Blood and Honor

by W. E. B Griffin

  Clete slid off Julius Caesar.

  ‘‘I like the hat,’’ Chief Schultz said, offering his hand.

  ‘‘Thank you.’’

  ‘‘If I’d had a little warning, I could have arranged for side boys,’’ Chief Schultz said, and then, remembering, added soberly, ‘‘I’m sorry as hell about your father, Mr. Frade.’’

  ‘‘Thank you. It’s good to see you, Chief.’’

  ‘‘You’re just in time for lunch,’’ Chief Schultz said, pointing inside the house. ‘‘Mr. Pelosi and Sergeant Ettinger are here. They told me you would be coming, but not when.’’

  Tony and Dave Ettinger—a tall, dark-eyed, sharp-featured man in his late twenties, in his shirtsleeves—were seated at a wooden table. There were bowls of tomatoes, onions, and red and green peppers, and what looked like ten pounds of two-inch-thick New York strip steaks on a wooden platter.

  They were being served by a dark-haired woman in her thirties, wearing a white blouse, a billowing black skirt, and what Clete thought of as gaucho boots. She smiled nervously at Clete and looked between him and Chief Schultz.

  I wouldn’t be at all surprised, Clete thought, if the lady keeps the Chief warm on cold pampas nights—at least when Tony and Ettinger aren’t here.

  The Chief attributed his near-perfect Spanish to the ‘‘sleeping dictionary’’ he had known during a tour at the Cavite Naval Base in the Philippines.

  ‘‘Buenos tardes,’’ Clete said, smiling at her.

  ‘‘Buenos tardes, Patrón,’’ she said.

  ‘‘That’s Dorothéa,’’ Chief Schultz said.

  Well, that’s nice. I’ll have to be careful to see the two ladies are not confused.

  ‘‘She’s helping you perfect your Spanish, Chief?’’ Clete said as he slipped into a chair and offered his hand to Ettinger.

  ‘‘Yeah, and she’s a not half-bad cook, too,’’ Chief Schultz said.

  ‘‘I’m sorry about your father, Major,’’ Ettinger said.

  ‘‘Thank you,’’ Clete said. ‘‘And just for the record, I’m out of the Marine Corps.’’

  ‘‘Tony was telling me something about that.’’

  Dorothéa extended the platter of New York strip steaks— called bife de chorizo—to Clete and he took one. Dorothéa filled a second plate with tomatoes, onions, and pepper.

  ‘‘Señorita,’’ Clete began.

  ‘‘Señora,’’ Chief Schultz corrected him. ‘‘She’s a widow.’’

  ‘‘And you’re the answer to a widow’s prayer, right?’’ Clete said in English, and then, in Spanish, went on. ‘‘Se ñora, please find Rudolpho and tell him I said to come in and eat.’’

  "Sí, Patrón.’’

  ‘‘Tony wasn’t very clear about the nature of our relationship to Commander Delojo,’’ Ettinger said.

  ‘‘I thought I made it pretty clear, Tony,’’ Clete said,

  ‘‘that I remain in command of this team—and that includes you, Chief Schultz. That means you have no relationship to Commander Delojo except through me. That answer your question, Dave?’’

  ‘‘Not precisely,’’ Ettinger said. ‘‘Tony said you met Mr. Leibermann.’’ Clete nodded. ‘‘I’ve been passing some things I’ve developed to Leibermann. Shall I do the same sort of thing for Commander Delojo?’’

  Clete felt a surge of anger. Ettinger was a damned good man, but he seemed unable to grasp that he was in the military—he was in the Army Counterintelligence Corps, on ‘‘detail’’ to the OSS—and that in the military one is not permitted to disobey orders that seem inconvenient or with which you disagree.

  ‘‘What sort of things have you been passing to Leibermann, David?’’ Clete asked coldly.

  ‘‘I’ve been working with the Jews here, the Argentine Jews and the refugees. . . .’’

  ‘‘I know that. What I want to know is what you’ve been passing to Leibermann.’’

  ‘‘Nothing that has any connection with anything we’re doing. I know how you feel about that.’’

  ‘‘Then what, for Christ’s sake?’’

  ‘‘The Argentine Jews are deeply involved in the shipping business. They’ve been giving me shipping manifests, sailing times, that sort of thing, for ships bound for Spain and Portugal, or allegedly bound for Spain and Portugal. Leibermann wants this sort of information, and—I don’t mean to sound flip, but we are on the same side in this war—I can’t see any harm in giving it to him.’’

  Neither can I. And I would be wasting my breath to order Ettinger to stop.

  ‘‘My orders—which are of course, your orders—are to have as little to do with the FBI as possible,’’ Clete said.

  ‘‘You’re telling me to stop passing him this sort of information? ’’

  ‘‘I’m telling you to have as little to do with the FBI as possible. And I would strongly suggest you do not, repeat not, ever let Commander Delojo become aware that you even know Leibermann.’’

  ‘‘OK,’’ Ettinger said. ‘‘That answers my question about what to tell him about Uruguay.’’

  ‘‘Tell him what about Uruguay?’’

  ‘‘I’m just getting to the bottom of it,’’ Ettinger said. ‘‘I haven’t even told Tony about it.’’

  That was my cue to sternly remind Ettinger that Tony is Lieutenant Pelosi, that in my absence Lieutenant Pelosi becomes Team Chief, and that Sergeant Ettinger is duty bound to tell Lieutenant Pelosi anything and everything of interest.

  But that, too, would be a waste of breath. Ettinger long ago figured out that the only reason Tony is down here is because he knows a lot about explosives and demolition, and that everything he knows about espionage and intelligence gathering can be written with a grease pencil inside a matchbook. And the truth is, Ettinger would probably make a better Team Chief than I am, and for that matter, a better Station Chief than Delojo. The only reason he’s not an officer is because he’s a Spanish national, and the U.S. Army is not commissioning Spanish nationals.

  ‘‘Tell us now,’’ Clete said.

  ‘‘I can’t prove this. I can’t get anybody to come out and say this is being done—all I get is doors slammed in my face, conversations suddenly ended—’’

  ‘‘Prove what?’’ Clete asked in exasperation as he put another piece of bife de chorizo in his mouth.

  ‘‘I think, if you have a relative in Sachsenhausen, or Belsen—probably any concentration camp, but those are the only names I’ve heard—’’ Ettinger said, ‘‘that, if you go to the right man in Uruguay, carrying with you a lot of dollars or Swiss francs, you can get him, her, the whole family out.’’

  ‘‘I’ll be damned,’’ Clete said. ‘‘Are you sure about this?’’

  ‘‘No. Not in the sense that I can prove it. But I believe it.’’

  ‘‘Who’s the right man in Uruguay? Somebody at the German Embassy? Do you have a name?’’

  ‘‘No. No name. But I don’t think it’s someone at their Embassy. I think the connection is from the right man in the Jewish community here, to the right man in the Jewish community in Montevideo, or maybe Colonia, and from there to whoever they’re dealing with in the German Embassy. Or, for that matter, the Spanish Embassy or the Swedish Embassy. I told you, Clete. Nobody wants to talk about it.’’

  ‘‘Not even to you?’’ Clete said. ‘‘Sorry, I had to ask that.’’

  Ettinger’s entire family had been taken into concentration camps in Germany . . . except for his mother, who had managed to escape from Germany with her son because they still had their Spanish passports. There had been official word from the SS that his grandfather and grandmother had ‘‘died of complications from pneumonia,’’ but there had been no other word of anyone else.

  ‘‘I picked up on this whole operation when an old man I knew in Berlin told me it was a pity I went to New York instead of here, ‘where something might have been done.’ ’’

  ‘‘You think he meant you could have brought your family out?’’

  �
��‘This fellow was brought out,’’ Ettinger said. ‘‘I saw the SS tattoo, the SS numbers, on his arm.’’

  ‘‘And he won’t tell you anything more?’’

  Ettinger shook his head, ‘‘no.’’

  ‘‘The big mistake I made when we first came down here was telling Ernst Klausner, somebody else I knew in Berlin, that I was in the American Army; he’s apparently spread the word. My feeling is that they have this system going, and they don’t want anything to happen that will threaten it.’’

  ‘‘Christ, don’t they know we’re fighting the goddamn Krauts?’’ Tony said.

  ‘‘They don’t want whatever is going on to be threatened, ’’ Ettinger repeated. ‘‘American interest in what’s happened, is happening, to European Jews, Tony, is a relatively new thing.’’

  ‘‘What happens to the people who get out of the concentration camps?’’ Clete wondered aloud.

  ‘‘Apparently, they’re provided with documents that take them out of Germany. To Sweden, maybe, or Spain. And then either to here or Uruguay. I don’t know. The old man is here; he got out of a concentration camp, and then out of Germany somehow. He couldn’t have done that without papers.’’

  ‘‘Have you said anything to Leibermann at all about this?’’ Clete asked.

  ‘‘No,’’ Ettinger said, and added: ‘‘I was waiting for you to come back, and to find out more, if I can.’’

  ‘‘I don’t want you to say anything at all about this to Leibermann, David.’’

  Ettinger nodded, accepting the order.

  ‘‘I think we have to pass this to Colonel Graham,’’ Clete said.

  ‘‘I was afraid you’d say that,’’ Ettinger said.

  ‘‘That bothers you?’’

  ‘‘It’s a moral problem for me,’’ Ettinger said. ‘‘If there is a system, and people are getting out, I don’t want to be the one responsible for shutting that system down.’’

  ‘‘There may be, almost certainly is, something here that you and I don’t know how to deal with,’’ Clete said.

  Ettinger, looking very unhappy, shrugged.

  ‘‘What David just told us doesn’t go anywhere,’’ Clete said, looking at Tony and Chief Schultz in turn. Both nodded.

  ‘‘There’s something I have to tell you. I just got, from a source I trust—’’

  ‘‘Meaning you’re not going to tell us who, of course?’’ Tony interrupted.

  ‘‘No, I’m not,’’ Clete said sharply. ‘‘And you know why. We operate on the premise that if any one of us is interrogated by a professional, sooner or later, and probably sooner, we’ll tell him everything he wants to know. If you don’t know something, you can’t give it up, OK?’’

  ‘‘Sorry, Clete,’’ Tony said, sounding genuinely remorseful.

  ‘‘A German officer, an SS colonel named Goltz, came here on the Lufthansa flight the same day I did—’’

  ‘‘SS, or SS-SD?’’ Ettinger interrupted.

  ‘‘SD. Does that mean something to you?’’

  ‘‘SD means Sicherheitsdienst. The Secret Police, so to speak. The real bastards.’’

  ‘‘OK, this guy is SD. And we already have the proof that he’s a bastard. This morning, this bastard issued orders to have you killed.’’

  ‘‘No shit?’’ Tony asked. ‘‘Just Dave?’’

  ‘‘That would suggest, wouldn’t it,’’ Ettinger said, ‘‘that maybe I’m asking the right questions?’’

  ‘‘Just for the sake of argument, yes,’’ Clete said. ‘‘And it would also suggest that this Colonel Goltz is connected with this business. He comes here, somebody tells him you’re asking questions, and he says, ‘eliminate him.’ ’’

  ‘‘I’ve been operating on the premise that such an order would be standard operating procedure. Eliminate anybody who’s asking the wrong questions. Or stumbles onto something, ’’ Ettinger said. ‘‘The Sicherheitsdienst is ruthless, and killing someone to keep a secret like this would be normal routine. You think this is something new?’’

  ‘‘According to my source—who I think is reliable—the order to eliminate you was issued this morning, by this Colonel Goltz. Maybe it’s a coincidence—they didn’t know you were asking questions until just now—but I don’t think so.’’

  ‘‘No,’’ Ettinger said after a moment, ‘‘neither do I.’’

  ‘‘Dave, do you have a gun?’’ Clete asked.

  Ettinger nodded.

  ‘‘He’s got a little .38,’’ Chief Schultz said. ‘‘I tried to get him to carry a .45, but he says he can’t shoot a .45.’’

  ‘‘I can’t,’’ Ettinger argued. ‘‘And a .45 is hard to conceal. ’’

  ‘‘It’s your neck, Dave,’’ Clete said. ‘‘Do what you think you should.’’

  Ettinger nodded.

  ‘‘Are we on the air, Chief?’’ Clete asked.

  ‘‘Five by five,’’ Chief Schultz replied.

  ‘‘David, write down everything you know or suspect about this ransoming operation. Right now. Before I ride back to the estancia, I want to send this out.’’

  Ettinger nodded his acceptance of the orders.

  ‘‘Everything, David,’’ Clete emphasized. ‘‘I want to tell Colonel Graham everything you know. And ask him if you should look deeper. For all we know, as far down on the totem pole as we are, they already know about this. They may just tell us to butt out.’’

  ‘‘I’ve considered the possibility that Leibermann is aware of it. He’s a very clever fellow.’’

  Clete nodded in agreement.

  ‘‘In the meantime, you don’t go back to Buenos Aires until I tell you to.’’

  ‘‘I can’t ask very many questions here,’’ Ettinger replied.

  ‘‘We may get orders telling you not to ask any more questions, period.’’

  ‘‘Clete, if you’re right that the order to kill me was issued only this morning, I don’t think they’d have time to set anything up. And I have a couple of people I’d like to talk to.’’

  Christ, he simply does not know how to take an order!

  ‘‘And there may be two guys outside your apartment this minute, waiting for you to show up. I don’t want you killed. I need you. You stay here until I tell you otherwise, you understand?’’

  Ettinger threw up his hands in a gesture of surrender.

  Clete turned to Chief Schultz. ‘‘Chief, in Washington they were really concerned about losing the station. I must have had six lectures on triangulation.’’

  ‘‘No problem here, Mr. Frade,’’ Chief Schultz said. ‘‘You know how that works?’’

  Clete nodded, and started to say ‘‘Yes, a little,’’ but Chief Schultz went on without giving him the chance.

  ‘‘First of all, they have to catch us on the air,’’ he explained. ‘‘By two, preferably three, directional antennae mounted on trucks. One receiver won’t cut the mustard. If they do happen to catch us, they won’t be close. To really pinpoint a transmitter, you have to get close.’’

  ‘‘And they can’t get close here?’’

  ‘‘You know how big this place is? I got a map of it. And Mr. Pelosi stole an almanac from the embassy for me. This place takes in more than eighty thousand hectares. A hectare is about two point seven acres. That makes it more than two hundred thousand acres. That’s three hundred twenty-five square miles. You know how big Manhattan Island is? Twenty square miles. This place is one-quarter the size of Rhode Island.’’

  ‘‘We’ve got counties in Texas that big,’’ Clete heard himself arguing. ‘‘Hell, I think the King Ranch takes in more than two hundred thousand acres.’’

  Chief Schultz looked at him for a moment with the tolerant look a veteran chief petty officer gives young officers who cannot seem to grasp a simple explanation.

  ‘‘Without coming on the property, Mr. Frade—and they can’t do that without us hearing about it—they can’t get close enough to us to get a good triangulation fix,’’ he said. ‘‘In
addition to which, I made the transmitter mobile.’’

  ‘‘What?’’

  ‘‘I mounted one of the transmitters and a receiver on one of the Model A’s, and a generator on another one. So what I can do is go three, four miles from here, rig a straight-wire antenna, fire it up, send the traffic, and then haul ass. Even if they got a triangulation fix on that site—which, like I say, is damned unlikely—by the time they got there there’d be nothing there but trees and cows.’’

  ‘‘What about the antenna I saw in the trees?’’

  ‘‘That’s a receiver antenna, Mr. Frade,’’ Chief Schultz said tolerantly. ‘‘What we hear people calling us over.’’

  Clete looked at Ettinger, who was an electrical engineer. Ettinger nodded. Chief Schultz was telling the truth.

  ‘‘Well, perhaps not all chief petty officers are as retarded as Marine officers are led to believe,’’ Clete said. ‘‘Could I have a look at this mobile transmitter of yours?’’

  ‘‘You don’t want to hear what Chiefs have to say about Marine officers, Mr. Frade,’’ Chief Schultz said. ‘‘You just want a look at it, or do you want me to fire it up for you?’’

  ‘‘A look now, and after Mr. Ettinger has finished his report, I’d like to see it in operation.’’

  ‘‘They’re right out in back, Mr. Frade.’’

  ‘‘Tell me about radar, Chief,’’ Clete said after Schultz had completed his demonstration of his truck-mounted radio station.

  ‘‘They’re really sending one down here?’’

  ‘‘It’s in Brazil, with a team to set it up and operate it.’’

  ‘‘I think they’re pissing into the wind,’’ Schultz said.

  ‘‘Tell me why.’’

  ‘‘You know how it works?’’

  ‘‘Tell me.’’

  ‘‘They found out—at Bell Labs, in New Jersey—that at the higher frequencies, radio waves bounce. So they send out directional radiation. You know what I’m talking about?’’

  Clete shook his head, ‘‘no.’’

  ‘‘You try to narrow the radiation field. Like, a civilian broadcasting system tries to get a wide radiation pattern. Like a stone dropped in the water, you know? Expanding circles? So the signal can be picked up by as many receivers as possible?’’