Death and Honor

Okay, Alejandro, truth time. Face the facts.

Your clever idea to send a young Marine officer—with absolutely no experience as an intelligence officer—down here wishfully thinking that maybe he could get his Argentine father to look more fondly on the United States has gotten completely out of hand.

For one thing, that mission is moot—El Coronel Frade is dead.

And it doesn’t really matter that young Frade probably can’t tilt the Argentine government toward us any more. Not impossible, but improbable. The bottom line here is that that isn’t nearly as important as the other things.

Frade is now involved in things far more important. It doesn’t matter how he got involved; the fact is that he knows about—is involved with—resistance to the Nazis by senior members of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht; the German navy; the head of Abwehr; the assassination plot against Hitler; Operation Phoenix; and the ransoming of Jews from concentration camps.

And while he’s so painfully right that he’s in over his head with all of this, the bottom line there is: So what? He’s involved.

“Major Frade, I want you to listen very carefully to what I’m about to say,” Graham said seriously.

Frade looked at him quizzically, nodded his head, but said nothing.

“That was an order,” Graham said. “To which, as a serving Marine officer, you are expected to reply, ‘Aye, aye, sir.’ ”

Graham saw the look on Frade’s face.

Is that contempt? Or amusement?

Probably both: Contemptuous amusement. Or amused contempt.

Frade said, “Aye, aye, sir.”

“Is something bothering you, Major?”

“ ‘Serving Marine officer,’ Colonel? So far as I know—with the exception of the Marine guards at the embassy—I’m the only Marine in Argentina. And God knows, I’m not functioning as a Naval Aviator. And as a serving Marine officer, I’m supposed to place myself at the orders of the senior officer of the Navy Department present. That would be Commander Delojo, and I have absolutely no intention of placing myself—or the Army officers, enlisted men, or Chief Schultz, who I do command—under Delojo’s orders.”

“Finished?” Graham asked.

Frade nodded. Then, a long moment later, when he realized Graham was waiting for the expected response, he said, “Yes, sir.”

“First, let’s straighten out the chain of command,” Graham said. “You are a Marine officer seconded to the Office of Strategic Services. As am I. I’m the senior Marine officer in OSS. That makes you subject to my orders. Clear?”

“Yes, sir.”

That reply was neither amused nor contemptuous.

I got through to him. At least a little.

A stray thought popped into Graham’s head.

The last time I thought of an amused contemptuous look on the face of Major Frade was when I went to the Documents Branch to pick up those absurd credentials Donovan ordered me to bring down here.

I knew that would be his understandable reaction to them.

But can I turn that around?

Christ, it’s worth a shot.

And I have to have him under control before I get into what he’s going to have to do now that he has stumbled into things he can’t control himself.

“You asked me to come down here at a time when I was planning to come anyway,” Graham said. That wasn’t true, but he saw that he had Frade’s attention.

Frade looked at him curiously, but said nothing.