“He was lying to me, sweetheart. I don’t know why, or what about, but he was lying to me.”
“Then why are you taking him?”
“I owed him, and he called the debt.”
She laid her hand on his cheek.
“When you get to the top of the stairs, remember to turn, smile, and wave at the people.”
“Take care of our baby.”
“Take care of our baby’s father.”
He kissed her very gently on the forehead. She squeezed his hand, and then he quickly went up the stairs.
At the top, he turned and waved at the crowd on the tarmac.
There was applause and cheers.
Undeserved.
I am really not qualified to fly this thing across the Atlantic Ocean.
What’s probably going to happen is that I’m going to dump this thing somewhere in the ocean and take all these people with me.
On the way to the cockpit, he stopped by Father Welner’s chair.
“Start praying. We’re going to need it.”
The copilot—What the hell is his name?—was already strapped into his seat and wearing headphones.
“Add 150 kilos to our gross weight,” Clete ordered as he sat down. “We have an unexpected extra passenger.”
“Sí, Señor.”
Gonzalo Delgano had naturally—he was, after all, SAA’s chief pilot—wanted to sit in the left seat. Or failing that, if SAA’s managing director pulled rank and wanted to be pilot-in-command, to at least be copilot on the first transatlantic flight.
Clete had told him that it just didn’t make sense for both of them to be on the same flight, which stood a fairly good chance of winding up in the drink. Clete promised Delgano he would be pilot-in-command on the first paying-passenger flight.
There was a seed of truth in Clete’s position. It was also true that Clete believed a commanding officer should not order anyone to do anything he was not willing to do himself.
But the real reason was that there were some things about the flight Clete did not want Delgano to know. Not that Delgano was going to run off at the mouth. But he probably would have told el Coronel Martín that Clete expected to be met off the coast of North Africa by U.S. Army Air Force P-38 fighters flying off the Sidi Slimane U.S. Army Air Force Base in Morocco.
Word of the Connie’s departure from Buenos Aires would reach Spain long before the airplane did. Colonel Graham—and Allen Dulles, which made it twice as credible—thought that there would be a genuine risk of the Germans sending fighters to shoot down the Constellation—possibly, maybe even probably, from Spanish airfields
that they secretly were using.
“The Argentine brave, but foolhardy, attempt to emulate German TransOceanic commercial air service, sadly, but predictably, ended in tragedy. Their airplane simply vanished somewhere in the Atlantic.”
The American fighters would be guided to the rendezvous point by the Collins radio. They would home in on the airplane much as an airplane would home in on a landing field.
Once the rendezvous had been made, SAA Flight 1002 would home in on a radio-direction-finding signal from another Collins radio secretly installed in the U.S. Embassy building in Lisbon, which was conveniently located less than a mile from Lisbon’s Portela Airport.
The P-38s would linger over the Portuguese coast long enough to ensure that the Constellation had landed safely. If Allen Dulles suspected that all was not as it should be at the Portela Airport, the radio in the embassy would order the Constellation to divert to Sidi Slimane, to which it would be escorted by the American fighter planes.
Clete stuck his head out the window and saw that the bunting-draped stairway had been pulled back.
He fastened his shoulder harness, put his headset over his ears, and pushed the switch activating the public address system.