“First things first,” he said. “Can you sneak around Ike’s obstacles with this to drop a couple agents in Sicily?”
“When?”
Canidy mimed looking at his watch. “Yesterday.”
“Who’s going in?”
“Who might you think?”
Darmstadter looked between Canidy and van der Ploeg.
“Should I ask?”
Canidy shook his head. “Best not to. That way—”
“I can honestly say I don’t know,” Darmstadter finished.
“You must have been going to my school, too,” he said with a smile.
“I can take you,” Darmstadter then said. “But not with this bird.”
“Why not?” Canidy asked.
Darmstadter smiled.
“Because I have something better,” he said, and gestured to the far end of the dirt strip.
“What’s down there?”
“You’ll see,” he said. “C’mon.”
* * *
Darmstadter, having booted the guard from the jeep, drove them down the dirt strip. As they neared the runway’s far eastern end, Canidy could begin to make out that a pocket had been carved into the side of the hill and covered in desert camouflage netting.
It’s a revetment.
With something big inside.
Somethings, plural.
Darmstadter stopped the jeep to one side of the revetment, then hopped out and waved for Canidy and van der Ploeg to follow.
As they stepped closer, Canidy said, “You’re hiding aircraft?”
Darmstadter smiled and said, “Yep. Here. Give me a hand.”
He untied two lengths of rope, and the three of them began rolling back the netting. Canidy then saw two identical C-47s, both unlike any he had seen.
A version of the Douglas DC-3 airliner, the twin-engine C-47 was an Army Air Forces workhorse, reliably transporting everything from troops t
o cargo to towing gliders. The Douglas manufacturing plants were producing them by the thousands, nearly one every half hour.
Canidy knew that the C-47’s fuel-efficient twelve-hundred-horsepower Twin Wasp radial piston engines gave the aircraft a cruise speed of 160 miles per hour and a top speed of 224. With a range of more than two thousand miles, it could without adding an auxiliary fuel cell—as Hank had done for the Save Canidy’s Ass Mission in Hungary—easily make the Dellys-Sicily round-trip.
Assuming, of course, it wasn’t shot down.
Darmstadter’s Gooney Birds were painted a flat black. And while, like conventional C-47s, they had USAAF insignia—a star in a circle over a bar—under each wing and on either side of the rear of the fuselage, the insignia was painted a matte gray, as were the tail numbers on the vertical stabilizer, just ahead of the rudder.