Honor Bound

by W. E. B Griffin

  “Yes, Sir,” Clete said. He waited until the old man had gone, then said, “David, I’m sorry you had to sit through that. There was no stopping him.”

  “Actually, it was a fascinating story,” Ettinger said. “And no, you couldn’t have stopped him. He’s like my mother.”

  “Your mother? Where is she?”

  “In New York. She and I got out. She hates like he does. When I told her I was going to Argentina, she was disappointed. She had visions of me blowing up the Brandenburg Gate with Adolf Hitler on it.”

  “You told your mother you were going to Argentina?” Clete asked incredulously, angrily. “Jesus Christ, Ettinger, what the hell were you thinking about?”

  Ettinger looked both shocked and distinctly uncomfortable.

  I guess I sounded like a Marine officer, and he didn’t expect that. Well, that’s what I am.

  “I presume you signed the same form that I did, which made it pretty clear it’s a General Court-martial offense to have diarrhea of the mouth about what we’re doing?” Clete went on coldly.

  “I felt relatively sure that whatever I told my mother, she would not rush to the telephone to pass it on to the Abwehr.”

  “Don’t be flip with me, Sergeant!” Clete said coldly. “Exactly how much did you tell your mother?”

  “Just that I was going to Argentina, Sir.”

  That’s right, Sergeant, you call me “Sir.”

  “To do what?”

  “She knew what I’ve been doing here…”

  “You told her what you were doing for the CIC? She and who else?”

  “Just my mother, Sir. I had to tell her something. I couldn’t just suddenly vanish. And what I told her seemed to be the best story I could come up with. The subject of what I was supposed to tell my mother never came up at the Country Club…”

  “You should have been able to figure that out without a diagram. You were supposed to tell her nothing! Damn it, Sergeant, you were in the CIC! You certainly should have known better than to tell anyone, much less a civilian…”

  “Sir, I don’t mean to be insolent, but your grandfather seems…”

  “What my grandfather knows or doesn’t know is not the subject here. What you told your mother is.”

  “Yes, Sir. I led her to believe that I would be doing the same thing there that I’d been doing here. Making sure that the refugees are in fact refugees. I told her that when I had an address, I would send it to her, but that she shouldn’t expect to hear from me for a while.”

  “I can’t believe you told her where we’re going!”

  “Sir, I thought it would put her mind at rest,” Ettinger said.

  “You did?” Clete asked sarcastically.

  “Mother knows that Argentina is neutral,” Ettinger explained. “And her memories of Argentina seem to begin and end with the Teatro Colón:”—Buenos Aires’ opera house—“Spanish-speaking people with exquisite manners.”

  “She’s been there?” Clete asked, wondering why he was surprised.

  Ettinger nodded. “So have I. But I was a kid, and I can’t remember a thing. My grandfather took us there.”

  “And how much did you tell your grandfather?”

  “My grandfather died in a concentration camp, Sir.”

  “What’s that, an attempt to invoke my sympathy?” Clete snapped, and was immediately ashamed of himself. “Sorry, Ettinger. Colonel Graham told me about your family. I was out of line.”

  Ettinger met his eyes. After a moment, he said, “So, apparently, was I. What happens now?”

  “I don’t know what the hell to do about this, frankly.”

  “If it would make it any easier for you, I’ll report my…indiscretion to the people from the Country Club tomorrow.”

  “‘Indiscretion’?” Clete snapped. “I’d call it stupidity. Incredible stupidity.”

  “Yes, Sir. I can see from your standpoint that it would be.”

  “And from your standpoint?”

  “I had to tell her something, Lieutenant. That was the best I could come up with.”

  “Incredible stupidity,” Clete repeated.

  Ettinger stood up.

  “Where are you going?” Clete demanded.

  “Back to the hotel, Sir. Under the circumstances, it would be awkward with your grandfather. I’ll make a report…”

  “If a report is made, Sergeant, I’ll make it,” Clete thought aloud, and then added, “The damage, if any, has already been done.”

  “Sir, I don’t think there will be any damage. I made the point to my mother that this assignment, including our destination, was classified. She won’t say anything to anybody.”

  “We don’t know that, do we?”

  “No, Sir. We don’t.”

  If I turn him in for this, it will really screw things up. Colonel Graham feels that getting us down there as soon as possible is damned important. If they have to scrounge around for a replacement for Ettinger—and that would obviously be difficult—God only knows how long a delay there would be.

  Or this fellow Pelosi and I will get sent down there by ourselves.

  I need him. It’s as simple as that.

  “We never had this conversation, Ettinger,” Clete said. “You understand me?”

  “Yes, Sir. Thank you.”

  “Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not being a nice guy. I just think turning you in would do more damage to this mission than taking you with us.”

  “I understand.”

  “I wonder if you do,” Clete said. “But the subject is closed. The conversation never occurred. Clear?”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  “Besides,” Clete said, smiling. It took more than a little effort. “If you were missing when my grandfather finishes his piss call, I would have to explain your absence. My grandfather, as you may have noticed, is a difficult man.”

  “I repeat, Lieutenant, thank you. I really want to go on this mission. It’s much more important than what I’ve been doing.”

  “Try to keep that in mind,” Clete said. “Now let’s change the subject.”

  Ettinger nodded, then smiled.

  “My grandfather was not unlike yours. A difficult man.”

  I don’t really give a damn about your grandfather, Ettinger.

  “Really?”

  “He believed what he wanted to believe, and the facts be damned. He chose to believe that despite what was going on, he was perfectly safe in Berlin. What was happening to the Jews there was happening only to the Slavic Jews, not to good German Jews like him. After all, he had won the Iron Cross as an infantry officer in France in the First World War.”

  “That didn’t do him any good?”

  “No. They took him away. He died ‘of pneumonia’ in a place called Sachsenhausen.”

  “You hate the Germans? In the way my grandfather hates the Argentines?”

  “No. I understand that the flesh is weak. If you hate weak people, you hate everybody. If you’re asking if I’m motivated to go to Argentina, yes, I think I can do—we can do—some good down there.”

  “Blowing up ‘neutral’ ships?”

  “That, certainly. And perhaps doing something about keeping the Argentine equivalent of the Nazis from taking over the country. The Nazis took over Germany because nobody fought back.”

  Cletus Marcus Howell pushed open the curtain and came back into the small room. His eyes passed back and forth between them as if he sensed something was wrong.

  “Have you asked for the car?” he demanded after a moment’s hesitation.

  “No, but I will bet it’s been waiting outside for the last half hour while you bored David with our family linen.”

  “I don’t think I bored Mr. Ettinger, did I, Mr. Ettinger?”

  “Not at all, Sir.”

  “Sometimes, Cletus, I don’t understand you at all,” the old man said. “Shall we go?”

  [TWO]

  The Gulf, Mobile & Ohio Railway Terminal

  Canal Street

&n
bsp; New Orleans, Louisiana

  1030 2 November 1942

  Second Lieutenant Anthony J. Pelosi, CE, AUS, late of the 82nd Airborne Division, had been thinking—especially for the last couple of hours—that Captain McGuire was right after all: Applying for this OSS shit was a mistake; where he belonged was with the 82nd Airborne.

  In another couple of weeks, he would have made first lieutenant (promotion was automatic after six months’ time in grade), and as a first lieutenant he could not be ranked out of command of his platoon. He would have been the permanent—not the temporary—commanding officer of an Engineer platoon in the 82nd Airborne Division…and not where he was, masquerading as a goddamned civilian.

  When Colonel Baxter F. Newton-Haddle called him in for what he called a “pre-mission briefing,” he told him he was to report for duty in New Orleans in civilian clothing. He asked him if that was going to pose any problem. Pelosi said, “No, Sir.”

  Tony Pelosi liked and admired Colonel Newton-Haddle. For one thing, the Colonel was also a paratrooper. Paratroopers are special people. In the briefing Colonel Newton-Haddle gave when they first came to the Country Club, he told them about what the people in OSS did—like making night jumps into France and Italy and connecting up with the resistance and showing them how to blow up bridges and tunnels. Doing those kinds of things would maybe make being in the OSS OK. But what he was about to do now was go into some goddamned South American neutral country where a bunch of taco eaters in big hats sat around in the shade playing guitars.

  Colonel Newton-Haddle didn’t tell him much about what he was supposed to do in Argentina, except they had to “take out” a ship, some kind of a freighter that was supplying German submarines. He explained that the ship would be neutral. By “take out” Colonel Newton-Haddle obviously meant “blow up,” or at least put a hole in it large enough to sink it.

  That bothered Tony Pelosi. It wasn’t a warship, but a civilian freighter. If there were people on it, they would be civilians; and if they were on the ship when he set off his charges—as sure as Christ made little apples—some of them would get hurt, get killed. German sailors were one thing, civilian merchant seamen another.

  When he was in OCS, he’d studied the Geneva Convention long enough to know that if they were caught trying to blow a hole in a civilian merchant ship, they would not be treated like prisoners of war, but like criminals, maybe even pirates. If they were caught after they blew it up, and civilians had been killed, they might be put on trial in some taco eaters’ court for murder.

  This wasn’t what he had had in mind when he volunteered for the OSS. Parachuting into France to show the French underground how to blow up the Nazi submarine pens at St. Lazaire was one thing; sneaking into some South American neutral country pretending to be a civilian and blowing up a civilian ship was different.

  Anyway, when Colonel Newton-Haddle asked him if civilian clothing was going to pose a problem, he said “No, Sir,” because he didn’t think it would be. But when he got home, went to his room and locked the door so nobody in the family would see him and ask what he was doing, and tried to put on his civilian clothes, none of them fit.

  The first thing he thought was that the goddamned dry cleaners had shrunk them. That had happened before. But not even his shirts fit, and the dry cleaner couldn’t have fucked them up, because his shirts had been washed and ironed in the house by the maid.

  After a while, though, what happened finally hit him: All the physical training he’d gone through, first basic training, then Officer Candidate School, and then jump school had really changed his body. He had real muscles now. That was why his jackets were too tight at the shoulders and he couldn’t even button his shirt collars.

  It didn’t matter as long as he could wear his uniform. Colonel Newton-Haddle not only told him that he could wear his uniform at home, because that would keep people from asking questions about how come he wasn’t, but that he should. And there wasn’t a hell of a lot wrong with wearing the parachute wings and jump boots; that went with being an officer of the 82nd Airborne Division. He wore his uniform the two times he went out with his brothers, Angelo, Frank, and Dominic. And if it weren’t for Dominic, he knew damned well he could have gotten laid. But you don’t try to get laid when you’re out with a brother who is a priest and who is out drinking with you only because of a special dispensation from the pastor of his parish, because he told him you were going overseas.

  Colonel Newton-Haddle had also told him he should explain to his family that he was going on temporary duty with a special engineer unit, and gave him an address in Washington where they could write to him. But he was not to tell them anything about going to Argentina; that was classified. So he hadn’t. An order is an order.

  So what he did was wear his uniform all the time he was home. And then, along with his uniforms, he packed a sports shirt, a pair of pants, a two-tone (yellow sleeves and collar, blue body) zipper jacket with “Pelosi & Sons Salvage Company” lettered on the back, and a pair of shoes. They got him a compartment on the Crescent City Limited, and he decided to just wait until he was almost in New Orleans to change into the civilian stuff. The OSS gave him a check for two hundred dollars to buy civilian clothing; he’d do that in New Orleans. And he’d ask what he should do with his uniforms; he didn’t think they’d want him to take them down to South America.

  Two things went wrong with that plan. First of all, he wasn’t all alone in the compartment. He thought he would have it all to himself, but when he got on the train there was already a guy in it. He was an expediter for the Western Electric Company, whatever the fuck that meant. So Tony had to come up with a bullshit story about having just been discharged from the 82nd Airborne because of a bad back he got jumping. Even when he showed the guy the draft card Colonel Newton-Haddle gave him that said he was an honorably discharged veteran, he didn’t think the Western Union guy believed him. And he sure gave him a funny look when he started changing out of his uniform and putting on the Cicero Softball League jacket.

  He really hated taking off his uniform, especially the jump boots. You had to earn jump boots, and he really liked the way they felt, as well as the way they looked (he’d polished them so you could actually see your face reflected in the shine of the toes). He wondered when the hell he would ever be able to put them on again.

  And then his goddamned civilian shoes were too small. He couldn’t figure that out. As far as he knew, there were no muscles in the feet, so they shouldn’t have grown the way his back and arms and neck had. But he could barely get the goddamned things on his feet; and when he did, it hurt him even to walk around the compartment. And when he walked three cars down to the dining car to have breakfast, his feet hurt him so much he didn’t believe it.

  When he got back to the compartment, he took off his shoes. And when they pulled into the train station in New Orleans, he took his socks off and put the shoes back on without them.

  Fuck how it looks. If I wear the socks, I’ll never make it all the way down the platform and into the station.

  Halfway down the platform, Tony saw Staff Sergeant Ettinger waiting for him, just inside the station at the end of the platform. Ettinger was wearing a three-piece suit, and he was talking to a tall guy wearing a cowboy hat, boots, and a sheepskin coat.

  The shit-kicker probably asked him a question or something.

  When Ettinger saw him, he smiled and waved, and Tony walked up to him.

  “What do you say, Ettinger?” Tony said.

  “Nice trip, Tony?”

  “It was all right.”

  Tony saw the cowboy looking at his bare ankles.

  Fuck you, Tex! Anybody wearing beat-up boots like yours is in no position to say anything about anybody else.

  “Tony, this is…Mr. Frade,” Ettinger said.

  Mr. Frade? This cowboy is Lieutenant Frade? A Marine officer?

  “Good morning, Sir,” Lieutenant Pelosi said.

  “’Morning,” Clete replied. “Pelo
si, from here on in, you can belay the ‘Sir’ business.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “We’re supposed to be civilians. Civilians don’t say ‘Sir.’ I’m Clete. He’s David. What’s your first name?”

  “Anthony, Sir,” Tony said. Then, “Sorry.”

  “That all your luggage, Anthony?”

  “Yes, S—Yeah.”

  “We’re parked out in front,” Clete said, then laughed. “What did you do, Anthony, forget your socks?”

  “My shoes are too small.”

  “Well, then, we better stop on the way to the hotel and find you some that fit,” Clete said. “Our mentors, who got here at seven this morning, are already convinced that David and I are retarded; if you showed up in bare feet, that would be too much for them.”

  Ettinger laughed.

  Tony Pelosi had no idea what a “mentor” was, but he was goddamned if he was going to ask.

  [THREE]

  The Franco-Spanish Border

  1525 3 November 1942

  Train Number 1218 of the Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer Français (Paris-Barcelona-Madrid) would be late crossing the border, but there was nothing the officials of the French National Railroad could do about it. It had been requested of them by the representative of the German Rail Coordination Bureau: (a) that a goods wagon then sitting in Paris (number furnished herewith), a Grande Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits sleeping car with crew, and a first-class passenger car be attached to Number 1218; and (b) that Number 1218’s schedule be “adjusted” to permit a fifteen- to thirty-minute ceremony at the Spanish border; and (c) that officials of the Spanish National Railroad be informed of the change of schedule.

  At 1455, fifteen minutes before Number 1218 was due, the gate (an arrangement of timbers and barbed wire) across the tracks on the Spanish side of the border was moved aside by Spanish Border Police. A moment later a tiny yard engine pushed a passenger car of the Spanish National Railroad across what everybody called “No-Man’s-Land” to the similar gate across the tracks on the French side of the border.

  After a minute’s conversation between French and Spanish officials, the French gate was opened and the yard engine pushed the Spanish passenger car approximately 300 meters farther into the Border Station, where it stopped. About forty rifle-armed members of the Guardia Nacional, all wearing their distinctive stiff black leather hats, debarked from the passenger car and formed two ranks on the platform. A moment after that, two officers of the Guardia Nacional came down from the passenger car, together with four more enlisted men, two of whom carried flags on poles.