There of course had been no opportunity to pick up his charts during this brief visit to Aeropuerto Coronel Jorge G. Frade.
All he had was his memory of many flights to Mendoza.
He knew, for example, that Mendoza was to the west of Buenos Aires.
He knew the only Radio Direction Finder transmitter en route to Mendoza was in San Luis, which was, give or take, five hundred miles from Buenos Aires, and that it had a range of no more than fifty miles—when it worked.
But there were roads, masquerading as highways, leading to Mendoza. National Route 8 and National Route 7, which ran more or less parallel across Argentina from Buenos Aires. After passing through Rio Cuarto, Route 8 jogged to the south and joined Route 7 about a hundred miles east of San Luis.
Clete was reasonably—not absolutely—sure he could simply follow the highways.
He had just found what probably was Route 8, and had turned the Lodestar so that he would be flying to the left of it, when Enrico came into the cockpit.
Frade motioned him into the co-pilot’s seat. When Enrico had put on the headset, he said, “I wondered where you were.”
“Putting a bandage on el Coronel.”
“A bandage? What happened to him?”
“He’s got a cut on his face.”
Enrico drew his index finger across his cheek to show where. Clete saw dried blood on Enrico’s fingers.
“Is it serious? What happened?”
“It’s not as serious as he thinks it is. He was squealing like a stuck pig.”
“What happened?”
“We took at least nine hits from those machine guns,” Rodríguez said matter-of-factly. “Five of them went straight through the plane, in the right side and out the other. One of them took out the window where el Coronel was sitting. A piece of that artificial glass . . .”
“Plexiglas,” Clete furnished.
“. . . got him here.” He drew his index finger across his face from his right ear to the chin. “Sliced him open pretty good, but I don’t think it got any muscles. There’s always a lot of blood with head wounds.”
“But you’ve bandaged him?”
“Sort of, Don Cletus.”
“What does that mean?”
“When I went to the first aid kit by the door, it was gone. Somebody must have stolen it.”
“So?”
“So I went to the toilet. You know those pads women use, Don Cletus?”
Frade nodded.
“I used one of those.”
If I laughed, or even smiled broadly, at the mental image of the vice president of the Argentine Republic sitting there feeling sorry for himself while holding against his face whatever they call a Kotex down here, I would really be a sonofabitch, wouldn’t I?
That thought was immediately replaced by a far more sober one: Would you be laughing, Red Skelton, if one of those bullets had hit him in the head?
[FOUR]
Aeropuerto Coronel Jorge G. Frade