by Bill Mesce
Doheeny had, at first, looked baffled over this largesse, but now he grinned skeptically. “This is his version of candy and flowers.”
“He is sorry, you know.”
“He should be. I’m not letting him off the hook, Harry. This isn’t like stepping on Mom’s fresh-mopped floor; you get a whack on the fanny and she cleans up your mess. There wouldn’t’ve been any cleaning up this guy’s mess.”
“I know.”
“I’m still sending that dispatch to Kneece’s CO. The next time Kneece gets another half-assed notion, I want him to remember this. Maybe he’ll keep his bright ideas to himself.”
“I’m not arguing with you, Jim.”
Having vented, Doheeny calmed. “Oh-eight-hundred is good.”
“Can I ask you something? Kind of official.”
Doheeny’s eyes narrowed. “Are you talking for him?”
“We’re on the case together.”
“As long as you’re doing the asking, I’ll answer.”
“Do you know any of the pilots flying diplomatic courier planes?”
“Most of the guys I know in the service are from my airline days. For the most part, they’re all flying for ATC.”
“Where do these ATC flights end up?”
“Well, you have the transatlantic direct flights; those can end up anywhere —”
“Forget those. The planes that fly this northern route.” Doheeny beckoned Harry to follow him to a map covering the North Atlantic from the Labrador coast to the European mainland. “Presque Isle is the western crossroads. From there, flights jump off across the States, across Canada to Alaska, over the Atlantic to Bluie-West-One or Kap Farvel, and from there hopping to Iceland and then the British Isles. The eastern terminus is Prestwick.” Doheeny pointed to a spot on the west coast of Scotland, thirty miles southwest of Glasgow.
“Do the flights ever go on from Prestwick?”
“If it’s a rush cargo, some kind of priority deal, maybe a plane flies on to London or something. I never have. As a rule, the run ends at Prestwick. The cargo is off-loaded and gets carried wherever it needs to go by local air or overland.”
“Ever fly to the Orkneys?”
Eyes on the tight-knit smattering of dots across the Pentland Firth, Doheeny shook his head. “That’s a British base. Anything that needs to be flown in, the RAF takes care of.”
“Would you ever have reason to land there? Let’s say an emergency —”
“When a pilot works up his flight plan, he’s supposed to consider ‘alternates’ — a place where he can put down if he has a problem. The first time a pilot flies the northern route, he learns thinking up an emergency alternate is a waste of time. Look at the map, Harry. The British have landing strips on the Faeroes, the Shetlands, the Orkneys, but they’re all so far off the normal flight path. If you can’t make Prestwick, you’re not making any of them, either. You make Scotland or you start rowing.” Doheeny yawned. “This coffee’s like battery acid. I’m going to hit the sack before you-know-who changes his mind. You coming?”
“Later.” Harry continued to stare at the map.
“Harry, you mind if I ask you a question?”
“Shoot.”
“Why’d you get on that plane tonight?”
“At about the time that plane of yours felt like it was standing on one wing, I was asking myself the same question.”
*
“What time is it?” Woody Kneece moaned, pulling himself upright on the passenger bench. He squinted out the window at the oppressive grayness of the arctic morning, and the rolling North Atlantic below.
“Oh-nine-forty Greenwich, sirs,” the flight mechanic said, appearing with a thermos of hot coffee.
“I woke up this morning, didn’t look like your bed had been slept in,” Harry told Kneece. “Is there that much of a nightlife in Iceland?”
“Hardly” Kneece stood, stretched, waiting for the mechanic to withdraw to the company of Sparks, who had recommenced exploring his guitar-strumming with mixed success. Kneece sat beside Harry He held a finger upright and announced, in a voice reminiscent of the narrator of a radio serial, “While our plucky troops slept the night away in blissful comfort, our youthful hero braved arctic temperatures in his dogged pursuit of truth, justice, and the American Way!”
“Is that Superman’s way of telling me you were snooping?”
“Investigating,” Kneece corrected. “Did you talk to Doheeny?”
Harry relayed the substance of his conversation of the night before with the pilot. “I had Reykjavik radio a query to Prestwick about these X-ray flights. I got an answer just before we took off. Wherever these planes are setting down, it’s not there. OK, your turn.”
“I checked with the guys in the control tower, communications, ground crews, asked the same questions we’ve been asking and got pretty much the same answers. They’ve been getting these off-log flights at least since the Americans landed in’42. Same deal we heard from Zagottis: The radio call from each flight includes an X-ray designation, so the field knows not to log it. Nobody knows what the cargoes are. Nobody’s sure they could identify the pilots. Most times the planes just set down long enough to gas up and go.”
“What about this last flight? The one that replaced McKesson’s?”
Kneece pulled out his notebook. “Army flight 121 X-ray. It came through, all right. They remember it.”
“Did anybody see Grassi on it?”
“People in these parts wear too much fur to tell each other apart. But there was somebody sounds like it had to be him. A couple guys remember somebody from the plane bothering the ground crew with a lot of questions: Have these kinds of flights come through before, do they know what’s on them, that kind of thing. They remember him especially because they thought it was funny him asking those questions. They figured he was on the plane; he ought to know. Now, another funny thing about this 121 X-ray, it didn’t just gas up and go: it sat out there on the runway for six hours. The crew was holed up in the layover barracks all that time, didn’t even come into the mess hall. They just kept to themselves —”
“Except for Grassi the noodge.”
“Except for Grassi the noodge.”
“The weather hold them up?”
“Weather was no worse than it usually is around here.”
“Then why the hell —”
“It didn’t make any sense to me either, Major, but I think I have a bead on it. Even with a refueling stop in Iceland, a C-47 can make the trip from Kap Farvel to the Orkneys in four, five hours if there’s no bad headwinds. I know, I checked with the Operations staff at Reykjavik. So, if 121 X-ray left Farvel a little after noon, that’d put it in the Orkneys between four and five P.M. Greenland time. But there’s a big time difference between Greenland and the Orkneys: four hours. It still would’ve been between one and two in the afternoon there.”
This was sounding uncomfortably like those arithmetic problems that Harry had detested as a schoolchild: If one train leaves the station at one o’clock traveling at sixty miles an hour, and another train leaves at two o’clock moving at thirty miles an hour…
“One-twenty-one X-ray sits at Keflavik for six hours. It’s another two hours’ flight time to the Orkneys. That plane didn’t reach the island until 2000 or later, which, in the Orkneys at this time of year, means not until way after dark. One-twenty-one X-ray didn’t fly in, Major. It snuck in.”
“Hey!” Sparks called from his station. “You guys ever see a Spitfire? Keep your eyes out starboard.”
The flight mechanic came aft and said, “The RAF station at Scapa Flow picked us up on their radar a couple minutes ago. They scrambled a Spit to check us over and make sure we’re who we say we are.”
“Awfully suspicious on their part.” Kneece’s eyes had the eagerness of a child about to receive a new toy.
“Well, they don’t get many Americans flyin’ out this way,” the flight mechanic said. “There he is! Down there about eleven o’clock l
ow.”
Harry caught the sleek silhouette and British bull’s-eye insignias against the leaden seas. The fighter nimbly chandelled, bringing itself several hundred feet above the Dakota, then throttled back on a parallel course above them. Evidently satisfied with its identification of the C-47, the Spitfire dropped alongside and waggled its wings in greeting. Doheeny answered with a more sluggish wave from his larger aeroplane. Kneece moaned.
“I swear to God, first chance I get, I’m getting a camera! I don’t care if I have to steal one from a reconnaissance plane! I can’t believe I’m not going to have a picture of this!”
“Captain!” It was Sparks, alarmed. “Down off the starboard wing! In the water! Is that a sub?”
“Hold on, everybody!” Doheeny called out calmly, and put the C-47 into a sharply banked circle. Below, Harry could see the shape, a long, dark oblong wallowing in the swells marked by a halo of hovering terns. Harry heard the flight mechanic take a tense breath. “What’s the matter?” he asked.
“Well, the word is that when the krauts sent their U-boats back into the Atlantic, they gave ’em more deck guns and told ’em not to run from aircraft. They want ’em to fight it out.”
“That doesn’t look like a sub,” Kneece objected. “Does it?”
“Funny-looking sub,” the flight mechanic said.
Harry guessed they were now three hundred feet above the water, and in as tight a circle as Doheeny could hold his ship. The object didn’t seem to be moving in any direction, just idly rolling in the swells. Harry saw no conning tower, no deck guns or any of the other appurtenances one would expect.
“Damn…” The sergeant sighed and handed a pair of field glasses to Harry.
Harry got the binoculars sighted. The object below had the slick, shiny quality of wet rubber. Occasionally, one of the circling seabirds would drop down and tear at the hulk with its hooked beak. A particularly high swell nudged the thing into a roll. Harry recoiled from the sudden appearance of a hole — a wound — several feet across, jagged around the edges, revealing an interior of pink meat bright against the pewter ocean. Shadowy shapes just beneath the surface of the water darted clear of the rolling body until it again settled with its damaged side turned into the water and the carrion fish could resume feeding.
“What the hell is that?” Kneece was still trying to get a look through the window
“Some kinda whale,” the flight mechanic said. “Probably hit one of the mines they got around Scapa Flow. Well, that’s kind of a waste, huh?”
*
An RAF corporal led Harry and Woody Kneece along the aerodrome’s manicured gravel paths, the well-ordered lanes swept clear of snow with typical British tidiness. From this high ground near Kirkwall on Orkney Mainland, they had a panoramic view of the base and the waters of Scapa Flow. A major British military installation since the first Great War, the base had concrete combat information centers, clapboard barracks and administration buildings, concrete-bolstered gun emplacements guarding the sea approaches, and massive waterfront hangars for the patrolling Sunderlands. Still farther, scattered at their moorings, their drab battle paint intentionally blending with the gray water, were the ships of the Home Fleet.
Kneece stopped in his tracks and pointed down toward the water. “What’s that huge thing out there! It’s like a mountain of guns!”
The corporal maintained a blase English reserve. “Oh, yes, sir, well, that’d be Duke of York, sir, battleship she is. The carrier — flattop, you Yanks like to say — that’d be Victorious. Please, sir, my officer’s waiting.”
At the Officers Mess they were led to a table tucked in a comer where a pot of tea and a tray of cups and biscuits were laid on. The RAF major at the table stood as they approached.
“Major Astin Moncrief, gentlemen. A pleasure. You must be Captain Kneece? And that would make you Major Voss. Please make yourselves comfortable. I’m adjutant at the airfield here. The CO thought as I’d acted as liaison with all the investigative types inquiring about your unfortunate colleague Lieutenant Grassi, I should take the duty on again.” He pronounced Grassi’s rank in the British manner: Leftenant. “I wasn’t sure if you’ve had a chance to eat in your travels. You’re a bit early for luncheon, I’m afraid, but I thought some tea and biscuits might tide you over.”
Harry guessed Moncrief to be in his late twenties, though, like nearly everyone he’d met in the northern climes, he had a face weathered beyond his years. The major was smallish, handsome in a mousy way, his polite smile permanently carved into his chapped cheeks.
Moncrief’s eyes fixed on the square of bloody gauze on Kneece’s forehead. “Hard traveling, wot? Need our doc to have a look there?”
Kneece shrugged the attention off. “About our flight crew…”
“Quarters are already arranged, they’ll be quite well taken care of, I can assure you. Any idea how long you’ll be with us?”
“A day or two,” Kneece replied. “At most.”
“We should be able to accommodate that with no problem. How do you gentlemen like your tea?”
After the tea had been poured and the biscuits doled out, Moncrief reclined slightly in his chair, crossed his legs very precisely, and drew a silver cigarette case from his blouse. “Do you gentlemen mind? Care to partake? No? Now, what is it I can do for you? I’d thought that between our intelligence services and yours, all the questions that needed to be asked had been asked. Even Scotland Yard sent a delegation to dig and delve. Have they not forwarded their report on to you?”
“Report?” Kneece said.
“We’ve been on the road for a few days,” Harry explained. “It might be behind us in Washington.”
“More milk for your tea? I presume that you’ll be off to London next?”
“Possibly.” Harry caught a look from Kneece. “Probably,” he amended.
Moncrief withdrew a small leather-bound agenda from his blouse pocket and scratched a quick note. “A reminder to myself,” he explained. “I’ll see to it that the Yard’s report is made available to you when you arrive in London.”
“Thanks.”
Kneece looked to Harry. Aside from the caricatures he’d seen in American films, Kneece’s first Englishman obviously constituted a being quite beyond his ken. Like most Americans on such a first meeting, he vacillated between a feeling of superiority over English stuffiness and inferiority under English decorum. His look asked that Harry take the lead, as the latter was probably better acquainted with the customs and language of the natives.
“Major,” Harry put in, “we don’t want to bore you asking questions you’ve been asked a dozen times already.”
“No bother, really. With all respect to Lieutenant Grassi’s tragic demise, I do quite enjoy all the skullduggery. Shades of Sherlock Holmes and all that. Don’t think me too callous, gentlemen. Please understand, the standard program for Orkney Mainland is frightfully tedious. Any change in the routine, even this unfortunate circumstance, is to be appreciated.” Moncrief’s smile assumed an apologetic air.
“Quite,” Kneece said, and Moncrief’s smile flickered, unsure whether or not he was being mocked.
“What I was going to say,” Harry interposed, “is maybe it’d be easier for you just to summarize what all these other parties came up with.”
“Oh, well, yes, let’s see. Naturally, all were quite keen on discovering how the poor chap got here in the first place. How’re those biscuits? Not quite from Mother’s oven I should imagine, but I trust they’re passable.”
“Fine, thanks,” Harry replied. “What we found on our end is it looks like Grassi hitched a ride on an American cargo plane. Obviously it must have landed here.”
Moncrief’s smile flickered again. “‘Obviously’?”
“How else could he have gotten here?”
“Well, that’s the question, then, isn’t it? But we’d know about a plane, now wouldn’t we? Pick it up on RDF and all that — that’s radar to you Americans. Where would he put down if
not at the airfield, eh? And if he didn’t arrive by air transport, what then? Fall off a passing ship perhaps? We’ve no record of any convoys in the area at the time, no reports from any of our patrol vessels of any craft sightings. If you’d like, I can arrange interviews with station and shipboard personnel to corroborate.”
“You’re saying no American aircraft has put in here recently”
The smile became one of satisfaction. “What I’m saying, Major Voss, is that no American aircraft has lit on the Kirkwall tarmac since I began service here last year.”
“And none of your personnel saw Grassi around until they found his body? Not in town — and I’m guessing there must be some kind of town around here — not on the base? Some stranger nosing around —”
“I’m afraid not, Major. As I said, MI5, MI6, Scotland Yard, they’ve all been through here and had a go at this. A puzzlement, eh?”
“I’ve got a relation that would call this an ‘arse-buster,’” Kneece interjected.
“Quite.” Moncrief took a draught on his cigarette. “Seems a pity you’ve come all this way for so little.”
“Who found the body?” Kneece asked.
“Actually, there were two of them, two of our Sunderland flyers off on a lark.”
“We should talk to them.”
“Of course.”
“Have them show us where they found the corpse.”
“Not a problem.” There was a hesitancy to Moncrief’s smile.
“Something the matter?” Harry asked.
“Just a forewarning, gentlemen. These two flyers, good chaps both, I can assure you, but it’s been a long war for them, I’m afraid. They might strike you as a bit, well… perhaps just a touch potty, if you gather my meaning.”
Kneece glanced over at Harry, puzzled. “‘Potty’?”
Harry laughed. “I think Major Moncrief is telling us they’re a little nuts. Right, Major?”
“Quite,” Moncrief said.
“Quite,” Kneece agreed.
*
BOOM!
Kneece was the first to straighten and look back up the shingle to where Taffy Macnee stood with his Purdy, shaking a pair of spent shotgun casings clear of the breech. Nearby Paddy Donlay wore a pained look. Behind them, up near where the two jeeps were parked, stood Moncrief, his smile sorrowful, his face semaphoring that well, yes, I did warn you about these two.