Delgano shook his head in disbelief.
“If I didn’t know better, I would think you’re a lunatic.”
The stewardess returned with their wine.
“My friend here tells me you can’t get to be a Varig stewardess unless you are forty years old or the mother of three or more children,” Frade said to her. “I told my friend that couldn’t possibly be true. Is it?”
“Do I look like I’m forty? Or have children?”
“That’s what I told him,” Frade said, nodding agreeably. “As I said, I didn’t believe it.”
“You will have to excuse him, señorita,” Delgano said, his face flushed with embarrassment. “He’s a norteamericano, and they’re all crazy.”
Frade pulled his Argentine passport from his suit jacket and held it out to the stewardess.
“Two glasses of wine and he gets like that. I wouldn’t give him any more, if I were you.”
The stewardess smiled brightly at Frade, gave Delgano a dirty look, and retreated down the aisle.
Delgano shook his head again.
“I’m glad I did that,” Clete said.
“You mean, made an ass of yourself?”
“A chief pilot is not permitted to lose his temper. You might want to write that down. No, what I meant was take my passport out.”
“I’m afraid to ask why.”
“Because it reminded me I’m an Argentine citizen.”
“You remembered! But what does that mean?”
“When we get to Pôrto Alegre, I think it would be best if you dealt with the local officials.”
“Now I’m really afraid to ask why.”
“Well, the last time I was here—when I picked up my Lodestar—I left under something less than ideal conditions.”
“Meaning what?”
“I now understand that the tower was ordering me to return immediately. But I don’t speak Portuguese, so I didn’t understand him, and kept going.”
“Holy Mother of Christ!”
“Well, actually, I did understand him, but I really didn’t want to go back and have to explain who the people I had aboard were, and why we hadn’t gone through immigration.”
“Ashton and the others and the radar,” Delgano said, shaking his head.
El Capitán Gonzalo Delgano of the Bureau of Internal Security had been waiting at the landing strip of the Second Cavalry Regiment in Santo Tomé when Cletus Frade had landed the Lodestar after flying it there from Pôrto Alegre.
There had been an unofficial arrangement with senior officers involved with Operation Blue for Clete to use the Santo Tomé airstrip to get the Lodestar into Argentina against Brazilian wishes. They wanted it available to Generals Ramírez and Rawson—and other senior officers—so they could flee the country if the coup d’état failed.
Clete had seen this as an opportunity to get Team Turtle—and more important, the radar—off the American air base in Pôrto Alegre and into Argentina surreptitiously and without running the risk of having the radar grabbed by either Brazilian or Argentine authorities.
It would have worked had not the decision to put Operation Blue into action been made. This meant that the Operation Blue officers needed the airplane at Campo de Mayo as soon as possible, and Delgano had been sent to Santo Tomé to make sure they got it.
The discovery that the Lodestar carried a heavily armed OSS team and a radar set complicated things more than a little. Clete announced that if Delgano and the BIS arrested Team Turtle they could get someone else to fly the Lodestar—knowing they had no one qualified to do so.