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Von Wachtstein considered the question and then nodded.
“Got the checklist?”
Von Wachtstein nodded again.
Frade keyed the microphone.
“Val de Cans tower, this is South American Airways Double Zero Nine. This is a Lockheed Constellation. I am ten miles south, at five thousand feet, indicating Two Nine Zero. Request approach and landing.”
“SAA Double Zero Nine, I have you on radar. Descend on present course reporting when at three thousand feet.”
“You have the aircraft, First Officer,” Clete said, and took his hands off the yoke.
“He sounded like an American,” von Wachtstein said.
“This is an American air base,” Frade replied. “One of our smaller ones.”
After they touched down, von Wachtstein looked around in awe, and said, “One of your smaller airfields?”
They were trailing a FOLLOW ME jeep down a taxiway lined on both sides as far as they could see with far-too-many-to-count four-engined Consolidated B-24 bombers parked wingtip to wingtip.
“The larger ones are really crowded,” Clete replied.
“What’s going on here?”
“This base served two major roles,” Clete said. “One, as a home base for B-24s looking for submarines and German—or allegedly neutral—merchant vessels, and, two, as a jump-off point for aircraft headed for Europe via Sierra Leone in West Africa.”
“There’s another Connie,” von Wachtstein said as they came close to the transient aircraft tarmac.
The airplane bore the markings of the U.S. Army Air Forces.
Frade thought: I wonder what the hell that’s doing here?
Did Graham or Dulles—or even Donovan—come down here to see me?
If that’s the case, the odds are I’m not going to like what they have to say.
As ground handlers wanded the Ciudad de Rosario into a parking spot beside the other Connie, Frade picked up his microphone again.
“Val de Cans tower, this is South American Airways Double Zero Nine. I’m sitting on the transient tarmac. Can you get a ladder out here to the cockpit door before, repeat before, you put a ladder up to the passenger door?”
“No problem, South American Double Zero Nine. Where’d you get the American accent?”
[FOUR]
The flight-planning room was deserted except for an Air Forces lieutenant and a plump sergeant. They were sitting at sort of a counter. A weather map and a flight schedule chart were mounted on the wall behind them.
“Sorry,” the sergeant greeted them, more or less courteously, “but this is for Americans only.”
“Not a problem,” Frade said, then looked at the officer. “Are you the AOD, Lieutenant?”
Frade was wearing the red-striped powder-blue trousers of an SAA captain, but had replaced the SAA tunic with a fur-collared leather jacket on which was a leather patch with Naval Aviator Wings and the legend FRADE, C H ILT, USMCR. He also had replaced the ornate, high-crowned SAA uniform cap with the Stetson hat his uncle Jim had been wearing when he dropped dead in the Midland Petroleum Club.
The lieutenant, whose face showed his confusion at what stood before him, shook his head and then asked, “You’re from that Argentine airliner?”
“Figured that out
, did you?” Clete said. “How about getting the AOD down here for me?”
