“Yes, they did,” she said.
“Why are you so sure they didn’t light up for you?”
She met his eyes.
“Sorry, Freddy,” the Duchess said.
She had sad eyes, he saw. There was something in them that made him want to comfort her. Really comfort her, not screw her. Well, maybe both, but first comfort her. And then he saw in her eyes that she was neither going to let him comfort her nor screw her.
“Me, too,” Freddy said.
[FOUR]
Canidy was sitting on a ten-foot-tall boulder, half buried in the side of the valley, his legs dangling over the side, sipping coffee from a gray pottery mug.
Ferniany was sitting beside him, and Capt. Hughson was standing behind them.
Canidy winced when the B-25 on its landing roll came to the shallow stream in the middle of the runway and set up an enormous cascade of water.
But the B-25 did not deviate from its path.
It rolled another thirty yards, braking hard, so that inertia depressed the piston on the nose gear almost completely. Then it stopped and turned, and began taxiing back down the runway.
When it passed the boulder, Dolan, in the copilot’s seat, made a “what now?” gesture with his hands, holding them out palms up, and shrugged.
Canidy made a “take it up” gesture, followed by a “bye-bye” wave. Dolan nodded and smiled, then put his hands over his face in an Oh my God! we’re going to crash! gesture.
The B-25 reached the inland end of the runway sixty seconds later, turned, ran up its engines, and then started to move. As it passed the boulder, Canidy could see the expressionless face of Gisella Dyer through the Plexiglas window in the fuselage. He waved at her. There was no response.
There was another eruption of water when the B-25 passed through the stream again, and it visibly slowed. But then it picked up speed again quickly, the nose wheel left the ground, and a moment later it was airborne.
The wheels went up, and the flaps, and then it climbed steeply.
Canidy watched for a minute until the plane was barely visible, and then he stood up, draining the coffee mug.
“Okay, Ferniany,” he said, “let’s get our show on the road.”
They walked off the top of the boulder where it joined the wall of the valley, then slid rather than walked to the valley floor. A three-wheel German Hanomag truck, sort of an oversize three-wheel motorcycle, was parked there.
The Hanomag had a canvas-covered truck bed; Canidy and Ferniany got in the back and closed the canvas tail-curtain over them, then Hughson kicked the engine into life and got behind the steering wheel.
They made their way about four miles down a path that turned first into a narrow cobblestone road and then into a rough macadam street. In a little while, they turned off onto a steep, narrow dirt path that led them to the water’s edge.
When Canidy climbed out of the Hanomag, he saw a thirty-eight-foot, high- pr owed fishing boat two hundred yards offshore dragging a net to the regular explosive snorting of a two-cylinder diesel engine. Just as he thought he saw the glint of binoculars in the small wheelhouse, the sound of the diesel engine changed pitch, the fishing boat slowed and then went dead in the water, and men started to retrieve the net.
When it was aboard, the boat headed for the beach in a wide curve.
“I don’t know how he’s going to like this,” Ferniany said.
“I hadn’t planned to ask him,” Canidy snapped.
“Maybe he’ll be smart enough not to volunteer an opinion.”
The moment he said it, he was a little sorry. There was something in the chemistry between him and Ferniany that produced dislike without real reason.
But that wasn’t why he had snapped at him. The reason for that was that Ferniany was close to the truth.
“Saint Peter,” the OSS agent on the fishing boat, was probably not going to like what he was about to learn. Nor would Stevens and Bruce, and if it got that far, Capt. Douglass or Colonel Donovan.
The OSS agents on the scene would be annoyed both by having their thunder stolen by a visiting brass hat and by the extra risk his grandstanding would mean. And Stevens and Bruce would bitterly question his decision to go into Hungary himself. First and foremost was the question of his running the risk of falling into German hands. And right on the heels of that was the equally valid question of whether he could do what had to be done any better than Yachtsman and Saint Peter could do it.