“Well, look what the tide floated in!” Graham said in Spanish.
“Mi coronel,” Frade said, and saluted.
Graham returned the salute, shook his head, and said, still in Spanish, “We are Marines. Naval custom proscribes the exchange of hand salutes indoors unless under arms. Try to remember that in the future.”
Then he gestured for Frade to follow him into his office.
“I’m almost afraid to ask what you’re doing here,” he said, waving Frade into an inner office and then into a chair.
“A personnel matter, mi coronel. A personal personnel matter.”
“What kind of a personnel matter?”
“I am in receipt, mi coronel, of a letter from the Finance Officer, Headquarters, USMC, informing me that inasmuch as I have not provided the appropriate proof that I have flown any aircraft the required four hours per month for the past twenty months, I am therefore not
entitled to flight pay, and it will therefore be necessary for them to deduct the appropriate amount from my next check.”
“¡Jesúcristo!”
“And since I have not received any paycheck at all for the past twenty-some months, I thought I’d come and see if I couldn’t clear the matter up.”
“Well, I’d probably be more sympathetic if I didn’t know how far removed from the welfare rolls you are, Colonel. What’s that phrase, ‘Rich as an Argentine’?”
“That, mi coronel, is what they call the pot calling the kettle black.”
Graham shook his head.
“So, what really brings you up here, Clete?”
“On the way back from Portugal with yet another load of Teutonic people carrying Vatican passports, as I sat there watching the needles on the fuel gauges drop, I wondered what was going to happen to Boltitz and von Wachtstein once the Germans surrendered.”
“And?”
“I thought that they would probably be loaded onto a troopship, returned to the former German Thousand-Year Reich, and then locked up in a POW enclosure until somebody decided their fate. If they survived that long.”
“And that’s probably what will happen.”
“So I figured I’d better come up here and get them.”
“The injustice of the Nazis getting to go to Argentina, and the good guys getting locked up—and possibly worse—is that, more or less, what you were thinking?”
“That’s exactly what I was thinking. We owe them, and you know it.”
“You did give just a little thought to their being locked up at Fort Hunt and getting them out of there would be impossible?”
“Next to impossible, mi coronel.”
Graham raised an eyebrow. “Meaning what?”
“Meaning that at this moment, they’re sitting in my grandfather’s Cadillac, which is waiting in General Donovan’s reserved parking spot.”
“You got them out of Fort Hunt?” Graham asked incredulously.
Clete nodded.
“I told them you wanted to talk to them; had sent me out there to fetch them.”
“And what the hell do you plan to do with them now?” Graham said. But before Frade could reply, he asked, “Why the hell did you bring them here? To me?”