Now Frade shrugged.
“I know not what course others may take,” Hughes intoned solemnly, “but as for me, give me rye whiskey when bourbon and scotch are not available.”
He reached for the bottle.
Colonel A. F. Graham came into BOQ Room 7 ninety minutes later, just as Howard Hughes was shaking the last drops of the rye whiskey into his glass.
“You’re out of luck, Alex, the booze is all gone,” Hughes said.
“You two are going to have to fly tomorrow,” Graham said. “And you’re drinking?”
“Only this one bottle,” Hughes said. “And it was nowhere near full when Len here brought it to us.”
Graham didn’t reply. He turned to Frade.
“I really wish you had a uniform. And a haircut. But there wasn’t time, so we’ll have to go with what we have.”
“Go where? And what do we have?” Frade asked.
“Don’t push me, Clete,” Graham said. “I’m not in a very good mood.”
“You couldn’t turn the Kraut?” Hughes asked.
Graham shook his head. “I’m still working on shaking him up. And I haven’t done well at that. He knows all about the Geneva Convention and enough about the United States to know we scrupulously follow them.”
“A real Nazi, huh?” Frade said. “A chip off the ol’ block—his mother’s block?”
“No. He’s more like his father. Go by the book. The book says don’t cooperate with the enemy, and that’s it, so far as he’s concerned.”
“What did he have to say about us having his parents?”
“I refused to discuss that. And when I asked him how familiar he was with Putzi Hanfstaengl, he said he’d never heard of him. Where he is now is in a room, alone, guarded by a couple of MPs. I told him he is not going back into the camp as a prisoner. I wouldn’t discuss that, either. I’m going to let him stew there overnight, and let you have a go at him in the morning. You, or you and Fischer. Your call.”
“I want Len there.”
“Okay. Now, why don’t we all go to bed?”
XV
[ONE]
Senior German Officer Prisoner of War Detention Facility Camp Clinton, Mississippi 0915 6 August 1943
It had been a thirty-mi
nute drive in a 1941 Chevrolet Army staff car from Jackson Army Air Base to the POW camp, down a narrow macadam road that cut through the loblolly pine trees of rural central Mississippi.
When they got close to the base—signs on what had been a farmer’s fence read KEEP OUT! U.S. GOVERNMENT PROPERTY—Frade started looking for the barbed-wire fences and observation towers of a POW camp. There were none.
Their driver turned off of the macadam onto a rutted red clay road, and two hundred yards down that saw a guard shack in the center of the road manned by a pair of armed MPs in uniform. A curved sign erected over the shack read PRISONER OF WAR CAMP. Below that, in smaller letters, it said CLINTON, MISSISSIPPI, and below that was a square sign reading, VISITING PROHIBITED.
Frade noted that now there was a single coil of concertina marking the perimeter.
“Not much barbed wire,” he observed aloud as the staff car pulled to a stop at the guard shack.
“Yeah,” Fischer said. “Why is that?”
“Where are they going to go if they escape?” Graham replied. “This is the middle of nowhere. The wire’s more of a psychological barrier; it serves as a reminder of where they are.”