"Yes, Mr. President," Hoover said.
The people he will send, Douglass thought, will be the ones who will spy most effectively on us.
"From the people so assembled, Captain Douglass will select those who will accompany the scientists to England as their protectors, and to see what other information they can develop."
"I respectfully-" Hoover tried again.
"I told you before, Edgar," the President said, "that this decision is not open for debate."
"Yes, Mr. President," Hoover said. The second most skilled politician in Washington knew when not to argue.
"Is that about it, Bill?" the President asked.
"Just one thing," Donovan said. "Edgar, if we want to arm our people, what would be the most inconspicuous way to do it?"
"Are you asking me if I will see FBI credentials given to your people?" Hoover asked, his face flushing.
"Edgar," the President said, "you missed the point. If Bill asks you for FBI credentials, you will either give him the credentials or explain to me why you can't."
"I don't want FBI credentials Donovan said. "I want something that won't call attention to our people. The FBI is famous. We want to be anonymous."
"Did you say 'infarnous'?" the President asked.
"Deputy U.S. marshal," Hoover said after a moment's thought. "They're armed, and they travel a good deal. How soon will you need them?"
"As soon as you and the Navy send your people," Douglass said. "I'll take care of it," Hoover said.
"I have heard from the National Institute of Health about you, Bill," the President said.
"The National Institute of Health?"
"You will be thrilled, I'm sure, to hear that you now have offices. In the National Institute of Health."
"The NIHT' Hoover asked, amused.
"I considered St. Elizabeths for a while," the President said, "before settling on NIH. At least it will be close to your place in Georgetown."
"Your kindness overwhelms me, Franklin," Donovan said.
"I wish you'd call me "Mr. President,"' Roosevelt said.
Donovan's eyebrows went up, but he didn't reply.
"I have another remark I wish to make as President," Roosevelt said. "I consider this atomic-bomb business the most important single thing we're doing. If I have made that point, gentlemen, I think we can finally get down to the drinking part of the evening."
"Yes, Mr. President," Donovan said immediately.
Roosevelt looked at Hoover.
"Mr. President," Hoover said, "the FBI and I are absolutely at your disposal."
"That's very fine of you, Edgar," Roosevelt said. "I expected nothing less."
He really didn't know whether Roosevelt was being sarcastic or not, Donovan thought.
"I think our first little snort," the President said, "should be a toast to the newly promoted Captain Douglass."
Rangoon, Burma 16 September 1941
Ed Bitter had presumed the.50-caliber ammunition spilled into the hold at Pearl Harbor had been intended for the American Volunteer Group's aircraft. The P40-B had two.50-caliber Brownings mounted in the nose, and two.30-caliber Brownings in the wings. But when the Jan Suvit stopped at Manila, the ammunition had been off-loaded.
After a day and a half in Manila, they steamed back out of the harbor, past the fortress of Corregidor, for Batavia, Indonesia. From Batavia, there was another long leg of the journey, the last, into the Gulf of Martaban, and then twenty-odd miles up the Rangoon River to Rangoon itself. They had been almost ninety days enroute from San Francisco.
A representative of the American Volunteer Group, another old birdman in the mold of Chennault, came aboard with the river pilot, and there was a military-type formation in which the 106 Americans aboard the Jan Suvit were divided into two groups. One group would consist of most of the pilots, Crookshanks told them, with a few maintenance and administrative personnel, and the other group would consist of the bulk of the maintenance personnel, a few administrative people, and two wingmen, Bitter and Canidy.
Canidy's running warfare with Crookshanks had obviously resulted in his being left behind, as a wiseass, with the other guiltyby-association wiseass, while the rest went off to start their training.
Bitter kept his mouth shut until they were in an ancient Ford taxicab, enroute to downtown Rangoon.
"You realize, of course," he said, "that you're the reason I'm doing this with you."
"Oh, that's all right, Eddie," Canidy mocked him. "You can put something extra in my stocking at Christmas."
"The fuckups got left behind, as usual," Ed said. "The trouble is that I'm not fucked up."
"And you're not too bright, either," Canidy said. "The other guys are being loaded on a train for that place with an obscenesounding name. They're going to be put up in old, and I mean old, English Army barracks, and General Chennault is going to read them his book, aloud, until the planes get there." ru19 LAST NER098 147
"And what are we going to be doing?"
-We're going to lie in bed in a hotel, and with just a little bit of luck, not alone, until CAMCO gets the airplanes put together. And then we're going to test-fly them. When they're ready, we'll fly them up to Fongoo-"
"Toungool" Bitter corrected him. He recognized "Fongoo" as some sort of Italian dialect obscenity.
"Wherever the other dummies are," Canidy went on, "and then come back for more. We're going to have a lot more time in those airplanes than anybody else. I intend to test them very, very carefully."
He was right, Bitter realized.
"How did you pull this off?"
"The chief went to Crookshanks and told him that he happened to know that you and I were damned good test pilots."
"We're not, for God's sake!"
"Nobody I met on the ship was any better," Canidy said reasonably.
S As they were having breakfast the next morning in the hotel dining room, John B. Dolan came in and sat down with them. There was no fouled anchor insignia pinned to the collar points of his khaki shirt, and there was no brimmed uniform cap perched cockily atop his head, but with those exceptions, he looked no less a chief petty officer of the United States Navy than he had at Pensacola NAS.
Dolan motioned with his finger for a cup of coffee and helped himself to a sugared bun from a basket on the table.
"CAMCO's got a house for use," Dolan said, "with its own mess and laundry. Right now there's only Finley and me and an ex --- chief radioman named Lopp. You'd probably be more comfortable there than here. Interested?"
"Fascinated," Canidy said immediately.
Bitter felt uncomfortable sharing quarters with ex-enlisted men, even if they were now, as civilians, technically social equals. Dolan and Canidy immediately made him even more uncomfortable.
"There's more," Dolan said. "They sent me down to the wharves to pick up a car. There's a whole godown full of new Studebaker Commanders. All you have to do, I think, is walk in, sign a chit, and ride out with one the way I did."
"All they can do is tell me to give it back, right?" Canidy said.
"Who owns the cars?" Bitter asked.
"CAMCO," John Dolan replied. "What we need is spare engines and assembly racks, and stuff like that, which we don't have, instead of Studebakers, but what the hell, use what you do have, right? No sense in letting them just sit in the warehouse."
"Isn't the group going to need them?" Bitter asked.
Dolan gave him a patient look.
"The way it is, Mr. Bitter," he said slowly, with more than a little disdain, "is we need all this stuff in China, which is the other end of the Burma Road. And we can't get it there, at least right now, you understand?"
"Yes, of course," Bitter said. He was uncomfortable that he had been treated like a fool.
"I'll go change," Canidy said, and got up and walked out of the dining room.
"I guess I'm a little surprised that an old salt like you and Mr. Canidy could be friends," Bitter said.
Dolan gave Bitter a tole
rantly contemptuous look.
"Let me put it this way, Mr. Bitter," Dolan said. "There's three kinds of officers. At the bottom are the really dumb ones. That's maybe two percent. Then there's most of them, say ninety-six percent. They do their job, and most of the time they don't cause anybody any trouble. Then there's the last two percent. You learn to spot them, and if you're smart, vou really take care of officers like that, because you know that they'll take care of you. Not only when that's easy for them, but when you really need taking care of and it costs them."
"And you think Mr. Canidy is in the elite two percent?"
"Oh yeah," Dolan said. "I spotted him right away, first time I took a ride with him. I've flown some, Mr. Bitter. I used to be a gold-stripe chief aviation pilot."
"I didn't know that," Bitter said. The Navy had a small corps of enlisted pilots. The elite of the enlisted pilots were the chief petty officer pilots, and the elite of that elite were the gold-stripe chief aviation pilots. The chevrons of their insignia were embroidered in gold thread.
,I figured if you're not flying, you shouldn't be wearing wings," Dolan said. He was, Bitter realized, letting him off the hook.
"And that's why you recommended Mr. Canidy to be a test pilot?"
"That's part of it Dolan said. "And at Toungoo, what Chennault's going to do is run everybody through pursuit pilot school, the Army way. Mr. Canidy doesn't need that, especially if it means he has to sleep in some old English barracks knocking bugs off his bunk."
"You don't think he needs pursuit pilot school?"
"You know the difference between flight training and pursuit pilot training?" Dolan asked.
"Tell me," Bitter said.
"In pursuit pilot school, they unlearn you everything you've been taught so far about what not to do with an airplane, and they try to teach you just how far you can go without dinging it. I think Mr. Canidy's got that down pretty pat already."
"And you think I have, too?" Bitter asked. "I understand you recommended both of us for test pilots."
Dolan didn't answer for a moment. Then he turned in his chair and looked right into Bitter's eyes.
"There's a couple of things with you," Dolan said. "You went to W. S. GRIFIF11V the Academy, for one thing. For another, Mr. Canidy told me about you losing your engine while you were barrel-rolling. But I guess what's most important is that I know that no matter what some people might think, Mr. Canidy wouldn't have a genuine asshole for a buddy."
For a moment, Bitter was speechless. But finally he managed, "Well, thank you, Dolan."
"That's all right, Mr. Bitter," the old chief said.
The house that CAMCO had acquired for the maintenance People, the communications technicians, and the two pilots was a large Victorian structure in the suburb of Kemmendine. They could see the gold-domed Shwe Dagon Pagoda from the window of their rooms, far away, dominating the skyline.
An hour after they had moved into the house, Canidy stuck his head in Ed Bitter's door ' where Bitter was sitting in an armchair rereading the P40-B dash-one.
"You want to take a ride out to the airfield?" he asked. "And see what's going on?"
The Studebaker Canidy had signed for at the CAMCO godown had less than a hundred miles on the odometer, and there was still a faint new-car smell--even though the car was chronologically at least a year old and had traveled ten thousand miles to the docks of Rangoon.
Canidy found Mingaladon Air Field without much trouble, and then the CAMCO hangars. In front sat four Curtiss P40-B aircraft. Three of them looked ready to fly, and there was a group of mechanics squatting under the wing of the fourth, peering up into the right wheel well. The right wing of that airplane had been jacked off the ground.
Canidy parked the Studebaker beside the nearest of the air-THIS LAST HEROES craft and got out. With Bitter following him, he walked around the airplane, studying it closely, and then he climbed up on the wing root and looked inside the cockpit. A middle-aged man detached himself from the group around the last P40-B and walked over to them.
Canidy jumped off the wing root.
,Canidy?" the middle-aged man asked, and when Canidy nodded, he identified himself as Richard Aldwood, of CAMCO. "Dolan told me about you," be said.
"You're more than just 'of' CAMCO, aren't you?" Canidy asked, shaking the offered hand. "Vice president, right?"
"Yeah, and at the moment in charge of making a studied guess about why that god damned wheel won't go up," Aldwood said modestly, gesturing at the jacked-up airplane.
"Ed Bitter," Bitter said, and he and Aldwood shook hands.
"How much time do you have in one of these?" Aldwood asked almost idly.
"I read the dash-one real carefully' " Canidy said wryly.
"I figured as much," Aldwood said. He looked at Bitter.
"I've never seen one before, sir," Ed Bitter said.
"Well, then, you're both about eight hours behind me Aldwood said. "And more than a little ahead of me. You're a hell of a lot younger, and Dolan approves of you."
"And he doesn't approve of you?" Canidy replied.
"Not after I told him there's no way I was going to let him fly."
"Why not?" Canidy asked. "I understand he's got a bell of a lot of time."
"Yeah, and some hard hours on his heart, too," Aldwood said. 44 Why did you think they took him off flight status? I'm surprised the Navy didn't pension him off years ago."
"I suppose," Canidy said, "before we start test-flying these things, somebody's going to have to check us out in them."
"I'll show you around the cockpit," Aldwood said. "And since You've already read the dash-one, that's it, I'm afraid. There's no ground school, unless Claire... Chennault... is starting one at Toungoo."
"And what if I bend the bird?" Canidy asked.
"Please don't," Aldwood said. "We've already wrecked two, and all we've got and are going to get is an even hundred."
"Are they all here?"
"Sixty-two. God only knows when we'll get the rest. We've been putting them together at the rate of one every day and a half. We hope to get that up to two a day, maybe three," Aldwood said. He climbed onto the wing root and motioned Canidy and Bitter up on the other side.
Aldwood gave them a detailed tour of the aircraft's controls and told them what he knew of its flight peculiarities. He didn't rush through it, but he was finished thirtyfive minutes later.
"You want to wait until you've been off the ship another night?" he asked, finally. "Or-?"
"I'm not going to be any better tomorrow," Canidy said.
Ten minutes later, wearing an Army Air Corps leather helmet and goggles, and a Switlick parachute marked PROPERTY USN, Dick Canidy looked out both sides of the cockpit, called "Clear!" and put his hand on the starter switch. It took him a long time to get the engine to even cough, and even when he had it running, it ran roughly and there was a peculiar oily smell he hadn't smelled before. There was also, barely visible in the propeller blast, a faint grayish smoke coming from the engine, obviously not the blue smoke from a toorich mixture or the nearly black smoke from an oil leak.
It disappeared shortly after the needles moved off their pegs and started to creep up to the strips of green tape indicating the safe operating zones for pressures and temperatures. He then realized what caused the smoke: preserving oil and greases being burned off what was almost a brand-new engine.
Canidy looked at Aldwood, gestured toward the instrument panel, and made an OK sign. Aldwood nodded and gave him a thumbs-up signal.
J ira Canidy put the microphone to his lips. "Mingaladon Tower. 14CO sixteen by the CAMCO hangars. Taxi and takeoff."
CA The control-tower operator came back immediately. A crisp British voice gave him the time, the barometer, the altitude, the winds, and cleared him to the active runway as number one to take off. Canidy released the brake and advanced the throttle. Too much. He had more than a thousand horsepower under his hand. The last time he had flown, he had less power, and in a much heavier air
craft. And the last time he had flown, he thought, had been more than three months ago.
Taxiing the P40-B was difficult. The seat was in a full-down position, putting him low in the cockpit. And the P40-B's nose was high, so it was difficult to see out. Because he had to taxi by looking to either side of the taxiway, he immediately saw that controlling the plane on the ground by use of the rudder was a skill he would have to acquire by a lot of practice.
He reached the threshold of the runway and stopped. He ran the engine up, checked the dynamos, moved the stick and the rudder pedals through their movement arcs, and then pulled the goggles down over his eyes. He picked up the microphone.
W E B Griffin - Men at War 1 - The Last Heroes Page 16