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

by The Fighting Agents(Lit)

  "Take a load off. Have a bite to eat. We have several hours to kill."

  Glowering at him, she walked to the head of the table and stabbed the call button on the floor with her toe.

  "For a moment, there, I thought she was going to slug me with her purse," Whittaker said.

  "Didn't it look that way to you?"

  "You sonofabitch," Cynthia said.

  "Nice to see you, too. Miss Chenowith," Whittaker said.

  The cook appeared.

  "I'd like some breakfast," Cynthia said.

  "Greg, are you hungry?"

  "I missed breakfast," he said.

  "Bring us, please, the same thing they had," Cynthia said.

  "You may sit down, Lieutenant," Whittaker said.

  Lieutenant Hammersmith didn't move.

  "I'll rephrase," Whittaker said.

  "Sit down, Lieutenant."

  "Damn you, play your games with me, but leave Greg alone."

  ""Greg'?" Whittaker parroted mockingly.

  "Wonderwoman to the rescue of "Greg'?"

  "You really are a bastard, Jimmy," she said.

  "You miss the point, Cynthia," Whittaker said.

  "The one thing I demand of my subordinates when I'm off saving the world for democracy is what they call instant, cheerful obedience."

  "What is that supposed to mean?" Cynthia flared.

  "I'm about to go into the Philippines," Whittaker said.

  "If the lieutenant here is half the radio wizard Douglass tells me he is, and if I'm convinced he'll take orders, he's going with me."

  "That's operational information," Cynthia flared.

  "That's Top Secret. I'm going to tell Colonel Donovan you've been running off at the mouth again, and Ellis, damn you, too, you're my witness."

  "Oh, you've got the Need-to-Know, Cynthia," Whittaker said.

  "You're the control."

  She looked at him and saw in his eyes that he was telling the truth.

  "I'm not thrilled about you being my control, frankly," Whittaker said.

  "But it was the only way I could think of to get you out of that school."

  "Why did you do that?" Cynthia snapped.

  "What gave you the right?"

  "I already told you," he said.

  "I love you, and all's fair in love and war. This seems to be both, so anything goes."

  "Damn you, Jimmy!" she said, furious that she felt like crying.

  "That may pose certain problems between us, Captain," Hammersmith said.

  "How is that?" Whittaker asked.

  "I'm in love with her, too," Greg Hammersmith said.

  "Oh, Greg!" Cynthia said.

  "From this point, then. Lieutenant, you are advised not to turn your back on me," Whittaker said.

  "Fair enough," Hammersmith said.

  "You look vaguely familiar to me, Lieutenant," Whittaker said.

  "Do we know each other?"

  "No, Sir," Hammersmith said.

  "He's the actor. Captain," Chief Ellis said.

  "Greg Hammer?"

  "Oh, yeah," WTiittaker said.

  "I'll be damned. How'd a movie star get in the oss?"

  "I'm a friend of Stan Fine's," Hammersmith said.

  "When the Army announced that I would be stationed as an instructor at Fort Monmouth for the indefinite future, I asked him to get me out of it."

  "I'm really sorry you told me that," Whittaker said.

  "I always find it difficult to cut the throats of friends of friends of mine."

  "Catch me asleep," Hammersmith said.

  "I'm very vulnerable when I'm asleep."

  "You just volunteered to run around in the Philippines, Lieutenant," Whittaker said.

  "How do you feel about that?"

  "I thought I had to prove I was a radio wizard first," Hammersmith said.

  "That was before you told me you have the hots for our girl... ," Whittaker said.

  "Damn you!" Cynthia said.

  "Obviously," Whittaker went on, "I could not go off to run around in the jungle and eat monkeys and leave you here to pursue yon fair maiden by yourself."

  "Obviously not," Hammersmith said, and chuckled.

  Damn it, Cynthia thought, they like each other!

  [THREE]

  First Lieutenant Henry "Hank" Darmstadter, U.S. Army Air Corps, a stocky, round-faced young officer of twenty-three, was not sure why he had volunteered for a "classified assignment involving great personal risk" or why he had been accepted.

  As a simple statement of fact, rather than from modesty, he understood that he was not the world's greatest airplane driver. There was proof of this.

  He had twice--once in basic and again in advanced--been sent before the elimination board. The first time, the reason had been simple. He had suffered airsickness.

  The only reason he had not been eliminated in basic and sent to navigator's or bombardier's school, or for that matter to aerial gunner's school, was that his class had an extraordinary number of cadets who also suffered from airsickness, plus half a dozen guys who had just quit. The elimination board had considered all those cadets who had an airsickness problem and decided that Darmstadter, H." was the least inept of the inept.

  They really couldn't eliminate all of those who under other circumstances should have been eliminated. Pilots were in short supply, and the demand was growing. When he had been given another "probationary period" by the elimination board, it had two conditions. The first was official: that he "demonstrate his ability to perform acrobatic maneuvers without manifesting signs of illness or disorientation." Translated, that meant that he do a loop without getting airsick. The second, unofficial, unspoken, condition was that he understand he would not get to be a fighter pilot or a bomber pilot, and that there was a good likelihood, presuming he got his wings, that he would be assigned to a liaison squadron, flying single-engine two-seaters. Or even be assigned to the Artillery to fly Piper Cubs directing artillery fire.

  Hank Darmstadter had conquered his airsickness. He wasn't sure whether this was because he had grown accustomed to the world turning at crazy angles or to being upside down, or because he had simply stopped eating when he knew that he was going to be flying.

  He had been given his wings and his second lieutenant's gold bar and sent to advanced training. Not in P-51s or P-38s or B-17s or B-24s, but in C-45s. The C-45 was a small, twin-engine aircraft built by Beech. It had several missions in the Army Air Corps, none of them connected directly with bringing aerial warfare to the enemy. It was used as a small passenger transport, and it was used as a flying classroom to train navigators and bombardiers.

  Two weeks before Hank Darmstadter was to graduate from advanced training in the C-45 aircraft, he had, flying solo, dumped one. He had lost the right engine on takeoff, and if he had had one hundred feet less altitude, he would have gone into the ground. But the hundred feet made the difference, and he had been able to stand it on its wing and make a 360-degree turn and get it back onto the runway, downwind and with the wheels up, just as the second engine cut out.

  Thirty seconds after he had scrambled out the small door in the fuselage, there had been a dull rumble, and then a larger explosion as the fuel tanks ignited and then exploded.

  When he appeared before that elimination board, they had discussed the accident and Darmstadter, 2nd It. H." as if he were not there. In the opinion of one of his examiners, if he was that far along in the course, he should have known and demonstrated the proper procedure to follow in the case of engine failure on takeoff. And the proper procedure was not to make a dangerous 360 and land the wrong way on the runway as Darmstadter had done, but to make the proper adjustments for flight on one engine, then to circle the field and gain sufficient altitude to make a proper approach (that is, from the other direction, into the wind).

  Another of his examiners, to Darmstadter's considerable surprise, had taken the position that since no one was with him in the cockpit, they didn't know what had happened, and tha
t it wasn't really fair to assume that he had done what he had done from paniG; that he was entitled to the benefit of the doubt; and that Darmstadter's best judgment had been to do what he had done.

  There had been seven officer pilots on the elimination board. The vote-it was supposed to be secret, but the president of the board told him anyway--was four to three not to eliminate him. He would be permitted to graduate and to transition to Douglas C-47 aircraft.

  The C-47--the Army Air Corps version of the Douglas DC-3 airliner--was supposed to be the most forgiving aircraft, save the Piper Cub, in the Army Air

  Corps. Douglas was building them by the thousands, and each of them needed two pilots. They were used as personnel transports and cargo aircraft. Most of the C-47s being built would be used in support of airborne operations, both to carry paratroopers and to tow gliders.

  Hank Darmstadter had understood that his glamorous service as an Air Corps pilot would be in the right--copilot's--seat of a C-47 Gooney Bird. He would work the radios and the landing gear and the flaps, while a more skillful pilot would do the flying.

  And that's what he had done at first when he'd come to England. But then the system had caught up with him. He had received an automatic promotion to first lieutenant, based solely on the length of his service. It was the policy of the troop carrier wing commander that the pilot-in-command, whenever possible, be senior to the copilot. And Darmstadter had picked up enough hours, and enough landings and takeoffs as a copilot, to be qualified as an aircraft commander.

  Ten days before, when his squadron had returned from a practice mission--in empty aircraft practicing low-level formation flight as required for the dropping of parachutists--the troop carrier wing commander had gathered the pilots in a maintenance hangar and told them Eighth Air Force was looking for twin-engine qualified pilots for a "classified mission involving great personal risk" and that those inclined to volunteer should see the adjutant.

  Only three Gooney Bird pilots had volunteered. The other two were pilots who desperately wanted to be fighter pilots, and believed that unless they did something, anything, to get out of Gooney Birds, they would spend the war in a Gooney Bird cockpit.

  Hank Darmstadter, who himself would have loved to be a fighter pilot, didn't think there was any chance at all of getting to be one by volunteering for this "classified mission." He could think of no good, logical reason for his having volunteered. Without false heroics, he understood that there was hazard enough in either towing gliders or dropping parachutists when there were a hundred Gooney Birds all doing the same thing at the same time in a very small chunk of airspace.

  The one reason he had volunteered was that he had wanted to, and he was perfectly willing to admit that it was probably a goddamned dumb thing to do.

  When he saw the adjutant, there was a short questionnaire to fill out. It asked the routine questions, and a couple of strange ones. One question was to rate his own ability as a pilot, with five choices from "completely competent" down through "marginally competent." Darmstadter had judged himself in the middle: "reasonably competent, considering experience and training."

  Another question wanted to know if he spoke a foreign language, and if so,

  which one and how well. And the last question was whether or not he had any relatives, however remote the connection, living on the European continent, and if so, their names and addresses.

  He was tempted to answer "no" to both questions, but in the end, he put down that he understood German, and that he had a great-uncle, Karl Heinz Darmstadter, and presumably some other relatives, in Germany but that he didn't know where.

  He hadn't quite forgotten about having volunteered, but he had put it out of his mind. For one thing, he felt pretty sure if they were making a selection of volunteers, they would probably have a dozen better qualified people than a Gooney Bird driver to pick, and for another, considering the Army Air Corps bureaucracy, it would take three weeks or a month before they told him "thanks, but no thanks."

  At four o'clock this morning, the charge of quarters had come to his Quonset hut, and told him the adjutant wanted to see him. The adjutant had handed him a teletype message:

  PRIORITY

  HQ EIGHTH US AIRFORCE

  COMMANDING OFFICER 312TH TROOP CARRIER WING

  1ST LT HENRY G. DABMSTADTER 03434090 2101 TROOP CARRIER

  SQUADRON TRANSFERRED AMD WILL IMMEDIATELY PROCEED

  FERSPIELD ARMY AIR CORPS STATION REPORTING UPON ARRIVAL

  THEREAT TO COMMANDING OFFICER 402ND COMPOSITE SQUADRON FOR

  DUTY. OFFICER WILL CARRY ALL SERVICE RECORDS AMD ALL

  PERSONAL PROPERTY. CO 312TH TCW DIRECTED TO PROVIDE MOST

  EXPEDITIOUS AIR OR GROUND TRANSPORTATION.

  BY COMMAND OF LT GENERAL EAKER

  A.J. MACHAMEE COLONEL USA AC ADJUTANT GENERAL

  At 0400 there was soup thick enough to cut with a knife, and the weather forecast said "snow and/or freezing rain," so the most expeditious air or ground transportation had been a jeep. It had been a five-hour drive, and Darmstadter had been stiff with cold when they were passed inside the Fersfield gate by an MP wearing his scarf wrapped around his head against the cold.

  "The 402nd's way the hell and gone the other end of the field, Lieutenant.

  When you see a B-17 graveyard, you found it," the MP said.

  As they drove down a road paralleling the north-south runway, past lines of B-17s in revetments, Darmstadter was surprised to hear an aircraft ap e of the jeep and looked at the sky. It was neither raining nor snowing, but conditions were far below "what he thought of as minimums of visibility.

  And then he saw the airplane. It was a B-25, and for a moment he thought the pilot had overshot the runway and would have to go around. But the pilot set it down anyway.

  Damned fool! Darmstadter thought, professionally.

  They reached the end of the runway. There was, as the MP had said, a B-17 graveyard: fifteen, maybe twenty, battered and wrecked and skeletal B17s, some missing engines, some with no landing gear, their fuselages sitting on the ground. Three battered B-17s, Darmstadter saw with confused interest, were still flyable, to judge by their positions near the taxi ramp, and by the fire extinguishers and other ground equipment near them. But the tops of their fuselages, except for portions of the pilots' windshields, were gone, as if someone had simply taken a cutting torch and cut them away. Someone, for reasons Darmstadter could not imagine, had turned three B-17s into open-cockpit aircraft.

  There were half a dozen Quonset huts and a homemade arrangement of tent canvas and wooden supports that obviously served as some sort of hangar, or at least a means to work on engines out of the snow and rain.

  As the jeep approached the area, the B-25 he had seen land taxied down a dirt taxiway, turned around with a roar of its engines, and stopped. Three sailors--it took Darmstadter a moment to be sure that's what they really were--trotted up to the B-25 and started to tie it down and put chocks in place. The crew door dropped open and an Air Corps officer jumped to the ground. Darmstadter waited for the rest of the crew to come out, and then, when the pilot turned and pushed the door closed, he was forced to conclude that, in violation of regulations--and, as far as he was concerned, common sense--the B-25 had been flown without either a co-pilot or a flight engineer.

  The jeep, all this time, had been moving.

  "This must be it, Lieutenant," the jeep driver said, and pointed to a small sign reading simply" orderly Room" nailed to the door of one of the Quonsets.

  "I'll see," Darmstadter said, and got out of the jeep and walked to the Quonset.

  He knocked and was told to come in. Inside were two Navy enlisted men, three Air Corps enlisted men, and three naval officers, all three of them wearing gold naval aviator's wings. Two of them were wearing USN fur-collared leather, zipper jackets. The third wore a navy blouse, with pilot's wings, the gold sleeve stripes of a lieutenant commander, and an impressive row of ribbons, Some of them Darmstadter had never seen before
, but he recognized both the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Purple Heart.

  Darmstadter saluted.

  "Sir, I'm looking for the 402nd Composite Wing."

  "You've found it, Lieutenant," the Navy flyer with the DFC said. He offered his hand.

  "I'm Commander Bitter."

  "How do you do, Sir," Darmstadter said.

  "You must be Darmstadter," the lieutenant commander said.

  "Yes, Sir," Darmstadter said. He handed over a Certified True Copy of the teletype message from Eighth Air Force.