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"Make a real effort."

"Now, just a minute, Jimmy!" Cynthia said.

"Cynthia?" Whittaker said.

"What?"

"Sssshhhh," Whittaker said, and by that time, Whittaker and Hammersmith were through the kitchen door, with Garvey more or less suspended between them.

lONE]

0615 Hours 12 February 1943

Canidy was late

. He had been expected at 0600. And It. Hank Darmstadter had been waiting to go since he had awakened, after a restless night, at quarter to four. When he looked out the window, there was thick fog, so thick that flight in his Troop Carrier Squadron would not even have been considered. It was likely that the fog would keep them from flying, but there was no one at 0345 whom he could ask.

Dolan knocked on Darmstadter's door at 0500 and seemed surprised to find him wearing the high-altitude flight gear over his uniform.

"Why don't you leave that sheepskin gear here?" Dolan suggested.

"I

thought we'd ride over and get breakfast in the Air Corps mess."

Dolan ate a hearty, air-crew-about-to-go-on-a-combat-mission breakfast, complete with real eggs and a slice of ham. Darmstadter's Troop Carrier Squadron had not gone on combat missions and consequently had been issued no fresh eggs, so they should have been a real treat. But he was so nervous he had no appetite, and he ate them only because he told himself he needed the nutrition.

A jeep took them to the revetment where the B-25G had been readied for flight. Dolan made a careful, if leisurely, preflight examination of the aircraft, then hoisted himself onto the hood of the jeep and waited for Canidy to show up.

"You think we're going to go, Commander?" Darmstadter asked. When Dolan's eyes rose in question, Darmstadter added, "The fog?"

"What I'm wondering about is where's Canidy?" Dolan said.

For lack of some better way to kill time, Darmstadter walked around the airplane again. Knowing that he was not only to be checked out in the

B25G

but that they were about to make a long-distance flight in it, Darmstadter had studied at length and with great interest TM 1-B-25-G, Flight Operations Manual, B-25G (Series) Aircraft.

He had realized the moment Commander Dolan had taken him out to the airplane for his first ride that most of his dedicated study had been a waste of time.

"You'll notice," Dolan had told him, "that we've modified this one a little."

It was a massive understatement.

The B-25G had been delivered to the Eighth Air Force with a twin.50caliber machine-gun position in the tail; with another pair of.50s in a rotating turret on top of the fuselage at the leading edge of the wing; with two single.50caliber machine-gun positions--"waist guns"--in the sides of the fuselage;

and with two fixed.50s and a 75mm M4 cannon in the nose.

All of the guns had been removed and their positions faired over. The bomb-dropping racks and mechanism were gone, and the bomb-bay doors were riveted permanently closed. Auxiliary fuel tanks had been installed in what had been the bomb bay, where the bombs were supposed to be.

In the fuselage aft of the trailing edge of the wing, where the radio operator's and waist gunner's positions had been, there were now five--as many as would fit--light brown leather civilian airliner passenger seats.

The seats had been "salvaged," Dolan told Darmstadter, from a U.S. Navy Boeing "Strato-Cruiser" transport, that Canidy had "dumped in Africa."

Darmstadter was very curious to learn more about that, but he had come to understand that while Major Canidy and the others seemed to make jokes about everything else, Canidy had been dead serious about the "Ask No Questions "rule.

Dolan had given Darmstadter seven hours of in-flight instruction in the B25G, which was really more than it sounded like, because with the exception of the first takeoff and landing, Dolan had never touched the controls again.