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

"That will be difficult to arrange," von Haas said, thinking aloud.

"Dieter, if you don't have anyone high up in the Foreign Ministry, your coup doesn't have a chance. And I am not as important to your plans as you have suggested I am."

"I will see what can be arranged, Karl."

"You will arrange it, or this conversation never took place."

"Where is he now?"

"He commands a Jaeger squadron near Berlin. Focke-Wulf 190s."

"Oberstleutnant?"—First Lieutenant.

“Hauptmann"—Captain.

"He's young to be a Hauptmann."

"He was eighteen when he went to Spain as a Feldwebel"— a sergeant.

"After," von Haas chuckled, "he was sent down from Marburg, ('Philip's University, in Marburg an der Lahn, in Hesse. It was to Marburg that the Russian and East European royalty sent their children to be educated, and at Marburg that Roentgen discovered the X ray.)

I recall."

"You and I, Dieter, came very close to being sent down from

Marburg," von Wachtstein said. ;

"They were better times, weren't they?" von Haas said. He looked at his watch. "It's a long drive to Berlin. I'd better be going."

Von Wachtstein stood up.

"Understand, Dieter, that my desires for Peter are not wishful thinking. Your telling me that you're sorry, you tried, but it couldn't be arranged will not be enough."

"I understand," von Haas said, and put out his hand.

"What do they say in Spanish? 'Vaya con Dios'? Vaya con Dios, Dieter. Go with God."

Von Haas met his eyes, nodded, and turned and walked out of the room.

[TWO]

The Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel

Los Angeles, California

12 October 1942

When Lieutenant Cletus Howell Frade, USMCR, stepped out of the tub onto a bath mat, the telephone was ringing.

He walked quickly, naked and dripping, into the bedroom to answer it, wondering both who it could be and how long the telephone had been ringing. It had been a long time since he'd had access to either unlimited hot water or privacy; he'd been in the shower for a long time.

He picked up the telephone on the bedside table.

"Hello?"

"¿El Teniente Frade?"

"S?, yo soy el Teniente Frade."

"Yo soy Graham, Teniente, Coronel A. F. Graham."

"Yes, Sir?"

"Are you alone, Lieutenant?" Graham asked, in Spanish.

"S?, mi Coronel."

"I'd like a word with you. Have you been drinking?"

"Not yet, mi Coronel."

Hell of a question,Clete thought, and a reply that was a little too flip for a lieutenant talking to a colonel.

"See if you can hold off for half an hour or so," Colonel Graham said, a chuckle in his voice. "I should be there by then. Nine twenty-one, right?"

"Yes, Sir."

The telephone went dead. Clete put the handset back in the cradle and walked toward the bedroom.

Jesus, did he speak Spanish to me?

I'll be damned if he didn't. That entire conversation was in Spanish. Pretty good Spanish at that. What the hell was that all about?

Clete dried himself slowly and carefully, partly to take advantage of the stack of thick, soft towels the hotel had so graciously provided for his comfort, and partly because his long exposure to soap and hot water had softened and loosened the scabs—perhaps twenty-five of them—on his legs and chest.

An incredible number of insects lived on Guadalcanal, and each variety there became addicted to Cletus's blood. Sometimes, it seemed as if they fought among themselves for the privilege of taking their dinner from him and leaving behind a wide variety of irritations. These ranged from small sting marks to thumbnail-size suppurating ulcers.

After he finished drying, Clete walked on the balls of his feet from the bathroom to the wood-and-canvas rack beside the chest of drawers that supported his suitcase. He took from it his toilet kit—once a gleaming brown leather affair, now looking like something a mechanic was about to discard. From this he took a jar of gray paste. Despite the assurances of the Medical Corps, U.S. Navy, that the stuff was the very latest miracle medicine to soothe what the doctors somewhat euphemistically called "minor skin irritations," he suspected that it was Vaseline.

He returned to the bathroom and with a practiced skill applied just enough of the greasy substance to protect each "minor skin irritation" without leaving enough residue to leave greasy spots on his clothing. He then returned to his toilet kit, carried it back into the bathroom, and shaved—in the process slicing the top off several "minor skin irritations." He dealt with these new wounds by applying small pieces of toilet paper to his face. When he examined himself in the mirror, he concluded that if he was going to look like a properly turned out officer of the U.S. Marine Corps, he'd need a haircut.

He went back into the bedroom and dug into a large brown Kraft paper bag, taking from it a brand-new T-shirt and cotton boxer shorts.

The Public Affairs Officer Escort had taken Clete and the other "heroes" to the Officers' Sales Store almost directly from the Martin Mariner that had flown them from Espiritu Santo to Pearl Harbor. There, the Escort Officer suggested mat they might wish to acquire new linen. Clete Frade bought six sets of underwear, six khaki shirts, six pairs of cotton socks, and two field scarves, which was what the Corps called neckties. And then, because the very idea that anyone would sleep in anything but his underwear or his birthday suit seemed absurd, he bought two sets of what their label identified as "Pajamas, Men's, Cotton, Summer."

Since there was no room in his one suitcase for his new acquisitions, he carried them in the paper bag the rest of the way— on a Pan American Clipper from Pearl Harbor to San Diego, and then on a chartered Greyhound bus from 'Diego to Los Angeles.

The new T-shirt was usable as is, and he put it on, but the boxer shorts reflected the Naval Service's fascination with fastening small tags to garments with open staples. He sat down on the bed and removed eight of them—he counted—from various places on his shorts. He had just pulled the shorts on when there was a knock at the door.

It was a bellman, carrying a freshly pressed uniform. Clete went to the bedside table, opened the drawer where he had placed his wallet, his watch, and his Zippo lighter and cigarettes, and found a dollar bill. He gave it to the bellman, then hung the uniform on the closet door. When he turned, he noticed for the first time on the bedside table on the other side of the bed, an eight-by-ten-inch official-looking envelope. It wasn't his, and he was sure that it hadn't been there when he'd gone into the bathroom for his shower.

He picked it up. It contained something other than paper, something relatively heavy. He opened the flap and dumped the contents on the bed. Insignia spilled out: two sets of first lieutenant's silver bars and a new set of gold Naval Aviator's wings—and bars of ribbons, representing his decorations. There was the Distinguished Flying Cross, with its oak-leaf cluster signifying the second award; the Purple Heart Medal with its oak-leaf cluster; and the ribbons representing the I-Was-There medals: National Defense, and Pacific Theatre of Operations, the latter with two Battle Stars. The ribbons were mounted together.

The Public Affairs people again,Clete thought. The Corps doesn't want its about-to-go-on-display heroes running around with single ribbons pinned unevenly, one at a time, to their chests; they should be mounted together. And God knows, I have never polished my first John's bars from the day I got them. And my wings of gold are really a disgrace, when viewed from the perspective of some Corps press agent; they're scratched, bent, and dirty.

I wonder if this stuff is a gift from the Corps, or whether they will deduct the cost from my next pay.