“Take that off,” she ordered. “The medals and the buttons hurt.”
“Sorry,” he said, and complied with the order.
“You may now kiss your bride, Cletus,” Dorotéa said, mimicking the Reverend Cashley-Price. “Where in the world were you when he said that?”
“I had just realized we were married,” he said.
“That hit me outside the church,” she said. “I thought, ‘My God, I now live here. This is where I’m going to raise my baby.’”
“I love you, Dorotéa,” Clete said.
“I saw that in your eyes while the Bishop was going through that Latin rigmarole,” she said.
“I said you could kiss me,” she repeated.
He hesitated.
“Is something wrong?” Dorotéa asked.
“Sweetheart, by now the house is getting full of people. They’ll expect us to come out. If I start now, I may not be able to stop.”
“To hell with them,” she said. “They can wait. The whole world can wait. I want my husband to make love to me. Now.”
XII
[ONE]
Aboard Lufthansa Flight 742
Over Portugal
1320 8 May 1943
It had been a very long and dangerous flight. They had to travel 2,700 miles from Buenos Aires to Cayenne in French Guiana in the northeast of the South American continent, and then 2,500 miles across the Atlantic Ocean from Cayenne to Dakar, on the west coast of Africa, and then 1,800 miles from Dakar to Lisbon. These great distances posed enormous problems of a purely aeronautical nature.
For starters, communication between the points of departure and the en route destinations was unreliable, if it worked at all. And even if there was communication, the weather reported at Cayenne might change completely by the time the Condor—which cruised at 215 knots—arrived there after a thirteen-hour flight from Buenos Aires, and the weather in Dakar might have changed drastically also after another twelve-hour flight.
And then they had to take off on each leg with the expectation that the aircraft would not encounter unusually strong headwinds (which would exhaust the fuel supply) or a storm that could not be flown around with the available fuel.
The weight of the fuel severely limited the Condor’s passenger and cargo weight allowances. Thus, on this flight the twenty-six-passenger aircraft carried only eight passengers in addition to First Secretary Anton Gradny-Sawz, Sturmbannführer Werner von Tresmarck, and Major Freiherr Hans-Peter von Wachtstein. Five of them were diplomats—two from Argentina, two from Chile, and one from Paraguay. The other three were Germano-Argentine businessmen.
Peter suspected the Germano-Argentines had been more or less ordered to take the Condor, and he thought the diplomats were fools. Either they didn’t comprehend the risk or they were flying despite it, for reasons of prestige or Latin machismo.
Brazil was at war with Germany, and under the rules of warfare the Condor was fair game. Because it could not fly over Brazil, it had to fly at least a hundred miles off the coast, in hopes that it would not be spotted by the American-supplied B-24 aircraft that patrolled the South Atlantic Ocean off Brazil and Uruguay looking for German submarines.
Cletus Frade had told Peter about the B-24s in Brazil. While they weren’t as heavily armed as the B-24s bombing Germany—since there were no German fighters operating in the area, they could dispense with the weight of the machine guns and ammunition they would normally have carried—they still carried enough Browning .50-caliber machine guns to shoot down a Condor.
Clete did not, in fact, think there was a great chance that the Condor would run into a patrolling B-24, and even if a B-24 pilot saw the Condor, he probably wouldn’t attack. Shooting down an unarmed transport, almost certainly carrying civilians, wasn’t the sort of thing a pilot would want to do.
“You might find yourself offered the choice between landing in Brazil, though, or getting shot down,” Clete said, “but what you really have to worry about is the Dakar-Lisbon leg.”
There was an active war in North Africa, with German bombers patrolling to interdict Allied shipping, and American fighters based in Morocco patrolling to interdict German bombers. Any aircraft with a swastika on its tail would be fair game.
With the exception of the steward, the Condor crew had just about ignored the passengers until they reached Dakar. Peter thought that was understandable. Von Tresmarck was in his SS uniform, and no one with the brains to find his ass with both hands wanted to get any closer to anyone in the SS than necessary. Peter himself had boarded the plane in civilian clothing, and on his diplomatic passport, and the crew naturally assumed he was a diplomat—like Gradny-Sawz, who had lost no time informing the pilot he was First Secretary of the German Embassy.
When they had refueled in Dakar, however, Peter had changed into his uniform, partly because his civilian clothes showed the signs of all that time in the air, and partly because he decided that he’d rather be in uniform if he was going to get shot down by some American P-51 Mustang pilot operating out of Morocco—which, come to think of it, would probably be a better way to check out than what’s liable to happen to me in Germany; my father wouldn’t be involved, and Alicia could get on with the sort of life she deserves.
That changed things, as far as the Condor pilot was concerned. The blond young man he had mistaken for a diplomat was not only a fellow pilot but the recipient of the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross. They were still climbing out of Dakar when the steward came to him and told him the pilot wanted to see him in the cockpit.