Then it struck him.
“Where’s the dog?” he said to Jagello. For the first time since Gierek had known Jagello, the other man was surprised. Jagello looked at the landing gear.
“I don’t know,” he said in a puzzled tone. Gierek watched as Jagello approached an erk. A gust of wind blew a heavy rain down the collar of Gierek’s flying togs and he pulled it close to his neck, wondering if he was shivering from the cold or the sudden, desperate feeling that the filthy dog that had always been their good-luck charm was gone.
Jagello came back with a troubled look on his face and Gierek felt his stomach fall; Jagello was troubled by nothing.
“They don’t know,” he said, wincing as the rain increased. He tossed the sky a reproachful glance. “No one’s seen the Black Prince.” Gierek read the concern in his face; whether it was concern for the dog or for them, he couldn’t tell. “We’d better get aboard,” the bomb-aimer/navigator said. “It’s almost time.”
Gierek nodded, unlatched the crew access panel in the nose, pulled himself up, eased around the radar display and viewfinder that protruded into the cockpit, and settled in his seat. He pulled the checklist out of the narrow pocket near his left foot when Jagello climbed into his seat.
Gierek heard the access panel door slam and the sound of two raps. It was the erk’s final signal; the doors closed and locked — ready for engines and warm-up. Gierek looked out the rain-scarred window as the erks worked the priming pumps for the engines, hoping for some sign of the dog.
He saw an erk give him the signal to switch on ignition, left engine first since they’d started the right engine the last time out. Gierek pressed the START button and the BOOSTER COIL button simultaneously. There was a slight sputter, the prop rotated a quarter turn, another, louder sputter, and suddenly the engine turned over with a healthy blast of blue smoke. Gierek glanced at the generator lamp as the engine eased up to 2,000 rpm. The warning light, signaling that the engine was creating enough rpms for the generator, went out. They went through the same sequence for the other engine.
Jagello, until now busy with his radar and navigation charts, pulled out the checklist for takeoff.
“Trim,” he said. “Elevator.”
Making the adjustment Gierek replied: “Flaps, twenty-five percent.”
“Rudder?”
“Ten degrees right.”
“Aileron?”
“Neutral.”
“Propeller?”
“Speed controls fully forward.”
“Fuel?”
“Levels. Check. Cocks to outer tanks.”
“Superchargers?”
“Moderate.”
Jagello slipped the checklist in its pocket as he asked the last question: “Radiator flaps?”
“Open.”
“So now we invade France,” Jagello said calmly.
“Yes,” Gierek said as he awaited further instructions from the tower. He looked across the rain-soaked tarmac again. “Where is that dog?”
Edland was glad that DeLong had scrounged up a peacoat for him; it was cold and windy, and as the 155 boat pulled into the harbor channel leading the other five boats in Squadron 142(2), he realized that it would get much worse. He was used to cold; most people thought that the Gobi Desert was like the Sahara — mountainous dunes, unrelenting sun, scorching sand. In some areas the Gobi was something like its cousin. In some areas the Gobi was as barren as the sea. But it was a frigid place in winter, with snowbound mountains that were virtually impassible unless you knew them — and the only people who truly knew them were the Mongols.
Cole turned to him as they shared the bridge. “I hope you know what you’re doing. What the hell am I thinking? I hope I know what I’m doing.”
“You said it was going to be a milk run,” Edland said. “What’s the problem?”
“Bad luck just seems to follow you, Commander.” He turned his attention to the PT boats forming up behind 155. It was eerie seeing the harbor almost devoid of ships. It was almost as if one minute you couldn’t maneuver for all the ships crowding Portsmouth Harbor, and the next minute they were gone. It was a tangible sign of the invasion, much more so than the hundreds of ships and thousands of men in constant motion that he had grown used to seeing. That had been going on for years. This — this happened in an instant. The harbor was nearly deserted. “Ease up, Randy,” Cole said. “Let them get in column.”
There was a trace of red in the sky behind them, trapped under a thick mountain of gray clouds. The crimson sunlight that did manage to find its way through washed across the bottom of the clouds, leaving a faint streak of color that was beginning to die. It was more than anyone expected as the boats moved into the harbor.
They came out, long craft almost invisible in the gray waters, the thunder of eighteen Packard engines rolling over them.
“What are your orders?” Edland asked.
“Move out to rendezvous with our escort, take position to the southwest, make sure no E-boats get past us. Simple enough.”
“Escort? I thought that you were the escorts?”
“We are, Commander. It’s just that we’re on the small side so we may need some assistance,” Cole said. He peered through binoculars at the boats trailing his. “Okay, Randy. Everyone’s where they ought to be. Let’s get going.”
“Right, Skipper,” DeLong said, moving the throttles up. Each boat in column increased speed correspondingly, six plywood warships, their crews removing canvas covers from machine guns and cannons, the radar reflector sweeping back and forth on top of the mast with its squat rotating power unit beneath it; slender, gray hulls slicing through the green waters that led to the Channel. Determined vessels, their decks cluttered with only those things that were necessary to fight, or to save lives. Their Mk XIII torpedoes were removed; there would not be targets for them. But there might be targets for the six .50-caliber Browning machine guns, or the two Oerlikon Mk 4 20 millimeter cannons, or the Bofor 40 millimeter cannon, or the M9 37 millimeter rapid-fire cannon on the bow.
As Cole scanned the deck, his eyes falling on his crew and the weapons that bristled from the boat, he wondered if this was the end of his war. And wondered as well, if that were such a bad thing, if the return of normalcy was something to fear. He realized with a start that it was the uncertainty of a life without war that frightened him, and he smiled at the revelation. There was, in a convoluted sense, a certainty in war. Go and do your duty. Follow your orders. The thing that had both repulsed and intrigued him about the military was the finality of structure. He remembered his grandfather, a large balding man with a deep voice and impatient nature. “A place for everything and everything in its place, Jordan,” Grandfather said, his dark brown eyes peering through wire-rim glasses. Perhaps he was what his grandfather was, a rebel, a maverick; but within the logic that he was able to extract from convention.
Cole studied the boats in line behind him, each at a distance of a hundred yards. After 155 came Ewing on the 168 boat, and then Dean and Moose Moontz on the 134 boat, Taylor on the 144 boat, Grant on 140, and finally Scott on Old Reliable — the 122 boat. Its engines were the worst in the squadron and its crew the most disreputable but Scott’s unassuming Virginia manner kept both of them in line.
“I can’t seem to get warm here,” Edland said. The comment might have been meant for Cole, or it might have been simply an observation. Cole felt the need to say something.
“I thought you used to live here. In France I mean.”
“Summer,” Edland said. “A few. Mostly I traveled with my father. In Asia.”
Cole said nothing; he’d done his bit by adding to the conversation. He had a squadron to run.
The speaker on the instrument panel crackled.