“Peter, how soon can you take off?”
“As soon as we load the passengers and dinner.”
“Have a nice flight,” Martín said.
[FIVE]
Above Provincial Route 60
Mendoza Province, Argentina
2305 16 October 1945
It wasn’t hard to find Casa Montagna on Estancia Don Guillermo. Clete Frade had come to think of it as Fort Leavenworth South; he had converted what had been a romantic retreat looking down at an enormous vineyard until it was, like Leavenworth, both a fort and a prison. The floodlights shining down from it made it stand out like a beacon on the hilltop—elsewhere it would be called a mountaintop—in the foothills of the Andes mountain range.
“What do you say we wake everybody up, Enrico?” Frade said, pushing the yoke forward and pointing the nose of the Lodestar at Casa Montagna. “Put a little excitement into their lives?”
“El Coronel?” Rodríguez asked.
“My Tío Juan needs a little excitement, too, to take his mind off”—in the last moment, he stopped himself from saying “the Kotex on his face” and instead said—“his many other problems.”
Frade buzzed Casa Montagna twice, flashing over the hilltop enclave at no more than two hundred feet, first from the north and then from the south, and then he turned the Lodestar toward the Mendoza Airfield.
He had to buzz that three times after he learned that he had no air-to-ground communications over which he could order the runway lights be turned on. Obviously, some of those machine-gun bullets, if they hadn’t hit the radio compartment itself, had taken out the antenna, or at least one of the antenna supports.
The runway lights finally came on, and he lined up with the runway with plenty of time to consider yet another unpleasant set of possibilities.
Had machine-gun bullets taken out the hydraulics necessary to lower the landing gear?
And/or punctured the tires?
He had no choice but to land. He wasn’t sure he had enough fuel to make it through the Andes to Chile. Even if he was able to pull that off, he didn’t want to land in Santiago in a bullet-riddled airplane carrying the vice president of the Argentine Republic. There would be questions.
The green GEAR DOWN AND LOCKED light came on five seconds before he got to the threshold of the runway. Ten seconds after that, as the Lodestar had not swerved out of control off the runway, he was able to draw the reasonable conclusion that there was air in the landing gear tires.
He taxied to an SAA hangar and shut down the engines.
He went into the passenger compartment.
El Coronel Juan D. Perón was nothing to smile over, much less laugh at. His uniform was black with blood and so was the leather of his seat. His face was pale from loss of blood.
Jesus Christ!
Next step is shock. I’ve got to get him to a doctor!
“We’ll have you out of here in just a minute, Tío Juan. Hang on. Try to stay awake.”
Perón grasped Clete’s arm.
“God bless you, Cletus,” he said emotionally.
Enrico had the door open by the time Clete got there. When he went through it and jumped to the ground, Clete found himself facing the headlights of three Ford pickup trucks. On the roof of one was an air-cooled .30 caliber machine gun.
Have we gone through all this only to get blown away the minute we land?
“My God, Don Cletus!” a voice called. “What happened?”
Clete couldn’t see who it was.