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Dulles drained his drink.
“I am sorry, Clete. Unfortunately, that is the nature of our business.”
Frade was silent a long moment, then sighed.
“Yeah, I know,” he said, “but it damn well doesn’t mean I have to like it. Thank you for leveling with me, Mr. Dulles.”
“How many times have I asked you to call me by my Christian name?”
“I could no more call you ‘Allen’ than I could call Colonel Graham ‘Alejandro.’”
“You could if you tried.”
“And if that’s all you have for me, Mr. Dulles, I’ll get in my airplane and fly another load of Germans wearing clerical garb and carrying Vatican passports to sanctuary in Argentina.”
Frade stood and put out his right hand. Dulles took it.
“We’ll be in touch,” Dulles said.
Clete nodded and walked out of the restaurant.
[TWO]
Washington National Airport Arlington, Virginia 1310 10 May 1945
The four-engine, triple-tail Lockheed Constellation was the finest transport aircraft in the world. In 1939, Howard Hughes, the master aviator whose vast holdings included the majority of shares in Trans World Airlines, had ordered the superplane built to his specs. It was capable of flying forty passengers in its pressurized cabin higher (an altitude of thirty-five thousand feet) and faster (cruise speed was better than three hundred knots) and for a longer distance (forty-three hundred miles) than any other transport aircraft. It
s wing design was nearly identical to that of the single-seat Lockheed Lightning P-38 fighter—although on a far grander scale.
South American Airways would have never received a single Connie if President Franklin D. Roosevelt had not had what Clete Frade thought of as a “hard-on” for Juan Trippe and his Pan American Airways. Actually, if Roosevelt had not been beyond pissed at Trippe—who had hired, then at first refused to fire, Colonel Charles “Lucky” Lindbergh after the world-famous aviator had dared to cross FDR—there never would have been a South American Airways at all.
But SAA did indeed exist, and it had not just one but a total of eleven Connies, setting it up to dominate transoceanic air travel postwar—and angering the volatile Juan Trippe no end.
Graham had told Clete: “FDR really knows how to carry one helluva grudge.”
Four days earlier, when Clete had landed South American Airlines Constellation Ciudad de Mendoza at Buenos Aires’s Coronel Jorge G. Frade airport—after a one-stop, Dakar-Senegal, flight from Lisbon—his wife had been waiting for him with a radiogram.
LOS ANGELES CAL 3 PM 9 MAY 1945
VIA MACKAY
CLETUS H FRADE
SOUTH AMERICAN AIRWAYS
BUENOS AIRES ARGENTINA
LITTLE CLETUS STOP THERE ARE FIVE CONNIES IN THE USED CAR LOT STOP IF YOU CAN HAVE YOUR BANK GUARANTEE PAYMENT AND GET THEM FLOWN OUT OF HERE WITHIN FIVE DAYS THEY ARE YOURS STOP REGARDS HOWARD
By the time Cletus broke ground at the controls of South American Airways Constellation Ciudad de Córdoba four hours later, he was absolutely convinced he was on a roll.
When he hadn’t been considering all that Allen Dulles had told him about their new enemies, Frade had spent much of the time between Lisbon and Buenos Aires wondering what the hell he could do about Peter von Wachtstein and Karl Boltitz. He wanted them out of prisoner-of-war confinement at Fort Hunt, Virginia, and back to Argentina—or somewhere safe—yet hadn’t come up with much of anything.
Howard Hughes’s radiogram solved just about everything.
While Frade was genuinely delighted to be able to buy five more Connies for SAA, taking a dozen pilots and six flight engineers to Los Angeles to pick them up was the cherry on that cake. It gave him a reason for the flight that would satisfy the curiosity of the U.S. government.
And there was a cherry on that cherry, too. “Aunt Martha” Howell was the only mother Clete had ever known—his mother having died in childbirth when he was an infant—and Clete was about twelve before he realized that his sisters Beth and Maggie were really his cousins. They had not yet seen Cletus Howell Frade Jr. who was now five months old. He could pick up the women in Midland or Dallas and bring them to Buenos Aires now and worry about getting them back to the States later.
