“He was taking a leak in the men’s room of a charming little hotel in the charming little village of San Martin de los Andes, when someone blew his brains all over the urinal with a Ballester-Molina—an Argentine copy of our .45.”
“You wouldn’t happen to know who did that, would you, Clete?”
“Of course not,” Clete replied not very convincingly.
“And what are the Argentines doing about all these Nazis running loose in Argentina? Looking the other way?”
“You ever hear that money talks, Bob?”
“Is that what it is?”
“There is also an element—perfectly serious people—who feel the Nazis were a Christian bulwark against the Communist Antichrist. Unfortunately, to some odd degree, I’m afraid they may be right.”
“You think the Communists are going to be a threat?”
It took Clete a moment to consider the wisdom of what he wanted to say. In the end, he decided to say it.
“I’m reliably informed that J. Edgar Hoover thinks they’re the new enemy.”
“And you agree with Hoover?”
“Yeah, I guess I do. I never was able to regard Stalin as Friendly Uncle Joe, and I know for a fact the Russians are trying very hard to break into the . . . one of our most important secrets.”
“Which secret would that be?”
“Sorry, I just can’t tell you.”
“Which brings us back, I suppose, to why you wanted to see me.”
“I don’t know this for sure, but I have the feeling that just as soon as I get to Germany, there will be a meeting about the submarines headed this way.”
“A meeting between whom?” Bendick asked.
“It will be under Eisenhower—probably under his G-2—but it won’t all be under SHAEF. Someone from General Marshall’s staff will probably be there, and certainly someone from Army Intelligence. And the Office of Naval Intelligence. And, of course, the OSS. And probably, come to think of it, the Secret Service agents here.”
Clete then said: “Whatever intelligence is available about the German submarines will be presented, discussed, and it will be agreed that something has to be done about them. And, finally, it will be decided who exactly will have to do something about them.
“The one thing senior brass hates to do is take on a mission that will probably end in failure. Or about which they know very little, which would cause them to fail. So they will look around for someone who is an expert in the area of dealing with German submarines in South America. There are only two people who meet that criterion, Bob. You and me.”
“I think I know where you’re going, Clete,” Bendick said, “but there is one flaw in your argument. I don’t have any idea how to find these German submarines.”
“You and I have something else in common,” Frade said. “If we can’t find the submarines, that’s not the fault of G-2, or Naval Intelligence—it’s our fault. ‘What do you expect? While we’ve been fighting the Wehrmacht across Europe, Bendick and Frade have been sitting in beautiful South America drinking rum and Coca-Cola and chasing senoritas.’”
“Do you know how many aircraft we’ve lost over the South Atlantic?” Bendick asked.
“How many were actually shot down?”
“I take your point,” Bendick said after a moment.
“I think they call that ‘pilot error,’” Clete said. “You don’t get no Air Medals or Distinguished Flying Crosses for pilot error.”
Bendick shook his head.
“Here’s how I see it,” Frade went on. “OSS will be given the mission, and your wing will be among our many assets.”
“As I said, this particular asset doesn’t have a clue where to look for these submarines.”
“Maybe we can give you a little help there. Out of school.”
“Out of school? I don’t understand.”
“I have some intel that I know is reliable, and when we get to Germany and start to talk to the crews of U- boats, I think we’re going to have some more intel, maybe a good deal more. The problem is I can’t tell G-2, or Naval Intelligence, and certainly not the Secret Service about it, because they will want to know where it came from, and I can’t do that.”
“Why not?” Bendick asked almost automatically, and then, before Frade had a chance to answer, said, “You have spies in Germany, is that what you’re saying?”
“Not spies, General,” Boltitz offered. “One is an anti-Nazi former U-boat officer.”
Bendick looked at Boltitz, then back at Frade. “And you’re going to see this anti-Nazi U-boat officer in Germany? Is that what you’re saying? And he’s going to help you find these submarines?”
“What this anti-Nazi U-boat officer is going to do, Bob, is tell you all he knows about how U-boat crews are trained to cross the South Atlantic, what courses they followed in the past and presumably will follow now, their schedules of on-the-surface and submerged operations—that sort of thing. And then, when we get to Germany, he’ll see what he can find out from U-boat crews now in POW cages.”
“I’m a little slow sometimes,” Bendick said. Then he looked at Boltitz. “Why should I trust you?”
Frade answered for him: “You’ve heard of the failed attempt by Colonel Graf von Stauffenberg to kill Adolf Hitler?”
Bendick looked at Frade, nodded, but said nothing.
“At the time, Kapitan zur See Boltitz was the German naval attache in Buenos Aires and”—he gestured at Peter—“Major von Wachtstein was the assistant military attache for air. The day after the bomb failed to kill Hitler, the embassy got a radio message ordering their arrest for high treason.”
“They were involved in the bombing?”
“In the plot of the bombing,” Frade explained, “as were Peter’s father, Generalleutnant Graf Karl-Friedrich von Wachtstein, and Karl’s father, Vizeadmiral Kurt Boltitz. General von Wachtstein was arrested, tried by a people’s court, and hung from a butcher’s hook.”
“My God!”
“Vizeadmiral Boltitz, who worked for Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the chief of German Military Intelligence, was not immediately arrested, nor was Admiral Canaris. We don’t know where Vizeadmiral Boltitz is, only that the SS was looking for him until the last day of the war.”
“He ran?” Bendick asked.
Frade nodded.
“On April twenty-third—just over two weeks ago—the 97th Infantry Division of the Third U.S. Army liberated the Flossenberg Concentration Camp in Bavaria. They found Admiral Canaris’s naked, decomposing body hanging from a gallows. It had been left there as a gesture of contempt following the admiral’s execution on April ninth for his role in the failed attempt to kill Hitler.”
“Jesus Christ!” Bendick said, then asked, “And these two German officers ran from the arrest order to Argentina?”
“No. What happened—both had been working for me—was that I flew them to Canoas, where they surrendered to the commanding officer. They were then flown to the senior enemy officer interrogation facility at Fort Hunt, outside Washington.”
“If they had been working for you, why didn’t you just keep them in Argentina?”
“Argentina was then neutral. Leaning strongly toward the Axis, but neutral. If von Wachtstein and Boltitz had stayed there, there was a good chance that some Argentine Nazi would learn where they were, tell the German Embassy, and the SS would go after them. Try to kill them.”
“They’d actually do something like that?”
“They already had done something like that. They tried to kill the commercial attache of the German Embassy, who had deserted his post. Boltitz and von Wachtstein were no longer of any use to me inside the German Embassy, so getting them into a POW enclosure in the States seemed to be the right thing to do.”
“But they’re not in a POW enclosure, are they?”
