were a harassed-looking captain and several sergeants behind a small counter. The officer spotted the civilians.
“You’re the CAT guys?” he asked.
“Right,” Fine said.
The captain flipped through sheets of paper on a clipboard and pulled one loose and handed it to Fine.
“They took it out of the hangar,” he said. “It’s on the parking ramp, way down at the end. You got wheels?”
Fine nodded.
“When you’ve checked it over, come back here,” the captain said, “and we’ll see about getting you off.”
The C-46, surprisingly, looked larger than the B-17E parked next to it. It was in fact a larger airplane, even though it had only two engines to the B-17E’s four.
As they were walking around it, starting the preflight check, a B-17E on its landing approach came over them at fifty feet, the noise of its throttled-back engines deafening.
They found a work stand, manhandled it into place, and removed the inspection plates on the port engine while the B-17E taxied up the ramp, turned, and parked beside them.
“I am losing my mind,” Homer Wilson said. “If the kid in the left seat of that thing is a day older than sixteen, I’m Eddie Rickenbacker.”
Fine looked up but couldn’t see anything.
By the time they finished inspecting the engine and were pushing the platform around the nose to the other engine, the B-17E crew had shut the airplane down, done the paperwork, and climbed out. They were standing by the nose, waiting for a ride down the parking ramp.
“You’re right,” Fine said incredulously, “that’s a boy. They’re both boys!”
“No, I’m not,” one of the B-17E pilots said to him, shaking her head. Her hair, which she had had pinned up, came loose and fell across her shoulders. “We’re WASPs.”
“I’m afraid to ask what that is,” Homer Wilson said.
“Women Auxiliary Service Pilots,” she said. “We ferry these from the factory.” She nodded at the C-46. “I thought they were flying these over from the West Coast.”
“Not this one,” Wilson said.
“If somebody with fifteen hundred hours-plus of multiengine time wanted a job with CAT,” she said, “who could she ask?”
“There’s an office in Rockefeller Center,” Wilson said. “But I don’t think you’d want to go to China.”
“Yeah, I would,” she said. “Three trips a week here from Seattle get a little dull.”
They gave the WASP crew, two pilots and a flight engineer, all women, a ride back up the ramp. Both the Pan American pilots seemed stunned, Fine saw.
They were sent to base operations for a pilots’ briefing. A major, an older pilot, told them, using a map and a pointer, that a flight of twenty-three B-17Es would soon begin taking off. They would form up at cruise altitude, nine thousand feet, over Morristown, New Jersey. Then, in four- and five-plane Vs, they would fly north over Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Maine, toward Newfoundland.
“If you can get off the ground now—within the next thirty minutes or so—” he said, “the flight will catch up with you somewhere over Maine. By the time the tail of the flight has gone past you, you should be pretty close to Gander. In other words, you’ll have some company on the scary part of the first leg.”
“Let’s go wind it up,” Homer Wilson said, and they went directly back to the plane, loaded their luggage aboard, and climbed up the ladder into the cabin. There were several fire extinguishers on wheels scattered along the parking ramp, and Fine drafted the security agent to help him wheel one into place.
Once he had his engines running, Homer Wilson paid no attention to Fine at all. Fine heard the hydraulic hiss as the brakes were released; then the C-46 moved onto the taxiway and headed for the far end of the field.
4
WHITBY HOUSE
KENT, ENGLAND
AUGUST 14, 1942
Lieutenant Jamison went looking for Dick Canidy late in the afternoon, carrying with him a six-inch-thick stack of printed forms. He found him in Colonel Innes’s command post, formerly the gamekeeper’s cottage, listening with something less than enraptured fascination to the colonel’s most recent inspiration about what he called “perimeter security.” Jamison had learned that Colonel Innes had fresh ideas on the subject at least twice a day.
Jamison decided that Canidy would probably like to be rescued.
“Sorry to interrupt, Sir,” he said, crisply military. “But there are some matters that require the major’s immediate attention.”
“I’m afraid I’ll have to get back with you later, Colonel,” Canidy said.
“I understand, of course,” Colonel Innes said.
As they walked back to the house, Canidy asked, “What’s up?”
Jamison hoisted the stack of requisitions.
“Well, I