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Well, maybe I am. That’s what it looks like.
Why the hell did I open this bag of worms?
“If you ‘turned in your wings’ in the Luftwaffe,” von und zu Aschenburg went on, “you were assigned to a penal battalion. You went to the front as a rifleman, and you stayed there until you were killed. If you were wounded, when you got out of the hospital, you went back to the penal battalion. The people I’m talking about knew this, so they kept flying.”
Jimmy shook his head.
“What I’m saying, Jimmy, is they didn’t have a choice. Be glad you did.”
“Even if it brings my yellow streak out in the open?”
“I don’t think you’re a coward, and I don’t think Clete does, either. Trying to stay alive isn’t cowardice. It’s common sense. Be glad you had the choice—and the courage to make it. Walking into suicide isn’t bravery . . . it’s stupidity.”
“Hey! Hey!” Clete said, suddenly and excitedly. “Look at this!”
They looked where he was pointing.
On the road ahead, half a dozen gendarmes armed with Mauser submachine guns were leading at least that many men—dressed in military field clothing, their hands locked at the back of their necks—toward a canvas-roofed gendarmerie truck.
“I would hazard the guess those are the people who have been surveilling us,” Clete said. “After we shoot our touch-and-gos, we’ll stop by the gendarmerie barracks in Mendoza and see what the gendarmes have found out about who they are. Five-to-one they’re from the Tenth Mountain, but you never know.”
[TWO]
El Plumerillo Airfield
Mendoza, Mendoza Province, Argentina
1025 21 October 1945
As they drove onto the airport, the Howell Petroleum Corporation Constellation was just lifting off. It flashed over them, retracted its landing gear, and went into a steep climb.
Clete Frade’s first reaction to this was to tell Dieter von und zu Aschenburg and Jimmy Cronley that the first problem in flying from Mendoza to Santiago de Chile was picking up enough altitude to get over the Andes.
“It’s not a problem in a Connie,” he said. “But when we started SAA with Lodestars, I was going to call it ATAA—Around and Through the Andes Airlines—because the Lodestars can’t make enough altitude to get over some of the mountains.”
Then he had a second thought, and said it aloud: “They should have been out of here before this. Siggie must have had trouble installing the Collins 7.2.”
—
They found Master Sergeant Siggie Stein in Hangar Two, and he apologized for taking so long to install the Collins radio.
“That happens, Colonel,” he
said.
“Well, they’re on their way to Santiago,” Frade said. “What are you doing in here?”
Stein pointed to a Lodestar painted in the SAA color scheme.
“That’s not working, either. The plane’s more badly shot up than we thought.”
Cronley realized that the Lodestar was the one in which Frade had flown Perón from Buenos Aires. When he looked closer he saw bullet holes in the fuselage.
“The mechanics were able to fix the hydraulics,” Stein explained, “and there was no damage to the engines. But the radios—you have zero radios. . . .”
“They were working when I landed,” Frade protested.
“They aren’t now, Colonel,” Stein said. “And they can’t replace the shot-out windows or patch the bullet holes here. That’ll have to be done in Buenos Aires, which means that this is going to have to be flown there, which means, since it doesn’t have any navigation equipment—except for a magnetic compass—that it will have to be shepherded there by another airplane—another Lodestar—that does have working navigation equipment.”
