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Thinking, The last time I did this was in an L-4 Piper Cub off Tulagi in the Solomons looking for Japanese barges, he dropped to two hundred feet above the water and then flew over the boats twice, once approaching them from the front, and a second time from the rear.
These boats are really getting tossed around. Why is that?
Because, Stupid, when the water in the River Plate estuary, always shallow, is affected by the tide and the winds, it can get really choppy.
And these boats are not intended for rough water.
He saw that the soldiers were sitting on the flat deck behind the wheelhouses, rifles held between their knees, getting drenched by water coming in over both the bow and the sides.
At first h
e thought the Horse Rifles had not brought their horses. Then he saw that every boat carried at least one horse and several had two.
Of course. Officers ride into battle. Waving the troops on with their sabers.
How are they going to get the horses off the boats? Make them jump?
Then he saw that each of the boats had a World War I Maxim heavy machine gun mounted on a wheeled carriage.
He picked up altitude and took up a course—he hoped—that would take him on a direct vector to Isla Martín García.
“Ask Bernardo,” he said into the intercom microphone, “if the Patricios have Browning automatic rifles.”
“Two BARs . . .” Martín replied.
Well, guess who finally remembered he’s the general in charge of this operation and took the headset away from the priest?
“. . . and two air-cooled Browning .30 caliber machine guns. Why do you ask?”
Does he really have to ask?
“Bad news, Bernardo. Two BARs and two .30-cal Brownings firing from shore can chew those boats up pretty easily. And, bobbing around the way those boats are, the Horse Soldiers won’t be able to effectively return the fire. Unless we can keep both sides from shooting, there’s going to a lot of dead Horse Soldiers.”
“Well, maybe Father Welner can do that.”
“The power of prayer, right?”
“Have you any better ideas?”
“If I think of something, I’ll tell you when I land on your goddamn island. Presuming I can find it.”
—
The island appeared, dead ahead, twenty minutes later. He did the math in his head. He was making, give or take, a hundred knots. Divided by three, that meant the invasion fleet was thirty-three miles behind him. Getting tossed around by the choppy water the way it was, the fleet was making no more than, say, fifteen knots. That meant they would reach the island in a little more than two hours.
Two hours to land, load Tío Juan aboard, and take off seems like plenty of time.
Presuming the Patricios don’t use their BARs and light Brownings to shoot us out of the sky.
Or, more likely, shoot us dead the moment we land.
If we can land.
It took him five minutes to reach the island, and another ten minutes to fly back and forth looking for some adequate place to set down the Storch.
He saw that he again had two options: to land on the beach or in the tiny square in the center of the island. There were problems with the beach. The Patricios had set up their Brownings to cover the beach, the only place the invaders could land.
If I try to land on the beach, I’ll be presenting the Patricios with a nice, easy moving target.
