[THREE]
Portela Airport Lisbon, Portugal 1850 17 May 1945
The weather had not been good. And there had been no tailwind. There had been turbulence—some of it severe—several times.
Delgano had flown the entire leg with Peralta as his copilot. Frade knew that the smart thing for him to do was take over from Delgano to give him a rest. He also knew—although it wasn’t true—that Delgano would take being relieved as proof that Frade found his piloting wanting. And so would the other SAA pilots and flight engineers.
So he had let him fly.
There was also some electrical disturbance; they didn’t pick up Portela’s Radio Direction Finding signal until thirty-five minutes after the dead-reckoning flight plan said they should. Worse, when they finally heard it, it showed them to be about one hundred miles south of where they should have been.
They had been in no unusual danger. They had a little more than an hour’s fuel remaining when they touched down at Portela Airport in a driving rain.
Still, it had been anything but a pleasant flight, and Delgano’s face showed his fatigue when he looked up at Clete.
“Nice job, Gonzo,” Clete said.
The grateful look Delgano then made told Clete he had made the right decision in not trying to relieve him.
A FOLLOW ME pickup truck led them to the passenger terminal.
It was raining so hard that Clete ordered that they leave the cockpit door closed and exit the aircraft by the passenger door, up to which had been rolled a covered stairway.
When they walked into the terminal, Frade immediately saw Fernando Aragão—ostensibly the SAA director in Portugal but, more important, the Lisbon OSS station chief. He was in his fifties and chubby, with slicked-back black hair and a neatly kept pencil mustache.
With Aragão was a well-dressed, tall, slender, olive-skinned man with an arrogant air about him.
Frade disliked him on sight.
Aragão began: “Señor de Hernández, this is—”
“I am Claudio de Hernández, the ambassador,” the man cut him off. “Who’s in charge of the charter aircraft?”
Frade pointed to Delgano.
Delgano pointed to Frade.
“Well,” the ambassador immediately and more than a little arrogantly demanded, “which is it?”
Then, before anyone could reply, he demanded of Frade, who was wearing his Naval Aviator’s leather jacket, “Who are you, señor?”
“Who did you say you were?” Frade replied.
“I am Claudio de Hernández, the Argentine ambassador.”
“Good. I was wondering how I was going to find you.”
“Excuse me?”
“Have you got something that says you’re the ambassador? A diplomatic passport, a carnet, something like that?”
“I don’t think I like your attitude or tone of voice, señor.”
“I don’t like yours much, either,” Frade said. “We’re back to how do I know you’re who you say you are?”
“Señor Aragão has told you who I am.”
“He’s told me who he thinks you are.” Frade looked at Aragão. “Has this fellow ever shown you his identification, Fernando?”
“Actually, no,” Aragão replied. “But—”
“There you go,” Frade said.
Coldly furious, de Hernández said, “I asked you before, señor. Who are you?”
“If you can show me something that says you’re the Argentine ambassador, I’ll tell you. Otherwise, I’m going to get in a taxi and go to the hotel. It’s been a long flight, and I’m tired.”
The ambassador came up with a diplomatic carnet and shoved it at Frade.
Frade examined it.
“This is in Portuguese,” he said. “I don’t speak Portuguese. You don’t have a passport?”
The ambassador produced his diplomatic passport. “I hope you find that satisfactory, señor,” he said sarcastically.
“Well, it’s a step in the right direction. Have you got our overflight clearances, Mr. Ambassador?”
After a moment’s hesitation, he said, “There is a problem. A small problem—”
“In other words, you don’t have them?”
“You said that once I established my bona fides you would identify yourself.”
“My name is Frade. General Farrell sent word to me that you—the Argentine Foreign Ministry anyway; I don’t recall that he specifically mentioned the Argentine ambassador to Portugal—would have the necessary overflight permission waiting for me when we arrived in Lisbon. And now you’re telling me you don’t have them. I can’t believe that General Farrell would tell me something he didn’t believe. Exactly what’s going on here, Mr. Ambassador?”
“Would you be so kind, Señor Frade, to tell me your function in this mission?”
“I’m the managing director of South American Airways. When General Farrell asked me to set this up, I was of course, as a patriotic Argentine, anxious to do what I could to rescue our diplomats from Germany, and I decided the best way I could do that was to fly the mission myself.”
“You’re a pilot?”
“How could I possibly fly this mission if I wasn’t a pilot, Mr. Ambassador?”
“I wasn’t told any of this,” the ambassador said.
“Why should you have been? And there is another problem, Mr. Ambassador. When we were at the North American Val de Cans Airfield in Brazil, I was summoned by the general in command. He made two things clear to me. First, that he suspects this flight is a cover under which senior former German officials—Nazis, to put a point on it—will be allowed to escape Germany under Argentine diplomatic protection—”
“That’s outrageous!”
“That’s what the North American general suspects. Second, he told me that if we are caught smuggling Nazis out of Germany, not only will we be tried by a U.S. Military Tribunal and put in prison for at least ten years, but they will confiscate the airplane.”
“They couldn’t do that,” Ambassador Hernández said. “We have diplomatic immunity!”
“I tried to tell him that. In effect, he said, ‘He who has the power to grant immunity has the power to take it away.’ I believe him. He was very serious. Now, I told Señor Nulder all this, and I told him to tell Ambassador Giménez, and now I’m telling you.”
“The whole idea is preposterous!”
“Be that as it may, I am not going to risk arrest by the Americans, nor the loss of an SAA aircraft by confiscation. Not only did it cost SAA right at half a million dollars—half a million dollars, Mr. Ambassador!—but if they caught us trying to smuggle Nazis out of Germany on an airplane they sold us, they certainly wouldn’t sell us another one.”
“I give you my word of honor, Señor Frade, that I know nothing about any of this,” Ambassador Claudio de Hernández said, his tone suggesting that he really hoped Frade would take his word.
Gotcha!
“What I would like you to do, Mr. Ambassador, is send a cable to the foreign minister in Buenos Aires, telling him that absent any clear denial from him that this rescue mission has absolutely nothing to do with rescuing Nazis from the wholly justified outrage of the Allies—and I will point out to you that Argentina has now become one of the Allies—that I intend to return to Argentina, flyover clearances or not.”
“I’m not sure I can do that,” Ambassador Hernández said.
“That, of course, is your decision. I can no more tell you what to do than you can tell me what to do.” He turned to Aragão. “Fernando, where’s the station wagon?”
“Just outside, Señor Frade.”