Air Force Eagles (49 page)

"Because I told him to. You start two weeks from Monday; I want you to get dried out, get yourself a new hairdo and some clothes, and do me proud. You understand?"

Ginny walked from the room without answering. She needed a drink, and she remembered she had a half-pint bottle of Old Forester tucked under her mattress. She'd think about her daddy's offer after she had a drink.

*

Nashville, Tennessee/December 25, 1954

It was a lonely Christmas Day, and Elsie had turned on all the lights, upstairs and down. She was playing her new high-fidelity record player at its peak, trying to force life into the house Troy McNaughton had built for her.

She'd left a lot of men in her life and a few had left her. She missed only two, Bruno Hafner and Dick Baker. Under the stress of the crash investigations, she had been glad to see Baker go, but now she missed him. As troublesome and cantankerous as he had been, as shamefully as he had taken advantage of her, she still wanted him back. It was perverse; she knew it and liked it. Baker had the perfect mix of dominance and domesticity—he knew exactly how to handle her. It struck her that she would have liked to have had a child by him.

But she also knew better than to try to seek him out. He'd given her his post office box number and combination, promising to send her an address as soon as he could. She checked the box every week, and he had not even sent a card.

It was the smart thing to do. Ruddick had advised them to keep totally apart for at least a year, to see what happened. The Air Force had apparently lost all interest in the case as soon as she indicated she would be willing to sell out if the price was right. A few weeks ago, she'd convinced the district attorney to drop the case against Baker, and she thought that the heat was off. Yet she couldn't be sure, and the last thing she wanted was to lead anyone to Baker. And that meant she couldn't let the trail lead to Ruddick, either.

Baker had left a paperwork nightmare behind him; the only reason McNaughton had any contracts at all was the Air Force's desperate need for B-47s. They had doubled up on the quality assurance inspectors and brought in a tough new plant representative. Worse, they'd made her to take on virtually the entire management staff from Vanguard, while insisting that she take no part in the management. Technically she wasn't barred from the plant, but whenever she visited, one of the quality assurance guys was detailed to be with her the entire time.

She was desperately lonely; she'd even gone to the plant a few times for personal reasons, trying to find a companion among the workers there. The word must have gone out, however, for while most of the men on the floor were as friendly as ever, no one responded to her overtures. Baker's departure had created an emotional vacuum, and it was proving to be extraordinarily difficult for her to summon the energy to find a new companion, a new lover. Her whole life had revolved around the plant, and she hadn't cultivated any other friends.

Part of the problem and most of the solution was the marijuana Baker had introduced her to. She smoked it regularly now, half a dozen times a day, and it softened the edges of her ambition even as it honed her various appetites. She gained back twenty pounds, which she'd lost in her long pursuit of Stan Coleman, and couldn't summon the initiative to go out and shop for new clothes.

Dick Baker wouldn't have cared that she'd grown fat again—he wouldn't even have noticed, not as long as she took good care of him. She wondered who was taking care of him now? Ginny was still in Little Rock, but Baker was not her type. And Milo would want him to keep his distance.

Even as she reasoned with herself, a current of envy tore through her. That was it! It would be just like Baker to get next to Ginny—and just like her to let him. She made up her mind to go to Little Rock. She could handle Ruddick—and he could put her in touch with Baker. As soon as they cashed her out, she'd be on her way.

***

Chapter 11

Chicago, Illinois/February 28, 1954

The elevated train shook the ancient building with a rumble like artillery fire, lending credibility to the article Weissman was reading about an Israeli attack on the Egyptians in Gaza; a nostalgia for the frantic days of 1947 swept over him, recalling how he'd help bolt the Messerschmitts together, working with the eager Negro, and the other dark American, the one named Riley.

The incidental reading was the only compensation for the interminable analysis and filing—the rest was tedious cross-referencing, trying to knit individual atoms of information into a molecule of intelligence. Yet it was valuable; his service had brought in innumerable snippets of data on the Ku Klux Klan, and he had found out that his old enemy Josten, of Nordhausen days, was working with them in Arkansas.

It was a natural alliance, Nazi and Klansman. At first he didn't understand the Klan's ineptitude, their failure to capitalize on the strength of racist feelings in America. He saw all around him signs that Negroes—"Blacks" they called them now—were as hated as the Jews had been in Germany. It had taken only a fanatic minority to begin the pogroms there. What was holding the Klan back?

Bit by bit, the files revealed the secret: lack of leadership. There was no longer any meaningful national Klan apparatus; instead there were local Klans, more vindictive Rotary club than terrorist, run by shabby, mean men who milked the organization for a small living.

There was a very short dossier on Josten, confirming what he had already known. He had been an ace in the Luftwaffe and spearheaded the drive to get the jet fighter. When jet engines were vitally needed, he collaborated in using slave labor to build them at Nordhausen. My alma mater, Weissman thought. Josten had been burned in a crash and came to the United States legally, ostensibly part of Operation Paper Clip, but apparently in repayment of some postwar service he had done. His wife had divorced him and had also come to America. She had been in the Resistance. Interesting. Maybe that was the cause of the divorce. He'd have to see where she was, too. Josten didn't sound like the sort of man who'd give up his family willingly.

Weissman had already raised the issue of becoming active again. Goldberg had told him to wait. They'd even given him a nickname, "Weissman the Marksman." Very funny. As far as he knew, none of the others, including Goldberg, had ever been in prison, had ever tried to kill a man. Who were they to ridicule him?

*

Frederick Air Force Base, California/
March 24, 1955

The cavernous maintenance hangar sang its own songs, creaking with every change of temperature, rattling in the wind, sighing as clouds formed and rained beneath its ceiling during humid weather. It had been built to accommodate the B-52s that would be arriving next year. Now it was packed with B-47s, their swept wings tucked together like gears in a watch to conserve space. Sergeant Greg Larson had just crossed from the yellow hydraulically lifted platform to the slanting wing and fuselage intersection of 51-5214, careful as a man on a tightrope, balancing a toolbox in one hand against the electric drill in the other.

Two hundred feet away, Lieutenant Colonel Kosanovich looked at his watch and cursed—5214 had a mission in six hours, and it was past time to get it out to the refueling pits. He walked rapidly over and called "Hey, Sarge, how long you going to be? This plane has to fly this evening."

"I'm not sure, sir. There's a tiny crack on the underside of the wing that I just stop-drilled, and there's another one up here. I was going to pull a couple of panels off and see what was happening inside."

"Look, we've spent too many man-hours on this inspection already. I want you to sign it off and get it towed out to the refueling pits.

"Colonel, you know what the tech order says—we're not supposed to let a crack like this go without fixing it. At least let me stop-drill it." Stop-drilling was a technique as old as metal airplanes—when a crack appeared, the mechanic drilled a hole at its terminal point, which slowed, but often did not really stop, the spreading fracture.

Kosanovich forced himself to stay calm—first-rate mechanics like Larson were overworked and underpaid, and it was bad policy to lean on them. But when the CO. had asked about this airplane's status, he'd told him it was ready to go.

"Sarge, I told Colonel Coleman this bird was in commission. Tell you what. It is going back to Boeing in Wichita at the end of the month to get the new heavyweight landing gear installed. I'll write up this crack before it goes, and they can fix it there. I'd rather have them replace the panel than have you just stop-drill it. Now get your ass in gear and get this airplane ready to go."

The mechanic shook his head as he carefully climbed back off the airplane to the lift. That was the service—never any time to do anything right, but always lots of time to do it over.

*

Frederick Air Force Base, California/
March 25, 1955

Curtis LeMay's primal presence soaked the Strategic Air Command in a sweaty mixture of fear, respect, and admiration; he was Billy Mitchell, Patton, Rommel, Churchill, Rockne, and Ziegfeld all rolled in one. Apocryphal stories blossomed about the hide-blistering profanity with which he chewed ass, about airplanes not daring to blow up when he smoked on board, about colonels turned into quivering tureens of jelly at his briefings. Most of them were true.

On the other hand, LeMay labored mightily to get the best living conditions for his people, fighting for quarters, and improving the mess halls by sending cooks to hotels to learn their trade. In the process, LeMay had turned SAC into one vast competition, pitting crews against crews, squadrons against squadrons, wings against wings. The single standard was perfection—anything else called for immediate explanation and then practice until perfection was achieved. If a pilot dinged a wingtip in California on Wednesday night, he was explaining why to LeMay personally in Omaha on Thursday morning. If an airman got drunk and ran his car into a ditch, LeMay was on the horn to the airman's boss, wanting to know why he let it happen.

There were two sweeteners in LeMay's program. The most important was the sense he inspired of being on the first team in the world's best air force; the second was his spot promotion program for the crew members who did well over a sustained period of time. LeMay had secured the authority to promote an individual on the spot, without regard to seniority, giving him the pay and rank of the next grade. The hottest of the hotshots had spots on spots—some young captains were wearing the silver leaves of lieutenant colonels. LeMay gave and LeMay took away—if the crew member stumbled anywhere along the line, the promotion was gone, often not only for him, but for his crew as well. The spot was a sizeable carrot to match the forceful stick of LeMay's personality, and it was having a positive effect throughout most of SAC. Under a lesser man, the competitive system could have simply become nonproductive tyranny. LeMay made it work—most places.

No one outside of SAC had any idea how hard the crews were trying, how fully each mission was packed with requirements to accomplish and be measured. A typical SAC bomber flight might begin with a celestial navigation leg, which could include gunnery and ECM practice, followed by an in-flight refueling, practice radar bomb runs, a practice low-level mission, followed by another refueling and another celestial navigation mission. After eight busy hours, the tired B-47 crews would wind up back at the field to shoot instrument approaches and touch and go landings for an hour before shutting down. Then they had to face the long debriefings with maintenance and operations, for LeMay's rules required that the crews had to record how well—or how badly—they did on every aspect of each mission.

A few weeks after the B-47 crash at Tonopah, Coleman succeeded Guy Williams as wing commander, and he let the crews know that he wanted top scores in everything—no matter how they got them.

The crews Coleman inherited were led by veterans of the Second World War, somewhat jaded and not impressed with LeMay's gung-ho competitiveness. They had found the peacetime Air Force to be a good life and stayed in for the flying, which was even more enjoyable because they weren't being shot at. There were few college graduates in the group—most were products of the egalitarian Aviation Cadet program, and most were making more money than they'd ever dreamed of. As soon as they understood what their new commanding officer wanted, they began to figure out ways to beat LeMay's system. Most of their tricks were easy to do and hard to discover. It became common to use visual assists on the radar bombing runs and to help out the celestial navigation legs with radio fixes. Within weeks, the wing had developed a variety of other gimmicks that saw to it that most missions received perfect scores, with just enough screwups to provide credibility.

Basically good crews, they had to cheat only a little to look like world-beaters. For the most part, the crew members regarded the whole process as little more than a high school prank, a joke on that stern principal, Curt LeMay.

Frederick Air Force Base had begun life as a primary training base in World War II, and the H-shaped wing headquarters building was the usual wooden shack, upgraded with shiny pine plywood panels and industrial-grade carpeting. In the glassed-in conference room adjacent to Coleman's office, Major Fitzpatrick was immersed in a mound of paperwork. A table on his left had all the reports on the last month's missions, with piles of Form l's, maps, navigation logs, and the mission debriefing logs. On his right was the ground school work—war plan briefings, code of conduct, special weapons training, any one of the dozens of courses that were going on all the time. He was enjoying himself, ignoring Coleman's hovering presence.