Secret Honor (Honor Bound 3)

“Dad!” Martha protested, but when Clete and the girls laughed, she joined in too.

Enrico looked confused.

Clete started the engine, watched the oil-pressure gauge for a long moment, and then tapped the horn and drove off.

“That horn sounds like a bull in heat,” Marjorie said.

Two minutes later, as Clete turned onto the macadam road, she said, “I thought so.”

“You thought what so?”

“We’re going to the radio station, aren’t we?”

“Uh-huh.”

“And Grandpa was right, wasn’t he? That was a Nazi airplane, right?”

“Butt out, Squirt,” he said.

Then he put his foot on the brake and stopped the car, pulled on the parking brake, and got out. Marjorie slid over behind the wheel.

“You think you can find it?” he asked.

“Sure,” she said. “I was a Girl Scout, remember?”

He did in fact remember. Both Marjorie and Beth had been Girl Scouts. Beth had loved it; Marjorie had hated it from her first meeting. She had envisioned riding out on the prairie on horseback, pitching a tent, building a fire, and cooking supper under the stars. What the Girl Scouts wanted her to do, she had announced indignantly, was sell cookies that came from a factory.

She had absolutely no trouble driving the Horch, as enormous as it was. Since she had been driving tractors and trucks on Big Foot Ranch from the moment her feet could reach the pedals, this should not have been surprising.

But it was. Marjorie was slight, delicate, and feminine, and looked somehow out of place at the huge wheel of the gigantic car.

And Clete thought that now that her father was dead, the responsibility for protecting her—and Beth—was now his, and he was going to have a hard time doing that when he was here and she was back in Texas.

Ten minutes later, Marjorie gestured out the windshield toward a half-acre-size clump of pine and eucalyptus directly ahead of them.

“There it is,” she announced.

The clump of trees looked no different from any of the countless other clumps of trees scattered all over the gently rolling pampas. The trees had been put there as windbreaks. And there were perhaps twenty-five similar clumps of trees scattered all over Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo. They contained cattle ramps, usually, and corrals, and houses for the gauchos and their families, and what would have been called toolsheds on Big Foot Ranch. They were in essence miniature ranches, self-sufficient enough that the gauchos usually didn’t have to make more than a couple of trips a month to the main buildings.

In other words, a windbreak offered ideal concealment for a shortwave radio station and its antennae.

But she was right. That was what they were looking for.

She slowed the car, and three hundred yards farther down the road found a dirt road leading off to the right. She down-shifted skillfully and turned off the macadam onto it.

As they got closer to the clump of trees, the outlines of four buildings could be seen inside it.

The first person they saw as they approached the larger of the four buildings was a large, florid-faced man in his middle forties wearing the billowing black trousers, broad-sleeved white shirt, wide-brimmed hat, and leather boots of a gaucho. He was leaning on the fender of a Model A Ford coupe.

Two other automobiles were parked against the larger of the four buildings: a Model A Ford pickup truck and a 1940 Chevrolet coupe. The Chevrolet carried both the special license plates issued by the Argentine government to diplomatic personnel and an egg-shaped insignia with the letters CD.

As the gaucho walked up to them, two other men emerged from the building. Both were wearing business suits. The first was small, slim, mustachioed, and dark-skinned, with a long, thin cigar in his teeth. The other was young and muscular, his chest straining the buttons of his shirt.

“Buenas tardes, Señorita Marjorie,” the man in gaucho costume said in fluent Spanish. “Señorita Beth. Mi Mayor.”

“How are you, Chief?” Clete replied in English.

“Hi, Chief,” Marjorie called cheerfully.