Frade shook his head.
“And you will fly one of your SAA Lodestars to Argentina. Okay? The managing director of SAA having gotten his ATR first. Still with me?”
Frade nodded.
“By the time you’re ready to move Frogger from Brazil, we’ll get him into civilian clothing and get him a passport. Probably South African.”
Graham looked between them.
“Any questions?”
Both Frade and Hughes shook their heads.
“Okay,” Graham said, “then have a nice flight.”
XVI
[ONE]
Aeropuerto El Alto La Paz, Bolivia 1230 11 August 1943
The airfield at La Paz left a good deal to be desired. The single runway was short and paved with gravel. The customs officials who met the SAA Lodestar were in ill-fitting khaki uniforms and expected to receive—and did—a little gift in appreciation of their professional services.
The fuel truck was a 1935 Ford ton-and-a-half stake-bodied truck—not a tanker—sagging under the weight of a dozen fifty-five-gallon barrels of aviation fuel. The pump was hand-cranked.
There was a small silver lining to that, however. When Frade examined the barrels, he saw from the intact paint on the openings that they hadn’t been opened since leaving the Howell Petroleum Refinery in Louisiana. The fuel would be safe to use.
Cletus Howell Frade did not mention to Gonzalo Delgano his connection with Howell Petroleum.
The weather station was “temporarily” out of communication with anybody else, which meant that they would have to rely on the weather report they’d gotten just before taking off from Guayaquil, Ecuador, not quite six hours before. That one had reported good weather all over the eastern half of South America, and from what they’d seen in the air, the report was valid.
They both were tired. It had been a very long flight. They’d left Burbank at six in the morning on August ninth and flown nonstop to Mexico City. They’d taken on fuel there and flown on to Guatemala City, whose airfield was downtown and surrounded by hills. The final approach was a dive at the threshold.
Frade and Delgano spent the night in Guatemala City in a charming old hotel, which apparently had not replaced the mattresses since they were first installed. But nevertheless both had overslept. They had planned to leave at six a.m., but it was a few minutes after eight before they broke ground on the next leg, to Guayaquil, Ecuador.
They didn’t want to try to go any farther, so they spent the night there, just about on the equator, which meant tropical temperatures and hordes of biting insects—many of them mosquitoes—that the somewhat ragged mosquito nets did little to discourage.
The next morning, they were wide awake at five a.m. and took off for La Paz as intended, at six a.m., without availing themselves of anything more than coffee for breakfast.
It had been a nearly six-hour flight, and as soon as they could after landing they headed for the airport restaurant.
The tableware was dirty, the papas fritas limp and greasy, and the lomo— filet mignon—was thin and had the tenderness of a boot sole.
“I don’t mean to be critical, Gonzo, but I have had better lomo,” Frade said as he pushed his plate away and reached for another piece of bread.
“Patience is a virtue, as you may have heard. In just a matter of hours, Cletus, my friend, we will be in Argentina, where, as you have learned, the women are beautiful and the beef magnificent.”
Delgano saw something in Frade’s eyes.
“What?” he asked.
“Gonzo, we have to talk.”
“I thought this would be coming.”
“Truth time?” Frade asked.
“That’s always useful. But one of the truths here is that I’m afraid we have different loyalties.”
“Different isn’t the same as opposing.”
“Would your admitting that you are a serving officer—a major—of the U.S. Corps of Marines attached to the OSS be the kind of truth you’re talking about?”
“Not really,” Frade said. “Colonel Martín has known that for some time, and so have you, Major Gonzalo Delgano of the Ethical Standards Office of the Bureau of Internal Security.”
Delgano considered that and nodded. He then said: “Colonel Martín also believes that you know a good deal more than you’re admitting about the disappearance of the Froggers. Are you going to tell me the truth about that? Is that what this is all about?”
Frade nodded.
“You kidnapped them?” Delgano asked.
“No. They came to me. I didn’t kidnap them.”
“We wondered about that. Kidnapping a German diplomat and his wife would have been very dangerous, and we couldn’t understand why you would do something so foolish.”
“Frogger had been ordered back to Germany. He was afraid he was suspected of being a traitor.”
“Colonel Martín considered that. He has a hard time believing Frogger is Galahad.”
“He’s not. And, yeah, Gonzo, I realize that when I say he’s not, I’m admitting there is a Galahad. Truth time.”
Delgano smiled wryly.
“Colonel Martín thinks Galahad is Major von Wachtstein,” Delgano said.
“Does he?”
“I didn’t really expect you to admit something like that,” Delgano said. “Why did Frogger go to you?”
“He didn’t. When he decided that he had to run, he went to somebody else, who brought the Froggers to me.”
“Are you going to tell me who that ‘somebody else’ is?”
“No,” Frade said simply.
“So why did you take them? Knowing how dangerous for you that would be?”
“I’d like to say because I’m a Good Samaritan, but I won’t. I’m not, and you wouldn’t believe it anyway. The truth is that my friend had no place to hide them and I couldn’t let them go. The Germans would learn who brought them to me, for one thing. And, for another, I got word that the SS had decided that Frogger knew too much and had put out an order to kill him—both of them; the wife, too—wherever and whenever found.”
“So what are you going to do with them?”
“This is where telling the truth gets uncomfortable.”
“Do you have any choice?”
Frade shook his head. After a moment, he said, “Do you remember having breakfast with a man called Stevens, an assistant consular officer, when we were at Canoas?”
Delgano nodded.
“Well, he solved my problem of what to do with the Froggers. He’s not an assistant consular officer at the embassy in Rio de Janeiro.”
“I didn’t think he was. Who is he?”
“A very senior OSS officer.”
“Who works for Colonel Graham?”
“Who works with Colonel Graham.”
“An important man,” Delgano said.
Frade nodded. “When I told him about the Froggers . . . I have to go off on a tangent here, Gonzo. What do you know about Operation Phoenix?”
Delgano gestured with his hand toward Frade. “Why don’t you tell me about Operation Phoenix?”
“I will if you tell me whether or not you’ve heard about it, Major Delgano.”
Delgano shrugged. “Very well. I’ve heard about it.”
“Okay. I’ll tell you everything I know about it, and you can then tell me if it’s what you’ve heard.”
“Fair enough.”
“Just about everybody in Hitler’s circle but Hitler himself has realized that the war essentially is over, and that most of them are going to get hung. So Martin Bormann came up with a plan—Operation Phoenix—to buy a sanctuary in South America. Primarily in Argentina, but also in Brazil, Paraguay . . .”
“That’s pretty much what we’ve heard,” Delgano said when Frade had finished.
“What have you heard about the ransoming of Jews out of the concentration camps and arranging for them to get out of Germany and come to Argentina and Uruguay?”
Delgano didn’t reply immediately.
“Nothing,” he finally said. “But it would certainly explain something that’s been bothering us.”