1.

In the latitudes of northern Scotland there was daylight until after ten o’clock and they made landfall by twilight with the formation intact, the three Fortresses in a V-triangle with the three transports riding below and behind them.

Alex stretched his limbs one at a time in the confined space.

Spaight was muttering in the throat mike: “If you wanted a sardine why the hell didn’t you draft one?” Spaight had that trait: every morning he made a joke—a sour joke about the weather or a caustic joke about the food. Somewhere in him was a core of bitterness; underneath the hard competence there was dissatisfaction. Alex hadn’t got too close to it but he had the feeling Spaight had been born with an impulse toward perfection and felt unfulfilled whatever he did. He was introspective and if he’d been more of a golfing backslapper he’d have had two or three stars instead of one but the fact that he had one at all was testimony to his extraordinary talent for organizing people and commanding their loyalty. He lacked a head for imaginative tactics but he had the genius of a first-rate staff officer: if you told him what had to be done he would produce everything that was needed for the job and put it all in the right place at the right time. Spaight was married and thrice a father but he kept his family rigidly segregated from his professional existence and he hadn’t once mentioned his wife since they’d left Washington. He was a soldier and she was a soldier’s woman and that was the way the game was played.

Pappy Johnson came on the headset. “Picking up some radio chatter from the Channel. I’ll cut you in.”

Static in the earphones and then he picked up the voices, quite distinct—a very calm crisp Welsh voice, “Break right, Clive, the bugger’s on your arse.”

He could hear the banging of the cannons and the fast stutter of machine guns above the whine of pursuit engines and then the same voice again, still dispassionate: “I’ve taken some tracers—on fire. I’m bailing out. Due east of Dover—I can see the cliffs. Someone save me a pint of bitter and a pair of dry drawers.”

In his imagination he could see the Spitfires and Messerschmitts in the twilight wheeling among the barrage blimps; the Heinkels in ponderous formation lining up for London and the Hawks and Spitfires trying to get at them before they could drop their sticks of bombs through the swaying beams of the searchlights.

There was a break in the static and Johnson said, “Sorry, I’ve got to change the frequency and get landing instructions.”

Spaight said, “You’ve got to hand it to those bastards.”

They were dropping across the mountains of Scotland in slowly fading twilight; the hillsides were indeterminate, dark and heavy. The B-17 thundered lower between the ranges and finally he saw the lights of the runway through the perspex. The bomber descended toward them like a climber on a sliding rope.

The runway was rough; the plane bounced and pitched along the center stripe between the cannister lights. A small van came shooting onto the gravel and curved in to intercept, running fast down the edge of the runway with a big FOLLOW ME sign across its rear doors, Turning on its tail wheel the bomber went along slowly after the van, unwieldy and awkward on the ground. Pappy Johnson was complaining into his radio: “This runway’s got a surface like a goddamn waffle. This Jesus shit airfield wouldn’t get certification from the civil air board of the corruptest county in Mississippi!”

The FOLLOW ME van circled to indicate their parking place and Johnson cut the engines. It was dusk now and the tower was carping in a crisp Scottish voice: “Let’s get the rest of the wee birds down now, lads—we want to switch off these lights, don’t we now.”

He inched painfully to the hatch and lowered himself by his arms. The leg had gone very stiff. Ground crewmen climbed into the bomber and Pappy Johnson stopped by the running board of the van to look back at it the way he might have looked at a woman.

The driver gave a palm-out salute. He saw to their seating and drove them down the gravel strip and decanted them beside a wooden hangar, and sped away to meet the next plane.

Felix was there with his compact movie-actorish looks and his readiness to laugh or spill tears or burst into rages; he emerged from the hangar in an immaculate white uniform his tailor must have worked around the clock to build.

Alex saluted him. It made Felix grin like a schoolboy. “Welcome to the toy shop, Alex.”

“Where’s our headquarters?”

Felix indicated the decrepit hangar behind him. “Right here, I’m afraid. Well then come in, all of you. My God that’s a big ugly monster of an aircraft.” He turned around with a casual wave that drew them all inside and walked through a small door cut into the hangar’s great sliding gate. Over his shoulder he added, “I’ve got Sergei off in search of billets for you and your friends.”

Alex suppressed a smile. Felix was playing the game to the hilt: he’d already taken over. They’d given him a new role-leader of men—and it looked as if it was the role Prince Felix had been waiting for all his life.