Death and Honor Page 9

  Graham waved them into the room.

  “I wondered when I was going to see you, Major,” Graham said.

  “I didn’t want to intrude on your conversation with Martín,” Frade said.

  “You have any idea what that was all about?”

  “I think he was sending us both a message that he’s watching us.”

  “Is there a situation here I don’t know about?”

  “That qualifies as a massive understatement,” Frade said.

  “What’s with the shotgun?”

  “Enrico has sworn an oath to God that what happened to my father will not happen to me,” Frade said.

  Graham met Frade’s eyes and saw in them that what he’d said was a statement of fact.

  “Unless you really want to stay here, I think you’d be more comfortable at San Pedro y San Pablo,” Frade said. “And we have to go there anyway.”

  “Why do we have to go there anyway?”

  “Today is the Fourth of July, and you, Colonel Graham, sir, will be the senior officer present as the local OSS detachment celebrates Independence Day.”

  Graham met his eyes again and saw that Frade was serious about this, too.

  “Won’t Martín know?”

  “If we leave right now, we can probably get away from here before Martín can get his people in place to surveil you.”

  Graham closed his suitcase.

  “Okay,” he said.

  Frade’s enormous Horch was parked in the Alvear Palace’s covered, off-the-street driveway, and when Frade, Graham, and Enrico came out of the revolving door, the top-hatted doorman hurried to open the rear door of the car.

  Frade, who was carrying Graham’s bag, walked quickly to it, threw the bag in the backseat, then closed the door. The car immediately drove off.

  Frade took Graham’s arm and propelled him out of the drive onto Avenida Alvear. When he saw the confusion on Graham’s face, he chuckled and said, “Sorry, mi coronel, it’s Ford time.”

  There was a 1941 wooden-sided Ford station wagon at the curb. Graham saw that Enrico was already in the street and had opened the driver’s door.

  Frade pointed to the front passenger door, and then as Graham got in, trotted around the rear of the station wagon and got behind the wheel. As soon as Enrico was sure the door was shut, he got in the back, and the station wagon pulled into the flow of traffic.

  “What’s this all about?” Graham said as they pulled up to, and stayed behind, the Horch.

  “The theory is that if they try to bushwhack me, as they bushwacked my father, they’ll probably hit the Horch first,” Frade said matter-of-factly. “There’s two guys with Thompsons in the Horch, and there’s another Thompson under your seat. ‘Surprise, surprise! ’ ”

  “You think that’s likely?” Graham said.

  Frade looked at him and shook his head in disbelief.

  III

  [ONE]

  Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo Near Pila, Buenos Aires Province Republic of Argentina 1925 4 July 1943

  Once they were out of the city, the Horch and the Ford station wagon heading south on National Route Two, Graham bluntly had asked: “So, what is it that’s so important I had to come down here to get you to share it with me?”

  Frade had replied by putting his index finger to his lips, then jerking his thumb toward Enrico, who was sitting in the next row of seats with his shotgun between his knees.

  Graham didn’t press for an answer.

  For two reasons, he thought.

  One, if he doesn’t want Enrico to hear what he has to say, he probably has a good reason.

  Two, pushing him won’t work. All that would accomplish would be to make both of us angry.

  That portion of the Code for the Governance of the Naval Service requiring immediate and cheerful, willing obedience to orders just doesn’t apply in this circumstance.

  He knows it. Worse, I know it.

  And even worse, he knows that I know it.

  Graham had been to the estancia before, but he realized after an hour or so on Route Two, with the glowing needle on the Ford’s speedometer seldom dropping below one hundred kph, that he had forgotten how far from Buenos Aires it was.

  They turned off Route Two at Lezama and, twenty-odd kilometers later, passed through the village of Pila. The maps of Argentina showed that the macadam road ended at Pila. It didn’t, but five hundred meters outside Pila, Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo began. The road here was privately owned, and had been built and was maintained by the proprietors of Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo and Estancia Santa Catalina. Estancia Santa Catalina was on the other side of Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo.

  Graham had known even before he had met Cletus Frade that Estancia Santa Catalina was owned by Señora Claudia de Carzino-Cormano. He knew, too, that Doña Claudia’s relationship with El Coronel Jorge Guillermo Frade over a twenty-year period had kept both of them from partaking of the sacrament of communion in the Roman Catholic Church, the canons of which deny the sacrament to those who have shared—in the case of Doña Claudia and El Coronel were sharing continuously and almost notoriously—sexual congress outside the bonds of holy matrimony absent confession and absolution, which carried with it their promise to go forth and sin no more.

  Several times Graham had met Doña Claudia—a svelte woman in her mid-fifties with gray-flecked, luxuriant black hair—and had liked her. He wondered if she would be at the estancia. He knew she often was, and this pleased him because he thought of her as a restraining influence—especially with regard to El Coronel Juan Domingo Perón—on Cletus Frade.

  Ten kilometers or so down the private road, the headlights of the station wagon illuminated a brick and wrought-iron sign at the side of the road. It read SAN PEDRO Y SAN PABLO. Five hundred meters past the sign, there was a fork in the road. But no signs or arrows indicated where either fork led.

  The Horch and the Ford took the left fork. Fifteen kilometers down that road Graham caught a first glimpse of the brightly illuminated, sprawling, white-painted stone main building. It sat with its outbuildings in a three-hectare, manicured garden, all set within a windbreak of a triple row of tall cedars.

  As they came closer, he saw, just outside the windbreak, the airfield. There were four airplanes parked there, three Piper Cubs and a Lodestar, the latter painted a glistening red. The paint job was the result of a presidential order.

  Franklin Delano Roosevelt had told General Hap Arnold of the U.S. Army Forces that he wanted to send an airplane, a Beechcraft Staggerwing, to an important Argentine to replace one that had been destroyed. The President had not shared with General Arnold how it had been lost, just that it had, and that he wanted the replacement to be as much like the lost plane as possible, including the color. And that it be brand new.

  With more important things on his mind, General Arnold had delegated the order to others. Two days later, the USAAF procurement officer at the Beech Aircraft Company in Wichita, Kansas, had reported to his superior that in late 1940, a Staggerwing Beechcraft bright red in color had been sold to a Colonel Frade in Buenos Aires, and this was almost certainly the airplane President Roosevelt had in mind. The procurement officer also reported that no new Staggerwings of any color were available.

  To the military mind, this was only a minor problem in executing an order of the commander in chief. The order was immediately amended to provide that an airplane of at least equal quality be obtained, painted Beechcraft red, and sent by the most expeditious means to Colonel Frade. It was soon discovered that Lockheed had delivered a number of Lodestar aircraft to the Air Forces. They were inarguably of at least equal quality, and moreover could be flown down there. A dozen Lodestars had recently been configured as airliners, sold to Varig, the national airline of Brazil, and flown down there by USAAF pilots.

  “Colonel,” the order had been issued to the procurement officer, “make sure the Lodestar you send to Colonel Frade be painted Beechcraft red, be as nicely configured as the ones we so
ld to the Brazilians, and get it on its way within forty-eight hours.”

  Three minutes later, they reached the main house. There were a number of people standing on the verandah.

  Somehow, Graham decided, they knew exactly when we would be here. Which means that he has people—his gauchos—stationed where they can watch the highway.

  One of the men on the verandah was wearing what clearly identified him as a gaucho: a black, wide, flat-brimmed hat; billowing black bombachas tucked into calf-high black boots; a wide, red, coin-studded leather belt; a leather vest; and a horn-handled foot-long knife in a silver scabbard at the back of the belt.

  Most of the others were armed with Colt .45 ACP semiautomatic pistols carried in leather holsters hanging from web belts.

  The gaucho came quickly off the porch, walked up to the Ford wagon, came to attention, and saluted.

  “Happy Fourth of July, sir,” Chief Radioman Oscar J. Schultz, USN, said. “If the colonel will give me his gear, I’ll take care of it.”

  Graham returned the salute as a Pavlovian reaction, then smiled as it occurred to him that if there was a more blatant violation of the Navy regulation that “naval personnel will not render the hand salute while in civilian attire” he couldn’t imagine what it would be.

  “Good to see you, Chief,” Graham said. “My suitcase is in the Horch.”

  “I’ll handle it for the colonel,” Chief Schultz announced, and went to the Horch.

  As Graham got out of the Ford, he saw that the other men—two in the uniform of U.S. Army officers, several of the others wearing parts of U.S. Army uniforms, and the rest in the clothing of gauchos—had come to attention. He wondered if someone had actually called “Attention!” or whether popping to attention had been the Pavlovian response on the part of one of the sergeants to the presence of a full-bull colonel, and the others had joined in.

  “As you were,” Graham ordered, and he walked toward the verandah, smiling and with his hand extended.

  There were four sergeants on the roster of what, in a document classified Top Secret in OSS headquarters, was officially known as OSS Western Hemisphere Team 17, code name Team Turtle. A sunken ship is sometimes said to have “turned turtle.” The original mission of the team had been to cause the sinking of the Reine de la Mer, an ostensibly neutral Spanish merchantman actually engaged in replenishing German submarines in Argentina.

  There had been five sergeants until Technical Sergeant David G. Ettinger had been murdered and mutilated in Montevideo. He had been killed with an ice pick in the ear, and his penis had been cut off and inserted into his mouth. Agents of the German SS-SD had correctly decided that the discovery of his mutilated body would make it clear to the German-Jewish communities of Buenos Aires and Montevideo that any contact with a fellow Jewish refugee from Germany now working for the Americans would become known and both would be punished.

  Ettinger’s assassination had deeply saddened and angered the members of Team Turtle. Especially the team’s other Jewish member, Sergeant Sigfried Stein, their explosives expert. Stein, also a refugee from Nazi Germany, said he was not surprised, however, at anything done by the Gottverdammt Nazis.

  The other two sergeants were Technical Sergeant William Ferris, who was the weapons and parachute expert, and Staff Sergeant Jerry O’Sullivan, who operated the team’s highly secret radar.

  Standing on the verandah with them were the officers: Captain Maxwell Ashton III and First Lieutenants Anthony J. Pelosi and Madison R. Sawyer III. Ashton and Pelosi, both assistant military attachés at the U.S. embassy, were in uniform, complete to the silver aiguillette of military attachés. Sawyer, whom Graham was about to tell he had just been promoted to captain, was wearing U.S. Army riding breeches, boots, and a blue polo shirt.

  Sergeant Ferris, Captain Ashton, and Lieutenant Sawyer all met the criteria of social prominence that allowed critics of the OSS to complain that the acronym really stood for Oh, So Social. They all came from wealthy, socially prominent families.

  Sergeants Stein and O’Sullivan and Lieutenant Pelosi did not. Stein was the only one of them who had a college degree (an E.E., earned at night school at the University of Chicago). Lieutenant Pelosi had barely made it through vocational high school in Chicago. And O’Sullivan had dropped out of high school in his sophomore year.

  The latter two had been the beneficiaries of the Army’s system of testing all enlisted men for their general intelligence and ability to learn. Scores on the Army General Classification Test determined where one would serve in the Army. Generally speaking, an AGCT score of 100 would send the new soldier to a technical school (the Signal Corps, for example) and an AGCT score of 110 would see the soldier as a ripe candidate for Officer Candidate School.

  After basic training, Private O’Sullivan (ACGT 142) was sent to the Signal School at Fort Monmouth for training in the new, still highly secret technology of radio ranging and direction, called “Radar,” and Private Pelosi (AGCT 138) went from Fort Dix to Fort Belvoir, from which he emerged just over three months later as a duly commissioned officer and gentleman of the Corps of Engineers.

  Now-Sergeant O’Sullivan had volunteered for an unspecified hazardous assignment overseas to get him out of the classrooms at Fort Monmouth, where he had been assigned to teach classes of newly commissioned officers— whose stupidity had astonished him—the basic principles of radio ranging and direction.

  Meanwhile, Second Lieutenant Pelosi had volunteered for an unspecified hazardous assignment overseas to get him out of the 82nd Airborne Division, where he had come to understand that engineer second lieutenants spent most of their time digging latrines and fixing roads and looking for land mines, and you had to be at least a captain before they would let you near any real demolition work.

  Both applications had been quickly accepted by the OSS, who had put out the call for volunteers, O’Sullivan’s because he knew more about radio ranging and direction than the OSS expert who interviewed him, and Pelosi’s because several very senior officers of the OSS had done business with the Chicago firm of Pelosi & Sons Demolitions Inc., which enjoyed a fine reputation for being able to take down twenty-story buildings with explosives without shattering windows across the street. One telephone call had confirmed that “Little Tony” was indeed part of the Pelosi clan and had been “taking things down” since he had joined the Boy Scouts.

  Pelosi and Ashton were the only two of the Americans who were legally in Argentina. They had diplomatic passports and diplomatic carnets attesting to their status as military attachés.

  The others—and the radar set—had been infiltrated into Argentina from the U.S. Army Air Forces base at Pôrto Alegre, Brazil, in a Lodestar flown— after only four hours of instruction—by Cletus Frade, who had never set foot in one before, never mind sat in its left seat.

  Frade, who had been born in Argentina, was considered by the Argentine government therefore to be an Argentine, and thus was in the country legally. Some, perhaps most, of his activities in Argentina could be considered treason against the country of his birth, and for some time that had been a genuine concern.

  But then, during the coup d’état of 19 April 1943, most doubts vis-à-vis his allegiance to Argentina had been dispelled, at least in the mind of General of Division (Major General) Arturo Rawson, who came out of the coup as president of the Governing Council of the Provisional Government of the Republic of Argentina.

  What had happened was that one section of Operation Blue—the plan for the coup d’état—had taken into consideration the possibility that the coup would in fact fail. Blue had been written in large part by El Coronel Jorge Guillermo Frade, Cavalry, Ejército Argentino, Retired, before his assassination, when it was anticipated that he would become president of the Governing Council of the Provisional Government.

  In such an event, the leaders of the failed coup would have to have a means to get out of the country—their alternative being the firing squad. And Operation Blue had dealt with that proble
m: El Coronel Frade was to fly his Staggerwing Beechcraft to the airfield at the Campo de Mayo army base, and use it to transport himself and other senior officers to either Uruguay or Brazil.

  By the time the coup began, El Coronel Frade was dead and the Beechcraft on the bottom of Samborombón Bay, having been shot down as Cletus Frade led an American submarine to the Reine de la Mer.

  Cletus, who had read Operation Blue after he found it in his father’s (then his) safe at Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo, decided that since his father had put his fellow officers in danger, Cletus was honor bound to carry out his father’s wishes. He flew the Lockheed Lodestar to Campo de Mayo and placed it—and himself—at the disposal of General Rawson.

  The coup didn’t fail, and the Lodestar wasn’t needed.

  But toward the end of the coup, as two columns marched toward Argentina’s Casa Rosada, General Rawson confided in Cletus Frade that he had lost contact with both columns. He needed to get directions to them, otherwise unnecessary blood would be shed.

  That didn’t seem to be much of a problem for Cletus Frade, who had been flying Piper Cubs over the prairies of Texas since he was fourteen, and where the standard method of getting messages—and often lunch—to someone on the ground was by dropping them in pillow cases out the window of a Cub. He told Rawson they could do the same thing using one of the Ejército Argentino’s Piper Cubs.

  Rawson first asked Cletus if he would fly such a mission, and then when Frade—aware he’d put his foot in his mouth again—said he would, Rawson had another thought. He said he would go with him in the Cub, so that he could personally issue the necessary orders.

  General Rawson had had very little experience flying in small aircraft, and absolutely none in flying at only two hundred feet above Avenida Libertador in downtown Buenos Aires. He regarded what Cletus Frade thought of as an uneventful short hop to a soccer field and back as a magnificent manifestation of both flying skill and great courage, proving that patriot’s blood as great as his late father’s coursed through the veins of Don Cletus Frade.