Griffin W.E.B.: Honor Bound 04 - Death and Honor

Without thinking of the circumstances of their coming to the estancia, von Wachtstein was showing off the flight characteristics of the Luftwaffe’s “ground cooperation” airplane and his own skill to Cletus Frade, himself a pilot.

He realized this when he was on the ground and taxiing the Storch to park it beside the three Piper Cubs.

That wasn’t too smart , he thought. But under the circumstances, I’m entitled to be a little crazy.

He considered that, then corrected himself: Crazy, but not careless .

The young blond woman slid off the enormous hood of the Horch, exposing more leg than she realized, and started walking toward the Storch.

On her heels came a large and burly middle-aged man with an enormous mustache. He was wearing a business suit that didn’t quite fit. He cradled a 12-gauge Remington Model 11 semiautomatic shotgun in his arms. Around his neck was a leather bandolier of brass-cased double-aught buckshot shells.

“Sergeant Major Enrico Rodríguez, Retired,” von Wachtstein said against the noise of the shutting-down Argus 10C engine. “Where Don Cletus is, Enrico can always be found. I think I should tell you Enrico’s not fond of Germans. He suspects, correctly, that people we hired wound up slitting his sister’s throat while they were trying to assassinate Don Cletus, and ambushed Don Cletus’s father, Oberst Frade, in that Horch. El Coronel died. The assassins thought Enrico was dead, too. He was full of buckshot, but he wasn’t dead.”

“Mein Gott!” Boltitz muttered.

Von Wachtstein waved at Doña Dorotea, loosened his seat belt, then started to unfasten the fold-down doors on the Storch.

Boltitz saw someone jump down from the fuselage door of the Lodestar and start to walk toward them. He was a tall, lanky, dark-haired young man wearing khaki trousers, cowboy boots, and a fur-collared leather zipper jacket.

That looks, Boltitz thought, like some kind of a flier’s jacket.

When the young man came closer, he saw that it was: Sewn to the breast was a gold-stamped identification badge. It carried the wings of a Naval Aviator and the legend C.H. FRADE, 1LT USMCR.

“ Hola, Peter,” Señora Frade greeted him with a wave and a smile as he crawled out of the airplane. “An unexpected pleasure.”

“Dorotea, may I present Korvettenkapitän Boltitz?” von Wachtstein said. “Dorotea is my wife’s oldest friend.”

Boltitz clicked his heels and bowed.

“Enchanted,” he said in Spanish.

“What can we do for you, von Wachtstein?” Cletus Frade asked in Spanish. His hostile tone of voice made it clear that he was displeased as well as surprised to see the German.

The surprise was genuine. The hostility was feigned. It was difficult to dislike someone who had saved your life. More than that: Frade was both genuinely fond of von Wachtstein and admired him. Maybe even loved him.

Cletus H. Frade had given his relationship with Hans-Peter von Wachtstein a good deal of thought.

We’re pawns on this crazy chessboard, he had originally thought, and the people moving us around are perfectly willing to sacrifice either of us to advance their game.

He’d changed that original assessment slightly: Well, maybe not pawns, maybe knights. But certainly not bishops, who by definition are supposed to promote good works and practice decency and honesty.

They had met six months before, in December of 1942, as the result of what he had politely thought of at the time as an almost funny misunderstanding between his father and his aunt—his father’s sister, Beatrice Frade de Duarte— but what he now thought of, far less kindly, as a typical Argentine fuckup.

Two months before they met, both had been serving officers. Frade had been flying a Grumman F4F Wildcat of Marine Fighter Squadron VMF-211 off Fighter One on Guadalcanal, and von Wachtstein a Focke-Wulf 190 of Jagdstaffel 232 defending Berlin against what was becoming a daily bombardment by the Allied heavy bombers.

That had a lot to do with what happened, Cletus Frade had decided, perhaps immodestly. We’re both fighter pilots. Fighter pilots are special people. Only another fighter pilot knows what being a fighter pilot is all about. It has nothing to do with what side of the war you’re on.

Cletus Frade had been returned to the United States from Guadalcanal to perform two duties the brass considered more important than his shooting down any more Japanese aircraft or strafing Japanese infantry.

The first was to be exhibited—with half a dozen other pilots with five or more kills—on various platforms and theater stages on the West Coast. Seeing real-life aces, the brass reasoned, was almost certain to encourage people to buy war bonds.

The second purpose—for the combat-experienced pilots to serve as instructor pilots to pass on the lessons they had learned to new pilots—Frade thought was probably going to be more dangerous than taking on some Japanese pilot. A new Navy or Marine aviator trying to prove he was worthy of being sent off to do aerial battle was very likely to be as dangerous to his instructor pilot as a fourteen-year-old riding his first motorcycle in front of his girlfriend.

Frade therefore had been very receptive to the offer made to him in a San Francisco hotel room as he reluctantly was getting dressed to go on display again.

It had come from a stocky, well-dressed, mustachioed, middle-aged man who said his name was Graham. He had shown Frade his identification card, that of a Marine Corps colonel, and then said that if Frade would volunteer to undertake an unspecified “mission outside the United States involving great risk to his life” he could get off the war bond tour—right then, that night—and would not be assigned as an IP when the war bond tour was over.

Frade had already decided to do something outrageous to get himself relieved of his instructor pilot duties, but that almost certainly would have meant getting shipped back to the Pacific, which would also certainly involve great risk to his life. So, figuring that he didn’t have much to lose, he signed a vow-of-secrecy document promising all sorts of punishments for even talking about his new duties.

It was only after he had signed that Colonel Graham told him he was now in the Office of Strategic Services, and what the OSS expected of him was to go to Argentina and attempt to establish a relationship with his father.

Not sure if he was embarrassed or amused, Frade had explained to the colonel that that was probably going to be a little difficult, as he could not remember ever having seen his father, and had it on good authority that his father had absolutely no interest in seeing him.

“I know,” Graham said. “Your grandfather told me.”

“My grandfather?” Clete had blurted.

Graham nodded. “I saw him just before I flew out here to see you. The kindest words he used to describe el Coronel Jorge Guillermo Frade—”

“My father is a colonel?” Cletus Frade asked, astonished.

Graham nodded again, and handed him a photograph. It showed a large, tall, dark-skinned man with a full mustache. He wore a rather ornate, somewhat Germanic uniform, and was getting into the backseat of an open Mercedes-Benz sedan. In the background, against a row of Doric columns, was a rank of soldiers armed with rifles standing at what the Marine Corps would call Parade Rest. Their uniforms, too, looked Germanic, and they were wearing German helmets.

“That was taken several months ago,” Graham said. “The day he retired from command of the Húsares de Pueyrredón, Argentina’s most prestigious cavalry regiment.”

“Jesus Christ!”

“You’re the product of an unfortunate infatuation, and a hasty, equally unfortunate marriage, right?”