He went back to the door and pushed on it. It gave considerably and Farley frowned. It wasn’t wood and it wasn’t metal. He tapped the wall beside it with a finger and produced a hollow, high sound. He thought he probably could punch through it.
There wasn’t much more that the room could tell him, so he sat in one of the chairs. It was more comfortable than it looked, and adjusted in ways he wasn’t used to a chair adjusting. It would even lie flat.
If the Army had taught Farley anything, it was that you should do blanket drill any time you have a chance to, if you aren’t on R & R. And this was about as far from R & R as Farley could imagine.
He put his hands on his chest and closed his eyes.
He was the only boy in the world, and she was the only girl. Just like that old song his mother used to sing. There was no one else. They had the world to themselves; they were a world unto themselves. They stood across from one another, close enough that he could see her face. Every mole and line and freckle, all the little imperfections and disproportions that together comprise character. The intelligent eyes, the determined jaw. The contours someone else had drawn from his vivid memory of a face he’d never actually seen.
And yet it seemed that she was far away from him. Her expression and the set of her eyes made him wonder if she even saw him. He knew she would not hear him if he spoke. As if he were some ghost. As if she were. Or as if they both were real but the common ground they shared was not.
A quick dull knock brought Farley upright so fast he nearly keeled over in the reclined chair. He was startled to realize he had fallen asleep.
The door opened and Wennda and Grobe walked in. Both still wore their oddly insect-like stretchy outfits with the matte-black panels. Wennda’s hair was tied back in a ponytail. She did not meet Farley’s eye as she went to stand at attention behind a chair at one end of the black glass table. Grobe nodded woodenly at Farley and stood behind a chair at the opposite end.
Farley knew what was coming, and he quickly got to his feet as the commander entered the room. He was bald with graying stubble, not large but muscular and flat-bellied, and he moved confidently and purposefully with an athletic economy. Grobe had said the commander was over fifty, but Farley had the impression of someone a decade younger. He wore the ubiquitous plain jumpsuit, but Farley didn’t need a military uniform to know command when he saw it.
Farley glanced at Wennda as the commander went to a chair on the opposite side of the table. Her expression didn’t change, but her chin rose a trifle. That must have been some ass-chewing, Farley thought.
The commander nodded curtly at Farley and sat down. Farley waited for Wennda and Grobe to sit before he did so himself.
If the commander was amused or annoyed, his face didn’t show it. “I’m Vanden,” he said.
“Captain Joseph Farley, United States Army Air Force. You’re in charge here, sir?”
“I’m head of military operations.”
“I appreciate you taking us in.”
“Your status hasn’t been determined.” Vanden raised a hand to forestall Farley’s reply. “I need to know about your aircraft.”
Farley took a deep breath. Here we go. “I need to know about our status,” he said.
“What I learn about the one will determine the other.”
“Is that a fact. What is it you want to know, exactly?”
“Was it able to fly when you abandoned it?”
Farley couldn’t help wincing at the word. As if he’d somehow orphaned the Morgana. Walked away from her without a fight. “Not without a hangar party,” he replied. “Two engines wouldn’t start. One was intermittent. Number One was—well, I think my flight engineer could have fixed it, but without him—” Farley shrugged.
“Is that a no?” Vanden asked.
“That’s a no.”
“If you were able to make the repairs, how long would it take?”
“Couple days, maybe. If we had the parts.”
“And if you didn’t have the parts?”
“Maybe never.” Farley shrugged. “My flight engineer could answer that better than me.”
“Then perhaps I should be talking to him.”
“I wish you could. He got shot back in the canyon.”
Vanden frowned. “This is alarming news,” he said. He didn’t sound alarmed.
“You’re telling me.”
Vanden looked at Wennda. “You didn’t mention this man’s role when you made your report.”
“I wasn’t aware of it until now,” she said stiffly.
“This just gets better and better, doesn’t it.” Vanden waved her off. “What is your aircraft’s armament?” he asked Farley.
Farley folded his arms. “I’m really not at liberty to discuss that.”
The commander studied him. “There’s every reason to believe this weaponry will be used against us,” he said. “That means against you, while you are here.”
“That would be unfortunate. But the information you want is classified by the U.S. Army Air Force.”
Vanden leaned back and tapped his mouth with thumb and forefinger and looked thoughtful. Then he nodded at Grobe.
Grobe tapped the tabletop, and a lighted rectangle appeared before him. It flickered, and Grobe banged the table with a fist. The rectangle held steady. Grobe tapped symbols within it, and on the table in front of Wennda a small panel lit. She frowned down at it.
Grobe looked at the commander and spread his hands.
“Wennda,” the commander said.
Wennda’s mouth went tight as she pulled her flat binoculars from a chest pocket and positioned them in the lighted square.
Grobe tapped his panel again. A green light glowed on the binoculars, and a few seconds later a twilit miniature of the massive, pale-green wall of the Redoubt formed in the center of the table. It looked absolutely solid, as if a model of a section of the canyon had been placed upon the glass.
Grobe slid a finger along the bottom of the panel and the image blurred. His finger stopped, and now Farley was looking at a miniature Fata Morgana parked on the canyon floor in the middle of the table, bathed in the eerie greenish light of the Redoubt. The entire scene expanded until the bomber was several feet long. Farley could not believe the solidity and detail. For all he could tell, he was looking at a meticulously detailed model of his B-17F as he had last seen her. Appraising the visible damage, he also could not believe he had managed to safely land her on a canyon floor.
A flat version of the image now occupied Grobe’s control panel. Grobe drew on it with a finger, and a red halo formed around the twin fifties on the top turret. “Two weapons here in a rotating mount,” he said. “Chemical firearms with high-capacity belt-feed loading systems.”
Farley narrowed his eyes. He glanced at Wennda, but she continued to stare firmly down in front of her.
Grobe drew another red halo, this time around the ball turret. “Two more here on an X-Y axis,” he said, “possibly remotely controlled.” Red ringed the tail gun. “Two here.” The cheek port. “One here.” Floating circles formed around the empty port in the plexiglas nose bubble and the swivel mount on the right-side gunner station. “Presumably one here and here.”
His finger traced a large circle around the perimeter of his monitor, and Farley was startled when the cross-section of landscape on the table rotated as if parked on a lazy susan. The floating red rings rotated with it. Another ring formed around the Browning in its mount on the left window. “And one here,” Grobe finished, “for a total of seven emplacements. Most seem to be manually operated.”