I could get a Piper Cub in there easily. I wonder if my father had that in mind?
It couldn’t have been cheap to dynamite all that rock out of the way and then make everything level.
He climbed to twelve hundred feet, leveled off, then picked up his microphone and pressed the intercom button.
“First Officer, you have the aircraft.” He pointed out the windscreen. “The airfield’s over thataway.”
She put her hands on the yoke and he took his off.
“Thank you, my darling,” the first officer said.
“That was a good landing,” Clete said.
“Well, thank you, darling.”
“Any landing you can walk away from is a good landing.”
“You bah-stud!”
He saw she was smiling.
If anything had gone wrong, I could have taken it away from her.
I think.
Looking out the windscreen, Clete Frade saw that a considerable number of vehicles were on hand to meet them. He was not surprised to see the four-door Lincoln Continental his Aunt Beatriz had rebodied or even the two dark green army-style trucks and two 1941 Ford sedans painted the same color that obviously went with the maybe a dozen members of the Gendarmería Nacional standing near them. And he had expected the small bus parked beside the gendarmes. There were in all seven Möllers and Körtigs, plus the suitcases now holding the clothing Rodríguez and the nun had bought for everybody.
But he was surprised to see that the Little Sisters of Santa María del Pilar were also on hand, represented by their Mother Superior. She was standing by a small bus, much like the one the Little Sisters of the Poor had had at Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo.
I wonder what that’s all about?
“Don Cletus?” a male voice behind him at the cockpit door said.
Clete turned and saw Inspector Peralta, one of the two Gendarmería Nacional officers who had been waiting for him at Jorge Frade when he’d “refueled.” The other officer was Subinspector Navarro. The best that Clete could figure was that Peralta was roughly the equivalent of a lieutenant colonel and Navarro a major. Inspector General Nervo’s orders to them had been simple: “Place yourself at Don Cletus’s orders and keep me posted—twice a day—on what’s going on.”
Frade made the introduction between Doña Dorotea and Inspector Peralta.
Then Peralta said: “With your permission, Don Cletus, rather than go directly to Estancia Don Guillermo, I will go to the Mendoza headquarters of the Gendarmería and have a talk with Subinspector Nowicki—he came to meet us; I see his car—and join you later. May I bring Subinspector Nowicki with me when I do?”
He’s being polite as hell, but he’s sure running the show.
“Of course.”
“Subinspector Navarro will escort you now with the trucks and men you see. If you would be good enough to show him the weapons cache, that would be helpful.”
Does that mean the weapons will then get loaded on the trucks, and bye-bye weapons cache?
Oh, stop it, for Christ’s sake! The next thing, you’ll be eyeing Mother Superior suspiciously.
What other choice do I have?
“I’ll have Rodríguez show him the cache as soon as we arrive.”
“Do you think four of my men will be sufficient to guard the aircraft, Don Cletus? Or shall I arrange for more?”
I never even thought about that. The Constellations in Buenos Aires, yeah. But not the Lodestar here.
You’re really on top of things, Señor Superspy!