hat he isn't at the White House. Naturally
they'd believe he was aboard this plane."

"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.

"A surface ship just ahead, sir, sending up distress flares," he
reported. "Probably a merchantman with a torpedo in her plates. We're
about three hundred and fifty out, due east of Barbados. Do you want me
to radio the ship's position? You gave orders, you know, to maintain
radio silence."

"Sending u