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

"I'll be damned," Clete said.

Peter raised his glass.

"Fighter pilots," he said.

"Fighter pilots," Clete replied, tapping Peter's glass with his. "And their ladies."

"Since I am an officer and a gentleman, I will refrain from commenting that yours has a rather attractive mammary development herself, even if she is so recently out of the cradle."

"Go fuck yourself, Peter."

"I had an ulterior motive in bringing the wine to you," Peter said. "Actually, several of them."

Now he wants the favor.

"I'm not surprised."

"Oberst Gr?ner called me into his office this afternoon."

"The military attach??"

Peter nodded. "He wanted to make sure that everyone here tonight sees that we have become friends ..."

"And the champagne is intended to do that?"

"... because he has good reason to believe you will not be among us much longer."

"Really?"

What the hell is this all about?

“He has learned from a reliable source in Internal Security that you are about to engage in a very foolish, amateurish operation ... and that it is doomed to failure."

"I can't imagine what he's talking about."

"If his information is correct, you are about to use your father's airplane to make a bombing run on a neutral ship in the Bay of Samboromb6n, with the hope of igniting her fuel tanks with homemade incendiary bombs."

Shit, if Oberst Whatsisname knows, they'll be waiting for us.

That miserable sonofabitch Delgano!

What is this "homemade incendiary bomb" bullshit?

Christ, they mean the flares. Which means they haven't thought of a submarine!

"I think your Oberst Whatsisname has been at the schnapps," Clete said.

"Oberst Gr?ner went on to say that the ship, the Reine de la Mer, is armed with two dual forty-millimeter Bofors and some heavy machine guns. It will have no trouble at all shooting you down."

Clete met Peter's eyes but said nothing.

"Now I personally felt that the Oberst's information was wrong," Peter went on. "For one thing, a pilot with your experience would know that if the pilot on such a mission were actually lucky enough to hit the ship with an incendiary bomb, the only thing the bomb would do is lie around on thick steel plates and burn itself out."

"I never gave the subject much thought," Clete said. "But now that you mention it, I think you're right."

"I did not offer my opinion on the subject to Oberst Gr?ner," Peter said. "I suppose that I should have. And I daresay in some quarters that my failure to do so would constitute treason."

"Why are you telling me all this, Peter?" Clete asked.

"Treason is a subject I've given a good deal of thought to, lately," Peter said.

"Where are we going with this conversation?" Clete asked.

"That remains to be seen," Peter said. "Did you mean what you said?"

"Said about what?"

"You said, if memory serves, that I have 'a blank check' with you."

"As long as it has nothing to do with the... idiotic notion your Oberst Whatsisname has, you do."

"I need your help."

"Anything I can do, you've got it."

"When I give you this, I'm putting my father's and several other people's lives in your hands," Peter said. He took his father's letter from his pocket and handed it to him.

Clete glanced at it.

"I don't speak German, Peter. You're going to have to translate this."

"Yes, of course, I didn't think about that," Peter said, and took the letter back and read it aloud, translating it with some effort into Spanish.

Toward the end, through eyes themselves bleared with tears, Clete saw that Peter's eyes, too, were teary. And his voice was breaking.

“I think I need a little more champagne,” Clete said, picking up the bottle and filling their glasses.

"Can you help me?" Peter asked.

"I can't help you," Clete said. "I'll have to go to my father. He'll have to hear what this letter says."

Peter nodded.

Clete went to the bedside and pushed the servant call button.

"You're doing what?" Peter asked.

"I'm sending for my father."

"I didn't mean tonight."

"That's all the time we have."

"Gr?ner was right?"

There was a knock at the door, so quickly that Clete was surprised. It was a maid.

"Se?or Cletus?"

"How did you get here so quickly?"

"El Coronel told me to wait in the upstairs pantry in case you needed something, Se?or Cletus."

"Please tell el Coronel that I need him here immediately; that it is something you can't do for me."

“S?, Se?or," the maid said, and quickly left the room.

"Gr?ner was right?" Peter repeated. "Clete, you don't stand a chance."

"I am not going to bomb anything with incendiary bombs, OK? Now leave that alone, Peter, for Christ's sake!"

Peter met Clete's eyes again.

"As you wish, my friend," he said.

"What now?" el Coronel demanded as he came in the room. "Your guests will start eating the furniture."

He saw the look on Clete's face and stopped.

"What is it?"

"You know I owe Peter my life," Clete said. "It's payback time. Or partial payback time."

"A debt of honor?" Frade asked. "What is it?"

"Peter has a letter from his father. It's in German. He'll have to translate it for you."

"Let's have the letter. I speak German. Among other things you don't know about me, I'm a graduate of the Kriegsschule."

Peter handed Clete's father the letter.

When he finished reading the letter, it took el Coronel Frade a long moment before he trusted his voice enough to speak.

"I can only hope, my friend," he said finally, "that one day my son will have reason to be half as proud of me as you must be of your father."

"Danke schon, Herr Oberst."

"Perhaps you will be able to find time in your busy schedule to spend a few days at Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo in the very near future. I will ask my brother-in-law, who is Managing Director of the Anglo-Argentine Bank, to join us for a private conversation."

"That's very kind of you, Herr Oberst."

"That business concluded, can we finally join Cletus's guests?"

The No-Longer-Virgin Princess' knee found Clete's knee within thirty seconds of their taking their seats at the dinner table. Her hand followed a moment later.

Anticipating this move, Clete caught it with his own hand and held it.

She turned to him in surprise.

"You look very nice in your dinner jacket," she said innocently.

"And you are the most beautiful thing I have ever seen in my life," Clete said.

[FOUR]

Radio Room

USS Alfred Thomas, DD-107

100 Nautical Miles Due East of Punta del Este,

Uruguay

0615 30 December 1942

Ensign Richard C. Lacey, USNR, the Communications Officer of the Thomas, a short, somewhat pudgy twenty-two-year-old, had spent most of the night trying to familiarize himself with the intricacies of the ship's cryptographic machine. Though all of his effort had resulted in virtually no success, he was hoping he'd be able to muddle through when he had to.

When Chief Schultz was still aboard, he politely suggested more than once that while only the supervision of shipboard cryptographic activity was among the communication officer's duties, not the actual operation of the equipment, it might be a good idea for him to show Mr. Lacey how the equipment actually worked.

Lacey declined the Chiefs offer, thinking that as long as the Chief was aboard, the Chief could handle the decryption operations. And he would of course supervise them.

Captain Jernigan himself made it crystal clear that Chief Schultz would remain aboard. "When you get a good chief, Mr. Lacey," Captain Jernigan said, "any good chief, but in particular a good Chief Radioman, you do what you can to keep him. Chief Schultz will leave the Thomas only over my dead body."