She walked out of the office.
“That was the important question,” Colonel Stevens said.
“But there is another important question. For reasons I cannot go into, it is impossible for us to send Lieutenant Shawup on this mission. But the team that he commands will make it. There will be a certain resentment on their part toward you. Can you handle it?”
“Yes, Sir,” Janos said without hesitation.
“They will resent–after having received promises to the contrary–not being under Shawup’s leadership. And they will resent being told… they will not be asked, they will be told… that elimination of the people being held may be necessary. They will resent that, too.”
“They’ll do what I tell them to do,” Janos said confidently.
“You sound very sure of yourself,” Stevens said.
“Look at me, Colonel,” Janos said.
“As big as I am, wouldn’t you hate to make me mad?”
Stevens’s face went blank for a moment, and then he chuckled.
“Yes, I guess I would,” he said.
He leaned over the desk and offered Janos his hand.
“I have every confidence that you can handle this, Lieutenant Janos,” he said.
“Good luck!”
[THREE]
When the P-38 flashed over them, Lieutenant Commander Edwin W. Bitter, USN, Captain Stanley S. Fine, USA AC and Lieutenant j.g. Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr., USNR, were sitting on folding wooden chairs outside the Quonset hut that served officially as the orderly room of the 402nd Composite Squadron and secretly as the headquarters for Operation Aphrodite.
They were taking the sun. There was precious little sun in England in February, and when it did pop out, everyone who could take the time tried to get out in it.
“I have been told by everybody from Bill Donovan to that ferocious WAC captain in David Bruce’s office that asking questions is like farting in the Sistine Chapel,” Kennedy said, “but I would still dearly like to know where the hell you are taking my brand-new airplane.”
“Come on, Joe,” Commander Bitter said, a mild reproof.
“Yours not to reason why, Lieutenant,” Fine said, smiling at him, “yours but
to take yon fighter jockey aloft and see how much you can teach him in an hour or two about driving the B-17.”
He gestured in the direction of the P-38, which the pilot had stood on its wing to line it up with the main Fersfield runway.
“I am also just a little curious why that is necessary,” Kennedy said, “since here sit Commander Bitter and myself, both fully qualified B-17 pilots, and in my case at least, an extraordinary “Look Ma, No Copilot’ 17 chauffeur.”
Bitter and Fine laughed.
“Your country, Lieutenant,” Fine said, “is saving you for more important things.”
“You aren’t going to tell me, are you, you sonofabitch?” Kennedy said.
“I can’t, Joe,” Fine said seriously.
They stood up to watch the P-38 land. It came in hot, in a crab, lining up with the runway at the last moment before touching down.
“If yon fighter jockey tries that in a 17,” Kennedy said dryly, “we will have one more to park over there.”
He pointed to the “graveyard” where remnants of more than two dozen crashed and shot-up B-17s were scattered around.
“Without any whistling-in-the-dark self-confidence,” Kennedy went on, “what are our chances of getting that 17 back?”
“That will depend on how much you can teach Doug,” Fine said.
A Follow Me jeep had driven out to the taxiway to meet the P-38. Fine started to walk toward the revetment in which it would be parked, and Bitter and Kennedy followed him.
“I think I’ll go along in the 17,” Bitter said.
“Maybe I could help Joe.”
“No,” Fine said, politely enough, but there was no mistaking it was an order.
“We want to keep you around to fly the other new one.”
They reached the revetment as the P-38 taxied up to it.
A ground crewman made a throat-cutting signal with his hand, and the engines died. A ground crewman laid a ladder against the cockpit, and It. Colonel Peter Douglass. Jr climbed down it.
He was wearing a pink Ike jacket, matching trousers, a battered, oil-spotted, fur-felt brimmed cap with the crown stiffener removed on the back of his head, half Wellington boots, and a parachute-silk scarf in the open collar of a gabardine shirt.