Canidy ran to him "I broke my fucking ankle again!
"Janos said furiously.
"Jesus Christ!"
"Was hat ihr gesacht?" Alois asked in rough German.
"I said I broke my fucking ankle," Janos said in Hungarian.
Alois smiled sympathetically, then stooped over and scooped Janos up in his arms like a baby. He looked at Canidy and nodded at the forest and then looked stone-faced at Canidy.
When there was no immediate response, he spoke to Janos, who translated:
"He wants to carry me into the woods, okay?"
Canidy nodded his head.
"Ja!"
The other parachutists were on the ground now, and they ran over to Canidy. They were all armed, he saw, with.30-caliber carbines with folding stocks.
"Who are you?" one of them demanded.
"That's Major Canidy," another said, recognizing him.
"Pick up your chutes and put them on the fire," Canidy said.
"And then--" He interrupted himself. The sound of the Twin Wasps was back.
The equipment drop. Why the hell hadn't the jumpmaster kicked that crap out the door after he dropped the jumpers?
The Gooney Bird appeared again over the cut-down area, its flaps and gear down again. He was now even lower than he had been before, when he'd buzzed the meadow.
If you stall it, friend, you're going to land here in this meadow The Gooney Bird didn't stall. But the pilot chopped the engines, and the Gooney Bird touched down. He bounced once, then stayed down, and Canidy saw smoke from the gear as the pilot braked it.
Dolan, you sonofabitch! If I had wanted you to land here, I would have said so. You're too fucking old to be a hotshot pilot!
Canidy ran down the meadow and to the rear door of the Gooney Bird, and looked in.
And It. Commander John Dolan, USNR, lying on the cabin floor, looked back at him out of sightless eyes.
[TWO]
It was raining, and there had been fog, and there had been serious doubt that the Washington courier would be able to get in that day at all. Late the previous day, the ATE C-54 had managed to make it into Prestwick, Scotland, ahead of the front, but too late to try for London.
There had been a break in the weather, and an arctic blast of dry air moving down over Scotland had cleared the skies enough at 0950 for the C-54 to take off. But by then London had been socked in. The question had then been whether the break would close in again at Prestwick before the fog cleared at It was decided in the end to take off and head for London in the hope that it would clear.
At Croydon, it had been necessary to "light the burners." The theory was-and damn the cost--that if enough gasoline were burned in devices set up alongside a runway, the heat generated would cause the air mass and the fog it contained to rise, clearing the runway. In practice, as now, what the burners did for pilots was serve as sort of a super beacon If you could see the glow of the burners, you knew that the runway was somewhere down there, and with a little bit of luck, when you went down low enough, you could find the runway.
The C-54, flown by a commissioned TWA pilot who had lots of experience finding San Francisco in the fog, came in low and slow toward the glow on his horizon over London and found the Croydon runway on his second pass.
As he taxied toward the terminal, it was raining so hard that he had trouble seeing out the windshield. The ground crew who came out to meet them were wearing yellow rubber coats, hats, and trousers, and looked, the pilot thought, like so many misplaced sailboat sailors.
The first passenger to come down the ladder was a chief petty officer of the U.S. Navy. He had a Valv-Pak in each hand and smaller pieces of luggage under his arms.
As he came down the stairs, an Austin Princess limousine drove up close to him. The chief opened the front door and tossed the luggage inside, then backed out and held the rear door open.
"Get in, Ellis!" Colonel William Donovan said as he came down the stairs from the C-54.