“I can watch the gauges awhile.
“I just took some Benzedrine,” Fine said as he poured a cupful of coffee for Wilson. “You should have woken me up,” Wilson said.
What I should have done, Fine thought, suddenly furious, when Canidy waved the flag at me, was tell him to stick it up his ass. Then I wouldn’t be in this fucking mess. The depth of his anger surprised him.
After a moment, he decided it was a symptom of fatigue. And fear.
The next thing he knew, he was coming awake. His bladder ached to be relieved of all the coffee, The damned Benzedrine doesn’t work, he thought angrily. The forty-eight-hour clock on the instrument panel had stopped. He looked at his watch. He had been asleep for two hours. The clock had stopped long before that. They had forgotten to wind it. What else, in our fatigue, have we forgotten to do? He wound the clock and set it, and then went aft to relieve himself. Nembly was shivering beneath his blankets, and the square aluminum box they were using as a toilet smelled so foul when Fine lifted the lid he thought he was going to be sick.
I FIVE I Luanda, Portuguese Angola 1000 Hours August ao, 194a For some reason-perhaps, Whittaker thought, because the London station chief had given him a gun so he could shoot Canidy, or perhaps because Whittaker had shoved his own gun into the man’s face and taken the gun away-the flight engineer was growing more and more nervous and irritable as the flight progressed. And ten hours and fifteen minutes after they had taken off, he had come forward and angrily and without asking permission switched on the radio direction finder. Canidy had turned it off hours before; its hiss annoyed him, and they were not in range of any transmitter it could detect. The way that sono/abitcb did that, Whittaker thought angrily, was pretty damned close to giving me the finger I’m pilot in command of this god damned airplane; I decide what gets switched on and when.
THE SECRET WARRIORS 9 3os After a moment’s thought, he decided against calling the engineer down.
The poor bastard’s probably nearly as scared as I am. Whittaker looked over at Canidy, who was sound asleep with his head resting at an angle that was going to give him a stiff neck when he woke. Very tenderly, Whittaker leaned over and pushed Dick gently, so that his head hung down over his chest. He would not wake him, he decided, until they were twenty minutes or so out of Luanda.
They found Luanda when and where they had planned to, and Whittaker set it down with no trouble. When they shut down the engines in front of the corrugated tin building that was the Luanda terminal, they saw waiting for them-in addition to the khaki-uniformed Portuguese customs officials-a civilian, obviously American, wearing a seersucker suit, a necktie, and a natty straw hat. Canidy climbed down the ladder and approached him. “I’m Canidy,” Canidy said.
“I presume you’re from the consulate?” The man gave him his hand. The handshake was perfunctory. “My name is Spiers,” the man said, “Ronald I.
Spiers, and I’m the United States Consul General for Angola.”
“Have you any word on what happened to the other plane?”
Canidy asked.
Ronald I. Spiers ignored the question.
“Excuse me, but you’ll understand the necessity of this,” he said.
“Do you have any identification?”
“Who the bell else do you think would be flying that airplane?” Jim Whittaker asked. He looks and talks like Baker, Canidy thought. They must have a mold somewhere where they turn them out like Hershey bars, each one just like every other one. And how did you fuck up, Mr United States Consul General, to get stuck in an asshole of the world like this?
“One never knows, does one?” Spiers said. Canidy handed over his AGO card. Spiers examined it and passed it back.
“There has been no word on the other aircraft,” he said. Shit!”
Canidy said.
“Goddamn it!” Whittaker said. Spiers looked at them with distaste.
Then he opened his briefcase and took from it an envelope stamped “Top Secret.” He opened it and took out a single sheet of paper and handed it to Canidy.