Death and Honor Read online

  “Why should he bother to tell you that?” Frade asked. “You’re an officer. You obey the orders you’re given, right?”

  “My father knew what those orders probably would be. He wanted me to know he knew.”

  “Who is your father? Where does he fit in here?”

  “My father, Major Frade, is a navy officer. Vizeadmiral Kurt Boltitz.”

  “And what were the orders your father the admiral was talking about? Were they in Canaris’s letter?”

  “Yes, sir,” Boltitz replied, and heard himself.

  I just called him “sir.” And for a second time.

  What does that mean? That I have subconsciously recognized his authority over me?

  “And they were?” Frade pursued.

  “Admiral Canaris’s letter ordered me to accept any order from Ambassador Lutzenberger as if they had come from him,” Boltitz said.

  “And then what?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “What were Lutzenberger’s orders? ‘Leave Wachtstein alone’?”

  “He told me he knew I had been to see von Wachtstein, and then that von Wachtstein was then in Montevideo, that he had told him to be careful, and that I should make an effort to know him better, as we had more in common than I might have previously realized.”

  “That’s all?”

  “Yes, sir”—Christ, I did it again—“but his meaning was clear.”

  “What happened to the letters?” Frade asked.

  “Ambassador Lutzenberger burned them.”

  “You saw that?”

  Boltitz nodded.

  “And then you went to see Wachtstein and he really let his mouth run?” Frade replied, and then turned to von Wachtstein. “What did you tell him, motormouth? And why?”

  “The korvettenkapitän told me he had seen the ambassador, Cletus,” von Wachtstein said, “and what had been said—”

  “According to him,” Frade said, pointing at Boltitz, “the ambassador didn’t say very much, just implied that he didn’t think you nose-diving onto the runway was a very good idea.”

  Boltitz said: “We both interpreted his remark that I should make an effort to know him better, that we had a good deal in common, to mean that we should confide in each other.”

  Frade didn’t reply for a moment.

  “What you’re asking me to believe, Captain, is that all it took to get you to change sides, to become a traitor to Germany, to turn your back on that code of honor you keep throwing at me, was a quick look at the letters Lutzenberger showed you. That’s a hell of lot to ask me to swallow. Even if you believe, right now, what you’re telling me, how do I know that you won’t change your mind again tomorrow? Or, more likely, when you get back to Germany? You are going back to Germany?”

  “Yes, of course, I’m going back—”

  “Clete,” von Wachtstein interrupted, “as embarrassing as it is for me to bring this up, you have benefited from the code of honor the korvettenkapitän and I believe in.”

  Frade glared at him for a moment, then shrugged, and smiled, and said, “Touché, Peter. I guess you told him about that, too?”

  “He asked me how I had come to be close to you,” von Wachtstein said.

  “Look at me, Captain,” Frade ordered. When his eyes were locked with Boltitz’s, he asked: “In that circumstance, knowing that it was the intention of your military attaché to . . . hell, the word is assassinate . . . to assassinate an enemy officer—this one—would you have done what Peter did? Warn me?”

  “I’d like to think I would have,” Boltitz said. “Assassination is not something to which an honorable officer can be a party.”

  Frade shrugged.

  He looked at his wife. “I’m probably losing my mind, but I’m tempted to believe him.”

  “Peter does,” Dorotea Frade said. “I guess I do, too.”

  Frade exhaled audibly.

  “I’m going to have to think this over,” he said, and looked at Boltitz. “In other words, the jury is still out, Captain Boltitz.” He moved his look to von Wachtstein. “I was about to say watch your back, Peter. But since you already trust this guy, I don’t suppose that’s necessary, is it?”

  “The korvettenkapitän is a brother officer, Clete,” von Wachtstein said. “And we have decided that what our fathers have decided, that our code of honor dictates that our duty is to Germany, not to Hitler and National Socialism. So, yes, Clete, I trust the korvettenkapitän.”

  Frade was silent again for a long moment.

  “Okay,” he said. “You were headed for Santa Catalina, right?”

  Von Wachtstein nodded.

  “How long had you planned on staying there?”

  “I’d hoped to spend the night,” von Wachtstein said.

  “Spoken like a true newlywed,” Frade replied. “Okay. Whatever is wrong with that ugly little airplane of yours is fixed. Get in it, go there, and tell either your mother-in-law or your bride that Dorotea and I accept their kind invitation for cocktails and dinner.”

  Boltitz wondered what that was all about when Frade, as if reading his mind, went on: “That may—but probably won’t—explain your presence here to El Coronel Martín. It’s worth a shot.”

  “I’ll take you to the airstrip,” Dorotea said.

  “No,” Frade said flatly. “Have Antonio take them in one of the Model A’s. And while Carlos is being helpful, one of you say something—in German— about not liking me and/or how unfortunate it was that you had to stop here.”

  “In German?” Boltitz blurted.

  “Good ol’ Carlos speaks German, but thinks I don’t know,” Frade said.

  He walked to the study door, unlocked its dead bolt, and held it open.

  Von Wachtstein offered him his hand as he walked past.

  “Keep your goddamn mouth shut, Peter,” Frade said, but he took the hand and touched von Wachtstein’s shoulder affectionately.

  Boltitz offered Frade his hand.

  Frade took it, and held on to it longer than Boltitz expected. When he looked curiously at Frade, Frade said, “Am I going to have to count my fingers when I let go, Captain?”

  “No,” Boltitz said. “But I think you will anyway.”

  Frade nodded at him. There was the hint of a smile on his lips.

  Both men had just about the same thought: Under other circumstances, we probably would become friends.

  After his wife passed through the door, Frade threw the dead bolt again.

  He went to the desk, took a sheet of paper, and rolled it into the Underwood.

  He patted his hands together for a moment, mentally composing the message, and then typed it rapidly.

  URGENT

  TOP SECRET LINDBERGH

  DUPLICATION FORBIDDEN

  FROM TEX

  TO AGGIE

  IN POSSESSION OF NEW INFORMATION REGARDING GALAHAD CONNECTIONS. I AM UNWILLING TO TRANSMIT EXCEPT PERSONALLY TO YOU. SITUATION HERE PRECLUDES MY LEAVING HERE. ACKNOWLEDGE. ADVISE.

  TEX

  Aggie was United States Marine Corps Reserve Colonel A. F. Graham, deputy director of the Office of Strategic Services for Western Hemisphere Operations. Like Marine Corps Major Cletus H. Frade, Graham was a former member of the Corps of Cadets at the Texas Agricultural and Mechanical College at College Station, Texas, and thus an Aggie.

  When he finished typing, Frade went to the door, unbolted and opened it, and handed the sheet of paper to Enrico, who was sitting in an armchair with his Remington in his lap.

  “Take this out to El Jefe right away,” Frade ordered. “Tell him to encrypt it and get it out as soon as possible.”

  El Jefe—“the chief ”—was Chief Radioman Oscar J. Schultz, USN, who had been drafted into the OSS off the destroyer USS Alfred Thomas, DD-107, when she had called at Buenos Aires three months before. Schultz had been her chief radioman and cryptographer. He now operated a radio and radar station in a clump of trees on the monte of Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo several miles from the main house.
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  “I will send Rodrigo,” Enrico protested.

  “You will take it,” Frade said firmly, and then smiled. “I won’t leave the house, Enrico. I promise. I give you my word of honor as an officer and gentleman, and you know how important that is to me.”

  The sarcasm went over Enrico’s head.

  “I will send Rodrigo here, then I will go,” he said. And then he asked a question. “Am I going to be permitted to kill the other young German bastard?”

  “Not just yet,” Frade said.

  II

  [ONE]

  The Reich Chancellery Berlin, Germany 1230 23 June 1943

  Parteileiter Martin Bormann—a short, stocky forty-three-year-old who wore his hair closely cropped—pulled open the left of the huge double doors to his private office and smiled apologetically at the waiting Vizeadmiral Wilhelm Canaris, who was short, trim, and fifty-five years old.

  Compared to just about everybody else in the senior hierarchy of Nazi Germany but the Führer himself, both men were simply uniformed. Bormann was wearing a brown shirt and trousers, and he had on shoes rather than boots. His right sleeve bore a red Hakenkruez armband with the black swastika in the center of a white circle. Canaris was wearing a naval uniform, but without the flag officer’s silver belt to which he was entitled, and which almost every other admiral wore. Neither was either man wearing a holstered pistol, another item of fashion among most senior officers.

  “I’m really sorry to have kept you waiting, Canaris, but you know how it gets in here sometimes,” Bormann greeted the vizeadmiral.

  “It’s not a problem, Herr Reichsleiter,” Canaris replied.

  He thought: I knew very well that you would keep me waiting. Not to do so would have been an admission that you were not working your fingers to the bone for the party. It is important to you that you appear important. That’s why I called you “Herr Reichsleiter.”

  Bormann’s official title—he was second only to Hitler himself in the Nazi party—was Parteileiter, “party leader.” But on several occasions Hitler had referred to him as “Reichsleiter”—a leader of the Reich. Canaris was convinced Hitler had simply misspoke, but the sycophants around Hitler, who were convinced the Führer never made a mistake, had begun to call Bormann “Reichsleiter” and Bormann liked it.

  “I’ll try to make amends with a good lunch,” Bormann said, waving Canaris into his office. “With your permission, of course, I thought we would eat here. Just the two of us. That way we won’t be interrupted.”

  “That sounds wonderful. But I can’t believe we won’t be interrupted.”

  “Trust me, we won’t be,” Bormann said.

  Bormann took his arm and led him through another set of enormous doors into his private dining room, where a table large enough for twenty had two place settings on it.

  A pair of waiters in white jackets, nice-looking young men in their late teens or early twenties, stood ready to serve them.

  They were interns, Canaris knew, “studying the operations” of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei so that they would be able to later assume roles of responsibility in the Thousand-Year Reich. This was important enough for them to be given “temporary” exemption from military service.

  There were more than two dozen of them working for Bormann. Every one of them, Canaris knew, was either the son or the nephew of a high-ranking Nazi Party official.

  Which is corrupt and immoral, Canaris thought.

  He believed that sort of favoritism was the basic flaw in the Nazi party and its leadership.

  The SS, especially, is riddled through with thieves and sociopaths.

  “May I offer you a glass of wine, Canaris? Or champagne, perhaps?” Bormann asked as he sat down and gestured for Canaris to take the chair at the side of the table.

  “Thank you, no, Herr Reichsleiter. If there is any, I’ll have a glass of beer.”

  Bormann snapped his fingers and one of the interns hurried to produce a bottle of beer, the proper glass for it, and to set it before Canaris.

  Bormann lifted the silver covers on the plates on the tables, and nodded approvingly at what they had been keeping warm.

  “That will be all, thank you,” he said to the waiters. “The admiral and I will serve ourselves.”

  Both young men clicked their heels, bowed crisply, and walked out of the dining room, closing the door after themselves.

  Canaris wondered if Bormann had his wire recorder running and was recording this meeting. It was an idle thought, as Canaris always acted as if he knew whatever he was saying was being recorded, and said nothing that could possibly be used against him.

  Wordlessly, the two served themselves. First, a consommé, then roast pork with mashed potatoes, green beans, applesauce, and red sauerkraut.

  “Very nice,” Canaris said.

  “Truth to tell, Canaris,” Bormann said. “I suspected getting people out of the office and my desk clear was going to take more time than I would have liked, and that I would be forced to ask you to wait. So a special lunch was in order, by way of apology. And if I proved to be wrong, and I could have received you on time, you would have been impressed by both my efficiency and the lunch.”

  Canaris smiled and chuckled dutifully.

  “I wanted to talk to you about Argentina, about Operation Phoenix,” Bormann then said. “That’s becoming a problem, wouldn’t you agree?”

  “I would.”

  “And with everything else the Führer has to deal with, I really hate to bother him with it.”

  “I understand,” Canaris said. “It hasn’t gone well, has it?”

  “The only good news was that we didn’t lose the special shipment on the shore of . . . what was it? Bonbon Bay? Something like that?”

  “Samborombón Bay,” Canaris furnished.

  “Why do you suppose that was, Canaris? Why didn’t the people who shot Standartenführer Goltz and Oberst Whatsisname, the military attaché?”

  “Grüner,” Canaris furnished.

  “. . . and Oberst Grüner grab the special shipment?”

  “There are several possibilities,” Canaris said. “The story Korvettenkapitän Boltitz got from the captain of the Océano Pacífico suggests that they didn’t have time to even begin unloading the special cargo from the Océano Pacífico’s lifeboat when the shooting started. The Luftwaffe officer, von Wachtstein, then put the bodies into the boat and they went back to the ship.”

  “You believe that story? I’ve always thought it was odd that the other two were killed and von Whatsisname wasn’t hurt.”

  “Von Wachtstein,” Canaris furnished. “May I go on, Herr Reichsleiter?”

  “Of course. Excuse me, Canaris.”

  “What I was about to say was that that suggests the possibility that the Argentines accomplished what they may have set out to do. That is, get revenge for the killing of Oberst Frade by killing two German officers. Once that was done, they had no further interest in the boat or its crew. And von Wachtstein was in civilian clothing, which suggests the possibility they thought he was just another seaman. And, of course, they had no idea what was in the crates.”

  “You think, then, that it was an act of revenge? By Argentine army officers?”

  “Excuse me, Herr Reichsleiter, but what I said was that it suggests the possibility. We have no facts to go on. But, having said that, the fact that they showed no interest in the crates suggests they didn’t have any idea what they contained, and didn’t care. Robbery was not the motive, ergo sum. And robbery would offend the Argentine officer’s code of honor.”

  “They can murder in cold blood but not steal?”

  “In a sense. They consider revenge to be one thing, theft another.”

  “How do you think they knew when and where the landing would be attempted? ”

  “Again, several possibilities. They have a man in their Bureau of Internal Security, an Oberst Martín, who is far more competent than one would expect. One possible scenario is that he ma
intained aerial surveillance of the Océano Pacífico once she entered the River Plate. They have the capability to do that. And once the Océano Pacífico left the normal channel to the Buenos Aires harbor, and moved toward Samborombón Bay, he sent up a watch on the shore in that area. He also has that capability.”

  “What you’re saying is that you don’t think we have a traitor in the embassy in Buenos Aires?”

  “I’m not saying that at all, Herr Reichsleiter,” Canaris replied. “There very well may be. If there is, I’m sure Brigadeführer von Deitzberg will find that out. If indeed he hasn’t already. Has anyone heard from him?”

  “Not that I know of,” Bormann said. “You didn’t mention your man just now, Korvettenkapitän Whatsisname?”

  “Boltitz, Herr Reichsleiter. He’s a junior officer and he’s taking his orders from, and will make his report through, von Deitzberg. He’s not really an intelligence officer . . . an intelligence officer for something like this.”

  “I don’t think I understand.”

  “Don’t misunderstand me, Herr Reichsleiter. Boltitz is a good man. Very smart. If you want an assessment of the Royal Navy, of the probable course and speed of a convoy crossing the North Atlantic in January, that sort of thing, he’s quite useful. He was a submarine officer—many successful patrols—but he doesn’t have much experience—any at all, actually—in counterintelligence, which is what von Deitzberg is dealing with here.”

  “I suppose that’s true,” Bormann said.

  “When von Deitzberg came to me asking if I had someone who could talk, as a seaman and in Portuguese, to the captain of the Océano Pacífico about what happened at Samborombón Bay, I assigned Boltitz to him. And Boltitz apparently impressed von Deitzberg, because he asked me if he could have him to go with him to Argentina.”

  “He speaks Portuguese?”

  “Yes. And Spanish. And English. Many naval officers are multilingual.”

  “I suppose that would be useful to a naval officer.”

  “Yes. But, frankly, Herr Reichsleiter, I wondered if Boltitz wouldn’t be more useful here in Berlin. I deferred to von Deitzberg.”

  “Huh,” Bormann grunted. “It is sometimes hard, is it not, not to defer to a high-ranking SS officer?”