Top Secret Read online

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  Jimmy thought that he hadn’t really understood the convoluted family relations of Cletus Frade until he’d gone to Argentina, although he had wondered about them from the time he wore short pants. Starting with, he thought now, wondering why Jim and Martha Howell’s “son” was named Frade instead of Howell.

  Gradually, he had been able to put some of the pieces together.

  Clete’s “mom” wasn’t his mother but his aunt. Beth and Marjorie—the Squirt—were his cousins, not his sisters. Their father, James Howell, was Clete’s uncle. James was one of Cletus Marcus Howell’s—the Old Man’s—two children, the other being Clete’s mother. She had died when Clete was an infant.

  Jimmy seldom had heard her name, but the Old Man made it clear that the reason she died was that she had married “a despicable Argentinian sonofabitch.” He knew this because that’s how Cletus Marcus Howell referred to him on those rare occasions when the subject came up in Jimmy’s hearing.

  Jimmy had grown up thinking that Clete’s father was some sleazy Mexican-type greaseball Casanova who had somehow managed to seduce a wholesome Midland girl, gotten her with child, watched her die—probably of the drugs and alcohol to which he had introduced her—and then abandoned her and their infant offspring. The baby—Clete—had then been taken in by James Howell, his mother’s brother, and reared by him and his wife, Martha, as their own.

  When Second Lieutenant Cronley had ordered one of Tiny’s Troopers to put a couple of rounds from the pedestal-mounted .50 caliber Browning machine gun on his jeep into the engine of Lieutenant Colonel Schumann’s staff car to convince the colonel that, IG or not, he was not going to be allowed into Kloster Grünau, he had been entirely within his rights to so.

  Cronley had been authorized by Colonel Mattingly to take whatever action was necessary, including the taking of human life, to protect what was going on at Kloster Grünau from becoming known.

  But there were ramifications to the shattered engine block. Colonel Schumann had gone to General Greene to report not only the assault upon his staff car, but to tell Greene that he was convinced the activity at the secluded monastery had a great deal to do with the rumor he had been chasing for some time—that renegade Americans were sneaking Nazis out of Germany to South America.

  With great difficulty—as Mattingly had not been then authorized to tell Greene anything about Operation Ost—he had managed to dissuade Greene from sending the 18th Infantry Regiment to seize Kloster Grünau from whoever held it. But Mattingly knew that was a temporary solution at best, and that a very credible scenario was that Greene, after thinking it over, would send the 18th Infantry and tell him about it later.

  If that happened, about seventy pounds, literally, of incriminating documents at Kloster Grünau would be seized. That simply could not be allowed to happen. Mattingly immediately collected the documents and Second Lieutenant Cronley from Kloster Grünau and took them to Rhine-Main airfield in Frankfurt.

  There, after ordering Cronley to guard the documents with his life until he could place them in the hands of Lieutenant Colonel Frade and no one else, he put both on an SAA Constellation bound for Buenos Aires. Then he put himself on a Military Air Transport Service C-54, which departed Rhine-Main for Washington.

  He had to convince Admiral Souers, who was presiding over the burial of the OSS, that General Greene and others had to be told of Operation Ost and ordered to support it. Otherwise Operation Ost was going to blow up in everybody’s face, and those faces included President Harry S Truman’s and General of the Army Dwight David Eisenhower’s.

  Mattingly’s orders to Cronley were that once the documents were safely in Frade’s hands, he was to catch the next Germany-bound SAA flight and return to Kloster Grünau, where he was to keep his mouth shut, and, if the 18th Infantry showed up, to stall them as long as possible before surrendering.

  Cronley had not been able to comply with his orders.

  —

  Cletus Frade had met Jimmy Cronley’s SAA aircraft at Aeropuerto Coronel Jorge G. Frade. He was driving a Horch automobile—very much like Colonel Mattingly’s—and had with him his wife, a long-legged blond with a flawless complexion who spoke English like the King.

  What Jimmy hoped was discreet questioning produced the information that the airport was named “Frade” because Clete had dedicated it to his father—that despicable Argentinian sonofabitch?—and that the Horch—“Nice car. Where’d you get it?”—had been his father’s.

  They drove into Buenos Aires, a city that didn’t look like anything Mexican, and stopped at a mansion overlooking a horse racetrack. Clete had told him the mansion, built by his Grand-uncle Guillermo, was where Clete and his wife and kids lived because Dorotea thought the “big house” was about as comfortable as a museum.

  When they went inside, things immediately became even more complicated.

  The Old Man was there. And Martha and Beth and Marjie Howell.

  All the Howell women kissed Cronley, which he sort of expected. What he didn’t expect was the way the Squirt kissed him. Clete’s baby sister wasn’t supposed to kiss him that way, and he absolutely wasn’t supposed to have the instant physical reaction to it that he did. All he could do was hope that no one happened to be glancing six inches below his belt buckle.

  But even that went into the background when Cronley, almost casually, mentioned to Clete that he had been talking with some of Gehlen’s people at Kloster Grünau about where a missing submarine, U-234, might have made landfall in Argentina, and they had come up with a very likely answer.

  “Jesus Christ, didn’t Mattingly tell you?” Clete said.

  “What?”

  “Apropos of nothing whatever, my last orders from General Donovan were to keep two things going at all costs—Operation Ost and the search for U-234. So tell me, what did you and the boys in the monastery come up with?”

  Jimmy’s reply had immediately triggered a good deal of frenzied activity adding to the frenzied activity already in progress, which included the attempted assassination of Colonel Juan D. Perón, whom Clete referred to as his Uncle Juan.

  Jimmy still had trouble remembering exactly what had happened and when, but in about the middle of it he had been in Mendoza—

  That was right after Clete flew there with a wounded Colonel Perón in the back of the machine-gun-riddled SAA Lodestar.

  And before the Squirt told me she’d loved me all her life—and I took her virginity. The next and last time we Did It was in the Lord Baltimore Hotel.

  That was after I got checked out in the Lodestar, then headed to the Straits of Magellan. And after I came back from down there with the uranium oxide from the U-234.

  And we loaded it on the Old Man’s Connie and flew it to Washington.

  And the next thing I knew I was a captain.

  And I was a widower—no—first I was a married man.

  The next day I was a widower, and that afternoon I was a captain.

  —on top of a mountain, in sort of a fort and prison run by Clete’s deputy, Major Maxwell Ashton III, and for the first time Jimmy and Clete were alone for a few minutes and Jimmy had just blurted out, “What the hell’s going on?”

  “You mean here at Casa Montagna—aka Fort Leavenworth South?”

  “Start with that.”

  “Well, it also was built by my Great-uncle Guillermo,” Clete said, “which is why it’s called Estancia Don Guillermo. I never met him, but I understand he was not crippled by modesty and self-effacement. I inherited it from my father, and placed it in the service of the Office of Strategic Services. Next question?”

  “How’d you go from being a hotshot fighter pilot to the OSS, Clete? I still remember your mom showing me the picture of you being awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for service there.”

  Clete turned his head slightly and nodded. “That’s right. I never t
old you. As you know, I made Ace—that takes five kills and I got seven—with VFM-226 on Guadalcanal. For living to tell about it, there was a prize: The Corps sent me home to go on a War Bond tour. You can imagine how much fun that was. And following the tour, the Corps was sending me to Pensacola to teach fledging birdmen.

  “I was in my room in the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel trying to decide who I was going to have to kill to get out of both the tour and flight school when a full bull Marine colonel showed up. He handed me a picture of a man wearing what looked like a German uniform. ‘That’s your father.’

  “I said, ‘Really?’ and he said, ‘We think he’s going to be the next president of Argentina.’

  “And I probably said, ‘Really?’ again, and he said, ‘Lieutenant, we want you to go to Argentina and do two things. Blow up an ostensibly neutral ship which is supplying German submarines in the River Plate, and see what you can do to tilt your father to our side. Right now he’s favoring Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo.’”

  “This is for real?”

  Clete nodded again. “It was mind-blowing. I said, very respectfully, ‘Sir, I have never laid eyes on my father. That’s the first picture I ever saw of him. And I have no idea how to blow ships up. I’m a Marine fighter pilot.’”

  “And?”

  “He said, ‘You were a Marine fighter pilot. What you are now is a Basic Flight Instructor on temporary War Bond Tour Duty en route to Pensacola. We’ll teach you how to blow up ships, and I’m sure you’ll figure out some way to cozy up to your daddy once you get to Buenos Aires.’”

  “Jesus!”

  “Three weeks later, I got off the Panagra Clipper in the River Plate. My cover was that I had been medically discharged from the Corps and was now going to make my contribution to the War Effort by making sure none of the crude or refined product that the Old Man shipped there from Howell Petroleum Venezuela wound up in German, Italian, or Japanese hands.

  “The Old Man arranged for me to stay with his major customer, who is a real pain in the ass. All Señor Enrico Mallin knew about me was that I was the Old Man’s grandson—not that my father was an Argentine.

  “Two nights after I get to Buenos Aires, I’m having dinner with the Mallin family, trying to keep my eyes off his daughter—”

  “His daughter?”

  “Good-looking blond. You’ve met her. Her last name is now Frade.”

  “That’s where you met her?”

  “You want to hear this story or not?”

  “Go!”

  “The phone rings. The butler tells my future father-in-law it’s for him. Señor Mallin snaps, ‘You know I don’t take calls at dinner,’ and the butler replies, ‘Señor, it is el Coronel Frade.’

  “Mallin turns white. He takes the phone and oozes charm as he tells el Coronel Frade how pleased he is to hear his voice, and asks how might he be of service.

  “A very loud voice that can be heard all over the dining room announces, ‘It has come to my attention that my son is under your roof. I would like to talk to him.’

  “‘Your son, mi Coronel?’

  “‘For Christ’s sake, Mallin! I know he’s there. Get him on the goddamned phone!’”

  Cronley laughed.

  “How’d he know you were there?”

  “You met General Martín. The guy who runs the Bureau of Internal Security. He was a light colonel then, Number Three at BIS. It was brought to his attention that an American named Cletus Howell Frade, whose passport said he was born in Argentina, had just gotten off the Panagra Clipper. He checked and—lo and behold!—there it was, el Coronel Frade had a son named Cletus Howell Frade. He asked my father if there was anything el Coronel thought he should know about his son who had just arrived in Buenos Aires.”

  “Why’d he do that?”

  “My father was about to stage a coup d’état, following which he would become president of the Argentine Republic . . .”

  “He was what?”

  “. . . which Martín thought was a good thing, and didn’t want anything screwing it up. Are you going to stop interrupting me?”

  “Sorry.”

  “So I took the phone from Mallin. And a deep voice formally announced, ‘This is your father. Would it be convenient for you to take lunch with me tomorrow?’ I said, ‘Yes, sir,’ and he replied, ‘The bar at the Alvear Palace. Half past twelve.’ And he hung up.

  “At twelve-forty the next day, ten minutes late—there are two bars at the Alvear, and I’d gone to the wrong one—I walked into the bar looking for a guy in a German uniform. No luck. But a guy wearing a tweed jacket and silk scarf looked hard at me. I walked over and in my best Texican Spanish asked if he was Colonel Frade.

  “‘You’re late,’ he announced. ‘I hate to be kept waiting. That said, may I say I’m delighted to see you’ve returned safely from Guadalcanal.’”

  “He knew you’d been on Guadalcanal?”

  “Yeah. I found out later he knew just about everything else I’d ever done in my life, like when I was promoted from Tenderfoot in Troop 36, BSA, in Midland.

  “Then he said, ‘With your approval, I suggest we have a drink, or two, here and then go to the Círculo Militar for lunch. That’s the officers’ club.’

  “In the next thirty minutes, over three Jack Daniel’s—doubles—he politely inquired into the health of the Howells, including the Old Man, then announced I had arrived conveniently in time for the funeral next week of my cousin.”

  “You had a cousin down here?”

  “Cousin Jorge, the son of my father’s sister, Beatrice. Pay close attention, Jimmy, it gets complicated from this point.

  “My father said Aunt Beatrice, who’d always been a little odd, poor woman, had just about gone completely bonkers when Cousin Jorge died in the crash of a Storch at Stalingrad. He was afraid she wasn’t going to make it through the funeral, which was going to include the posthumous presentation of the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross.”

  “You had a cousin who was a German pilot at Stalingrad?” Jimmy said incredulously.

  “He was an Argentine captain, at Stalingrad as an observer.”

  “Jesus Christ!”

  “And sometime during this exchange of family gossip, I told him the bullshit cover story about me being medically discharged from the Corps, and how I was in Argentina to check on what happened to Howell Venezuela crude and refined product.

  “To which he replied, ‘Teniente Coronel Martín—who’s seldom wrong—thinks the OSS sent you down here.’ So I asked him who Martín was, and he told me, and I said he’s wrong, to which he replied, (a) ‘Please do not insult me by lying to me,’ and (b) ‘Don’t worry about Martín. I can handle him until we get you safely out of the country.’

  “Then he said it was time for lunch. I tried to be a gentleman and pay for the drinks, but my father waved at the barman. ‘My son’s money is no good in the Alvear. Make sure everyone knows that.’

  “We walked out of the hotel. The Horch was parked there next to an Absolutely No Parking Or Stopping At Any Time sign. Enrico—you know Enrico . . .”

  Jimmy nodded.

  “. . . was standing there holding the driver’s door open. My father said, ‘Cletus, this is Suboficial Mayor Rodríguez. We soldiered together for twenty-five years. Enrico, this is my son Cletus.’

  “Enrico popped to attention. ‘An honor, mi teniente. El coronel has told me what a fine officer of the Corps de Marines you are.’”

  “I thought your father was a Nazi. Or a Nazi sympathizer.”

  “At the time, so did I. So then my father said, ‘Get in the back, Enrico. Teniente Frade will drive.’ I got behind the wheel and drove to the Círculo Militar, a couple of blocks away.

  “I later found out I was the first person except Enrico my father ever let within ten feet of that steering wheel. He really loved his Horch.
He died in it.”

  “What?”

  “Assassinated. Two barrels of twelve-gauge double-aught buckshot to the face.”

  “Jesus Christ, Clete!”

  “I’ll return to that later. So we went to the Círculo Militar, where we had several more double Jack Daniel’s while waiting for our lunch, during which time he introduced me to maybe half of the senior brass of the Ejército Argentino as ‘my son, Teniente Cletus, hero of Guadalcanal, where he shot down seven Japanese aircraft and earned the Distinguished Flying Cross.’

  “During lunch, which was an enormous filet mignon served with two bottles of Don Guillermo Cabernet Sauvignon—from here, Jimmy, my father said it came from a ‘little vineyard the family owns’ . . . Okay, where was I? Oh. The important part. Over lunch, I heard my father’s version of his marriage and why I was raised by Mom and Uncle Jim. It differed substantially from the Old Man’s version.”

  “What was your father’s version?”

  “That he and my mother were married in New Orleans, in the Saint Louis Cathedral, with the Old Man’s blessing. His poker-playing pal the Cardinal Archbishop did the honors. No one had ever told me that.

  “My father’s best man was his Army buddy, then Major Juan Domingo Perón. A year later, I was born—upstairs in this house, the attending physician was Mother Superior—and Tío Juan became my godfather.”

  “That old nun who just sewed up Perón?”

  “One and the same. She runs the Little Sisters of Saint Pilar hospital. She also delivered both of my kids.”

  “So what the hell happened?”

  “My mother, when she converted to Roman Catholicism, jumped in with both feet. The Old Man thought her conversion was no more than a formality to get the cardinal to marry them in the cathedral. But she became deeply devout.”

  “So what? I don’t understand.”

  “She’d had trouble when I was born. Mother Superior warned her that future pregnancies would be dangerous. This was confirmed by other doctors.”