“Huh?”
“Waiting for the sharks. I think I would have gone nuts.”
Tony could imagine that. He felt a chill.
“You ever shoot down any Japs?”
There was a moment before Clete replied, “I got lucky a couple of times.”
“You going to tell me how many times?”
“Seven.”
“You’re an ace, then.”
“Before I was dumb enough to volunteer for this, the Marine Corps was about to put me and a dozen other aces on display on the West Coast to sucker other innocent young men into volunteering for the crotch.”
“The crotch”? What the hell is “the crotch”? Oh! He means the Marine Corps. If I called it “the crotch” he’d shit a brick.
“Was it as bad as they say on Guadalcanal?”
“It was unpleasant, Tony. Hot, humid, filthy, lousy food—much of it captured from the Japs—all kinds of bugs. And flying beat-up, shot-up, worn-out airplanes against Zeroes…a much better airplane, flown by pilots who were better than we were.”
They weren’t all better than you. Not if you shot down seven of them.
“You never talked about it before.”
Clete shrugged. “Most people, civilians especially, don’t understand.”
“Can I ask you a question?”
“Sure.”
“What are we doing here?”
“Hell, I thought you knew, Lieutenant Pelosi. Our contribution to the war effort is going to be to blow up a ship. That is, if people we must presume are far wiser than we are can make up their minds which ship, and tell us where it is, and how the hell we are supposed to blow it up.”
Tony chuckled.
“I meant, where we’re going?”
“Tomorrow morning, when we dock in Montevideo, we are going to a crude-oil terminal and make believe we know what we’re doing as we examine the pipes and tanks and look at the books. Then we are going to a gambling casino for the night.”
“A gambling casino?”
“You ever hear that line, ‘theirs not to reason why, theirs but to ride into the valley of death’? In our case, it’s walk into a gambling casino.”
“And then what?”
“The next morning, we drive a rented car to a place called Punta del Este, where we take a swim. If Nes—the man who gave me our orders wasn’t pulling my leg, the beaches of Punta del Este are crowded with good-looking women. Then, at night, we drive up to the Brazilian border, where they will air-drop your explosives to you.”
“How are they going to do that?”
“I would presume from an airplane.”
Tony chuckled.
“I meant how are we going to communicate with the drop aircraft?”
“I was told you were the air-drop expert.”
“You need a radio to talk to the drop aircraft.”
“I wondered about that. I do know that at specified times we are to turn the headlights on and off for sixty-second intervals. Maybe that’ll be enough to let the guy flying drop the stuff to us.”
“Who gives us our orders?”
“I can’t tell you his name, Tony, sorry. But I think he knows what he’s doing,” Clete said seriously. “And I’m sure he’s right about the way they do things. If you don’t know his name, you can’t tell anybody…if, for example, we get caught and they start roasting you over a slow fire, or pulling your fingernails out.”
“Can that happen?”
“I hope not.”
“If everything goes all right, if everything works, and we blow up this fucking ship, then what? What happens to us?”
“I don’t know. Maybe they’ll want us out of Argentina, and maybe they’ll want us to stick around doing something else until we do get caught, or until we win the war, whichever comes first.”
“I wish to Christ I was back in the 82nd Airborne.”
“And I almost wish I was back on Guadalcanal,” Clete said. No, I don’t, he thought. There is no Virgin Princess on Guadalcanal. “For what the hell it’s worth, Tony. We had Marine paratroops on Tulagi, a battalion of them. They landed by ship, not by jumping. They got shit kicked out of them. More than ten percent killed. I think our odds are a little better than that; and in the meantime, it’s clean sheets, steaks, and with a little bit of luck, a piece of ass in Punta del Este.”
“I could use a little,” Tony said. “I saw the most beautiful girl I ever saw in my life in Buenos Aires. I get a hard-on just thinking about her.”
“Much the same thing, oddly enough, happened to me,” Clete said.
He flicked his cigar over the rail.
“What do you say we hit the sack?”
“I never slept on a boat before,” Tony confessed. “Do you get seasick in your sleep?”
“A ship,” Clete corrected him. “A boat is a vessel you can carry aboard a ship. And no, if you were going to get seasick, you would be seasick by now.”
[THREE]
El Casino de Carrasco
Montevideo, Uruguay
2000 8 December 1942
“Very nice,” Lieutenant Pelosi observed to Lieutenant Frade as he inspected their suite—two bedrooms, plus sitting room and foyer.
“Try to remember you’re an officer and a gentleman,” Clete said, “and don’t piss in the bidet.”
“Screw you, Clete!”
Pelosi went to a window and hauled on the canvas tape that raised the heavy blinds over the French doors.
“Hey, the ocean’s right out here!” Pelosi said, and then began to raise the other blinds.
“Jesus Christ, it really gets around, doesn’t it? The last time I looked, it was in Miami.”
“I mean we’re facing the ocean, wise guy,” Tony said, and opened one of the French doors. “And there’s a balcony.”
Clete followed him outside.
They were on the top floor of the ornate, stone, turn-of-the-century building. The balcony indeed faced an open body of water.
“The water’s dirty,” Tony observed.
“I think this is still the River Plate,” Clete said. “You don’t get to the Atlantic until you’re in Punta del Este. That’s up that-a-way, about a hundred miles.” He pointed.
“That breeze feels good. Jesus, I hate this hot weather. You realize it’s only a couple of weeks ’til Christmas? Sweating on Christmas!”
“Why don’t we open all the blinds—in the bedrooms, especially—and the doors, to let the breeze in. And then go down and have dinner and see what happens? Play a little roulette, maybe?”
“Jesus, I’m still recovering from lunch, and we didn’t eat that until three,” Tony replied. “I think I’ll just sit out here and watch the water go up and down.”
“I don’t think Ne—we were sent here to try our luck,” Clete said. “And if someone were trying to contact us, they’d prefer to do it in a crowd, rather than up here in the room.”
Tony considered that a moment, then said, “Let me take a leak. I’ll be right with you.”
When he came out of his bathroom, Clete handed him five fifty-dollar bills.
“What’s this for?”
“To gamble. It’s your Christmas present from the taxpayers of the United States.”
“And what if I win?”
“You will be expected, of course, to turn all your winnings over to the government.”
“In a pig’s ass I will.”
“Shame on you, Lieutenant Pelosi!”
They had a very good dinner in the dining room. It was in the center of the building, a large, somewhat dark space from whose three-story-high ceiling hung four enormous crystal chandeliers. A grand piano was at one end of the room, beside the bar, and a pianist played light classical music for most of their meal. Later it was replaced with a string quartet.
The room was full of prosperous-looking people, Clete thought; but nobody there was an aristocrat. Successful businessmen, he decided. Or ranchers in from the country for a night on the town. Moneyed, but no
t rich-rich like the sixteen or so people at Aunt Beatrice’s and Uncle Humberto’s dinner table.
Uncle Humberto’s guests were rich-rich; they smelled of money and privilege. And they were simply fascinated with Dear Jorge’s long-lost son. Half a dozen of them simply refused to speak Spanish with him, insisting on proving their worldliness by showing they spoke a second language as well as their native tongue.
He’d heard somewhere that in the Russian Court—before they booted the Czar out and murdered him and his family and threw their bodies down a well—the official language was French.
Clete thought of that after noticing that just about everybody had a pronounced loathing for the Russians, with a lesser but concomitant sympathy for the Germans.
Dear Beatrice’s Poor Jorge had been murdered by the filthy communists, not killed in battle in Russia while accompanying an invading army. The Germans did not shoot their aristocracy, and they were engaged in fighting the filthy, godless communists. Thus, they could not be all bad.
This talk bothered him; but he managed to resist a growing temptation to mention the Germans’ murder of several hundred thousand Jews—he was not sure if he believed Nestor’s several millions figure; he didn’t want to. But he didn’t want to get in an argument with anybody either, not when Aunt Beatrice was liable to pop up at his side at any moment, and tell him again how much he looked like his mother and Poor Dear Jorge, both of them now together and with God and all the blessed angels…and how they took baths together and splashed and laughed and were so happy when they were infants.
Aunt Beatrice was out of her mind; there was no question about that. But Uncle Humberto was worse. He was not floating around on a drug-induced cloud. He was in the here and now and knew what was going on. Humberto kept looking at Clete out of big, dark, immensely sad eyes—How is it that you are alive, and my Jorge is dead?—until he saw Clete looking back. Then he put on a wide, toothy, absolutely phony smile and gave him a thumbs-up sign.
The Mallíns were there, of course. Not only were they part of that social circle, but it would be unthinkable not to invite them after they were so kind to Dear Cletus when he arrived.
The Mallíns, less the Virgin Princess. Aunt Beatrice’s dinner to meet Dear Jorge’s son had been a grown-ups’ party; children not welcome. Clete wasn’t sure at first if he was relieved or disappointed, but soon admitted he was goddamned disappointed.
At least I could have looked at her every once in a while.
All things considered, it was a lousy evening at Aunt Beatrice’s and Uncle Humberto’s.
No one tried to speak to Clete or Tony at dinner, and there wasn’t even any eye contact from the other diners.
Nor was there anyone who paid the slightest bit of attention to them in the casino, except when Tony delivered a loud Cicero, Illinois, “Oh, shit!” when he drew a king to a pair of fives and a two at the Vingt-et-Une table and dropped almost a thousand dollars.
By then it was midnight, and Clete decided he had been wrong about a possible contact in the casino. Nestor told him to spend the night here, he decided, because that’s what an American in Uruguay on business would be expected to do.
“Let’s go to bed,” he said to a sad Tony Pelosi as he counted what was left of his money.
Tony was sad, but without good reason.
“I’m up six hundred over the two fifty you gave me,” he announced in the elevator. “And if I hadn’t gotten that fucking king!”
“Don’t be greedy. Greedy gamblers always lose.”
“My father says that all the time,” Tony agreed. “You say that too?”
“I thought I made it up,” Clete said, straight-faced.
Pelosi was in his room less than two minutes when Clete heard him call, excitedly, “Hey, Frade! Come in here.”
Clete walked across the sitting room. Tony was in his underwear, and he was holding what looked like an oversized telephone to his ear.
“What the hell is that?”
“It’s a walkie-talkie.”
“A what?”
“A radio. A two-way radio!”
“That little thing?”
“I seen them demonstrated at Bragg. They’re new. Not yet issued.”
Pelosi pointed to a small leather bag on the bed, not much larger than a woman’s purse.
“That was on the rack at the foot of the bed when I came in,” Pelosi said. “With this inside.”
He handed Clete a three-by-five-inch filing card—obviously American—on which was typewritten:
* * *
(1) Speak English
(2) Your call sign is “Hunter.”
(3) You will contact “Mallard.”
(4) You have 45 mins possible, 1 hr stretching it, battery power. (90 mins, 2 hrs, using spare set)
(5) Leave walkie-talkies in Wardrobe Punta de E. on departure.
* * *
Clete took the radio from Tony and examined it dubiously.
There was a nameplate on it: AN/PRC-6 MOTOROLA CORP. CHICAGO, ILL.
“These things really work?”
“Yeah. Well, now we know how we talk to the drop plane.”
Clete put the walkie-talkie to his ear and heard a hiss.
“There’s two of them?” he asked.
“Yeah. Take that one into your room, and we’ll see if they work.”
Clete went back to his room, examined the walkie-talkie again, pulled out an antenna that looked as if it should be mounted on a car fender, put the radio to his ear, and depressed a two-inch-long lever marked PRESS TO TALK.
“Dr. Watson, can you hear me?”
“Yeah. You’re coming in five by five.”
“I will be damned. Dr. Watson, over and out.”
He walked back to Tony’s room.
“What’s the range of these things?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Tony replied, thinking about it. “Maybe a mile. Maybe longer if we’re talking to an airplane.”
“Start thinking about how we can get these into Argentina,” Clete said.
“We’re supposed to leave them in the hotel in…Where we going? Punta someplace?”
“Punta del Este. Fuck ’em. The first thing a Marine learns, Tony, is that when he puts his hands on a piece of equipment that works, he keeps it.”
[FOUR]
La Posta de la Congrejo Hotel
Punta del Este, Uruguay
0005 10 December 1942
“You want to put the top down?” Lieutenant Frade inquired of Lieutenant Pelosi as they prepared to get in their rental car.
“Why not? We could see better.”
The car was a 1937 Ford convertible sedan. They had a good deal of difficulty pulling the top down.
“The President probably has people who do this for him,” Clete observed.
“What?”
“I said, Roosevelt probably has people who do this for him.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“President Roosevelt has a car just like this. I don’t think he could put the top down himself; he probably has an official top-putter-upper-and-downer.”
“He’s crippled. Polio. How the hell can he drive a car?”
“It has levers on the steering wheel. You never saw it in the newsreels?”
“Yeah, now that you mention it.”
“How far is this place?”
“A hundred and twenty-five miles,” Clete said. “According to the map, the road’s a highway. I figure we can make forty miles an hour; that’s three hours to get there. We have an hour, an hour and a half’s, cushion.”
“You figuring this in miles or kilometers?”
“Miles. You know how to convert?”
“Sure,” Tony said.
Bullshit. You don’t know, but don’t want to admit it.
“To get miles from kilometers, you divide the kilometers by eight, then multiply by five. Two hundred kilometers divided by eight is twenty-five. Times five is one twenty-five.”
“Yeah, right. You want me to drive?”
“I’ll drive. You work the map. I wish to hell we had a flashlight. Flashlights, plural.”
“I got one,” Tony said. “In the bag with the walkie-talkies.”
“Good for you! You bring it with you?”
“No. But when I figured we would need one, I went to that little store on the main drag and said, ‘Señora, una linterna, por favor,’ and she sold me one.”
“You should have bought two.”
“I did, Lieutenant, Sir. I knew I had to take care of you.”
“Insolence does not become you, Lieutenant.”
The first fifty miles were on a macadam road on which they met few cars but a large number of open-bodied trucks of all sizes. In the direction of Montevideo, most of these were heavily laden with everything from firewood to cattle; but they were mostly empty headed north. Clete was not surprised when they reached the city of Rocha to find an all-night truck stop. He pulled in, gassed the car, and then he and Tony ate brochettes of beef, peppers, and onions cooked on an open fire. The beef was so tender, it had to be filet mignon.
A few miles out of Rocha, the pavement stopped abruptly, and they found themselves on a gravel road.
Christ, I should have thought about that! Clete realized, angry with himself. This is Uruguay, not Louisiana.
His concern proved unnecessary. The gravel road was wide and smooth and well cared for. Twice, the headlights picked up Caterpillar Road Graders and tractors with grading blades parked by the side of the road, which explained it.
Forty miles farther along, they came to a small town called Castillos, dark except for the bright lights of another all-night truck stop. Thirty-five miles past that they came to a still-smaller town, La Corinilla. They were almost at their destination. Finding it proved far easier than Clete thought it would be. Nestor’s map was right on the money.
Three point seven miles past La Corinilla’s Abierto Las 24 Horas truck stop, they turned right, drove 2.1 miles down a slightly more narrow, but equally well cared for gravel road, and then .6 miles down that, turned right again onto another fairly narrow road, drove .3 miles, and stopped.
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