Above him he saw Johnson hunch into the austere cockpit, splashed with its hundred droplets of glittering instrument faces. The copilot was a young man with gangly grasshopper legs and red hair; he was reaching for a clipboard. “Six-tenths stratocumulus at five thousand feet, Captain.”

“Okay. Wind ’em up if you’re done with the preflight.”

Spaight helped Alex into the wired jump suit and the parachute pack; they settled into their seats while the engines hacked and wheezed and came alive one by one. Spaight handed him the flying helmet and he put it over his head: stiff leather chin cup, fur-lined visor, throat mike, earphones, goggles strapped up against the forehead. Now he could hear the pilots’ chatter again and presently the tower said, “Army Seven Nine Six, runway four, you’re cleared for takeoff,” and the airplane began its ponderous roll, bouncing on its tail wheel. He felt the tremors against the raw wound in his thigh.

The Flying Fortress roared down the runway. Tugged upward by the vacuum created above its cambered wing surfaces it lifted off, banking steeply; the city of Boston tilted and swayed beneath him and then they were climbing out to sea with the long arm of Cape Cod curving away like a crab’s claw.

They ran up the Maine coastline with cloud tendrils slipping past the wings. The synchronized engines sent smooth tremors through the plane at rhythmic intervals. Pappy Johnson came on the headset:

“We’ll do this lap at ninety-five hundred feet. You won’t need oxygen. How’s the patient?”

“Still respirating,” Alex said.

Spaight reached over to check the dial of the thermostat on his suit. Alex was still sweating from the ground-level heat and he pushed Spaight’s hand away. Spaight switched off his throat mike and leaned forward to be heard above the racket:

“That had to be the same people that killed Devenko.”

Alex nodded.

Spaight said, “They won’t quit after one bad try, Alex.”

“Next time we’ll give them a little bait, I think.”

“What?”

“Let’s take the next one alive, what do you say? I’d like to hear the answers to a few questions.”

“You can’t hear much if you’re dead.”

He felt near it by the time they came down over the lakes of Newfoundland into the barrens of the wilderness base at Gander. He was awake again but only just; all his joints were stiff with cramp. When the engines died out the silence left him with a lightheaded sensation of nightmare unreality.

There wasn’t much feeling in his fingertips but he got the parachute pack unbuckled and stumbled to the hatchway. They lowered him gently to the gravel and he started walking aimlessly in the dawn with Spaight at his shoulder trying to conceal his troubled concern. “Should you be walking on that?”

“If I don’t I’ll have bedsores,” he said drily.

“I hope you were kidding about baiting them into another try.”

Alex shook his head, trying to clear it. The air was cool and sharp with a damp chill; the sky was half clouded with a band of red spreading above the dreary eastern horizon. He shivered a little. “If they’re going to try anyway I’d just as soon have it on my terms.”

“They could be sighting in on you right now.”

“In Labrador?”

“Who knows who they are, Alex? Who knows how many they’ve got? They reached Devenko in the Pyrenees-they reached you in Boston. They’ve got a hell of a net.”

“Or a handful of people with good sources of intelligence.”

“We need to know where to look for them. Haven’t you got any ideas at all?”

“The field’s too wide. I haven’t got time to waste on it. The other thing comes first.”

“Not if you’re killed it doesn’t.”

“We’ve been around that bush before. We’ll just have to see to it that I don’t get killed, won’t we.”

Spaight said morosely, “Isn’t that a little like asking the sun not to come up in the morning?”

The rest of the planes trickled down to base within the next ten minutes and it took nearly an hour getting them all ready for the long nonstop transatlantic jump. Alex went into the ops shack and sat by the round metal stove in the middle of the room. The place had the flavor of a pioneer camp but air traffic roared in and out incessantly: it was the intermediate stop for aircraft to and from England-British planes, Americans, Royal Canadian Air Force. Pursuit planes came in and out with wing- and belly-tanks for extra fuel range; some of them could make the jump and some of them had to fuel again in Greenland and Iceland. Convoy patrols and sub-chasing PBY amphibian Catalinas chugged across the field at steady close intervals and there wasn’t a ninety-second silence between any of the takeoffs and landings. On top of the ops shack a radar dish swiveled and six radio controllers kept moving up and down the tower steps with coffee and cigarettes. They had grey weary faces like combat veterans who’d been too long in the front lines.

Finally Pappy Johnson came in and took a seat beside him, wrapping his hands around a hot coffee cup. “Copilot’s filing the flight plans. How you making it, Skipper? You look a little like a ghost right now.”

“I feel a little like one.”

“You going to be all right?”

“I’ll sleep my way over. I should be all right by the time we get to Scotland.”

“That thing going to leave you a limp?”

“No.”

“I reckon you’re a little more used to getting shot to pieces than I am. I mean those scars all over your neck and all.”

“You’ve never flown combat, then.”

“Naw-I got into this lunacy from flying airmail. I started out with air shows and then got work doing the mail. In those days we got our weather reports by phoning the next airfield and finding out if it was raining there.” Johnson grinned. “More reliable than the met forecasts we get now.”

Alex knew them all over the globe-the barnstormers and bush pilots who made their livings walking the wings of fabric-and-wood biplanes and slept out under the wings of their Jennies. “I’m surprised you opted for bombers then.”

“No future in single-seaters, Skipper. The war ain’t going to last forever. When it’s over they’re going to need cargo pilots, not peashooter jockeys. Old Pappy’s always thinking ahead, see.” He shook his head. “Besides I’ll tell you something else-if I’m going to get shot at while I’m up there I’d just as soon be in one of these babies.”

“It’s a big slow target for the enemy.”

“But a Fort’s damn near impossible to shoot down with anything less than a direct artillery hit. You can knock out three of the four engines and the son of a bitch will still fly. You can knock off half a wing and still keep it airborne. That’s a forgiving airplane, it ain’t like a lot of these slapped-together military designs-the thing about a Fort, it wants to fly. There’s never been an airplane like that B-17. Probably never will be again. And you’ve got ten machine guns poking out of those turret-blisters all over the airplane from nose to tail and top to bottom. I’d hate to be the Nazi peashooter that had to go up against a flying gun platform.”

Tickle Johnson in his enthusiasm and he was off like a candidate on the Fourth of July. Alex listened with half his attention and soaked up the warmth of the cozy rustic room.

Then Alex said, “All right, Pappy, suppose I give you a target about nine feet wide and eighty feet long moving at anywhere from twenty to sixty miles an hour-on the ground, in a straight line. Suppose I paint a big bright X on top of it. Can you hit it with bombs?”

“Skipper, I could drop a doughnut into a coffee cup from ten thousand feet with a B-Seventeen and a good bombardier. What is it you want me to hit? Sounds like a bus.”

“Something like that. But it’s not a matter of hitting it two out of three or nine out of ten. You’ve only got one crack at it. What gives you the best odds of destroying it?”

Spaight came in and sat down on the bench, listening with interest. Pappy Johnson said, “Just one bus, right? Not a whole convoy of them.”