"Your country, Lieutenant," Fine said, "is saving you for more important things."
"You aren't going to tell me, are you, you sonofabitch?" Kennedy said.
"I can't, Joe," Fine said seriously.
They stood up to watch the P-38 land. It came in hot, in a crab, lining up with the runway at the last moment before touching down.
"If yon fighter jockey tries that in a 17," Kennedy said dryly, "we will have one more to park over there."
He pointed to the "graveyard" where remnants of more than two dozen crashed and shot-up B-17s were scattered around.
"Without any whistling-in-the-dark self-confidence," Kennedy went on, "what are our chances of getting that 17 back?"
"That will depend on how much you can teach Doug," Fine said.
A Follow Me jeep had driven out to the taxiway to meet the P-38. Fine started to walk toward the revetment in which it would be parked, and Bitter and Kennedy followed him.
"I think I'll go along in the 17," Bitter said.
"Maybe I could help Joe."
"No," Fine said, politely enough, but there was no mistaking it was an order.
"We want to keep you around to fly the other new one."
They reached the revetment as the P-38 taxied up to it.
A ground crewman made a throat-cutting signal with his hand, and the engines died. A ground crewman laid a ladder against the cockpit, and It. Colonel Peter Douglass. Jr climbed down it.
He was wearing a pink Ike jacket, matching trousers, a battered, oil-spotted, fur-felt brimmed cap with the crown stiffener removed on the back of his head, half Wellington boots, and a parachute-silk scarf in the open collar of a gabardine shirt.
He is absolutely, totally, out of uniform. Fine mused. And then he corrected himself. No, that is the uniform prescribed by fighter pilots for themselves.
And there is no question that Doug is one hell of a fighter pilot. There were Japanese meatballs and German swastikas painted in three neat rows on the cockpit nose, plus a submarine.
And something brand new. Douglass had named his airplane "Charity."
"Where the hell is my brass band?" Douglass asked, wrapping his arm around Commander Bitter's shoulders and (because he knew it annoyed Bitter immensely) kissing him wetly on the temple.
Fine and Kennedy smiled.
"Who's Charity?" Kennedy asked.
"As in "Faith, Hope and,"" Douglass said. "if I don't get a band, how about lunch? I'm starved."
"You're going flying with Lieutenant Kennedy," Fine said.
"You can have lunch when you come back."
"Where am I going flying with you, Kennedy?" Douglass asked.
"Up and down, up and down," Kennedy smiled.
"Fine wants me to teach you to line an airplane up with the runway while you're still in the air."
"Only bomber pilots have to do that," Douglass said.
"It's because their reflexes are so slow. You're serious about this, aren't you? Before I have lunch?"