Empire and Honor (Honor Bound 7)

“I know.”

“For not letting a man who loves you take care of you.”

“Stop! Not one more word!”

She started to sob then, and he held her, stroking her back and her arms until he realized that she had both stopped sobbing and fallen asleep.

What the hell am I going to do?

[THREE]

Rhine-Main Airfield

Frankfurt am Main, Germany

0755 8 October 1945

“Rhine-Main,” the pilot of South American Airways Ciudad de Rosario, a Lockheed Constellation aircraft, announced, “South American Double Zero Five on the ground at five to the hour. Please close us out.”

The “Connie” was arguably—perhaps inarguably—the best transport aircraft flying. Designed by the legendary aviator Howard Hughes, it carried forty passengers in a pressurized cabin as high as thirty-five thousand feet at a cruising speed of three hundred knots

, and could do so for 4,300 miles. Its wing design was nearly identical to that of the single-seat Lockheed “Lightning” P-38 fighter, which Hughes had also designed.

“Roger, Double Zero Five. You are closed out.”

Immediately, there was a fresh voice: “South American Double Zero Five, Rhine-Main ground control.”

“Good morning, ground control,” the pilot replied cheerfully, even unctuously. “And how may South American Airways be of service to you this morning?”

It was not the response the ground control operator expected. This was, after all, a U.S. Army Air Forces base. There were rules, a protocol, to be followed.

The pilot of SAA 005 knew this. In another life, he had been a Naval Aviator, and was still carried on a Classified Top Secret “Roster of Personnel on Duty with the Office of Strategic Services” as “Frade, Cletus H., Lt. Col., USMCR.”

Once a Marine . . . as the saying goes.

This was not the first time he had tweaked the tail of control tower operators. In his sealed records at Headquarters, USMC, there was a copy of a Letter of Reprimand alleging that First Lieutenant Frade, of Marine Fighter Squadron VMF-211, in an act prejudicial to good order and discipline, had buzzed the tower at Fighter One on Guadalcanal in his Grumman F4F Wildcat fighter, causing the occupants to jump therefrom.

The ground control operator regained his aplomb.

“South American Double Zero Five, Rhine-Main ground control. Take taxiway two and stop. A Follow-Me will meet you. Acknowledge.”

“Roger, ground control. It will be my pleasure,” Frade said to his microphone, and then switched it to INTERCOM.

“You get that, Hansel?” he asked.

The co-pilot, a trim blond twenty-seven-year-old who in another life had been Major Freiherr Hans-Peter von Wachtstein of the Luftwaffe, nodded.

“Try not to run over the Follow-Me,” Frade said.

Von Wachtstein shook his head resignedly.

Both were wearing the uniforms prescribed for pilots of South American Airways. Frade was a captain. There were four inch-wide golden stripes sewn to his dark blue, double-breasted, brass-buttoned tunic. Von Wachtstein, a first officer, had three such stripes. The trousers of both were a powder blue and had an inch-and-a-half-wide gold stripe down the leg seams. Both wore SAA pilot’s wings, about twice the size of Frade’s Naval Aviator’s Wings of Gold, and which had what looked like a sunburst in their centers. It had actually been taken from the flag of the Argentine Republic. SAA was an Argentine airline.

Frade had once confided to his wife that the uniforms reminded him of those worn by bandmasters of a traveling circus, except the SAA uniforms were a bit more flamboyant.

—

The Follow-Me, a ton-and-a-half weapons carrier painted in a black-and-yellow checkerboard pattern and flying two checkerboard flags, appeared. The Constellation began to follow it far across the airfield.