Donovan's middle-aged but still very attractive secretary laid a file folder stamped TOP SECRET on his desk two minutes later. Donovan flipped through it quickly.
"Yeah, I knew there was something," he said, a slight triumphant tone in his voice. "It was not a Beechcraft. They couldn't come up with a Beechcraft on such short notice."
"And?"
"When we asked the goddamned Air Corps for an airplane, they said they could give us a C-45. We said fine. Then they said they couldn't give us a C-45, after all, how about a C-56?"
"What's a C-56?" Graham asked. "I can't keep those model numbers straight."
"The Air Corps man I asked," Helen offered, "said they were about the same thing. Both twin-engine small transports."
"How small?" Donovan asked. "Compared to the C-47, for example?"
"Smaller," Helen said. "The Air Corps man, I can't think of his name off-hand, he was a brigadier general, it should be in there somewhere, said they were both smaller than the C-47."
"Is that a problem?" Graham asked.
"Not for me, Alex," Donovan said. "For you. You'll have to find this Air Corps general's name, and then, without telling him why, tell him he has to arrange for the Air Corps in Brazil to paint this C-56, or whatever the hell it is, fire-engine red, and then have somebody available around the clock down there who can show Frade how to fly it. But you can't, of course, tell him who Frade is, when he's showing up, or where he's going with the airplane. Good luck!"
"Thank you," Graham said, chuckling.
"I'm not really trying to be funny," Donovan said. "After we go through all this, how do we know that Frade can really fly this airplane? Have you consid-ered that?"
"He's a Marine aviator, Bill," Graham said. "Of course he can fly it!"
"Oh, God!" Donovan groaned. "Get out of here, Alex, and let me do some work."
[THREE]
Above Nueva Helvecia
Uruguay
1105 13 April 1943
Major Freiherr Hans-Peter von Wachtstein turned and looked into the backseat of the Storch to see if Standartenf?hrer Josef Goltz was awake.
He was. He was wearing a gray flight suit, a coverall-like garment that he had reluctantly crawled into at La Palomar airfield an hour and a half before. He had earphones on his head.
Peter gestured with his hand out the window and down. When he saw that Goltz was looking at the small town under their right wing, he picked up his mi-crophone.
"New Switzerland, Herr Standartenf?hrer," Peter said.
It took Goltz some time to locate his microphone and push its transmit but-ton.
"What?"
"New Switzerland, Herr Standartenf?hrer," Peter repeated. "They call it Nueva Helvecia. A little further up the river, there is Nueva Berlin."
Goltz did not seem grateful for this recitation of travel lore.
"How far to Montevideo?" Goltz asked impatiently.
"Approximately fifty-minutes, Herr Standartenf?hrer," Peter replied, then gave in to the impulse and added, "unless we pick up some more headwinds, which may delay us another twenty minutes or so."
There were no headwinds. Peter had invented them for the same reason he'd made a full-flaps, full-power takeoff from La Palomar, which he knew would cause an unpleasant sinking feeling in the Herr Standartenf?hrer's stom-ach. Likewise, whenever he'd glanced in the rear seat and noticed that the Herr Standartenf?hrer was about to doze off, he'd made sudden small attitude and di-rectional changes that he knew would wake him up.
We would be touching down right about now at Carrasco, Schiesskopf, if you hadn't insisted we fly the overland route.