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

But who is the other fellow, Pelosi, coming with him?

We'll just have to wait and see.

He walked back to his desk, picked up a pen, and scrawled a note to his secretary, asking her (a) to please make reservations for an American gentleman, Se?or Pelosi, at either the Alvear Palace or the Plaza, for at least a week, starting November twenty-first (a small suite, to be billed to the SMIPP account); (b) to please remind him to inform his wife that they would be entertaining the young grandson of Cletus Marcus Howell for an indefinite period beginning November twenty-first; and (c) to please contact Schneider to ask if their meeting tomorrow could be rescheduled for later in the day; two-thirty or three, if possible, but no earlier than one-thirty.

[FIVE]

Aboard "The Ciudad de Rio de Janeiro"

(Pan American Airlines Flight 171)

1815 21 November 1942

One of the stewards (Clete Frade had serious doubts about his masculinity) came through the cabin, knelt in the aisle by each quartet of seats, and announced they were preparing to land in Buenos Aires. They should be on the ground—or, titter, on the water—in about fifteen minutes.

In fact, Clete's aviator's seat-of-the-pants instincts had already told him they'd been letting down slowly for about fifteen minutes. He had noticed a slight change in the roar of the Martin 156's quadruple thousand-horsepower engines, and a just barely perceptible change in attitude. Without taking it out of Autopilot, the pilot had just touched the trim control, lowering the nose maybe half a degree.

Clete was slept out and bored, so he had been doing his own dead-reckoning navigation since they'd left Rio de Janeiro. He used his Marine Corps-issue Hamilton chronograph and several sheets of the notepaper engraved "In Flight—Pan American Airways." Pan American had provided the paper—along with a good deal else—for the comfort of its passengers. He could only guess at the winds aloft, of course, but putting them at zero for his calculations, it was time to arrive in Buenos Aires.

He'd thought quite a bit about the watch, starting with the amusing notion that a diligent Marine Corps supply officer was almost certainly at this very moment trying to run down First Lieutenant Frade, USMCR, to make him either turn it back in or sign the appropriate form so the cost thereof could be deducted from his pay.

He got a strange feeling sitting in the softly upholstered seat of the Martin (every time they landed—first at Caracas, Venezuela, and then at Belem and Rio de Janeiro in Brazil—the crisp linen head cloths of the seats were replaced, and the ashtrays emptied) computing time and distance with the same watch he'd used when he had to wonder if he had enough gas to bring his Grumman Wildcat back to Midway or Henderson. Same identical watch, except for the strap. He replaced the old, mold-soaked strap with a new leather band in New Orleans.

It occurred to him that in his new role as a spy/saboteur/secret agent, he probably should put the watch away and wear one more appropriate to an oil industry executive.

That man is obviously a secret agent. You can tell by his watch!

But he had a strange, strong emotional reluctance to take it off. In a sense, the Hamilton and the Half Wellington boots he was wearing were his last connection with VMF-229, with Henderson and Guadalcanal, with the Corps, with Francis Xavier Sullivan. It was a connection he didn't want to break.

From the beginning in the hotel room in Los Angeles, he'd had doubts about the whole OSS operation. These had not only not diminished, they had grown more defined. He found it difficult to believe that the United States of America—faced with the problem that German submarines were being replenished by "neutral" freighters in Argentina—could not come up with a better solution than sending a fighter pilot, an immigrant electrical engineer, and a none-too-bright Italian boy from Chicago who was allegedly a demolitions expert to deal with it.

If General Frade had been in charge, he would have dispatched several Boeing B-17 bombers to Brazil with orders to bomb any suspicious-looking ship; and if the Argentineans didn't like it, fuck 'em. What were they going to do, declare war on the United States and bomb Miami? If the OSS knew about the ship, they would certainly know where it was. And it shouldn't be too hard to pass that information on to the bomber people.

On the other hand, it was also very true that the B-17s, the only aircraft Clete knew of with range enough to bomb Buenos Aires from a base in Brazil, weren't the invincible flying fortresses the Army Air Corps was advertising. B-17s had bravely gone out day after day from Midway and Henderson and Espiritu Santo to bomb Japanese ships; and so far as Clete knew, they hadn't been able to hit one of them.

They'd lost a bunch of B-17s—either to Japanese fighters, pilot (or navigator) error, or lousy maintenance. At least some of the Seventeen pilots must have known they were pissing into the wind, but they kept their mouths shut and tried to do what was asked of them, because that was the way things are in a war.

And that's how he felt about blowing up "neutral" freighters in Argentina. He would give it a shot—and for that matter, even try to make friends with his father—because that was what he had been ordered to do. Phony discharge and draft card and civilian clothing aside, he was still a serving Marine Officer. He'd taken an oath to "faithfully execute the orders of those officers appointed him"; and simply because orders like these weren't what he expected to get didn't release him from that oath.

All he could do was hope that "faithfully executing" his orders wasn't going to get himself—and Pelosi and Ettinger—killed in the process. And considering that the sum total of his knowledge about how to be a successful secret agent could be written inside a matchbook with a crayon—despite the mind-numbing, day-and-night, relentless efforts of the mentors in New Orleans—getting killed did not seem an unlikely possibility.

Ettinger seemed both smart and tough. Even telling his mother that he was going to Argentina now seemed less stupid than it did when Clete first heard it and ate him out about it. He had to tell her something, obviously, and in the absence of a furnished cover story—the OSS left things out, forgot things ... this was obviously not a comforting thought—the one he came up with was a pretty good one. And someone who had lost his family to Hitler's goons didn't have to be reminded that the Germans were the bad guys.

Pelosi worried him more. Sure he knew his stuff, incredibly. ... Lieutenant Greene, the Navy Salvage officer, gave Pelosi practice setting charges on a ship by giving him a to-be-scrapped World War One destroyer to blow up. Greene came back from Mississippi damned near glowing with tales of his expertise. But Pelosi was a Second Lieutenant, a kid, who thought war was like they showed it in Alan Ladd and Errol Flynn movies. Based on his own recent experience in the role, Clete considered himself an expert about the stupidity of second lieutenants. And he was thus afraid that Pelosi would try to do something heroic—an excellent way to get yourself and the people with you killed.

When the opportunity presented itself—the mentors saw to it there was no time for that in New Orleans—he intended to have a long talk with Pelosi on the theme that discretion is often the better part of valor.

The mentors also ruined his plans to correct what was now a near-terMi?al case of Lackanookie. Finding a cure for that was the one thing he could reasonably expect to find in Buenos Aires. Three of their mentors had been there. They swore to a man that the women were both lovely and (sometimes) willing.

He remembered clearly very few of the nine million facts about Buenos Aires that they threw at him. But one of those few concerned Four Hour Hotels. Four Hour Hotels were set up for the express purpose of catering to unmarried people who wished to spend four hours alone together in a horizontal position without their clothes. That seemed to be a little too good to be true, but he was going to do his best to find out for himself.