Dooley saw that he was not wearing an oxygen mask.
Don’t tell me it’s pressurized! It has to be. He’s at twenty thousand with no mask!
Jesus, I know what it is. It’s a Constellation! I’ve seen pictures.
What the hell is it doing here?
Dooley saw that his airspeed indicator needle was flickering at 320.
“Five Oh Nine, Mother Hen. We are going to form a protective shield above and ahead and behind you and lead you in.”
“Thank you very much.”
I will be goddamned if I will ask him if that’s really a Constellation.
Dooley went almost to the deck with the Constellation, watched it touch smoothly down, then shoved his throttles forward and picked up the nose so that he—and the rest of the flight—could go around and get in the landing stack.
When Dooley’s P-38 was at the end of its landing roll, he was surprised to see that instead of at Base Ops, where he expected it to be, the Constellation was at a remote corner of the field, where maybe fifty people were hurriedly erecting camouflage netting over it.
“Mother Hen to all Chicks. Refuel, check your planes, but don’t get far from them. I was told to expect another mission when we got back.”
He switched radio frequencies from Air-to-Air Three to Air-to- Ground Two.
“Sidi Tower, Mother Hen is going to taxi to the Constellation.”
“Negative, Mother Hen. You are denied—”
Dooley turned his radios off and taxied to the Constellation.
By the time he got there, the camouflage netting was in place and the staff car of the base commander was parked at the foot of a long ladder that reached up to the fuselage of the Constellation.
The base commander glowered at Dooley.
Fuck it! What’s he going to do, send me to North Africa?
He started to shut down the Lightning.
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He had to wait until someone brought a ladder so that he could climb down from the P-38 cockpit.
By the time he got close to the Constellation, two civilians were climbing down the ladder.
That guy looks just like Howard Hughes.
The guy who looked just like Howard Hughes said, “Why do I think you’re Mother Hen?” Then, without waiting for a reply, he said to the other civilian, “This is the guy who shepherded us in here, Colonel.”
“I was very happy to see you out there, Captain,” the other civilian said, offering Dooley his hand. “Thank you. And are you going to take care of us on the way to Lisbon?”
The base commander put in: “I thought I’d wait, Colonel Graham, until you got here before I told the captain where he was going next.”
“But he is prepared to leave shortly?” Colonel Graham asked.
“Just as soon as his aircraft is refueled,” the base commander said, then looked at Dooley. “Right, Captain?”
“Yes, sir.”
The base commander looked back at Graham and added, “And he picks up the flight plan at Base Ops, of course, and confers with the C-47 crew.”