“You didn’t answer my question, Captain,” Canidy said. “You’re right, we want Captain Fine permanently.”
“Why?” Canidy asked. “You ask entirely too many questions, Canidy,” Baker said.
“Newspaper columnist Drew Pearson, who loathed Franklin Roosevelt and seldom passed over an opportunity to attack him, had pieced together one or two facts with a good deal of vague hearsay and written a column in which he accused Roosevelt, through Colonel William J. Donovan, of keeping his rich, famous, and social dilettante friends out of combat service by recruiting them for his propaganda organization. Pearson had even heard about the house on Q Street, calling it a “luxurious mansion requisitioned to serve as a barracks for Rooseveltian favorites,” but had mis located it in Virginia.
“He’s another good friend of Eric Fulmar,” Captain Doug lass said.
“You gave me that too easily,” Canidy said. “Which means that isn’t the reason you want him.”
“You’re getting very perceptive, Dick,” Doug lass said.
“But we’re not playing twenty questions. If you don’t like that answer, I’m sorry, but it’s all you get for now.”
“Why have I been picked to recruit him? I hardly know him.”
“When I said that’s all you get for now, Dick,” Doug lass said, “I meant it.”
@A TWO I Chanute Field, Illinois June 28, 194a An eight-ship flight of B-17Es appeared in the air in the north. Canidy watched from a pickup truck. The truck was painted in a checkerboard pattern, and a large checkerboard flag was flying from its bed. The tai lend B-17E dropped its nose and made a steep descent for a straight-in approach to the runway.
“That’ll be Captain Fine, Sir,” the assistant base adjutant, who was driving the pickup, said to Canidy.
“He likes to sit on the taxiway so that he can offer ‘constructive criticism’ of their landings.”
Canidy smiled. The translation of that was “eat ass.”
The assistant base adjutant, a captain, was very impressed with Major Richard Canidy. This was his first encounter with an officer assigned to General Headquarters, Army Air Corps, who was traveling on orders stamped “Secret.” That he was flying a Navy airplane added a delightful touch of mystery.
“This is Major Canidy, Captain,” the base commander had told him. “I want you to take him where he wants to go and do whatever you can to assist him. But don’t ask him any questions.”
The remaining seven B-17Es circled the field in formation. As they passed over, the roar of their engines was awesome. They were simply enormous-and seemed invincible. Canidy let himself dwell for a moment on the incredible logistics problem involved in just getting them into the air. How many gallons of gas had it taken to fill their tanks?
How many mechanics were required to service that many engines? For that matter, how many parachute riggers had to be trained just to pack all those parachutes? One by one, at ninety-second intervals, the B-17Es detached themselves from the formation and began to land. By the time the first wheels touched down on the wide concrete runway, Fine’s plane had stopped a third of the way down the parallel taxiway, shut down its inboard engines, and turned its nose toward the runway.
The captain drove the pickup over next to it, and Canidy saw in the pilot’s seat a thin-faced, ascetic man with horn-rimmed glasses. He wasn’t at all like the man Canidy remembered. Captain Stanley S. Fine was wearing a leather-brimmed cap with a headset clamped over it. He looked down at the pickup truck, then turned his attention to the first plane landing.
A minute later, a sergeant in sheepskin high-altitude clothing came to the pickup. He saw Canidy’s gold leaf and saluted. “Sir, Captain Fine wants to know if you’re waiting for him.”
“Yes, I am, Sergeant,” Canidy said.
When the message was relayed to him, Fine looked down at the pickup truck again, without recognition. His eyebrows rose in curiosity, and he smiled. Then he looked away and didn’t look back at Canidy until the last of the B-17Es had landed. Finally he held up his index finger as an “I’ll be with you in a minute” signal and disappeared from view.