W.E.B. Griffin: Victory and Honor

Cletus Frade brought the Lodestar in low over the pampas and smoothly touched down on the runway. The first time he’d flown here, the runway had been grass. Now, three years later, it was pebble and lined with lights. And the tarmac was now cobblestones, and there was another hangar, this one large enough for two Lodestars.

During the landing, he had seen that there was a welcoming party. It wasn’t until he had taxied up to the hangars and stopped the aircraft that he really realized how large the group was.

“It looks like the Turtles have come out to welcome us,” Frade said, turning to look at his wife in the copilot seat.

When I met you, he thought, you’d never even been in an airplane.

And look at you now, Amelia Earhart!

“Darling,” his copilot said resignedly, as she shut down the engines and then took off her headset, “I’ve told you time and again that they don’t like being called the Turtles.”

A Top Secret personnel roster filed in Colonel Alec Graham’s office at OSS Headquarters in Washington, D.C., listed the members of OSS Western Hemisphere Team 17, which was code-named Team Turtle. A sunken ship was sometimes said to have “turned turtle”—and the original mission of the team had been to cause the sinking of the Reine de la Mer to stop its replenishments of German U-boats .

The roster listed, under one Lieutenant Colonel Cletus Frade, USMCR, Majors Maxwell Ashton III and Anthony J. Pelosi (now assistant military attachés at the U.S. Embassy); Captain Madison R. Sawyer III; Navy Lieutenant Oscar J. Schultz, the team’s radioman; Master Sergeant William Ferris, their weapons and parachute expert; and Technical Sergeant Jerry O’Sullivan, who operated the team’s highly secret radar.

Ferris, Ashton, and Sawyer all came from wealthy, socially prominent families, thus meeting the criteria for the—possibly a little jealous—critics of the OSS who suggested the abbreviation actually stood for “Oh, So Social.”

The only Turtles missing from the reception party—or not on the Lodestar—were Captain Sawyer and newly promoted Master Sergeant Sigfried Stein, the team’s explosives expert who was a refugee from Nazi Germany. Both were at Frade’s Estancia Don Guillermo, near Mendoza in the foothills of the Andes, holding down the fort of what Frade thought of as the lunatic asylum, and his wife thought of as her little house in the mountains, more formally known as Casa Montagna.

There were also four gauchos on horseback by the hangars, all armed with either rifles or submachine guns, and there were, Clete knew, at least six or eight more out of sight, keeping watch on the Big House.

There were also a half dozen servants of both sexes from the Big House and as many mechanics/ground handlers.

“I really hate to go out there,” Clete said to Dorotea. “Signing autographs for fans is so tiring.”

“My father was right about you. You’re bonkers, absolutely bonkers. I should have listened to him.”

“You were deaf with uncontrollable lust.”

“You bah-stud!”

“I love it when you talk dirty.”

“My God!” Dorotea exclaimed as she opened the door to the passenger compartment. Clete saw that she was smiling.

After disembarking from the Lodestar, the women saw that the children were placed in baby carriages for the ride to the Big House that would pass through over a hectare of English garden. Then the women—with the exception of Dorotea—walked after the servants who pushed the baby carriages. Other servants trailed them with everyone’s luggage.

The men, meantime, pushed the Lodestar into the hangar. Moving the big airplane took grunting effort from all of them.

When the Lodestar had been arranged to Clete’s satisfaction, Allen Dulles cleaned his hands with a handkerchief. Then, pointing, Dulles asked, “What’s that under the tarpaulin?”

“The last time Hansel was here, he left in a hurry and forgot it,” Frade said. “Being the wonderful fellow that I am, I’ve been taking care of it for him.”

Von Wachtstein, having heard his name, walked up as two mechanics responded to Clete’s gesture and started removing the tarpaulin.

When they had finished, von Wachtstein said, “My God!”

The Fieseler Storch—a small, highwing, single-engine aircraft—was painted in the Luftwaffe spring and summer camouflage scheme of random-shaped patches in three shades of green and two of brown. Black crosses identifying it as a German military aircraft were on both sides of the fuselage aft of the cockpit, and the red Hakenkreuz of Nazi Germany was painted in white circles on both sides of the vertical stabilizer.

“It looks like it could be flown right now,” von Wachtstein said.

Frade glanced at his wife, then said, “Dorotea and I flew it to your mother-in-law’s house for dinner last week.”

“How did Peter come to ‘forget it’ the last time he was here?” Dulles asked.

“Well,” Frade said by way of explanation, “Peter can’t be accused of being a military genius, but he did set up an emergency get-out-of-Dodge plan. Which worked.”

“When we got word,” von Wachtstein furnished, “Ambassador von Lutzenberger called me at four A.M. with the joyous news that God had saved our beloved Führer from Claus’s bomb at Wolfsschanze. I then picked up Karl Boltitz at his apartment, went out to El Palomar Airfield, filed a flight plan to Montevideo, and, as soon as it was light, took off in the Storch. And flew here. Cletus then flew us—no flight plan—to Canoas in the Red Lodestar. Thirty-six hours later, Karl and I were officially POWs at Fort Hunt.”

“Von Lutzenberger,” Dulles said, “the German ambassador in Buenos Aires?”

Von Wachtstein nodded.

“He knew what you were doing?” Dulles pursued.

Von Wachtstein nodded again, then looked at Frade and said, “What happened to him after the unconditional surrender?”

“I don’t know,” Frade said. “I should have asked Martín.”

“I did ask General Martín,” Dorotea said. “The ambassador and his wife are either in Villa General Belgrano or will be shortly. Just about everybody else from the embassy was taken to the Club Hotel de la Ventana in the south of Buenos Aires Province.”

“What’s that, a house?” Major Ashton asked. “‘Villa General Belgrano’?”

“It’s actually a place,” von Wachtstein said, “a little village in Córdoba. It looks like it’s in Bavaria. It was started by German immigrants, and when the Argentine government had to put the interned survivors of the Graf Spee somewhere, the most dedicated Nazis were sent there. I used to fly that”—he pointed to the Storch—“up there once a month with the payroll and their mail.”

“And the less dedicated Nazis?” Dulles asked.

“Some of them went to an Argentine army base near Rosario,” Boltitz chimed in, “and the rest to the Ventana Club Hotel.”

“I used to go there, too,” von Wachtstein said. “Usually, I had a message or a package for the Bishop of Rosario, a man named Salvador Lombardi. You know what they say about converts to Catholicism becoming more Catholic than the Pope? Well, that sonofabitch was a convert to National Socialism and was more of a Nazi than Hitler. He told me one time that anyone who opposed Der Führer would suffer eternal damnation. And he meant it.”

“I believe the bishop is a close friend of my Tío Juan,” Frade said. “I wonder why that doesn’t surprise me.”

There were many reasons for Frade’s deep distrust of el Coronel Juan Domingo Perón—his godfather, “Uncle” Juan—who was vice president, secretary of War, and secretary of Labor and Welfare of the Argentine Republic. Chief among them was that Perón, very sympathetic to Germany’s socialist political ideals, was too friendly with the Nazis in Argentina. And, Frade had discovered, Perón’s ultimate ambition wasn’t to become president of Argentina—he instead aspired to be ruler of a Greater Argentina that the Nazis had intended to create by combining Uruguay, Paraguay, and even parts of Chile and Brazil.