The Honor Of Spies - The Honor of Spies Part 3
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The Honor of Spies Part 3

"Mr. Hughes told me you are the son of Jorge Guillermo Frade. You have the same answer options, Mr. Frade."

"Yes, sir."

"Good."

"Sir, permission to speak, sir?"

"Granted. You may stand at Parade Rest."

"Yes, sir. Sir, did Howard tell you I wouldn't know the sonofabitch if I fell over him?"

"He did mention something along those lines. Tell me, Mr. Frade, are you looking forward to the War Bond Tour? And teaching people how to fly?"

"No, sir."

"If I could get you out of both, would you accept a top-secret overseas assignment involving great risk to your life?"

"What kind of an assignment?"

"What part of 'top secret' didn't you understand, Mr. Frade?" Graham said.

Then he handed Frade a photograph of a man wearing what looked like a German uniform, including the steel helmet, standing and saluting in the backseat of an open Mercedes-Benz.

"That's what your father looks like. I don't want you falling over the sonofabitch without knowing who he is."

"Colonel, what's this all about?"

"I'll answer that, Mr. Frade, but it's the last question you get. What I want you to do is go down to Argentina and persuade your loving daddy to tilt the other way. Right now he's tilted toward Berlin."

He handed Frade a sheet of paper. The letterhead read: OFFICE OF STRATEGIC SERVICES, WASHINGTON, D.C. Clete had never heard of it.

"Sign that at the bottom. It's a formality. What it is is your acknowledgment that you fully understand all the awful things your government will do to you if you run off at the mouth."

There was too much small print to read. Frade looked at Graham.

"Or don't sign it, Mr. Frade. Your call. But I'm on a Transcontinental and Western flight to Washington in ninety minutes. With you or without you."

He extended a pen to Frade, who took it and scrawled his signature.

Graham then folded the sheet of paper and put it in his suit coat's inside pocket.

"Welcome to the OSS, Mr. Frade," Graham said. "And I bring greetings from your grandfather. If you're a good boy, I'll try to get you a couple of days with him before we put you on the Panagra flight to Buenos Aires."

"You know my grandfather?"

"He doesn't like your father very much, does he?" He did not wait for a reply, and nodded toward the bedroom. "Now, you'd better pack."

"That will be all, Amelia," el Colonel Peron said. "No calls, no visitors."

"Si, senor."

Cranz waited until the maid had closed the double doors to the library.

"Juan Domingo," Cranz began, "you were right about Tandil. I'm almost positive Frade has the Froggers there."

Peron nodded just perceptibly.

"Cletus Frade has arrived in Los Angeles," he said. "At the Lockheed airplane factory. There was a Mackay radiogram. De Filippi called me yesterday."

Guillermo de Filippi was chief of maintenance of South American Airways.

Cranz did not regard that as especially good news; a great many of his problems would have been solved if the Lockheed Lodestar that Frade was flying had lost an engine--preferably both--and gone down somewhere--anywhere--during the hazardous six-thousand-mile flight from Buenos Aires, never to be heard from again.

But unfortunately, the airplane was brand new, his copilot was the very experienced chief SAA pilot Gonzalo Delgano, and Frade himself was both a superb pilot and someone who apparently had more lives than the nine of the legendary cat.

Cranz's predecessor as the senior SS-SD officer in Argentina had not only botched a very expensive attempt to remove Cletus Frade from the equation, but had shortly thereafter died when a rifle bullet fired by one of Frade's men--or perhaps by Frade himself--had caused his skull to explode on the beach of Samborombon Bay.

Cranz had taken great care to make sure that his arrangements to eliminate Frade would not fail this time.

"Juan Domingo, something has to be done about the Froggers," Cranz said.

Peron didn't reply.

"And we both know that Cletus Frade has them."

Cranz felt sure he knew (a) why Frogger, the German Embassy's commercial attache, and his wife had disappeared, and (b) why Frade had them.

Frogger was privy to many details of Operation Phoenix, the plan conceived by Reichsfuhrer-SS Heinrich Himmler; Reichsleiter Martin Bormann, head of the Nazi Party; Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, chief of German Military Intelligence; and other very senior members of the Nazi hierarchy, who understood that the war was lost and had no intention of facing Allied vengeance.

Cranz knew all about Operation Phoenix: Hundreds of millions of dollars were to be spent to purchase South American sanctuary for high-ranking members of the Nazi establishment--probably including Der Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler, himself, although Cranz wasn't sure about this--from which, after some time passed, National Socialism could rise, phoenixlike, from the ashes of the Thousand-Year Reich.

Cranz had been sent to Argentina to make sure nothing went wrong with the plan--after something had gone terribly wrong.

An attempt had been made at Samborombon Bay, on the River Plate, to smuggle ashore a half-dozen crates stuffed with English pounds, American dollars, Swiss francs, gold coins and bars, and thirty-odd leather bags heavy with diamonds. The transfer was made on boats from the Comerciante del Oceano Pacifico, a Spanish-registered freighter. But someone had been waiting. Cranz suspected Cletus Frade and members of his OSS team, though he wasn't absolutely sure of this; it could have been Argentines.

There had been a brief burst of gunfire from a concealed position near the beach. Two of the three German officers--SS-Oberst Karl-Heinz Gruner, the military attache of the German Embassy, and his deputy, SS-Standartenfuhrer Josef Luther Goltz, had been dropped in their tracks, their skulls exploded by the rifle fire.

The snipers had missed the third officer, Major Hans-Peter von Wachtstein, the embassy's deputy military attache for air. Von Wachtstein had managed to get the crates--"the special shipment"--and the bodies of Gruner and Goltz onto the Comerciante del Oceano Pacifico's boats and back out to the ship.

The captain of the Oceano Pacifico, who had been in one of her boats, had been more than effusive in describing von Wachtstein's cool courage under fire. Courage was something to be expected of an officer who had received the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross from Hitler personally, of course, but Cranz wasn't really sure if von Wachtstein had been extraordinarily lucky or whether the snipers had intentionally spared him.

What Cranz was sure of was that the attack made clear that the embassy housed a traitor. And he was just about certain that that was the reason Frogger had deserted his post, taking his wife with him.

Not that Frogger was the traitor. So far as Cranz knew, the Froggers were--or until their desertion, had been--patriotic Germans. They had lost two of their officer sons in Russia, and the third, the eldest, Frogger's namesake, Oberstleutnant Wilhelm Frogger, had been captured when General von Arnim had surrendered the Afrikakorps.

Furthermore, Cranz knew that Frau Else Frogger secretly had been on the payroll of the Sicherheitsdienst, the Secret Police of the SS, and had been charged with reporting on the other Germans in the embassy to Oberst Gruner.

There was a downside to these faultless patriotic credentials. The Froggers had seen enough of the functioning of the SS-SD to know that with as much at stake as there was, if the actual traitor in the embassy could not be found, one would be created. Himmler and Bormann would want to be told the problem had been dealt with.

The Froggers knew that if Cranz, who had replaced Gruner, and Naval Attache Kapitan zur See Karl Boltitz, who had come to Argentina with Cranz, and almost certainly was working for Admiral Canaris, could not find the traitor, they would be replaced. In which case, they would be sent--if they were lucky--to the Eastern Front. Or to a concentration camp.

Furthermore, Frogger was aware that while he was privy to the secrets of Operation Phoenix, he was by no means a member of the inner circle. He knew too much.

Worse, he was privy to many of the details of an even more secret operation--which didn't have a code name--run by SS-Brigadefuhrer Ritter Manfred von Deitzberg, first deputy adjutant to Reichsfuhrer-SS Himmler. Von Deitzberg had charged Cranz with making sure that this operation--in which senior SS officers were enriching themselves by arranging the release of Jews from concentration camps, and their subsequent movement to Argentina, on payment of a substantial ransom--was kept running and kept secret.

Cranz therefore thought it very likely that when the Froggers had been ordered to return on the next Condor flight to Berlin, Frogger had decided--or his wife had decided, or the both of them--that they had been set up as the scapegoats. And knowing what that meant, they had deserted their posts.

Now they were going to have to be killed before they could barter their knowledge of Operation Phoenix and the ransoming operation for their own sanctuary.

Peron said: "While I am fully aware of the problem the Froggers pose, Karl, I don't want anything to happen to Cletus Frade. He is my godson. His father--my dearest friend--died unnecessarily and I don't want the death of Cletus weighing on my soul as well."

"I understand your position, Juan Domingo. But--the reason I asked you to receive me on such short notice--I have come up with a rough plan that, since Cletus Frade is in the United States, poses no threat to him whatever."

"We don't know when he will return," Peron said.

"But not within the next three or four days, wouldn't you agree?"

"No, of course not," Peron said impatiently. "He just got there. He has to do what has to be done to get the SAA pilots the licenses Lloyd's of London insists they have to have, however long--three or four days--that will take, and then fly back here."

"De Filippi will know," Cranz said. "More important, will he tell you when Frade will actually be here?"

"Of course."

"And you will tell me?"

"Why would you want to know?"

"As I said, Juan Domingo, I know, and respect, your feeling vis-a-vis your godson. If I know when he will return, I can either adjust my plan, or call it off completely, if it would in any way put Frade at risk."

"I'm glad we understand one another," Peron said.

"May I speak bluntly, Juan Domingo?"

"Please do."

"I think you are as aware as I am of the problems the Froggers will cause both of us if we can't return them to German control and get them out of Argentina."

"Let's hear what you have in mind," Peron said tartly.

"The reason I'm sure the Froggers are in Tandil is that one of my men has seen them there."

"You sent someone from the SS to Tandil?" Peron asked on the edge of anger.

"I sent an Argentine, an ethnic German who works for me, down there to see what he could learn. Would you like to hear from him what that is?"

"How could I do that?

"He's here, in the foyer. May I get him?"

Peron considered that for a long moment.

"You did consider, of course, that Martin's men would see you bringing him here? What that would mean?"

"I'm sure they did," Cranz said, smiling. "He was driving my car; he's my chauffeur."

Peron considered that a moment, then smiled.

"You are good at what you do, aren't you, Karl? Yes. Bring him in."

[THREE].

Building T-209

Senior German Officer Prisoner of War Detention

Facility

Camp Clinton, Mississippi

1850 6 August 1943

Building T-209 had been erected in four days just over a year before. Sitting on concrete blocks, it was a one-story frame structure containing a living room, a kitchen, and two bedrooms.

In each of the bedrooms, a curtained-off cubicle held a sink, a toilet, and a cement-floored shower. The furniture was what was prescribed in an Army Regulation titled "Colonels Through Major Generals, Temporary Bachelor Accommodations, Furnishings For."

That is to say, the single beds in the bedrooms were marginally larger and had more comfortable mattresses than the "Cots, Steel w/mattress" provided for officers of lower rank. And the living room held a simple, if comfortable, cloth-upholstered couch, two matching armchairs, and a coffee table. There was a refrigerator and a stove and a kitchen table with two chairs in the kitchen. Officers of lesser rank had none of these creature comforts.

A very large fan on a pole had been placed in the open kitchen door so that it blew toward the open living room door. It didn't cool the cottage much against the stifling heat of Mississippi in August, but it was much better than nothing.