It was August 2nd and they had made better time aboard the Hammond than he could have imagined, considering they had not gotten underway until July 23rd. Their fast sailing time had been amazing. After a few days of puking over the rails he and Sensei had grown to love the motion of the graceful ship and the sensation of being pulled across the water-covered world by the wind, slicing through heaving mountains of foaming ocean as fast as a horse could run. They really wanted to be established in Buenos Aires before Burton arrived there in mid-September. Unfortunately two monkey wrenches had been thrown into the proverbial works.

For starters, they were not in Buenos Aires! The prick captain of the Hammond was trying to break some damned record for circumnavigating South America, and decided to dump them off at Montevideo—what a shack-heap. Oh yeah, but with a church! That makes it okay to live in squalor. Let’s multiply like rats!

They knew that Burton would pass through Montevideo, but when and for how long was very sketchy. Besides, Burton had hooked up with two adventurers in Buenos Aires, and Jan and Randy were determined to be those two men.

They were sharing the pier with Herb Radcliffe, a fat bald, bearded reporter for some Midwestern newspaper, and Belson, his small skinny photographer with sweeping lamb-chop sideburns and a handlebar mustache. Belson was essentially lugging a TV set and tripod, and Herb was waddling under a load of luggage which he promptly piled onto some poor 65-pound kid at the docks in return for a penny. He had hoped to be seeing the last of these two idiots by now. But here they were, stuck in the same crappy predicament.

Isn’t this funny, in the future I could never get stuck keeping company with some idiot I’d rather mount over the fireplace unless it was in a cell.

Really, you would put Radcliffe’s head over your fireplace?

Of course not, he’d go in the gallery in the back of the den, on the bottom tier, right under Andy Severn’s earless head.

That’s right, you have standards.

He reached for his carry-case of single malt scotch he had purchased from the First Mate, uncorked one of his three fifths of the Catholic Viking nectar, snubbed the newspaper men, offered Sensei a swig—which he gladly took—and downed a few shots before corking it back up.

That’s better!

The second really lousy aspect of their predicament was the War of the Triple Alliance, some stupid genocidal spat over who owned a riverbank.

They had known all about the war; that Burton would be covering it about now, etc. That would have been no sweat if they had made Buenos Aires by clipper. Now they were stranded. Sensei, being a military buff, had of course predicted their dilemma before they made the port.

“You know that all local transport will be involved in building the supply head upriver. We—that means you gofer—will have to get creative to make it across the bay.

“And Randy just get us a small shallow draft fishing boat. The port of Buenos Aires will not be dredged for another decade or two. The harbor will only be chest high for miles out into the bay.”

He stood stunned regarding his leader, who had somehow thought to research port conditions with the same brain that was capable of tolerating Radcliffe and Belson. “Yes Sir, as you say.”

At least Uruguay was a Spanish speaking country and not some Portuguese mud-hole. Although he had never admitted it to any other member of The Service—not even your stupid brother who can’t even speak one language—he was “fluent” in Spanish.

It had originally irked him to have to learn how to speak and write in what he thought of as a subhuman language. But being the fixer on the Inside for the Arуan Brotherhood, he had been charged with developing an alliance with various Hispanic organizations. Dealing with the Blacks had been out of the question, and most of his brothers were simply too stupid to learn a second language. Probably, the one thing that had been most responsible for driving him out of the White Supremacist movement was the fact that he had little patience for stupidity, especially of the congenital variety.

Yes, the necessity of White-Brown alliances still irks me—and here I am, in need of a human solution and up to my elbows in jabbering Brown answers.

Actually there is little African and Indian blood in evidence. It looks like the Spics just wiped out the indigenous mud-people and imported a bunch of dagos who think they are White to do the dirty work.

It is looking like a well-stocked hunting preserve.

You just need to forget about those double-crossing dagos in Philly.

That’s it; a triple shot of this scotch will set you right….

…Yessss, all in Krishna baby!

No cleansing the mud from Thor’s boots yet. You have to prove yourself invaluable to Sensei and the higher ups. Then you can wax righteous in good time.

Yes, in Good Time.

It seemed that Sensei just assumed that there would be an English-speaker to act as a guide wherever they went. He had never even mentioned anything about bridging the language gap in South America.