The Special Services officer, carried away with righteousness, put his hand on Eric’s arm and tried to pull him away. Fine called out a warning. He knew that trying such a move with Eric was foolish under any circumstances, but under these it was suicidal. Eric Fulmar’s jaws were working, and there were tears in his eyes.
With blinding speed, Fulmar struck the Special Services officer on the bridge of his nose with the heel of his hand. Fine was familiar with the blow. He had learned it from the Berbers in Morocco and had taught it to Jim Whittaker, who, as a result of his own Philippine experience, was the OSS’s acknowledged master of lethal hand-to-hand combat. Whittaker, in turn, had taught it to the English experts at Station X. Its effectiveness had awed even the highly skilled assassins of the SOE.
Blood gushed from the flack’s eye sockets and his nostrils, and he fell screaming to the floor.
The other Air Corps officers in the room, as if in slow motion, slowly realized what was happening and came to the defense of the man screaming on the floor.
A large captain, with the massive neck and shoulders of a football player, advanced warily on Fulmar. And Eric, his eyes narrow, seemed to be matter-of -factly considering the best way to put him down.
“Eric,” Fine shouted,“for Christ’s sake, no!”
For a moment there was no response, but then, as if he were waking up, Fulmar looked over his shoulder at Fine, and then at the man on the floor, and then back at Fine. Sadness was now in his eyes.
“Shit,” he said.
Chapter THREE
“I don’t give a damn what this says, frankly, Colonel,” the Air Corps colonel commanding Wincanton Air Corps Base said as he handed Lt. Colonel Edmund T. Stevens’s OSS identity card back to him,“my flight surgeon tells me the officer your man struck is liable to lose an eye, and I’m not about to sweep this under the rug.”
“Colonel,” Stevens said,“if you question my authority, please call General Smith at SHAEF.”
“Bedell Smith?” the Air Corps colonel asked. Stevens nodded. “I’m not going to call anyone, Colonel. I’m the base commander. This is my responsibility. ”
“Then I will call him,” Stevens said.
Somewhat contemptuously, the Air Corps colonel waved at his telephone.
“Thank you,” Stevens said politely. He picked up the telephone. “Get me London military two zero zero five, please,” he said, glancing as he spoke toward Stanley Fine, who was sitting next to a wall trying to be invisible.
A direct order from Eisenhower’s deputy, the second-ranking American officer in England, was enough for the Air Corps colonel to release Lieutenant Fulmar into the custody of Colonel Stevens, but it did nothing to assuage his anger.
“Just for the record, Colonel,” he said to Stevens, “this isn’t the end of this. I’m going to bring charges—it’s assault upon a superior commissioned officer—and if this lieutenant of yours isn’t tried, I’m damned sure going to find out why.”
“I deeply regret this incident, Colonel,” Stevens said.
“You damned well should, Colonel,” the Air Corps colonel said.
And then he left them in order to order Fulmar released from the base stockade.
“I deeply regret this incident, Colonel,” Fine said when they were alone. “I feel responsible for it.”
Stevens looked at him.
“You know what I was just thinking, Stan?” he asked, and went on without waiting for a reply. “We’re training people, by the hundreds, to… use their hands the way Fulmar did. What’s going to happen five, ten years from now? When the war is over? In barrooms when they get drunk? In bedrooms when they are provoked?”
“I said, sir, that I feel responsible,” Fine said.
“No more than I am,” Stevens said. “Canidy told me you were going to bring him here. I didn’t stop him. And there’s something else. Maybe I’m being perverted by all this. I would like to think it’s out of character for me to think this way, but the unpleasant truth is that when I called Bedell Smith, I was angry. Not at Fulmar, but at the damned fool who laid his hands on him and caused all this inconvenience.”
“What am I to do with him when we get him back?” Fine asked.
Stevens’s eyebrows rose as he considered the question.
“Under the circumstances, I think you should do with him what Dick would do with him,” he said finally. “Go out and get drunk with him.”
The Air Corps colonel appeared with Fulmar a few minutes later.
“I’m sorry about this, Colonel,” Fulmar said.