One of the men with pistols motioned the prisoners into a line, and then into two lines, then three, prodding the slow ones with the barrel of his pistol.
And then another man came down the line and rudely jerked people out of line by grabbing their shoulders.
If I wasn’t so afraid, this would be funny.
The man reached him, jerked Fulmar out of line, and marched him toward the front of the truck. Fulmar saw what had stopped the truck. A tree lay across the road. At first he thought it had been sawed, but then he saw that it had been taken down by somebody who knew how to use Primacord.
Standing near the cab of the truck were more Hungarians. One of them, in a large soft black woolen hat, looked somehow familiar
“You do not recognize me,” Canidy ordered quietly when Fulmar was dragged before him.
Fulmar shook his head in wonderment and smiled, but said nothing.
“We don’t have much time,” Canidy said.
“Just tell me which of the others would escape if they had half a chance?”
Fulmar looked confused.
“You heard me,” Canidy said.
“I need to know who are the serious criminals.”
Fulmar was as much confused by the question as he was surprised to see Canidy. But he finally understood that the question -was important for reasons he could not imagine.
“These guys are petty criminals,” Fulmar said.
“If they weren’t in jail, they’d probably starve. No real criminals, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“Damn,” Canidy said.
“Now, is Professor Dyer one of the people we pulled out of there?”
Fulmar looked.
“Second from the end,” he said, “with the glasses.”
Canidy waved another of the Hungarians over and spoke softly to him in English.
“No gangsters,” he said.
“We’ll just have to take half a dozen of them with us, that’s all there is to it. You saw Dyer?”
“Yeah, but I don’t think he recognized me.”
“Let’s try to keep it that way for the time being,” Canidy said.
“You go ahead and get them to uncover the plane.”
“The plane?” Fulmar blurted.
“You’ve got an airplane?”
“Take Loudmouth here with you,” Canidy said.
“He insists on talking English.”
There was a sharp cracking noise, followed a moment later by a creaking, tearing noise, and finally a great crashing sound.
Fulmar realized that another tree, its trunk severed by Primacord, had been dropped across the road.
“Let’s go, Lieutenant,” the man Canidy had spoken to said softly, and Fulmar followed him off the road and into the forest.
It was a long way across steep, heavily forested hills from where the prison truck had been stopped to the meadow; and when they got there, Fulmar was sweat-soaked and panting from the exertion.
He didn’t see an airplane. All he saw was a Hungarian standing at the far end of the meadow beside two of the largest horses he had ever seen. The horses wore whatever horses used so they could pull a wagon or a plow, but there was nothing around for them to pull.
And then, as they crossed the meadow, he saw a round red light sticking top of an aircraft vertical stabilizer.
An American pilot wearing a leather A2 jacket and with a Thompson sub machine gun in his hands came out of the woods.
“This is Fulmar,” Ferniany told Darmstadter.
“Canidy’s bringing the other one.”
Darmstadter looked with unabashed curiosity at Fulmar.
This young guy in blue work clothes was the purpose of this whole operation
“Hello,” Fulmar said.
That shocked Darmstadter into action.
He looked around for someplace to put the Thompson down and finally hung it from a brass horn on the harness of one of the horses. Ferniany watched him, then shrugged and put his pistol in his pocket and went to the mound of snow-covered brush.
When the branches were off the tail section, Alois hitched a stout rope to the tail wheel and the huge horses pulled the C-47 far enough out of the for est to turn the airplane around.
It took half an hour to remove all the branches from the C-47. Some of them had frozen to the wings and fuselage, and small branches had wedged into the openings of the movable control surfaces.