Eagles at War (21 page)

Bandfield might have laughed if Caldwell hadn't looked so desperate.

"You know she used to work for Bruno Hafner. You probably knew all along that they were lovers."

"Well, I didn't
know
anything, but it figures. Bruno was a bastard who'd fuck anything that moved, and she was just a young kid who didn't know any better. But Christ, that was ten years ago, maybe more, and Bruno's dead. What can it matter?"

"You think he is and she thinks he is. But I've known for a long time that he is alive. Crippled, I understand, but alive."

Bandfield knocked his drink over as all the old emotions of hate and fear flooded him. Bruno Hafner! The man had haunted him for almost ten years—and now he was back from the dead! He mopped up the liquor with his handkerchief and, finally, his voice under control, said, "Incredible. I thought I killed him over Guernica."

"No, and I feel like a damn fool for not knowing earlier. We should have followed up on the fight, found out what happened. But everything was so sensitive—you being in the Air Corps and fighting for the Loyalists."

"Are you sure? How good is your source? Why didn't you tell me before?"

"I couldn't, because of the source—it's inside Germany, and I can't reveal it. And I didn't want to shake you up. But that's beside the point. Elsie doesn't know he's alive—but I'm still insanely jealous of the time she spent with him."

"That
is
nuts, Henry. You're overtired, overworked. You can't let something like this eat you up."

"Jesus, Bandy, think about it. It's bad enough that I'm emotionally involved with a woman who works for a contractor—I know everybody thinks I'm favoring McNaughton because of that. But she'd probably be considered a security risk, too, because she used to"—he hesitated, visibly torn by his choice of words—"used to screw Hafner!"

"Henry, that's the least of your problems! The real threat is that people might believe you're being influenced by love or money. You know, you're a much bigger spender nowadays than you ever were before."

Caldwell stared at him. "Jesus, Bandy, it was pretty goddamn tough for a captain to be a big spender during the Depression. I'm a general now, with no responsibilities—of course I can spend more."

"We're talking about how things look, Henry . . . and people—"

"Goddamnit, you're getting off the point. I don't want to talk about stupid bullshit like whether I'm on the take or not. I'm acting like a damn fool over Elsie, and I don't know how to stop."

"Well, I know what Patty would say. She'd say face up to it, tell Elsie your concerns. Tell her you've heard Bruno is alive. See how she reacts. You're probably just borrowing trouble. You ought to take two weeks leave and haul Elsie down to New Orleans or somewhere and just screw this out of your system."

Caldwell calmed down as he turned the idea over in his mind. "It would be great. I don't think I could get away for two weeks. But I could manage maybe four or five days. Hell, I'm entitled."

"You're entitled. Besides, the Army needs you; it can't afford to have you worrying about your sanity."

The older man was touched by Bandfield's obvious concern. "Back to business. Tell you what, Bandy. Just to be on the safe side on this long-range fighter business, why don't you see what you can do about extending the range on some of the standard fighters—you know, external tanks, fuel in the wings, behind the cockpit, whatever?"

Bandfield decided to go for the extra mile. "And how about splitting the Merlin engine deliveries between McNaughton and North American?"

"Yeah, maybe we can do that. And, Bandy, I'm sorry if I flew off the handle. I've got a lot of pressure on me. Talking to you really helped."

"Giving me this assignment will help, too—people will see that you've got a lot of irons in the fire and aren't just playing up to McNaughton."

"I hope so. Doesn't matter. I've got to do what I think is right. Fuck 'em all but six, Bandy, and save them for pallbearers. Right?"

"Right, General."

***

Chapter 6

Leipheim, Germany/July 18, 1942

Many more than six pallbearers were needed in a Germany suffocating in bad odors. From the rank fug arising from the unwashed masses on the U-Bahn to the death-sweet stench of burned wood and crumpled bodies in bombed-out buildings, Germany reeked. On the windblown airfield at Leipheim, there was a nauseating new stink, the pestilential vapors of 12 fuel. A half-tracked Kettenkrad had towed a tank truck into position and greasy, snouted nozzles were pumping peat-yellow oil into the tanks of the prototype Messerschmitt Me 262. Its turbines could burn anything from alcohol to paraffin, but were designed specifically for J2, the dregs of the refining process and available in quantity.

"Smells wonderful, eh, Josten?" Bruno Hafner sat in his wheelchair, a woolen throw across his legs. "Don't wrinkle your nose like that—we couldn't afford this masterpiece if it burned aviation gasoline."

Josten looked at Hafner with an odd combination of fascination and admiration. He was one of the bravest men he'd ever known, fighting from a wheelchair the total war that Hitler always called for.

Absolutely ruthless—cruel was a better word—he put Germany before everything. And he knew how to get things done. Josten had once been sickened by the human cost of foreign workers systematically starved to death under Hafner's methods. But as the casualty tolls from bombing and the Eastern Front soared, he had hardened. Now he was as committed to winning by any means as Hafner. After the war, the
Frontsoldaten,
the warriors, would clean up this Nazi mess.

"This is what we need to stop the bombing. I hate to think what it will be like a year from now when the Americans join with the Royal Air Force. We've got to get some new fighters. If we win on the Eastern front, we can come back and build all the bombers Hitler wants."

Hafner nodded in agreement. "I have a meeting scheduled with Albert Speer for later this afternoon. If you have a successful flight, I'm going to try to convince him to let me bring this aircraft into immediate full production."

Josten nodded and then walked to the waiting 262, admiring the shark shape of its flat-bottomed triangular fuselage with its leopard-like mottled camouflage. Messerschmitt engineers had coated the skin with putty and water-sanded it smooth for the sleekest aerodynamic finish. The 262 was big for a fighter, with a thirteen-meter wingspan, and weighing seven thousand kilograms fully loaded—twice as much as the 109. Its conventional tail-wheel undercarriage gave the plane a nose-up stance, so that the Junkers Jumo 004A turbojet engines slung under the wing almost touched the ground. Josten knew that on engine start, flames would blowtorch out the rear of the long, tubular nacelles, and he'd have to move forward quickly to avoid burning holes in the asphalt hardstand. The tricycle gear planned for production aircraft models would eliminate the problem.

A mechanic helped him up on the wing and into the cockpit. The side-closing canopy was similar to the one in the 109, but the cockpit was bigger, more spacious. The obvious, most disquieting differences between the airplanes were the absence of propellers and the stomach-churning stench of the jet fuel.

Once settled in the cockpit, he adjusted the clipboard on his knee, then began the critical, two-handed engine-start process. In a practice session, he'd had to leap out of one burning 262 when pooled fuel ignited in the nacelle.

The jet burned fuel so fast that there was no time to waste. Josten taxied quickly to the end of the twelve-hundred-meter-long grass runway, checked his instruments again, and slowly added power. Throttle movement was critical—too fast and you would have an explosion, too slow and the engine would stall from fuel starvation.

The engineers had said the airplane would fly off at 180 kilometers per hour. He hoped they were right. If they were wrong there wouldn't be enough runway left to stop, and burning up, even in the world's fastest fighter, would be no honor.

The high-slung nose blocked out the forward visibility, so he used the runway edge as a reference as he eased the throttles full forward. The airplane was sluggish, leaden, as if protesting that the power rushing from the rear of the engines was only so much hot air. At least it didn't have the corkscrew torque forces of the 109, which still killed pilots on a daily basis by pulling them off the runway on takeoff.

The 262 dragged forward and an internal alarm went off as the runway slowly unreeled beneath him, a sensor warning, "This thing isn't moving fast enough." The airspeed passed 160 kilometers per hour and the tail showed no sign of rising. Adding more and more forward pressure on the stick, he tried to get the nose down to cut the drag and accelerate. There was no response—the airflow over the wing was blanking out the elevators. The runway could reach to Johannesburg and he'd never get off the ground.

Grudgingly, the Messerschmitt moved faster, the short runway disappearing behind it, its tail wheel still planted firmly, the airflow streaming over the wing, hitting the ground, then deflecting up to hold the low-set tailplane down.

Hafner half rose out of his wheelchair, screaming, "Jesus, Helmut, pull up, pull up!"

The airspeed indicator read 180 kilometers per hour. Josten knew that in ten seconds he would scream off the end of the runway into a line of trees, rolling Germany's last chance at victory into a ball of flames. There was no longer room to stop—it was fly or die.

In desperation he tapped the brakes; they grabbed momentarily, wrenching the nose down in a reverse rotation. It was miraculous; the elevators bit the air, and Josten instinctively horsed back on the stick to send the airplane rising like a pheasant from a hedge, the wheels clipping through the tops of the trees, speed building, the controls answering crisply. One tap of the brakes had changed death to life.

His left hand reached down and pressed the buttons to raise the landing gear. The jet was accelerating so fast he was afraid he'd tear the gear doors off; he kept coming back on the stick, the nose kept rising, but unlike any airplane he'd ever flown before, the airspeed kept increasing at a faster and faster rate. They had briefed him that power would increase with speed, as more air was forced into the engine, but no one had told him to expect that the plane would grow quieter the faster he went, in a sweet, vibrationless soaring that was more like a super-swift sailplane than a fighter.

God, what an airplane, he thought. It feels like the angels are pushing!

He glanced below—the field was already almost out of sight, and he hadn't even leveled off, the speed packing power into the engines, the engines translating the power to more speed.

He cocked the jet up in a sixty-degree bank, keeping the field in sight; when he leveled out he left the power forward. The jet fighter leapt forward to 800 kilometers per hour, faster than any fighter in the world, and on its first test flight. What a triumph for the engineers, for Willi Messerschmitt, for Germany! No matter what the Allies were doing, they couldn't have anything like this. The speed and the firepower made this a
war-winner,
and no mistake.

As he leveled off and checked the instruments, the full weight of his responsibility hit him. It was one thing to have made a successful first flight—he knew that a less experienced pilot would probably have crashed before the plane left the runway—but it was another now to affect national policy, to weld together all the competing political interests and concentrate on manufacturing this airplane, to get Galland and Hafner to work together.

The flight was only eight minutes old when Josten swooped down and thundered across the field at ten meters above the ground, the slim, trim lines of the aircraft appearing and disappearing before the crowd of engineers and pilots lining the field could even hear the roar of its engines. Josten pulled up in a steep chandelle to traffic pattern altitude and then flew a cautious approach, carrying power, making sure that he touched down on the near edge of the runway; this was no time to have a landing accident.

Bruno Hafner had watched the jet roar across the field with the certainty that he had found a solution. As a pilot, he knew he was watching history being made. As a manager, he knew that the bureaucracy would take years to get this airplane into production. Everything depended upon Speer's response, for Speer would have the last word with Hitler.

Josten managed to taxi back through the jubilant crowd lining the runway. Utterly pragmatic, he knew that he'd been lucky to survive the first flight of an experimental aircraft and that he might not survive the second. Shrugging off congratulations, Josten ran to the operations shack and put through a Blitz Priority call to Galland's headquarters.

"Dolfo, you were right about the 262—it is sensational."

"Congratulations on surviving the first flight!"

"Thanks. Let me tell you, I'm not just being carried away. I'm being conservative when I tell you that this could put us two or three years ahead of the enemy. They couldn't live in the skies with this airplane, not now, not next year, not three years from now. We've got to get it into mass production right away."

"Any problems? Besides the engines, what needs to be changed for the operational aircraft?"

"I've only flown it once, so I can't be sure. It needs to have a tri-cycle landing gear, certainly; service pilots couldn't use it otherwise. And you're right, the engines are just toys now, they need to be developed. But believe me, no matter what the problems, if we build enough of them we can establish air superiority everywhere.

The speed is fantastic, and the ground tests prove that the guns are killers."

"The engines are the only bottleneck—we've got to solve the overheating problem."

Josten agreed, signed off, and then sat slumped in the chair, the joy of his triumphant first flight fading in the light of Galland's concerns.

As the test-flight tension drained from him, he wondered why his life had to be so complicated. He was just a soldier, yet nothing was easy. It was evident that he and Lyra were drifting apart, no matter what he did. She was preoccupied with something, behaving more and more strangely. He didn't think it was another man, although it could be, of course. It was probably this stupid Jewish business. He knew
he
hadn't changed.