W E B Griffin - Honor 1 - Honor Bound
Page 62
"I was not aware that Germans drink champagne in the middle of the day," Clete said. "I would have thought beer."
"Only fighter pilots," Peter said. "Bomber pilots and other lesser mortals drink beer. Or peppermint schnapps."
"Ah ha!"
"I have the feeling that you two are about to say something rude to each other that will ruin our lunch," Alicia said.
"You have no cause for concern, my dear Alicia," Peter said. "I am here under orders to be charming to Se¤or Frade."
"Under orders, did you say, mi Comandante?" Clete asked.
"The orders of my superior, el Coronel Grner, the Military Attache1, Se¤or Frade."
"How extraordinary!" Clete replied as the waiter finished pouring the wine. "I can't imagine why he would do that, mi Comandante."
"I think he wants to make the point that we Germans had nothing to do with the unfortunate business at your home," Peter said.
Clete felt a shoe push against his. He moved his foot. A mo-ment later he felt Dorotea's leg pressing against the back of his calf. He looked at her, then decided that he did not want to look at her.
"Apparently, your Colonel has not read Shakespeare, mi Com-andante."
"Shakespeare?"
" 'Methinks thy Colonel dost protest too much,' " Clete quoted.
"There is another line, Se¤or Frade," Peter said. "I don't know who wrote it, some Englishman probably. It had to do with the charge of the light brigade at Balaclava: 'Theirs not to reason why, theirs but to ride...' et cetera."
"I believe it ends, 'into the valley of death,' mi Comandante," Clete said.
"I don't like this conversation at all," Alicia said.
"Neither do I," the Princess said.
"This is a friendly conversation, with literary overtones, be-tween friends. Isn't that right, Se¤or Frade?"
"Absolutely, mi Comandante."
"If you're friends," the Princess said with surprising firmness, "then you should stop that ridiculous 'mi Comandante' and 'Se¤or Frade' business."
"Princess, there is nothing that makes a brand-new comandante happier than to hear himself called 'Comandante,' " Clete said, laughing.
Alicia gave him a dirty look. Peter laughed.
"We have a saying in the Luftwaffe that there is nothing faster than a brand-new Unterfeldwebel-I think you say 'Corporal'- rushing to his first noncommissioned officers' meeting," Peter said. "But may I suggest we indulge the ladies? May I call you 'Cletus'?"
"You may call me 'Clete,' my friend. It's 'Hans-Peter,' right? Do I call you 'Hans' or 'Peter'?"
"Peter, if you please," von Wachtstein said.
"Tell me, Peter," Clete asked mischievously, "when you were a little boy, did they call you 'Hansel'?"
"Hansel?" the Princess asked.
"As in Hansel and Gretel," Clete explained. "The fairy tale."
"Oh, yes," the Princess said. "Of course."
"Yes, they did," Peter said. "My parents called me Hansel until... I guess until I went off to the university. And sometimes afterward."
There was something in his tone, something artificially bright, that made Clete look at him. And then he saw that his eyes were very thoughtful. Sadly thoughtful.
Well, what the hell. He's a long way from home, too, and it's the day after Christmas. And home for him is not somewhere safe like the States. We 're bombing hell out of Germany.
"Clete," Peter said, "before I forget it. I don't want to bore the ladies with business, but I need a service, a favor. Could I call on you?"
"I owe you," Clete said. "You've got a blank check, Peter."
"Excuse me?"
"You name it, you've got it, my friend."
"Thank you," Peter said. "I understand."
The Princess's hand patted Clete's leg under the table.
"That's much nicer," she said. "Thank you."
If she doesn't take that hand away, I'm going to get a hard-on to end all hard-ons.
She didn't, and he did. And she moved her hand so there could be absolutely no doubt in his mind that she was aware of his physiological transformation and had a possessive interest in it.
He looked at her face. Total innocence.
"What are you thinking, Clete?" the Princess asked.
"I was thinking we should drink to Peter's promotion," Clete
said.
"Oh, yes," the Princess said, and after sort of a farewell squeeze, removed her hand from beneath the table and picked up her champagne glass.
[SIX]
The Embassy of the German Reich
Avenue Cordoba
Buenos Aires. Argentina
1630 26 December 1942
Major Freiherr Hans-Peter von Wachtstein took a long, effusive time to thank Se¤or Cletus H. Frade and the ladies for the pleasure of their company at luncheon.
He's doing that, Clete reasoned, so he will be seen. I wonder what the hell kind of a favor he wants? Or whether he is the one who wants the favor, or his Colonel, with some scenario a la Graham and company in mind?
"And we will be in touch soon, Se¤or Frade?"
"Like I said, Hansel, anything but my toothbrush or my girl."
"You should stop calling him that," Alicia protested. "He is not a child."
"My friends can call me Hansel," Peter said. "You may call me Hansel, Alicia, if you like."
"All right," Alicia said. "I think I will. I like 'Hansel.' "
Peter shook Clete's hand a second time, then walked through the gate in the fence onto the embassy grounds. A large, brilliant red flag with the Nazi swastika hung limply from a flagpole on the lawn.
"Can we drop you at my father's place, Alicia?" Clete asked, turning to face her in the backseat. "Please," she said.
"This is not the way to your house," the Princess accused ten minutes later, somewhat indignantly turning on the seat of the Buick to look at him.
"This is the way to your house," Clete said.
"We are not going to your house?"
"No."
"I have somehow offended you?"
"I have some stuff to do."
"I thought you would like my little caress," the Princess said. "All the boys here beg me to do that to them."
"And do you?"
"All the time," she said. "But I will never do it again to you if you don't like it. And besides, we can't go to my house. Mother thinks I am having luncheon and then bridge at the Belgrano Athletic Club. I can't go home before eight-thirty."
"What if your mother finds out you were with me?"
"Mother would understand, I think," she said. "My fa-ther..."
"He will find out," Clete said. "Then what?"
"I'll tell him we are in love," she said. "But I would rather not face that today. Is there some reason I can't wait at your house, while you do-what was it you said-your 'stuff?"
"Why don't I drop you at the Belgrano Club?"
"If you did that, my parents would hear about it within the hour. You'll have to think of something else."
I already have. I put you in a taxi and send you to the Club. That would solve the problem neatly.
What the hell. There's nobody in the house.
You're thinking with your dick, pal.
You look for the first taxi and put her in it.
"My father's having you, your whole family, to dinner on Tuesday," he said.
The Princess shrugged.
"I didn't say I didn't like it," he said. "Jesus, I loved it."
The Princess shrugged again.
"If you liked it, we would be going to your house."
The Buick entered a wide, sweeping, tires-screaming U-turn.
"If you think I am going to move next to you and do it now, you are mistaken."
"How about when we get to the house?"
"Perhaps," the Princess said. "Perhaps not."
She resolved her indecision in the affirmative the moment they were in the basement garage of Granduncle Guillermo's house.
First Lieutenant
Cletus H. Frade, USMCR, was therefore in an understandable state of excitement when-his arm around the Princess, her arm around him, his face smeared with her lip-stick-he walked into the kitchen and found Chief Radioman Os-car J. Schultz, USN, in full dress-white uniform, gold hash marks from sleeve cuff to elbow, gleaming, full-sized medals dangling from his breast, sitting at the table drinking a beer with Suboficial Mayor Enrico Rodriguez, Argentine Cavalry, Retired; Second Lieutenant Anthony J. Pelosi, CE, USAR; and Staff Sergeant Da-vid G. Ettinger, AUS, all of whom were in civilian clothing.
"We got a problem, Mr. Frade," Chief Schultz said. "Dave here, it turns out, can't take code worth a shit. And Chief Daniels, the Ordnanceman, says Mr. Pelosi's going to blow hisself up if he tries to take apart an illuminating round by hisself."
"What is he talking about?" the Princess asked. "Darling, who are these people?"
"Jesus, Mr. Frade, I didn't think she'd speak English," Chief Schultz said, sounding genuinely contrite.
"You didn't see the lady, understand?"
"Aye, aye, Sir."
"I'll be with you in a minute," Clete said.
"Take your time, Mr. Frade," Chief Schultz said understandingly.
Clete led the Princess from the dining room to the foyer. As he boarded the elevator, he heard Chief Schultz's somewhat grav-elly voice pass on a bit of Naval lore to Lieutenant Pelosi and Staff Sergeant Ettinger.
"Them Marines are all like that. They don't let nothing get between them and their squeezes. Not a goddamn thing."
He had, Clete thought, a certain touch of admiration in his voice.
Chapter Twenty
[ONE]
4730 Avenida Libertador
Buenos Aires
1735 26 December 1942
"Sorry to keep you waiting," Clete said, thirty-five minutes later, as he walked into the kitchen.
Chief Schultz held up both hands in a "no explanation nec-essary; I know how it is" gesture.
"It's OK, Mr. Frade," he said. He winked, and then offered Clete the bottle of beer he had been in the process of opening.
"No, thank you," Clete said. "Enrico, would you take the Se¤orita to the Belgrano Athletic Club, please?"
"S¡, mi Teniente."
"Honey!" Clete called.
The Princess marched through the kitchen and out the door to the garage without looking left or right. Enrico followed her.
"Maybe you'd want to rub your neck, Clete," Lieutenant Pelosi said. "Up under the chin."
Clete took out his handkerchief and rubbed his neck, up under the chin. He was not surprised when the handkerchief showed a red smear.
"I didn't think you guys would still be here," he said. "What's going on?"
"Well," Chief Schultz replied, pausing to take a pull at the neck of his beer bottle, "when we went aboard the Thomas, the Skipper was waiting for me. The local chiefs are throwing a re-ception for the chiefs at the Escuela de Guerra Naval"-the School of Naval Warfare-' 'and he thought it would look strange if I didn't go. I'm the senior chief aboard; they would wonder where I was. So the Skipper and Mr. Pelosi talked it over, and I put on my dress whites, and at half past seven I'm gonna be at the reception."
"What's this about Dave not being able to take code?"
"That's one of the two problems we have, Mr. Frade: Dave here, and Mr. Pelosi, which is why I come here."
"Tell me about Dave first," Clete said.
"I'm not very good at Morse code," Ettinger confessed. "I can send maybe ten or twelve words a minute, and I'm even worse at taking it."
"Christ, you are supposed to be a radio expert!" Clete said.
He remembered his own experience with Morse Code training. It was a required course in ground school, and he had a hell of a time acquiring the absolute minimum proficiency: sending and receiving twelve words a minute, with a ninety-percent accuracy.
"He knows radios," Chief Schultz came to Ettinger's defense. "With the fixes we worked out, he could probably set up the transmitter without a damn bit of trouble. But working the Thomas and the Devil Fish? With his hand? Forget it."
"Explain that to me," Clete said.
"You'll be using one of the Contingency Codes," Chief Schultz said. "There's maybe a dozen of them in the Captain's safe. Just for some screwy operation like this one. They're all numbers. Numbers, for somebody like Dave, is the hardest to transmit and receive. And you get a couple of numbers wrong, maybe just one number wrong, you're all fucked up. The codes are numerical nonrandom sequential, you know what I mean? There's phase shift built in..."
Clete held up his hand.
"I haven't the faintest idea what you're talking about, Chief."
Chief Schultz did not seem at all surprised.
"Take my word for it, Mr. Frade," he said. "What you need with codes like this is an operator with a pretty good hand, thirty-five, forty words a minute, with a zero error rate."
"Like you, for example, Chief?"
"That's what I was thinking, Mr. Frade," Schultz said. "I wouldn't be the first sailor in the history of the Navy to get hooked up with some local lollypop and miss his ship..." He stopped. "I didn't mean nothing by that, Mr. Frade. I could tell right off that the one you had in here was a nice girl."
"No offense taken, Chief," Clete said.
"And, Dave told me something about the walkie-talkies he's been working on," Chief Schultz went on quickly, obviously re-lieved that he had gotten himself off the lollypop hook. "I think we can probably rig them, work on them a little more, so that we can have our own air-to-ground link."
"What?" Clete interrupted.
"You use the aircraft radios, Mr. Frade," Chief Schultz ex-plained patiently. "There's sure to be someone monitoring those frequencies. And you'll be using voice..."
"I didn't think of that," Clete said.
"And as far as communicating with the submarine, Clete," Ettinger interjected, "the longer we're on the air, the more time the Argentines will have to triangulate the transmitter. We'll be on three or four times as long if I try to key code than if the Chief does it."
"How does that work?" Clete asked.
"Two, preferably three receivers with directional antennae," Ettinger explained. "They know their precise location on a map. They get a bearing on the transmitter from their receivers. They draw straight lines. Where the lines intercept, there's the trans-mitter. Very simple. We need the Chief."
"What happens to a sailor, Chief, who gets hooked up with a local lollypop and misses his ship?"
"In the States, or someplace like Cavite in the Philippines, Guantanamo, someplace where there's a Navy shore installation, they toss them in the brig with lost time."
"What's lost time?"
"They count from the time you miss the ship until you get back aboard as lost time. You don't get paid for it, they add it to the end of your enlistment, and the next time you get paid, they deduct the cost of your rations. Depending on the skipper, you get captain's mast or a court-martial."
"You really wouldn't be jumping ship," Clete said. "That would be for public consumption, that's all."
"I figured that."
"When this is over, you could be placed in the custody of the Naval Attach‚, maybe, until we could get you back to your ship," Clete said. "Let me think about this, Chief. I'll have to ask my boss, too."
"We don't have much time, Mr. Frade."
"I know. Now tell me about this Ordnanceman-Chief Dan-iels, you said?"
"Well, he don't know shit about what's going on here. All he knows is that I brung Mr. Pelosi on board. And I told him that this guy that's wearing butcher clothes with blood all over them is an Army officer, and that he needs to know about taking a five-inch illuminating-round shell apart, and to keep his mouth shut."
"I didn't know how much I was authorized to tell him about why I needed the flares and parachutes," Tony Pelosi explained.
"So you told him nothing?" Clete asked.
Tony nodded.
"So what happened?"