Honor Bound (Honor Bound 1)

“Not yet, mi Coronel.”

Hell of a question, Clete thought, and a reply that was a little too flip for a lieutenant talking to a colonel.

“See if you can hold off for half an hour or so,” Colonel Graham said, a chuckle in his voice. “I should be there by then. Nine twenty-one, right?”

“Yes, Sir.”

The telephone went dead. Clete put the handset back in the cradle and walked toward the bedroom.

Jesus, did he speak Spanish to me?

I’ll be damned if he didn’t. That entire conversation was in Spanish. Pretty good Spanish at that. What the hell was that all about?

Clete dried himself slowly and carefully, partly to take advantage of the stack of thick, soft towels the hotel had so graciously provided for his comfort, and partly because his long exposure to soap and hot water had softened and loosened the scabs—perhaps twenty-five of them—on his legs and chest.

An incredible number of insects lived on Guadalcanal, and each variety there became addicted to Cletus’s blood. Sometimes, it seemed as if they fought among themselves for the privilege of taking their dinner from him and leaving behind a wide variety of irritations. These ranged from small sting marks to thumbnail-size suppurating ulcers.

After he finished drying, Clete walked on the balls of his feet from the bathroom to the wood-and-canvas rack beside the chest of drawers that supported his suitcase. He took from it his toilet kit—once a gleaming brown leather affair, now looking like something a mechanic was about to discard. From this he took a jar of gray paste. Despite the assurances of the Medical Corps, U.S. Navy, that the stuff was the very latest miracle medicine to soothe what the doctors somewhat euphemistically called “minor skin irritations,” he suspected that it was Vaseline.

He returned to the bathroom and with a practiced skill applied just enough of the greasy substance to protect each “minor skin irritation” without leaving enough residue to leave greasy spots on his clothing. He then returned to his toilet kit, carried it back into the bathroom, and shaved—in the process slicing the top off several “minor skin irritations.” He dealt with these new wounds by applying small pieces of toilet paper to his face. When he examined himself in the mirror, he concluded that if he was going to look like a properly turned out officer of the U.S. Marine Corps, he’d need a haircut.

He went back into the bedroom and dug into a large brown Kraft paper bag, taking from it a bra

nd-new T-shirt and cotton boxer shorts.

The Public Affairs Officer Escort had taken Clete and the other “heroes” to the Officers’ Sales Store almost directly from the Martin Mariner that had flown them from Espíritu Santo to Pearl Harbor. There, the Escort Officer suggested that they might wish to acquire new linen. Clete Frade bought six sets of underwear, six khaki shirts, six pairs of cotton socks, and two field scarves, which was what the Corps called neckties. And then, because the very idea that anyone would sleep in anything but his underwear or his birthday suit seemed absurd, he bought two sets of what their label identified as “Pajamas, Men’s, Cotton, Summer.”

Since there was no room in his one suitcase for his new acquisitions, he carried them in the paper bag the rest of the way—on a Pan American Clipper from Pearl Harbor to San Diego, and then on a chartered Greyhound bus from ’Diego to Los Angeles.

The new T-shirt was usable as is, and he put it on, but the boxer shorts reflected the Naval Service’s fascination with fastening small tags to garments with open staples. He sat down on the bed and removed eight of them—he counted—from various places on his shorts. He had just pulled the shorts on when there was a knock at the door.

It was a bellman, carrying a freshly pressed uniform. Clete went to the bedside table, opened the drawer where he had placed his wallet, his watch, and his Zippo lighter and cigarettes, and found a dollar bill. He gave it to the bellman, then hung the uniform on the closet door. When he turned, he noticed for the first time on the bedside table on the other side of the bed, an eight-by-ten-inch official-looking envelope. It wasn’t his, and he was sure that it hadn’t been there when he’d gone into the bathroom for his shower.

He picked it up. It contained something other than paper, something relatively heavy. He opened the flap and dumped the contents on the bed. Insignia spilled out: two sets of first lieutenant’s silver bars and a new set of gold Naval Aviator’s wings—and bars of ribbons, representing his decorations. There was the Distinguished Flying Cross, with its oak-leaf cluster signifying the second award; the Purple Heart Medal with its oak-leaf cluster; and the ribbons representing the I-Was-There medals: National Defense, and Pacific Theatre of Operations, the latter with two Battle Stars. The ribbons were mounted together.

The Public Affairs people again, Clete thought. The Corps doesn’t want its about-to-go-on-display heroes running around with single ribbons pinned unevenly, one at a time, to their chests; they should be mounted together. And God knows, I have never polished my first john’s bars from the day I got them. And my wings of gold are really a disgrace, when viewed from the perspective of some Corps press agent; they’re scratched, bent, and dirty.

I wonder if this stuff is a gift from the Corps, or whether they will deduct the cost from my next pay.

Clete dropped the brand-new set of glistening gold wings on the bed, then picked up the telephone.

“Room Service,” he ordered when the operator came on the line.

“Room Service,” a male voice said.

“This is Lieutenant Frade in nine twenty-one,” he said. “I would like a bottle of sour-mash bourbon, Jack Daniel’s if you have it, ice, water, and peanuts or potato chips, something to nibble on.”

His voice was soft, yet with something of a nasal twang. Most people he’d met in the Corps thought he was a Southerner, a Johnny Reb, but some with a more discerning ear heard Texas. Both were right. Clete Frade had been raised in New Orleans and in the cattle country (now cattle and oil) around Midland, Texas. He’d spent his first two years of college at Texas A&M, and then, when his grandfather had insisted, finished up (Bachelor of Arts) at Tulane.

“Lieutenant,” Room Service said, hesitantly, “you understand that only the room is complimentary?”

“I didn’t even know that,” Clete said. “But if you’re asking if I expect to pay for the bourbon, yes, of course I do.”

And I damned sure can afford it. There’s four months’ pay in Sullivan’s boots.

Sullivan was—had been—First Lieutenant Francis Xavier Sullivan, of Cleveland, Ohio, and the 167th Fighter Squadron, U.S. Army Air Corps. The Corps and the Navy had flown Grumman Wildcats off Henderson Field and Fighter One on the ’Canal. The Army Air Corps, those poor bastards, had flown Bell P-39s and P-40s. The story was, and Clete believed it, that the P-39s and P-40s had been offered to, and rejected by, both the English and the Russians before they had been given to the Army Air Corps and sent to the ’Canal. They were both essentially the same airplane, a weird one, with the engine mounted amidships behind the pilot. The one good thing they had was either a 20- or a 30-mm cannon that fired through the propeller hub. But they were not as fast or as maneuverable as the Wildcat, which meant they were not even in the same league as the Japanese Zero. And in a logistical foul-up that surprised Clete not at all, they had been sent to the ’Canal with the wrong oxygen-charging apparatus, so they could not be flown over 12,000 feet.

The pilots flying them fought, in other words, with one hand tied behind them. And one by one they were shot down, Francis Xavier Sullivan among them.