by Blood
Clete took the earphones off his head and reached up and turned the navi-gation LIGHTS switch of OFF.
Porto Alegre passed under him.
He looked at Enrico, who had his eyes closed and was making the sign of the cross.
He flew to the edge of the city, then set a course for Santo Tome.
[TWO]
Above Rio Grande do Sul Province
Brazil
2145 IB April 1943
Captain Maxwell Ashton, Signal Corps, Army of the United States, got out of his seat and walked to the cockpit door of the Lockheed, opened it, and stood behind the pilot's seats.
"Presumably, mi Mayor, you know where we are," he said to Major Cletus H. Frade, USMCR. "I can't see a goddamn thing down there."
Clete turned to look at him.
"Enrico," he ordered, "let el Capitan have your seat."
Enrico unbuckled himself and got out of the copilot's seat. Clete had the feeling he was glad to go. He motioned Ashton into the seat and gestured for him to strap himself in, and to put on his headset.
"Not entirely," Clete said. He handed Ashton an aeronautical chart. "The last X shows where we should be."
"Should be?"
"We are navigating by what is known as dead reckoning," Clete explained. "-Which means that I know that we're making about 220 knots indicated about 10.000 feet above sea level and on a heading of 310 true. I also know that we left Porto Alegre about thirty-seven minutes ago. That, presuming there are no winds aloft, should put us-two minutes ago-where I marked the X on the chart."
"OK," Ashton said, after a moment to consider this. "What's the hook?"
"There are always winds aloft," Clete said. "The problem is one never knows what sort they are. They may be coming straight at us at, say, twenty knots, which would mean that we've been making 200 knots-not 220-over the ground. Or they may be coming from behind us, which would mean that we are making 240 knots over the ground. Most likely, they are coming from one side or the other, as well as from the front or back. When there are winds, so to speak, from the side, they will push us off course, to one side or the other."
"I came up here to be reassured, thank you, very much, mi Mayor," Ashton said. "When you got this thing into the air, I thought there might be a slight pos-sibility that you actually knew what you're doing."
"What I'm actually trying to do is find the town of Carazinho," Clete said. "It's about a hundred and sixty miles northwest of Porto Alegre. You see it?"
Ashton found it on the map.
"Yeah," he said. "And there's nothing around it for miles. What happens if we miss it?"
"Because there's nothing around it, that increases our chances of finding it. We'll look for a glow on the horizon, starting about now. If, since there is noth-ing else for miles, there is a glow, it will probably be Carazinho."
"Then what?"
"Then we change course to 270 true-due west-and start looking for an-other glow, which, with a little bit of luck, will be either a village named Ijui or a town called Sao Angelo. If we hit Carazinho, it will probably be easier to find Ijui and/or Sao Angelo because there is a highway between them, down which, I devoutly hope, there will be a stream of cars, trucks, and buses, headlights on high."
"Is this the way airplane pilots normally steer?" Ashton asked.
"No. Normally, there's a radio direction finder. There's a loop antenna-it looks like a doughnut-which can be turned. You look at a meter, and when the strength of the radio signal is strongest, you can tell the antenna is pointed at the transmitter. So you just steer toward the transmitter."
"We don't have such a clever device? We have to look for buses with their headlights on?"
"The airplane has the antenna. What I don't have is the frequency of any ra-dio station, or its location. When I asked for what are cleverly called 'Aids to Navigation,' Colonel Wallace said he would have them for me by the time I fin-ished clearing Brazilian Customs."
"Do you think Wallace was born a chickenshit sonofabitch, or did he have to go to school?"
"I guess if you spend a lot of time in uniform you get used to doing things by the book, and learn to spend a lot of your time covering your ass."
"When should we be seeing this glow we're looking for?" Ashton asked.
"That may be it," Clete said, pointing with his finger straight ahead.
"Right where it's supposed to be."
"That's almost certainly an accident," Clete said. "Either that, or it isn't Carazinho."
"What else could it be?"
"Dallas, maybe," Clete said. "I'm not too good at dead reckoning."
He put the Lockheed into a shallow turn to the west.
"You're not going to fly over it to make sure?" Ashton asked. "Don't they paint the name of the town on roofs down here?"
"I wouldn't be surprised if the Brazilian Army Air Corps is looking for us," Clete said, growing serious. "By now I think it's entirely possible that Wallace has had time to both decide I'm not going back there and to consider the best way to cover his ass. Telling the Brazilians that we're overdue and probably lost would do that."
"So would telling the Brazilians a crazy Argentine stole one of his air-planes," Ashton said thoughtfully.
"With a little bit of luck, we should find the highway," Clete said. "If I stay a couple of miles to one side, we see them, and they can't see us."
"I'm impressed, mi Mayor," Ashton said.
Five minutes later, Clete spotted lights moving slowly across the terrain. When he got closer, the lights divided into two, and he could just pick out the red glow of running lights.
"I think we just found Route Sixty-six," he said.
Once the glow of Ijui faded, it was possible to pick up another glow. But as he approached this, it was obvious that it came from the lights in a far smaller town than Ijui. Sao Angelo was larger than Ijui; the glow it gave off should be larger.
Don't panic. Don't start running around looking for bright lights. You didn't do anything wrong. There is an explanation for this.
The explanation came ten minutes later, when a glow appeared on the ground past the lights he thought had to be Sao Angelo.
That's almost certainly Sao Angelo. What the other lights were was a small town, a village, not marked on the chart.
Final proof came thirty minutes later, when he saw a large glow where his chart showed him Sao Luis Gonzaga should be.
And then the glow dimmed, and then brightened, and then dimmed again and vanished.
Christ, there's a low-level cloud cover down there!
"Shit!" he said.
"Something wrong, Frade?" Ashton asked.
"Obviously, we're getting into the soup," Clete said. "Which means I have to drop down so that I can see the ground. The lower I go, the less distance I can see. and that chart doesn't have altitudes on it. I don't want to run into a rock-filled cloud."
"I'm sorry I came up here," Ashton said. "Sitting in the back, I could pre-tend I was on Eastern Airlines, about to land in Miami. Are we really in trouble?"
"That depends on what we find at five thousand feet," Clete said as he pushed the nose of the Lockheed down into a shallow descent.
They broke out of the soup at 6,000 feet, but into rain, not the clear. The ground was again visible, if not as clearly as before. The problem now was how far the area of rain extended; if it was part of an electrical storm; and-if it was raining in Santo Tome-what the rain would do to the dirt landing strip.
He leaned forward and looked out and upward through the cockpit window, then confirmed what he suspected by banking steeply and looking out the win-dow by his side.
The three-quarter moon, which had been clearly visible from the time they took off, was no longer clear. They were entering some kind of soup, perhaps even bad weather. He was flying in the clear above clouds at 4,000 or 5,000 feet, and below a layer of clouds at maybe 15,000 feet.
The glow that had to be Sao Luis Gonzaga appeared again, faintly.
I h
ave two options. I can stay on this course, dropping down to see if I can get under that cloud layer at 5,000, and follow the road-turning onto it-from Sao Luis Gonzago to Sao Borja. But to do that, I need the headlights on the road. If I can't see them, I won't know where the hell I am.
Or I can continue on this course, fix past Sao Luis Gonzaga, and try to find the Rio Uruguay. If I can find the river, I can drop down to 500 feet and fly down the river until I hit Sao Borja and Santo Tome. And if I get lucky, and there is, say, 1,500-feet visibility under the cloud layer, I can probably find that glow of their lights and just steer toward it until it breaks in two. The glow on the right will be Santo Tome.
The decision was made for him. As he dropped down, visibility worsened and the glow of Sao Luis Gonzaga vanished.
Rain began to beat against the cockpit windshield.
There was nothing to do but lose more altitude and pray that the clouds he was flying through were not rock-filled. The needle crept past 5,000 feet to 4,000 to 3,500.
A quick glance at the Hamilton confirmed his suspicion that by now he had flown past Sao Luis Gonzaga without seeing it.
He did not to have to remind himself that he was 3,500 feet above sea level, which was not the same thing as 3,500 feet above the ground; a chilling experi-ence in the Hawaiian Islands-a pineapple plantation on Maui had suddenly appeared out of the soup fifty feet below him with his altimeter indicating 2,500 feet-had burned that detail of aviation lore permanently in his brain.
According to Delgano, the field in Santo Tome was 950 feet above sea level. Call it a thousand. He was actually 2,500 feet above the ground.
Very, very slowly, he lost more altitude, until the altimeter indicated 2,500 feet. It was now getting turbulent, and, if anything, darker.
And then the cloud cover above him opened for a moment, and the light from the moon provided just a little more visibility. For a moment he could make out a light on the ground.
There was nothing to do but see what it was.
I will not go lower than a thousand feet! If I can't get through this, I'll just do a one-eighty and head back for Porto Alegre.
With the altimeter indicating a little less than 2,000 feet, the light he was approaching became clearer and then divided into two lights: red and green.
Navigation lights.
A boat! Or a ship!
It didn't matter. If it was a boat or a ship, it has to be the river!
What he could not afford to do was lose those navigation lights. He dropped lower.
There was no longer any reason to look at the altimeter. Altimeters worked on atmospheric pressure, and there was a built-in dampening system. The alti-tude indicated on the dial was the altitude the aircraft had held two, three sec-onds-he had heard as many as seven seconds-before.
He could now make out the outline of the vessel he was approaching. It was a freighter, a vessel capable of sailing the high seas. He flashed over it no more than 200 feet over its masts.
"I think you probably scared hell out of whoever was steering that," Ashton said dryly.
Clete considered that.
Hell, yes, he had scared whoever was at the wheel of the freighter. He had turned off his navigation lights as soon as he broke ground at Porto Alegre. The people on the ship certainly heard his engines, but they couldn't see anything, and it is virtually impossible to determine the direction of an airplane at night by the sound of its engines.
And then, all of a sudden, this great big sonofabitch with 2,400 unmuffled horsepower roars overhead at 220 knots.
"Serves him right," Clete said idiotically, and then started to chuckle, then giggle.
"I'm glad that someone finds this situation amusing," Ashton said, and for some reason Clete found that hilarious too.
He was laughing uncontrollably.
One part of his brain told him that what was happening wasn't at all funny, that he was experiencing a nerve overload. But that was not enough to make him stop laughing. His eyes started to water.
He lost vision, and that frightened him, and as suddenly as it had begun- the instant he pulled back on the wheel to pick up altitude-the hysterical laughter stopped.
And in that moment he saw a glow ahead. First it was a single, wide glow, and then, a moment later, it separated into two separate glows.
"We'll be landing in just a few minutes, ladies and gentlemen," Clete said. "Please put your seats in the upright position and check your seat belts."
"That's Santo Tome?" Ashton asked.
"I think so."
"You are an amazing man, mi Mayor!"
"Tell me that again when I get us on the ground," Clete said.
He steered to the right of the glow on the right, and two minutes later saw a small, very bright glow.
"I think that's the outer marker," he said. "The bonfire."
He leveled off at an indicated altitude of 2,000 feet and flew directly over the fire. He punched the button on his Hamilton and watched as the sweep sec-ond hand made its way around the dial. When the smaller dial showed that he had flown four minutes, he made a one-minute, 180-degree turn.
He could now see a faint line of small glowing spots stretched off at right angles to the wooden bonfire. He turned and carefully lined up with the "run-way." He flipped on the landing light switch, retarded the throttles, and low-ered the flaps to twenty degrees.
Where the hell is the little fire that's supposed to tell me where the wind is?
There it is! I'm flying into the wind!
This final approach looks perfect.
That's probably wishful thinking.
What I should do is fly around again and make sure I know what I'm doing.
But on the other hand, I'm not likely to make another accidentally perfect approach like this one if I do.
He reached up to the quadrant and pulled down the lever with the repre-sentation of a wheel on it.
He felt the additional drag immediately.
The green gear down and locked indicator light did not go on.
Christ, I'm going to have to go around!
I got this far, and now the gear's going to give me trouble?
The green gear down and locked indicator light came on as he flashed over the bonfire, his hand preparing to shove the throttles forward.
He took his hand off the throttles and put it on the wheel.
The wheels touched, and bounced him back into the air.
He flared again, and this time the wheels stayed on the ground.
He applied the brakes and felt the Lockheed start to skid.
He corrected, but not before he had left the "runway." Both lines of pots filled with gasoline burning in sand were to his left.
The rumble from the landing gear was frightening.
He tried the brakes again. They seemed to work for a moment, and then the Lockheed started to skid again.
He looked at the airspeed indicator. As he watched, the needle dropped abruptly to zero.
That doesn't mean we've stopped; it means we're going less than forty miles an hour.
He pushed on the brakes again, and this time they worked.
The Lockheed lurched to a stop, at the last moment turning slightly to the left.
"I'll be damned!" Captain Maxwell Ashton III said.
"Oh, ye of little faith!" Clete said, and started to shut the engines down.
"What this means, you understand, mi Mayor," Ashton said, "and I will never forgive you for this, is that I can never again make a long-shot bet. I have used up my lifetime's allocation of long-shot luck in the last two hours."
Clete felt a sudden chill.
He put his hand on his chest and found that he was sweat-soaked. And then his hands and knees began to tremble uncontrollably.
You 're a brave and intrepid Marine Aviator? Bullshit!
"What happens now?" Ashton asked.
"I'm afraid to get up," Clete said. "There is a strong possibility that I have pissed-or worse-my pants."
He be
came aware that he had not turned off either the landing lights or the main buss. As he reached for the switch he saw a dozen or more horsemen, in rain-slick ponchos, approaching the airplane from the right.
He turned off the main buss, unstrapped himself, and left his chair.
"Wait here a minute," he said. "The people who expect me here do not ex-pect you, and I'll have to come up with some sort of explanation."