“Why not?” Frade said.
“Simple answer, you can’t get fifty million dollars or a hundred million dollars or—and I really heard this figure—one hundred fifty million dollars in a suitcase.”
“More sophisticated answer?” Frade asked.
“The sale, or the transfer, whatever you want to call it, is not going to take place in Argentina,” Martín said. “Think about it, Cletus. There’s supposed to be five hundred sixty kilos of the uranium—that’s a little over half a ton. Even if Egorov had it in the Trade Mission right now, what would he do with it? How would he get it out of Argentina? And let’s say Mannhoffer—or Körtig or Lang—either separately or together, had the hundred or the hundred fifty million dollars Egorov paid them. What would they do with it? Put it under the mattress? They know we’d be looking for signs of sudden wealth. If a transfer takes place, neither the ore nor the cash will be actually involved here.
“The most credible scenario is that the ore will be moved from wherever it is now to a Russian ship on the high seas, and the money—which will never have been in Argentina at all—will be transferred, probably through the Banco Suisse Creditanstalt, to an account or accounts in South Africa or Switzerland.”
“Then how would the uranium oxide get from where it is now to rendezvous with a Soviet ship on the high seas?”
“On U-234,” Martín said. “I don’t think U-234 has been scuttled.”
Frade nodded thoughtfully. “Don’t let this go to your head, Bernardo, but that’s the most credible scenario I’ve heard so far.”
“I thought so,” Martín said, “when I heard it from von Dattenberg on the way here this morning.”
Damn it!
I give a five-minute speech on why I don’t trust that sonofabitch, then Martín marches him in here, offers a scenario I declare is the best one I’ve heard, then says he got it from von Dattenberg.
“From von Dattenberg?” Frade asked softly.
“Cletus,” von Dattenberg said, “earlier on you told me to put myself in Alois Schneider’s shoes. . . .”
I don’t recall giving you permission to address me by my Christian name.
Oh, Christ. Yes, I did . . .
“I remember,” Frade said.
“And I did. But that first attempt resulted in only changing my mind about whether U-234 made landfall in Argentina or not. But when I thought about what Alois would do about the uranium oxide—”
“You referred to Schneider by his first name just now. That implies you’re close.”
“Very close,” von Dattenberg said. “All of us who served aboard U-boats are sort of a brotherhood. But Alois and I were even closer than—”
“Were . . . or are?”
“Are. I should have said that.”
“Why?”
“Because we are alive, Colonel Frade—the U-boat service had a casualty rate approaching seventy-five percent—and because both of us made a number of special missions here. Only a few of us were selected, time and again, for that duty.”
Now he’s back to addressing me by rank?
“By ‘special missions,’” Frade said, “you mean smuggling missions?”
“Yes. That’s what I meant.”
“Where do you think U-234 is right now?” Frade asked.
“Very probably where Cronley thinks it is. If not there, then tied up somewhere close—within one hundred kilometers of there. I can’t think of any reason for Schneider to be taken from Villa General Belgrano except to do something with the boat.”
“Like what?”
“Move her. Or perhaps take her to sea. She’s been down there long enough for her to take on fuel and provisions.”
“Have you any suggestion how we should deal with your scenario?” Frade asked.
“Yes, I do, Colonel. Get me down there somehow so I can help Major Grüner look for her from his Storch.”
Why does he want to go down there?
“What could you do to help him? That he can’t do himself?” Frade asked.
“General Martín says he can get me nautical charts of the area—Argentine charts would be better than the ones I had on U-450—and from them I could make a better guess, I suggest, than could Grüner about where she might lie, and where she might be moving to.”
What is it the lawyers say?
“Never ask a question unless you’re sure what the answer will be.”
How the hell can I argue with what he said?
This is not the time to ask him, “How do I know that if you find the sub you won’t live up to your sacred oath to der Führer by doing whatever you can to let him know we’re onto him?
“Or that if you do see the sub, and Grüner doesn’t, that you’ll just keep your mouth shut?”
“That makes sense to me,” Nervo said.
“And to me,” Frade said. “But the only way we can get von Dattenberg down there—unless we put him in a car right now, and he drives down there—is in the Lodestar, and we won’t know if we can do that until we hear from Grüner. His convoy—the flatbed trucks carrying the Cub, Storch, and bulldozer, and the Army trucks with soldiers, heavy arms, food, and fuel—left Aeropuerto Frade yesterday afternoon. They aren’t even halfway there. And once they do get there, we don’t know how long it will take them to grade a suitable runway. So we’re going to have to wait for that.”
“When you’re thinking of sending people down there, Cletus,” the old man offered, “you’re going to have to give some thought—presuming of course you find and seize either the submarine with the uranium oxide aboard or the uranium oxide where it is being kept on land—to who will take legal possession of it.”
“I don’t follow you, Grandfather.”
“Both the Argentines—General Martín and the BIS, or the Argentine army—”
“The Ejército Argentino,” Clete furnished without thinking.
“Thank you ever so much, Cletus,” the old man said, icily sarcastic. “I’ll write that on my shirt cuff so I won’t forget it again. If I may continue?”
“Sorry.”
Where the hell did this come from?
And where the hell is he going with it?
“Both the Ejército Argentino and the U.S. Army and Navy—and I suppose the Royal Army and every other ally—have the right to seize the uranium oxide and, for that matter, the submarine itself, as property of the defeated enemy. In the same way as you acquired the Storch.
“As I understand that, a military attaché from our embassy seized the Storch in the name of the United States from an Argentine national, one Don Cletus Frade, in whose possession—illegal possession—it was.”
“What do you mean, ‘illegal possession’?” Clete protested.
“Von Wachtstein had no right to give you that airplane, which was the property of the German embassy,” the old man said. “Isn’t that right, General Martín?”
“Yes, it is,” Martín said. “The polite fiction at the time was that I believed von Wachtstein had crashed it into the River Plate, taking Boltitz with him.”
“Is there a point to this?” Clete asked.
“Oh, yes,” the old man said. “A very important point.”
Why do I think I just asked another question without knowing what the answer would be?
“Now, if General Martín seizes the uranium oxide, which he has every right to do, he would have to inform General Farrell and Coronel Perón. Is that right, General?”
“Yes, it is.”
“And we don’t want either of them—in particular Coronel Perón—to know about that, do we?”
“No,” Clete said. “We do not.”
“So that means the uranium oxide will have to be seized by an officer of one of the armed forces of the United States.”
“Cletus Frade, Lieutenant Colonel, U.S. Marine Corps, at your service. Okay?”
The old man shook his head. “Not okay. Don Cletus Frade is in Argentina as his birthright. He is an Argentine.”
“I�
��m also a serving officer of the USMC.”
“That Cletus Frade, Colonel Frade, is in this country illegally. Am I right, General?”
“You’re right, Señor Howell.”
“Okay,” Clete said. “Then Maxwell.”
He pointed to Major Maxwell Ashton III.
“No. For the same reason. He’s here illegally, as are all your OSS comrades. How about the military attaché who seized the Storch for you? Is he available?”
Frade exhaled audibly.
“No. For one thing, the American ambassador told me I was not to have any contact with the embassy at all. For another, I don’t want him or anyone in the embassy to know anything about U-234 or the uranium oxide.”
“Jesus Christ,” Jimmy Cronley breathed as he realized the significance of what was being said.
Frade looked at him, then suddenly announced, “Anticipating this line of discussion, Grandfather, I have already equipped Lieutenant Cronley with Antarctic cold-weather gear identical to that worn by Admiral Byrd so that he can go down south and seize U-234 and the uranium oxide in comfort.”
Silence greeted this announcement and lasted thirty seconds before Nervo laughed out loud.
“You got them all, gringo. You even had me—for fifteen seconds or so—thinking, Goddamn, ol’ Clete really is a genius.”
“Me, too, and I live with him and know better,” Dorotea said.
“I smell a rat here,” Clete said. “Why do I think my beloved grandfather didn’t come up with this seizure idea all by himself?”
“That cruel and unfounded accusation hurts me deeply,” the old man said. “Although I will admit that Harry—excuse me, President Truman—touched on the subject of the seizure of enemy assets briefly while we were having our little pick-me-up, and then, on my way down here, when it came out that Commander Ford is also an attorney—”
“Also an attorney?” Clete challenged.
“I have that privilege,” the old man said. “I thought you knew. Anyway, Commander Ford and I discussed it at some length.”
If I ask him if he’s really a lawyer, I won’t like his answer.
He probably graduated from the University of Texas Law School magna cum laude.
“So, what do we do now?” Nervo asked.
“We wait to hear from Grüner,” Frade said. “And we send Enrico and Colonel Garcia to San Martín de los Andes. And we wait to see who’s been surveilling us and why.”
“Does that mean I’m going down there to help Grüner find the U-boot?” von Dattenberg asked.
“That’s what it means,” Frade said.
XIII
[ONE]
Estancia Don Guillermo
Km 40.4, Provincial Route 60
Mendoza Province, Argentina
0935 21 October 1945
Just before walking out of the officers’ mess, Clete had solved Jimmy Cronley’s immediate problem—I really don’t want to see the Squirt right now, Jimmy had thought, not until I do better at figuring that situation out than I have so far—by pointing to the stacks of paper on the table and ordering, “You better stay here and try to help straighten that mess out.”
“That mess” was the stacks of files Colonel Manning had stuffed into the bags at Kloster Grünau, Manning’s selection criteria being, If it could possibly compromise Operation Ost, send it to Argentina.
The bags had been carried into the officers’ mess while Cronley was having breakfast. Niedermeyer, Strübel, and Frogger had gone into—pawed through—the documents looking for dossiers. They had stopped doing that when the meeting had begun, but had gone back to it as soon as the meeting was over.
Jimmy realized he had not been very useful—the documents were, after all, Abwehr Ost files, and they knew more about them than he did—but being there kept him from having to see Marjie, and that was the priority.
The only solution to the Marjie problem he could think of was to get Clete to send him back to Bavaria, dodging Marjie until he could get on the plane. But that had been blown out of the water when Mr. Howell had seen him appointed as Official Seizer of Uranium Oxide in the Name of the United States Government.
The only honorable solution he could think of now was to allow himself to freeze to death at the mouth of the Strait of Magellan. Freezing to death was supposed to be painless.
There was the sound of an aircraft engine. A familiar sound.
That’s a Franklin! So that has to be a Piper Cub.
A single sixty-five-horsepower Franklin 4AC-176-B2 four-cylinder engine powered the Piper J-3 aircraft.
What’s going on?
“That must be the puddle jumpers from the Húsares de Pueyrredón,” Strübel said. “You ought to take a look at that, Cronley. It’s something to see.”
Cronley went outside in time to see the first of two Piper Cubs in Ejército Argentino markings making a slow approach to the mountaintop.
It touched down and ended its landing roll about fifty yards from where Cronley stood. Clete was waiting there with Enrico and Captain Garcia, whose uniform now carried the insignia of a lieutenant colonel. Garcia quickly got into the Cub, which then turned around, taxied to the end of the “runway”—which also served as the front lawn of the big house—and took off.
The second Piper began its approach.
Cronley now saw, standing in front of the big house, Martha Howell, Beth Howell, and Empress Elsa the Great von Wachtstein. They also apparently had been told that watching the Pipers land and take off was something they should see. Reasoning that if Beth and her mother were there, Marjie would not be far away, Cronley quickly retreated to the safety of the BOQ.
He took one step inside the building when someone grabbed his arm.
“We’re going to have to stop meeting this way,” Marjie said. “People will talk.”
She raised her face to be kissed.
Jimmy grabbed her arms and held her away.
“What we’re going to have to do, Squirt, is stop this nonsense.”
“What?”
“I’m not a nice guy.”
“I guess I’ve known that for—what?—sixteen, seventeen years.”
“I mean, really not nice. If you knew, you wouldn’t be—”
“Knew what?”
He looked over her shoulder and out the door where Martha, Beth, and Elsa were watching Enrico Rodríguez get into the second Piper Cub.
He nodded toward them.
“I did more with her than follow her around like a lovesick calf,” Jimmy said.
Marjie turned to see what his nod was pointing out.
When she turned to look at him, her face showed that she had taken his meaning.
“And there’s more you don’t know about me,” he proclaimed. “Worse than that.”
“What could be worse than that?”
“You really want me to tell you?”
Her reply to that was nonverbal.
She struck his face. Not with an open hand, a slap, against his cheek—but with her fist balled. She hit him square in the nose, with sufficient force to both daze him and cause his eyes to water.
When he could see again, he saw that his right hand—which in a reflex action he had brought to his face—was bloody.
And when he looked away from his hand, he saw that Marjie was gone.
He looked out the door but couldn’t see her.
He fished out his handkerchief—with some difficulty, as his bloody hand was at his face and he had to use his unbloodied left to get to his right hip pocket—and held it against his nose, and leaned against the wall just inside the door.
He had been there about five minutes, long enough to decide that, all things considered, a bloody nose was a fair price to pay for being able to end the business with Marjie—and then to wonder who the hell had taught her to punch as she had.
He was about to push himself off the wall, find a men’s room, wash off the blood, and return to help Niedermeyer and the others with the documents he’d brought from
Kloster Grünau when Cletus Frade came through the door.
Oh, God! Marjie was probably crying, and he saw her, and now he’s come to settle with me for whatever I did to make his baby sister cry!
“Jesus Christ!” Frade exclaimed when he saw the bloody handkerchief, then asked, sarcastically, “What did you do, walk into a door?”
Jimmy decided that that seemed an obviously better thing to confess to than the truth.
“That’s exactly what I did,” Jimmy said, pointing at the door.
“You have to be careful, Jimmy. You can really hurt yourself that way. You sure you’re all right?”
“I’m fine. A little bloody, but . . . What’s up?”
“I’m going to take von und zu A to the airport and shoot some touch-and-gos in the Lodestar. I thought you might want to come along.”
Who the hell is von und zu A?
Oh . . . the guy who used to fly transports here from Germany.
Oberstleutnant Dieter von und zu Aschenburg.
“Why?”
“Why are we going to shoot touch-and-gos, or why am I asking you along?”
“Both.”
“We may need von und zu A to fly down south. He’s got a lot of experience in flying in Arctic—Antarctic—conditions like that, and I have zero such experience.”
“North Dakota doesn’t count?”
“That was a Cub in North Dakota. A Cub is not a Lodestar. And North Dakota is not the mouth of the Magellan Strait.”
“Okay.”
“And the reason I’m asking if you want to ride along—I may even let you shoot a couple of touch-and-gos—is because I’m still trying to make amends.”
“For what you thought about the Squirt and me?”
“Right.”
“Thanks, I’d like to go along.”
—
There were two Ford station wagons parked in front of the BOQ. Former Oberstleutnant Dieter von und zu Aschenburg was in the front passenger seat of one. There were six men, all armed, in the second.
Clete got behind the wheel of the first station wagon and Jimmy got in the back. There was a Thompson submachine gun on the seat.
As they were moving slowly down the steep and narrow road from the mountaintop, von und zu Aschenburg turned in the seat and offered his hand to Jimmy.
Empire and Honor Page 47