“I don’t know what to say, sir,” Bitter said.
“Well, I took him at his word, Commander. I don’t know Canidy well, but well enough to know that he approves of few people. And I think we both know that he’s in a business where he can’t use Auld Lang Syne’ as a personnel selection criterion.” Bitter looked into Lorimer’s face but didn’t reply.
“They’ve had you flying a desk, I understand?” Lorimer said.
“I came here from BUAIR, General.”
“You want to get back to flying?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, a worn-out seventeen isn’t a P-58, of course,” General Lorimer said. “But it’s better than flying a desk. Have you got any multi-engine time?”
“A few hours in a twin-Beechcraft,” Bitter replied. He realized that General Lorimer had, perhaps naturally, concluded that he was to fly in this operation. He really hadn’t considered that before, but now that it had come up, he was excited.
“I was thinking, this morning as a matter of fact,” General Lorimer said, “that the most dangerous part of the whole thing will be bailing out of the aircraft. You ever use a parachute?”
“No, sir,” Bitter said.
“You were in the lucky half, huh?”
“Sir?”
“I was t’lking to one of my fighter group commanders, you probably know him, come to think of it, Doug Douglass, and he told me that one of two AVG pilots was at least once either shot down or had to make a forced landing.”
“I flew with Douglass, sir,” Bitter said, then blurted, “When I was hit and had to make a forced landing, Doug set down beside me, loaded me into his plane, and took off. If it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t have made it.” Lorimer looked at him thoughtfully.
“So that was Douglass, was it?” he said. “I heard that story, but until just now, I thought it was so much public relations bullshit.
How the hell did you both get into the cockpit of a P40?”
“He put me in first and then sat on my lap. I don’t know how he managed to work the rudder pedals.”
“III be goddamned,” General Lorimer said thoughtfully, and then, after a moment, returned to the present, “Did Canidy tell you Douglass’s group took heavy losses trying to skip bomb these goddamned sub pens?” “I heard about it,” Bitter said, abut not from Canidy.” “Which brings us back to the drones,” Lorimer said. “I had the chance to drop in at Fersfield, and had a couple of minutes to talk with two officers-Navy off ficers, by the way–a Commander Dolan and a Lieutenant Kennedy.” He paused, looked at Bitter to see if there was a response to the names, and when Bitter shook his headano,” went on, “Basically, they have two problems. One of them is control of the drone itself, which they’re working on. They have already decided that it will be impossible to get them off the ground without a pilot.
There’s no way they can install radio-controlled mechanisms that will permit really flying the aircraft. So a human pilot will take it off the ground, bring it to altitude, trim it up, synchronize the engines, set it on course, and then turn it over to the drone pilot in the control aircraft. That’s when they start the radio controls working.”
“The pilot would then parachute from the drone?” Bitter asked.
“That’s the second problem,” General Lorimer said, “getting the pilot out. How familiar are you with the seventeen?”
“I’ve never been in one,” Bitter said.
“Well, that can be easily fixed,” General Lorimer said. “I can arrange for you to participate in a crew training exercise. For that matter, I can send you as an observer on a mission.”
“I would appreciate that, sir,” Bitter said.
“Well, you’ll understand this better after you’ve ridden in a B-17.
But the exit problem, in brief, is that when they pack the fuselage with as much explosive as they need to crack the sub pens–and they can put a lot in there, without the bomb casings, Torpex doesn’t weigh very much–it blocks the hatches normally used to bail out.
You’re going to have to solve that problem, too ” Bitter realized suddenly that General Lorimer had stopped speaking and was looking at him either curiously or impatiently. He had been lost in thought, not of solutions to the problems General Lorimer had outlined, but of his own inadequacy to solve them. He knew nothing about explosives, or parachutes, and he had never been in a B-17.