Near Pila, Buenos Aires Province
1605 1 May 1943
The Lockheed Lodestar was a fourteen-passenger transport aircraft slightly smaller, but faster, than the twenty-one-passenger Douglas DC-3. It had a takeoff weight of 17,500 pounds and a 69-foot wingspan; and it was powered by two 1,200-horsepower Wright Cyclone engines, which gave it a top speed of 259 mph over a range of 1,800 miles.
Cletus Frade knelt by the left undercarriage of his Lockheed Lodestar (for it was his, having been his father’s) and studied the wheel, the tire, the brakes, the piston, and even the cavity in the wing into which the landing gear would retract, for signs of damage and hydraulic leaks, and other indications of potential malfunction.
The trouble, he thought, is that I don’t have a clue what I’m looking for. Or, for that matter, at. The only thing I know for sure is that this is a great big sonofabitch, and the people who designed it were perfectly justified in deciding that it takes two people to fly it.
On the other hand, you are a Marine aviator, complete with wings of gold, right? And you already have flown this big sonofabitch all by yourself three times—no, more than three times: From Pôrto Alegre to Santo Tomé. From Santo Tomé to the military field at Posadas. From Posadas here. From here to the field at Campo de Mayo. And from there back here. That’s five times, right?
That’s five successful takeoffs and five good landings—a good landing being defined as any landing you can walk away from—right? So there is no reason you can’t do it again, right?
Wrong.
What you know you should do, pal, is tell Ashton you’ve changed your mind, and what you’re going to do is fly him to Uruguay in one of the Piper Cubs and land him in some farmer’s pasture. That you know how to do.
He ducked under the fuselage and examined the right landing gear and its well.
He had his head in the wheel well when someone spoke to him.
“May I be of some help, Señor Frade?”
There was a man standing by the engine. It took Clete a moment to remember his name: Benito Letieri. He was an aircraft mechanic, charged with maintaining the Cubs and, before Clete had put it into Samborombón Bay, the Beech Staggerwing.
Clete also had no doubt that even if Letieri wasn’t actually one of Coronel Martín’s BIS agents, he reported to the BIS whatever Clete did with the airplanes.
It was a moot point. There was no way he could fly to Uruguay without Martín hearing about it. It didn’t even matter if Martín learned after the fact that Ashton had been aboard the Lodestar when he took off. He didn’t think the Argentine Army Air Corps would try to shoot him down.
For that matter, it was damned unlikely that the obsolete fighters of the Argentine Army Air Corps—Seversky P-35s, with a top speed of 275 mph—could be scrambled in time to catch up with the Lodestar to shoot him down.
“Well, I want to run the engines up, Benito,” Clete said. “And I thought I’d give it a little test hop. Would you like to go along?”
“Sí, Señor. Thank you.”
“Get somebody to roll a fire extinguisher out here, and then come on board.”
“Sí, Señor.”
Clete looked around until he found Enrico Rodríguez.
“You want to go for a little ride, Enrico?”
“Sí, Señor Clete,” Enrico said with absolutely no enthusiasm.
The Dash One—Pilot’s Operating Manual for Lockheed Model L18-Series Aircraft—was where he had left it, on the shelf under the windshield in the cockpit.
He sat down in the pilot’s seat and read the STARTING PROCEDURE and TAKEOFF PROCEDURE and LANDING PROCEDURE sections very carefully.
Benito came into the cockpit. Clete looked out the side window and saw that a wheel-mounted f
ire extinguisher had been rolled into place, and two men were prepared to man it. He wondered if there was an auxiliary power unit around someplace to start the engines in case the batteries were dead, or whether they would have to recharge them.
He motioned to Benito to get into the copilot’s seat, then fastened his harness, signaled to Benito to do the same, and then showed him the levers that controlled the landing gear and the flaps.
“When I tell you ‘Gear up,’ you pull that up. And when the green light comes on, you tell me, ‘Gear up.’ If the red light comes on, you tell me that. Got it?”
“Sí, Señor.”