Victory and Honor Page 3

  “Ready, Don Cletus,” the man said after he had hung the ladder out the door.

  His name was Enrico Rodríguez. He was a retired suboficial mayor—a sergeant major—of the Húsares de Pueyrredón regiment of the Argentine Cavalry. All his adult life, he had served el Coronel Jorge Guillermo Frade, first as batman and chauffeur, then as bodyguard. He had been beside him—and left for dead—when el Coronel Frade had been assassinated, and now quite seriously believed God’s mission in life for him was to protect el Coronel’s only child.

  Cletus went to the door and knelt to get on the ladder.

  “Leave the shotgun, Enrico. And if you have a pistol, leave that, too.”

  Enrico looked very unhappy.

  “Or stay on the airplane,” Frade finished.

  Rodríguez first took a Remington Model 11 twelve-gauge riot shotgun from where he had it suspended under his suit jacket and wrapped it in a woolen blanket on the aircraft floor.

  He looked at Frade, who raised his eyebrows in question.

  Rodríguez then reached under his jacket and came out with a Ballester Molina .45 ACP semiautomatic pistol, which was a variation of the 1911-A1 Colt pistol, manufactured in Argentina under license from Colt. He carefully added it to the blanket with the Remington and looked at Frade.

  Frade’s eyebrows rose higher.

  Rodríguez met his eyes for a moment, then shrugged. He raised the right leg of his trousers and took a snub-nosed Colt Police Positive .38 Special revolver from an ankle holster and hid it with the other weapons.

  “This is America, Enrico. No one is going to shoot at us here.”

  “You are the one, Don Cletus, who says that one never needs a gun until one needs it badly.”

  Frade nodded, then quicky went down the rope ladder. Rodríguez followed.

  [THREE]

  On the tarmac, Frade and the welcoming committee examined each other.

  Lieutenant Colonel Cletus H. Frade—one hundred ninety pounds on a trim six-foot frame—carried himself with the élan, some would say the arrogance, of a Marine fighter pilot.

  The MPs—a captain, a sergeant, and a private first class—saluted when they saw his silver oak leaves. Frade returned the salute and handed the senior of the MPs a small leather wallet.

  The MP captain examined it.

  It contained a gold badge on one side and a sealed-in-plastic photo identification card in the other. The photo ID was clearly patterned after the Adjutant General’s Office identification cards issued to commissioned officers. There was space for a photo, a thumbprint, and the individual’s name, rank, and date of birth.

  But this was not an AGO card. In its center was the Great Seal of the United States. In two curved lines at the top was the legend THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, and under that, OFFICE OF STRATEGIC SERVICES. A rectangular block at the bottom, with space for the individual’s name and rank, identified Cletus H. Frade as an area commander.

  The credentials were not exactly bona fide—although they had been manufactured by the OSS’s Document Section. A Princeton professor of psychology with three doctoral degrees recruited into the OSS thought it would be nice if OSS operators in the field had their own credentials.

  Wild Bill Donovan had lost his famous Irish temper when he’d seen them.

  Absolutely unbelievable! Who the hell does this academic think OSS agents would show these? They’re spies, for christsake!

  He tossed the sample credentials in his Shred and Burn wastebasket and tried to forget about them. But when Colonel A. F. Graham, his deputy director for the Western Hemisphere, showed up at his door, Donovan decided to share them for a laugh.

  After inspecting them, Graham said, “May I have these, Bill?”

  “You’re serious, Alec?”

  “Yeah. It’s no secret in Argentina that Frade and his men are OSS. He may find a use for them. He’s resourceful.”

  “He’s a damn dangerous loose cannon,” Donovan had replied, then pushed the credentials to Graham. “Get them out of here. Every time I see them, I get mad all over again.”

  Graham had been right. Frade had successfully used them a few times—once to dazzle the stubborn commander of the Army Air Corps base in Brazil. When he saw Frade identified as an OSS area commander, the chickenshit had become the poster child for cooperation and goodwill. That experience had made Frade think they just might work at Washington National now.

  “How may I help you, Colonel?” the MP captain, looking appropriately impressed, said.

  Well, Frade thought as he took back the wallet, that worked.

  So far, so good. Still on a roll . . .

  “Presumably, Captain, you’re in charge of security?” Frade asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I will be here no more than three hours,” Frade said. “I’ll be loading five passengers. Three of them may already be here. I’ll get the ones who are not. I don’t want anyone to get near my aircraft.”

  “Yes, sir,” the captain said. “I understand.”

  Frade gestured toward Enrico. “Sergeant Major Rodríguez here is under strict orders to keep the aircraft secure.”

  Clete noticed that Enrico read between the lines—that he was going to stay with the airplane and not accompany Clete—and was both surprised and glad that Enrico did not protest being left behind.

  “Yes, sir,” the captain repeated. “There won’t be any problem.”

  “We didn’t get any heads-up about this,” one of the civilians, a starchy heavyset man in a cheap suit, charged in an officious tone.

  “Of course you didn’t,” Frade said. “You’re from the airport, right?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “We’ll require fuel, of course. And enough food for a dozen people for a ten-hour flight. In Marmite cans. You can bill that to the OSS, right?”

  “I’d have to have authorization.”

  “From whom?”

  “From the OSS.”

  “Then you just got that authorization,” Frade said. “Now, has anybody seen a chauffeur-driven 1940 Cadillac?”

  “As a matter of fact,” the MP captain said, “there’s a car like that in the parking lot.”

  Frade turned to the civilian from the airport.

  “See what you can do about a real ladder or stairs to get up there,” he said, pointing to the Constellation’s rear door. “I’m not sure my passengers will want to climb a rope ladder.”

  “I’m sure I can come up with something,” the man said.

  As Clete approached the custom-bodied Cadillac, his grandfather’s chauffeur got out and opened the rear door. Tom, a silver-haired black man, had been driving Cletus Marcus Howell around Washington for as long as Clete could remember.

  The Cadillac had a gasoline ration sticker affixed to its windshield. The otherwise glistening door had stripes of dull black tape on it, obviously to cover something on the door. Until that morning, the door had shown a legend required by the Office of Price Administration.

  There had been gasoline rationing in the United States since early 1942, not because there was any shortage of gas but because there was a critical shortage of rubber to make tires.

  A fairly complicated distribution system had been set up. At the bottom end were ordinary citizens who received two gallons of gas a week. At the top were politicians, from local mayors to members of Congress, who got all the gasoline they said they needed. Ordinary citizens got an “A” sticker, whereas congressmen and other important politicians got an “X” sticker.

  In between were those who were issued “B” or “C” or “D” stickers. “B” meant the car was being driven by someone essential to the war effort; somebody driving to work in a tank factory, for example. A “B” sticker was worth eight gallons a week. “C” stickers were worth as many gallons of gas as clergymen, doctors, and “others essential to the war effort” could convince the ration board to give them. “D” was for motorcycles, which got two gallons per week.

  There was a “C�
� on the windshield of the custom-bodied Cadillac, which was registered in the name of the Howell Petroleum Corporation. Cletus Marcus Howell was chairman of the board of Howell Petroleum, and he had been more than a little annoyed that he had to go to a ration board and beg for gas so that he could conduct the business of Howell Petroleum, whose oil wells and refineries in Texas, Louisiana, and Venezuela were turning out many millions of gallons of gasoline every day.

  But he had put up with the regulations of the Office of Price Administration because he thought of himself as a patriotic American, and because his only grandson, Cletus Howell Frade, a Marine hero of Guadalcanal, was still serving his country.

  He had, however—almost literally—gone through the roof when the Office of Price Administration decreed that passenger vehicles enjoying the privilege of extra gasoline because they were being used for business had to paint the name of that business and its address on doors on both sides of said vehicle, so that the citizenry would know that no one was getting around the system. The Office of Price Administration had helpfully provided the size of the lettering and the color that had to be used.

  The dull black stripes on the door of the Cadillac had been applied to conceal the legend painted in canary yellow that was prescribed by the Office of Price Administration:Howell Petroleum Corp.

  16th & H Streets, NW

  Wash., DC

  Sixteenth and H Streets Northwest was the address of the Hay-Adams Hotel, where Cletus Marcus Howell kept an apartment—and the Cadillac—for use when he was in Washington. It was across from the White House.

  The universally loathed gas rationing had ended almost immediately after the Germans had surrendered unconditionally on May 7, 1945. As soon as that news had reached Cletus Marcus Howell, at his home in New Orleans, he had telephoned Tom, the chauffeur, and told him to cover the goddamn door sign immediately, until the door could be repainted.

  “Nice to see you again, Mr. Clete,” Tom said.

  “Nice to see you, too, Tom.”

  “Where we going?” Tom said as he got in behind the wheel.

  “Fort Hunt,” Clete replied from the backseat. “You know where it is?”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “You weren’t supposed to have heard of it, Tom.”

  “Where is it?”

  “I haven’t a clue. Somewhere around Alexandria.”

  [FOUR]

  Fort Hunt Alexandria, Virginia 1405 10 May 1945

  Finding Fort Hunt, it turned out, wasn’t at all difficult. Surprisingly, there had in fact been a highway sign with an arrow pointing the way.

  Getting into Fort Hunt was another story.

  One hundred yards off the highway, there had been another sign, this one very large:STOP AND TURN AROUND NOW

  RESTRICTED NATIONAL DEFENSE ESTABLISHMENT

  ENTRANCE TO FORT HUNT STRICTLY FORBIDDEN

  WITHOUT PRIOR CLEARANCE

  TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED

  BY ORDER OF THE COMMANDING GENERAL

  MILITARY DISTRICT OF WASHINGTON

  “What do I do, Mr. Clete?” Tom asked.

  “Let’s see what happens if we ignore that,” Clete said.

  What happened a half-mile down the road was the appearance of two MPs, both sergeants and both armed with Thompson submachine guns. They stood in the middle of the road. One of them held out his hand in an unmistakable Stop Right Damn There! gesture and the other looked as if he would be happy to finally be able to shoot the Thompson at somebody.

  Tom stopped the Cadillac. Almost immediately, an Army ton-and-a-half truck, commonly called a weapons carrier, appeared behind the Cadillac. An MP jumped from the passenger seat, and two more MPs from the truck bed. They all had Thompsons, and they were clearly determined to do their duty to keep interlopers not only from getting into Fort Hunt, but also from escaping now that they had been captured.

  The sergeant who had made the Stop Right Damn There! gesture now marched toward the Cadillac, with the other covering his back.

  He had almost reached the car when he saw that the passenger was in uniform, and that the insignia of a lieutenant colonel was on his collar points and epaulets.

  He went to the rear door and saluted. Clete returned it as the window rolled down.

  The MP said, “Sir, may I have your prior clearance?”

  “Take me to the commanding officer, Sergeant,” Clete replied, then nodded at the MP standing behind him. “And tell the sergeant there that if he intends to fire that Thompson, he’d better work the action.”

  That didn’t have to be repeated. The sergeant immediately looked down at his weapon and clearly recalled that the Thompson submachine gun fired from an open bolt. Looking more than a little chagrined, he pulled back the bolt, thus rendering it operable.

  Frade met the eyes of the MP at his window, smiled, then said, “Have you a vehicle we can follow, or would you rather ride with us?”

  “Just a moment, Colonel, please, sir,” the sergeant said.

  After consultation with the others, the sergeant returned to the Cadillac and got in the front seat. The sergeant with the now-functioning weapon walked to the weapons carrier, got in the front seat, and signaled for all but two of the others to get in the back. The two exceptions started walking in the direction of a guard post mostly hidden in the heavily treed roadside.

  The weapons carrier moved to the front of the Cadillac.

  “If you’ll just follow the truck, please?” the sergeant sitting beside Tom said.

  Frade knew the highly secret mission of Fort Hunt—the interrogation of very senior enemy officer prisoners, predominantly German, but including a few Italians and even, Colonel Graham had told him, two Japanese—but he had never been here before.

  It was not an imposing military installation, just a collection of built-in-a-hurry-to-last-four-years single- and two-story frame, tarpaper-roofed buildings. Clete wondered why it was called a fort. Most for-the-duration military installations—like the senior officer POW Camp Clinton he had visited in Mississippi—were called camps.

  The two-vehicle convoy stopped at one of the two-story frame buildings. It bore the sign HEADQUARTERS, FORT HUNT. Standing in front were two U.S. Army soldiers, a slight, slim, bespectacled lieutenant colonel in a somewhat mussed uniform, and a stocky, crisply uniformed master sergeant. Both wore MP brassards on their sleeves and carried 1911-A1 pistols in holsters dangling cowboy-like from web belts, instead of the white Sam Browne belts that MPs usually wore.

  Both looked with frank curiosity at the little convoy.

  “Wait here, please, Colonel,” the MP sergeant sitting beside Tom said as he opened his door.

  Screw you, Clete thought. I want to hear what you tell those two.

  Frade was out of the Cadillac before the MP had reached the soldiers standing in front of Headquarters, Fort Hunt.

  The two looked curiously at him. The master sergeant, apparently having spotted Frade’s silver oak leaves, said something behind his hand to the lieutenant colonel, whereupon both saluted.

  “Good afternoon,” Clete said cheerfully as he returned the salute. “Why do they call this place a fort? It looks as if it was built yesterday.”

  The question was obviously unexpected.

  Clete saw on the Army lieutenant colonel’s uniform his name: KELLOGG.

  After a moment, Kellogg said: “Actually, it was a fort. It was built for the Coast Artillery just before the Spanish-American War.”

  “No kidding?”

  “And the land once was part of George Washington’s farm,” Kellogg added.

  “I’ll be damned!”

  “How can we help you, Colonel?” Kellogg then said cordially but with authority.

  “My boss wants to chat with a couple of your guests,” Frade replied.

  “Colonel, may I see some identification?” Kellogg said.

  Frade handed him the leather wallet holding his spurious credentials.

  The lieutenant colonel examined them c
arefully, then handed them to the master sergeant, who did the same before handing them back to Frade.

  “We don’t see many credentials like those,” Kellogg admitted.

  “Well, so far we’ve managed to keep them off the cover of Time,” Frade said.

  “And your . . . boss . . . your boss is who?”

  “Colonel Alejandro F. Graham, USMCR—”

  “I know Colonel Graham,” Kellogg interrupted.

  “—sometimes known as the Terrible Tiger of Texas A&M,” Frade finished. “Whose bite is far more deadly than his growl.”

  Kellogg smiled somewhat uncomfortably.

  “And you say Colonel Graham sent you out here to chat with two of our prisoners?”

  “No. What I said was that he wants to chat with two of them, and sent me out here to fetch them.”

  Frade went into a pocket on his tunic and came out with a sheet of paper.

  “One of them is a Kapitän zur See Karl Boltitz and the other is Major Freiherr Hans-Peter Baron von Wachtstein. Now, that’s what I call a mouthful! I wonder how they get all that on his identification card?”

  The master sergeant smiled.

  “It’s not easy, Colonel,” he said. “And some of these Krauts have names that are even worse than that.”

  “Colonel, this is more than a little unusual,” Kellogg said. “We didn’t even know you were coming. Do you have any kind of authority—written authority?”

  “You mean, you want me to sign for them? Sure. Be happy to.”

  “No, I meant a document authorizing you to take these officers with you.”

  Frade sighed. “Colonel, let me explain how I came to be here. I got to Washington two days ago. I can’t tell you . . . Hell, why can’t I? The Germans have surrendered. I was in Portugal . . .

  That’s true. I was in Lisbon not long ago, smuggling even more Nazis out of Europe.

  “. . . as area commander . . .

  Now I’m lying again. I’ve done so much of that it comes as natural to me as it did to Baron Munchausen.