“North Dakota doesn’t count?”
“That was a Cub in North Dakota. A Cub is not a Lodestar. And North Dakota is not the mouth of the Magellan Strait.”
“Okay.”
“And the reason I’m asking if you want to ride along—I may even let you shoot a couple of touch-and-gos—is because I’m still trying to make amends.”
“For what you thought about the Squirt and me?”
“Right.”
“Thanks, I’d like to go along.”
—
There were two Ford station wagons parked in front of the BOQ. Former Oberstleutnant Dieter von und zu Aschenburg was in the front passenger seat of one. There were six men, all armed, in the second.
Clete got behind the wheel of the first station wagon and Jimmy got in the back. There was a Thompson submachine gun on the seat.
As they were moving slowly down the steep and narrow road from the mountaintop, von und zu Aschenburg turned in the seat and offered his hand to Jimmy.
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.”