Honor Bound

by W. E. B Griffin

  “I understand the distinction now, mi Coronel,” Habanzo said. “Thank you.”

  “Proceed.”

  “The American destroyer, the Thomas, sailed at three-thirty P.M. yesterday, dropped the Armada Argentina pilot immediately outside the port, then proceeded down the Río de la Plata accompanied by the Armada Argentina battleship—” He stopped and quickly corrected himself: “Warship, the corvette San Martín. Upon entering the upper limits of Samborombón Bay, the destroyer engaged in a series of slow-speed maneuvers; the purpose of which is not clear…”

  I don’t suppose the notion that they were taking soundings of the Bay ever entered your mind; but since I am not in a mood to deliver another lecture, “The Importance of Accurate Charts to Naval Operations,” I will let that pass without comment.

  “…these maneuvers lasting until the lower limits of Samborombón Bay, and thus Argentinean waters, were reached. Whereupon, the American destroyer headed on a due east course into the Atlantic Ocean at a high rate of speed. The corvette San Martín lost sight of her approximately thirty minutes later.”

  Which means what? That the American Captain wanted to rub in the face of the Captain of the San Martín the overall technical superiority of a U.S. Navy destroyer over an Armada Argentina corvette? Or that he didn’t wish the San Martín to guess which course he assumed when he reached the Atlantic Ocean? Or that he had a schedule to keep, a rendezvous with another vessel?

  “Habanzo, I presume the Armada was monitoring the radio frequencies the American warship was likely to use?”

  “Of course, mi Coronel.”

  “And did the American warship use its radios?”

  “Twice, mi Coronel. First, there was a message to the Captain of the San Martín, just before he left Argentinean waters. I have it here.”

  He handed Martín a sheet of typewriter paper:

  * * *

  FROM: CAPTAIN USS ALFRED THOMAS DD-107

  TO: CAPTAIN ARMADA ARGENTINA VESSEL SAN MARTIN

  THANK YOU FOR YOUR ASSISTANCE, COURTESY AND COOPERATION.

  COME SEE US SOMETIME

  JERNIGAN, LIEUTENANT COMMANDER, USN

  * * *

  “And shortly after they began to move at a high rate of speed, there was another message,” Habanzo reported, handing Martín another sheet of typewriter paper.

  * * *

  OPERATIONAL IMMEDIATE

  FROM: USS ALFRED THOMAS DD-107

  TO: CHIEF OF NAVAL OPERATIONS WASHDC ALL RECEIVING USN VESSELS AND SHORE STATIONS TO RELAY

  USS ALFRED THOMAS DD-107 LEFT ARGENTINE WATERS 0125 GREENWICH 28DEC42. RECEIVED COMPLETE COOPERATION IN ARGENTINA.

  PROCEEDING.

  JERNIGAN, LTCOM USN COMMANDING

  * * *

  This was sent in the clear. As a courtesy? Or because they wanted to lull us into thinking that they have no other intentions in this area?

  “Was there anything else of interest, Habanzo?”

  El Teniente Coronel Habanzo smiled.

  “Some of the destroyer’s men found Argentina, or perhaps Argentinean woman, impossible to leave, mi Coronel.”

  “What, precisely, does that mean, Habanzo?”

  “Several of the destroyer’s sailors missed the sailing of their ship, mi Coronel,” Habanzo said. “Just before the pilot left the vessel, the Captain gave their names to the pilot, together with a letter to the American Ambassador, asking him to inform the proper Argentine authorities, and to arrange for the men to be held in custody when they finally turn up.”

  “Let’s see the names,” Martín said.

  There were three names on the list: Chief Radioman Oscar J. Schultz, USN; Chief Ordnanceman Kenneth B. Daniels, USN; and Seaman Second Class Horace K. Williams, USNR.

  “We have no idea where these people are?”

  “I have checked with the various police agencies, mi Coronel. No.”

  “No idea at all?”

  “The Chief Petty Officers attended a reception given for them at the Escuela de Guerra Naval, mi Coronel. They were last seen there entering a taxi, presumably to return to their ship.”

  Martín turned in his chair and took out his English-Spanish dictionary and looked up the word “ordnance.” He found what he expected to find, but it never hurt to be sure.

  “Habanzo, I want you to meet with el Coronel Savia-Gonzalez and tell him that I consider this a matter of the greatest importance. I want the Policía Federal to find these sailors, if it means they have to visit every brothel in Buenos Aires, every bar, and the residence of every woman who has a reputation for not keeping her knees together in the presence of an American dollar bill.”

  “Sí, mi Coronel. You suspect they missed their ship on purpose, mi Coronel?”

  “I do not know that, of course, Habanzo, but I think we should err on the side of caution, don’t you?”

  “Of course, mi Coronel.”

  “Assign as many of our men as you think appropriate to assist the Policía Federal, Habanzo.”

  “Sí, mi Coronel.”

  “And I am to be notified, no matter the hour, when any one of them is located.”

  “Sí, mi Coronel.”

  By now, Martín thought, all three of these American sailors are at Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo, doing for young Frade and his men whatever they are unable to do by themselves.

  And Señor A. F. Graham will doubtless be there too. That “Vice-President of Howell Petroleum”—according to his visa and passport—who has not once visited the offices of Sociedad Mercantil de Importación Productos Petrolíferos. But who has visited both the American Embassy and the Destroyer Thomas, where he was saluted by the Officer of the Deck as he went aboard. And who was last seen in el Coronel Frade’s Buick station wagon on the road to Pila and Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo.

  But no one will be able to accuse me of closing my eyes if the sailors who “missed their ship” are caught trying to sink the Reine de la Mer—possibly by affixing a mine to her hull; a chief ordnanceman works with explosives—or if they disappear after doing something else in violation of Argentine neutrality; or if such an act causes one or more of their bodies to wash up on the beach. I might be looking in the wrong direction, possibly, but not closing my eyes.

  “That will be all, Habanzo. The sooner we find these sailors, and find out what they’re up to, the better.”

  “Sí, mi Coronel.”

  [THREE]

  Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo

  Near Pila, Buenos Aires Province

  1315 29 December 1942

  Second Lieutenant Anthony J. Pelosi, CE, AUS, was alone when he drove a Ford Model T pickup truck up to the ranch house.

  First Lieutenant Cletus H. Frade, USMCR, Colonel A. J. Graham, USMCR, Suboficial Mayor Enrico Rodríguez, Argentine Cavalry, Retired, and Staff Sergeant David G. Ettinger, USAR, were sitting on the verandah.

  “That truck is older than he is,” Colonel Graham observed.

  “Where’s Chief Daniels?” Clete asked when Tony walked onto the verandah.

  “Taking five-inch rounds apart.”

  “Still? How many flare assemblies will we need?” Clete asked.

  “Twenty-four,” Tony replied, his tone of voice suggesting he was puzzled by the question. That number was agreed to after much discussion and a few practical experiments, and Clete knew that.

  “How many do we have? Now?”

  “We had eighteen, maybe nineteen this morning, that we can trust.”

  “How long does it take to take five or six more apart?”

  “That depends on who’s doing it. Chief Daniels is taking his time. He doesn’t like the look of the explosive charge,” Tony said. “The goddamned shells were loaded in 1935, can you believe that?”

  “The powder’s old?” Graham asked.

  “Yeah, and it’s sort of like TNT, which is trinitrotoluene. It gets unstable if it settles—the nitro sort of leaks out of the fuller’s earth—and then you’ve got nitroglycerin, which is unstable
as hell.”

  “Out of the what?” Clete asked.

  “Think of dirt mixed with sand,” Tony explained. “This is special stuff. I don’t know what the Navy calls theirs; but in commercial TNT, it’s fuller’s earth. It’s uniformly porous, so it absorbs the nitroglycerin evenly. You understand?”

  Clete nodded.

  “OK. That makes it stable. And when it burns, it burns uniformly. So when it’s improperly stored—in too much heat, for example; or for too long, like these shells, loaded seven years ago—the nitro seeps out, and you have nitroglycerin again.”

  “And you didn’t think you could help Chief Daniels?” Colonel Graham asked.

  Tony didn’t like the question.

  “Yes, Sir, I could have helped him. But he said there was no point in both of us getting blown up; and he ran me off.”

  “You’re an officer,” Graham said, not pleasantly. “Daniels is a chief.”

  “Just a minute, Colonel!” Clete protested angrily. “You’re talking to somebody who was willing to make his own magnetic mine and stick it on the goddamned Reine de la Mer.”

  Graham looked coldly at Clete, then said, “No offense, Pelosi.”

  Pelosi, perhaps encouraged by Clete’s defense, had a reply of his own.

  “The way it works when you’re fucking around with high explosives, Colonel, when you have a fuck-up like this one, is make the guy responsible fix it. The Navy fucked these shells up, let a sailor fix them. If he blows himself up, don’t worry. If I have to, I can go into those ancient shells and get out what I need, and I know I won’t blow myself up.”

  “Señor Cletus,” the housekeeper announced behind him. “If it is convenient, luncheon is served.”

  “Saved by the bell, Colonel,” Clete said.

  “You look as if you belong there, Clete,” Colonel Graham said a minute or so after they took their seats at the dining room table.

  “Excuse me?”

  “At the head of the table, in the Royal Chair, approving the wine.”

  What is he trying to do, charm me?

  “Do I?”

  “Have you ever considered that it will be yours one day—the Royal Chair, the whole estancia?”

  “No, as a matter of fact, I haven’t.”

  “The law is quite clear. Unless your father marries, when he dies, it’s yours—lock, stock, and barrel.”

  “Is that so?”

  “You’re the only child. They consider you an Argentine national. That’s it.”

  “How will that Argentine national business affect me if they find out I helped sink the Reine de la Mer?”

  “Interesting question,” Graham said matter-of-factly. “I don’t know.” He looked at Clete and smiled. “Don’t get caught.”

  The housekeeper brought in a telephone, set it on the table beside Clete, and then plugged it into the wall. She then took the handset from the cradle, handed it to Clete, and announced, “El Coronel, Señor Cletus.”

  “Cletus? This is your father.”

  “Hola, Papá,” Clete said, smiling.

  “Papá?” el Coronel repeated incredulously, then went on: “The reason I called, Cletus, is about tonight.”

  Tonight? What the hell is he talking about?

  “I wanted to make sure you asked Señor Graham to join us, in case you have not already done so.”

  Jesus, I asked him to have the Princess and her family to dinner. And that’s tonight.

  “I just about forgot about tonight, to tell you the truth.”

  There was ample justification for forgetting a dinner. A hell of a lot was going on at the estancia. There was far more involved in setting things up—secretly—than Clete expected when he started.

  Setting up a high-powered radio transmitter and receiving station, Clete learned, was not simply a matter of erecting a couple of towers and stringing a piece of wire between them.

  To begin with, there was no topographical map of the estancia and its surrounding areas, something that Chief Schultz considered a necessity for locating the transmitter site.

  In the absence of a good map, finding a transmitter site entailed several hour-long flights in the Beechcraft, mostly at fifty feet off the ground, so that Schultz could find suitable high ground. They found several possibilities, but these had to be narrowed down, taking into account that the site had to be easily accessible to transport. That was because the material to erect the towers, a gasoline generator to power the radios, the radios themselves, and a small building to house everything had to be transported there. And then there had to be an emergency exit route to move the radios quickly away, in case of an invasion by Argentines who had triangulated the antenna location.

  They’d have ample warning of such an invasion. There already was an in-place system of what the Marine Corps would call perimeter patrols. Every possible access route to the interior of Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo was watched around the clock by gauchos working (and sleeping) on the pampas, or else by the proprietors of small cantinas (small general stores which also serve food) and pulperías (male-only bars). These businesses operated at the pleasure of el Coronel Frade; they were happy to keep him advised of strangers.

  The warning system had to do with Clete’s father’s involvement with the Grupo de Oficiales Unidos, which in turn had something to do with what his father said about deposing the current President of Argentina. His father and his G.O.U. associates obviously didn’t want people snooping around Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo. Hence the in-place perimeter security operation.

  There was no way to avoid, however, having the takeoffs and landings of the Beechcraft witnessed by a very curious el Capitán Gonzalo Delgano, Argentine Army Air Service, Retired, and other members of what Clete came to think of as the San Pedro y San Pablo Air Force. In addition to the Beechcraft, there were five Piper Cubs based at the estancia. Three belonged to el Coronel, and two to Señora Carzino-Cormano. These were for use on her estancia, but they were based for convenience at Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo.

  Delgano and the other pilots lived on the estancia in what amounted to a small village not far from the ranch house. The village housed the estancia’s professional staff: the estancia manager; a doctor; a veterinarian; the schoolmaster; a resident engineer, and so on.

  “They are my people; they can be trusted to do what they are told without asking questions,” Clete’s father told him when that question came up during a meeting with Graham.

  Apparently operating on the theory that if orders came via Suboficial Mayor Rodríguez they came from el Coronel, the estancia manager and the resident engineer provided anything asked of them without argument or question. Delgano was not so agreeable. Probably because he regarded the Beechcraft as his personal property before the arrival of el Coronel’s son from the Estados Unidos, he was visibly petulant when Clete politely told him he would not need his services to fly the Beech.

  But when the petulance was replaced by a suspicious anxiety to be as helpful as possible, Clete and Graham decided that whether Delgano could be completely trusted or not, a little deception seemed called for when it came time to make the in-flight tests of Tony’s and Chief Daniels’s flares.

  The tests were conducted in two phases: First they used inert charges (the magnesium of the flares replaced with sand)—to test the opening of the parachute and the timing of Tony’s homemade detonating devices. And finally they tried fully functioning flares.

  Dropping them required removing the door of the Beechcraft. Unfortunately, this could not be done in flight. And it couldn’t be done at the estancia’s airstrip, either: Clete and Graham knew that Delgano’s curiosity—as would their own, in similar circumstances—would shift into high gear if he saw them taking the door off, loading mysterious packages into the plane, and then taking off.

  The solution they came up with was to use a landing strip—a straight stretch of dirt road with a wind sock—in a remote corner of Señora Carzino-Cormano’s Estancia Santa Catharina. They
sent Tony there in the Buick with the flares. Then they flew the Beech there with Chief Daniels as a passenger. They took off the door, loaded the flares, went up and dropped them, landed on the dirt strip to drop Tony off and put the door back on, and then flew back to the field at Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo

  When they were in the air over Estancia Santa Catharina, Capitán Delgano twice “happened” to be making a routine flight in one of the estancia’s Piper Cubs. But the Beechcraft was so much faster than a Cub, losing him was no problem.

  Neither Graham nor Clete was happy with el Coronel’s confidence in el Capitán Delgano, but there was nothing they could do about it.

  “And if you forgot dinner with the Mallíns,” el Coronel said, sounding annoyed, “it would follow that you forgot to ask Señor Graham for the pleasure of his company. I think that good manners requires that you—we—do so.”

  Why is it important to my father that Graham come to dinner? Because he wants a report of our activities out here, and he wants to be able to look at Graham’s face when he delivers the report.

  “Señor Graham is here with me. We’re having lunch. Hold on a minute and I’ll ask him if he is free to accept your kind invitation.”

  “Tell him that I would consider it a great favor.”

  Clete put his hand over the telephone receiver, then changed his mind.

  “It is my father, mi Coronel,” he said in Spanish, loudly enough for his father to hear. “My father asks me to tell you that he would consider it a great favor if you would take dinner with us tonight in Buenos Aires.”

  Also in Spanish, Graham replied, loud enough to be heard over the telephone: “Please tell your father that I would be delighted to accept his kind invitation.”

  “Papá,” Clete said, “Señor Graham says he would be honored to accept your kind invitation.”

  “I heard, and I don’t think you are amusing,” el Coronel Frade said. Then he added, “Early. Nine-thirty,” and hung up.