He immediately bumped into him; he had come down the aisle to see what
was going on.
"I've never been on a horse in my life," Ashton said in English.
"You heard all that?" Clete asked.
Ashton nodded.
"And I'm not comfortable with them guarding our stuff," Ashton said. "So what we'll do is that I will stay aboard-"
"No," Clete said. "I don't want Coronel Porterman to get the idea we don't trust him."
"I don't trust him," Ashton said.
"If they want to take the radar away from us, there's nothing we can do to stop them," Clete said. "We will accept his hospitality."
"You trust the guy you were talking to?"
"Yes, I do," Clete said, hoping there was more conviction in his voice than he felt.
"OK," Ashton said. "Your call, Major."
Thirty minutes later, a wagon drawn by a matched pair of white-booted roans took aboard four passengers and headed through the rain toward the barracks of the Second Regiment of Cavalry.
Saddled horses had been brought from the stables along with the wagon, for Clete, Enrico, and First Lieutenant Madison R. Sawyer III, Infantry, Army of the United States, the only member of Ashton's team who said he could ride.
As they started to ride away from the Lockheed, Lieutenant Sawyer told Clete that he had "played a little polo at Ramapo Valley" while at Yale, and asked if there would possibly be a chance that he could play while he was in Ar-gentina.
"We'll see, Lieutenant," Clete said.
He looked over his shoulder.
Four troopers of the Second Cavalry, short-barreled Mauser carbines hang-ing muzzle downward from their shoulders, had set up a moving perimeter guard around the tied-down Lockheed.
To one side, maybe a dozen others were squatting around a bonfire under a quickly erected tent fly. A dozen horses stood stoically in the rain, their reins tied to a rope suspended between two tree limbs jammed into the ground.
If it wasn't for the Lockheed, Clete thought, this could be the plains of West Texas in 1890.
[THREE]
USS Alfred Thomas DD-107
26ø 35" South Latitude 42ø 45" West Longitude
0615 17 April 1943
Lieutenant Commander Paul Jernigan, a neat, thin Annapolis graduate who was six months shy of being twenty-nine years old, pushed himself out of his pedestal-mounted, leather-upholstered bridge chair-the captain's chair-and walked to the navigation room.
His ruddy-faced, Irish, twenty-three-year-old navigator, Lieutenant (j.g.) Thomas Clancy, USN, and Ensign Richard C. Lacey, USNR, a short, somewhat pudgy twenty-two-year-old, who was the communications officer of the Thomas, were bent over the chart.
"She appears to be picking up speed, Skipper," Clancy said. "Lacey esti-mates she's now making twenty-two knots."
"She" was a vessel they hoped was a Spanish-registered merchantman called the Comerciante del Oceano Pacifico. They had been looking for her for almost four days. There had been an OPERATIONAL IMMEDIATE, the high-est-priority communication, from the Navy Department.
TOP SECRET
OPERATIONAL IMMEDIATE