“We’ll start with one. What’s your opinion?”

“Well ideally you’d want a squadron of planes. That way you’d cancel out the chance of error.”

“You know how big our bomber force is, Pappy.”

“Three planes. Well that’s plenty, what the hell, one target? One lousy bus?”

“You’ve got to train my people to hit that target, Pappy. That’s your job.”

“Then I’d go in treetop and set delay fuses on the bombs. Armor-piercing noses on the bombs so they’ll penetrate the roof of the bus instead of bouncing off.”

“Treetop?” Spaight said. “In a four-engine bomber?”

“Skipper wanted to know the best odds. I’m giving them, General. I didn’t say it was the only way to do it. But it’s the best.”

He came awake just once. The sun was drilling right down through the nose perspex. Hard silver reflections shot back against his eyes from the ocean far below. John Spaight said, “Christ look at all that water.”

“That’s only the top of it.”

Pappy Johnson’s voice crackled on the intercom:

“You want to get out and walk back to Texas, General?”

“I wouldn’t mind. I’m beginning to get the feeling I’ve signed on with a pack of lunatics.”

“Just keep that in mind,” Alex said. “It’ll probably help explain some of the things you’re going to have to do.” Then he went back to sleep.

PART FOUR:

September-November 1941

1

In the latitudes of northern Scotland there was daylight until after ten o’clock and they made landfall by twilight with the formation intact, the three Fortresses in a V-triangle with the three transports riding below and behind them.

Alex stretched his limbs one at a time in the confined space.

Spaight was muttering in the throat mike: “If you wanted a sardine why the hell didn’t you draft one?” Spaight had that trait: every morning he made a joke-a sour joke about the weather or a caustic joke about the food. Somewhere in him was a core of bitterness; underneath the hard competence there was dissatisfaction. Alex hadn’t got too close to it but he had the feeling Spaight had been born with an impulse toward perfection and felt unfulfilled whatever he did. He was introspective and if he’d been more of a golfing backslapper he’d have had two or three stars instead of one but the fact that he had one at all was testimony to his extraordinary talent for organizing people and commanding their loyalty. He lacked a head for imaginative tactics but he had the genius of a first-rate staff officer: if you told him what had to be done he would produce everything that was needed for the job and put it all in the right place at the right time. Spaight was married and thrice a father but he kept his family rigidly segregated from his professional existence and he hadn’t once mentioned his wife since they’d left Washington. He was a soldier and she was a soldier’s woman and that was the way the game was played.

Pappy Johnson came on the headset. “Picking up some radio chatter from the Channel. I’ll cut you in.”

Static in the earphones and then he picked up the voices, quite distinct-a very calm crisp Welsh voice, “Break right, Clive, the bugger’s on your arse.”

He could hear the banging of the cannons and the fast stutter of machine guns above the whine of pursuit engines and then the same voice again, still dispassionate: “I’ve taken some tracers-on fire. I’m bailing out. Due east of Dover-I can see the cliffs. Someone save me a pint of bitter and a pair of dry drawers.”

In his imagination he could see the Spitfires and Messerschmitts in the twilight wheeling among the barrage blimps; the Heinkels in ponderous formation lining up for London and the Hawks and Spitfires trying to get at them before they could drop their sticks of bombs through the swaying beams of the searchlights.

There was a break in the static and Johnson said, “Sorry, I’ve got to change the frequency and get landing instructions.”

Spaight said, “You’ve got to hand it to those bastards.”

They were dropping across the mountains of Scotland in slowly fading twilight; the hillsides were indeterminate, dark and heavy. The B-17 thundered lower between the ranges and finally he saw the lights of the runway through the perspex. The bomber descended toward them like a climber on a sliding rope.

The runway was rough; the plane bounced and pitched along the center stripe between the cannister lights. A small van came shooting onto the gravel and curved in to intercept, running fast down the edge of the runway with a big FOLLOW ME sign across its rear doors, Turning on its tail wheel the bomber went along slowly after the van, unwieldy and awkward on the ground. Pappy Johnson was complaining into his radio: “This runway’s got a surface like a goddamn waffle. This Jesus shit airfield wouldn’t get certification from the civil air board of the corruptest county in Mississippi!”

The FOLLOW ME van circled to indicate their parking place and Johnson cut the engines. It was dusk now and the tower was carping in a crisp Scottish voice: “Let’s get the rest of the wee birds down now, lads-we want to switch off these lights, don’t we now.”

He inched painfully to the hatch and lowered himself by his arms. The leg had gone very stiff. Ground crewmen climbed into the bomber and Pappy Johnson stopped by the running board of the van to look back at it the way he might have looked at a woman.

The driver gave a palm-out salute. He saw to their seating and drove them down the gravel strip and decanted them beside a wooden hangar, and sped away to meet the next plane.

Felix was there with his compact movie-actorish looks and his readiness to laugh or spill tears or burst into rages; he emerged from the hangar in an immaculate white uniform his tailor must have worked around the clock to build.

Alex saluted him. It made Felix grin like a schoolboy. “Welcome to the toy shop, Alex.”

“Where’s our headquarters?”

Felix indicated the decrepit hangar behind him. “Right here, I’m afraid. Well then come in, all of you. My God that’s a big ugly monster of an aircraft.” He turned around with a casual wave that drew them all inside and walked through a small door cut into the hangar’s great sliding gate. Over his shoulder he added, “I’ve got Sergei off in search of billets for you and your friends.”

Alex suppressed a smile. Felix was playing the game to the hilt: he’d already taken over. They’d given him a new role-leader of men-and it looked as if it was the role Prince Felix had been waiting for all his life.

2

Black felt curtains overhung the hangar’s few small windows; the high naked lighting within was harsh even though the building was so huge that the farther corners were in shadow. “It used to be a service shop for aircraft on North Sea rescue patrol,” Felix told them. “They’ve moved most of that over to Scapa Flow now. It’s obsolete and cobwebby but it’s ours.”

The room wasn’t far short of an acre in dimension. Vertical steel supports sprouted from the cracked concrete floor here and there; the ceiling was a skeleton of metal and the roof above it was an arched tunnel of corrugated steel gone rusty in patches so that it looked like camouflage paint. Without the clutter of aircraft for which it had been designed the floor space looked infinite; the scale was intimidating, it dwarfed them all.

In the front corner a plywood partition seven feet high marked off an office that might have been used by the maintenance director at one time; it had an open doorway and Alex could see the end of a desk within. The remainder of the huge room was undivided except by the eight steel pillars-two-foot-square I-beams, the sort they built bridges out of.

It had been Vassily Devenko who’d obtained the use of it and he must have done a good deal of very fast talking because even if they’d intended to abandon the building they’d have wanted to demolish it for scrap.