Dieter began: “The colonel—”
“I asked you to call me Clete,” Frade interrupted.
“—Clete tells me he taught you how to fly,” Dieter went on.
“That he did. And when my father found out, I was grounded for thirty days.”
“Grounded?”
“No movies, no radio, no bicycle, nothing but school and looking at the ceiling in my room. For a month.”
Clete laughed. “They were pissed, weren’t they? Possibly because you had just turned fourteen.”
“Clete also told me you got pretty good at it.”
“Clete never told me that.”
“I was wondering why you didn’t follow him into the Corps of Marines as a pilot.”
“I wondered about that, too,” Clete said, glancing over his shoulder.
“You really want to know?” Jimmy asked.
Clete, looking forward again, nodded. “Yeah.”
Jimmy turned to Dieter and said, “Clete joined the Boy Scouts. When I was old enough, I joined the Boy Scouts. He got to be an Eagle Scout. I got to be an Eagle Scout. He went away to school, and the next year I went away to the same school.”
“Saint Mark’s,” Clete offered, “from which you got the boot.”
“Because I got caught running the poker game you taught me how to run,” Jimmy said, looking at Clete. He looked back at Dieter and went on: “Then Clete went to A&M—”
“To what?”
“Texas Agricultural and Mechanical University,” Clete furnished.
“So I went to A&M. Then Clete dropped out and went to play tennis at Tulane and then into the Marine Corps and became a Naval Aviator. And then the Marine recruiters showed up at College Station—my clue to follow him into the Marine Corps and become a Naval Aviator.”
“And?” Clete said.
“I had an epiphany. It was time for me to stop following Cletus.”
“No kidding?” Clete said.
“No kidding.”
“Then why didn’t you go in the Air Corps?”
“Two reasons. One, that would have been following you as a pilot.”
“But you are a pilot. You’ve had a commercial ticket and an instrument ticket since you were eighteen.”
“And a multi-engine ticket and fifty hours as pilot-in-command of my father’s Beechcraft Model 18. And while I was doing that, I had another epiphany.”
“Which was?” Clete said.
“It was just about the time the Marines were trying to recruit me. I was home from College Station for the weekend. Dad had some people at the ranch who had to go back to Dallas. He said, ‘We’ll have Jimmy fly us there in the Beech.’ And they said, ‘Oh, is your son a pilot?’ or words to that effect, to which Dad replied, bursting with pride, ‘Oh, yes. He soloed just after he turned fourteen. He’s one hell of a pilot’ or words to that effect.
“So there I was, at the end of Twenty-two at Midland Airport, with my father and my mother and three of his pals and their wives in the back, and the tower says, ‘Beech Six Four Four, you are cleared for takeoff.’ And I put my hand on the throttles and said, ‘Six Four Four rolling’—and then had my epiphany.”
“Which was?”
“‘What the fuck am I doing here, about to take eight people into the air? I’m a lousy pilot and I know it. I don’t even like flying. My stomach knots every time I put my hand on the throttle quadrant. The only reason I’m flying is so that I can be like Cletus. And being like Cletus is not a good enough reason to risk my life, not to mention other people’s lives.’
“So I went in the Army, not the Marine Corps, and when I was in Officer Basic School and they came and said, ‘We see you’ve got twelve hundred hours and an instrument ticket and a multi-engine ticket. So as soon as you finish here, we’re going to make you an Army aviator, a liaison pilot,’ I said, ‘No, thank you just the same, I’ll drive a tank.’”
“You’re serious, aren’t you?” Clete asked.
“Yeah.”
“I’m sorry, Jimmy,” Clete said, his tone sincere.
“And then they found out that Dad and General Donovan were World War One buddies, and sent me to the Counterintelligence Corps.”
“I’m sorry, Jimmy,” Clete repeated.
“Don’t be. If I hadn’t been drafted into the CIC, I wouldn’t be here about to seize a half-ton of uranium oxide and maybe a German submarine for the U.S. government.”
He exhaled audibly and added, “Thus making the world safe for democracy and Mom’s apple pie.”
Clete chuckled. “I guess this means you don’t want to shoot touch-and-gos in my Lodestar.”
“You don’t understand, Clete. I’m happy to shoot touch-and-gos in your Lodestar, providing you’re sitting in the left seat. What I don’t like to do—what I’ve stopped doing—is flying by my lonesome.”
Dieter von und zu Aschenburg grunted.
“I knew others like you,” he said, nodding. “Both fighter pilots. One in France, and a second in the East.”
“How’d you find out about them?” Jimmy said.
“They told me. I guess you’ve heard that fighter pilots drink more than they should.”
“What happened to them?” Jimmy pursued.
“They didn’t have a choice, Jimmy, so they continued flying until they went down.”
Jimmy met his eyes, and thought, Meaning of course that you—and probably Clete, too—think I’m a coward for not following Clete into the Marines and the cockpit of a fighter.
Well, maybe I am. That’s what it looks like.
Why the hell did I open this bag of worms?
“If you ‘turned in your wings’ in the Luftwaffe,” von und zu Aschenburg went on, “you were assigned to a penal battalion. You went to the front as a rifleman, and you stayed there until you were killed. If you were wounded, when you got out of the hospital, you went back to the penal battalion. The people I’m talking about knew this, so they kept flying.”
Jimmy shook his head.
“What I’m saying, Jimmy, is they didn’t have a choice. Be glad you did.”
“Even if it brings my yellow streak out in the open?”
“I don’t think you’re a coward, and I don’t think Clete does, either. Trying to stay alive isn’t cowardice. It’s common sense. Be glad you had the choice—and the courage to make it. Walking into suicide isn’t bravery . . . it’s stupidity.”
“Hey! Hey!” Clete said, suddenly and excitedly. “Look at this!”
They looked where he was pointing.
On the road ahead, half a dozen gendarmes armed with Mauser submachine guns were leading at least that many men—dressed in military field clothing, their hands locked at the back of their necks—toward a canvas-roofed gendarmerie truck.
“I would hazard the guess those are the people who have been surveilling us,” Clete said. “After we shoot our touch-and-gos, we’ll stop by the gendarmerie barracks in Mendoza and see what the gendarmes have found out about who they are. Five-to-one they’re from the Tenth Mountain, but you never know.”
[TWO]
El Plumerillo Airfield
Mendoza, Mendoza Province, Argentina
1025 21 October 1945
As they drove onto the airport, the Howell Petroleum Corporation Constellation was just lifting off. It flashed over them, retracted its landing gear, and went into a steep climb.
Clete Frade’s first reaction to this was to tell Dieter von und zu Aschenburg and Jimmy Cronley that the first problem in flying from Mendoza to Santiago de Chile was picking up enough altitude to get over the Andes.
“It’s not a problem in a Connie,” he said. “But when we started SAA with Lodestars, I was going to call it ATAA—Around and Through the Andes Airlines—because the Lodestars can’t make enough altitude to get over some of the mountains.”
Then he had a second thought, and said it aloud: “They should have been out of here before this. Siggie must have had trouble installing the Collins 7.2.”
—
They found Master Sergeant Siggie Stein in Hangar Two, and he apologized for taking so long to install the Collins radio.
“That happens, Colonel,” he said.
“Well, they’re on their way to Santiago,” Frade said. “What are you doing in here?”
Stein pointed to a Lodestar painted in the SAA color scheme.
“That’s not working, either. The plane’s more badly shot up than we thought.”
Cronley realized that the Lodestar was the one in which Frade had flown Perón from Buenos Aires. When he looked closer he saw bullet holes in the fuselage.
“The mechanics were able to fix the hydraulics,” Stein explained, “and there was no damage to the engines. But the radios—you have zero radios. . . .”
“They were working when I landed,” Frade protested.
“They aren’t now, Colonel,” Stein said. “And they can’t replace the shot-out windows or patch the bullet holes here. That’ll have to be done in Buenos Aires, which means that this is going to have to be flown there, which means, since it doesn’t have any navigation equipment—except for a magnetic compass—that it will have to be shepherded there by another airplane—another Lodestar—that does have working navigation equipment.”
“But it is flyable?”
“The mechanics say so, but there’s been no pilots to give it a test hop, so the answer to your question is ‘probably.’”
“Well, there’s one way to find out,” Frade said. “Get a tractor to drag it outside and call for the fuel truck.”
Frade turned to von und zu Aschenburg and asked, “Do you say ‘kill two birds with one stone’ in German? As in ‘combine test flight with touch-and-goes’?”
“Zwei Fliegen mit einer Klappe schlagen,” Dieter said.
“The German phrase that comes to my mind,” Jimmy said, “is drei Piloten mit einem Flugzeug schlagen.”
“‘Kill three pilots with one airplane’?” Dieter translated. “I like that.”
“For Christ’s sake, Dieter, don’t encourage him,” Frade said, laughing.
—
After the tractor had pulled the Lodestar from the hangar, and it had its tanks topped off, Clete conducted the walk-around while Jimmy and Dieter got to see the bullet holes in the fuselage close up.
When they boarded, Jimmy got to see the holes again as he followed Clete and Dieter up the aisle toward the cockpit. And he saw where the shot-out window had been. It now was covered with a plywood patch. He also saw that the upholstery on the seat and the carpet under the seat were stained, and wondered what that was.
And then understood that he was looking at a bloodstain.
That’s where Perón was sitting.
If he lost that much blood, he damn near died.
And when they were talking about General Martín getting shot, they said it was possible, even likely, that he had been hit by the same machine gun that had “shot up Clete in the Lodestar.”
And then he had another epiphany, a frightening one.
They really are trying to kill people around here.
And I am one of the people that someone is going to try to kill.
Why didn’t I understand that before?
Did I think the Thompson on the seat of the station wagon just now—or, for that matter, the one Clete keeps in his wardrobe back in Buenos Aires—was there to shoot beer bottles?
And everybody here—except Mrs. Howell, Marjie, and Beth—has been shot at before.
What are you going to do, Jimmy Cronley, when someone takes a shot at you—which is probably going to happen in the next forty-eight hours?
You know you’re a coward. Otherwise you would have followed Clete into the Marine Corps. Dieter was just being a nice guy when he said trying to stay alive isn’t cowardice.
So, what the hell are you going to do?
“Get your ass up here,” Clete shouted from the cockpit. “I don’t want to have to do this cockpit orientation twice.”
Jimmy hurried up the aisle and sat on the jump seat behind the pilot’s and co-pilot’s seats. When Frade had finished explaining the functions of all the switches and levers, he said, “And this is how we start the engines. Pay attention.”
I will pay attention because I’m here and have no choice.
But it will be a cold day in hell before I start the engines on this airplane alone.
Or any other airplane.
—
Three hours later, as Cronley brought the Lodestar to the end of its landing roll, Frade said, “Well, Jimmy, that last landing wasn’t especially awful. Another ten hours or so of my expert instruction and I might be tempted to sign you off on this airplane.”
Wasn’t he listening in the station wagon?
Or was he listening and pretending that didn’t happen?
I can’t let it go.
“Clete, I will fly your airplane anywhere in the world—except maybe to the mouth of the Magellan Strait—just as long as you’re sitting right there in the left seat. Weren’t you listening before?”
Frade met his eyes for a long moment and then said, “Yeah, I was listening. I was trying to talk you out of what you said.”
“Don’t.”
After another long moment, Frade said, “Okay. Your call. But I think you’re wrong. Now park the airplane and then we’ll go see what the gendarmes found out.”
[THREE]
Gendarmería Nacional Barracks
Mendoza, Mendoza Province, Argentina
1415 21 October 1945
“Why do I think General Nervo is here?” Cletus Frade said, pointing to a glistening black 1942 Buick Roadmaster sitting in front of a large NO PARKING! sign by the front door of the building. A small Argentine flag flew from a mast on the right front fender and a small Gendarmería Nacional flag was similarly mounted on the left front fender.
“You’re just guessing that’s his car,” Jimmy Cronley said, playing along. “There must be . . . I don’t know . . . a hundred, maybe more, cars just like that around.”
When they got inside the building, Frade, von und zu Aschenburg, and Cronley were shown into the office of the commander of the Mendoza District of the Gendarmería.
General Santiago Nervo was sitting at the commander’s desk, and the commander, a gendarmerie comandante—major—was sitting backward on a folding chair. Both of them were looking through a plate glass window into a small room.
In the room, Subinspector General Pedro Nolasco and a pleasant-appearing young man were sitting at a metal table to which the young man was attached with handcuffs.
“Say hello to Comandante Sanchez,” Nervo greeted them.
“I know Don Cletus, of course,” Raul Sanchez said.
“Comandante,” Frade said, and they shook hands.
“Do you remember, Raul,” Nervo asked, “when the Germans, during the war, were flying that four-engined airplane here from Europe? The Condor?”
“Of course.”
“The pilot was this gentleman,” Nervo said, “Dieter von und zu Aschenburg, who came here to give Don Cletus flying lessons.”
Sanchez smiled.
“And this young man, James Cronley, is another gringo,” Nervo said. “A very unusual young man.”
“How is that, my general?” Sanchez asked.
“He is a subteniente who not only can find his ass with only one hand, but without assistance.”
“I can only hope, Teniente,” Sanchez said, smiling at Cronley, “that Don Cletus has warned you about General Nervo.”
Nervo looked at Cronley.
“How did the flying lesson go?” he asked.
“If I give them just a little more training,” Jimmy said, “I think the both of them could be permitted to fly short distances without supervision.”
Nervo and Sanchez laughed.
“What’s going on in there?” Frade asked, pointing at the window.
“The young fellow is Captain Guillermo O’Reilley of the Tenth Mounta
in,” Nervo said. “We know that because he told us. He also told us the gendarmerie has no right to ask him what he’s doing while he is on official business of the Ejército Argentino, much less a right to detain him. But that’s all he’s told us.”
“Is he right about you not having such authority?” Frade asked.
“No, he’s not. And he knows he’s not. I suspect he’s one of the brighter young officers in the Tenth, which makes me suspect that he was told to say what he’s been saying by a senior officer of the Tenth—possibly even by el Coronel Hans Klausberger himself—should the gendarmerie catch him at what he was doing.”
“Which was?” Jimmy asked.
“Surveilling Casa Montagna,” Nervo said. “And also Provincial Route 60, probably with the purpose of finding the best place from which they could shoot up cars and trucks moving to and from Mendoza.”
“Hoping to shoot who?”
“Well, I’d say Don Cletus is high on that list, and probably any of the Good Gehlens, as I suspect they are regarded as traitors by a number of people.”
“What would they get out of killing Clete?” Jimmy asked. “Or any of the Good Gehlens?”
“I don’t know, Jimmy. They have to know that Juan Domingo would be really furious. He would have been furious before Clete took him off Isla Martín García and brought him here, a little bloody but alive. After that happened—”
“What are you going to do with this guy?” Clete interrupted, nodding toward Captain O’Reilley. “And the others? How many were there?”
“Two tenientes, six sergeants, and a corporal. I have placed them all under arrest. And I’ve been sitting here wondering how effective it would be if I put the corporal—he’s about as old as Jimmy—in there with Nolasco and Captain O’Reilley, then announced to O’Reilley that unless he tells us everything we want to know, we will cut off the corporal’s fingers one at a time with bolt cutters. That would force O’Reilley to consider what an officer’s moral obligations to his enlisted soldiers are.”
“Jesus Christ!” Clete said. “You can’t be serious—”
Nervo put up his hand to stop him, and grinned.
“Everyone will please notice that Cletus was the only one who fell for that. What I really have been thinking is that the smart thing to do is nothing while we wait for one or both of two things to happen. One, they send people looking for Captain O’Reilley and his men, and we lock them up. And we keep doing that until we get a teniente coronel or better in our bag.”
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