Blood and Honor
Page 59
‘‘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 Capitán 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 nacelle 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 handles.
Clete set the throttles, checked the fuel switch, and reached for the LEFT ENGINE 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 Lockheed 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, Capitán,’’ 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 reasons.’’
‘‘Which are?’’
‘‘Because you are in here with me.’’
XXI
[ONE] Posadas Airfield Posadas, Missiones Province, Argentina 0930 18 April 1943
It was a twenty-five-minute flight from Santo Tomé to Posados, which turned out to be a recently and extensively expanded airfield shared by Aerolíneas Argentina 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 capabilities: 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 Pôrto 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 Tomé.
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 major 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 Delgano. 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 airplane. 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 permitted 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 aircraft 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 clearin
g 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 runway, 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 received 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 remembered 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 Pôrto 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.
‘‘Oh? About what?’’
‘‘If you succeeded in bringing the airplane across the border to Santo Tomé, my orders were to take it directly from Santo Tomé to Campo de Mayo.’’
‘‘OK,’’ Clete said. ‘‘And my having my passengers screwed that up?’’
‘‘That and the fact that it is not the C-45 light twin you told us it would be. I thought I would be able to fly the C- 45 alone.’’
‘‘Alone?’’ Clete asked, not quite understanding what Delgano was talking about.
‘‘You were to become a guest of Colonel Porterman at Santo Tomé for the next four or five days,’’ Delgano said.
‘‘You . . . forgot . . . to mention that.’’
‘‘Coronel Martín spoke with General Rawson,’’ Delgano said. ‘‘Coronel Martín believed that if you flew any airplane into Campo de Mayo, that would have put you in a delicate position—actually, I suppose, a more accurate term would be ‘dangerous position.’ ’’
‘‘How so?’’
‘‘You would have played an active part in the revolution, ’’ Delgano said. ‘‘If OUTLINE BLUE failed, and for some reason you could not leave the country, you would almost certainly be one of the dozen or so officers who faced the most severe consequences.’’
‘‘You mean, they would shoot me?’’ Clete asked. ‘‘Just for loaning you an airplane?’’
‘‘For flying the airplane to Campo de Mayo, and because you are your father’s son,’’ Delgano said, waited long enough for that to sink in, and then went on. ‘‘Your execution by Castillo’s people under such circumstances would be—is—a real possibility.’’
‘‘Is?’’ Clete thought aloud.
‘‘So, on General Rawson’s authority, it was decided that I would ‘borrow’ your airplane at Santo Tomé, and leave you there. Two things, of course, made that impossible. You arrived in an airplane that I could not fly by myself, and you had your ‘passengers’ and their cargo with you.’’
‘‘If I had known about this,’’ Clete said, ‘‘I would have thought twice about bringing Captain Ashton and his people with me.’’
‘‘Well, what is the expression? That’s water under the dam. The reality I had to deal with is that you arrived at Santo Tomé with an airplane I could not fly by myself, and with your passengers and the cargo aboard.’’
‘‘OK,’’ Clete said, and waited for Delgano to go on.
‘‘I made a decision at Santo Tomé,’’ Delgano said, ‘‘without consulting with el Coronel Porterman, but on my own authority. Based on the facts that I had somehow to get the airplane to Campo de Mayo, that I could not do so alone, and that I could not leave your passengers and their cargo with the Second Cavalry, I decided that everybody would leave Santo Tomé and that en route I would ask you to divert to Campo de Mayo.’’
‘‘Ask me?’’
‘‘Insist.’’
‘‘How insist?’’ Clete asked, aware that he was getting angry.
Delgano shrugged, making it clear he was sure Clete knew what he was talking about.
‘‘En route, I decided that brandishing a pistol would not only be melodramatic but probably impractical. Suboficial Mayor Rodríguez would certainly try to stop me, for one thing. In any event, I decided that attempting to take control of the airplane would be at best risky. It would also have been dishonorable on my part.’’
‘‘If you asked me to divert to Campo de Mayo, I would have flown there,’’ Clete said.
‘‘Knowing that your ‘passengers’ would certainly be interned the moment we landed?’’
‘‘They weren’t interned at Posadas.’’
‘‘I needed you to fly the airplane out of Posadas,’’ Delgano said. ‘‘If they appeared at Campo de Mayo, they would have been arrested.’’
‘‘So now what?’’
‘‘The situation is now in your hands,’’ Delgano said.
‘‘In other words, you’re asking if I will fly the airplane to Campo de Mayo?’’
Delgano nodded.
‘‘Aware of what I said before,’’ Delgano said. ‘‘That doing so constitutes more than simply ferrying an airplane. ’’
‘‘Sure,’’ Clete said. ‘‘I promised you the airplane. I’ll deliver it. A deal’s a deal, Delgano.’’
‘‘Thank you. I really thought that would be your reaction. On my part, unless asked directly, I will not report that we made a passenger stop here.’’
‘‘Thank you.’’
‘‘I am, of course, honor bound to inform Coronel Martín. But I don’t think that will be a problem for you. He already knows about your radio station, and I’m sure understands the mission of the second OSS team. If he wanted to shut you down, he could have done so before now.’’
Clete nodded.
‘‘What about the people at Posadas?’’ Clete asked.
‘‘I may be wrong, but I don’t think they will have anything to say. They know nothing except that you and I took on fuel and some unidentified passengers at Posadas in connection with OUTLINE BLUE. They may have thought that Captain Ashton’s accent was odd, but he spoke Spanish— and you speak Spanish like an Argentine—and they have no reason to suspect that any of you are norteamericanos.’’
‘‘And Colonel Porterman?’’
‘‘If the airplane appears at Campo de Mayo, he will presume that any problems we faced were solved. He took my word that your passengers and their cargo do not pose any threat to Argentina. He was a friend of your father’s. He wishes you no harm.’’
‘‘OK, Capitán,’’ Clete said, putting out his hand to Delgano. ‘‘We have a deal. Now let’s get the aircraft unloaded, and then we’ll take it to Campo de Mayo.’’
As Clete was walking Delgano through the pref
light check of the Lockheed, Tony Pelosi arrived in the 1941 Studebaker Clete had seen at the radio station. Chief Schultz drove up fifteen minutes later at the wheel of a Model A truck.
Ettinger, Clete decided, is probably monitoring the radio.
Then he sensed that something was not as it should be. Neither the Chief nor Tony smiled when they came up. The reverse. They both looked uncomfortable.
‘‘Where the hell is my brass band?’’ Clete asked.
‘‘Ettinger took off,’’ Tony blurted.
‘‘He did what?’’
‘‘He took off.’’
‘‘Took off to where?’’ Clete asked.
Tony looked uncomfortably at Delgano, visibly wondering if he should continue talking in the presence of an Argentine.
‘‘I have two men here who were supposed to keep Sergeant Ettinger on the estancia,’’ Delgano said.
‘‘How much does this guy know?’’ Tony blurted.
‘‘He knows the Germans are trying to kill Ettinger,’’ Clete said.
‘‘He probably went to Uruguay,’’ Chief Schultz said.
‘‘What the hell for?’’
‘‘The Chief thinks it’s got something to do with the message where you told Graham the name of the German in Montevideo,’’ Tony said.
‘‘How did he see that?’’ Clete asked furiously.
‘‘That’s my fault, Cle . . . Major,’’ Tony said. ‘‘Ettinger was awake when I started to encrypt it. The Chief was asleep. Ettinger’s better with that than I am. So, instead of fucking it up, or waking the Chief, I asked Ettinger if he would do it.’’
‘‘Jesus H. Christ, Tony! I can’t believe you were that stupid!’’
‘‘Neither can I, now,’’ Tony said. ‘‘Anyway, the next morning, he wasn’t there. He left this for you.’’
Tony handed him a sheet of paper, on which Ettinger had typed:
Clete:
I think I can put Bagman’s name together with a couple of names I already have. If I can, we’ll have just about all the pieces of the chain identified.
I hope your flight went smoothly. See you soon.