Kennedy had a sudden thought, and acted on it.
“There’s no reason that both of us have to freeze,” he said. “I’ll drive myself.”
“Oh, I don’t know, Lieutenant,” the older white hat said. “You’re supposed to have a driver.”
“If anybody asks, tell them I gave you a hard time about it,” Kennedy said.
“It’s gassed up, I suppose?”
“Yes, sir, and there’s an authorization for gas with the trip ticket.”
“Okay, then,” Kennedy said. “That’s it.”
“Lieutenant, would you mind writing down that you wanted to drive yourself?”
“Got a piece of paper?” It was half past four when he turned the jeep onto the Great North Road.
He had lived in London for several years before the war and for the first couple of hours on the Great North Road, he knew where he was.
But by half past seven–about the time it had grown dark and the rain blowing through the open sides had soaked through his woolen overcoat–he was in strange territory and had to admit (which angered him) that he was lost.
He had a map, one he had drawn himself with care, even carefully listed the distance between turns in miles and tenths of a mile, but it had proved useless. And there were no road signs. They had been taken down in anticipation of a German invasion in the summer of 1940, and only a few of them had been replaced.
At nine o’clock he reluctantly gave up, and spent the night on a tiny and uncomfortable bed in a small country inn. It was a hell of a way to spend Christmas Eve, he thought.
At first light he started out again, unshaven, in a damp uniform.
There had been a stove in the room, and he had hung his overcoat, jacket, and trousers over two chairs and a bedside table close to it.
It had done almost no good.
It took him two hours to reach Atcham. The MP at the gate was willing to accept his identity card and trip ticket as proof that he hadn’t stolen the jeep, but warned him that Atcham Air Force Station was “closed in.” Once he came inside, he would not be permitted to leave until 0600 hours 26 December.
That strongly suggested that an operation was in progress, that he had come all this way only to find that the man he wanted to see was somewhere over France or Germany. Then he found a faintly glowing coal of hope. It was raining again. Visibility was about half a mile.
There was a thick cloud cover at I, 000 feet. It was likely that an operation would not be able to get off the ground because of the weather.
He decided that seeing Major Peter Douglass was worth a chance.
He’d worry about getting off the base when it was time to leave.
As he drove the jeep through an endless line of rain-soaked P-38s in sandbag revetments, a B-25 flashed low over him, so low that he could see the fire at the engine exhausts. It touched down and immediately disappeared in a cloud of its own making as it rolled down the rain-soaked runway.
One of two things was true, Naval Aviator Kennedy thought professionally. Either his assessment of flying conditions was way off, or the pilot of the B-25 was a fucking fool flying in weather like this.
Headquarters, 311th Fighter Group, U. S. Army Air Corps was a Quonset hut surrounded by tar-paper shacks with a frame building used for a mess, theater, and briefing room.
There was no answer to his knock at the door, so he pushed it open.
Inside, a bald headed man was snoring under olive-drab blankets on a cot. The jacket with staff sergeant’s chevrons draped over a chair identified him as the charge of quarters.
When he shook the sergeant’s shoulder and woke him, Kennedy expected the man would be upset that an offlcer had caught him asleep.
But the reaction was annoyance rather than humiliation.
“I would like to see Major Douglass,” the lieutenant said.
“He’s asleep,” the sergeant said doubtfully as he reluctantly got off the cot and began pulling his trousers on. “He came in pretty late last night.”