“And you think Mr. Canidy is in the elite two percent?”
“Oh yeah,” Dolan said. “I spotted him right away, first time I took a ride with him. I’ve flown some, Mr. Bitter. I used to be a gold-stripe chief aviation pilot.”
“I didn’t know that,” Bitter said. The Navy had a small corps of enlisted pilots. The elite of the enlisted pilots were the chief petty officer pilots, and the elite of that elite were the gold-stripe chief aviation pilots. The chevrons of their insignia were embroidered in gold thread.
,I figured if you’re not flying, you shouldn’t be wearing wings,” Dolan said. He was, Bitter realized, letting him off the hook.
“And that’s why you recommended Mr. Canidy to be a test pilot?”
“That’s part of it Dolan said. “And at Toungoo, what Chennault’s going to do is run everybody through pursuit pilot school, the Army way. Mr. Canidy doesn’t need that, especially if it means he has to sleep in some old English barracks knocking bugs off his bunk.”
“You don’t think he needs pursuit pilot school?”
“You know the difference between flight training and pursuit pilot training?” Dolan asked.
“Tell me,” Bitter said.
“In pursuit pilot school, they unlearn you everything you’ve been taught so far about what not to do with an airplane, and they try to teach you just how far you can go without dinging it. I think Mr. Canidy’s got that down pretty pat already.”
“And you think I have, too?” Bitter asked. “I understand you recommended both of us for test pilots.”
Dolan didn’t answer for a moment. Then he turned in his chair and looked right into Bitter’s eyes.
“There’s a couple of things with you,” Dolan said. “You went to W. S. GRIFIF11V the Academy, for one thing. For another, Mr. Canidy told me about you losing your engine while you were barrel-rolling. But I guess what’s most important is that I know that no matter what some people might think, Mr. Canidy wouldn’t have a genuine asshole for a buddy.”
For a moment, Bitter was speechless. But finally he managed, “Well, thank you, Dolan.”
“That’s all right, Mr. Bitter,” the old chief said.
The house that CAMCO had acquired for the maintenance People, the communications technicians, and the two pilots was a large Victorian structure in the suburb of Kemmendine. They could see the gold-domed Shwe Dagon Pagoda from the window of their rooms, far away, dominating the skyline.
An hour after they had moved into the house, Canidy stuck his head in Ed Bitter’s door ‘ where Bitter was sitting in an armchair rereading the P40-B dash-one.
“You want to take a ride out to the airfield?” he asked. “And see what’s going on?”
The Studebaker Canidy had signed for at the CAMCO godown had less than a hundred miles on the odometer, and there was still a faint new-car smell–even though the car was chronologically at least a year old and had traveled ten thousand miles to the docks of Rangoon.
Canidy found Mingaladon Air Field without much trouble, and then the CAMCO hangars. In front sat four Curtiss P40-B aircraft. Three of them looked ready to fly, and there was a group of mechanics squatting under the wing of the fourth, peering up into the right wheel well. The right wing of that airplane had been jacked off the ground.
Canidy parked the Studebaker beside the nearest of the air-THIS LAST HEROES craft and got out. With Bitter following him, he walked around the airplane, studying it closely, and then he climbed up on the wing root and looked inside the cockpit. A middle-aged man detached himself from the group around the last P40-B and walked over to them.
Canidy jumped off the wing root.
,Canidy?” the middle-aged man asked, and when Canidy nodded, he identified himself as Richard Aldwood, of CAMCO. “Dolan told me about you,” be said.
“You’re more than just ‘of’ CAMCO, aren’t you?” Canidy asked, shaking the offered hand. “Vice president, right?”
“Yeah, and at the moment in charge of making a studied guess about why that god damned wheel won’t go up,” Aldwood said modestly, gesturing at the jacked-up airplane.
“Ed Bitter,” Bitter said, and he and Aldwood shook hands.
Page: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142