Griffin W.E.B. - Honor Bound 01 - Honor Bound

"When the destroyer arrives, I'm going aboard. I'll identify myself as a Marine officer and ask her captain to send a message to Colonel Graham."

"And if he doesn't have the right kind of radios, or let you send Colonel Graham a message, then what?" Tony asked.

Clete shrugged. "If you can think of anything else, Tony, I'm wide open to suggestions," Clete said, then turned to Ettinger. "Unless you could set up a radio here?"

Ettinger shook his head no. And then explained: "I don't have the equipment. And I don't think I could find it here. I asked around. Most of their equipment is pretty primitive. And from what I remember about what this fellow Collins used, it required a hell of an antenna. Nothing we could hide; it would attract a good deal of attention. Sorry, Lieutenant."

"It never hurts to ask," Clete said.

"So what do we do now?" Tony asked. "While we're waiting for the destroyer to show up?''

"Try to think of some way to take out an armed merchantman besides using a TBF... or three lonely guys with twenty-odd pounds of explosive," Clete said.

"One thing we absolutely must not do," Ettinger said thoughtfully, "is tell Nestor about this little chat."

"He's the OSS Station Chief," Clete said. "I don't want to put you in the middle of the fight between the two of us."

"I told you before, Clete, that a man can't serve two masters," Ettinger said. "And the oath I swore when I came into the Army was 'to obey the orders of the officers appointed over me.' I don't think Nestor qualifies as an officer, Lieutenant. You do. That's the philosophic argument. What Tony would call the gut reaction is: 'If Lieutenant Frade doesn't trust this man, why should we?' "

"No matter how this turns out, Clete," Tony said, "we're with you. OK? We decided that on the way over here."

Christ, I'm no better than my father. I want to cry.

"Which brings us back to Tony's question," Ettinger said. "What should we do now, Tony and I?"

"Nothing. Unless someone comes to you and tries to order you to commit suicide by trying to take out the Reine de la Mer. This is a direct order, Lieutenant Pelosi: I forbid you to attempt any action against the Reine de la Mer without my specific approval. Clear?"

"Yes, Sir," Tony said.

"If you want to get in touch with me, have David call and say he's from American Express and I have mail there. I'll then meet you at five o'clock the same afternoon. Where?"

"One of the hotel bars," Ettinger said. "That would look coincidental."

"The bar in the Plaza," Tony decided.

"The bar in the Plaza," Clete parroted. "And now get out of here."

Pelosi and Ettinger both offered their hands.

Clete watched them as they walked to the library door.

Pelosi turned at Ettinger's arm, surprising Clete, and then surprised him even more:

"Detail, Ten-hut!" Pelosi barked.

Ettinger came to attention.

Pelosi raised his hand in a crisp salute and held it.

“Permission to return to post, Sir?”

Clete returned the salute.

"Post, Lieutenant Pelosi."

Pelosi brought his saluting hand crisply to his side, then barked, "Haa-bout, Face!" and "Faw-wud, Harch!" and marched out of the library.

Just in time. Otherwise they would have seen the tears running down my cheeks.

[FIVE]

Recoleta Cemetery

Buenos Aires, Argentina

1435 19 December 1942

As he observed the casket of el Capitan Jorge Alejandro Duarte being placed before the altar inside the Duartes' enormous marble tomb, Hauptmann Freiherr Hans-Peter von Wachtstein decided that he was honor bound to inform Lieutenant Cletus Howell Frade that an attempt would be made to murder him.

He reached this conclusion by a circuitous route, starting from a moment when he glanced down at the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross around his neck and at the other one on the red velvet pillow.

His first thoughts were unkind: This goddamned fool does not deserve the Knight's Cross. He got himself killed flying an airplane that he was not supposed to be flying in the first place, in a war that wasn't his.

Other thoughts immediately followed: Furthermore, he was probably unqualified to fly the Storch at all. It is a relatively simple, stable aircraft; but like all airplanes, it has its peculiarities. The Storche I've flown have gone from the first faint, barely detectable indication of a low-speed stall condition to a full stall in the time it takes to spit.

Whereupon, the sonofabitch drops through the sky like a stone. Standard stall-recovery procedures work, of course, providing you have several hundred feet of altitude to play with. If not, you encounter the ground in an out-of-control attitude, and with consequent loud crashing noises.

There are two ways to enter a stall condition— in addition to on purpose, which is what the instructor pilot does to you during Transition Training, which it is safe to assume the late Capitan Duarte did not have, the Luftwaffe not being in the habit of teaching Cavalry officers from South American countries to fly its airplanes. An airplane goes into an unplanned stall either because the pilot is stupid enough to allow the airfoils to run out of lift, or because the propeller has stopped turning and pulling the airplane through the air with enough velocity for the airflow over the airfoils to provide sufficient lift. Propellers stop turning usually because the engine has stopped turning. Engines are fairly reliable. They seldom stop turning unless they are broken, as when, for example, they are hit by small-arms fire.

The rule to be drawn from this is that if you are flying a Storch near the ground someplace, you pay particular attention to airspeed and engine RPM, so that if the engine is struck by small-arms fire and shows indications of stopping, you can make a dead-stick landing someplace without stalling.

Capitan Duarte did not do this. The documents accompanying the remains gave the cause of death as “severe trauma to the body caused by sudden deceleration." If he was hit, the documents would have said so.

The late Capitan Duarte crashed the sonofabitch, because he didn't know how to fly the sonofabitch. And he took some poor bastard with him.

He therefore deserves the posthumous award of the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross about as much as Winston S. Churchill does. And awarding it to him is a slap in the face to every pilot who has earned it, including, of course, Hauptmann Freiherr Hans-Peter von Wachtstein.

By the time the funeral procession moved from the courtyard outside the Basilica to the cemetery, Peter was having second thoughts:

Wait. Am I being fair to the poor bastard? Is the coffee cup full of brandy I had for breakfast talking? Or the monumental ego of Hauptmann von Wachtstein, fighter pilot extraordinary? Or both?

Bullshit. Clete Frade was contemptuous when he heard they were awarding this clown— his cousin, by the by— the Knight's Cross. Christ, even Oberst Gr?ner was disgusted.

From that point, Peter became less unkind.

On the other hand, even if he was a Hauptmann, Duarte was an inexperienced officer. Inexperienced officers do dumb things, especially before they learn that all the talk of the glory of war is pure bullshit. I did. To save Germany from godless communism, and to bring glory to the Luftwaffe and Der F?hrer, 1 did some pretty goddamn dumb things in Spain myself. And in Poland. And in France.

Cletus told me that he went on his first combat mission determined to personally avenge the humiliation the United States suffered at Pearl Harbor.

“It took about fifteen seconds with a Zero on my tail,” Clete said, "to realize that all I wanted out of the war was Clete Frade's skin in one piece; somebody else was welcome to the glory of avenging Pearl Harbor.”

Clete is an honest man, more honest than I am. I would find it hard to publicly admit a sentiment like that, even though I felt it. And Clete is no coward. He told me that he thought his “chances of getting off Guadalcanal alive ranged from zero to none," but he continued to fly.