“Of course I’m right,” Chennault snorted.
“What is the general proposing, sir?” Canidy asked.
“I’m offering you a one-year contract, Canidy, on behalf of the Central Aircraft Manufacturing Company, Federal, Inc., to go to China and participate in the construction, maintenance, and development of civilian aircraft for the Chinese Air Transport Ministry.”
“I’m in the Navy, General.” ignoring him, Chennault went on. “What you’ll be doing is flying Curtiss P40-Bs against the Japanese. The pay-your pay, I’m offering you a job as a wingman-is six hundred dollars a month, plus rations and quarters and a bonus of five hundred dollars for every aircraft you down.”
That was nearly twice what he was paid by the Navy. And, of course, there were no five-hundred-dollar bonuses for primary flight instructor pilots.
“At the conclusion of your contract year,” Chennault went on, you will be taken back into the Navy with no loss of time in grade. If you get promoted flying for us, you will receive a similar promotion in the Navy.”
“I would be discharged from the Navy?” Canidy asked. “Not just released from active duty, subject to recall?”
“Discharged,” Chennault said. “You would leave the United States as a civilian.”
“And if I didn’t come back in the Navy?”
“You are a gutsy bastard, aren’t you?” Chennault asked admiringly. “Saying that in front of the admiral.” He paused. “You do your year, and if I’m wrong, and there is no war, I’ll guarantee you can come home and go to work for Boeing. You could probably get more money as an engineer in China, come to think of it. But if the United States gets in the war, and I think it will, you’ll have to make your own arrangements with the draft board.”
“And if I don’t want to go to China?”
“Then you go back to your BOQ and forget you ever met me Chennault said. “You won’t be able to do that, of course. You’ll remember this little encounter, no matter what you decide, for the rest of your life.”
“When would I have to go?”
“Sometime in the next thirty days,” Chennault said.
“How many others are being asked?”
“In the first group, a hundred pilots. We have a hundred P40-Bs enroute to China.”
“Why P40-Bs?”
Chennault paused before replying. “Because our noble English cousins don’t want them. They consider them obsolete9” he said.
“OK?”
“I’ve never flown a P40,” Canidy said.
“No one has, the first time,” Chennault said dryly.
“May I ask why I’m being asked? I don’t have all that much experience.”
“All we have to go on is records, Mr. Canidy,” the admiral said. “Yours are outstanding.”
“One year. And when that’s over, I’m out. Is that the proposition?”
“That’s the deal,” Chennault said. “I won’t muddy the waters with any talk of duty, honor, country.”
“And how much time do I have to make up my mind?”
“Take whatever it takes,” Chennault said. “Two, three minutes.
Canidy had a sense of being caught in something he had no control over. He thought of the cliche “swimming against the stream, and he thought that he really was being recruited for this because of the performance he’d turned in in advanced training. He held the training command record for most holes in a towed target, and he had shot down (according to the motion-picture cameras mounted on the Grumman F317-1 where the.30-caliber Browning machine gun was normally mounted) all four of the advanced fighter training instructors they’d matched him against, one after the other.
It was also, he thought, equally possible that he was being asked to go to China because he had been judged expendable by his Navy superiors. If that was true, that the Navy felt they could do without him, that could really be dangerous when the war started. Fliers the Navy felt it could do without would be the ones sent on missions where severe losses were to be expected.
“Shit,” Canidy said, the word coming without his intending it to. He was aware that both the admiral and General Chennault were looking at him with distaste.
,I’ll go he hastily added.
“OKI 9 1 Chennault said. He stood up and offered Canidy his hand. k took Dick Canidy back to the officers’ When the admiral’s Buic club, Ford and Czernik were gone. He thought that he hadn’t been gone all that long, despite all that had happened, and that Bitter nlight still be trying to explain why he had made the unscheduled landing. He went to the bar and ordered a pitcher of beer. He would wait for him.