Chapter Twenty
[ONE]
Bachelor Officers' Quarters
2035th U.S. Army Air Carps Support Wing
Porto Alegre, Brazil
1730 1G April 1943
Clete found Captain Maxwell Ashton III at the bar of the hotel. Ashton was in a tieless shirt and sweater, sipping a beer and examining with interest and obvi-ous approval the long legs of a waitress as she bent over to deliver a round of drinks to a table across the room.
"We have a problem," Clete said as he slipped onto a bar stool beside him.
"Why doesn't that surprise me?" Ashton said. "You want a beer, or is it the kind of bad news you would rather tell me sober?"
Clete looked around the room and found a table where there was less chance to overhear their conversation than at the bar.
"Let's go over there," he said.
"You want to take a beer with you?" Ashton pursued.
"No, I'm flying," Clete said automatically.
"I'm sorry to hear that," Ashton said, sliding off his stool. "I was hoping the bad news was that something was wrong with the airplane and
the operation was called off."
"Nothing wrong with the airplane," Clete said. "The problem is with the pi-lot."
"What does that make you? The only modest Marine pilot in the Naval Ser-vice?"
They sat down at the table. The long-legged waitress appeared. Clete or-dered hot chocolate.
"And I, my dear, will have another of this very excellent beer," Ashton said.
He waited until she had walked out of hearing, then said, "Let's have it, mi Mayor."
"I don't know how this happened, but the airplane they sent down here is a C-56, not a C-45."
"What's the problem?"
"The C-45 is a small twin. I know how to fly one. The C-56 is a Lockheed Lodestar...."
"And you don't know how to fly a Lodestar?"
"I just spent three hours in this one with a guy who used to fly them for Transcontinental and Western Airlines. He taught me how to start it, how to taxi it, how to get it in the air. No real problem there. Landing it, however, it some-thing else. This is a great big airplane, Ashton. Almost all of my time is in small airplanes."
"Which means?"
"That I had one hell of a time getting the Lockheed onto the ground. I missed three approaches."
"I don't know what that means," Ashton confessed.
"Three times I came in either too fast, or too high, or both-and it was day-light; I could see the runway. I could not get it onto the wide, long runways here and had to go around."
"Why?" Ashton asked.