The trip back to the United States was a long ordeal of waiting for broken airplanes and weather delays. Raymond was sure he would spend Thanksgiving eating beans in a makeshift barracks next to an airstrip in the middle of nowhere. But he got lucky finally and was granted a short stay in St. Paul for the holiday, after which he boarded a train to Los Angeles. He didn’t mind the slow pace to the west; he’d had all he could stand of airplanes. From Los Angeles he was driven down to Pendleton, and then, in the middle of the night, a boat took him to the secret base on Catalina Island.
In the mornings, the OSS trainees on Catalina Island ran up the mountain above Toyon Bay and then down its west side to Hell Beach, so called because it had no sand, only a plain of jagged rocks leading to wav
