W. IV: Honor Bound 05 - The Honor of Spies

Cletus Frade entered the United States Marine Corps and became a fighter pilot. Flying F4F Wildcats off "Fighter One" on Guadalcanal in the South Pacific, he became, by shooting down four Japanese Zero fighters and three Betty Bombers, an "Ace Plus Two."

That was enough for the Marine Corps to send him home, ultimately to pass on his fighter pilot's skill to fledgling fighter pilots, but first to participate in a War Bond Tour during which real live heroes from the war would be put on a stage to encourage the public to do their part by buying War Bonds Until It Hurt.

The first leg of the tour had found the war hero in California:

Frade was in his room in the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel taking on a little liquid courage for his first appearance on stage when a well-dressed, neatly mustached man appeared at his door and inquired in Spanish if Frade happened to know an aviator and motion picture producer by the name of Howard Hughes.

"Who wants to know?" Frade said.

"Colonel Alejandro Frederico Graham, USMCR, wants to know, Mr. Frade. And stand to attention when you're talking to him."

There had been something about the civilian's tone of voice that caused Frade to stand to attention.

Colonel Graham pushed past Frade, entered his room, and closed the door.

"The question was, 'Are you acquainted with Howard Hughes?' You may answer 'Yes, sir' or 'No, sir.'"

"Yes, sir."

"Mr. Hughes told me you are the son of Jorge Guillermo Frade. You have the same answer options, Mr. Frade."

"Yes, sir."

"Good."

"Sir, permission to speak, sir?"

"Granted. You may stand at Parade Rest."

"Yes, sir. Sir, did Howard tell you I wouldn't know the sonofabitch if I fell over him?"

"He did mention something along those lines. Tell me, Mr. Frade, are you looking forward to the War Bond Tour? And teaching people how to fly?"

"No, sir."

"If I could get you out of both, would you accept a top-secret overseas assignment involving great risk to your life?"

"What kind of an assignment?"

"What part of 'top secret' didn't you understand, Mr. Frade?" Graham said.

Then he handed Frade a photograph of a man wearing what looked like a German uniform, including the steel helmet, standing and saluting in the backseat of an open Mercedes-Benz.

"That's what your father looks like. I don't want you falling over the sonofabitch without knowing who he is."

"Colonel, what's this all about?"

"I'll answer that, Mr. Frade, but it's the last question you get. What I want you to do is go down to Argentina and persuade your loving daddy to tilt the other way. Right now he's tilted toward Berlin."

He handed Frade a sheet of paper. The letterhead read: OFFICE OF STRATEGIC SERVICES, WASHINGTON, D.C . Clete had never heard of it.

"Sign that at the bottom. It's a formality. What it is is your acknowledgment that you fully understand all the awful things your government will do to you if you run off at the mouth."

There was too much small print to read. Frade looked at Graham.

"Or don't sign it, Mr. Frade. Your call. But I'm on a Transcontinental and Western flight to Washington in ninety minutes. With you or without you."

He extended a pen to Frade, who took it and scrawled his signature.

Graham then folded the sheet of paper and put it in his suit coat's inside pocket.

"Welcome to the OSS, Mr. Frade," Graham said. "And I bring greetings from your grandfather. If you're a good boy, I'll try to get you a couple of days with him before we put you on the Panagra flight to Buenos Aires."

"You know my grandfather?"

"He doesn't like your father very much, does he?" He did not wait for a reply, and nodded toward the bedroom. "Now, you'd better pack."

"That will be all, Amelia," el Colonel Peron said. "No calls, no visitors."

"Si, senor."

Cranz waited until the maid had closed the double doors to the library.

"Juan Domingo," Cranz began, "you were right about Tandil. I'm almost positive Frade has the Froggers there."

Peron nodded just perceptibly.

"Cletus Frade has arrived in Los Angeles," he said. "At the Lockheed airplane factory. There was a Mackay radiogram. De Filippi called me yesterday."

Guillermo de Filippi was chief of maintenance of South American Airways.

Cranz did not regard that as especially good news; a great many of his problems would have been solved if the Lockheed Lodestar that Frade was flying had lost an engine--preferably both--and gone down somewhere--anywhere--during the hazardous six-thousand-mile flight from Buenos Aires, never to be heard from again.

But unfortunately, the airplane was brand new, his copilot was the very experienced chief SAA pilot Gonzalo Delgano, and Frade himself was both a superb pilot and someone who apparently had more lives than the nine of the legendary cat.

Cranz's predecessor as the senior SS-SD officer in Argentina had not only botched a very expensive attempt to remove Cletus Frade from the equation, but had shortly thereafter died when a rifle bullet fired by one of Frade's men--or perhaps by Frade himself--had caused his skull to explode on the beach of Samborombon Bay.

Cranz had taken great care to make sure that his arrangements to eliminate Frade would not fail this time.

"Juan Domingo, something has to be done about the Froggers," Cranz said.

Peron didn't reply.

"And we both know that Cletus Frade has them."

Cranz felt sure he knew (a) why Frogger, the German Embassy's commercial attache, and his wife had disappeared, and (b) why Frade had them.

Frogger was privy to many details of Operation Phoenix, the plan conceived by Reichsfuhrer-SS Heinrich Himmler; Reichsleiter Martin Bormann, head of the Nazi Party; Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, chief of German Military Intelligence; and other very senior members of the Nazi hierarchy, who understood that the war was lost and had no intention of facing Allied vengeance.

Cranz knew all about Operation Phoenix: Hundreds of millions of dollars were to be spent to purchase South American sanctuary for high-ranking members of the Nazi establishment--probably including Der Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler, himself, although Cranz wasn't sure about this--from which, after some time passed, National Socialism could rise, phoenixlike, from the ashes of the Thousand-Year Reich.

Cranz had been sent to Argentina to make sure nothing went wrong with the plan--after something had gone terribly wrong.

An attempt had been made at Samborombon Bay, on the River Plate, to smuggle ashore a half-dozen crates stuffed with English pounds, American dollars, Swiss francs, gold coins and bars, and thirty-odd leather bags heavy with diamonds. The transfer was made on boats from the Comerciante del Oceano Pacifico, a Spanish-registered freighter. But someone had been waiting. Cranz suspected Cletus Frade and members of his OSS team, though he wasn't absolutely sure of this; it could have been Argentines.

There had been a brief burst of gunfire from a concealed position near the beach. Two of the three German officers--SS-Oberst Karl-Heinz Gruner, the military attache of the German Embassy, and his deputy, SS-Standartenfuhrer Josef Luther Goltz, had been dropped in their tracks, their skulls exploded by the rifle fire.

The snipers had missed the third officer, Major Hans-Peter von Wachtstein, the embassy's deputy military attache for air. Von Wachtstein had managed to get the crates--"the special shipment"--and the bodies of Gruner and Goltz onto the Comerciante del Oceano Pacifico 's boats and back out to the ship.