3

ARRECIFE FIELD
LANZAROTE, CANARY ISLANDS
1800 HOURS
AUGUST 19, 1942

 
Fine, Wilson, and Nembly had been taken in the back of one of the trucks to an ancient stone barracks on Lanzarote, and held in a sparsely furnished basement room long enough for Wilson and Nembly to conclude that whatever Fine was up to, it wasn’t going to work. They were going to be interned for God alone knew how long.

There was no breeze in the room and the air was hot and humid. They were fed, three times, on speckled blue porcelain-over-tin plates. The first meal was sausage and peppers, a chunk of bread, and coffee. The second meal was ground meat and peppers, a chunk of bread, and coffee. The third meal was identical to the first.

When the door to their basement room opened again, Wilson cracked, “Gee, I hope they serve peppers for a change.”

But this wasn’t another meal. It was a tall, aristocratic-looking officer in a well-cut uniform, who announced that he was Colonel di Fortini. Di Fortini went to each of them in turn, formally and expansively shook their hands, and told them, in vaguely British-accented English, that he was very happy indeed to have the pleasure of meeting them.

Then he politely asked if he could have a word in private with Stanley S. Fine, took him to a corner of the room, and, whispering confidentially, said that he was sure Fine was aware of the arrangement made between certain mutual friends of theirs.

Fine gave him forty thousand dollars. Colonel di Fortini very politely said he understood the figure agreed upon was fifty thousand dollars. Fine told him he had given the other ten thousand dollars to the officer who had met them on landing. Colonel di Fortini said that whatever Fine had given anyone else was between them, the figure that he had agreed to was fifty thousand dollars.

There was something unreal, almost comical, about the conversation.

All he has to do, Fine thought as he took another ten-thousand-dollar stack of bills from his money belt and handed it to di Fortini, is help himself. I couldn’t do a damned thing if he did.

As Fine stuffed his shirt over the remaining forty thousand dollars in his money belt, di Fortini carefully distributed his five ten-thousand-dollar stacks of currency in his tunic pockets, then shook Fine’s hand again.

Then he gestured dramatically toward the door. Fine told him that it would be necessary to work on the engine, and that he would be most grateful if the colonel could arrange for a ladder to do so.

“Your mechanical irregularity has been detected and corrected,” di Fortini said, “by our very best workmen. It was a loose oil line.”

Fine said that he would like to have a look at the engine anyway, just to be sure there was nothing else wrong.

“That will be unnecessary,” di Fortini said. “You have my personal assurance that there is no longer any sort of mechanical irregularity.”

Fine decided not to press the point. If the leak had not been repaired, that would be evident when they started the engine. To insist on checking would have been an insult to Spanish pride, and they were in no position to insult anything Spanish.

There was a little smoke when Wilson cranked the engine, but that was residual lost oil, and it disappeared before they had taxied back down the runway and turned around to take off.

Wilson was flying. He didn’t say so, but it was clear that he thought the runway much too short. He ran the engines to full takeoff power before releasing the brakes, and they were within a hundred yards of the end of the runway before he could get it in the air.

 
There was nothing to worry about now, Fine thought, as they passed through 8,000 on their way to their cruising altitude of 9,000 feet, but two “small” problems.

First, there was the very real possibility that the charming Colonel di Fortini had contacted his German friends in Morocco.

Second, they were now going to arrive at Bissau before daybreak. Arrangements had been made for them to land there at night, and the runway lights would be on to accommodate them. Now they were long behind schedule. Bissau would naturally have assumed that they had gone down in the drink, and there would be no one available to turn on the landing-field lights.

Thankfully, there were no Germans, but there was another problem. As they reached 10,000 feet, Nembly began to complain of cramps. By the time they had climbed to 20,000 feet, his cramps had turned to diarrhea. With a portable oxygen mask clamped to his face, he had gone into the cabin to deal as best he could with the situation on the makeshift toilet.