“I really don’t know,” Canidy had told him. Lindbergh shrugged.
“And since there is some question about where my sympathies lie in this war, I don’t suppose I’ll be asked to fly this mission. That means, I suppose, that you will.”
“I don’t know that, either,” Canidy said. “Hub!” Lindbergh snorted, and then went on: “Well, we’ll proceed on the notion that you’ll be flying it.”
“I really don’t know, Colonel,” Canidy pursued.
“I’ve never flown anything but fighters-and a Beech DI 8S, “They’re sending kids with a hundred twenty hours’ total time to Europe as B-17 aircraft commanders,’ Lindbergh said.
“How many hours did you say you have, Ace?”
Canidy didn’t reply, He had more than 2,000 hours in the air, more than twice 120 hours in combat, but he was reluctant to say so. Lindbergb chuckled, then went on: “Far down the west coast of Africa. Perhaps as far as South Africa. The way to do that is with a Curtiss.”
“Why?” Canidy asked simply, “Because it can fly faster and higher tbqn a Sikorsky, and when we solve the problem of auxiliary fuel tanks, maybe a thousand miles farther.” Lindbergh had arranged for a Pan American Strato liner, the civilian version of the Commando, to be flown to Newark. The story was let out that it had been requisitioned by the Air Corps. While one crew of workmen stripped the seats, the carpets, and the sound-deadening material from the cabin, another crew removed the glistening white paint and Pan American insignia from the outside skin.
Then Hangar 17 was isolated and placed under guard by Air Corps military policemen. Canidy came to understand that isolating aircraft and cargo was a routine procedure these days.
Whenever a crew from Pan American was doing something that did not require his expertise, Lindbergh talked to Canidy at length about long-distance, high-altitude flight. In the course of these discussions, Lindbergh and Canidy prepared more than a dozen flight plans, all based on the idea that the departure point would be either the Azores or one of the American air bases in England. Though they didn’t know where they were going, Or even where they would leave from, Lindbergb seemed determined to have a flight plan prepared for every possibility.
Lindbergb also spent long hours showing Canidy around the Curtiss’s cockpit, familiarizing him with the controls and the peculiarities Of the aircraft, while delivering conversational lectures on how to milk the most mileage from its twin 2,000-horsepower Pratt & Whitney Twin Wasp engines. He gave no consideration to the fact that Canidy had never flown the Curtiss. Lindbergh seemed to believe that little problem could be solved in an hour or two in the left seat, going around the pattern shooting touch-and-go landings.
Although Canidy was by no means modest about his flying ability he was, after all, a pretty good fighter pilot-flying the Curtiss when the p time came made him more than a little nervous.
And-there being no question in his mind that Lindbergh had correctly deduced where the plane was headed-what he had come to think of as the African flight wasn’t all Canidy had to deal with. His primary duty was still the baby-sitting of Admiral de Verbey at Summer Place, and there were always other problems with that-most of them small but time-consuming ones with the guards. They developed colds. One of them fell over a piece of driftwood on the beach, dislocated his shoulder, and nearly died of exposure before he was found. And then disputes between the guards over the duty roster had to be resolved.
Canidy and the admiral had quickly dropped the polite fiction that Canidy was his liaison officer. The admiral knew that he was being politely held prisoner. To pretend otherwise would have been insulting. And the admiral placed yet another demand on Canidy’s time.
In what Canidy came to think of as his Great Summer Place Mistake, on his second or third night in Deal-caught up in the excitement of the game he had played some first-class bridge, wiping out the admiral and Mrs. Whittaker and awing the ex-FBI agent who had been drafted for a fourth. The admiral thereafter saw in Canidy a bridge player worthy of his own considerable talent, From then on, whenever Canidy sat down near a flat surface, the admiral started drawing up chairs and shuffling cards. Canidy soon realized that he should have dropped the cards on the floor the first night. And then the admiral announced, dead serious, that he intended to steal-he said “restore to service against the Boche’@-the battleship jean Bart, the largest vessel in the French Navy, currently at anchor “under German monitor ship’ in Casablanca harbor. The first time Canidy learned this, he was torn between amusement and concern for the admiral’s mental health. Telling himself that humoring the feisty little old man was the price he was going to have to pay to keep the admiral happy, he had reluctantly presented himself at Admiral de Verbey’s war plans room-a glassed-in porch on the second floor-to be “briefed.”