Honor Bound (Honor Bound 1)

“Is that so?”

“You’re the only child. They consider you an Argentine national. That’s it.”

“How will that Argentine national business affect me if they find out I helped sink the Reine de la Mer?”

“Interesting question,” Graham said matter-of-factly. “I don’t know.” He looked at Clete and smiled. “Don’t get caught.”

The housekeeper brought in a telephone, set it on the table beside Clete, and then plugged it into the wall. She then took the handset from the cradle, handed it to Clete, and announced, “El Coronel, Señor Cletus.”

“Cletus? This is your father.”

“Hola, Papá,” Clete said, smiling.

“Papá?” el Coronel repeated incredulously, then went on: “The reason I called, Cletus, is about tonight.”

Tonight? What the hell is he talking about?

“I wanted to make sure you asked Señor Graham to join us, in case you have not already done so.”

Jesus, I asked him to have the Princess and her family to dinner. And that’s tonight.

“I just about forgot about tonight, to tell you the truth.”

There was ample justification for forgetting a dinner. A hell of a lot was going on at the estancia. There was far more involved in setting things up—secretly—than Clete expected when he started.

Setting up a high-powered radio transmitter and receiving station, Clete learned, was not simply a matter of erecting a couple of towers and stringing a piece of wire between them.

To begin with, there was no topographical map of the estancia and its surrounding areas, something that Chief Schultz considered a necessity for locating the transmitter site.

In the absence of a good map, finding a transmitter site entailed several hour-long flights in the Beechcraft, mostly at fifty feet off the ground, so that Schultz could find suitable high ground. They found several possibilities, but these had to be narrowed down, taking into account that the site had to be easily accessible to transport. That was because the material to erect the towers, a gasoline generator to power the radios, the radios themselves, and a small building to house everything had to be transported there. And then there had to be an emergency exit route to move the radios quickly away, in case of an invasion by Argentines who had triangulated the antenna location.

They’d have ample warning of such an invasion. There already was an in-place system of what the Marine Corps would call perimeter patrols. Every possible access route to the interior of Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo was watched around the clock by gauchos working (and sleeping) on the pampas, or else by the proprietors of small cantinas (small general stores which also serve food) and pulperías (male-only bars). These businesses operated at the pleasure of el Coronel Frade; they were happy to keep him advised of strangers.

The warning system had to do with Clete’s father’s involvement with the Grupo de Oficiales Unidos, which in turn had something to do with what his father said about deposing the current President of Argentina. His father and his G.O.U. associates obviously didn’t want people snooping around Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo. Hence the in-place perimeter security operation.

There was no way to avoid, however, having the takeoffs and landings of the Beechcraft witnessed by a very curious el Capitán Gonzalo Delgano, Argentine Army Air Service, Retired, and other members of what Clete came to think of as the San Pedro y San Pablo Air Force. In addition to the Beechcraft, there were five Piper Cubs based at the estancia. Three belonged to el Coronel, and two to Señora Carzino-Cormano. These were for use on her estancia, but they were based for convenience at Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo.

Delgano and the other pilots lived on the estancia in what amounted to a small village not far from the ranch house. The village housed the estancia’s professional staff: the estancia manager; a doctor; a veterinarian; the schoolmaster; a resident engineer, and so on.

“They are my people; they can be trusted to do what they are told without asking questions,” Clete’s father told him when that question came up during a meeting with Graham.

Apparently operating on the theory that if orders came via Suboficial Mayor Rodríguez they came from el Coronel, the estancia manager and the resident engineer provided anything asked of them without argument or question. Delgano was not so agreeable. Probably because he regarded the Beechcraft as his personal property before the arrival of el Coronel’s son from the Estados Unidos, he was visibly petulant when Clete politely told him he would not need his services to fly the Beech.

But when the petulance was replaced by a suspicious anxiety to be as helpful as possible, Clete and Graham decided that whether Delgano could be completely trusted or not, a little deception seemed called for when it came time to make the in-flight tests of Tony’s and Chief Daniels’s flares.

The tests were conducted in two phases: First they used inert charges (the magnesium of the flares replaced with sand)—to test the opening of the parachute and the timing of Tony’s homemade detonating devices. And finally they tried fully functioning flares.

Dropping them required removing the door of the Beechcraft. Unfortunately, this could not be done in flight. And it couldn’t be done at the estancia’s airstrip, either: Clete and Graham knew that Delgano’s curiosity—as would their own, in similar circumstances—would shift into high gear if he saw them taking the door off, loading mysterious packages into the plane, and then taking off.

The solution they came up with was to use a landing strip—a straight stretch of dirt road with a wind sock—in a remote corner of Señora Carzino-Cormano’s Estancia Santa Catharina. They

sent Tony there in the Buick with the flares. Then they flew the Beech there with Chief Daniels as a passenger. They took off the door, loaded the flares, went up and dropped them, landed on the dirt strip to drop Tony off and put the door back on, and then flew back to the field at Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo

When they were in the air over Estancia Santa Catharina, Capitán Delgano twice “happened” to be making a routine flight in one of the estancia’s Piper Cubs. But the Beechcraft was so much faster than a Cub, losing him was no problem.

Neither Graham nor Clete was happy with el Coronel’s confidence in el Capitán Delgano, but there was nothing they could do about it.

“And if you forgot dinner with the Mallíns,” el Coronel said, sounding annoyed, “it would follow that you forgot to ask Señor Graham for the pleasure of his company. I think that good manners requires that you—we—do so.”