Dolan came into the cockpit.
“It’s up to you now, kid,” he said.
“The next pass is all we’re going to get, or everybody will think we’re having an air show up here.”
Darmstadter smiled uneasily.
Dolan went back into the fuselage. There he would strap himself into a harness and take up a position by the open door. When Darmstadter turned the red light on–there were supposed to be red and green lights, but the green wasn’t working–and then off, he would push the first of the parachutists through the door. When they were all gone, he would throw the three equipment bags after them.
Darmstadter made his approach very carefully, slowing the C-47 down as much as he dared, coming in very low and shallow over the tips of the trees in the forest, one hand on the Gooney Bird’s wheel, the other on the toggle switch for the light for the door.
And then he flicked the toggle switch.
He thought he could sense a slight change in the controls, which would mean that he had lost 1,000 pounds of weight–five parachutists–from his gross weight, and that the loss had changed the center of balance.
He had a strange, wild, arrogant thought.
/ could have landed this sonofabitch in that meadow! The way the wind is blowing up from the stream, I was making maybe forty knots over the ground. I was going so slow I could see Camay’s face! And I could have stopped it in plenty of time.
He looked over his shoulder into the aisle for Dolan.
He couldn’t see him at first, and then he did.
Dolan was on the cabin floor on his side, curled up. Darmstadter looked out the windshield, then back. Dolan straightened, grew almost stiff, and then went limp.
[FOUR]
ISO Degrees 20 Minutes West Longitude
There were four people on the bridge of the conning tower of the USS Drum as she made fifteen knots on a course of 275 degrees through oil-smooth, gently rolling seas. They were almost exactly halfway around the world from the Adriatic Sea and Budapest, Hungary, where at that moment it was 5:25 a.m.” February 21, “the next day.”
The Drum’s captain, It. Commander Edwin R. Lennox, USN, and Capt.
James M. B. Whittaker, USA AC were in clean and pressed but unstarched khakis. Commander Lennox wore a battered brimmed cap whose cover was once white, but was now nearly brown with oil stains. Captain Whittaker was hatless.
The talker, with a headset and microphone device over his head, was also hatless. He wore a light blue denim shirt and a darker-shade pair of denim trousers, as did the lookout, who also wore a blue sailor’s cap, the brim of which he had turned down all around.
The lookout, Commander Lennox, and Capt. Whittaker all had identical Navy-issue Bausch & Lomb ten-power binoculars on leather straps around their necks.
Commander Lennox looked at his wristwatch, and then, with a sailor’s eye, at the darkening sky.
“Anytime you’re ready, Jim,” Commander Lennox said, “you can go below.”
Whittaker smiled.
“Aye, aye, Sir,” he said.
“Permission to leave the bridge?”
“Granted,” the Drum’s captain replied, smiling back.
They had grown to like each other on the voyage from Pearl Harbor.
Lennox had thought about the growing friendship a good deal during that time–remembering what he had been told by a full lieutenant when he’d been an ensign aboard the Kingfisher- He’d been told that her skipper wasn’t really such a hard-nosed sonofabitch as he seemed, but that a skipper couldn’t afford to have friends, that command was indeed a lonely thing.
He had accepted that then because he was an ensign, and ensigns believe what they are told by full lieutenants. But it was only after they had given him the Drum, his first command, that he’d really understood it The master of a man-of-war could not have friends He could be civil and courteous, but there had to be a wall between the skipper and everybody else aboard It had a little to do with “familiarity breeds contempt,” but there was more to it than that.
The captain had to appear omniscient to his crew, and one of the best ways to do that, especially if you were convinced that at least two of your officers were far smarter than you were and better leaders of men, was to be aloof, to be somewhat mysterious, to share no opinion or confidences with anybody.