Saving the miniatures to pass out as he saw fit did not represent any sacrifice, booze-wise, on the part of It. Colonel Douglass. He had his own out-of supply-channels source of booze, and when he had a couple of medicinal postmission nips, he took them from a bottle of Scotch.
He shrugged out of the sheepskin, high-altitude flying jacket and threw it toward his bed. It, too, fell short of the target and slid to the floor. He left it there, then pushed the suspenders holding up the sheepskin trousers off his shoulders.
He stood on one leg to pull the trousers off, then on the other leg to get them completely off. Then he threw them toward his bed. This time he made it.
He then picked up a telephone.
“Meteorology,” he said when the operator came on the line. And then, a moment later, “What have we got, Dick?”
His weather officer predicted perfect–that is absolutely un flyable-weather in England and over the European landmass for not less than forty eight hours, and probably for as much as seventy-two or ninety-six hours.
“There’s a stationary front, Colonel, a massive chunk of arctic air, which, meeting with an equally massive chunk of warm air from the Mediterranean–” “What your colonel had in mind, Captain,” It. Colonel Douglass interrupted him, “is whether or not it would be safe for him to get drunk for a day or two.”
“In my professional meteorological opinion, Sir,” the weather officer said, “you have that option.”
“Thank you,” Douglass said.
“Colonel, I’m sorry about Major Till,” the weather officer said.
“Yeah,” It. Colonel Douglass said after a moment.
“Thank you.”
Then he hung up.
He went to a large, sagging-to-one-side wardrobe and worked the combination of the long-shafted bicycle padlock that, looped through two eye-rings, locked it. He opened the left door and looked inside, and then, frowning, the right door.
One lousy, half-empty imperial quart of Scotch! What the hell had happened to the rest of it?
He didn’t like his own answer. I have drunk the rest of it, that’s what has happened to it. A couple of little nips here, and a couple more there, and the four imperial quarts of straight malt Scotch have evaporated.
Well, what the hell, there was more where that came from. There was a sturdily locked room at Whithey House stacked to its high ceiling with booze.
Canidy ran the OSS Station at Whithey House on the philosophy that unless his people “were now given by a grateful nation the best available in the way of booze and food, there was a good chance that his people would not be around to get it later.
He would just have to run over to Whithey House and replenish the larder, that was all there was to it. Canidy had declared him to be an Honorary Spock, with all the rights and privileges thereunto pertaining, such as access to the booze larder.
And then he remembered that Canidy was gone. He was off on one of his nobody-knows-anything-about-it missions in his souped-up B-25G. Canidy had given Douglass no details, of course, other than that he “would be away for a couple of days.” But then Douglass had learned that Dolan was off somewhere, too. And he’d flown over Whithey House, and the B-25G normally parked there was gone.
Ergo. Canidy and Dolan were off somewhere doing something secret and important in the souped-up B25G.
There was a steady, sometimes nearly overwhelming, temptation for Douglass to ask Canidy–or, probably smarter, to ask OSS London Station Chief David Bruce–to have him transferred to the OSS. And there was little question in his mind that it could be easily arranged: For one thing, if the OSS wanted somebody, they got him. No matter what assignment an officer–or, for that matter, an enlisted man–had, it was not considered as essential to the war effort as an assignment to the OSS.
And he was sure that David Bruce had at least considered that It. Colonel Peter Douglass, Jr.” knew far more about the OSS and its personnel and operations than he was supposed to.
Douglass had flown with Canidy and Bitter with the Flying Tigers in China and Burma, where their airplanes had been maintained by “Mr.” John Dolan. It made no sense to indulge the notion that any of them would regard Doug Douglass as someone who couldn’t be trusted with classified information, even if all of them, in fact, tried to keep him in the dark.