay, Jimmy. Question. Prefacing this with the announcement that not only would I trust my life to Willi and Dieter but have done so more times than I like to remember, what do you think Cletus’s reaction would be if he heard I told them about Operation Ost?”
Before Cronley could begin to reply, von Wachtstein added: “Karl knows all about it.”
“You’re putting me on a hell of a spot,” Jimmy said.
“In other words, you don’t want to answer the question?”
“I don’t, but I will. I think Cletus wouldn’t like it, but would give you the benefit of the doubt, providing he knew your friends understand the rules.”
“Which are?” Dieter von und zu Aschenburg asked.
“That if you run at the mouth to anyone—anyone at all—about what he tells you—or you learn in some other way—Cletus will kill you, and if he doesn’t, I will.”
“Oddly enough,” von und zu Aschenburg said, thoughtfully, after a moment, “I think the lieutenant is perfectly serious.”
“I am,” Cronley said simply.
“Herr Oberstleutnant,” Boltitz said, looking at Dieter, “if Hansel decides to tell you, and you—as Lieutenant Cronley puts it—‘run at the mouth,’ and Cletus Frade doesn’t kill you both, or the lieutenant here doesn’t, I will.”
“Understood, Herr Kapitän zur See,” von und zu Aschenburg said.
“Understood, Herr Kapitän zur See,” Willi Grüner said.
“What did they call you?” Jimmy asked.
“I was at one time a Kriegsmarine officer, a kapitän zur see,” Boltitz said.
“Well, the decision having been made,” von Wachtstein said, “let’s take the plunge. Dieter, does the name Generalmajor Reinhard Gehlen mean anything to you?”
“Abwehr Ost?”
Von Wachtstein nodded.
“Shortly before the war ended,” von Wachtstein began, “Gehlen went to Allen Dulles of the OSS. . . .”
—
“How much of this do the Soviets know?” von und zu Aschenburg asked five minutes later.
“Precisely how much, no one knows. But something certainly,” von Wachtstein replied. “We know they are sending the man who was running the KGB in Mexico to Argentina. We not only have to keep Operation Ost a secret from the Soviets but from the American people as well. The political damage to President Truman should it come out that he’s been smuggling German officers—much less Nazis—out of Germany into Argentina is something that just can’t be allowed to happen.”
“And you’re prepared to kill to do that?”
“We,” Cronley explained, “are prepared to kill to keep the Soviets from laying their hands on the former Abwehr Ost officers and men and their families we haven’t—yet—been able to get out of Eastern Europe and the Russian Zone of Germany.”
“That was stupid of me. I should have thought of that,” von und zu Aschenburg said. “That’s who the KGB’ll go after, especially the families. Good luck with that, Lieutenant.”
“And now to the situation in Argentina,” von Wachtstein said. “The last time I saw Cletus Frade he was taking off—in a hail of machine-gun fire—in a Lodestar from Oberst Jorge Frade airfield in Buenos Aires with Oberst Juan Domingo Perón aboard, trying to keep him from being assassinated.
“I don’t know where he was headed, probably to Mendoza, where he has an estancia. But he may have gone the other way, across the River Plate to Uruguay. The head of the Argentine Bureau of Internal Security, General Martín . . .”
—
Relating the story of the attempted assassination of Perón and all the possible ramifications of that—what had happened at the airport, the scenarios of what they might find when they landed, and the scenarios to deal with those scenarios—took almost twenty minutes.
“We’ll just have to see what happens when we get there,” von Wachtstein said finally. “My problem with all of this is Cletus Frade’s ability to get thrown down a latrine, only to emerge moments later puffing on one of his cigars, smiling, and smelling like a rose. I suppose I expect that to happen again now. And I know that’s not smart.” He paused, glanced at each man, then added, “No, I won’t take any questions because I don’t really have any answers.”
He paused again.
“We’re over France now. It’s a little over a thousand nautical miles to Lisbon, where we’ll take on fuel and have lunch. We cruise at just about three hundred knots, so we should be there in about three hours.
“From there we go to Dakar, Senegal, a distance of fifteen hundred nautical miles. That’s five hours. There we have dinner, take on fuel, and head for Buenos Aires. It’s thirty-eight hundred nautical miles, give or take—”
“You’re going to fly nonstop Dakar–Buenos Aires?” von und zu Aschenburg asked incredulously.
“If we’re lucky. Five hours into the flight, I’ll get our position shooting the stars. That’ll tell me if we can make Buenos Aires with available fuel. Sometimes we encounter really bad headwinds. If that happens, we’ll go to either São Paulo or Belém, Brazil, and from there to Buenos Aires.”
“At an altitude of sixty-five hundred meters, in a pressurized cabin, making three hundred knots,” von und zu Aschenburg said in awe. “This is one hell of an airplane, Hansel!”
“Yeah, it is,” von Wachtstein said.
“Peter,” Boltitz said, “what are the chances of finding U-405?”
“What?” von Wachtstein asked, visibly confused.
“I learned something when I was in Norway, and later in Bremen,” Boltitz said. “You remember hearing that before U-234 sailed from Narvik for Japan, her captain permitted a dozen of her crew to go ashore? I mean, not to sail with her.”
“What’s that got to do with U-405?” von Wachtstein asked.
“Bear with me, please, Peter. I ran down one, an old shipmate, Kurt Schrann, who had been the U-405’s second engineer. I found him in Bremen. He told me there was a contingency plan. If, when U-234 reached the South Atlantic and they hadn’t been able to take on the fuel they needed to reach Japan, they were to make for a location on the Argentine coast. It was a point south of Río Gallegas, near the Chilean-Argentina border just north of the Magellan Strait.”
Von Wachtstein nodded. “And?”
“And there they were to put ashore their passengers and cargo, bury the cargo—which is not only crates of money and jewels, but that five hundred kilos of the nuclear whatever . . .”
“Five hundred and sixty kilos of uranium oxide,” von Wachtstein furnished.
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br /> “. . . that Clete was so concerned about. The U-234 would then be scuttled, and the crew and the passengers were supposed to make their way to someplace, San Carlos—”
“San Carlos de Bariloche?” von Wachtstein offered.
“Right. Where there are some SS people who would take care of them. When things calmed down, they could go back and dig up the stuff they buried. That uranium oxide is apparently worth a lot of money.”
“There are several large holes in that plan that I can see,” von Wachtstein said. “For one thing, the area south of Río Gallegas—that whole area is the opposite of hospitable. For hundreds of kilometers there’s nothing but ice and snow. Year-round. It’s really part of the Antarctic. The waters close to shore are uncharted, which means getting in close enough to off-load anything would be next to impossible. And even if you managed to unload the cargo and bury it, how could you go back and find it later? In a week, it would be buried under new snow and ice.”
“So you think I should forget this, Peter?”
“I probably will tell you just that, after you explain what this has to do with Willi von Dattenberg’s U-405.”
“Maybe they knew all about that ice and snow,” Boltitz said. “That there was a possibility the crew wouldn’t make it to San Carlos Whatever. What they did was put the coordinates of where the landing would take place in a sealed envelope and put that in U-405’s safe.”
“I can’t believe that Willi wouldn’t have said something,” von Wachtstein said. “After Cletus gave him sixty seconds to forget his duty as an honorable Kriegsmarine officer and start talking or Cletus would shoot him and bury him on the Pampas, Willi was a fountain of information.”
“All I thought, Peter, is that if we knew where Willi scuttled U-405, maybe we could send a diver down and get into his safe and get these coordinates. Since we don’t want the Soviets to get their hands on that uranium oxide, the effort seems justified.”
“Well, unless Willi burned the contents of his safe before he sailed into the Port Belgrano Navy Base at Punta Alta flying a black flag and surrendered—and now that I think about it, he almost certainly did . . .”
“He didn’t scuttle U-405?”
Von Wachtstein shook his head.
“She was tied up between two old Argentine battleships, the Rivadavia and the Moreno, at Punta Alta, under the control of a vice admiral named Crater. He’s a pal of Cletus’s pal General Martín.”
“So we can get the coordinates?” Boltitz asked.
“Very possibly . . . if Willi didn’t burn them and if there is no civil war that has found Oberst Perón shot—as well as Cletus and Martín and Crater for good measure.”
Jesus! Cronley thought.
There’s that goddamned other shoe I’ve been worried about dropping.
How am I going to get to be with Elsa now?
“Do you think that’s likely? Clete getting shot?” Cronley asked.
“If the civil war they were worried about got started, I’d say the odds are fifty-fifty,” von Wachtstein said.
“So why the hell are we going to Buenos Aires before we find out what’s going on?” Jimmy asked.
Von Wachtstein chuckled.
“One day, my young friend, you may fall in love. And when you are in love you go to where your beloved is, even if that might get you shot. My wife and son are in Buenos Aires. Understand?”
[THREE]
4730 Avenida Libertador General San Martín
Buenos Aires, Argentina
1235 19 October 1945
“I think,” Doña Dorotea Mallín de Frade said, tapping her fingers on a photograph that took up a third of the front page of La Nacíon, “that I’ll see if I can’t get La Nacíon to make me a large print of that. I’ll frame it.”
The photo was of the vice president of the Argentine Republic, el Coronel Juan D. Perón, standing on the balcony of the Casa Rosada and addressing a crowd La Nacíon estimated at “more than 325,000 persons.” On his immediate right was Señorita Evita Duarte, who was beaming. Standing to his immediate left was Don Cletus Frade, his arms folded across his chest, wearing an I don’t know what the hell I’m doing here look on his face.
“Whatever for?” Doña Claudia Carzino-Cormano asked.
“It’s an historic moment,” Dorotea said.
“Indeed it is,” Clete said. “But we’re not going to frame a photograph of it.”
“I was kidding, my darling.”
“What we are going to do is have an oil portrait made from it. At least two meters tall. We’ll hang it in the foyer. And before it, on a small table, there will be votive candles for the faithful to prayerfully light.”
Marjorie Howell giggled.
“Don’t let Father Whatsisname hear you say that, Clete,” she said.
“Father Welner’s in the picture,” Clete said. “Behind Evita. He’ll love it. We’ll have the artist paint one of those glowing circles around his head.”
Dorotea laughed.
“Why not?” she asked. “Over time it will become as well known as da Vinci’s The Last Supper.”
“I think we are confusing poor Elsa,” Claudia said.
“I never know when you’re serious,” Elsa von Wachtstein said.
She was sitting next to Willi von Dattenberg, who agreed.
“Either do I,” he said. “The Argentine sense of humor . . .”
“Cletus is half-American,” Claudia said.
“Only half, unfortunately,” Cletus Marcus Howell said.
“Don’t start up, Grandfather,” Clete said.
“Or what?”
“I’ll have the artist paint you into the picture, with one of those glowing circles over your head, and send a copy of it to the Dallas Petroleum Club. It’ll look great in the lobby.”
“They call those halos, Clete,” Marjorie said. “Not ‘glowing circles.’”
“No fooling?”
“No fooling. They go back to around four hundred and fifty B.C. The first pictures showed one over the head of Perseus as he killed Medusa.”
“I’m awed. I guess I forgot they finally let you out of the eighth grade and into junior high.”
Marjorie made a face.
“Then I guess you also forgot,” she snapped, “to send that Browning over-and-under for graduating from Rice a year early and summa cum laude! I always suspected either Mom or Grandfather sent it. If you had sent me a shotgun, it would have been a Sears Roebuck economy special.”
“God have mercy on the man who marries her,” Clete said. “She’s as bad as the old man.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” Marjorie said.
“Both of you knock it off,” Martha Howell ordered with a mother’s authority.
Antonio, the butler, came to where Clete was sitting at the head of the dining table.
“El Coronel Perón is on the telephone for you, Don Cletus,” he announced.
“Tell him Don Cletus is not at home, Antonio,” Dorotea ordered.
“I did. He said it’s very important, Señora.”
“What the hell does he want?” Clete asked rhetorically. “Okay, Antonio, bring in the goddamned phone.”
“Watch your mouth, Cletus,” Martha Howell said.
Antonio brought in a telephone, plugged it in under the table, and handed him the receiver.
“Cletus, this is your godfather,” Juan Domingo Perón announced.
“What can I do for you, Tío Juan?”
“I need a great favor from you, Cletus.”
“Will this wait? I have a houseful of people.”
“No. It won’t.”
“What kind of a favor?”
“I want you to meet me at the city hall in Junín.”
“I’m not even sure where that is.”
“In the north of the province. Take National Route 7. It’s about two hundred sixty kilometers.”
“What the hell’s going on in Junín?”
“I’ll tell you when you get here.�
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“You sound like you want me to come wherever the hell that is right now,” Clete said incredulously. “I just told you I have a houseful of people.”
“I do. Father Welner and General Martín will also be here.”
“Martín’s going to drive two hundred sixty kilometers to be there? For Christ’s sake, he took a bullet in his leg. He’s on crutches and painkillers. I was surprised the poor bastard didn’t pass out on the Casa Rosada balcony last night.”
“I told you to watch your mouth, Cletus,” Martha said.
Frade glanced at her and made a face as Perón said, “Cletus, this is very important to me. Please.”
“What’s going on in Junín, for the second time?”
“I can’t get into that on the telephone. I can only repeat that this is very important to me.”
“And Welner and Martín are going to be there?”
“Yes, they are.”
“Okay, I’ll come. But this had really better be important.”
“God bless you, Cletus. How soon can you leave?”
“Just as soon as I hang up and escape from my wife. You heard what I said about this better be important?”
He hung up and looked at Dorotea.
“My precious,” she said, “did I just hear that you’re going to walk out of here right now and drive two hundred sixty kilometers to Junín?”
“I don’t believe it myself,” Clete said.
“Darling, in that picturesque Texas—or is it Marine Corps?—phrase you so often use, ‘In a pig’s ass, you are!’”
“You tell him, Dorotea,” Marjorie said.
“Marjorie, you keep out of this,” Martha said.
“What the hell is the matter with you?” Dorotea demanded. “Why couldn’t you just have told him no?”
“Sweetheart, I just don’t know,” Clete admitted.
“Well, call him back and tell him you’re not going,” Dorotea said.
“Call him back where?” Clete asked.
“Junín?” Marjorie said sarcastically.
“Where in Junín?” Clete challenged.
“What’s going on there anyway?” Dorotea asked.