The Double Agents (Men at War 6)

Darmstadter glared at him.

Canidy went on, “You know, ones that go rat-a-tat-tat and boom-boom? I leave the operation of airborne buses to those pilots whose lips tend to move when they read the checklist.”

Darmstadter shook his head as he settled into the pilot seat and retrieved the checklist.

He said, “With all due respect, Major, you can be such an ass sometimes.”

Canidy smiled smugly.

The C-47 taxied to the threshold of runway 32, stuck its nose into the prevailing light wind coming off the sea, then, after engine run-up, roared down the strip and went wheels-up for the sixty-kilometer flight to Dellys. All the while, Canidy watched Darmstadter with the critical eye of the flight instructor he once had been at Naval Air Station Pensacola.

The C-47 copilot usually handled the business of putting the gear up and down, setting the flaps, running the radios. Darmstadter never asked Canidy to lift a finger. He effortlessly covered all the tasks.

And he didn’t even move his lips when the read the checklist.

Despite the fact that it was safer to have the copilot read the checklist and work the panel, leaving the flying itself to the pilot, Canidy took no offense. He knew it was not a case of him not trusting Canidy, or of him showing off, or even of him being reckless.

Darmstadter simply loved to fly, to truly be pilot in command.

And as Canidy looked coolly out of the airplane, casually following Darmstadter’s movements and being quietly impressed, Canidy was reminded how fine a pilot Darmstadter was, and how he almost missed the chance to become one.

Because he sure as hell had not started out as one.

The fact—not to mention the irony—was that Darmstadter, Henry, Lieutenant, United States Army Air Forces, almost wound up as a navigator, a bombardier, an aerial gunner—anything but a pilot in command of an aircraft.

Reason: The then nineteen-year-old had damn near flunked out of basic flight training. Despite his genuine enthusiasm to fly, his skills as a pilot had been rather rough, and compounding that problem were his bad bouts of airsickness.

What had saved his ass was a combination of two things. One, there had been a severe shortage of pilots. Two, there had not been a shortage of rough-around-the-edges fledgling flyboys in Darmstadter’s class who also suffered from airsickness.

If the AAF elimination board had resorted to disqualifying everyone with less-than-polished skills or with airsickness—or with both—and declared them unfit to fly, then the result would have been a great number of empty cockpits…and thus grounded aircraft.

Resigned to the fact that they had to fill slots, the elimination board took another look—a long, hard book—at each candidate who had a problem with airsickness. (The ones left, that is. Half a dozen guys had simply gotten sick of being sick and quit to pursue other land-based assignments.) And the elimination board had then decided that Darmstadter held the dubious honor of being the least bad of a bad class.

They gave him another chance. They said that if during his probation period he could show he could perform aerobatic maneuvers without getting disoriented—or airsick—then they would see that he would earn his wings to fly, say, two-place, single-engine Piper Cubs. Fighters and bombers clearly being beyond his scope of competence.

The enthusiastic Darmstadter was determined.

Turning the phrase what goes up must come down on its head, he figured what doesn’t go down can’t come up and stopped eating on the days he knew he was going to fly. The result had been that he still got a little light-headed, but the throwing up was history. And with that resolved, he’d been able to successfully complete the aerobatic maneuvers.

The board made good on its condition of probation, and he soon pinned on his wings and butter bar and headed for advanced training.

It was there that he found the board also meant what it had said about what he would be flying—or not flying.

He had been sent to learn to fly the small twin-engine transport C-45.

Not a problem, he’d thought. He still would get to fly.

But then, just as he was about to graduate, he dumped one. Taking off solo in a C-45, he lost an engine. Miraculously, he’d had barely enough altitude to pull a three-sixty and, despite landing downwind, get the plane back in one piece on the runway—where he lost the other engine.

No sooner had he escaped the fuselage and made it across the tarmac than the fuel ignited and the aircraft exploded in a magnificent fireball.

And he found himself in front of the elimination board again.

The seven members debated his actions in his presence. One declared that he should have followed Standard Operating Procedures, including adjusting the aircraft to fly on a single engine and to circle the field until able to land properly, into the wind. Another member gave him the benefit of the doubt, saying no one but Darmstadter really knew what had happened, and how could it really be a pilot’s fault when both of his engines crap out?

The elimination board voted in secret, and Darmstadter (by a single yea, he later learned) passed. He then transitioned to learn how to fly the C-47, and, following his successful graduation from that course, had been sent to England to fly Gooney Birds.

But not in the left seat.