Honor Bound (Honor Bound 1)
Page 137
“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