Empire and Honor (Honor Bound 7)

“Is your Tío Juan with you?”

“He’s in the back, wearing one of my father’s suits and looking very nervous. I’m over Pilar, about five minutes out. What am I going to find when I land there?”

“A battalion of the Patricios Regiment and an ambulance.”

“What’s the ambulance for?”

“Your Tío Juan.”

“He’s not that badly injured. He doesn’t need an ambulance.”

“How badly injured is he?”

“Not badly enough to need an ambulance.”

“President Farrell is waiting for him, for you and him, at the Argerich Military Hospital. The safest way to get him there is in an ambulance. Guarded by the Patricios, of course.”

“General Martín,” Perón’s voice came over the earphones. “This is the vice president of the Argentine Republic speaking.”

Startled, Clete looked over his shoulder. Perón was standing just inside the cockpit door and wearing a headset.

“Yes, sir?”

“I will of course meet el Presidente wherever he chooses,” Perón announced. “But before I go to meet him, I have to go to my apartment for a uniform. And I am not going there, or to the military hospital, or anywhere, hiding in an ambulance. I will not give the bastards who are trying to kill me the satisfaction of suggesting that I’m afraid of them.”

“Can I put my two cents in?” Cletus asked.

Perón looked at him in annoyance, considered the question, and then said, “Of course.”

“The SAA guards at the airport are all ex-Húsares—”

“Known, I believe, as Frade’s Private Army,” Perón interrupted.

Frade nodded, then went on: “They can protect you as well as the Patricios. There are probably reporters from El País and La Nación at the gates to the airport right now trying to find out what’s going on out here. If you try to leave—protected by a battalion, even a company, of the Patricios—you will be recognized and it will be all over Buenos Aires in an hour that the civil war you’re worried about has started.”

Perón considered this for a moment, then asked, “What are you suggesting?”

“There’s always a couple of station wagons on the field. They take pilots home, pick them up, that sort of thing. We can have a couple meet the airplane when I park it. You and the Húsares we have with us get in, and we drive to your apartment. Which is where, by the way?”

“The sixteen hundred block of Arenales,” Perón replied absently.

“And then when you’re in uniform, we get back in the station wagons and take you—again without attracting attention—to the military hospital. Enrico knows how to sneak in the back way.”

“I’m not going to sneak in or out of anywhere,” Perón said.

“You’d be discreet, Tío Juan, not cowardly.”

There was a long moment of silence, then Perón asked, “I presume you heard what Don Cletus said, General?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Have the station wagons and the men he speaks of meet the airplane when we land.”

“El Coronel—”

“That was an order, General, not a suggestion. Have the Patricios return to their barracks, where they will stand by in case they’re needed.”

“Yes, sir.”