"We could... ," Fine began.
"I don't know what I'm talking about, and I won't until I know just what the Gooney Bird can do."
"Well," Douglass said, nodding toward a small door in one of the wide hangar doors where an MP, armed with a Thompson submachine gun, was checking the identification of It. Commander John Dolan, USNR, It. Henry Darmstadter, and Ernest J. Wilkins, "here comes the expert."
"Well," Wilkins said, cheerfully confident, as he walked up to them.
"God loves us, apparently. The immediate and twenty-four-hour weather over the drop zone is going to be perfect."
Douglass laughed nastily.
"Darmstadter," Fine asked.
"What's the range of a Gooney Bird? Would a Gooney Bird make it one way to Pecs?"
"No," Darmstadter said immediately.
"What's wrong with the B-25?" Dolan asked.
"Canidy has cleverly modified the B-25 so that you can't drop parachutists from it," Douglass said, "or at least not a team of them, without scattering them all over Hungary."
"Good God!
"Wilkins said.
"And we can't put the 17 into Vis," Dolan said.
"Right," Fine said.
"Jesus, now what?" Douglass asked.
"Canidy expects us at daybreak."
"So we use the B-17 for the drop," Dolan said.
"And it comes back here. And we send the B-25 to Vis. No problem."
"No," Wilkins said.
"What do you mean, 'no'?" Fine asked.
"Maintenance found landing-gear problems," he said.
"They called me and told me it would take twenty-four hours, maybe a little more, to replace what was broken."
"Then you'll have to get us another 17,"Fine said.
"There will be a lot of questions asked why someone wants to borrow a bomber," Wilkins said.
Darmstadter's mind had been racing. He thought he saw a solution. But he was reluctant to offer it. These people, he told himself, know what they're doing.
I'm just a mediocre Gooney Bird pilot.
And then he thought, Fuck it!
"If there would be only the team, five men, on the Gooney Bird," he said "it would be very light. It would take another ton and a half, maybe two, before it got close to Max Over Gross."
"If you're talking about fuel," Dolan said, not unkindly, "we just don't have time to rig au