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Fifteen minutes after landing, he was airborne again.

The second Húsares de Pueyrredón Piper, the one he saw now, had taken off immediately after he had and flown the dirt road from Mendoza, carrying General Nervo, to its refueling point. Then it had taken off and continued down the dirt road until it intersected Highway 146, onto which it had turned to the northeast.

It came upon the convoy first—which wasn’t surprising, as it had less a distance to fly—and had then followed orders by flying wide circles to the right of the road.

Clete flew his Cub to intercept the other one, and signaled to the pilot that he was going to fly low over the road to make sure it wasn’t full of large rocks and then land. The Húsares de Pueyrredón pilot nodded his understanding.

Clete pushed the nose down and headed for the road. At probably three hundred feet, using the cloud of dust as a wind sock, he decided that he had gotten lucky. By flying into the prevailing wind, which was the way you were supposed to do it, he would end his landing roll right in front of the Mercedes.

He could see nothing on the road that would keep him from landing, and also that the passengers in the Mercedes were looking up at him incredulously.

He went around, came in low and slow—and touched down.

The Mercedes was two hundred meters down the road. General Rawson got out, tugged on the skirt of his tunic, and then, with his back to the Mercedes, checked his pistol.

He had shown it to Clete just before they had taken off. It was a pretty little Colt short-barreled revolver chambered for the .32 Police cartridge. Clete thought it would probably be about as lethal as the Red Ryder Daisy BB gun he had been given for his fifth birthday.

He reached onto the floor of the Cub and picked up his Model 1911A1 .45 semiautomatic pistol and slipped that into the pocket of his JACKET. LEATHER, NAVAL AVIATORS W/FUR COLLAR, and then, to be sure he wasn’t going to be out-gunned, took a Thompson .45 ACP submachine gun from where he had propped it between the fuselage skin and the instrument panel.

By then the other Cub was down, and General Nervo and the pilot—who looked more than a little nervous—had walked up to them.

Colonel Schmidt and several officers were standing in front of the Mercedes. They were wearing Wehrmacht steel helmets. Clete remembered that the first time he’d ever seen a picture of his father—Colonel Graham had shown it to him in the hotel in Hollywood—his father had been dressed just like this.

“Do we go there, or what?” Nervo asked.

“I’m the president of the Argentine Republic,” Rawson said softly. “People come to me.”

A very long sixty seconds later, the officers with Colonel Schmidt came to attention and marched toward the people standing by the airplanes.

&nbs

p; “Do you think they’ve spotted the president?” Nervo asked quietly.

“We’ll soon find out,” Rawson himself answered.

The expression on el Coronel Schmidt’s face didn’t change even when he was so close to Rawson that it would have been impossible not to recognize him.

Schmidt saluted. Rawson returned it.

“All right, Colonel,” Rawson said. “If you have an explanation, I’m ready to hear it.”

“Mi general,” Schmidt said, “I very much regret that I must ask you to consider yourself under arrest pending court-martial.”

Clete saw that one of the officers with Schmidt—there were four of them—had his hand in his overcoat pocket.

That sonofabitch has one of those toy Colt revolvers in there!

“Arrest? Court-martial? I’ll remind you, Colonel, that I am the president of the Argentine Republic.”

“You are a traitor to the Argentine Republic, Gen—”

He did not get to finish the sentence. Seven 230-grain, solid-point bullets from Don Cletus Frade’s Thompson struck him in his midsection, from just above his crotch on his right side to just below his shoulder joint on his left.

Schmidt fell backward.

Clete turned the Thompson on the officer he thought might have a little Colt revolver and, just as the pistol cleared the officer’s pocket, put four rounds of .45 in him.

“Cletus! My God!” President Rawson exclaimed. “What have you done?”