“What I want to find out is whether a pilot with about your level of skill can be taught to land and take off from a dirt runway with a stream running through the middle of it.”
“Sir?”
“It’ll be two or three days before we go,” Canidy said, “time enough for Commander Dolan to check you out in the B-25. That is, presuming you’re still an eager volunteer?”
“Sir, I’m still confused,” Darmstadter said.
“But maybe you’ve heard enough to rethink a little? Reconsider volunteering?
If you want to walk, you can walk right now. No hard feelings, and no black marks on your record.”
“You aren’t pulling my leg, are you. Major?” Darmstadter said.
“You’re making a joke of it, but you really meant everything you said, didn’t you?”
Canidy nodded.
“And that’s all I’m going to be told, isn’t it?”
The major nodded again.
“In or out, Darmstadter?” Canidy asked.
“It’s up to you.”
“In, Sir,” Darmstadter said.
“Commander Dolan,” the major said, “may I suggest we follow that delight nil naval custom of splicing the main brace to welcome a new officer to the wardroom?”
“Aye, aye. Sir,” Commander Dolan said, and took a bottle of bourbon from a file cabinet.
“For Christ’s sake,” Commander Bitter said, “it’s half past ten in the morning!”
“I’m Joe Kennedy,” the third naval aviator said to Darmstadter, offering his hand. The gold letters below the aviator’s wings on the leather patch sewn to his flight jacket identified him as LT. JR
KENNEDY, JR.” USNR.
“It’s a little crazy around here, but you get used to it.”
Dolan passed around glasses that had once contained Kraft cheese spread.
They now held a good two inches of the bourbon. Commander Bitter shook his head but took one.
Canidy took a small swallow of the whiskey.
“Rule One around here, Darmstadter,” he said, “is that you don’t write home to Mommy about what you’re doing or what you’ve seen. And you don’t tell your pals, either. The Second Great Commandment is like unto the first.
You don’t ask questions. But before we put that into effect, you can have one question.”
There were at least a dozen questions spinning around in Darmstadter’s mind. He was surprised at the one he blurted:
“Why are the tops cut off those B17s?”
“That’s not the question I expected,” Canidy said.
“I thought you’d ask what’s going on around here. Then I would have told you that you have just joined the OSS on a probationary status. If you turn out, you’ll join the OSS’s private air corps. If you don’t… you won’t like what will happen if you don’t. Not a threat, a statement of fact.”
Darmstadter had heard about the OSS. Very hush-hush, involved in all sorts of things involving espionage and sabotage and dropping agents behind enemy lines.
Canidy saw the shock on Darmstadter’s face and smiled.
“As far as the B-17s are concerned,” Canidy went on, “what we’re trying to do with them is turn them into radio-controlled flying bombs. We fill them with an English explosive called Torpex. Then Joe gets in, fires it up, and takes off. We cut the roof off so he can bail out. The plane is then flown to the target by radio control. If we can get the sonofabitch to work twice in a row, we’re going to fly one into the German submarine pens at Saint-Lazare. So far we haven’t been able to get it to work twice in a row.”
Darmstadter looked into Canidy’s face and saw that he had been told the truth.
“You’ve had your question,” Canidy said.
“I answered it. That’s all you get.”
“I understand. Sir,” Darmstadter said seriously.
The door of the Quonset creaked again as it opened. Darmstadter saw an enormous Packard limousine sitting outside. It had been adopted for military service by having a serial number stenciled onto the hood and the words “U.S.
Army” on the doors. But it still looked, Darmstadter thought, as if it should be rolling up to Buckingham Palace and not a Quonset hut in a B-17 graveyard.
A tall, attractive woman wearing the uniform of a sergeant of the Women’s Royal Army Corps came in. The uniform was of rough woolen material and ill fitting but it did not hide the fact that beneath it was a very well set-up female, indeed.