The 34th Degree

34

T he landing lights of the Flying Fortress blinded Jack MacDonald for a moment before it touched down at Blida, the Allied air base outside Algiers. MacDonald watched the B-17 taxi to a corner of the field under the stars. The thirty-year-old red-haired Scot then stamped out his cigarette with his flying boot and zipped up his leather bomber jacket. The scarf at his throat blew in the desert wind as he crossed the runway toward the Pegasus. His black-painted B-24 bomber was awaiting takeoff behind a line of other Liberators ready to strike Wehrmacht supply lines in southern France.

Wing Commander Rainey, his copilot, was running down the checklist with the navigator when MacDonald clambered into the cockpit and clamped his earphones over his cap.

“Our package is here,” MacDonald said, angrily flicking the switches on his instrument panel. “Just once in this bloody war, I’d like to drop a real bomb on a real German target, preferably the Reich Chancellery in Berlin.”

As it was, Captain Jack MacDonald of RAF Squadron 624, one of Britain’s Special Operations squadrons, was too good a pilot for typical bombing runs and felt condemned to a career of flying secret supply missions to resistance forces in the Balkans and southern France. Tonight’s fantastic orders involved the delivery of an American OSS agent.

“So they’re serious?” Rainey asked. He was twenty-two, with a baby face. He looked at MacDonald in disbelief.

“Mission orders confirmed-it’s Switzerland,” MacDonald told his amazed copilot. “We’re going to risk our necks crossing France to drop some American Joe in a neutral country, no less. We’ll probably slam into the Matterhorn and burn before we get there.”

MacDonald wasn’t afraid of dying. He just wanted to take down with him as many Nazis as hell could hold.

He had never flown before he joined the RAF in 1940 and, as a child, had been afraid of heights. But after his wife and daughter were killed in the London Blitz by German bombers, he couldn’t get up in the air fast enough to pay back those Nazi bastards. And pay them back he did. Flying twin-engine Bristol Beaufighters in the night skies over the Channel, he engaged and destroyed eleven incoming German bombers during the Battle of Britain. Bombers were such easy, slow-moving targets in the air. He could soar past their operating altitude, fire from overhead, and blow them out of the sky in one pass. He could also outfly their Messerschmitt escorts.

He pursued his prey with such reckless abandon that he became a legend in the RAF. His suicidal tendencies, however, made it difficult for him to hold on to copilots. Rainey had stuck with him the longest. MacDonald had been shot down four times and earned a Distinguished Service Order and Distinguished Flying Cross in the process. But his medals couldn’t bring back Carol or little Sarah.

Because of his skills in night interception, the geniuses at the Bomber Command had the brilliant idea of transferring him to Squadron 624. Who better to stick in the cockpit of a B-24 bomber than a former ace who could outthink and outmaneuver any night fighters the Luftwaffe sent his way? Unfortunately, they wanted him to drop not bombs but secret agents and supplies behind enemy lines. It was a more constructive use of his abilities, he realized, but less therapeutic. His two tours of duty had inflicted little damage that he could see to the Third Reich. One real air strike was what he needed-the mother lode-and then maybe he could let go of his bitterness.

But it wouldn’t be tonight.

“I think I see our Joe now,” Rainey said.

MacDonald looked out his cockpit window. Their mysterious passenger, clad in expensive civilian clothing beneath his halfzipped flight suit, stepped out of the darkness at the edge of the flight line. He was talking to a woman in a Royal Marine uniform and some wiry old man in a tweed sport coat. The lovely lass then gave the Joe a kiss and disappeared into the night.

“Well, now, would you look at that,” MacDonald said. “How come we never get that kind of send-off?”

The American Joe was nodding as he and the old man ran across the tarmac toward the Pegasus. The old man, having trouble keeping his hat on against the rushing wind of the plane engines, waved good-bye.

Rainey said, “Isn’t that the professor from OSS who-”

MacDonald cut him short. “The same. Now I know we’re in trouble.”

It was over a year before that MacDonald had been in the operations room when Professor Prestwick proposed an insane operation “guaranteed to destroy the Third Reich” by demoralizing the Fuhrer. According to OSS psychoanalysts, this could be best accomplished by exposing Hitler to obscene quantities of pornography. For this, Prestwick wanted MacDonald’s squadron to drop the magazines and photographs. It was only after MacDonald raised bloody hell that he learned the new U.S. Army Air Force had already refused to have anything to do with the professor. The mission was scrubbed.

“Why are we the ones who have to drop this American?” Rainey asked. “Why don’t the Americans handle their own?”

“Because they’re too smart to risk the life of a single airman for those maniacs at SOE and OSS.”

“Cargo on board,” said the tailgunner over the intercom.

Rainey socked the starter button, and the four Pratt amp; Whitney Twin Wasp radial engines whirred, coughed, and kicked over. The navigator opened his logbook and penned a terse entry for the flight record. Date: 17 May 1943. Type of aircraft: B-24 Liberator. Length of flight: Nine and a half hours. Number of landings: Zero.

The B-24 taxied onto the runway behind the other Liberators, which one by one lifted off into the darkness. A moment later, MacDonald shoved the throttles forward, and the Liberator picked up speed down the airstrip.

“Tail’s up,” said Rainey as the tachometer moved to takeoff speed.

MacDonald took a deep breath, pulled back on the yoke, and felt the Pegasus leap off the desert floor and into the night sky. “Here we go again.”

After a quick glance at his compass, he turned on a heading that led toward France and Switzerland. The logbook recorded the destination simply as “Combat mission-secret.”