I think you can probably get away with it."
"And what, exactly, are you and Dolan going to do?" Darmstadter asked.
"To coin a phrase," Canidy said, "we'll cross that bridge when we get to it."
"I'd really like to know," Darmstadter persisted.
Canidy thought it over a moment before replying.
"They gave us a pill," he said.
"Actually, it's a small glass vial, filled with what looks like watery milk. When you bite it, it's supposed to work before you feel the little pieces of glass in your mouth. The idea is that we're supposed to bite it when it becomes clear we're not going to make it to Vis. But what I think we'll do is bail out over the mainland and take a chance the partisans will find us before the Germans do. If we land in the lap of the Wehrmacht, then we'll j bite the pill." | "What the hell do you know that makes suicide necessary?" Darmstadter | blurted. | Canidy had not responded. |
Just over an hour before, Canidy had turned on the radio direction finder.
By then, the three of them had relieved for each other at the controls at roughly hourly intervals, and Dolan was then sitting in the pilot's seat. At first, the signal strength indicator needle on the instrument panel had made no response as Canidy turned the crank that rotated the loop antenna mounted atop the fuselage.
Then the needle jumped, just perceptibly, and he reversed his cranking motion, aiming the antenna at the source of the radiation. The needle on the signal-strength indicator crept very slowly, barely perceptibly, upward as the signal strength increased.
And then, very faintly, over the static in his earphones, Darmstadter began to be able to recognize one Morse code letter, Dah-Dah-Dah, D, and then another, and finally a third, until there was in his earphones, endlessly repeated Dah-Dah-Dah Dit-Dit-Dit-Dit Dah-Dah-Dah. He wondered if DHD meant something, or whether it had been selected because it was a long, readily recognizable string of letters.
"I don't think," Canidy's voice came dryly and metallically over the earphones, "that's what they call 'right on the money."" Dolan looked up at the roof of the cabin, at the needle on the antenna rotating mechanism. Then he put the B-25G into a very gentle turn, in a very slightly nose-down attitude, and made small adjustments to the throttle and richness controls.
Finally, his voice came metallically over the earphones.
"Fuck you, Canidy."
A moment later, he straightened the B-25 on a course corresponding with that indicated on the radio direction finder, made a minute adjustment of the trim wheel, and then touched his intercom mike button again.
"And i
f you can refrain from walking up and down, Darmstadter, like a passenger on a ferry boat, I would be obliged."
Then he folded his arms on his chest.
The B-25 dropped very slowly toward the layer of cotton wool far below them.
The indicator needle on the signal-strength meter suddenly dropped back to the peg.
"You've lost the signal," Darmstadter said.
"That's probably because they've stopped transmitting," Dolan said dryly.
The B-25 flew on, in a very shallow descent.
Eleven minutes later, when they were still above the cloud cover, there was a one-minute transmission from Vis, and Dolan made a tiny course correction to line the plane up again on course before the signal-strength meter fell back to its peg again y were in the cloud bank when Vis came on the air again. Darmstadter could see about one inch past the windshield. There were a dozen or so drops of condensation on the window frame just past the Plexiglas, for some mysterious aerodynamic reason undisturbed by the air through which they were passing at an indicated 290 knots. But beyond the drops of condensation there was nothing but a gray mass.
"You don't want to go down to the deck and see if we can get out of this shit?" Canidy asked. It was a question, Darmstadter understood, not a suggestion, certainly not an order.
Dolan shook his head, "no," in reply, and then, a full minute later, spoke.
"If it looks like it's working, don't fuck with it," he said.
It sounded more as if Dolan was thinking aloud than replying to Canidy, or, Darmstadter thought a moment later, as if Dolan had called that old pilot's cliche from the recesses of his memory to reassure himself.
The point of the needle on the vertical speed indicator was indicating a de scent only on close examination; on casual glance, it seemed to indicate level flight. The needle on the altimeter moved counterclockwise very slowly. But it was moving, and they were going down.
Twenty-odd minutes later, during another Vis transmission, Canidy said, "I wish that transmitter wasn't working quite that well."