They were introduced to Clete as the commanding officer and the executive officer of the Fourth Pursuit Squadron, but no names were provided by Del-gano. 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 air-plane. 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 per-mitted 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 air-craft 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 clearing 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 run-way, 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 re-ceived 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 remembere
d 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 Porto 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 Tome, my orders were to take it directly from Santo Tome to Campo de Mayo."
"OK," Clete said. "And my having my passengers screwed that up?"