The Special Services officer looked at Fine with dismay and loathing in his eyes.
“I can’t even imagine why you would wish to embarrass Miss Sinclair this way, Captain,” he said. “But that is the sickest joke I have ever heard.”
“What’s sick about it is that it’s not a joke,” Fine said.
“You two will leave the club immediately!”
Eric spoke for the first time.
“Piss off,” he said contemptuously. Then he looked directly at his mother. “Hi, Mommy!” he said cheerfully. “Long time no see!”
“You ungrateful shit!” she hissed.
“Mommy!” Eric said, as if he were a little boy crushed by an unjust accusation.
Monica put her hands over her ears and howled.
The piercing shriek silenced the room.
Still holding her hands over her ears, Monica Sinclair screamed,“Get him the fuck out of here!”
The Special Services officer, carried away with righteousness, put his hand on Eric’s arm and tried to pull him away. Fine called out a warning. He knew that trying such a move with Eric was foolish under any circumstances, but under these it was suicidal. Eric Fulmar’s jaws were working, and there were tears in his eyes.
With blinding speed, Fulmar struck the Special Services officer on the bridge of his nose with the heel of his hand. Fine was familiar with the blow. He had learned it from the Berbers in Morocco and had taught it to Jim Whittaker, who, as a result of his own Philippine experience, was the OSS’s acknowledged master of lethal hand-to-hand combat. Whittaker, in turn, had taught it to the English experts at Station X. Its effectiveness had awed even the highly skilled assassins of the SOE.
Blood gushed from the flack’s eye sockets and his nostrils, and he fell screaming to the floor.
The other Air Corps officers in the room, as if in slow motion, slowly realized what was happening and came to the defense of the man screaming on the floor.
A large captain, with the massive neck and shoulders of a football player, advanced warily on Fulmar. And Eric, his eyes narrow, seemed to be matter-of -factly considering the best way to put him down.
“Eric,” Fine shouted,“for Christ’s sake, no!”
For a moment there was no response, but then, as if he were waking up, Fulmar looked over his shoulder at Fine, and then at the man on the floor, and then back at Fine. Sadness was now in his eyes.
“Shit,” he said.
[THREE]
“I don’t give a damn what this says, frankly, Colonel,” the Air Corps colonel commanding Wincanton Air Corps Base said as he handed Lt. Colonel Edmund T. Stevens’s OSS identity card back to him,“my flight surgeon tells me the officer your man struck is liable to lose an eye, and I’m not about to sweep this under the rug.”
“Colonel,” Stevens said,“if you question my authority, please call General Smith at SHAEF.”
“Bedell Smith?” the Air Corps colonel asked. Stevens nodded. “I’m not going to call anyone, Colonel. I’m the base commander. This is my responsibility. ”
“Then I will call him,” Stevens said.
Somewhat contemptuously, the Air Corps colonel waved at his telephone.
“Thank you,” Stevens said politely. He picked up the telephone. “Get me London military two zero zero five, please,” he said, glancing as he spoke toward Stanley Fine, who was sitting next to a wall trying to be invisible.
A direct order from Eisenhower’s deputy, the second-ranking American officer in England, was enough for the Air Corps colonel to release Lieutenant Fulmar into the custody of Colonel Stevens, but it did nothing to assuage his anger.
“Just for the record, Colonel,” he said to Stevens, “this isn’t the end of this. I’m going to bring charges—it’s assault upon a superior commissioned officer—and if this lieutenant of yours isn’t tried, I’m damned sure going to find out why.”
“I deeply regret this incident, Colonel,” Stevens said.
“You damned well should, Colonel,” the Air Corps colonel said.
And then he left them in order to order Fulmar released from the base stockade.
“I deeply regret this incident, Colonel,” Fine said when they were alone. “I feel responsible for it.”
Stevens looked at him.
“You know what I was just thinking, Stan?” he asked, and went on without waiting for a reply. “We’re training people, by the hundreds, to . . . use their hands the way Fulmar did. What’s going to happen five, ten years from now? When the war is over? In barrooms when they get drunk? In bedrooms when they are provoked?”
“I said, sir, that I feel responsible,” Fine said.
“No more than I am,” Stevens said. “Canidy told me you were going to bring him here. I didn’t stop him. And there’s something else. Maybe I’m being perverted by all this. I would like to think it’s out of character for me to think this way, but the unpleasant truth is that when I called Bedell Smith, I was angry. Not at Fulmar, but at the damned fool who laid his hands on him and caused all this inconvenience.”
“What am I to do with him when we get him back?” Fine asked.
Stevens’s eyebrows rose as he considered the question.
“Under the circumstances, I think you should do with him what Dick would do with him,” he said finally. “Go out and get drunk with him.”
The Air Corps colonel appeared with Fulmar a few minutes later.
“I’m sorry about this, Colonel,” Fulmar said.
“So am I, Eric,” Colonel Stevens said.
“How’s the guy I hit?” Fulmar asked.
“He’s probably going to lose an eye,” the Air Corps colonel said, “and I, Lieutenant, intend to see that you are brought before a court-martial.”
“I’m sorry,” Eric said. “I’m really sorry.”
“Sorry won’t wash, Lieutenant,” the colonel said. “I’m going to do whatever is necessary to take that bar off your collar and put you in the stockade. ”
Colonel Stevens gestured for Fine and Fulmar to precede him out of the room.
When Fine and Fulmar reached the Dorchester, where Canidy, at Stevens’s order, was waiting for them, it was long after hours and the bar was closed. There was nevertheless the sound of voices and feminine laughter behind the door. Fine knocked, and a bartender quickly let them in.
Canidy was inside, by himself. Fine wondered where Ann Chambers was.
The Scorpion was there with the usual crowd of young officers hovering close to her. Her eyes lit up at the sight of Fulmar.
“What happened?” Canidy asked when they sat down beside him.
“The colonel had to call Bedell Smith to get him turned loose,” Fine said.
Canidy shook his head.
“They’re going to court-martial me. I put a guy’s eye out,” Fulmar said.
They’re not going to court-martial you. You could have put Bedell Smith’s eye out, and they wouldn’t court-martial you. Not now.
“You’re leaving town just in time, then, aren’t you?” Canidy said.
The Scorpion came over.
“And where have you two been all night?” she asked. She slipped into a chair facing Eric.
“As a matter of fact, they’ve been out carousing,” Canidy said. "Whiskey, wild women, brawling. That sort of thing.”
“That sounds terribly naughty,” the Scorpion said.
“If I asked you a question,” Fulmar said to her,“could I get an honest answer? ”
She leaned forward across the table and ran her fingernails across the back of his hand.
“You can ask me anything you want, darling,” she said. “Whether you get an—”
“Have you got someplace we could go?” Eric interrupted. “Or would you rather we stayed here and groped each other?”
“Don’t be a bastard, darling,” she said, stiffening. “I’ve never done anything to you.”
“The question, then, is do you want to? And if so, where?” Canidy said.
The Scorpion angrily flashed her eyes at Canidy and then moved them to Fulmar.
He stood up and walked to the door, then turned and looked back at the table.
“Opportunity knocks but once,” Canidy said.
“Fuck you, Canidy,” the Scorpion said. He laughed, and she glowered at him. Then she got up and went to Fulmar.
She put her hand on his arm and turned.
“Good night, everybody!” she cried.
It pleased her, Fine saw, to have the world know that she had sunk her stinger into the plumpest baby rabbit of them all.
“Do you think there will be anything left?” Canidy asked. “By that, I mean, when she has sucked him dry, will she also eat the empty shell?”
“It was pretty bad with his mother, Dick,” Fine said.
“I was afraid it would be,” Canidy said. “Going to see her was not a good idea.”
“I’m not sure his going with the Scorpion is such a good idea, either,” Fine said.
“Well, you know what Benjamin Franklin said about older women,” Canidy said. " ’They don’t yell, they don’t swell, and they’re grateful as hell.’”
Fine laughed. “Franklin didn’t say that.”
“What is it you ambulance-chasers say? ‘Or words to that effect’?”
Fine chuckled again.
“I was going to run her off,” Canidy said. “But then I had a sudden insight. I think she’s just what he needs tonight. Now, what can I do for you?”
“What?”
“I hate to send any of my loyal legion into the mouth of death without getting them a farewell live-today-for-tomorrow-we-die piece of ass. How does yonder redhead strike your fancy?”
Fine laughed. “I’m going to the U.S. Embassy in Bern,” he said.
“First,” Canidy said.
Fine smiled.
“Thank you, sir, but no thank you, sir. I am one of the few surviving members of that rara avis,‘faithful husband.’”
Canidy chuckled. “Is that what love is, Stanley, not wanting to fuck anybody else?”
Fine sensed that it was a serious question.
“You can look, but not touch,” he said. “They call it fidelity.”
“Then I must have caught it,” Canidy said.
“Maybe you’re coming down with a cold,” Fine said.
“Screw you,” Canidy said fondly.
[FOUR]
Fersfield Army Air Corps Station Bedfordshire, England 29 January 1943
Lt. Commander Edwin W. Bitter was torn between annoyance and pleasure when he saw the Packard limousine bouncing directly across the airfield— rather than taking the access road or even the taxiway—toward the ancient B-17. He could see Sergeant Agnes Draper behind the wheel. That was fine. But there were two others in the backseat, two officers with the golden United States eagle on their caps. One of them was almost certainly Canidy, and the other more than likely Stanley S. Fine.
He’d suspected Canidy would show up, and that he would probably bring Fine with him. Fine was, after all, a former B-17 squadron commander with far more time in seventeens than either Joe Kennedy or Dolan. He was even, Bitter recalled now, a rated Instructor Pilot.
But when Agnes parked beside the sandbag revetment where the B-17 sat, Pete Douglass, not Fine, emerged from the Packard.
“Anchors aweigh, you-all,” Douglass called out. Then Dolan and Joe Kennedy also appeared from inside the B-17. “And who is this booze-nosed old salt all dressed up to go flying?” Douglass asked.
“Why,” Dolan said, chuckling, “I thought the major knew Lieutenant Kennedy.” And then he corrected himself. " ’The colonel,’ that is. When did that happen?”
"Yesterday,” Douglass said. “It will not be necessary for you to prostrate yourself. Kissing my hand will suffice.”
“Congratulations, Pete,” Bitter said. “Well deserved.”
“Don’t get carried away,” Douglass said, suddenly bitter. “Eighth Air Force has a regulation. Lose half your command on a dumb mission, but come back yourself, and you get promoted.”
“You were promoted because you deserved it,” Bitter insisted loyally.
“Good morning,” Agnes Draper said as she walked up to them.
“Good morning, Sergeant,” Bitter said.
“Oh, what a tangled web we weave,” Canidy quoted as he shook Dolan’s and Kennedy’s hand,“whene’er we try to deceive.”
Bitter glowered at him. Agnes Draper showed no reaction at all.
“The radio types aren’t here?” Canidy asked.
“Inside,” Dolan said, jerking his thumb up at the B-17. “You want to have a look?”
“Yeah,” Canidy said. “And so does the colonel. I figured maybe he’d see something we don’t.”
“Christ,” Douglass said, looking up at the B-17. “Will this fugitive from the boneyard actually fly?”
It was less a flippant remark than a statement of fact. The B-17 had been reclaimed from the salvage yard. There were crude patches riveted to the fuselage and wings where it had been struck by antiaircraft and machine-gun fire. Just below the pilot’s side window, a shiny new duralumin patch covered about half of the representation of a large-bosomed, scantily dressed female. It cut off her head, one breast, most of the legend—“Miss Twen” was all that was left—and what looked like half of a row of small bombs representing missions.
There were other crude patches fairing over what had been the Plexiglas in the nose and the gun positions in the fuselage. The fuselage and the wings had been painted white. But there had not been enough paint to do the job properly, and what paint there was had been more solvent than pigment.
“This is one of our better ones, Colonel,” Joe Kennedy said to Douglass.
“I’d hate to see one of the worst ones,” Douglass said.
Kennedy took his arm and led him out to a position on the taxiway that would let them see into the two adjacent revetments. One of them held an even more battered B-17. The other held Canidy’s—technically, the OSS’s— B-25.
“All we want from them is six hours,” Kennedy said. “Just six more hours.”
Douglass shook his head and walked back into the revetment. Canidy was no longer in sight. Sergeant Draper pointed up at the battered B-17, and Douglass climbed the aluminum ladder hanging from the fuselage under the nose.
There was barely room for him once he got inside. Four people were crowded into the cockpit area. And the flight engineer’s station was packed with mattress covers. Figures, obviously representing weight, were crudely painted on these. Douglass wondered what they were using to duplicate the weight and bulk of the Torpex explosive that would be loaded into the operational aircraft.
He looked back into the fuselage. With its openings faired over, it was dark, except where the sun made beams of light through open rivet holes and unrepaired bullet and shrapnel holes. The fuselage was packed nearly shoulder high with more mattress covers stuffed with whatever they were using to duplicate Torpex.
A tiny Air Corps captain with horn-rimmed glasses was explaining to Canidy the function of the radio-controlled servomechanisms. These, it was hoped, would let the chase plane fly the B-17 by remote control.
“Take a look at this, Doug,” Canidy said, and the two sergeants with the captain made room for him the only way they could, by climbing down out of the B-17.
The servomechanisms were simpler than Douglass expected them to be. They were in effect just electric motors whose direction of revolution could be reversed.
“And now let’s go see how Captain Allen and his stalwart troops have fucked up my pretty B-25,” Canidy said.
The tiny Air Corps captain smiled.
“I told you, Major,” he said, “hardly at all. All I had to do was install one long wire antenna to each of the vertical stabilizers. They use the same mount on the fuselage. Unless you look for it, you’d never know it was there.”
The three of them examined the B-25 from the outside.
"Okay,” Ca
nidy said. “So I won’t have to castrate you.”
The captain beamed in Canidy’s approval. He had been a ham radio operator in civilian life, and the Air Corps had put him in charge of a radio overhaul facility. What he was doing now was right down his alley, and it gave him a feeling of making a real contribution to the war effort.
“Dick,” Bitter said, a little uncomfortably, “I had planned to ride with Joe.”
“Had you now?” Canidy asked dryly.
“I want to take notes,” Bitter said, more than a little lamely. “Joe will have his hands full flying it.”
“And who was going to fly the remote control?” Canidy said.
“Dolan,” Bitter said.
“And who was going to fly my B-25?”
“There’s half a dozen people checked out in it,” Bitter said.
“And if something goes wrong, how do you plan to get out of the seventeen with your stiff knee?” Canidy asked.
“I can get out of it,” Bitter said.
“What we’ll do is send the colonel to take notes,” Canidy said.
“In a pig’s ass you will,” Douglass said. “I’m not going up in that flying junk heap.”
“In that case, Eddie, okay,” Canidy said. “We about ready to go?”
“Anytime,” Bitter said.
“Captain Allen, would you like to ride in the B-25?” Canidy asked.
“It might be a good idea if I did, sir,” the tiny captain said, visibly thrilled at the prospect.
“Maybe we better get you on flight pay,” Canidy said. “You’re the only one around here who seems to know what he’s doing.”
Canidy’s good at that, Douglass thought. He’s made this pint-size radio genius feel ten feet tall.
Douglass followed Canidy and Dolan in their walk-around preflight of the B-25, and then motioned Captain Allen ahead of him into the B-25. He strapped himself into one of the four airline passenger chairs Canidy had had installed in the back, telling himself that’s what he was on this flight, a passenger. But then curiosity got the better of him, and he went forward to the cockpit as the engines were started.
Dolan, in the pilot’s seat, held an aluminum box with a Bakelite cover in his lap. The box was connected to the radio panel by a thick cable running along the deck. The box was obviously the remote control system controls. But there were only toggle switches. Douglass had expected a joystick.
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