She curtsied to the Countess, then to the men.
“She says,” the Countess said, “that if she had known we were coming, her husband would have of course been here, and there would be a meal prepared.
As it is, all there is is simple boar gulyas. Paprika gulyas.”
After they had eaten, Canidy was outfitted, from a wide selection, with a green loden cloth coat and lace-up boots, which were, he suspected, older than he was. Laughing, the Countess added a black cap of heavy wool.
“A real Magyar!” she said.
The caretaker showed up as the Countess -was lacing up her boots. With him was a man Canidy’s age, with a double-barreled shotgun hanging upside down on a woven leather strap from his shoulder.
“This is Alois, the chief hunter,” the Countess explained.
“His great grandfather was my great-grandfather’s chief hunter. We will take him with us to the meadow. If there is anything that has to be done, he will see that it is done, and then he will forget that he ever saw you.”
“How big a place do you have, Countess?” Canidy asked.
“In other words, how about the neighbors?”
“This estate is roughly an oblong,” she replied matter-of-factly.
“It is twenty three kilometers long and about fourteen wide. There are no neighbors, and the local authorities are my tenants. If I do not wish them to see me, or anything else, they will not see me, or anything else.”
“You sound very confident of that,” Canidy said.
“I am,” she said.
A ten-minute walk over light snow brought them to the meadow. It did not meet any of the criteria for a drop zone. It was far too small, and it was surrounded on three sides by a mature pine forest, into which anybody who missed the drop zone would land.
But trees had been harvested at one end of the meadow, where the land dropped precipitously off toward a stream.
When Ferniany arrived with the radios and the panels, tomorrow or the next day, Canidy would arrange the panels either at the edge of the meadow by the forest or at the stream, depending on the wind. With a little bit of luck, they would be able to put three or four of the five parachutists down in the meadow. The others would have to take their chances on landing on his just cut-over steep land at the end of the meadow.
There would be time to talk to the plane. Darmstadter had dropped parachutists before. He would know how to drop them here, once he had been told of the conditions by radio.
Canidy thought of the emergency backup procedures. There was always that in the planning. Here, in the case of radio failure or if there were no opportunity to put the signal panels in place, it was a smoky fire at the point in the drop zone that would indicate where the first parachutist in the string was supposed to land.
However, it didn’t seem to make a hell of a lot of sense to bother about that particular backup. For one thing, there would be a chance to put the panels out and talk with the plane by radio. For another, unless the drop could be discussed with the plane, there would be no point in making the jump; it would be too risky.
But in the end, Canidy asked the Countess to have her chief hunter arrange for a five-foot-high stack of pine boughs at both ends of the drop zone. He showed, with his hands, how large the piles should be.
“And two cans of kerosene, preferably, or else gasoline, by each stack,” he said.
She translated that for him.
And then, as if they were two old friends out for a walk in the woods, she took his arm and they walked back to the hunting lodge.
[TWO]
The first thing Freddy Janos realized when he saw that the bomb bay doors of the B-25 in the hangar were not functional was that he was going to have a hell of a hard time dropping out of the crew-access door when the time came.
Then he measured the access door with his hands and realized that there was no way any of the team could exit the aircraft wearing all their equipment.