"Anything funny happen on your flight down, sir?" Freddy Farmer asked, as the senior officer paused for breath.
"Nothing that I noticed," Colonel Welsh replied with a shake of his head. "But just because things don't happen doesn't mean that they won't, in time. So, as I said, we won't know for sure until we arrive at Casablanca."
"And maybe not even then," Dawson mumbled to himself.
Colonel Welsh gave the Yank air ace a sharp look, and then nodded his head.
"That's right," he agreed. "And maybe not even then. Just another reason why an Intelligence man gets gray hair so early in life. You never can tell about a job until it's all finished and you're working on another. Then it's the same thing all over again."
The trio lapsed into silence, but not for long, because the question that had been plaguing Dawson just had to come out.
"Supposing we make it to Casablanca okay," he said, "and you feel sure that the enemy hasn't learned a thing about the President's trip, what then? The sealed orders Farmer and I were to have delivered at the rest of the stops are destroyed, and you say you collected the envelopes we left at Miami and Puerto Rico. How will they know about the President's plane when it does come through?"
"A good question, but I've got the answer, Dawson." The colonel smiled and pointed to a brief-case on his little table. "In there are duplicates of the orders, without the part about the next bomber through being the President's plane. If we reach Casablanca safely, we'll turn around and head south for Liberia, cross the South Atlantic to Natal, and deliver one of those sealed envelopes to each of the stops as we fly north to Washington. I've allowed sufficient time for us to do that, in case that's the way it works out."
"Well," Dawson remarked, and shifted to a more comfortable position on his chair, "there's nothing like a two-way hop across—"
But he never finished his sentence, because at that moment the pilot of the B-25 came back into the made-over bomb compartment and spoke to Colonel Welsh.