General Lorimer shrugged his shoulders helplessly.
Admiral Foster checked his temper.
“Anything the Navy can do to help, Ken,” he said. “And you remember that, too, Commander. Anything at all. Keep in touch.”
“I’ll walk you to your car, G.G.,” General Lorimer said.
“I’ll find it, thank you,”Admiral Foster said, and shook their hands and left.
When the door had closed after him, Lorimer turned to Bitter and waved him into a chair.
“So what can I do for the OSS, Commander?”
“General,” Bitter said. “I am somewhat embarrassed to confess that I think I have just been made a pawn in a game of some sort between Major Canidy and the Navy. I just got here. It was Admiral Foster’s idea to bring me, to introduce me to you. I have no idea what I am supposed to do here.”
Lorimer looked at him for a moment and then smiled.
“Let me clear the air between us, Commander,” General Lorimer said. “I don’t really give a damn one way or the other who runs this sub-pen-busting operation. I want to see it done right for selfish reasons. Eighth Air Force has lost a lot of airplanes and men with no apparent results. We’re already starting to feel the pinch of short supplies because of the shipping those subs are sending to the bottom. I want the submarines gone, and if helping the OSS get them gone is what it takes, you just tell me what the OSS wants.”
He paused, then went on: “And with Canidy running this, I am at least satisfied he’s acting as I think an officer should.”
“Sir?”
“I was taught as a second lieutenant that an officer should not ask anyone to do anything he is not willing to do himself. Canidy showed up at Horsham St. Faith yesterday, before daylight, all ready to fly a photo recon mission of the sub pens. We were ready for him. Colonel Stevens had called me and told him he was likely to try something like that, so, at my orders, he wasn’t allowed on the plane.”
“I wasn’t informed—” Bitter said.
General Lorimer shut him off by raising his hand.
“Canidy called me this morning and told me I owed him one, and I could pay it back if I got the admiral off your back and sent you on to Fersfield. That’s where the drones are. I did what I could.”
“May I ask why Canidy believed you ‘owed him one’?”
“Because when Colonel Stevens said he thought Canidy was planning to go on the mission and that was not a very good idea, I made sure that he didn’t go,” General Lorimer said. “But what I had in mind, Commander, was that when the B-26 that made it back crashed and burned on landing at Horsham St. Faith, Canidy damned near got himself blown up pulling the crew out of it.”
“He didn’t say anything about that to me, sir,” Bitter said.
“Nor to me,” Lorimer said. “He painted a pretty glowing picture of you, however. He said you’re quite a fighter pilot. And he said he thinks you just might be able to carry off the sub pen project.”
“I don’t know what to say, sir,” Bitter said.
"Well, I took him at his word, Commander. I don’t know Canidy well, but well enough to know that he approves of few people. And I think we both know that he’s in a business where he can’t use ‘Auld Lang Syne’ as a personnel selection criterion.”
Bitter looked into Lorimer’s face but didn’t reply.
“They’ve had you flying a desk, I understand?” Lorimer said.
“I came here from BUAIR, General.”
“You want to get back to flying?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, a worn-out seventeen isn’t a P-38, of course,” General Lorimer said. “But it’s better than flying a desk. Have you got any multi-engine time?”
“A few hours in a twin-Beechcraft,” Bitter replied. He realized that General Lorimer had, perhaps naturally, concluded that he was to fly in this operation. He really hadn’t considered that before, but now that it had come up, he was excited.
“I was thinking, this morning as a matter of fact,” General Lorimer said, “that the most dangerous part of the whole thing will be bailing out of the aircraft. You ever use a parachute?”
“No, sir,” Bitter said.
“You were in the lucky half, huh?”
“Sir?”
“I was talking to one of my fighter group commanders, you probably know him, come to think of it, Doug Douglass; and he told me that one of two AVG pilots was at least once either shot down or had to make a forced landing.”
“I flew with Douglass, sir,” Bitter said, then blurted:“When I was hit and had to make a forced landing, Doug set down beside me, loaded me into his plane, and took off. If it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t have made it.”
Lorimer looked at him thoughtfully.
“So that was Douglass, was it?” he said. “I heard that story, but until just now, I thought it was so much public relations bullshit. How the hell did you both get into the cockpit of a P-40?”
“He put me in first and then sat on my lap. I don’t know how he managed to work the rudder pedals.”
“I’ll be goddamned,” General Lorimer said thoughtfully, and then, after a moment, returned to the present:
“Did Canidy tell you Douglass’s group took heavy losses trying to skip-bomb these goddamned sub pens?”
“I heard about it,” Bitter said,“but not from Canidy.”
“Which brings us back to the drones,” Lorimer said. “I had the chance to drop in at Fersfield, and had a couple of minutes to talk with two officers— Navy officers, by the way—a Commander Dolan and a Lieutenant Kennedy.”
He paused, looked at Bitter to see if there was a response to the names, and when Bitter shook his head “no,” went on:
“Basically, they have two problems. One of them is control of the drone itself, which they’re working on. They have already decided that it will be impossible to get them off the ground without a pilot. There’s no way they can install radio-controlled mechanisms that will permit really flying the aircraft. So a human pilot will take it off the ground, bring it to altitude, trim it up, synchronize the engines, set it on course, and then turn it over to the drone pilot in the control aircraft. That’s when they start the radio controls working.”
“The pilot would then parachute from the drone?” Bitter asked.
“That’s the second problem,” General Lorimer said, “getting the pilot out. How familiar are you with the seventeen?”
“I’ve never been in one,” Bitter said.
“Well, that can be easily fixed,” General Lorimer said. “I can arrange for you to participate in a crew training exercise. For that matter, I can send you as an observer on a mission.”
“I would appreciate that, sir,” Bitter said.
“Well, you’ll understand this better after you’ve ridden in a B-17. But the exit problem, in brief, is that when they pack the fuselage with as much explosive as they need to crack the sub pens—and they can put a lot in there: without the bomb casings, Torpex doesn’t weigh very much—it blocks the hatches normally used to bail out. You’re going to have to solve that problem, too.”
Bitter realized suddenly that General Lorimer had stopped speaking and was looking at him either curiously or impatiently. He had been lost in thought, not of solutions to the problems General Lorimer had outlined, but of his own inadequacy to solve them. He knew nothing about explosives, or parachutes, and he had never been in a B-17.
“I won’t take any more of your time, General,” Bitter said. “I think the thing for me to do is to get over to Fersfield and see for myself.”
Lorimer nodded, then stood up and offered Bitter his hand.
“Let me know what I can do for you,” he said.
When Ed walked out of the building, Sergeant Agnes Draper was across the street leaning against the fender of the Packard. When she saw him, she started to get in. But he signaled for her to wait for him there and walked over to her.
When he reached her, she was holding the door to th
e tonneau open for him.
“Fersfield, Commander?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said, then added,“I think I’ll drive, if you don’t mind.”
“I don’t think you’re supposed to do that,” Sergeant Draper said.
“Nevertheless,” he said,“I will drive.”
“Yes, sir,” she said.
He got behind the wheel and started the engine.
“If I may be so bold, Commander,” Sergeant Draper said. Bitter looked at her.
“Yes?”
“Might I remind the Commander that we are in England? Where, as Major Canidy puts it,‘the natives drive on the wrong side of the road’?”
“Thank you, Sergeant,” he said. “I’ll try to keep that in mind.”
It occurred to him a few minutes later that there was probably a European Theater driver’s license, and he didn’t have one.
What’s the difference? If we are caught with this illegal automobile, the fact that I don’t have a license to drive it won’t matter.
He wondered why he had suddenly had the urge to drive, and, as important, why he had given in to it. Probably because he always seemed to be able to think clearly while he was driving, he concluded after a moment, and he certainly had a lot to think about.
And then he knew that wasn’t true. The reason he was driving was that he had wanted to ride up front. With Sergeant Draper. And driving was the only way he could think of to do that.
“Would you like a cigarette, Commander?” Sergeant Draper asked. “I have both Players and Camels.”
“A Camel, please,” Bitter said.
When she seemed to be taking an inordinate amount of time to find the cigarettes, he turned his head to look at her.
She had two cigarettes in her mouth, and was lighting both of them at once.
She handed him one. He nodded his thanks and puffed on it.
A moment later, he glanced at his hand on the wheel. On the cigarette he was holding in it was a faint but unmistakable ring of lipstick.
When he puffed on the cigarette again, it seemed to him that he could just faintly feel the lipstick against his lips.
Chapter THREE
Fersfield Army Air Corps Station
Bedfordshire, England
9 January 1943
A blackened hulk of a B-17 lay in a farmer’s field just outside the Fersfield airfield. It had apparently crashed while trying to land, and it more than likely had not been pilot error: The fuselage was torn in several places, and stitched with bullet holes in others.
The MP at the gate was impressed with both the Packard and its naval officer driver, but even more impressed with the passenger; he took a long time examining her identity documents.
Bitter was annoyed. Compared with the crisp and disciplined Marines to be found at Navy bases, Army guards were slovenly and insolent. Marine guards would never act as if they were trying to pick up a female sergeant right under the nose of an officer.
The salute the MP rendered after he had made absolutely sure Sergeant Draper was not a German spy—and after telling her she would be very welcome indeed at the base NCO Club if she had a little time—was more on the order of a casual wave than a proper salute.
There were a great many B-17s on the base, some shiny and new, others battle worn. And some skeletons were shoved together in a corner of the field, with mechanics here and there cannibalizing them for usable parts.
At the far end of the field, Bitter stopped the Packard before a four-by-eight -foot sign identifying six frame huts and a hangar at the 503rd Composite Squadron.
“This must be it,” he said.
“Unless we have been misled,” she said.
He looked at her in surprise. She was smiling at him.
“Sergeant,” he said. “I’ll find out what I can about billeting arrangements for you.”
“Thank you,” she said.
“You have been told that we may be here for a day or two?”
“Yes, sir,” she said.
“You are prepared? I mean in terms of… uh… clothing? That sort of thing?”
“Captain Stanfield told me to be prepared for anything, Commander,” she said.
Bitter decided there was no double entendre intended. And besides, she had this time referred to Captain the Duchess Stanfield as “Captain Stanfield, ” not “Elizabeth.”
“Good,” Bitter said, then left the car and marched up to the hut closest to the sign.
While there was a place for women in uniform, he thought on the way— Sergeant Draper was obviously releasing an able-bodied man for more active service—there were nevertheless problems because of their sex. Overnight accommodations for a male driver, for instance, would be much less difficult to arrange.
When he pushed open the door of the hut, a seaman spotting the gold braid of a senior officer on Bitter’s cap brim called “Attention!”
“As you were,” Bitter said, a reflect action. He had just located an interior door with a sign reading LT CMDR J. B. DOLAN nailed to it when Lieutenant Commander Dolan himself appeared to see who had come into the office.
“I’ll be goddamned,” Lt. Commander Dolan said. “Look what the tide washed up!”
He walked quickly across the room, his hand extended. He was a heavyset, balding man in his middle forties, and a broad smile was on his face. The last time Bitter had seen Dolan was in China: John Dolan had been on one end of the stretcher that carried Bitter aboard the transport plane that flew him to the Army General Hospital in India. Dolan had been one of the legendary enlisted Navy pilots, a gold-stripe chief aviation pilot. In China he was the maintenance officer of the First Pursuit Squadron of the American Volunteer Group.
Canidy’s cryptic remark about the “agent-in-place” at Fersfield now made sense.
“Chief, I’m glad to see you,” Bitter said warmly.
“Chief, my ass, it’s commander, Commander,” Dolan said, grinning broadly and pointing to the gold oak leaf he had pinned to his collar. “How the hell are you, Mr. Bitter?”
Old habits die hard, Bitter thought. Dolan could not break the habit of referring to junior naval officers as “Mister.” And then he admitted: And I could not instantly or easily accept seeing him as a commissioned officer whose rank equals my own.
“I’m doing pretty good, John,” he said. “I’m back on flight status.”
“I saw you limping when you came up the walk,” Dolan said, making it an accusation.
“That’s the damp weather,” Bitter said.
“That sonofabitch,” Dolan said, laughing. “He told me the new skipper was a candy-ass from the Pentagon.”
“Well, the Pentagon part is right,” Bitter said.
“Goddamn,” Dolan said, “I am glad to see you. This operation is strange enough without some paper-pusher coming to run it.”
“I’m glad to see you, too, Dolan,” Bitter said.
“And maybe just a little surprised to see me in uniform?”
“Yes,” Bitter confessed. When he’d last seen him, Dolan had been waging a futile battle to get back on flight status. He had a bad heart.
“I tried to get recalled from retirement when I came home from China. BuPers says ‘No way.’ So I went to work for Boeing; I knew some guys there from the old F-4B. Then this candy-ass commissioned civilian from BuPers shows up and tells me that the Navy has changed its mind. I told him to go fuck himself. Two days later, he’s back. If I will come back with the understanding that I will go overseas immediately, the Navy will make me a lieutenant. So I figure what the hell, if they want me that bad, they want me bad enough to make me a lieutenant commander. I know the regulation, and the regulation is that you retire in the highest grade you held for thirty days in wartime. So I figure that I can put in thirty days before my medical records surface and they retire me again. But this time it’ll be as a lieutenant commander, which pays a hell of a lot better than what I was getting as a retired chief. So I tell him,‘Lieutenant commander, and you
got a deal.’
“Two days later, he’s back with the commission and swears me in. And he’s got my orders. I’m to report to Norfolk for further shipment. Apartments are hard to come by in Seattle, so I don’t even give mine up. I buy two sets of blues and a couple of shirts, leave my car in the gas station, and get on a plane to Norfolk. I figured my medical records will catch up with me right away, but that I can stall them for thirty days. So I’d be back in Seattle in five, nor more than six weeks.
“When I get off the plane in Norfolk, I am met by a good-looking blonde with hair down to her ass who talks like Katharine Hepburn. She drives me to Andrews Air Corps Base outside D.C., and thirty minutes later, I’m on my way here. Canidy was waiting for me at Croydon with a shit-eating grin from ear to ear.”
“And you came here?”
“Right.”
“How are things going?”
“Not too hot,” Dolan said. “You wouldn’t believe the assholes that were here when I got here. I think we may be getting things shipshape, though, now that we shipped the experts out.”
“And what about your medical records?” Bitter asked.
“As I’m sure you’ve learned yourself, Commander,” Dolan said, “the results of a flight physical depend on who gives the exam.”
“Flight physical? You’re flying?”
“Who would have ever thought,” Dolan asked, innocently, “that you and me would wind up flying B-17s?”
It was a question and a challenge, and Bitter recognized it.
“Nothing you do would surprise me, Commander Dolan,” he said.
“Good,” Dolan said. “You used to be sort of a starchy sonofabitch, if you don’t mind my saying so.”
Bitter told himself that he would deal with the problem of Dolan’s physical condition later. And then he realized he was lying to himself about that.
I’m going to need Dolan, and the only way I can have Dolan is on Dolan’s terms. If Dolan can’t fly, he’ll simply retire again. Or ask Canidy to find something else for him to do.
“I have grown older and wiser, Dolan,” Bitter said.
“Tell me about the Limey broad with the marvelous breasts,” Dolan said. “She going to stay? How’d you talk Canidy out of his Packard?”
The Soldier Spies Page 22
