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“Sir?”

“I was talking to one of my fighter group commanders, you probably know him, come to think of it, Doug Douglass; and he told me that one of two AVG pilots was at least once either shot down or had to make a forced landing.”

“I flew with Douglass, sir,” Bitter said, then blurted:“When I was hit and had to make a forced landing, Doug set down beside me, loaded me into his plane, and took off. If it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t have made it.”

Lorimer looked at him thoughtfully.

“So that was Douglass, was it?” he said. “I heard that story, but until just now, I thought it was so much public relations bullshit. How the hell did you both get into the cockpit of a P-40?”

“He put me in first and then sat on my lap. I don’t know how he managed to work the rudder pedals.”

“I’ll be goddamned,” General Lorimer said thoughtfully, and then, after a moment, returned to the present:

“Did Canidy tell you Douglass’s group took heavy losses trying to skip-bomb these goddamned sub pens?”

“I heard about it,” Bitter said,“but not from Canidy.”

“Which brings us back to the drones,” Lorimer said. “I had the chance to drop in at Fersfield, and had a couple of minutes to talk with two officers— Navy officers, by the way—a Commander Dolan and a Lieutenant Kennedy.”

He paused, looked at Bitter to see if there was a response to the names, and when Bitter shook his head “no,” went on:

“Basically, they have two problems. One of them is control of the drone itself, which they’re working on. They have already decided that it will be impossible to get them off the ground without a pilot. There’s no way they can install radio-controlled mechanisms that will permit really flying the aircraft. So a human pilot will take it off the ground, bring it to altitude, trim it up, synchronize the engines, set it on course, and then turn it over to the drone pilot in the control aircraft. That’s when they start the radio controls working.”

“The pilot would then parachute from the drone?” Bitter asked.

“That’s the second problem,” General Lorimer said, “getting the pilot out. How familiar are you with the seventeen?”

“I’ve never been in one,” Bitter said.

“Well, that can be easily fixed,” General Lorimer said. “I can arrange for you to participate in a crew training exercise. For that matter, I can send you as an observer on a mission.”

“I would appreciate that, sir,” Bitter said.

“Well, you’ll understand this better after you’ve ridden in a B-17. But the exit problem, in brief, is that when they pack the fuselage with as much explosive as they need to crack the sub pens—and they can put a lot in there: without the bomb casings, Torpex doesn’t weigh very much—it blocks the hatches normally used to bail out. You’re going to have to solve that problem, too.”

Bitter realized suddenly that General Lorimer had stopped speaking and was looking at him either curiously or impatiently. He had been lost in thought, not of solutions to the problems General Lorimer had outlined, but of his own inadequacy to solve them. He knew nothing about explosives, or parachutes, and he had never been in a B-17.

“I won’t take any more of your time, General,” Bitter said. “I think the thing for me to do is to get over to Fersfield and see for myself.”

Lorimer nodded, then stood up and offered Bitter his hand.

“Let me know what I can do for you,” he said.

When Ed walked out of the building, Sergeant Agnes Draper was across the street leaning against the fender of the Packard. When she saw him, she started to get in. But he signaled for her to wait for him there and walked over to her.

When he reached her, she was holding the door to th

e tonneau open for him.

“Fersfield, Commander?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said, then added,“I think I’ll drive, if you don’t mind.”

“I don’t think you’re supposed to do that,” Sergeant Draper said.

“Nevertheless,” he said,“I will drive.”

“Yes, sir,” she said.