“You’re right,” Fine said incredulously, “that’s a boy. They’re both boys! ” “No, I’m not,” one of the B-17E pilots said to him, shaking her head.
Her hair, which she had had pinned up, came loose and fell across her shoulders. “We’re WASPS.”
“I’m afraid to ask what that is,” Homer Wilson said. “Women Auxiliary Service Pilots,” she said.
“We ferry these from the factory.” She nodded at the C-46.
“I thought they were flying these over from the West Coast.”
“Not this one,” Wilson said.
“If somebody with fifteen hundred hours-plus of multi engine time wanted a job with CAT,” she said, “who could she ask?”
“There’s an office in Rockefeller Center,” Wilson said.
“But I don’t think you’d want to go to China.”
“Yeah, I would ,” she said.
“Three trips a week here from Seattle get a little dull.”
They gave the WASP crew, two pilots and a flight engineer, an women, a ride back up the ramp. Both the Pan American pilots seemed stunned, Fine saw.
They were sent to base operations for a pilots’ briefing. A major, an older pilot, told them, using a map and a pointer, that a flight of twenty three B-17Es would soon begin taking off. They would form up at cruise altitude, nine thousand feet, over Morris town, New Jersey.
Then, in four and five-plane Vs, they would fly north over Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Maine, toward Newfoundland.
“If you can get off the ground now-within the next thirty minutes or so” he said, “the flight will catch up with you somewhere over Maine.
A.4 j By the time the tail of the flight has gone past you, you should be pretty close to Gander. In other words, you’ll have some company on the scary part of the first leg.”
“Let’s go wind it up,” Homer Wilson said, and they went directly back to the plane, loaded their luggage aboard, and climbed up the ladder into the cabin. There were several fire extinguishers on wheels scattered along the parking ramp, and Fine drafted the security agent to help him wheel one into place. Once he had his engines running, Homer Wilson paid no attention to Fine at all. Fine heard the hydraulic hiss as the brakes were released; then the C-46 moved onto the taxiway and headed for the far end of the field.
FOUR Whitby House Kent, England August 14, 1942 Lieutenant Jamison went looking for Dick Canidy late in the afternoon, carrying with him a six-inch-thick stack of printed forms. He found him in Colonel Innes’s command post, formerly the gamekeeper’s cottage, listening with something less than enraptured fascination to the colonel’s most recent inspiration about what he called “perimeter security.” Jamison had learned that Colonel Innes had fresh ideas on the subject at least twice a day. Jamison decided that Canidy would probably like to be rescued.
“Sorry to interrupt, Sir,” he said, crisply military.
“But there are some matters that require the major’s immediate attention.”
“I’m afraid I’ll have to get back with you later, Colonel,” Canidy said.
“I understand, of course,” Colonel Innes said. As they walked back to the house, Canidy asked, “What’s up?” Jamison hoisted the stack of requisitions. “Well, I appreciate being rescued, Jamey,” Canidy said.
“If I had spent another five minutes in there, I would have fallen asleep and really hurt his feelings.”
“He does try hard, doesn’t he?” Jamison said. “Still-as a manifestation of my boundless faith in your ability, and also because I don’t know what I’m signing anyway-you should know that I want you to go right ahead and forge my name to requisitions whenever you think you have to.”
“That sort of puts me on a spot,” Jamison said after Canidy had flipped through the stack of requisitions. “How?”
“One of those requisitions you are about to sign is for a car,” Jamison said.
“A real car, not a jeep. I am prepared to defend it, but I’d rather you knew about it. You won’t if you haven’t even seen it. Canidy looked at him curiously. “A car?” he asked.
“You mean an American car?”
“Three jeeps and a couple of three-quarter-ton trucks are supposed to arrive tomorrow with the service troops,” Jamison said.