“I have no idea what you’re talking about, mi general,” Clete said. “Unless you’re suggesting that some of the priests, brothers, and nuns who SAA has ferried here for the Vatican—and traveling on Vatican passports—weren’t who they claimed to be.”
Martín said: “One thought that occurred to me is that if there was an important Nazi—or Nazis, plural—who wished to spare themselves a long and hazardous trip on a submarine to come here . . .”
“They could come in the comfort that SAA offers to all its passengers?” Clete finished for him.
“It’s a thought,” Martín said.
“Bernardo, did you hear the rumor that Hitler did not kill himself and his wife, but was flown out of Berlin in a Fieseler Storch?”
“Delgano mentioned that he’d heard that,” Martín said. “Do you believe it?”
“No, I don’t. But this thought of yours makes sense.”
“Are you going to try to see General Gehlen while you’re in Germany?” Martín asked, and then, before Clete could answer, went on: “Maybe he would have some thoughts on all this.”
“No one seems to know where he is, but I’m going to try to find him.”
“To what end?”
“I’ll play that card when someone deals it,” Clete said. “We made a deal with him. Nobody’s told me the deal is off.”
“Bring him here?”
“If that’s the only option to keep him out of the hands of the Russians.”
“He’d have a Vatican passport?”
“The others traveled that way.”
“Clete,” Delgano said, “Peralta just showed up; looks like he’s headed here.”
Captain Mario Peralta was a member of the second crew. If he had had any questions about First Officers von Wachtstein and Boltitz replacing the SAA pilots originally scheduled for the flight, Clete hadn’t heard about them. That suggested to Clete that Peralta was taking his orders from Gonzalo Delgano both as an SAA pilot and as somebody else who also worked covertly for Martín.
“It would appear that your mission of mercy and compassion is ready to go,” Martín said.
“You told me one time you had a man in Berlin,” Frade said.
Martín nodded.
“José Ruiz,” he said. “We were at the Academy together.”
“He’s the military attaché?”
“The financial counselor,” Martín said.
“And he’ll be coming back with us?”
Martín nodded again.
“He might be useful,” Frade said.
“So I told Gonzalo,” Martín said. “Anything else I can do?”
“As a matter of fact,” Frade said, and handed him the briefcase he’d gotten from Colonel Flowers. “I forgot to leave my wife her allowance. Would you get this to her, please?”
Martín took the briefcase. It was much heavier than he expected.
“What’s in here besides her allowance—bricks?”
“Nothing. I’m probably more generous to my wife than you are to yours.”
Martín looked at the briefcase suspiciously but didn’t reply.
“Go on. Have a look. You were going to anyway, the first chance you had. If you look now, you can apologize for doubting me.”
After a moment’s hesitation, Martín lifted the flap of the briefcase and looked inside.
“¡Madre de Dios!” he softly exclaimed a moment later.
“Gotcha! Now you can apologize.”
“What’s this for?” Martín asked.
“El General Bernardo Martín, master of the outrageous personal question. One man should never ask another why he is giving his wife a little pocket change for her purse.”
“Forgive me,” Martín said sarcastically.
The two looked at each other and smiled.
“Clete, be careful,” Martín said. “I don’t think the most dangerous part of this will be flying across the Atlantic Ocean.”
“Great minds walk the same paths,” Frade said, then shook Martín’s hand and walked out of the Executive Suite of South American Airways.
[THREE]
Aboard Ciudad de Rosario Approaching Val de Cans Airfield Belém do Pará, Brazil 0135 17 May 1945
Captain Cletus Frade had been at the controls of the Constellation Ciudad de Rosario as she took off from Aeropuerto Coronel Jorge G. Frade, breaking ground at 1832. Mario Peralta was in the right seat.
As soon as the aircraft reached cruising altitude, he had turned the plane over to Peralta and sent another SAA backup pilot to the cockpit. Then he crawled into one of the two crew bunks and closed his eyes.
Three minutes later, Siggie Stein shook his shoulder.
“Don’t shoot the messenger, Colonel. Your Collins is out.”
A dozen Collins Radio Corporation Model 7.2 transceivers and SIGABA encryption systems had been acquired for Team Turtle at Stein’s suggestion—“Trust me, they’re six months ahead of state of the art”—from the Army Security Agency at Vint Hill Farms Station in Virginia. They were to provide secure communication with the ASA—and thus with the OSS—from anywhere in Argentina.
They were “installation systems,” which translated to mean they were designed for use in a communications center, rather than “mobile,” which would have meant installation in a truck.
One day at Estancia Don Guillermo, Clete had idly commented that he wished he could have the communications capability in the Red Lodestar.
“If you want to take a chance on me really blowing one up, I can have a shot at it,” Stein had replied matter-of-factly. “Maybe el Jefe will have some ideas on how to do it.”
Clete had remembered then—and only then, which embarrassed him—that Colonel Graham had told him that when being interviewed by OSS experts to see if he was qualified to be the radar man on Team Turtle, they had reported that Stein knew more about the transmission of radio waves than they did.
And that Stein and former Chief Radioman Oscar Schultz, USN, had become instant buddies when they started talking about communications equipment in a cant only the two of them understood.
Two weeks later, a SIGABA and Collins 7.2 were up and running in the Red Lodestar. Clete had not been surprised when a similar installation in SAA’s first Constellation had worked well in Argentina. But he had been surprised—perhaps awed—when the system had worked in the middle of the South Atlantic Ocean and later on the ground at Lisbon.
Frade sat up in the crew bunk and said, “Siggie, I don’t want to go to Germany without it. I won’t go to Germany without it. What’s wrong with it? Belay that. I wouldn’t understand. Can you fix it, or are we going to have to go back to Buenos Aires for another one?”
“I think I can fix it if you can get me into the radio shop at Belém. Your call. It’ll take me a couple of hours to get another system out of the warehouse at Jorge Frade.”
“And to fix it at Belém?”
“Thirty minutes, if I’m right about what’s wrong.”
“Did Mother Superior teach you how to pray, Sergeant Stein?”
“She didn’t have to. I’m a Jew. We pray a lot.”
“Start now,” Frade ordered.
He had then lain back down and closed his eyes.
Ten minutes after that, he opened them again, sat up, pushed himself off the bunk, and went looking for Stein, Boltitz, and von Wachtstein. He found them sitting in the seats for the backup crew, trying to doze.
He beckoned for them to follow him back into the sleeping section, motioned for the doors to the cockpit and the seating area to be closed, and then began, “We have a small problem. Belay that. We have a few small problems, plural.