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"Whittaker asked.

"What's in the boxes? "the chief of the boat asked.

"The long ones are packed with carbines," Hammersmith answered.

"And half the others are filled with ammo," Whittaker added.

"And the other half?"

"A million dollars' worth of gold coins," Whittaker said.

The chief of the boat accepted that stoically.

"Gonna be a bitch getting that stuff ashore in rubber boats," he said.

"I

don't suppose the people who'll be meeting you would have boats, real boats, something big enough to handle that weight?"

"That's one of our problems. Chief," Whittaker said.

"Nobody knows we're coming."

"Holy shit! "the chief of the boat said, and then immediately got control of himself.

"Well, we'll figure something out, Captain."

[THREE]

16 Degrees 20 Minutes North Longitude (Over the Adriatic Sea)

The B-25G "Mitchell" had been alone for hours high in the bright blue sky, its passage around the heel of the Italian boot and up the center of the Adriatic marked by twin trails of condensation behind it. Par beneath it was an unbroken bed of clouds, stretching as far as the eye could see, looking like a vast layer of cotton wool.

Dolan was at the controls, Canidy in the copilot's seat, and Darmstadter was sitting on a fold-down jump seat immediately behind the pilots' seats. It was uncomfortable on the jump seat, but the foam-r

ubber and leather seats in the fuselage had little appeal for Darmstadter. When he was alone in the fuselage, he had too great an opportunity to think of what could go wrong. He was finding what reassurance he could from being close to Canidy and Dolan.

Darmstadter had been in the left seat when they left Malta, and had made the takeoff. But Canidy had taken over the controls after they had left the ground, and he was the one who had set the course and rate of climb and fine tuned the engines and the mixture.

And then, matter-of-factly, he had told Darmstadter where they were going--but not why--and pointed out their course on a chart.

And then he had told him, patiently, even kindly, as a flight instructor teaches a student pilot, how it was planned for them to find Vis and what would happen if things went wrong.

Canidy explained that the OSS agent with the British SOE force on Vis had a radio transmitter-receiver capable of operating on the frequencies used for aviation. Using the radio direction-finding equipment on the B-25G, they would home in on Vis very much as they would home in on Newark Airport after a flight from Washington.

With several significant exceptions:

"The trouble with RDF transmitters," Canidy said, "is that they can be picked

up by anybody tuned to that frequency. For example, German or Italian aircraft.

A curious Luftwaffe pilot looking for the way home from a patrol over the Adriatic might come across the signal from Vis and wonder what the hell it was."

"The worst possible scenario is that two pilots, or for that matter, two ground stations, might hear the Vis transmission at the same time, and mark their position and the relative position of the Vis transmitter on a chart. If they did that, all that would have to be done would be to put the chart marks together.

Triangulation. You with me?"

Darmstadter nodded. He knew that without actually following a signal to its source, the location of the transmitter could be easily determined.