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I’m insane.
And flying solo.
Shit . . .
He lifted the tail wheel, and then edged back on the stick.
The Mighty Cub went airborne.
[SIX]
South Latitude 41.205 degrees,
West Longitude 65.114 degrees
The Atlantic Ocean Coast of Santa Cruz Province, Argentina
1210 23 October 1945
If they had been flying at, say, thirty-five hundred feet and making ninety knots or better, they almost certainly wouldn’t have seen it.
Or if they were actively looking for it, they probably wouldn’t have seen it, either.
But what they were doing was pulling out of a forty-five-knot dive—the third dive, each one increasingly deeper, in the last forty minutes—at fifteen hundred feet (the Storch following at 1,750) to see if the wings on the Mighty Cub would stay on.
From the first dive, Cronley figured if the wings failed, he might survive the crash that would follow, and Grüner could safely put down the Storch on what looked like a reasonably level field and give him a ride back to Estancia Condor.
Presuming, of course, that Grüner and von Dattenberg could get close enough to the flaming wreckage of the Mighty Cub and pull Cronley’s battered body therefrom.
And then the Mighty Cub came out of the third dive, its wings still on.
And then Cronley leveled off—and there it was.
I’ll be damned!
He wasn’t looking down at U-234.
It was right in front of him.
Oh, shit!
If I can’t pull up enough to get over that white camouflage net, or whatever the hell that is, I’m going to fly right into the sonofabitch!
He cleared the camouflage net by a good ten—maybe fifteen—feet and picked up a little more altitude.
“I guess you saw what I saw?” Cronley then said into his microphone.
“Yeah, but in the end you missed,” Grüner replied.
“So, what do we do now?”
“I think we have lost the element of surprise,” von Dattenberg said. “And you saw all those, several hundred, twenty-five-liter fuel cans?”
“I saw them,” Cronley said. “By the trucks that had to bring them.”
“And they weren’t neatly stacked; they were tossed aside,” von Dattenberg said. “The fuel they contained has to now be in U-234’s tanks, suggesting she can go to sea to move elsewhere, or to rendezvous with a Russian ship somewhere.”
“So, what do we do now?” Cronley repeated.
