W E B Griffin - Men at War 4 - The Fighting Agents

by The Fighting Agents(Lit)

  But trees had been harvested at one end of the meadow, where the land dropped precipitously off toward a stream.

  When Ferniany arrived with the radios and the panels, tomorrow or the next day, Canidy would arrange the panels either at the edge of the meadow by the forest or at the stream, depending on the wind. With a little bit of luck, they would be able to put three or four of the five parachutists down in the meadow. The others would have to take their chances on landing on his just cut-over steep land at the end of the meadow.

  There would be time to talk to the plane. Darmstadter had dropped parachutists before. He would know how to drop them here, once he had been told of the conditions by radio.

  Canidy thought of the emergency backup procedures. There was always that in the planning. Here, in the case of radio failure or if there were no opportunity to put the signal panels in place, it was a smoky fire at the point in the drop zone that would indicate where the first parachutist in the string was supposed to land.

  However, it didn't seem to make a hell of a lot of sense to bother about that particular backup. For one thing, there would be a chance to put the panels out and talk with the plane by radio. For another, unless the drop could be discussed with the plane, there would be no point in making the jump; it would be too risky.

  But in the end, Canidy asked the Countess to have her chief hunter arrange for a five-foot-high stack of pine boughs at both ends of the drop zone. He showed, with his hands, how large the piles should be.

  "And two cans of kerosene, preferably, or else gasoline, by each stack," he said.

  She translated that for him.

  And then, as if they were two old friends out for a walk in the woods, she took his arm and they walked back to the hunting lodge.

  [TWO]

  The first thing Freddy Janos realized when he saw that the bomb bay doors of the B-25 in the hangar were not functional was that he was going to have a hell of a hard time dropping out of the crew-access door when the time came.

  Then he measured the access door with his hands and realized that there was no way any of the team could exit the aircraft wearing all their equipment.

  "Something wrong, Janos?" It. Colonel Douglass asked him.

  "That hatch isn't big enough," Janos said.

  "There's no way we can drop through that little hole."

  "We've dropped people through that hole before," Douglass said.

  "Only Fulmar," Capt. Stanley S. Fine said, entering the conversation.

  "The others went out the bomb bay. Before Canidy removed the racks and the door opening mechanism. And Fulmar jumped in with a British chute. No spare.

  And it took him a long time to get through the door. If we could get them through the door, it would take so long they would land all over Hungary."

  "Jesus Christ!" Douglass said furiously.

  "What the hell do we do now? How come this is the first time anybody thought about this?"

  "The B-17 can't land on Vis," Fine said, answering that question before it was asked.

  "What's Vis?" FreddyJanos asked.

  Fine and Douglass looked at each other before Fine answered, "An island in the Adriatic. Where we will pick you up when this operation is over."

  "Pick us up? We're not going to stay?"

  "No," Fine said.

  "It has been decided to bring you out right away."

  "Can I ask why?"

  "You can ask, but I can't tell you," Fine said.

  "I must be out of my mind," Janos said.

  "But that sort of pisses me off."

  "Jesus, that's all we need, a hero," Douglass said.

  Janos felt his face turn warm with anger. With an effort, he fought it down by telling himself that Douglass, by any criterion, was a hero, and thus had the right to mock the word.

  "I guess that sounded pretty dumb," he said.

  "Yes, it did," Douglass said, not backing off.

  "I just hope you can restrain your heroic impulses when you do get in there, and that you do just what you're told, and nothing more."

  They locked eyes for a moment. Janos, for the first time, saw that Douglass could have very cold and calculating eyes. And he sensed suddenly that Douglass was judging him, and that if Douglass found him wanting--if Douglass concluded that there was a risk he would foolishly take once he was in Hungary--there was a good chance he would be left behind.

  "Can a Gooney Bird land on this island?"Janos asked.

  There was no response from Douglass. He continued to look at Janos with cold calculating eyes.

  "What the hell," Douglass said finally. There was even the flicker of a smile.

  "When all the clever ideas fail, be desperate. Go by the book. Use a parachutist-dropping airplane to drop parachutists."

  "Can we get our hands on a C-47? "Janos asked.

  "Yes," Fine said, almost impatiently. He had seen a dozen of the twin-engine transports sitting on the field. There would probably be one they could have simply by asking for it. And if there was a problem, one would have to be "diverted from other missions." The OSS had the ultimate priority.

  "But does a C-47 have the range?"

  "I don't think it does," Douglass said.

  "I'm not even sure it will make it to Hungary. There's no way one of them could make it to Pecs and then to Vis."

  "Where's Darmstadter?"Pine asked.

  "He ought to know."

  "He and Dolan are checking the weather," Douglass said.

  "What's the priority?" Pine asked rhetorically.

  "To get Janos's team on the ground in one piece," Douglass said.

  "We could... ," Fine began.

  "I don't know what I'm talking about, and I won't until I know just what the Gooney Bird can do."

  "Well," Douglass said, nodding toward a small door in one of the wide hangar doors where an MP, armed with a Thompson submachine gun, was checking the identification of It. Commander John Dolan, USNR, It. Henry Darmstadter, and Ernest J. Wilkins, "here comes the expert."

  "Well," Wilkins said, cheerfully confident, as he walked up to them.

  "God loves us, apparently. The immediate and twenty-four-hour weather over the drop zone is going to be perfect."

  Douglass laughed nastily.

  "Darmstadter," Fine asked.

  "What's the range of a Gooney Bird? Would a Gooney Bird make it one way to Pecs?"

  "No," Darmstadter said immediately.

  "What's wrong with the B-25?" Dolan asked.

  "Canidy has cleverly modified the B-25 so that you can't drop parachutists from it," Douglass said, "or at least not a team of them, without scattering them all over Hungary."

  "Good God!

  "Wilkins said.

  "And we can't put the 17 into Vis," Dolan said.

  "Right," Fine said.

  "Jesus, now what?" Douglass asked.

  "Canidy expects us at daybreak."

  "So we use the B-17 for the drop," Dolan said.

  "And it comes back here. And we send the B-25 to Vis. No problem."

  "No," Wilkins said.

  "What do you mean, 'no'?" Fine asked.

  "Maintenance found landing-gear problems," he said.

  "They called me and told me it would take twenty-four hours, maybe a little more, to replace what was broken."

  "Then you'll have to get us another 17,"Fine said.

  "There will be a lot of questions asked why someone wants to borrow a bomber," Wilkins said.

  Darmstadter's mind had been racing. He thought he saw a solution. But he was reluctant to offer it. These people, he told himself, know what they're doing.

  I'm just a mediocre Gooney Bird pilot.

  And then he thought, Fuck it!

  "If there would be only the team, five men, on the Gooney Bird," he said "it would be very light. It would take another ton and a half, maybe two, before it got close to Max Over Gross."

  "If you're talking about fuel," Dolan said, not unkindly, "we just don't have time to rig au
xiliary fuel tanks." | "I'm talking about fifty-five-gallon drums," Darmstadter plunged on, "and| hand pumps to replenish the fuel in the main tanks as it's burned off."

  "Hey!" Dolan said after a moment's thought.

  "Would that work, John?" Fine asked.

  "Eight fifty-five-gallon drums would weigh thirty-two hundred pounds Dolan said.

  "A little over a ton and a half. And that would be another four hun dred gallons. More than enough to get a Gooney Bird from here to Pecs, andi|j then to Vis."

  "And you can get a Gooney Bird into Vis?" Douglass said.

  Dolan thought that over a moment before replying.

  "Yeah," he said after a momentI think Brother Darmstadter and I could sit a Gooney Bird down on Vis in one piece." He caught Darmstadter's eye an4 went on. ""We'll have to get the tail wheel down before we hit the stream, going in. If we were still up on the main gear, we'd go over on our nose. Getting| out will be easier; we'll just keep the tail wheel on the ground till we're i| through the water." , ,g Darmstadter nodded his understanding. | "Could Brother Darmstadter and me sit one down in one piece?" Douglasl asked. ', Dolan looked at him. "You don't have hardly any Gooney Bird time, Colonel," Dolan said, after 9, moment. , "But I don't have dysentery, either," Douglass said.

  "Canidy told me about,!

  your'dysentery,"John" "Canidy has a big mouth," Dolan said.

  "And I'm all right."

  "I don't think we can take a chance on that, John," Douglass said.

  "I'm missing something here," Wilkins said.

  "I'm afraid Commander Dolan will not be able to go," Douglass said, "Whatever plans we make will have to exclude him."

  "First of all, that'd be Fine's decision," Dolan said.

  "And you haven't heardj me out."

  "Go ahead, Commander," Fine said, and immediately wondered why he I called Dolan by his rank.

  "Darmstadter knows more about dropping... what is it they 'sticks'... sticks of paratroopers than anybody else. And he's also the off

  one of us with any experience to speak of flying a Gooney Bird on the deck.

  And the only way we're going to be able to find Pecs and not get ourselves shot down is to go in on the deck."

  "Okay, that takes care of Darmstadter," Douglass said.

  "He flies the Gooney Bird. We're talking about who goes with him. We're talking about your' dysentery "I was flying cross-country using a road map before anybody else here was out of diapers," Dolan said.

  "I'm the only one here who can, for sure, find this meadow Canidy has picked out for us."

  "That presumes you don't have another... attack of dysentery," Douglass said "If, for example, you were to go in the Gooney Bird," Dolan went on, ignoring him, "that would leave me and Fine to fly the 25 to Vis. Captain Fine is not what you could call an experienced B-25 pilot. I hate to think what would happen if he had to try to land the B-25 on Vis."

  "Dolan, do you think Colonel Douglass could land the 25 on Vis?"

  "He stands a much better chance than you do," Dolan said.

  "And the kid doesn't need him in the C-47."

  "And what if you're not 'available' in the C-47?" Fine challenged.

  "That's the chance we have to take, that by me just sitting there in the right seat and letting the kid fly, my dysentery won't come back."

  Douglass looked at Fine.

  "I think we have to go with Dolan," Fine said.

  "His main advantage, I think, is that he's the one with the best chance... maybe even the only one with a chance... of finding the drop zone."

  [THREE j

  It. Hank Darmstadter thought that the most difficult part of the flight so far had been taxiing to the end of the runway in Cairo. They had taken off at 2100, which would put them over the meadow outside Pecs at just after daylight.

  The airfield at Cairo was blacked out, and while Wilkins had been able to arrange for the runway lights to be turned on long enough for them to take off, they had had to be led to the runway from the hangar by a man holding a flashlight in the back of a jeep.

  The flashlight-in-the-jeep had been very hard to follow. It was almost impossible to see directly ahead out over the nose of a C-47 with its tail wheel on the ground. C-47 pilots learned to taxi by looking out the side and by swinging the nose from side to side to provide a look ahead through the side windows.

  It was difficult following the jeep, but they'd made it to the end of the runway all right, sometimes flicking the landing lights on to make sure of their position. Darmstadter had been a little surprised and flattered that Dolan had not taken over the controls and done the taxiing, but Dolan had left that to Darmstadter.

  And from the moment they had lined up with the centerline of the runway, things had gone without a hitch.

  Dolan had waited until he'd run the final mag check for the engines, and then he'd called the tower for the lights, and they had come on immediately.

  Despite what had turned out because of the air temperature to be four hundred pounds over Max Over Gross, the takeoff had been no problem at all.

  The only way Darmstadter could tell how heavy they were was a reluctance to pick up altitude. But they had never come close to a stall, and the climb was steady, if slow.

  The first leg, the longest, was on a west-northwest course across the desert to the Mediterranean, and then across the Mediterranean far enough south of Crete to avoid a chance encounter with German aircraft based on the island.

  And then they turned north across the Ionian Sea.

  There was almost a half moon, providing what Dolan described as the most they could ask for, enough light for them to make out landmasses and shorelines, but not enough to make it easy for anyone to spot them.

  The Strait of Otranto, which separates the heel of the Italian boot from Albania and the Adriatic from the Ionian Sea, came into view just when they expected it to, and they could see both shorelines for a while.

  Dolan had planned that that leg of the flight would take six hours and twenty-five minutes. It actually took six hours and two, meaning that they were making better time than anticipated, even with the engines thinned back as much as possible for fuel economy.

  Once they had crossed the Strait, Darmstadter had raised the nose slightly, starting a slow climb to 9,000 feet, and Dolan had begun to peer intently out the window looking for the narrow strip of land that ran between the Adriatic and Lake Scutari on the Yugoslav-Albanian border.

  Dolan had told him, jokingly, but meaning it, that the secret of "road map" navigation was to look for something on the ground that was large enough to be easily seen and that couldn't be confused with anything else.

  Lake Scutari fit the bill. It was twenty-five miles long and was separated from the Adriatic by a strip of land as narrow as seven miles. It could be easily found, and it could not be mistaken for anything else.

  "Steer straight north from the end of the lake," Dolan said when they had

  found Lake Scutari, and then he got out of his seat.

  "I think it's time to get rid of another drum."

  It. Janos had been shown how to pump fuel from the fifty-five-gallon drums into the main tanks. One of the drums had been semi permanently installed, with a line running from its bottom to the main aircraft tank. Fuel from it had been pumped into the main tank, and then that fuel was replenished from other fifty-five-gallon barrels.

  The empty tanks didn't weigh much, but they could not be completely drained, and Dolan was worried that the avgas sloshing around in them would create fumes that would be dangerous. He had gone back into the cabin several times to make sure that as soon as each drum had been emptied, Janos had thrown it out.

  The ground seemed to glow white about that time, and after a moment Darmstadter figured out what it was--the moonlight reflecting back from snow on the ground. That meant they were approaching the mountains in Montenegro, the highest of which was about 7,500 feet. There would be at least 1,500 feet between them and the highest peak, but it was i
mportant that they know when they passed over it, so they could safely descend.

  Darmstadter had been worried that Dolan would want the controls after they started down and were flying on the deck. There was no question that Dolan was a better and more experienced pilot. But there was also no doubt that he had had a heart attack and might have another But Dolan lived up to what he had promised Douglass: that he would "work the road map in the right seat and let the kid fly."