The Soldier Spies (Men at War 3)

“I told you, Major,” he said, “hardly at all. All I had to do was install one long wire antenna to each of the vertical stabilizers. They use the same mount on the fuselage. Unless you look for it, you’d never know it was there.”

The three of them examined the B-25 from the outside.

"Okay,” Canidy said. “So I won’t have to castrate you.”

The captain beamed in Canidy’s approval. He had been a ham radio operator in civilian life, and the Air Corps had put him in charge of a radio overhaul facility. What he was doing now was right down his alley, and it gave him a feeling of making a real contribution to the war effort.

“Dick,” Bitter said, a little uncomfortably, “I had planned to ride with Joe.”

“Had you now?” Canidy asked dryly.

“I want to take notes,” Bitter said, more than a little lamely. “Joe will have his hands full flying it.”

“And who was going to fly the remote control?” Canidy said.

“Dolan,” Bitter said.

“And who was going to fly my B-25?”

“There’s half a dozen people checked out in it,” Bitter said.

“And if something goes wrong, how do you plan to get out of the seventeen with your stiff knee?” Canidy asked.

“I can get out of it,” Bitter said.

“What we’ll do is send the colonel to take notes,” Canidy said.

“In a pig’s ass you will,” Douglass said. “I’m not going up in that flying junk heap.”

“In that case, Eddie, okay,” Canidy said. “We about ready to go?”

“Anytime,” Bitter said.

“Captain Allen, would you like to ride in the B-25?” Canidy asked.

“It might be a good idea if I did, sir,” the tiny captain said, visibly thrilled at the prospect.

“Maybe we better get you on flight pay,” Canidy said. “You’re the only one around here who seems to know what he’s doing.”

Canidy’s good at that, Douglass thought. He’s made this pint-size radio genius feel ten feet tall.

Douglass followed Canidy and Dolan in their walk-around preflight of the B-25, and then motioned Captain Allen ahead of him into the B-25. He strapped himself into one of the four airline passenger chairs Canidy had had installed in the back, telling himself that’s what he was on this flight, a passenger. But then curiosity got the better of him, and he went forward to the cockpit as the engines were started.

Dolan, in the pilot’s seat, held an aluminum box with a Bakelite cover in his lap. The box was connected to the radio panel by a thick cable running along the deck. The box was obviously the remote control system controls. But there were only toggle switches. Douglass had expected a joystick.

It seemed impossible to believe that an airplane as large as the B-17 could be controlled by something so simple.

Captain Allen handed Douglass a set of earphones. He put them on in time to hear Canidy call the tower and request taxi and takeoff permission.

Chapter FIVE

The Swiss-German Border

0905 Hours 29 January 1943

The train that rolled slowly to a stop in Lörrach, just across the border from Basel, was the first train that Unterinspektor Lorin Wahl of the Geheime Staatspolizei had been directed to examine on his own, without supervision.

Wahl was tall, slender, and blond-haired. His face was scarred with acne and his skin was pale. And his prominent eyes were pale blue. Lorin Wahl had been born in Munich in 1918 to a working-class family. He had joined the National Socialist Transportation Corps at sixteen, anticipating a career in either truck or rail transportation. Later, his father, who had early on joined the National Socialist German Workers’ Party and was then employed in the administrative offices of the Gauleiter for Schwabing, had enough influence with the Gauleiter himself to arrange that his son be taken on by the Bavarian State Police.