“For the first time in his life, he’s in love,” Whittaker said, “and almost immediately upon getting jabbed with Cupid’s arrow, they shipped him over here.”
“Being in love produced that tirade?” she asked. “That, and knowing that a mission he set up is under way,” Whittaker said.
“Despite what he says, he really thinks he should be doing it.”
“You seem to know a great deal about the major,” she said. “We’ve been pals since we were kids,” Whittaker said. “What did he mean about you eating cavalry horses in the Philippines? ” “Eat your ham and eggs, Duchess,” Whittaker said.
“After which, Friendly Jim Whittaker will take you to Nasty Dick Canidy so that you can kiss and make up.”
“But you were in the Philippines?” she pursued.” Yeah,” he said.” I was in the Philippines.” She looked down at the huge slice of ham and the four fried eggs on her plate. And saw that her shirt was unbuttoned halfway to her navel. She felt her face color. He was still behind her, which meant that he was almost certainly looking down her dress. She was not furious with him. He was, she reminded herself, in his cups.
TWO I Lisbon, Portugal August 16,1942 There were a dozen German fighter bases around Brest and Saint-Nazaire, whose pilots would have been happy to shoot the China Air Transport C46 down, but they had come no closer to Brest than two hundred miles.
And they’d been four hundred from Saint-Nazaire. En route to Lisbon, they picked up some air-to-air conversation in German, which gave Fine time to experience vicariously what bomber pilots went through. Four and a half hours after taking off from Shannon, the Lisbon tower operator, in a strangely accented English, cleared China Air Transport Two-naught-six to land on runway twelve. The Portuguese customs officials, who were accompanied by a Portugese Air Force officer, were considerably more pleasant than the Irish had been. The Air Force officer’s request to be shown around the airplane was pure flier’s curiosity. The C-46 was the first he had ever seen. When they asked him if there was someplace they could get something to eat and a few hours’ sleep, he summoned a taxi bargained with the driver for them, and sent them to “a place I think you will like” in Lisbon. It turned out to be an elegant turn-of-the century hotel. They were met by a desk clerk in a morning coat who told them he had had a telephone call about them from the Air Force officer. He then took them to a finely furnished two-bedroom suite on an upper floor overlooking Rossi Square and the Dona Maria 11 National Theater. The bathroom contained an enormous bathtub and thick towels. After Fine came out of his bath, he found the others sitting before a large assortment of hors d’oeuvres.
“No Scotch,” Homer Wilson said dryly.
“The war, you know. But they did manage to scrape this up.” He raised a quart bottle of I. W, Harper. The dining room offered a wide menu at incredibly low prices, and they ate ravenously. Wilson arranged with the maitre duiel for box lunches to be prepared for the morning chicken and ham sandwiches.
At half past six the next morn in , China Air Transport Two-zero-six requested taxi and takeoff for Porto Santo, in the Madeira islands.
Almost exactly four hours later, they were telling another amiling, friendly Portuguese Air Force officer that all they were going to do was top off the tanks and get back in the air. The next leg was a long one, twenty-six hundred miles, ten hours plus, to Bissau in Portuguese Guinea on the lower tip of the Horn of Africa. They climbed slowly to twenty thousand feet and set up a course that would place them no closer than a hundred miles off the African coast. They also planned to fly just to the west and out of sight of the Spanish Ca nary Islands, If they were spotted by Spanish aircraft, it was likely that the Spanish would make their presence known to the Germans. Twenty minutes after Wilson had turned the pilot’s seat over to Will Nembly, the other ex-PAA pilot, and gone back into the cabin to sleep, a buzzer sounded and the oil-pressure warning light for the starboard engine lit. Almost immediately, there was another warning buzzer, louder than the first, and the fire light for the starboard engine lit. “You better go get Wilson,” Nembly ordered calmly as he quickly shut off fuel to the starboard engine and pulled the lever that engaged the carbon dioxide fire extinguisher. Fine looked out the window as he entered the cabin. Thick black smoke was pouring from the engine nacelle. it turned gray and white as carbon dioxide mixed with the smoke, and then the gray smoke vanished. Wilson, instantly awake, went to the cockpit and sat down, hastily fastening his seat and shoulder harness. Fine stood between the two pilots’ seats, He could see that the starboard propeller, feathered, had stopped spinning, and that the airspeed was already down well under two hundred miles per hour and dropping. Wilson did not take over the controls from Nembly. He didn’t even seem especially upset. “We have an oil leak,” he announced conversationally. “No shit?” Nembly asked sarcastically. “What the hell do we do now?” Homer Wilson asked rhetorically. “Go back? How long can we rely on the other engine? And where the bell are we?” He reached beside him for the chart. “We’re a hundred fifty miles, roughly, from Santa Cruz in the Canary Islands,” Nembly said.