He looked at Delgano, who smiled, and crossed himself.
Clete took off the brakes
and nudged the left throttle forward. The Lock-heed shuddered, and then the left wheel came out of the depression it had made during the night. Clete advanced the right throttle, and the right wheel came out.
He straightened the Lockheed out, then taxied back between the clay pots marking the runway, and then down it as far as he could to where he decided the downward slope of the "runway" was going to be too much to handle.
He turned the plane around, and saw that the wheels had left ruts six inches deep.
"Here we go," he announced matter-of-factly, and moved the throttles to takeoff power.
The Lockheed shuddered, and for a moment seemed to refuse to move. Then it began to move.
It picked up speed very slowly, and then suddenly more quickly. Life came into the controls. He pushed the wheel forward a hair to get the tail wheel off the ground, then held it level until he felt it get light on the wheels. He edged the control back, and a moment later the rumbling of the gear stopped.
"Gear up!" he ordered.
Thirty seconds later, as he banked to the left, setting up a course for Posadas, he glanced at Delgano.
"This is a fine airplane!" Delgano said.
"I don't know about you, Capitan," Clete said, "but I always have more trouble landing one of these things than I do getting one off."
"I have faith in you, mi Mayor," Delgano said. "For the very best of rea-sons."
"Which are?"
"Because you are in here with me."
Chapter Twenty-One
[ONE]
Posadas Airfield
Posadas, Missiones Province, Argentina
0930 18 April 1943
It was a twenty-five-minute flight from Santo Tome to Posadas, which turned out to be a recently and extensively expanded airfield shared by Aerol¡neas Ar-gentina and the Air Service of the Argentine Army.
Clete managed to put the Lockheed down on the field's new, wide concrete runways without difficulty. A pickup truck flying a checkered flag met them at the taxiway turnoff and led them to a new hangar, where a dozen soldiers of the Air Service, Argentine Army, were waiting to push the Lockheed into a hangar.
The aircraft normally parked in the hangar-a half-dozen Seversky P-35 fighter planes-were parked outside. Clete stared at them with fascination. In high school, he made a tissue-covered balsa wood model of the fighter. He was so fond of it that he was never able to find the courage to wind up its rubber band and see if it would fly.
When Clete was in high school, the Seversky was about the hottest thing in the sky. Dreaming of one day flying it, Clete could still remember its capabili-ties: It had a Pratt & Whitney 950-horsepower engine, which gave it a 280-m.p.h. top speed; and it was armed with two.30-caliber machine guns firing through the propeller and could carry three 100-pound bombs, one under each wing and the third under the fuselage.
The F4F-4 Wildcat Clete flew on Guadalcanal had six.50-caliber machine guns, and was powered by a 1,200-horsepower Pratt & Whitney engine, which gave it a 320-knot top speed. The F4U Corsair, which was already in the Pacific to replace the Wildcat, had a 2,000-horsepower Pratt & Whitney engine, a top speed of 425 knots, and in addition to its six.50-caliber machine guns could carry a ton of bombs.
Clete had never seen a P-35 before. It was obsolete long before Clete went to Pensacola for basic flight training. There was something very unreal about seeing them parked here, obviously ready for action.
If the Brazilians decided to bomb Argentina with the B-24s I saw parked at Porto Alegre, and the Argentines sent up these P-35s to attack them, it would be a slaughter. The multiple.50s in the B-24s' turrets would be able to knock the P-35s out of the sky long before the P-35s got into firing range of their.30-caliber guns.
Why am I surprised? They're still practicing how to swing sabers from the backs of horses in Santo Tome.
The Lockheed was equally fascinating to the Argentine pilots standing by their Severskys. To judge from the looks on their faces, they had never seen a Lockheed Lodestar before.
As soon as the Lockheed was inside the hangar, the doors were closed. Clete and Delgano walked through the cabin, opened the door, and found a ma-jor and a captain waiting for them.