“What kind of an aircraft did you say?” the admiral inquired.
“A Fieseler Storch, mi Almirante, a Fi 156.”
The Storch was what the Wehrmacht had called a Ground Cooperation Aircraft. The small, high-wing airplane, used for liaison and artillery direction, could carry a pilot and two passengers and was capable of landing and taking off within remarkably short distances.
Where the hell did he get a Storch?
Why am I still surprised at anything he does?
“My compliments to el General,” Crater said. “Tell him I will be there directly.”
“Sí, mi Almirante.”
“And put the aircraft out of sight in a hangar. And do not record that it’s been here. This is a matter of national security.”
“Sí, mi Almirante.”
—
Vicealmirante Crater did not see a Storch anywhere on the field when his gray 1942 Buick staff car took him and his aide-de-camp, Capitán de Fregata Roberto Otero, there.
“Which hangar?” he wondered aloud.
“I would suggest the far one, mi Almirante,” Otero said, having overheard the conversation announcing the arrival of the Storch and Crater’s orders to get it out of sight.
“Drive there,” Crater ordered.
General Martín was standing by the Storch. He had just about finished changing into his uniform.
“I like your new horse, Bernardo,” the vicealmirante said. “Where’d you get it?”
Martín smiled and chuckled, and the two officers patted one another’s backs.
?
?I drove to Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo and commandeered it,” Martín said. “You said this was important.”
“That’s Cletus Frade’s airplane?”
“It is now,” Martín said. “It used to belong to the German embassy. I thought you knew that story.”
Crater shook his head.
“The day after the bomb didn’t kill Hitler at his headquarters, Himmler ordered the arrest of those he suspected were involved. And their families. That included Major Hans-Peter von Wachtstein of the German embassy here. Von Wachtstein and Boltitz were way ahead of them. They got in the embassy’s Storch, filed a flight plan to Montevideo, took off—and disappeared.
“Everyone thought they had gone out over the River Plate and dove into it, to escape the tender ministrations of the SS. What they really did was fly out to Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo, where they put this”—he patted the Storch fuselage—“into Frade’s hangar. Frade then flew them to the American airbase at Porto Alegre, Brazil, in his Lodestar, from which they were flown to the United States. Nobody was any wiser—”
“Including you?” Vicealmirante Crater interrupted.
“Including me. I knew, of course, that Boltitz was Admiral Canaris’s man in the embassy, and that Frade had turned von Wachtstein. But I didn’t know what had happened to either of them until several days after the German surrender, when Frade flew to the United States and brought them back.”
“And this airplane?”
“Frade kept it. When Argentina declared war on Germany, Frade—or his man in the American embassy, Major Pelosi—claimed it as captured enemy property. Pelosi then immediately sold it to an Argentine national—Cletus Frade—for ten pesos, and then Frade asked me to help him get it registered here.”
“And you did.”
“And I did. I thought it might be useful someday. And so it has proven to be.”