“Dolan, do you think Colonel Douglass could land the 25 on Vis?”
“He stands a much better chance than you do,” Dolan said.
“And the kid doesn’t need him in the C-47.”
“And what if you’re not ‘available’ in the C-47?” Fine challenged.
“That’s the chance we have to take, that by me just sitting there in the right seat and letting the kid fly, my dysentery won’t come back.”
Douglass looked at Fine.
“I think we have to go with Dolan,” Fine said.
“His main advantage, I think, is that he’s the one with the best chance… maybe even the only one with a chance… of finding the drop zone.”
[THREE j
It. Hank Darmstadter thought that the most difficult part of the flight so far had been taxiing to the end of the runway in Cairo. They had taken off at 2100, which would put them over the meadow outside Pecs at just after daylight.
The airfield at Cairo was blacked out, and while Wilkins had been able to arrange for the runway lights to be turned on long enough for them to take off, they had had to be led to the runway from the hangar by a man holding a flashlight in the back of a jeep.
The flashlight-in-the-jeep had been very hard to follow. It was almost impossible to see directly ahead out over the nose of a C-47 with its tail wheel on the ground. C-47 pilots learned to taxi by looking out the side and by swinging the nose from side to side to provide a look ahead through the side windows.
It was difficult following the jeep, but they’d made it to the end of the runway all right, sometimes flicking the landing lights on to make sure of their position. Darmstadter had been a little surprised and flattered that Dolan had not taken over the controls and done the taxiing, but Dolan had left that to Darmstadter.
And from the moment they had lined up with the centerline of the runway, things had gone without a hitch.
Dolan had waited until he’d run the final mag check for the engines, and then he’d called the tower for the lights, and they had come on immediately.
Despite what had turned out because of the air temperature to be four hundred pounds over Max Over Gross, the takeoff had been no problem at all.
The only way Darmstadter could tell how heavy they were was a reluctance to pick up altitude. But they had never come close to a stall, and the climb was steady, if slow.
The first leg, the longest, was on a west-northwest course across the desert to the Mediterranean, and then across the Mediterranean far enough south of Crete to avoid a chance encounter with German aircraft based on the island.
And then they turned north across the Ionian Sea.
There was almost a half moon, providing what Dolan described as the most they could ask for, enough light for them to make out landmasses and shorelines, but not enough to make it easy for anyone to spot them.
The Strait of Otranto, which separates the heel of the Italian boot from Albania and the Adriatic from the Ionian Sea, came into view just when they expected it to, and they could see both shorelines for a while.
Dolan had planned that that leg of the flight would take six hours and twenty-five minutes. It actually took six hours and two, meaning that they were making better time than anticipated, even with the engines thinned back as much as possible for fuel economy.
Once they had crossed the Strait, Darmstadter had raised the nose slightly, starting a slow climb to 9,000 feet, and Dolan had begun to peer intently out the window looking for the narrow strip of land that ran between the Adriatic and Lake Scutari on the Yugoslav-Albanian border.
Dolan had told him, jokingly, but meaning it, that the secret of “road map” navigation was to look for something on the ground that was large enough to be easily seen and that couldn’t be confused with anything else.
Lake Scutari fit the bill. It was twenty-five miles long and was separated from the Adriatic by a strip of land as narrow as seven miles. It could be easily found, and it could not be mistaken for anything else.