"You'd better be going then," Gr?ner said. "I told Loche to bring my car around and wait for you."
"Jawohl, Herr Oberst."
[TWO]
Aboard Pan American-Grace Airlines Flight 171
The Ciudad de Natal
Above Montevideo, Uruguay
1505 9 April 1943
There was a break in the cloud cover. Through it, 11,000 feet below, they could see Montevideo. But when they moved out over the river Plate toward Buenos Aires, the cloud cover closed in again, and there was nothing beneath them but what looked like an enormous mass of pure white cotton batting.
Buenos Aires was 105 miles away. At 165 miles indicated
, call it forty min-utes. Ten minutes out over the 125-mile-wide mouth of the River Plate, the First Officer looked at the Captain, and the Captain nodded.
They were flying a Mart¡n 156, a forty-two-passenger flying boat powered by four 1,000-horsepower Wright Cyclone engines. The First Officer took the plane off Autopilot, made the course correction, then retarded the throttles just a tad, worked the trim control, and then put it back on autopilot.
They would make a long, slow descent for the next twenty-five minutes, and with a little luck, break out of the cloud cover at, say, 4,000 feet, with Buenos Aires in sight.
Two minutes later, the Ciudad de Natal slipped into the clouds, and there was nothing to be seen through the windshield but an impenetrable gray mass.
Ten minutes after that, with the altimeter indicating 8,500 feet, they broke out of the cloud cover. Now they could see the River Plate beneath them, and here and there a dozen assorted vessels, small and large, some under sail, and some moving ahead of the lines of their wakes. Neither the Captain nor the First Officer could see whitecaps; their landing therefore would probably be smooth.
"Tell the steward to pass the word we'll land in twenty minutes," the Cap-tain ordered. Then he added, "I'll be damned, look at that."
The First Officer looked where the Captain was pointing, out the window beside his head.
"I'll be damned," the First Officer unconsciously parroted when he found what had attracted the Captain's attention.
A thousand yards away, on a parallel course at their altitude, was a very long, very slender, very graceful aircraft. It looked something like the Douglas DC-3, particularly in the nose. But it had four engines rather than two. It was painted black on the top of the fuselage, and off-white on the bottom. On the vertical stabilizer and on the rear of the fuselage were red swastikas, outlined in white.
"Is that a Condor?" the First Officer asked. (The Focke-Wulf 200B Condor, first flown in 1937. was a twenty-six-seat passenger airplane, powered by four 870-horsepower BMW engines, built for Lufthansa, the German airline. The 200C was a mili-tary modification, turning the aircraft into an armed, long-range reconnaissance/bomber aircraft.)
"I can't think of anything else it could be," the Captain said.
"He's come a hell of a long way in something that won't float," the First Of-ficer said, a touch of admiration in his voice. "Nice-looking ship, isn't it?"
The Captain grunted, then said, "Tell the steward to ask that ex-Marine to come up here."
The First Officer nodded and got out of his seat.
They met the ex-Marine, a good-looking kid, in Weather Briefing in the Pan American terminal in Miami. The Weather Briefing facilities were off limits to the general public, but there he was-dressed in a tweed jacket, tieless button-down-collar shirt, gray flannel slacks, and cowboy boots-standing in front of the wall-size maps holding the latest Teletype weather reports in his hands.
There was a brief conversation:
"I don't think you're supposed to be in here. Sir," the pilot said.
"Probably not," the young man said. "But I used to be an aviator, and I like to check the weather between where I am and where I'm headed."
"Used to be?"
"I used to be a Marine," the young man said.
"Where are you headed?"