by Blood
Where there was grass, often there was not mud. The airstrip here had not been used, except to graze cattle. The strip itself might be all right.
One criterion to judge by would be how far the Lockheed's wheels had sunk into the ground overnight. It was to be expected that they would sink in somethere was 18,000 pounds resting on maybe two square feet of tire sur-face-but sometimes that didn't prohibit taxiing and takeoff.
A Wildcat could often be rocked out of tire ruts using the engine alone, or helped by people pushing. But you could feel a Wildcat and operate the throttle accordingly. The Lockheed was too heavy to feel, and probably would be diffi-cult to push.
He had a quick mental image of a team of horses pulling the Lockheed out of tire ruts with a rope tied to the gear.
And then he had another thought. The Lockheed no longer weighed 18,000 pounds. It weighed 18,000 pounds less the weight of the fuel consumed be-tween Porto Alegre and Santo Tome, and while he hadn't done what a good pi-lot should have done-checked to see how much fuel remained-he figured he had burned at least a thousand pounds of AvGas, and possibly more. Maybe even two thousand pounds.
If they topped off the tanks here, that would mean adding that weight back, which very well might spell the difference between sinking into the ground and being able to taxi and take off.
He could also considerably lighten the aircraft by off-loading the ton of radar equipment and not taking anyone with them. That would get the aircraft into the air and to Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo, where it was needed, at the price of worrying how to get Ashton, his team, and the radar to the shore of Samboromb¢n Bay.
"Don't start fueling it until I have a look at it," Clete said.
"We are pressed for time," Delgano said.
"Getting that airplane, fully loaded, off of here may be difficult. Hold off on topping off the tanks," Clete ordered firmly, as another problem entered his mind.
Delgano nodded, agreeing with the takeoff problem.
"And we're probably going to need more runway than I thought we'd need for the C-45," Clete went on. "Which means we have to walk some more to make sure there's nothing out there we'll run into."
"We have to get that airplane to Buenos Aires Province as soon as possi-ble," Delgano said.
"If I can't get it off the ground here, it'll never get to Buenos Aires Province," Clete said. "The lighter it is, the better a chance I have."
Delgano nodded again.
They were now at the door to the officers' mess.
"I'll be in in a minute," Clete called to Ashton, then turned to Delgano: "I'd try to get it off with the fuel aboard, but I know I don't have enough to make Es-tancia San Pedro y San Pablo. What I'm thinking is going from here to a regu-lar airfield, and taking on fuel there."
"That would call attention to us," Delgano argued.
"The safest thing to do would be to unload my cargo here, leave my pas-sengers here, and you and I take off alone, with the fuel now on board, and re-fuel somewhere between here and Buenos Aires."
Delgano nodded. "What's your cargo?"
"I don't think you want to know," Clete said.
"Explosives?"
"I don't think you want to know," Clete repeated.
"I think I should know," Delgano said.
"Are you familiar with radar?" Clete asked.
"I know what it is, of course. A radar? What are you going to do with a radar?"
"Guess," Clete said.
"My best information-el Coronel Martin's best information-" Delgano said without missing a beat, "is that there is no German replenishment vessel in Samboromb¢n Bay."
"That was yesterday," Clete said. "If I left my cargo and my passengers here, could you arrange transportation for them and guarantee their safe arrival to Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo?"
"No," Delgano said after some thought. "I could get a truck, but there would be at least a dozen checkpoints on the highway between here and there. Authorization from Colonel Porterman-a shipping manifest-might get them past the Army checkpoints, but not those of either the Polic¡a Federal or the Provincial Police. They would want to check the cargo against the manifest. The only way I could ensure getting through them would be to be there and I have to be with the airplane."
Clete grunted thoughtfully.
"They could stay here until after..." Delgano suggested.
"And if the coup d'‚tat fails, then what happens to them?" Clete didn't wait for a reply. "I'm not going to leave them here. That brings us back to two choices: taking off with them aboard, which I'm not at all sure I can do, or leav-ing them here, to make it by road to some airfield near here where I can get 110-130-octane aviation gasoline."
"Posadas," Delgano said immediately. "It's 130 kilometers from here; two hours, maybe a little less, by truck."
"Long-enough runways? Capable of handling the Lockheed?"
Delgano nodded.
"OK. Posadas it is. Let's get some breakfast."
If the fuel gauges were to be trusted-and Clete had learned from painful ex-perience that this was something wise birdmen did not do-there was just barely enough fuel remaining aboard to get them to Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo.
That was not good news; he would have been happier if the tanks had con-tained just enough AvGas to get them to Posadas. The Lockheed would have been that much lighter.
He briefly considered pumping gas out of the tanks. That was obviously not practical. It would have been time-consuming in itself. And, since there were no empty barrels at the landing field to pump it into, they would have had to wait until empty barrels could be brought from the barracks out to the strip.
A second truck sent from the barracks to take aboard the radar had made it out to the Lockheed without trouble. By driving across the grass of the pampas, Clete noted somewhat smugly, and staying off the muddy road.
He was almost through giving Capitan Delgano enough of a cockpit check-out to enable him to work the landing gear and flaps controls on orders, and to operate the radio direction finding system, when Captain Maxwell Ashton III came up to the cockpit.
"The radar's on the truck," he announced. "But just between you and me, mi Mayor, I'm more than a little nervous to see my radar going off by itself."
"There will be no awkward questions asked at checkpoints of five happy Brazilian civilians in a civilian car," Clete said. "There would be if you guys were on an Army truck."
"OK," Ashton said. "Good luck!"
"If I can't get this thing out of here, you're on your own," Clete said. "I'm sorry about that."
"Yeah, well, let's see what happens," Ashton said.
He touched Clete's shoulder, then turned and left the cockpit.
Clete looked around the cockpit a moment, then got up and walked through the cabin to make sure the door was closed properly. When he returned to the cockpit, had strapped himself in, and looked out the window, he saw that the thorough Capitan Delgano had arranged for a fire extinguisher to be present against the possibility of fire when the engines were started.
It was not, however, the latest thing in aviation-safety technology. It looked as if it belonged in a museum. It was a wagon-mounted water tank, with a pump manned by four cavalry troopers. Presumably, if there was a fire, and the four of them pumped with sufficient enthusiasm, a stream of water could be directed at it.
But since water does not extinguish oil or gasoline fires with any efficiency, all it was likely to do was float burning oil and/or AvGas out of the engine na-celle over the wing and onto the ground.
Clete threw the master buss switch and yelled "Clear!" out the window.
The four cavalry troopers, startled, took up their positions at the pump han-dles.
Clete set the throttles, checked the fuel switch, and reached for the left en-gine START Switch.
The left engine started, smoothed down, and he started the right engine.
He looked at Delgano, who smiled, and crossed himself.
Clete took off the brakes
and nudged the left throttle forward. The Lock-heed shuddered, and then the left wheel came out of the depression it had made during the night. Clete advanced the right throttle, and the right wheel came out.
He straightened the Lockheed out, then taxied back between the clay pots marking the runway, and then down it as far as he could to where he decided the downward slope of the "runway" was going to be too much to handle.
He turned the plane around, and saw that the wheels had left ruts six inches deep.
"Here we go," he announced matter-of-factly, and moved the throttles to takeoff power.
The Lockheed shuddered, and for a moment seemed to refuse to move. Then it began to move.
It picked up speed very slowly, and then suddenly more quickly. Life came into the controls. He pushed the wheel forward a hair to get the tail wheel off the ground, then held it level until he felt it get light on the wheels. He edged the control back, and a moment later the rumbling of the gear stopped.
"Gear up!" he ordered.
Thirty seconds later, as he banked to the left, setting up a course for Posadas, he glanced at Delgano.
"This is a fine airplane!" Delgano said.
"I don't know about you, Capitan," Clete said, "but I always have more trouble landing one of these things than I do getting one off."
"I have faith in you, mi Mayor," Delgano said. "For the very best of rea-sons."
"Which are?"
"Because you are in here with me."
Chapter Twenty-One
[ONE]
Posadas Airfield
Posadas, Missiones Province, Argentina
0930 18 April 1943
It was a twenty-five-minute flight from Santo Tome to Posadas, which turned out to be a recently and extensively expanded airfield shared by Aerol¡neas Ar-gentina and the Air Service of the Argentine Army.
Clete managed to put the Lockheed down on the field's new, wide concrete runways without difficulty. A pickup truck flying a checkered flag met them at the taxiway turnoff and led them to a new hangar, where a dozen soldiers of the Air Service, Argentine Army, were waiting to push the Lockheed into a hangar.
The aircraft normally parked in the hangar-a half-dozen Seversky P-35 fighter planes-were parked outside. Clete stared at them with fascination. In high school, he made a tissue-covered balsa wood model of the fighter. He was so fond of it that he was never able to find the courage to wind up its rubber band and see if it would fly.
When Clete was in high school, the Seversky was about the hottest thing in the sky. Dreaming of one day flying it, Clete could still remember its capabili-ties: It had a Pratt & Whitney 950-horsepower engine, which gave it a 280-m.p.h. top speed; and it was armed with two.30-caliber machine guns firing through the propeller and could carry three 100-pound bombs, one under each wing and the third under the fuselage.
The F4F-4 Wildcat Clete flew on Guadalcanal had six.50-caliber machine guns, and was powered by a 1,200-horsepower Pratt & Whitney engine, which gave it a 320-knot top speed. The F4U Corsair, which was already in the Pacific to replace the Wildcat, had a 2,000-horsepower Pratt & Whitney engine, a top speed of 425 knots, and in addition to its six.50-caliber machine guns could carry a ton of bombs.
Clete had never seen a P-35 before. It was obsolete long before Clete went to Pensacola for basic flight training. There was something very unreal about seeing them parked here, obviously ready for action.
If the Brazilians decided to bomb Argentina with the B-24s I saw parked at Porto Alegre, and the Argentines sent up these P-35s to attack them, it would be a slaughter. The multiple.50s in the B-24s' turrets would be able to knock the P-35s out of the sky long before the P-35s got into firing range of their.30-caliber guns.
Why am I surprised? They're still practicing how to swing sabers from the backs of horses in Santo Tome.
The Lockheed was equally fascinating to the Argentine pilots standing by their Severskys. To judge from the looks on their faces, they had never seen a Lockheed Lodestar before.
As soon as the Lockheed was inside the hangar, the doors were closed. Clete and Delgano walked through the cabin, opened the door, and found a ma-jor and a captain waiting for them.
They were introduced to Clete as the commanding officer and the executive officer of the Fourth Pursuit Squadron, but no names were provided by Del-gano. He referred to Clete as "Major," without a last name.
It was obvious that the Major and the Captain were participants in Outline Blue, and that they were not only nervous about having the Lockheed at their field but deeply curious to get a better look at it.
Delgano, sensing that, suggested to Clete that he show them around the air-plane. While they were in the cockpit, the hangar door opened wide enough to permit a hose from a fuel truck to be snaked inside, and the tanks were topped off.
The curious pilots and ground crewmen outside the hangar were not per-mitted inside.
By the time Ashton's team arrived at Posadas-crammed into the same 1939 Ford Clete used to find Ashton in the Automobile Club Hotel-Clete was able to receive a somewhat rudimentary weather briefing and, with Delgano watching over his shoulder, to lay out the flight plan.
The truck with the radar arrived ten minutes after Ashton and his men. The crates were loaded aboard, and then the passengers.
The Major and the Captain shook hands rather solemnly with Clete and Delgano, and then the hangar doors were opened again. Ground crewmen pushed the Lockheed back out onto the tarmac. Two men with a bona fide air-craft fire extinguisher on wheels appeared. Three minutes after Clete started the engines, he lifted the Lockheed off the runway and set course for Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo.
[TWO]
Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo
Near Pila, Buenos Aires Province
1205 18 April 1943
Once he found the cluster of buildings around the Big House on Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo, Clete dropped close to the ground and went looking for the radio station. He wanted to see if he could find it-if he could find it from the air, then somebody else also could-and to let Ettinger, the Chief, and Tony, if he was there, know he had returned.
He had a good idea where the station was in relation to the Big House, but still had a hard time finding it. When he did, pleasing him, he could see nothing that would identify it from the air as a radio station. The three reddish sandstone buildings visible in the clearing were essentially identical to other buildings in other stands of trees all over the estancia. Such buildings were used as housing and for any number of other purposes in connection with the operation of the ranch.
He was, in fact, not entirely sure he had found the right buildings until, on his third pass over the clearing, a gaucho he recognized as Schultz came out of one of them and gazed up with curiosity.
Clete dipped his wings and turned toward the landing strip at the Big House.
Clete was not very concerned about putting the Lockheed onto the estancia strip. When he'd flown the stagger-wing into it he had more than enough run-way, and he had enough experience with the Lockheed to have a feel for its landing characteristics.
But, as he took deeply to heart the saying that a smugly confident pilot is the one who is about to badly bend his airplane, he set up his approach very carefully. He came in low and slow and greased the Lockheed onto the strip within twenty feet of the whitewashed line of rocks that marked the end of the runway. He had a good thousand feet of it left when he brought the Lockheed down to taxi speed.
"Nice landing," Delgano said.
"Thank you," Clete said. "This thing isn't as hard to fly as I thought at first."
Clete turned the Lockheed off the runway and taxied toward the hangar.
I wonder if we can get this great big sonofabitch in that little hangar?
Because Second Lieutenant Cletus H. Frade, USMCR, of VMF-221 had re-ceived a truly magnificent ass-chewing on Henderson Field on Guadalcanal for using too much of his Wildcat engine's power in similar circumstances, he now remembere
d to use the Lockheed's engines very carefully to turn the airplane around so that it pointed away from the hangar without flipping over one or more of the Piper Cubs parked near it.
That done, he started to shut it down. This time he checked the gauges for remaining fuel. He still had enough aboard, he quickly calculated, to make it back and forth to Montevideo, and probably enough to make it one-way to Porto Alegre.
He unfastened his harness and started to slide out of his seat.
Delgano stopped him by laying a hand on top on his.
"We must talk," Delgano said.