Secret Honor (Honor Bound 3)

“He’s fifteen and he can’t drive?” Clete asked incredulously. “He doesn’t look backward.”

“He can’t drive,” Enrico Mallín repeated, somewhat coldly.

“Well, then, it’s high time he learned. And Beth can teach him.”

Among the many things Enrico Mallín did not like about his son-in-law-to-be was his presumption that he had the right to offer Little Enrico things—potentially dangerous things—without first seeking his approval.

“See you at the house in forty-five minutes,” Clete said, and gestured for Dorotéa to get moving.

There was the sound of gunfire as they approached the radio station.

Clete knew what it was, and smiled.

Dorotéa looked at him in alarm and saw the smile. “What in the world is that?” she asked.

“An old Texas custom,” he said. “Good ol’ boys whiling away a dull Sunday afternoon, ventilating tin cans.”

In a locked room in one of the outbuildings near the garage, Clete had come across small-arms ammunition—enough, in his professional judgment as a Marine officer, to supply a battalion about to land on a hostile beach.

He presumed his father had cached the ammunition there before the coup d’état. Whatever the reason, he had shown it to Chief Schultz, who had loaded a dozen cases of .45 ACP pistol ammunition—1,200 rounds per case—onto his Model A pickup and taken it to the radio station.

The marksmen turned out to be Chief Schultz and three of the men of Ashton’s Western Hemisphere Team 17—Staff Sergeant Jerry O’Sullivan, a radar operator, a wiry little man with sharp features and intelligent eyes; Technical Sergeant Ferris, a trimly built man who ran the generator powering the radar and was the team’s armorer; and the team’s executive officer, First Lieutenant Madison R. Sawyer III, a large, good-looking, well-muscled young man.

O’Sullivan and Ferris were in casual civilian clothing, purchased for them by Ashton in Pila, the nearest town. Like the chief, Sawyer was wearing the billowing shirt, trousers, and boots of a gaucho.

If Sawyer was aware that he looked ridiculous popping to attention dressed that way and crisply saluting Clete, it didn’t show on his face. “Good afternoon, Sir!”

Clete returned the salute, pretending not to see that Sergeants Ferris and O’Sullivan were shaking their heads in disbelief at Sawyer’s parade-ground behavior.

“I was hoping to see you, Sawyer,” he said. “Everybody’s here?”

“Stein has the duty, Sir,” Sawyer said.

Sergeant Siegfried Stein’s family had fled Hitler’s Germany in 1935; he now had a degree in electrical engineering from the University of Chicago. He was the radar expert.

By “has the duty,” Sawyer meant that Stein was at the radar site, where the equipment was turned on once every two hours or so—never at a precise interval, but long enough to scan Samborombón Bay looking for a ship that might be a German submarine-replenishment vessel.

The crack he had made about good ol’ boys whiling away a dull Sunday afternoon had been right on th

e money, Clete thought. Not only had they been ventilating tin cans—there was a pile of bullet-riddled cans twenty-five yards from the main building—but they had also been having a beer-and-beef barbecue.

“Gentlemen, I don’t believe you know my fiancée. This is Dorotéa Mallín. Honey, the big gaucho is Lieutenant Madison Sawyer; the ugly Irishman is Sergeant Jerry O’Sullivan; and that’s Sergeant Bill Ferris.”

He waited until they had all gone through the polite motions with her, then added, “And in answer to the question that everybody’s too polite to ask, yes, she knows what you’re doing out here besides drinking beer.”

“Speaking of which?” Sawyer asked.

“Yes, indeed. Thank you very much. I was afraid you were never going to ask.”

“I’ll go get a glass for the lady,” Ferris said.

“Don’t bother,” Dorotéa said. “I like it from the bottle.”

“How did things go yesterday, skipper?” the chief asked.

“Like you know what through a goose,” Clete said. Dorotéa looked at him curiously. “I turned him over to Whatsisname—”

“Stevenson? Ralph Stevenson? Our guy in Montevideo?”