TWO WEEKS LATER ON THE USS YELLOW JACKET
A crowd of soldiers are sitting around in a dark room somewhere in the aircraft carrier's guts. They're on rows of steel folding chairs, staring at a wall lit by the blank white square of a slide machine with no slide in it. As they sit, talking among themselves, Brigadier General Bone steps out of the shadows and into the light. Everyone quiets down.
Welcome back. Good to see so many familiar faces, even if we are short a limb or two and have a bit more scar tissue to share. I'm here because the powers that be have discovered something rather interesting. So, of course, they would like us in the 888th to stick our rat noses into it and see what crawls up a nostril. That interesting thing is an order from one Alfred Rosenberg to Nazi forces in Poland. Some of you may remember this particular Kraut as a Nazi ambassador of sorts; he came to the UK sometime in '33 and tried to convince us all to join up in the goosestep. He made a stir back then, tomb of the unknown soldier incident and all, but he's gone up in the world considerably since he last darkened our collective doorstep. He's now minister of all occupied territories in the east and even said to be the "racial theorist" of the party.
Now, Rozenberg's orders are quite simple; he wants German forces in Poland to start kidnapping children. Specifically children between the ages of 10 and 14. According to the orders, they will be transported to Germany to act as slave labor, but something about this rings hollow. What sort of hard labor can be extracted from prepubescent children, Hm? And who in their right mind would think it worth the effort? It is an atrocity without reason as it stands; and atrocities, senseless as they may be, always have a reason. Cruel, stupid or illogical, yes, but there is always a reason. And we are the ones who are going to go find that reason; find the real explanation behind these orders for mass kidnapping.
Now, 'fore I go any further, do we have any good pilots around here? No wanna-bes or farmers who flew their daddy's crop duster. I need a real pilot, even if I gotta hire one.