The Fighting Agents (Men at War 4)

"Now, is Professor Dyer one of the people we pulled out of there?"

Fulmar looked.

"Second from the end," he said, "with the glasses."

Canidy waved another of the Hungarians over and spoke softly to him in English.

"No gangsters," he said.

"We'll just have to take half a dozen of them with us, that's all there is to it. You saw Dyer?"

"Yeah, but I don't think he recognized me."

"Let's try to keep it that way for the time being," Canidy said.

"You go ahead and get them to uncover the plane."

"The plane?" Fulmar blurted.

"You've got an airplane?"

"Take L

oudmouth here with you," Canidy said.

"He insists on talking English."

There was a sharp cracking noise, followed a moment later by a creaking, tearing noise, and finally a great crashing sound.

Fulmar realized that another tree, its trunk severed by Primacord, had been dropped across the road.

"Let's go, Lieutenant," the man Canidy had spoken to said softly, and Fulmar followed him off the road and into the forest.

It was a long way across steep, heavily forested hills from where the prison truck had been stopped to the meadow; and when they got there, Fulmar was sweat-soaked and panting from the exertion.

He didn't see an airplane. All he saw was a Hungarian standing at the far end of the meadow beside two of the largest horses he had ever seen. The horses wore whatever horses used so they could pull a wagon or a plow, but there was nothing around for them to pull.

And then, as they crossed the meadow, he saw a round red light sticking top of an aircraft vertical stabilizer.

An American pilot wearing a leather A2 jacket and with a Thompson sub machine gun in his hands came out of the woods.

"This is Fulmar," Ferniany told Darmstadter.

"Canidy's bringing the other one."

Darmstadter looked with unabashed curiosity at Fulmar.

This young guy in blue work clothes was the purpose of this whole operation

"Hello," Fulmar said.

That shocked Darmstadter into action.

He looked around for someplace to put the Thompson down and finally hung it from a brass horn on the harness of one of the horses. Ferniany watched him, then shrugged and put his pistol in his pocket and went to the mound of snow-covered brush.

When the branches were off the tail section, Alois hitched a stout rope to the tail wheel and the huge horses pulled the C-47 far enough out of the for est to turn the airplane around.

It took half an hour to remove all the branches from the C-47. Some of them had frozen to the wings and fuselage, and small branches had wedged into the openings of the movable control surfaces.