W E B Griffin – Men at War 4 – The Fighting Agents

He poured coffee and handed a mug to Canidy, who indicated with a jerk of his thumb that it should go to Dolan. Dolan took it, moved his mask away for a moment, sipped the coffee, and then put the mask back on.

“Shit,” his voice came over the earphones.

“Burned my fucking lip!”

Darmstadter glanced at the altimeter, then looked at it again, more closely, to be sure he had read it right. It indicated 27,500 feet, which was three thousand five hundred feet higher than the “maximum service altitude” for a fully loaded B-25G, according to TM 1-B25G.

Had Canidy rigged the engines so they would function at that altitude? he wondered. Or was the greater altitude possible because the weight of the guns and the parasitic drag of their turrets and mounts was gone?

Then he thought that the only thing he knew for sure to explain what he was doing at 27,500 feet over the Atlantic Ocean was that they were headed for an island called Vis. He had a hundred questions in his mind about that, including.

how come there was a landing field in an area shaded in red–indicating “enemy occupied”–on every map he had ever seen of the Adriatic area.

And, of course, there was the big question: Why had they picked a C-47 pilot with a mediocre record like his to go along? It was almost impossible to accept the reason Canidy had offered, that they wanted to see if a pilot of his skill level could manage a takeoff and a landing on a strip that had a stream running through the middle of it.

Canidy surprised him by getting out of the copilot’s seat and motioning him into it, then pointing to the altimeter, then handing him the chart.

That was the first time he’d seen the chart. They had politely but carefully kept him from seeing it before they’d left. Dolan had even kept him from attending the final weather briefing at Fersfield by going there before he came to Darmstadter’s room to wake him up.

The chart for the first leg of the flight showed a course leading out to sea in a general south-southwest direction so they would pass no closer than two hundred miles to the coast of France, Then it turned southeast, with Casablanca, Morocco, as their destination.

There were cone-shaped areas drawn on the chart, the small end in France, the wide end over the Atlantic. Canidy explained that they indicated the normal patrol areas for German Messerschmitt ME109F fighters, based in France.

There were larger cones, which Canidy identified as the patrol areas for Geran Heinkel bombers used as long-range reconnaissance aircraft. The larger cones covered much of the B-25’s projected route.

“The theory,” Canidy said dryly, “is that the Heinkels fly at about ten thousand feet, which gives them their best look for convoys and the best fuel consumption.

And we hope that if one of their pilots happens to look up here and see us, he will decide that prudence dictates he keep looking for ships.”

“But what if one of them sees us?”

“We have two defenses,” Canidy said.

“We’re a little faster. If that doesn’t work, Brother Dolan will lead us in prayer.”

“We’re faster because you removed the guns? That weight is gone?” Darmstadter asked.

“The weight, sure, but primarily because of the parasitic drag,” Canidy said.

“By taking the two turrets out of the slipstream, we picked up twenty knots at twenty thousand feet. We got another five or six knots when we faired over the waist-gun position. We can go either faster or farther at the same fuel consumption rate.”

“Clever,” Darmstadter said.

“The engineers obviously knew their stuff.”

“Thank you,” Canidy said, smiling.

“You did it? You’re an engineer?” Darmstadter blurted, remembering as he spoke that it was a question and questions were against the rule. But Canidy didn’t jump on him.

“You will doubtless be awed to hear that you are dealing with R. Canidy, BS, Aeronautical Engineering, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, ’39.”

Darmstadter bit off just in time the question that popped to his lips:

“How’d you get involved in something like this?”

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