There was a blackboard and a little lecture podium. Johnson posted himself behind it. “It’s not an office party, gentlemen. Siddown.”
He waited for them to sort themselves out on the three long benches and then he said, “I’m sure there are at least a thousand men who know more about precision bombardment than I do.” He looked slowly from face to face. “However I don’t see any of them here.”
He had their attention. “Anybody have trouble understanding my English?”
A few of them shook their heads; the others didn’t answer. “I don’t know who’s got rank here other than His Highness but as long as we’re in training here I’m the boss. When I tell you the sow’s fat then she’s broad across the back. Just you remember I’m in charge here and we’ll all get along fine.”
He saw a slow grin spread across Prince Felix’s face. The others took their cue from that and he knew it was going to be all right.
“Now you’re going to make mistakes. You don’t think you will. But you will. I don’t mind mistakes but I don’t want excuses. Fair enough?”
Abruptly he turned to the blackboard and dashed a quick rough sketch that approximated the outlines of a four-engine bomber.
“The B-Seventeen Flying Fortress has something like seventy-five thousand working parts. In the next few weeks we’re going to have a lunatic schedule around here because you misters are going to have to learn about a lot of those parts. In an emergency in the air you’re going to have to be able to act as your own flight engineers. This afternoon we’re all going to climb around inside those aircraft and find out what holds them together. You’ll work your way up from the tail turrets to the cockpits. By the time you get that far you’ll be able to repair a busted elevator cable or free up a jam in the bomb-bay racks. And then we’re going to tackle the instruments. You misters are mostly used to flying peashooters, I understand. You’re going to have to learn a whole new rule book about instruments. You’re going to have to learn how to sort out a hundred different facts you’ve got at your fingertips in that cockpit-information about your course, your altitude, your airspeed, rpm’s, manifold pressures, fuel levels, horizon attitude, engine temperatures, synchronizations, mixtures, radio equipment, a lot of other stuff. You misters are going to have to memorize an encyclopedia full of facts and you’re going to have to be able to recite them back to me on call.”
An hour later he was still having at them.
“Now one thing you ought to remember if you don’t want to get dead. Keep the nose down when you’re taking off with a heavy load on board. Pushing the nose up, trying to climb-that’s no good if you’re at too steep an angle to get speed. You won’t get height that way, you’ll only stall out. These are heavy machines. You must always sacrifice altitude, no matter how little you have, to get speed. Is that clear?
“Now I remind you these airplanes are not peashooters. They are not designed to do aerobatics. You try doing a loop-the-loop and your wings will come right off. Just bear in mind Newton’s Law. In a Fort you come down easy and smooth or you come down like a falling safe. There ain’t no in-between. But you’re going to learn how not to fly on a roller coaster. You’ll learn a constant glide. The first time you try your hands on those controls you won’t believe it can be done but you’ll learn it.
“Bear in mind one other thing. These aircraft are rated to fly at twice the altitude you’ve been used to. At high altitudes lack of oxygen can cause a blackout and quick death. Use your masks.”
By now they were reeling a little; they’d filled notebooks. He said, “One more thing. About your parachutes. If you have to ditch and you’ve pulled the ripcord and the parachute does not open, here’s what you do.”
He stepped aside from the podium and stood unsteadily, the muscles of his left foot making constant corrections in his balance while he twisted his right leg around his left, shoved both arms straight up in the air and wrapped his right arm around his left arm.
Then he said, “It won’t do you a bit of good but it’ll make it a little easier for the rescue party to unscrew you out of the ground. Okay let’s take a five minute break.”
They stood up laughing.
He gathered them with the thunder of his voice. “Knock it off. Recess is over.”
They returned to the benches and Pappy Johnson leaned on the podium.
“The object of training is to get you misters into a condition where you can put a one-hundred-pound bomb on a postage stamp. Near-misses count in a game of horseshoes; they don’t count here. Now we’re going to make it a little bit easier for you because we’re going to limit the training to low-altitude bombardment. That’s because it’ll simplify things for all of us if all we do is train you to fly one specific mission. So I’m not going to fill your heads with the tricks of high-altitude bomb placement or how to evade flak at ten thousand feet. Those things won’t be your concern. Your problem is going to be strictly deck-level attacks.
“You’re thinking the enemy will be able to hit you with rocks. Let me tell you misters that ain’t your problem. At combat speed a B-Seventeen travels nearly two hundred yards in two seconds. You aren’t likely to get shot down by rifles or machine guns from the ground. They won’t even get a chance to start shooting before you’ve gone out of range.
“No. Your problem, gentlemen, when you’re flying treetop in a B-Seventeen, is going to be a lot worse than that.
“You’ll be going in low all the way. Flying in the grass where Uncle Joe Stalin won’t find you. You’re going to fly so low you’ll have mud on your windshields. At that kind of altitude an aircraft can fly into thermal updrafts that act like concrete walls. It’s going to feel as if the air’s full of boulders. You’re going to have to manhandle those Fortresses every inch of the way to the target and if you take your hands off the control yoke for a split second you’re likely to find yourselves digging a tunnel with the nose of your airplane.”
He stood up straight. “I think it’s time we went out and had a look at what a real airplane looks like. If you misters will follow me?”
11
Baron Yuri Lavrentovitch Ivanov’s house had been built for a titled cousin of Lord Nelson’s. The drawing room was very high, very dark and very English-a soft dark polish of woodwork and padded leather.
Count Anatol took pride in his ability never to let feelings get the better of him but he had to fight the impulse to pace the room: he tried to force his mind into the discipline of reading but his eyes kept returning impatiently to the Seth Thomas clock on the oak mantel.
Finally the Baron came in quickly on his short legs; he still wore his topcoat. “My deepest apologies, Anatol.”
“I am not in the habit of being kept waiting.”
“A cipher came in through the bag. I have just decoded it. There has been a complication.” The Baron shouldered out of his coat and threw it across a chair; he tossed an envelope on a low table and dropped into a leather reading chair beside it. “Did you know that Stalin employs a double?”
Anatol felt his spine tighten. “No.”
“He suffered a severe breakdown shortly after the German attack. He had to be spirited out of Moscow to a retreat in the Kuybyshev. For more than two weeks in June and July the Soviet government was run by Beria and Malenkov. They employed a double to put in public appearances to allay suspicions in Moscow. Obviously this was no last-minute deception-they must have had the understudy well-trained and waiting in the wings for just such an emergency. For those seventeen days the top Soviet echelon was powerful enough to manage things in Stalin’s absence. They kept the machinery functioning during the worst days of the panzer drive into Russia. They are stronger men than we have credited them.”
“It only confirms what both Devenko and Danilov have insisted on-we cannot merely assassinate the top man, we must eliminate the entire palace guard.”
“Quite. But that reasoning doesn’t apply in the calculations of our people in Germany. They have been moving forward on the assumption that they need only kill Stalin. They feel there would be no further resistance to a German victory. The Grand Duke Mikhail is eager to see Hitler win it.”