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The two embraced.

Humberto Duarte thought: I have no goddamn idea what Cletus is up to.

But whatever it is, he just got away with it.

[THREE]

Aeropuerto Coronel Jorge G. Frade

Morón, Buenos Aires Province, Argentina

1710 19 September 1943

It is entirely likely, Cletus Frade thought as he looked out the cockpit window, that there’s not a ladder within miles of here that’s long enough to reach up to the door, which will tend to put a damper on the triumphal arrival of the Big Bird.

He looked down at the people standing on the tarmac, most of them holding up champagne stems in salute as they looked with what approached awe at the Lockheed Corporation’s latest contribution to long-distance commercial aviation.

Claudia probably set that up; Humberto wouldn’t think of it.

Whoever did it, it was a good idea.

Frade saw that Major Freiherr Hans-Peter von Wachtstein, who was not in uniform, was almost feverishly taking photographs of the airplane with a Leica camera.

Just like the one we used to take pictures of the Froggers.

And, of course, of Tío Juan’s map of South

America after the Final Victory. He spotted el Coronel Juan Domingo Perón standing beside el Coronel Martín.

And you’re here, aren’t you, you sonofabitch?

And what the hell were you talking about, Martín, when you said you had to see me as soon as possible on a matter of “life and death”?

Well, at least it doesn’t concern Dorotea or anyone at Casa Montagna. I talked to her just before we took off from Canoas. I told her I was about to fly here. I didn’t tell her in what I was about to fly here, just that I was, and that I would see her there just as soon as I could deal with what I had to do in Buenos Aires.

There was a Collins Model 7.2 transceiver installed in the Connie; it had connected easily from Canoas with the Collins transceiver at Casa Montagna and with the one at Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo. As a result of the latter call, there would be at least three of the estancia’s station wagons, three sedans, and a stake-bodied truck waiting at the airfield to transport the Connie’s passengers and their luggage. Frade’s Horch was, he presumed, parked where he had left it in the hangar.

Among the passengers aboard were three ASA people from Vint Hill Farms Station: Second Lieutenant Len Fischer and two young enlisted men who were both T-3s. T-3 was an Army rank Fischer had to explain to Frade, as there was no such rank in the Marine Corps. Their staff sergeants’ chevrons had a “T,” meaning “Technician.” And staff sergeant was Pay Grade Three, hence T-3.

The ASA people, however, were not in uniform. They all wore civilian clothing and carried passports, draft cards, and other identification saying they were employees of the Collins Radio Corporation, Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

There were other civilian technicians aboard, some of them actually civilians. One of the bona fide civilians was an employee of the Curtiss-Wright Aircraft Engine Company. He would stay in Argentina only long enough to ensure that two other “employees of Curtiss-Wright”—actually, two U.S. Army Air Force technical sergeants—both were qualified to care for Curtiss-Wright R-3350-DA 3 18-cylinder supercharged 3,250-horsepower radial engines and were prepared to teach their art to employees of South American Airways. Four of the Curtiss-Wright radials powered the Constellation.

Additionally, there was a bona fide civilian employee of the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation and two more Army Air Force noncoms in mufti, who would both care for the airframe and see to the necessary instruction of South American Airways personnel to function as flight engineers.

At Howard Hughes’s suggestion, Chief Pilot Gonzalo Delgano had decreed that the flight engineers would have to be fully qualified pilots.

Six of these pilots were also aboard, getting their training hands-on.

Which meant that three of SAA’s Lodestars, which the pilots had flown to Canoas, would have to sit there on the tarmac until Frade and Delgano could figure out how to get them back to Argentina.

That problem being compounded by the delivery to Canoas of the second Constellation and, within the week, the expected arrival of the third Connie.

They would have to be stripped of their U.S. Army Air Force markings, then repainted in the South American Airways scheme—one as the Ciudad de Mendoza and the other as the Ciudad de Córdoba—and then flown to Buenos Aires, that problem compounded by the fact that only two SAA pilots—Frade and Delgano—had as many as fifteen takeoffs and landings, and neither Frade nor Delgano was willing to turn one of the Constellations over to less experienced pilots no matter how high their enthusiasm.

There were also aboard two slightly older bona fide civilians. Both were accountants, and looked like it, but for obvious reasons their identification did not indicate that they in fact practiced their profession as employees of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The accountants would stay in Argentina—Frade had not decided whether in Buenos Aires or in Mendoza—to keep track of and make sense of whatever the Froggers, father and son, would tell them and what could otherwise be learned from other sources on how the German Operation Phoenix money was being invested—hidden—in the Argentine economy.