The Undaunted (Book 2 of The Undesirables)

Chapter 48: The Daredevil

It wasn't the first time Jack had broken into an airplane hangar. When he was just a kid he broke into the barn his father had used as a hangar for his Curtis Jenny crop duster. At the Army Air Force training base in Florida he'd broken into hangars twice: once to take a pair of pretty young socialites on a flight in an effort to seduce them, and once to steal high-octane fuel for an amateur car race. So he was confident that breaking into the Sredneia airfield's supply hangar wouldn't be a problem. Liberating four P-39 external fuel tanks wouldn't be a problem. The problem was going to be installing them without anyone noticing.

He'd gotten the message from Bobby earlier in the day. The regiment's radio operator had received the call from Pavlov's House, where Bobby was hiding until he could be transported across the river. The call hadn't come from Pavlov's usual wireless operator, a soldier by the name of Ilan Hait. Instead it came from a woman with a strange accent, a woman they all knew to be an embedded reporter, the same woman who had recently written a story about the Bell Over Stalingrad. Pavlov's platoon was preparing an offensive operation, the woman had said, and so Ilan was busy. So Sergeant Pavlov had trusted her with the platoon's radio and the message.

Or so she claimed.

The message was that they'd be escorting Bobby across the river and returning him to his unit that night, on foot. Then Bobby jumped on the wire and asked to speak to his old friend Jack. Sredneia's radio operators didn't suspect anything, so that request was granted.

At first Jack hadn't suspected anything, either. He'd just felt joy and relief. He'd already heard that Bobby had survived his parachute jump and had been rescued by Soviet troops, but it was one thing to hear about and another thing to talk to the man directly.

The conversation started with the usual good-natured banter about who would pay for the celebratory drinks and whose fault it was that he'd had to bail out in the first place. "You should've seen the damage to my plane!" Bobby razzed Jack.

"You should have paid more attention to your fuel gauge! Either way, I'm just glad you'll make it back in one piece."

"Come on," Bobby re-assured Jack, "you knew I'd survive. I'm like a bad penny, you can't get rid of me."

"Seems that way," laughed Jack.

"Just like Alaska," Bobby reminded him. "I bet you never expected to see me there again, either."

"No, I sure didn't," Jack admitted.

"What did you think when I showed up out of the blue like that?"

Jack chuckled. "I thought how'd that smart son-of-a-bitch get out of jail?"

"Probably didn't think I could escape, did you?"

"Naw," agreed Jack. "I figured you must've tricked a judge to let you free."

"That's right, 'cause nobody ever escapes Leavenworth, do they?"

"None that I'd ever heard of," Jack admitted.

"Not even smart sons-of-bitches."

That's when Jack first sensed it, sensed that Bobby was trying to tell him something, say something he didn't want other people to overhear and understand. "No," Jack said, talking more slowly now. "Not even smart sons-of-bitches."

"Remember how we had to steal the planes?" Bobby asked. "Remember what a pain the ass it was to install the external fuel tanks?"

"Sure," Jack agreed. But it was a lie. They hadn't needed external fuel tanks to fly across the Bering Strait. What the hell was Bobby talking about?