Blood and Honor

by W. E. B Griffin

  ‘‘I don’t think that’s such a good idea,’’ Ashton said. ‘‘I think the ‘smuggler’ will be watching us. He’s a little too obliging.’’

  ‘‘Is there a train, or a bus, from São Borja to Pôrto Alegre? Or could I rent a car there?’’

  ‘‘It’s not much of a town. I’m not sure you could rent a car at all, and even if you could, it would attract attention. And how would you get it back, if you fly back here?’’

  ‘‘Then it’s a train or a bus?’’

  ‘‘Unless you can think of something else,’’ Ashton said. ‘‘When do you want to go?’’

  ‘‘As soon as possible.’’

  ‘‘The last ferry leaves at six-thirty, unless it’s full. If it’s full, then it leaves whenever it’s full after five. Can you make that?’’

  Clete looked at his watch.

  ‘‘I’ll give it a hell of a try. If I can’t make it tonight, I’m sure I can be on the first ferry in the morning. I suggest you go to Pôrto Alegre, tell Colonel Whatsisname that I’m on the way, and get your people ready.’’

  Ashton looked at him thoughtfully again.

  ‘‘You’re sure you’ll have an airplane when you get there?’’

  Clete nodded.

  ‘‘Jesus, I hate to tell Consuelo to put her clothes on,’’ Ashton said. ‘‘But I guess I have to.’’

  Clete looked at his watch.

  ‘‘It’s not quite three,’’ Clete said. ‘‘That gives us two hours to make the ferry. I’ll try to be on it.’’

  ‘‘I was really looking forward to tonight,’’ Ashton said. ‘‘You understand what a sacrifice you’re asking of me? Sweet girls like Consuelo don’t come down the pike very often—Consuelo means ‘consolation,’ by the way.’’

  ‘‘Neither does an offer that will keep you from jumping out of an airplane or paddling across that river.’’

  ‘‘That’s true,’’ Ashton said.

  ‘‘Where do I go when I arrive in Pôrto Alegre?’’

  ‘‘The Gran Hotel de Pôrto,’’ Ashton said. ‘‘That’s now the Air Corps BOQ. It’s not far from the Navy base. I think it would be better to check in with me before you go see Colonel Wallace.’’

  ‘‘OK. As soon as I can get there, I’ll see you there.’’

  Ashton nodded.

  ‘‘One thing, mi Mayor. I think you should know that I got a Gold Star to take home to Mommy when I went through the knife-fighting course,’’ Ashton said. ‘‘If we reach Pôrto Alegre and you tell me ‘Sorry, there’s been a change a plan’ and we have to do the parachute bit, I will, mi Mayor, with my razor-sharp instrument of silent death, turn you into a soprano.’’

  ‘‘I’ll bear that in mind,’’ Clete said. ‘‘My very best regards to Señorita Consuelo, Capitán.’’

  [SIX] The Port Montevideo, Uruguay 1430 15 April 1943

  Although he was in fact an agent of the Office of Strategic Services—and before that an agent of the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps—David Ettinger rarely thought of himself as a real-life version of the secret agents Humphrey Bogart, Alan Ladd, and other film stars portrayed in the movies.

  Earlier, he was assured that his employment at the RCA Laboratories was ‘‘essential to the war effort’’ and would thus exempt him from the draft. Even so, he enlisted in the Army because putting on the uniform of the country that had given him and his mother refuge seemed the right thing to do.

  At the time, however, he thought there was very little chance he would be handed a rifle and sent off to fight the Nazis and the Germans in the trenches. Indeed, David Sarnoff, the head of RCA, for whom he worked, had used that argument when he tried to talk him out of enlisting:

  ‘‘One of two things will happen to you, David. They will make you a rifleman and you will get killed, which would be a terrible waste and not nearly as great of a contribution to the war as you can make here; or they will send you to the Signal Corps Laboratories at Fort Monmouth, where they will have you doing the same thing you’re doing here, except with a good deal less freedom, and on a private’s pay.’’>

  At the time Sarnoff tried to dissuade him from enlisting, Sarnoff was himself about to become Colonel David Sarnoff of the Signal Corps, so David concluded that Sarnoff’s arguments to him were pro forma at best. Meanwhile, other sources told him that a man with his background and experience would qualify for a commission. Thus he imagined that after he went through the horrors of basic training, he would be commissioned a lieutenant. And then, more than likely—as Colonel Sarnoff suggested—he would be assigned to the Army’s Signal Laboratory to work in his specialty —high- and ultrahigh-frequency radiation.

  He applied for both a direct commission and for Officer Candidate School during his second week of basic training at Camp Polk, Louisiana. By the time both applications returned—within days of each other in his seventh week of basic training—he had decided that being an enlisted man was not the most pleasant way to serve one’s newly adopted country. Unhappily, the returned applications stated that inasmuch as he was a Spanish National, he was not qualified to be commissioned as an officer in the Armed Forces of the United States.

  A week later he was summoned from the Live Hand Grenade Range to meet a gentleman from the Counterintelligence Corps—he still remembered holding a bomb, fuse ticking, as the most terrifying aspect of his basic training. It had come to the attention of the CIC, the gentleman in civilian clothing told him in a thick Munich accent, that he spoke both German and Spanish. Was this true?

  ‘‘Auch Französisch,’’ Private Ettinger replied.

  They chatted for ten minutes, long enough to convince the CIC agent—also a Jew who had escaped from Nazi Germany—that he wasn’t a Nazi spy. And then the CIC agent told him that the CIC needed someone like him. A large number of Germans lived in the Yorktown district of New York City—and elsewhere. And the Army wished to keep an eye on them. And Private Ettinger seemed to have the necessary linguistic and educational qualifications for that.

  Private Ettinger volunteered for the Counterintelligence Corps for several reasons. For one thing, it would keep him from being sent to the then forming Ninety-fifth Infantry Division for training as a radio operator. For another, he would probably be assigned to New York City, where his mother lived. And finally, he was told that after graduation from the CIC School in Baltimore, he would be designated a Special Agent of the CIC, which carried with it the pay of a staff sergeant. CIC agents, he was told, worked in civilian clothing, and their rank was not made public.

  That seemed to be the next-best thing to getting the commission he was denied because of his Spanish nationality.

  After graduating from the CIC School at Camp Holabird in Baltimore, Special Agent Ettinger was retained there as an instructor in shortwave radio telephony. This allowed him to travel to New York City to see his mother just about every other weekend. The Pennsylvania Railroad’s tracks went past Cherry Hill, New Jersey, where, had he not been overwhelmed with patriotic fervor to serve his adopted country, he would still be employed by RCA at a vastly greater compensation than he was now being paid.

  While he was stationed at the CIC Center, another civilian with interesting credentials visited him. This man was an agent of the Office of Strategic Services, an organization about which Special Agent Ettinger had heard very little.

  This interview was conducted in a dialect of Spanish Ettinger recognized as Tex-Mex—in other words, spoken by people of a Mexican background who lived in Texas. In this interview the OSS agent told him that the OSS needed someone qualified to set up and operate a clandestine shortwave radio station in a not-then-identified South American nation, and that Ettinger seemed to have the quali fications they were looking for. It was some time later that Ettinger learned that he had been interviewed by a man who was not only a full colonel of the U.S. Marine Corps, but Assistant Director for Western Hemisphere Operations of the OSS.

  A week later, Ettinger found himself in a place that be
fore the war had been the Congressional Country Club in Virginia, not far from Washington. The training there was something like a repeat of basic training and CIC training— in a sense, ludicrous, considering what he had been told was planned for him. He was going to Argentina, by Pan American Airlines, ostensibly an expert on oil-industry tank farms, to operate a radio station. He thought it highly unlikely that he would ever be called upon to parachute from an airplane, or engage in a knife fight, or follow someone down city streets without being seen, or pick a lock.

  Once he was in Buenos Aires, Argentina, he did find himself on the fringes of warlike acts, but only on the fringes. He wore civilian clothing and lived in an apartment. He ate in restaurants. He even had a maid to do his laundry, and an automobile to get around town and to drive out to the radio station. His role in the sinking of an ostensibly neutral merchant vessel engaged in the clandestine resupply of German submarines was indisputably noncombatant.

  Nevertheless, he took a private pride in knowing that without his radio station, there would have been no way to tell the submarine where to find the ship it would torpedo.

  Although he sensed that if he gave either of them the slightest hint of this, they would be embarrassed, David Ettinger was thrilled to be closely associated with men like Cletus Frade and Anthony Pelosi.

  More than that, they had given him the resolve—he didn’t think of it as courage—to do what he was doing now. He realized that in a manner of speaking he was indeed now in the trenches, facing the Nazis personally.

  And he was doing work that Cletus Frade and Tony Pelosi could not do, no matter how courageous they were, or how skilled at things like flying airplanes or rigging explosive charges. They didn’t have his background or, frankly, his intelligence. Nor did they speak German, nor were they Jews.

  There was no telling what the Nazis were up to with their ransoming operation. He had no idea whether it was simply one more turn of the screw to squeeze more money out of Jews inside, or outside, Germany, or a far more complex operation. But whatever it was, it had certainly attracted the attention of Colonel Graham back in Washington.

  And this problem—this, if you will, contribution to the war effort, to the war against the Nazis—was his to solve. His alone. He had been ordered not to even mention anything about it to Milton Leibermann. At first he thought this was preposterous. Leibermann was after all FBI, and thus presumably skilled in investigation and interrogation. But then he wondered about that. If Leibermann was so skilled in investigation and interrogation, then why was it David Ettinger, and not FBI agent Milton Leibermann, who uncovered the Nazi ransom operation?

  While of course he wasn’t doing any of this for credit, if Leibermann was brought into it, the ‘‘investigation,’’ if that’s what it could be properly called, would have become Leibermann’s—the FBI’s—investigation. David Ettinger, after all, was officially only a staff sergeant radio technician detailed to the OSS.

  Furthermore, it was entirely possible that the very presence of Leibermann, or one of his FBI agents, would be counterproductive. It had taken him a good deal of time, and all of his psychological insight, to persuade any of the people involved to talk to him at all.

  The sudden appearance of someone else asking questions would very likely result in all the just-beginning-to-open doors being very firmly slammed shut again.

  And he was getting close to finding out how the money was being moved. The fact that the Sicherheitsdienst colonel had ordered his assassination was clear enough proof of that.

  He was, of course, concerned about that. But the time of greatest danger for him was when he was still on the estancia. It was possible, if not very likely, that the German-hired assassins would try to do to him what they had done to Cletus Frade’s father, ambush him on the road to Pila.

  Not only was that unlikely, but he was being protected on Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo—and as far as that went, anywhere in Argentina—by two men from the Bureau of Internal Security. He had heard Pelosi telling the Chief about that.

  And so, feeling rather clever about the whole thing, he made sure that once he had sneaked away from the house, with lights in the Chevrolet turned off so that neither Pelosi nor the Chief would wake up, he turned the lights on, so that the BIS men would see him and follow him.

  Which they did. All the way into Buenos Aires. There they stationed themselves on Calle Monroe outside his apartment. If any assassins were lying in wait on the estancia, or at his apartment, the sight of two men in an obviously official car was enough to discourage them from trying anything.

  In the apartment he took a shower and shaved, then called the ferryboat terminal and reserved space for the 8:30 departure. Then he dealt with the problem of his gun. He had two holsters for the Smith & Wesson .38 Special snub-nose, a shoulder holster and one that strapped on his belt. It was, of course, illegal to take any firearm across the border. It was unlikely, he thought, that he would be searched passing through Uruguayan Customs, but it was better to be safe than sorry.

  He decided he didn’t need the holster. The Smith & Wesson was small enough to carry in his pocket. He wrapped the pistol in a small face towel, then put the package in his toilet kit under his razor and other toilet articles. He put the toilet kit itself in the small suitcase he was taking with him, carrying only a change of linen and a spare set of trousers. He didn’t plan on being in Uruguay long.

  At 7:45 he left his apartment, got in the Chevrolet, and, trailed by his BIS protectors, drove to the port. He was early—on purpose—which meant that his early on-loaded car would be off-loaded early in Montevideo.

  When the ferry moved away from the pier, he saw the men from the BIS standing on the quay, and resisted the temptation to wave at them. They would not, of course, follow him across the border.

  He paid some attention to his fellow passengers on the ferry, but none of them looked like assassins for hire. They looked like businessmen off to Montevideo for the day— in other words, he hoped, much like he did.

  Uruguayan Customs and Immigration officials performed their function aboard the ferryboat. An Immigration officer took a quick glance at his passport, saw that it bore the stamps of a dozen or more short trips back and forth between Buenos Aires and Montevideo, added one more stamp, and waved him on to the Customs officers standing at the ramp.

  They asked him to open the trunk, and after finding nothing in it but a spare tire and a jack, didn’t even ask him to open his one small suitcase.

  He drove off the boat, then drove to the Casino in Carrasco by the Rambla, the road that follows the coastline.

  He was completely unaware of the somewhat battered and rusty 1937 Graham-Paige sedan that followed him to Carrasco, possibly because it never came closer than two cars behind him, and possibly because he wasn’t looking for it. He did not expect to be followed in Uruguay.

  He had not telephoned the Casino Hotel for a reservation, to obviate the possibility that the desk clerk, the concierge, or someone else in the hotel hierarchy had been paid to notify someone if he should again come to Montevideo.

  He felt just a little smug about this, too. It seemed to prove that he had paid attention to the instructors in Camp Holabird and at the Country Club.

  The Casino Hotel had a room for him, a nice two-room suite on the second floor. He went to the room, left his bag, and then went back downstairs and to the car. He drove it into the basement garage and went back up to the room.

  If there was any basis to think that the Germans, or Uruguayans in German employ, had arranged to be notified if he appeared again, then obviously they had already been notified, or would be shortly.

  He took the Smith & Wesson snub-nose from his toilet kit and checked it for operation. He even went so far as to put a match head in his jar of Vaseline and lubricate the wear points.

  He had confidence in the pistol and in his ability to use it. He was not, of course, a shot like the Chief and Tony Pelosi were shots. He used to watch them a little e
nviously as they shot their .45 automatic pistols on Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo. They would shoot at tin cans, more to kill time than anything else, burning up case after case of Argentine Army ammunition provided by Frade’s father through his sergeant.

  They just didn’t shoot the tin can. The object was to make it jump in the air, and keep jumping, as long as any ammunition was left in the pistol.

  Ettinger knew that no matter how much he practiced, he could never become that sort of pistol shot. But he had paid attention at the pistol ranges at Camp Holabird and the Country Club. They shot at life-size silhouette targets at seven yards. The object was to fire rapidly and hit what were called ‘‘vital’’ areas on the silhouette targets.

  Using a pistol identical to one he had now, over time he became rather proficient. Three times out of four, firing five shots as rapidly as possible, he put four bullet holes in the vital areas of silhouette targets.

  When he was really feeling good about his shooting, he aimed all shots at the silhouette’s head. Two or three times, he put all five shots in the head.

  He didn’t telephone the man he wanted to see. You couldn’t dial the number directly. You had to give it to the operator, who did the dialing for you. If you accepted the possibility that the concierge was paid to telephone someone that he was in the hotel, then it followed that the telephone operator was probably keeping a record of the numbers he called.

  It wasn’t really a problem. He knew where the man he wanted to see was going to be at seven-thirty. He stopped in for a going-home glass of beer at a bar on Avenida Foster, less than a dozen blocks from the Casino Hotel. Ettinger had met him there three times before. The bar was crowded at that time of day, and it was relatively easy to exchange a few words about how and where they could meet in privacy.

  Ettinger hadn’t had much to eat in the restaurant on the ferryboat, and it was possible that dinner might be delayed by the business he had to do tonight.

  There were a half-dozen cafés and restaurants within easy walking distance of the Casino Hotel. The restaurants would probably not yet be open, but you could generally find a small steak at any café.