The Honor of Spies

But unfortunately, the airplane was brand new, his copilot was the very experienced chief SAA pilot Gonzalo Delgano, and Frade himself was both a superb pilot and someone who apparently had more lives than the nine of the legendary cat.

Cranz's predecessor as the senior SS-SD officer in Argentina had not only botched a very expensive attempt to remove Cletus Frade from the equation, but had shortly thereafter died when a rifle bullet fired by one of Frade's men--or perhaps by Frade himself--had caused his skull to explode on the beach of Samborombon Bay.

Cranz had taken great care to make sure that his arrangements to eliminate Frade would not fail this time.

"Juan Domingo, something has to be done about the Froggers," Cranz said.

Peron didn't reply.

"And we both know that Cletus Frade has them."

Cranz felt sure he knew (a) why Frogger, the German Embassy's commercial attache, and his wife had disappeared, and (b) why Frade had them.

Frogger was privy to many details of Operation Phoenix, the plan conceived by Reichsfuhrer-SS Heinrich Himmler; Reichsleiter Martin Bormann, head of the Nazi Party; Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, chief of German Military Intelligence; and other very senior members of the Nazi hierarchy, who understood that the war was lost and had no intention of facing Allied vengeance.

Cranz knew all about Operation Phoenix: Hundreds of millions of dollars were to be spent to purchase South American sanctuary for high-ranking members of the Nazi establishment--probably including Der Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler, himself, although Cranz wasn't sure about this--from which, after some time passed, National Socialism could rise, phoenixlike, from the ashes of the Thousand-Year Reich.

Cranz had been sent to Argentina to make sure nothing went wrong with the plan--after something had gone terribly wrong.

An attempt had been made at Samborombon Bay, on the River Plate, to smuggle ashore a half-dozen crates stuffed with English pounds, American dollars, Swiss francs, gold coins and bars, and thirty-odd leather bags heavy with diamonds. The transfer was made on boats from the Comerciante del Oceano Pacifico, a Spanish-registered freighter. But someone had been waiting. Cranz suspected Cletus Frade and members of his OSS team, though he wasn't absolutely sure of this; it could have been Argentines.

There had been a brief burst of gunfire from a concealed position near the beach. Two of the three German officers--SS-Oberst Karl-Heinz Gruner, the military attache of the German Embassy, and his deputy, SS-Standartenfuhrer Josef Luther Goltz, had been dropped in their tracks, their skulls exploded by the rifle fire.

The snipers had missed the third officer, Major Hans-Peter von Wachtstein, the embassy's deputy military attache for air. Von Wachtstein had managed to get the crates--"the special shipment"--and the bodies of Gruner and Goltz onto the Comerciante del Oceano Pacifico's boats and back out to the ship.

The captain of the Oceano Pacifico, who had been in one of her boats, had been more than effusive in describing von Wachtstein's cool courage under fire. Courage was something to be expected of an officer who had received the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross from Hitler personally, of course, but Cranz wasn't really sure if von Wachtstein had been extraordinarily lucky or whether the snipers had intentionally spared him.

What Cranz was sure of was that the attack made clear that the embassy housed a traitor. And he was just about certain that that was the reason Frogger had deserted his post, taking his wife with him.

Not that Frogger was the traitor. So far as Cranz knew, the Froggers were--or until their desertion, had been--patriotic Germans. They had lost two of their officer sons in Russia, and the third, the eldest, Frogger's namesake, Oberstleutnant Wilhelm Frogger, had been captured when General von Arnim had surrendered the Afrikakorps.

Furthermore, Cranz knew that Frau Else Frogger secretly had been on the payroll of the Sicherheitsdienst, the Secret Police of the SS, and had been charged with reporting on the other Germans in the embassy to Oberst Gruner.

There was a downside to these faultless patriotic credentials. The Froggers had seen enough of the functioning of the SS-SD to know that with as much at stake as there was, if the actual traitor in the embassy could not be found, one would be created. Himmler and Bormann would want to be told the problem had been dealt with.

The Froggers knew that if Cranz, who had replaced Gruner, and Naval Attache Kapitan zur See Karl Boltitz, who had come to Argentina with Cranz, and almost certainly was working for Admiral Canaris, could not find the traitor, they would be replaced. In which case, they would be sent--if they were lucky--to the Eastern Front. Or to a concentration camp.