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Dear ol’ Dad, God bless him, would not like this shit one bit.

[TWO]

Darmstadter raised the landing gear and retracted the flaps of the Gooney Bird after their departure from the dirt strip at Dellys. He then pushed the yoke slightly forward, leveling off the plane, and adjusted the throttle back just slightly, settling in on a due easterly course right along the coastline.

The sun was to their back, a little more than an hour from setting and starting to create long shadows across the ground ahead of them. After a few minutes, Darmstadter pointed in an animated fashion at eleven o’clock out the windscreen.

“There they go,” he said over the intercom. “Headed for the Sandbox.”

Canidy looked out that direction, and saw another C-47. The sunlight set it off in the blue sky.

Canidy saw that it was approaching the western edge of Dellys. Then he saw, in quick succession, eight figures drop from the back of the aircraft—then their parachutes pop open one after another. They floated down, all nicely lit by the sun, and landed somewhat scattered. Then the aircraft disappeared over the ridge, headed in the direction of the dirt strip on the other side.

Canidy looked at Darmstadter and gave a thumbs-up.

Darmstadter nodded, then caused the Gooney Bird to make a slow turn, so that the needle on the compass came to rest on 200 degrees. That would result in a more or less direct vector to the airfield at Algiers.

Canidy went back to looking out the windscreen. Nothing he saw really registered, as he mentally went back over everything that had just happened at the Sandbox.

He was disappointed. He realized—again—that he’d come away from the OSS finishing school with pretty much zip. While the trip had not been a total waste of time—he, of course, had been able to share his talk with the agents there—he desperately had to make some headway of his own here soon….

Suddenly, Darmstadter banked the aircraft. He was turning away from the Algiers airfield, on a course out over the sea.

Canidy looked at him for an answer.

Darmstadter’s voice came over the intercom: “Algiers control is routing me out and around the long way. Not the first time it’s happened. Damn sure won’t be the last.”

Canidy nodded, resigned to the fact that that amounted to yet another small delay for him.

He turned to watch the waves, lost in thought.

Everyone back in that room at the Sandbox is fighting to defeat Hitler—if not exactly for the same honorable reasons.

Donovan told me before sending me into Sicily that to a man everyone is working some angle to come out on top after the war.

Just among the damn Frogs there’s the Communist Francs-Tireurs et Partisans; the Organization de la Résistance dans l’Armée, followers of Giraud; De Gaulle’s Forces Française de l’Intérieur; and a deadly mix of other warring subfractions.

Christ knows how many we will deal with in Sicily. But clearly the usual suspects. Including my new friends in the Mafia.

What was it Donovan told Hoover? “I know they’re Communists, Edgar. That’s why I hired them.”

Communists, Fascists, mobsters—the Boss isn’t afraid of working with anyone to win this damn thing.

But then neither are FDR and Churchill.

Just consider that damned Stalin. His belief that “One man’s death is a tragedy, but a million deaths is merely a statistic” doesn’t exactly qualify the sonofabitch for sainthood.

Pulling these various factions together—or at least managing them in our own way—is how Donovan expects to do that.

They’re really on their own side. That’s a given. And most likely why that bearded bastard in the classroom would not look me in the eyes.

But we do have the upper hand. They all need our training and weapons and money. And they all know we can go into every last one of their countries, behind enemy lines, and sabotage anything we don’t want them to have—power plants, heavy factories, railroads—just take out the equipment short-term if they cooperate or, if they don’t, call in the bombers and blow the hell out of everything.

Just like a certain spook blowing up a munitions supply ship full of nerve gas in Palermo.

Shit….

Canidy looked down. He shook his head, hoping to clear it, then looked again out the windscreen.