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 German 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?”
He was beginning to understand that there were questions he could ask, but that asking personal questions was taboo.
The answer, anyway, seemed self-evident. Whatever the OSS really did—some of the stories he’d heard about the OSS simply couldn’t be true—it obviously had a high priority for personnel and equipment. The big brass had apparently decided that an MIT-trained aeronautical engineer could do more good working and flying for the OSS than he could, say, as a maintenance officer in a troop carrier or heavy bombardment wing.
Canidy connected a portable oxygen bottle to his face mask, then went into the cabin. Ten minutes later, he returned.
“I’ll sit there awhile, John,” he said to Dolan, motioning him out of the pilot’s seat. “Take a nap.”
When Dolan had hooked up a portable oxygen mask and gone back into the fuselage, Canidy’s voice came metallically over the intercom.
“Dolan’s a hell of a fine pilot,” he said. “He was a gold-stripe chief aviation pilot before the war.”
Darmstadter had heard that both the Navy and the Marines had enlisted pilots in peacetime, and the legend was that they were better pilots than most of the officers because all they did was fly.
“And then he got a commission?” Darmstadter asked.
“No,” Canidy said. “First, they took him off flight status. Bad heart. Then he got out of the Navy and went to China with the American Volunteer Group as a maintenance officer. Then he got a commission.”
“But he’s flying!”
“How Commander Dolan passed a flight physical, Darmstadter, is one of those questions you’re not supposed to ask,” Canidy said. “When you were in preflight, and they were giving you those fascinating lectures on military tactics, did they touch on ‘conservation of assets’?”
Darmstadter thought about it, then shook his head.
“I don’t remember,” he said.
“What you’re supposed to do, if you’re a general or an admiral and about to enter battle, is decide what ‘asset’ you absolutely have to have if things get tough. Then you squirrel that asset away so it’s ready when you need it. I just sent my asset back for a nap. If anybody can sit this thing down safely on a mountain strip with a stream running across the runway, Dolan can. You follow?”
“Yes, Sir,” Darmstadter said. He was more than a little uncomfortable. Canidy was obviously a highly skilled B- 25 pilot and comfortable