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His place was in the copilot seat. And there, he’d spent countless hours picking up time—and skills—with superior pilots in command, as they practiced low-level flights for dropping parachutists, towing gliders, and such. In the process, he’d also picked up—on top of an automatic time-in-grade promotion to first lieutenant—enough flight hours, plus landings and takeoffs, to qualify as an aircraft commander.
Then one day his troop carrier wing commander had made an announcement to the pilots he’d gathered in the maintenance hangar. Eighth Air Force needed volunteer pilots, the commander said, for a “classified mission involving great personal risk.”
Two of the Gooney Bird pilots there
wanted nothing more than to be fighter pilots—and knew that towing gliders and dropping parachutists was not the career path for them. They jumped at the opportunity.
Hank Darmstadter admitted that he (1) would have loved being a fighter pilot but (2) knew that, with his history, did not for a minute stand a chance of becoming one. Nor did he really believe, as might the other two pilots, that this dangerous mission would put him in at the controls of a fighter plane.
But, he’d thought, sounds interesting. What the hell? Why not apply? Probably won’t make it, anyway….
Just when enough time had passed since he’d filled out the questionnaire that he knew he’d been passed over, though, sure as hell an order had arrived that said for him to immediately report to Eighth Air Force.
And, very shortly, he discovered that he’d very likely done a dumb goddamn thing by volunteering for this secret outfit called the Office of Strategic Services.
The mission—smuggling some important people out from under the noses of the damn Nazis—had been dangerous. But it had also been exciting, far more than tugging gliders through the sky. And in the process he’d saved the ass of one Major Richard M. Canidy.
Darmstadter got Canidy’s attention when he pulled back on the throttles of the C-47’s Twin Wasp engines. It was exactly half an hour after they’d gone wheels-up. He tapped Canidy on the shoulder, then pointed directly ahead of them toward the coastline, where the green hills led down and met the emerald sea.
“Dellys,” Darmstadter’s voice said in Canidy’s headset.
Canidy looked and nodded. He saw the small city of low white buildings set into the hillside, with a small, semicircular harbor at the bottom, and thought that Dellys did indeed look as Stan Fine had said, “a miniature version of Algiers.”
Canidy glanced at the altimeter and watched the needles creep counterclockwise as the aircraft settled into a slow descent.
They had been flying at a thousand feet above ground level (AGL), which he knew was considered the standard height from which to drop paratroops—Once again, Canidy thought, Hank proves old habits are hard to break—although he was more than aware that in certain conditions AGL altitudes of five hundred and six hundred feet were quite common.
The closer you drop men to the ground, the less time they spend in the sky floating to earth as easy targets.
He noted, too, that the airspeed indicator showed one hundred forty miles per hour. That of course was the target speed for turning the jump light from red to green.
Darmstadter’s consistent. He still flies like they trained him, before we snagged him. Which, of course, is why we snagged him…to drop agents by parachute.
Saving our ass in Hungary was just icing on the cake.
Canidy sat back and relaxed as Darmstadter maneuvered the aircraft to just shy of the western edge of the city, then made a gentle, flat turn out over the sea, and then turned again to roughly parallel the coast.
They were at a little more than a hundred feet off the deck and coming up on the shoreline somewhat quickly.
Canidy wasn’t concerned; he knew Darmstadter could skim the bird along the tops of the waves and still land with his wheels dry. But Canidy did wonder where the hell he was going to put down. There wasn’t a flat spot anywhere he could see that would be big enough to accommodate the Gooney Bird.
And, right now, with the peak elevation above Dellys looking to be at about a thousand feet above sea level, they presently were on a direct vector into the side of the land rise.
Darmstadter, showing no apparent concern, pointed toward the eastern end of Dellys.
Again his voice came through Canidy’s headset: “There’s the Sandbox.”
Canidy followed to where he was pointing and found at the edge of town, right along the seawall, a compound that covered a whole block. It had a one-story tan-colored building that looked like a schoolhouse. The compound was ringed by a high wall built of white stone. There was a large courtyard, and in the half of the courtyard that was dirt Canidy saw lines of men going through what looked like hand-to-hand combat.
The Gooney Bird buzzed the compound. Then, with the Twin Wasps roaring from Darmstadter’s big push on the throttles, the aircraft quickly gained altitude, then turned to the south and easily hopped the ridge.
Barely a moment later—just as Canidy made out a small, crude dirt strip dug out on the backside of the ridge, with a Nissen hut at one end and a jeep parked under a tarp strung alongside the hut—Darmstadter, in a flash of hands, slightly retarded the throttles, extended the full flaps for landing, and dropped and locked the landing gear.
They were on the ground in no time and taxiing toward the Nissen hut and jeep. Canidy noticed that an armed guard was standing in the shade of the tarp.
After Darmstadter had shut down the Twin Wasps, Canidy undid his seat harness.
“Hank,” he said, patting him on the shoulder, “I was going to try to make up for my apparently offensive comment earlier and tell you that that just now wasn’t half-bad flying.”
