"We don't have such a clever device? We have to look for buses with their headlights on?"
"The airplane has the antenna. What I don't have is the frequency of any ra-dio station, or its location. When I asked for what are cleverly called 'Aids to Navigation,' Colonel Wallace said he would have them for me by the time I fin-ished clearing Brazilian Customs."
"Do you think Wallace was born a chickenshit sonofabitch, or did he have to go to school?"
"I guess if you spend a lot of time in uniform you get used to doing things by the book, and learn to spend a lot of your time covering your ass."
"When should we be seeing this glow we're looking for?" Ashton asked.
"That may be it," Clete said, pointing with his finger straight ahead.
"Right where it's supposed to be."
"That's almost certainly an accident," Clete said. "Either that, or it isn't Carazinho."
"What else could it be?"
"Dallas, maybe," Clete said. "I'm not too good at dead reckoning."
He put the Lockheed into a shallow turn to the west.
"You're not going to fly over it to make sure?" Ashton asked. "Don't they paint the name of the town on roofs down here?"
"I wouldn't be surprised if the Brazilian Army Air Corps is looking for us," Clete said, growing serious. "By now I think it's entirely possible that Wallace has had time to both decide I'm not going back there and to consider the best way to cover his ass. Telling the Brazilians that we're overdue and probably lost would do that."
"So would telling the Brazilians a crazy Argentine stole one of his air-planes," Ashton said thoughtfully.
"With a little bit of luck, we should find the highway," Clete said. "If I stay a couple of miles to one side, we see them, and they can't see us."
"I'm impressed, mi Mayor," Ashton said.
Five minutes later, Clete spotted lights moving slowly across the terrain. When he got closer, the lights divided into two, and he could just pick out the red glow of running lights.
"I think we just found Route Sixty-six," he said.
Once the glow of Ijui faded, it was possible to pick up another glow. But as he approached this, it was obvious that it came from the lights in a far smaller town than Ijui. Sao Angelo was larger than Ijui; the glow it gave off should be larger.
Don't panic. Don't start running around looking for bright lights. You didn't do anything wrong. There is an explanation for this.
The explanation came ten minutes later, when a glow appeared on the ground past the lights he thought had to be Sao Angelo.
That's almost certainly Sao Angelo. What the other lights were was a small town, a village, not marked on the chart.
Final proof came thirty minutes later, when he saw a large glow where his chart showed him Sao Luis Gonzaga should be.
And then the glow dimmed, and then brightened, and then dimmed again and vanished.
Christ, there's a low-level cloud cover down there!
"Shit!" he said.
"Something wrong, Frade?" Ashton asked.
"Obviously, we're getting into the soup," Clete said. "Which means I have to drop down so that I can see the ground. The lower I go, the less distance I can see. and that chart doesn't have altitudes on it. I don't want to run into a rock-filled cloud."
"I'm sorry I came up here," Ashton said. "Sitting in the back, I could pre-tend I was on Eastern Airlines, about to land in Miami. Are we really in trouble?"
"That depends on what we find at five thousand feet," Clete said as he pushed the nose of the Lockheed down into a shallow descent.