Victory and Honor

matter how he was dressed.

And Rodriguez could not be left behind. To the usual arguments he made when not taking him along somewhere came up for discussion he had added a new one: “Don Cletus, I spent a year in Germany when el Coronel, may he be resting in peace with your sainted mother and all the angels, was at the Kriegsschule. You, however, have never been there.”

Enrico Rodriguez was listed on the flight manifest as a “security officer.”

They had been waiting since one o’clock for the “Foreign Minister’s Relief Party” to show up, the last three hours of that time in the executive offices as a result of an executive decision by the managing director, who was in something of a pique at the time.

“Fuck it!” he said. “I’m not going to stand around here with my thumb up my ass waiting for these clowns any longer. We’ll go to the executive offices and have them send up coffee and something to eat.”

The executive offices were not quite the center of executive activity it sounded like. Managing Director Frade was now willing to admit he had been a little derelict in the execution of his duties when examining the architect’s drawings of the buildings to be erected at Aeropuerto Coronel Jorge G. Frade. Concerned primarily with the hangars, the control tower, and the maintenance and cargo-handling facilities, Frade had not realized until everything had been constructed and equipped that about half of the third floor of the terminal building was devoted to something called the “Executive Suite.”

The Executive Suite was further divided into an office for the managing director, an office for the chief pilot, a conference room, an office for their secretaries, a small kitchen, separate restrooms, and a reception area.

SAA also maintained offices in downtown Buenos Aires—two floors in the Anglo-Argentine Bank, the managing director of which was el Senor Humberto Valdez Duarte. El Senor Duarte was also Cletus Frade’s uncle and SAA’s financial director. Duarte supervised the day-to-day business activities of SAA from his office in the bank.

The result of this was that the Executive Suite of the SAA terminal was, in corporate parlance, “underutilized.” Neither Cletus Frade nor Chief Pilot Gonzalo Delgano had secretaries, and moreover Delgano had a small but adequate office off the flight-planning room in Hangar Two. He almost never went to the Executive Suite. Frade went there rarely, usually only when he wanted to change into—or out of—his SAA captain’s uniform. The company had issued him three uniforms, and he kept them in the Executive Suite.

It was in the Executive Suite that von Wachtstein, Boltitz, and Stein had been hastily outfitted with SAA uniforms. Clete had sensed that all three shared his opinion of the garish outfits, but they were too polite to say anything, and he hadn’t said anything either because he thought it would only serve to make a bad situation worse.

The truth was that while SAA pilots, from Chief Pilot Delgano down, thought their uniforms properly reflected their important role as dashing fliers, when Frade put on his uniform and looked into the mirror, he thought he looked like a tuba player in the Ringling Brothers, Barnum & Bailey Circus band—or maybe the guy driving the wagon holding the caged snarling tigers in the circus parade.

There were times, of course, when he had to wear it. Today, for one example. And, for another, when he was combining a scheduled Constellation flight with a training flight for pilots being upgraded from the left seat of a Lodestar to the right seat of a Connie, which meant passengers were aboard. And he wore it when flying to Lisbon, putting it on only after all other preflight activities had been accomplished and taking it off just as soon as he could when he had returned to Aeropuerto Jorge Frade.

“Who’s down there?” Frade said into his telephone, his tone incredulous, and, after there was a reply, said, “Send them up.”

He put the handset in the base and turned to the men in the room.

“Get your feet off the coffee table, Gonzalo. Your boss is on the way up. And so is the guy who thinks he’s mine.”

It was an open secret to those in the room that in addition to his role as SAA chief pilot, Gonzalo Delgano was a colonel of the Bureau of Internal Security. He had been keeping an eye on el Coronel Frade from the time he was a captain and ostensibly the pilot of el Coronel’s Beechcraft Staggerwing. Now he kept an eye on Cletus Frade and SAA.

The other reference was obviously to Richmond C. Flowers, USA, the military attache at the American Embassy who was de jure but not de facto the senior OSS officer in Argentina.

The same question ran through both Frade’s and Delgano’s minds: I wonder what the hell this is all about.

El General de Brigada Martin, in civilian clothing, came into the office first, followed by Colonel Flowers and two muscular young men, also in civilian clothing, one of them carrying a bulging leather briefcase that clearly was stuffed full.

Frade thought: Clever fellow that I am, I suspect that those two are Marine guards.

How do I know? They’re muscular, bright-eyed—and nobody else in Buenos Aires has haircuts like that.

I wonder what the hell this is all about. . . .

“Good afternoon,” Martin said.

“Bernardo, if you’ll tell me who told you we were up here,” Frade said as he stood up, “I’ll have him dragged down Runway 28—that’s the long one—by his testicles.”

“Actually, it was a rather good-looking young woman,” Martin said, smiling.

“Then by her ears,” Frade said. He turned to Colonel Flowers. “Good afternoon, sir. I believe you know everybody?” Then, looking at the two muscular young Marines, he added, “Semper fi, guys.”

The younger of the two smiled back and said, “Semper fi, sir.”

Colonel Flowers raised his eyebrows.

Clete shrugged. “You know what we say, Colonel. Once a Marine, always a Marine.”

Colonel Flowers looked uncomfortable. He had known Kapitan zur See Boltitz and Major von Wachtstein when they had been respectively the Naval attache and the assistant military attache for air of the German Embassy.

Clete thought: And by now you’ve heard that I plucked them from durance vile at Fort Hunt.

“What’s going on?” Martin asked.

“Actually, we were just talking about you,” Frade said.

“Really?” Martin said as he walked around the room, shaking hands and exchanging embraces.

Flowers shook hands wordlessly with everyone.

“I said something to the effect that if el General was here we could ask him what this swap-the-diplomats mission is really all about,” Frade said.

“I was hoping you could tell me,” Martin said, walking finally to Clete, where he hugged his shoulder.

“May I say how elegant you all look in your uniforms?” Martin asked.

“Only if you say it without smirking,” Clete said, then added: “You really don’t know what’s going on? Or where our passengers are? I told Humberto to tell my Tio Juan we wanted to leave no later than four-thirty.”

“Colonel Frade, may I have a moment with you?” Colonel Flowers asked.

“Certainly. May we use your office, Gonzalo?”

“Certainly.”

When they had gone into the adjacent office, Flowers said, “Sergeant, leave the briefcase, please, and wait for me in the corridor.”

One of the Marines handed Flowers the briefcase, then both Marines left the office, closing the door behind them.

Flowers put the briefcase on the desk, then sat down in an armchair before it.

He looked at Clete and said, “May I ask where you’re going?”

Why not tell him?

“The Foreign Ministry has chartered a Connie to take a crew of Argentine diplomats to Germany and bring back the ones who are there.”

“Sort of a rescue mission?”