“Of course not. Whatever Edgar is, he’s no fool.”
“Best scenario,” Graham went on, “Argentina sees the light and joins the Allies. Next best, Argentina remains neutral, leaning toward us. Next best, Argentina remains neutral, leaning the other way. Worst, Argentina gets in a war with Brazil and becomes a de facto if not de jure member of the Axis powers. Anything we can do to keep the worst scenario from coming into being seems to me to be worth the effort. The Frade father-son card isn’t much, but you play what you have. Sometimes you get lucky.”
“I agree,” Donovan said. “But be careful, Alex,” he said. “And keep me posted. Personally, not with one of your memorandums.”
“Right,” Graham said. He raised his eyebrows, asking, Is that all?
“It’s always a pleasure to see you, Alex,” Donovan said drolly. “We really should do this more often.”
Graham laughed. “The very next time I’m in town,” he said, and then walked out of Donovan’s office.
III
[ONE]
The Country Club
Fairfax County, Virginia
1115 16 October 1942
The brick pillars which just over a year before had supported the country club’s crest and the legend “Private Club—Members Only” remained; but the sign with the club’s name had been taken down. Twenty yards down the macadam road, just barely visible from the highway, two new signs, each painted on a four-by-eight-foot sheet of plywood, one on each side of the road, announced that this was a U.S. Government Reservation and trespassers would be prosecuted. Eighty yards farther down the road, a guard shack had been built. On either side of the road, a twelve-foot hurricane fence, topped with coiled barbed wire, disappeared into groves of trees.
The guardhouse was manned by two men in blue, vaguely police-type uniforms. They had badges pinned to zipper jackets, and were armed with Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum revolvers.
When Graham’s 1942 Plymouth station wagon came down the road, one of the guards stepped out of the shack and waved it, unnecessarily (a striped pole barrier hung across the road), to a stop. As Graham rolled down his window, the guard leaned over and looked in the car.
Graham offered the guard a small leather wallet, holding it open. It contained an identification card with a photo on it. The guard knew Graham by sight, but the security Standing Operating Procedure dictated that no one would be passed through without proper identification, not even an Assistant Director of the OSS.
“Good morning, Colonel,” the guard said.
“Morning,” Graham replied, then nodded his head toward Staff Sergeant David G. Ettinger, Army of the United States, who was sitting beside him. “The Sergeant is with me.”
“Yes, Sir,” the guard said; he didn’t seem at all surprised that an Army sergeant was wearing a well-cut civilian suit. “Sergeant, may I see some identification? Dog tags?”
Ettinger, a tall, dark-eyed, sharp-featured man, with very light brown hair, reached into the pocket of his tunic and came out with a small, folding leather wallet much like the one Graham had shown the guard. The guard took it, said, “Just a moment, please,” and went into the guard shack.
“I’ve heard about this place,” Ettinger said.
There was a faint accent, but not readily identifiable. In New York City, it would go unnoticed, Graham observed when he first met Ettinger.
“From what I’ve heard,” Graham said, “you will quickly learn to loathe it.”
“I’ve heard that, too,” Ettinger said.
“Perhaps our security here isn’t as tight as we like to think,” Graham said. “I’m sure it couldn’t be that there are loose lips at the Counterintelligence Corps Center.”
“What they told us in training was that there are loose lips everywhere, Sir,” Ettinger said.
Graham smiled. In the eighteen hours since he met Ettinger, he had come to like him. He had a droll sense of humor…not unlike his own. And he quickly became convinced (good things as well as bad often come in threes) that he was right in choosing Ettinger to round out the Argentine Team. It could have gone the other way. Ettinger could have been as fluent in Spanish as Graham himself, as knowledgeable about radio as David Sarnoff himself, and wholly unsuitable for the Argentine Team.
The guard returned to the car with a clipboard and a visitor’s badge: a plastic-covered, striped card hanging from a dog-tag chain.
“Sergeant, would you sign this?” the guard asked. “It’s a receipt for the visitor’s badge. Wear it at all times when you’re on the reservation.”
He handed the clipboard across Graham to Ettinger, who looked carefully at what he was being asked to sign before signing it and handing it back. When the guard passed him the visitor’s badge, he looped the chain around his neck.
The guard inside the shack pressed a lever, and the striped steel pole barrier rose into the air.
“Thank you,” Graham said to the guard by the car and drove onto the reservation.
“I had something like this when I was in kindergarten,” Ettinger said, examining the visitor’s badge.
Graham chuckled. “Where was that?”
“Madrid,” Ettinger said.
“They called it a ‘kindergarten’?”
“It was run by Germans,” Ettinger said simply.
Graham turned a curve on the narrow road and a large fieldstone and brick building, the Club House, came into view.
“And how did the members of this place react when it was placed in public service?” Ettinger asked.
“There were howls of protest that it was too much of a sacrifice to ask for the war effort,” Graham said. “Except from the finance committee, who saw their patriotic sacrifice as a means to fill up the treasury. I hate to think what this place is costing the taxpayer.”
“It’s rather beautiful, isn’t it?”
“I’m sorry to tell you, David, but you won’t be living here. Just over the hill—out of sight of this, of course—they’ve built standard barracks for the trainees.”
“For some reason, I am not surprised.”
Graham stopped the Plymouth in front of the main entrance and opened his door.
“Leave your bag. If they don’t offer to take you to the barracks, I will. But come with me now, please. I want you to meet the man who runs the place.”
Another security guard in a police-type uniform sat at a desk just inside the door to the lobby. He rose to his feet as soon as he saw Graham, but did not make it quite to the door before Graham opened it himself.
“Good morning, Colonel,” the guard said.
“Good morning.”
“Colonel, the Colonel would like to see you.”
The Colonel, the other colonel, was the Deputy Assistant Director for Training, Colonel Baxter F. Newton-Haddle.
“As his peers played golf and polo,” Colonel Donovan had announced in a stage whisper, just before he introduced Graham to him, “Newton-Haddle played soldier. I think the greatest disappointment of his life was when Georgie Patton told him he was too old to come on active duty. But he’s that rare bird for us, the round peg in the round hole.”
Their reserve colonelcies, Graham often thought, were the only things he and Newton-Haddle had in common. He had kept his reserve commission after the First War, too, and worked his way up in the Marine Corps Reserve, as Newton-Haddle had in the Army.
But for him it was a serious business, not a game. From what he had seen of Newton-Haddle, Donovan had been right about him. Newton-Haddle loved to “play soldier.” Graham did not think the war was a game, an activity to be enjoyed.
Graham led Ettinger up a wide flight of marble stairs to the second floor. Newton-Haddle’s secretary, who was one of the very few women at the Country Club (he brought her with him from his office at the First Philadelphia Trust Company), rose from behind her desk when she saw Graham.
“Colonel Newton-Haddle expects you, Colonel. Go right in.” When she saw Ettinger start to follow Graham, she quickly add
ed, “Colonel, I think the Colonel would rather see you alone for a moment.”
Graham ignored her and went to the door. It opened on a spacious, paneled room with windows overlooking the South Course.
“You wanted to see me, Newt?”
Newton-Haddle, a lithe and trim sixty-year-old who looked at least fifteen years younger than his age, was wearing Army-green trousers and a tieless, open-collared khaki shirt adorned with colonel’s eagles and parachutist’s wings. He stepped quickly from behind his desk and strode toward Graham with his hand extended.
Bounded, Graham noticed, like a gazelle. Not walked.
“Alex,” he said, “you look fit.”
“Appearances are deceptive,” Graham said.
“I tried to call you before,” Newton-Haddle said. “Your secretary told me you were coming down.”
“Newt, this is Mr. Ettinger,” Graham said. “I think he’s going to be quite valuable.”
“Sergeant Ettinger, isn’t it?” Newton-Haddle said, nodding at Ettinger, and not offering his hand.
“He’s a CIC Special Agent,” Graham said. “They’re called ‘Mister,’ right?”
“But now he belongs to us, Alex,” Newton-Haddle said. “So he’s no longer a CIC agent, right?”
“I’ve arranged for him to keep his credentials until he actually leaves for Argentina, Newt,” Graham said, with an edge in his voice. “I thought they might come in handy.”
“I don’t mean to sound argumentative, Alex,” Newton-Haddle said argumentatively, “but here we operate on a military basis. We use our ranks.”
“That’s one of the reasons I’m here, Newt,” Graham said. “I wanted to talk to you about that.”
“About how I run the training school?”
“About David’s training here,” Graham said.
“Oh.”
“I rather doubt that there will be time for him to complete the entire course. I want to get this team down there as soon as possible.”
“Of course. We all do. But certainly you don’t want him sent down there half-trained, inadequately trained?”
“He’s had the CIC training. What he needs from you, in whatever time is available…”
“How much time are we talking about, Alex?”
“Documents is working on his papers. He needs a visa, which the Bank of Boston has to arrange for via the Argentine Consulate in Boston. Since we want as few eyebrows raised as possible, we can’t push too hard for that. Still, I don’t think he will be here for more than ten days or two weeks, and I think we had better operate on the ten-day idea.”
“There’s not much I can do for him—nothing personal, Sergeant—in ten days.”
“Run him through as much explosives training as time permits, and if there is any time left over, work on his swimming, and maybe even infiltration techniques. Explosives first.”
“Whatever you think is best for him, of course,” Newton-Haddle said. “We’ll do our best for him. Sergeant, I wonder if you’d be good enough to wait outside for a moment while I have a word with Colonel Graham?”
“Certainly, Sir,” Ettinger said, and left the office, closing the door behind him.
“What’s on your mind, Newt,” Graham said, “that you didn’t want the sergeant to hear?”
“Alex, we’re friends, right?” Newton-Haddle asked. He waited until Graham nodded. “And so I may speak with candor?”
“Please do.”
“It’s always difficult when one feels one must—when duty requires that one must—point out to a friend where one feels the friend, so to speak, is going off half-cocked.”
“We’re friends, Newt. Have a shot at it.”
“I see a great deal of potential in the men of your team, a potential I would really hate to see disappear down the toilet. Even Pelosi…”
“Even Pelosi?” Graham asked.
“His knowledge of explosives is extraordinary…”
“He cut his teeth, so to speak, on a stick of dynamite,” Graham said. “That’s why I picked him.”
“I would like to keep him here as an instructor, at least for the time being.”
“He’s going to Argentina, Newt, sorry. But now that you’ve brought up Pelosi, and his extraordinary skill, can I suggest that you get him to teach Ettinger as much as he can while they’re here?”
“By the time Pelosi reaches Argentina,” Newton-Haddle said, ignoring the suggestion, “the problem there will be solved. The team down there will have taken out the ship. I trained them myself, and they’re good.”
“I’m sure they are, and I hope—of course I hope—that they can take out that damned ship long before the backup team gets to Argentina. But we can’t bank on that happening. We need a second team down there as soon as we can get them there. A little redundancy never hurts, Newt. And I have been charged with taking out the replenishment vessel. He goes, sorry.”
“There is, of course, a good deal to what you say,” Newton-Haddle said charmingly. “There always is. It is always better to err on the side of caution.”
“I’m glad you understand,” Graham said.
“Which brings us to Lieutenant Frade,” Newton-Haddle said.
Graham’s patience with Newton-Haddle was about exhausted.
“If you’re going to bring up again my refusal to send him through here, Newt, save your breath. He needs a rest-and-recuperation leave, not your version of Parris Island recruit training.”
“He’s the asset it would really be criminal to flush away.”
“Get to the point, please, Newt. I have to get back to Washington.”
“I think we should give more thought to the use of this one-of-a-kind asset than we have so far.”
“I discussed the use of this one-of-a-kind asset with Colonel Donovan yesterday,” Graham said. “He seems to find that the use I came up with is satisfactory.”
“How would you feel about a meeting between you, Bill, myself—and possibly even Jasper Nestor—to look into Lieutenant Frade’s potential worth a little more deeply? I’m sure Nestor could be here in forty-eight hours if the Bank of Boston called him home for an ‘emergency consultation’ or some such. That would justify getting him a seat on the Pan American Clipper from Buenos Aires…”
“By ‘Bill’ are you by any chance referring to Colonel Donovan, Colonel Newton-Haddle?” Graham asked icily.
“No disrespect was intended. This is just a conversation between friends.”
“To answer your question, Colonel,” Graham went on, “I have no interest in discussing this mission with either you or Mr. Nestor, other than to inform you what will be required of you. Now is that clear enough, or should I get on the telephone and ask Colonel Donovan to personally make the point that operations are not your concern?”
“Now, Alex, there’s no point in flying off the handle…”
“Do you take my point, Colonel, or should I get Colonel Donovan on the phone?”
“I take your point,” Newton-Haddle said after a moment.
“Colonel, I am now going to take Mr. Ettinger to meet Lieutenant Pelosi. I am going to inform Lieutenant Pelosi that he is to devote the rest of the time he is here—however long that might be—to imparting to Mr. Ettinger as much as possible of his knowledge of explosives and demolition techniques. I am going to tell him that you will help him in any way you can, and I want you there when I tell him.”
“If you wish.”
“I don’t know how it is in the paratroopers, Colonel, but in the Marine Corps, the proper response when given an order is to respond with the words ‘Yes, Sir.’”
After a long moment, Colonel Baxter F. Newton-Haddle said, “Yes, Sir.”
[TWO]
Big Foot Ranch
RFD #2, Box 131
Midland, Texas
1115 21 October 1942
First Lieutenant Cletus Howell Frade, USMCR, put his arm around the stocky, short-haired blond woman standing beside him at the grave and hugged her. Then he said, his
voice breaking, “Christ, Martha, I’m sorry.”
Clete was wearing a brand-new Stetson, dark-brown worsted woolen work pants, somewhat battered Western boots, and a heavy sheepskin coat. The woman, who was in a fur-collared trench coat, turned and smiled up at him and put her hand to his cheek.
“He was too damned young, but he had a good life, honey,” she said. “And he was so damned proud of you!”
The tombstone, an eight-foot-wide, five-foot-high block of Vermont marble, read HOWELL in the center. Below, to the left, in slightly smaller letters, it read,
JAMES FITZHUGH HOWELL
Gunnery Sergeant USMCR WWI
March 3, 1895–August 11, 1942
To the right had been chiseled,
MARTHA WILLIAMSON HOWELL
June 11, 1899—
“We got to the ’Canal on the tenth of August,” Clete said. “We flew off an escort carrier as soon as they got the field operational. I didn’t even get the damned notification until the twentieth.”
“You wrote me, honey,” Martha Howell said.
“If I’d been in the States, I probably could have got an emergency leave,” Clete said. “But not from the ’Canal.”
“Honey, don’t apologize for something you couldn’t control,” Martha said. “And there was nothing you could have done. He just keeled over in the bar of the Petroleum Club, and that was it.”
“Goddamn!”
Martha moved out from under his arm, walked to the pole-and-chain fence surrounding the small cemetery, and pointed to one of the poles.
“You know what that is, Clete?”
“Looks like drill pipe,” he said.
“It is. I was going to use cast iron, but the cast iron place in New Orleans is out of business for the duration, so I had them cut up some pipe, and weld some chain to it to keep the cattle off. I thought I’d get the cast iron after the war, but now I’m not so sure. What’s wrong with drill pipe? And chain. God knows, in his life he wrapped enough chain around drilling strings.”
“Looks fine to me the way it is,” Clete said.
“That’s good, for there’s room in here too for you and yours, whenever that happens,” Martha said.
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