Honor Bound (Honor Bound 1)

Donovan nodded his agreement again.

“What I don’t understand, Alex,” he said, “is why you’re devoting so much of your time and effort to this.”

“It’s my mission,” Graham said, and then added, “Unless something has happened to change that?”

“I simply meant that Newton-Haddle has no doubt that his team down there will have no trouble in putting the German ship out of action.”

“‘His’ team?” Graham asked, and now there was ice in his voice.

“Newton-Haddle told me he trained them personally,” Donovan said. “That’s all I meant.”

Colonel Baxter F. Newton-Haddle, U.S. Army Reserve, was the OSS’s Assistant Director For Training, and ran the Country Club (the OSS operated a training school in Virginia at a requisitioned country club). He was a wealthy Philadelphia socialite, the archetypal WASP, as Donovan privately thought of him. Donovan was also aware that Graham, who had seen combat with the Marines in France in World War I, thought he was a strutting peacock.

Graham’s face showed that Donovan’s explanation hadn’t mollified him.

“It may be replenishment ships, plural,” he went on. “That wouldn’t surprise me. Even if they take out the ship now in the River Plate…”

“When they take it out, not if,” Donovan interrupted, with a smile he hoped would remove the tension. “Think positively, Alex.”

“…there is little question in my mind,” Graham went on as if he had not heard a word, “that the Germans will send another to replace it—or several others.”

“OK,” Donovan said. “And you think one team isn’t enough? Your mission, Alex, your decision.”

That satisfied him, Donovan thought, judging from the look on Graham’s face. And then he developed the thought: If the bad blood between Newton-Haddle and Graham gets out of hand, and I have to choose between them, I need Graham more than I need Newton-Haddle.

“Thank you,” Graham said. “Frankly, I wasn’t sure where I stood.”

“Your mission, Alex,” Donovan repeated. “Just tell me about it.”

“When I get the second team down there, the primary mission of both teams will remain the interruption of the replenishment of German submarines and any merchant raiders which may still be active there. I think we have to make two points to the Argentines: First, there is a limit to our patience; we won’t let them look the other way while the Germans replenish their warships in their waters. And second, we are willing, and capable, of playing hardball ourselves.”

“Who’s on the second team besides the son of Colonel Whatsisname?”

“Frade,” Graham furnished. “The second man is a second lieutenant I found in the 82nd Airborne Division. His family is in the industrial demolitions business in Chicago. I watched his father demolish a grain elevator next to my right-of-way in Wisconsin. Great big brick sonofabitch, eight stories high and a quarter of a mile long. He dropped it in on itself without getting so much as a loose brick on my tracks. If this kid is half as good as his father, he’s just what I need.”

“A second lieutenant?”

“And scarcely old enough to vote,” Graham said. “The third man on the team will be a Spanish Jew with German connections whose family was in Dachau…murdered there, it looks like. I found him in the Army’s Counterintelligence Corps at Camp Holabird in Baltimore. He’s an electrical engineer, and according to Dave Sarnoff at RCA, a pretty good one.”

“When do you plan to send these people to Argentina?”

“As soon as the explosives kid, his name is Pelosi, and Ettinger the Jewish chap have gone through a quickie course at the Country Club. And after we take care of their papers and make their cover stories credible.”

“Which are?” Donovan asked.

“Ettinger is well-educated, multilingual; and he’s been through the CIC training program. I want to talk to him myself—I haven’t done that yet. But I think he will fit unobtrusively into the Bank of Boston, if I can convince Nestor that he can’t use him for anything else until the replenishment-ship problem is solved.”

“Jasper Nestor’s the Station Chief in Buenos Aires,” Donovan thought out loud. “He may have other ideas where to use this fellow.”

“And this is my mission,” Graham said sharply. “Which I have been led to believe is the most important thing we have going down there right now. I hope Nestor understands that.”

“I’m sure he does. Nestor is a good man,” Donovan said. Then, suddenly and perversely unable to resist the temptation to needle Graham, he added: “Colonel Newton-Haddle thinks very highly of him.”

Good God, why did I say that? The last thing I want to do is antagonize him!

Graham’s eyes, ice cold, locked on Donovan’s for a moment. Then, his eyes still cold, he flashed Donovan a gloriously insincere smile.

“What is it they say, Bill, about birds of a feather?”