"Yes."
"And how is he?"
"He is in the Argerich Military Hospital," Ramirez said. "He will recover."
"If you please. General. I would like to see him."
"Of course. I will arrange it."
"I mean now. Sir."
Ramirez looked at him thoughtfully for a moment, then nodded.
"Whatever you wish, Se¤or Frade," he said, and leaned forward on the seat to give the driver his orders.
"For whatever small comfort this might provide, Se¤or Frade," Ramirez said, "the people who did this outrageous act did not get away with it. They were located by the Provincial Police and died in a gun battle which followed."
Clete's mouth ran away from him.
"He who lives by the sword shall die by the sword," he said sarcastically, mentally adding, And dead men tell no tales, right, like about who hired them?
The sarcasm was not apparent to General Ramirez.
"And if we are to believe the Holy Scripture," he said, "they will burn in hell through eternity for their mortal sin."
Chapter Five
[ONE]
El Palomar Airfield
Buenos Aires, Argentina
1535 9 April 1943
Sometimes a Condor flight came twice a month, most often once a month, and the last flight before this one had been five weeks ago. Whenever he went to meet one, Major von Wachtstein was always relieved and a little surprised that the Condor had made it at all. He knew aircraft: Before coming to Argentina he had flown in Spain with the Condor Legion, and with fighter and fighter-bomber squadrons in Poland, Russia, and France, and had commanded a squadron of Focke-Wulf 190s defending Berlin.
It was one hell of a long flight from Berlin to Buenos Aires, and the shoot-ing down of transport aircraft of the enemy was just as legal under the Geneva Convention as torpedoing their merchant ships.
First, the Condor had to make the 1,436 miles from Berlin to Portugal. There were few places over Germany, and fewer over occupied France, where one could not reasonably expect to encounter an Allied fighter.
The skies over neutral Spain and Portugal were safe, but fifteen minutes out of Lisbon toward Dakar, in French West Africa on the next leg of the flight, the Condor lost the protection of Portuguese neutrality. To avoid Allied aircraft cer-tain to be alerted to its departure by Allied agents at the field, it had to fly far out into the Atlantic. Now that the Americans were in Morocco, that was a real threat.
It was about 1,800 miles from Lisbon to Dakar. Marshal Petain's officially neutral Vichy French government had no choice but to permit a German civil-ian aircraft to make a fuel stop at the Dakar airfield. But once the Condor left Dakar, the danger of being shot down was replaced by the danger of bad weather and running out of fuel. It was 2,500 miles from Dakar to Cayenne in French Guiana on the South American continent, and another 2,700 miles from Cayenne to Buenos Aires.
To avoid detection and interception on the Cayenne-Buenos Aires leg, the Condor had to fly at least one hundred miles off the coast of Brazil. Brazil had declared war against the Axis powers, and the Americans had given them some armed long-range maritime reconnaissance aircraft. On that leg the Condor faced dangers both from enemy aircraft and from the hazards of an incredibly long flight. Only a few years before, any aircraft that had successfully com-pleted a flight of that distance would have made headlines. It was still a mag-nificent achievement.
Major Freiherr von Wachtstein privately thought the Condor flights were an exercise in idiocy. For one thing, they required a great deal of fuel. And the Condor, like any aircraft, had a finite weight-carrying capability. The unavoid-able result was that when the Condor took off there was very little weight avail-able for either passengers or cargo. Usually the planes arrived carrying only half a dozen passengers, a dozen or so mailbags, and the diplomatic pouches.
He thought, again very privately, that there were only two reasons for mak-ing the Condor flights at all, and both were connected with the convoluted thinking of the upper hierarchy of the National Socialist German Workers' Party. First: Someone as important as Reichsmarschal Hermann Goring, head-of all things in aviation in Germany, the Luftwaffe (Air Force), and Lufthansa (the national airline), probably felt that maintaining the flights increased-or at least maintained-Nazi prestige.
The effects on Nazi prestige when an Allied fighter pilot-inevitably-got lucky, happened across the pride of Germanic aviation, and shot it down had not occurred to Der Grosse Hermann.
The second reason, even more convoluted, and thus even more likely in the Nazi never-never-land, was that the Condor often carried high-ranking mem-bers of the Nazi hierarchy aboard. It was a matter of prestige for them to fly aboard a Condor; they would seem much less important if they traveled abroad on a civil aircraft of a neutral power.
As Peter von Wachtstein stood behind the fence, watching the Condor taxi up to the terminal building, the face of the pilot was familiar. They had flown to-gether in Spain.
A stairway was pushed out to the plane as the pilot shut down the engines. Argentine Customs and Immigration officials stationed themselves at the bot-tom, and the passengers began to debark.