Eagles at War (28 page)

His voice was weak and hesitant as he replied. "The little job, the flying bomb, worries me more than the rocket. If they build enough of them, they can stop the second front."

"Well, then, there's your way out! You've got influence with Arnold, and with Eaker, too. Convince them to bomb out the factories building the jets and the flying bombs. If you get me just six months, we'll have our jet ready to go. Just six months!"

Caldwell left, driving his Plymouth staff car down the icy streets and progressively converting his despair into anger with Elsie, blaming her for his situation, hating her because she had gotten him into this mess and because she had once been Bruno's woman.

More furious than the storm outside, he stomped through her front door, tracking snow across the knotted rag rugs, shouting like a madman. She stifled his cries with an embrace and led him upstairs, where he passively accepted the maddening insouciance of her kisses. In the sweetly familiar bedroom of her old-fashioned two-story frame house on the Murfreesboro Pike, he gazed at the $219 mahogany suite he'd given her, her dressing table filled with the perfumes he loved to inhale as he nuzzled her neck. She was wrapping him in breast-soft comfort, drowning his arguments in her mouth. Shaking off her kisses even as he let her pull off his clothes, he flung more accusations at her, telling her that she had betrayed him, that she was a whore.

She replied with more kisses and darting hands; even as he screamed at her, she unbuttoned his fly, pushing him back down on the bed to pull his trousers down, gently amused that he could curse her as he let her undress him.

Caldwell knew how stupid it was and how perfectly it fitted the bizarre pattern of their relationship. He had been faithfully married for twenty-two years to his high school sweetheart, even though Shirley's increasingly religious bent had muted their sex life. When she died, he'd been blessed or cursed with a sudden new adolescent capacity for love. He had fallen for Elsie with a coltish naiveté that made him more vulnerable than a teenager.

Caldwell tried to regain his anger, struggling to his feet, nude, detumescent, and she slipped behind him saying, "Oh, Hank, you can't be mad about Bruno. It was all such a long time ago, I was just a kid."

Her absolute tranquility appalled him. She felt no guilt or remorse; she was kissing and squeezing him as if she had genuinely missed him. Shamelessly, knowingly, without any regard for what had happened in the past or might happen in the future, she pressed herself on him with her always irresistible ardor.

The terrible, unreliable part was that he was responding in every way but the one that counted; he wanted her desperately, wanted to settle all the arguments by bolting himself to her and, bucking, spend himself within her, listening to her gasps of pleasure, not caring if they were real or not. But a countercurrent of quietly determined guilt swam upstream against desire, and he was impotent.

"You're acting crazy, Hank. You've been on a long trip, and God knows what you eat over there. Or what you drink." She looked up at him archly, "Or who you screw. Let me fix you a little bourbon and branch water."

She poured him a drink and said, "I loved Bruno, just like I love you. I still love his memory, poor dear. But that has nothing to do with us."

A wiser man might have expected it. He had felt for a long time that Elsie was strangely and genuinely an innocent, as ignorant of sin as she was of what others called virtue. Elsie was Elsie, enjoying life and making do with whatever circumstances provided her.

"I can't believe you'd say that, Elsie. How can you love a man who killed his wife, betrayed his country?"

"Who ever proved he killed her? Lots of people die in plane crashes. And his country is Germany, he's never betrayed it. Besides, look how he used to make planes for the government. You bought them yourself, just like you're buying McNaughtons."

He listened to her nonsequitur nonsense, sadly aware that of all improbable things, he was a romantic. "Tell me the truth, Elsie. Do you enjoy making love to me?"

He was silent and she said, "Look, Henry, you're just mad because little John Henry Junior there is having his temper tantrum. Let me talk a little French to him, and in a little while you'll be all better."

The ghastly thought struck him. "Do you have names for all of them?" It wasn't a question but a confession, a groveling admission of his subjugation to her.

Her expression was blank, fleeting. "Names for all of what?"

It was agonizing to ask, a painful extrusion of his soul through pressing rollers of pride and embarrassment. He spat it out. "Goddamnit, Elsie, did you have a name for Bruno's penis?"

She burst into laughter. "Lord, I haven't thought of that in years. Sure, it was Red Baron; he was an ace, too, you know. I thought it was cute. And Troy, he's Barney Google because he's got a . . ." Her voice trailed off.

"Jesus Christ, you're fucking Troy, too?"

"Don't use words like that, Henry. Especially not with the Lord's name. Of course Troy has made love to me. Wake up and get your belt through all the loops! Do you think I'd have a chance at a job like mine if all I could do was type sixty words a minute?"

He shuddered in revulsion. He had been so willing to believe that Elsie was "his" in some spiritual way. She had done so much for him, made him feel so good about himself—she was always approving.

It hit him like a sudden light in a dark room. That was it, he knew. Elsie had always approved everything he did or didn't do, unlike his parents, for whom nothing was ever good enough, unlike poor Shirley, who always felt he should pay less attention to his job and more attention to church. Elsie approved of him, so he approved of her—and to do that he had had to be blind to everything.

She moved around him, pressing against him, blowing on his neck.

"Come on, sugar, don't be like this. We're all babies at heart; you've just had your feelings hurt." She slipped her arm around his waist, gently grasping him with her hand, rubbing the rough velvet of her pubis against his bottom.

"Now, I can tell that little John Henry Junior is beginning to feel all better already. Why don't you just let me and him work this thing out; we know how to talk to each other. In a minute or two, you'll forget all this nonsense."

Major General Henry Caldwell, advisor to the President, a towering power in the Army Air Forces, confidant of major leaders in the aviation industry, stood transfixed, watching what was happening in the mirror over the bureau. He stood silently as a tiny bundle of nerves, a shapeless white ganglion smaller than a lima bean, disconnected him from reality as it responded mindlessly to Elsie's soft, wet coaxing.

He felt the stirrings, and he thought, I should walk out of here and never see her again. But he heard his mouth say, "Let's go over to the bed."

Elsie went to work busily, aware that she'd have fences to mend for the next few weeks. She was pleased with her comment about "typing sixty words per minute." If Caldwell was stupid enough to think that Troy McNaughton valued only what she could do on a Sealy or behind a Remington, that was all to the good. Even Troy underestimated her. She wasn't an engineer, but she was a manager and she knew what was going on. And she was
not
going to be left penniless when the war was over, when Troy no longer needed her and she'd be too old to work for someone else. No, she was going to take care of herself, and Henry Caldwell was going to help.

*

Burbank, California/March 15, 1943

The Lockheed plant had disappeared from the face of the earth. Lieutenant Colonel Frank Bandfield, the new silver oak leaves shining on his shoulders, cocked his Douglas A-20 on its wing and circled until he spotted the runway. The year before a Jap sub had shelled Santa Barbara, and Lockheed had covered the entire plant with camouflage netting. Now there was a huge network of false streets, fake houses, and phony trees that turned this part of Southern California into an incongruous slice of the Middle West.

It was the first leg of a two-stage journey to the South Pacific, one that might bail Caldwell out of his growing difficulties. The Merlin-engined Sidewinder was a failure. But because McNaughton had received all the Merlin engines, there wouldn't be any long-range P-51s in England until early 1944—and that meant heavy bomber losses for the rest of the year. In desperation, Caldwell had assigned Bandfield to go to Guadalcanal to fly P-38s, to see if his cruise control techniques and the new 310-gallon drop tanks could make it into the elusive long-range fighter for the European theater.

Patty had been furious. "I know you. You'll go on every damn mission, and you won't be happy unless you do some shooting. It's in your blood." "Don't say that, makes me sound like a killer." "You are a killer. You kill me every time you leave." It was a tough time for Patty. She'd stopped almost all of her outside activities to take care of the children—and Clarice Roget. After complaining about "the miseries" for months, Clarice had finally gone into the hospital for a checkup. The diagnosis had been quick and cruel: Hodgkin's disease, an incurable cancer of the lymphatic system.

Bandfield could tell that Caldwell had called ahead. Lockheed was completely prepared for him, designating their top test pilot, Milo Burcham, to check him out, and scheduling him for a visit with Clarence "Kelly" Johnson, the Chief Research Engineer.

Bandy had flown one of the pre-production YP-38s at Wright Field, but Burcham took him to new ground, a combat-ready P-38G. It was a beautiful aircraft, gleaming silver, the sleek needle-nosed twin booms bulging with the power of the supercharged

Allison engines, the central nacelle packed with four .50-caliber machine guns and a 20-mm cannon.

"It's an easy bird to fly, Bandy. The props are counter-rotating, so you don't have any torque problems to worry about. The only thing I'd warn you about is high-speed dives. It's so clean that it can run into what we call compressibility." Burcham went on to give him his first real insight on the tremendous forces involved when an aircraft approaches the speed of sound.

"How do you recognize it?"

"It's easy! It feels like you're flying through boulders, and the controls stiffen up, feel like they're reversing on you. We've got some dive flaps coming along that may solve it, but for now—don't dive too steep."

Three days later, Bandy had completed the syllabus of ground instruction and flying that Burcham had specially created for him and felt perfectly at ease in the aircraft.

The visit with Kelly Johnson proved to be unsettling. First, he was so young, only thirty-three, and so self-assured. Bandfield sensed he was in the presence of a great man who wasn't too happy with him.

"Would I be too inquisitive, Colonel Bandfield, if I asked if you were following the progress on jet engine development?"

Uh-oh, Bandfield thought, he's heard about McNaughton's problems.

"Not at all. I've been briefed on as much as we know about the German developments. We know that the British have flown an experimental jet, not a fighter. And as you probably know, we've been doing some work on it, too."

Johnson was quiet-spoken, taciturn, but determined.

"Let me show you a few drawings."

He turned the pages of a sketch pad showing a very clean, low-wing single-engine aircraft, air intakes tucked on the side of its nose, jet exhausting from the tail.

"We'd like to get in the jet business, Colonel. General Caldwell hasn't been very encouraging. He says he needs the P-38s and the bombers we make too badly to let us try."

In the end, Bandfield said that he'd press Lockheed's case with Caldwell. He left confident that if the McNaughton jet did fail, Johnson was clearly a man to be depended on to deliver a jet from Lockheed on time.

*

Stockholm/April 13, 1943

It was truly a world at war. Distant countries as unthreatened—and unthreatening—as Bolivia, Ethiopia, and Iraq had declared war on Germany. In Sweden, the mood was shifting. The German invasion that loomed so large in its thinking in 1940 no longer seemed so imminent, but a balanced decision still had to be made: did Sweden wish to be surrounded by German-or Russian-controlled land? The truth was neither; the unspoken best solution for Sweden was an endless conflict in which both countries bled themselves to death, buying plenty of war materiel in the process.

On the surface, Sweden still danced to Germany's tune. More than 10 percent of Swedish rail traffic was employed in transporting German troops and materiel, and Swedish naval vessels escorted German ships through coastal waters. In the previous March, six hundred thousand tons of Swedish ore had been funneled into German blast furnaces, and dozens of Swedish "fishing" ships had been sold to serve as German minesweepers. Most blatant of all, Swedish vessels under contract served as tankers to fuel German U-boats.

Yet Lyra sensed the fundamental change in Swedish attitude toward Germans as soon as she arrived. Helmut's rank and Knight's Cross had entitled him to fly on the previous day's German courier plane. She had been fortunate to be able to get a seat on the Swedish airline Aerotransport's silvery Junkers Ju 52
Vikingaland.
When they landed at Bromma Airport, she found that the porters were their normal eager selves with the few Swedish passengers but ignored the Germans. The same applied to everyone, from the hat-doffing doorman to the surly taxi drivers. And where in the past the customs officials had been courteous to the point of negligence in their inspections of papers and baggage, they now acted like Gestapo agents.

It was true in the restaurants as well; service was now slow and surly, even worse if a foreigner from an Allied country was sitting nearby.