Honor Bound (Honor Bound 1)

“My grandfather was not unlike yours. A difficult man.”

I don’t really give a damn about your grandfather, Ettinger.

“Really?”

“He believed what he wanted to believe, and the facts be damned. He chose to believe that despite what was going on, he was perfectly safe in Berlin. What was happening to the Jews there was happening only to the Slavic Jews, not to good German Jews like him. After all, he had won the Iron Cross as an infantry officer in France in the First World War.”

“That didn’t do him any good?”

“No. They took him away. He died ‘of pneumonia’ in a place called Sachsenhausen.”

“You hate the Germans? In the way my grandfather hates the Argentines?”

“No. I understand that the flesh is weak. If you hate weak people, you hate everybody. If you’re asking if I’m motivated to go to Argentina, yes, I think I can do—we can do—some good down there.”

“Blowing up ‘neutral’ ships?”

“That, certainly. And perhaps doing something about keeping the Argentine equivalent of the Nazis from taking over the country. The Nazis took over Germany because nobody fought back.”

Cletus Marcus Howell pushed open the curtain and came back into the small room. His eyes passed back and forth between them as if he sensed something was wrong.

“Have you asked for the car?” he demanded after a moment’s hesitation.

“No, but I will bet it’s been waiting outside for the last half hour while you bored David with our family linen.”

“I don’t think I bored Mr. Ettinger, did I, Mr. Ettinger?”

“Not at all, Sir.”

“Sometimes, Cletus, I don’t understand you at all,” the old man said. “Shall we go?”

[TWO]

The Gulf, Mobile & Ohio Railway Terminal

Canal Street

&n

bsp; New Orleans, Louisiana

1030 2 November 1942

Second Lieutenant Anthony J. Pelosi, CE, AUS, late of the 82nd Airborne Division, had been thinking—especially for the last couple of hours—that Captain McGuire was right after all: Applying for this OSS shit was a mistake; where he belonged was with the 82nd Airborne.

In another couple of weeks, he would have made first lieutenant (promotion was automatic after six months’ time in grade), and as a first lieutenant he could not be ranked out of command of his platoon. He would have been the permanent—not the temporary—commanding officer of an Engineer platoon in the 82nd Airborne Division…and not where he was, masquerading as a goddamned civilian.

When Colonel Baxter F. Newton-Haddle called him in for what he called a “pre-mission briefing,” he told him he was to report for duty in New Orleans in civilian clothing. He asked him if that was going to pose any problem. Pelosi said, “No, Sir.”

Tony Pelosi liked and admired Colonel Newton-Haddle. For one thing, the Colonel was also a paratrooper. Paratroopers are special people. In the briefing Colonel Newton-Haddle gave when they first came to the Country Club, he told them about what the people in OSS did—like making night jumps into France and Italy and connecting up with the resistance and showing them how to blow up bridges and tunnels. Doing those kinds of things would maybe make being in the OSS OK. But what he was about to do now was go into some goddamned South American neutral country where a bunch of taco eaters in big hats sat around in the shade playing guitars.

Colonel Newton-Haddle didn’t tell him much about what he was supposed to do in Argentina, except they had to “take out” a ship, some kind of a freighter that was supplying German submarines. He explained that the ship would be neutral. By “take out” Colonel Newton-Haddle obviously meant “blow up,” or at least put a hole in it large enough to sink it.

That bothered Tony Pelosi. It wasn’t a warship, but a civilian freighter. If there were people on it, they would be civilians; and if they were on the ship when he set off his charges—as sure as Christ made little apples—some of them would get hurt, get killed. German sailors were one thing, civilian merchant seamen another.

When he was in OCS, he’d studied the Geneva Convention long enough to know that if they were caught trying to blow a hole in a civilian merchant ship, they would not be treated like prisoners of war, but like criminals, maybe even pirates. If they were caught after they blew it up, and civilians had been killed, they might be put on trial in some taco eaters’ court for murder.

This wasn’t what he had had in mind when he volunteered for the OSS. Parachuting into France to show the French underground how to blow up the Nazi submarine pens at St. Lazaire was one thing; sneaking into some South American neutral country pretending to be a civilian and blowing up a civilian ship was different.