Eagles at War (41 page)

"Roger. We duplicated it on a test this morning, just slid an O-ring on the pitot tube of a production test-flight plane. It only works in the higher speed ranges, but at the top end it caused the airspeed indicator to read fifty miles an hour faster."

"How come no one caught it?"

"I don't know—just too inconspicuous. It's probably a manufacturing defect from tooling, probably came from some new manufacturer. It's the kind of thing no one would catch unless they were looking for it specifically."

This was a perfect answer to satisfy Truman, an oddball test procedure anomaly, the sort of thing that happened in the rush of wartime business. It didn't excuse the Sidewinder for being slow, but it removed any appearance of fraud.

"Well, let's get a tech bulletin out to the field to see how widespread the problem is—and to check all the parts in stock. By God, Hadley, you're all right. I owe you one for this."

Hadley's pleasure in his find was transparent. He ran his hand through his crew-cut hair and said, "Yeah, and for a bunch of other stuff, too. How about taking me off this godforsaken Operation Leapfrog and putting me on the jet program? We've done about all the damage we can do with the Leapfrog—we're not going to get anything out of it, not in this life."

Caldwell was feeling expansive.

"Take your pick, Hadley. You want to go to Lockheed or work here with McNaughton?"

"To be honest, I'd rather go with Lockheed. But they're too sophisticated for me—I'd be out of my depth trying to keep up with Kelly Johnson. They need me here. Let me work with McNaughton."

"You're on."

*

Over Germany/April 24, 1944

Desperate with fear, the Mustang pilot ducked his head down, locked his left arm around the stick and with his right hand pulled the emergency canopy release. The canopy scooped away with a wild rush of wind that jerked his helmet and oxygen mask off and away, whipping red welts across his face and neck with the radio cords. He switched arms, grunting to keep the stick against his belly, and with his left hand first threw the gear lever down and then rolled the elevator trim full aft. The gear doors twisted away, but the plane shuddered and slowed with the increased drag. With the inert reluctance of a boulder slowly being levered from the ground, the Mustang's nose edged toward the horizon, beginning to break the breathless plunge toward the green German earth. It would be very close.

There was nothing more he could do. As the G forces lessened, his vision began to clear. There was a blur of trees ahead, then a town, thatched roofs, a stone steeple, everything growing level, he was going to make it. The nose passed through the horizon and began to rise. With trembling hands he rolled in forward trim and tried to retract the gear. A grinding shudder told him that the gear hadn't come all the way up. Glancing out, the wrinkled upper surface of the wing betrayed the force of the pullout.

The Mustang yawed insistently to the left, and his leg already ached from the full-strength press on the right rudder pedal, skidding the nose to point roughly to the west. Only nine months before a flight school instructor had been screaming at him, "Fly the goddamn airplane, don't let it fly you." He was just barely flying it now, it was screaming to let go and crash; throttling back to save fuel, he felt the creaking warnings of the wind that to go any slower he'd stall and spin forever into the German earth. Panic clawed at his throat—could he nurse this wreck across the Channel, a sitting duck for any flak or fighters?

His instruments spun in a crazy frenzy, the compass points passing in dizzy succession, the artificial horizon tumbling over and over. Only the elusive sun, slipping through the building cumulus, hinted that if he could stay aloft he'd find England.

Damn good thing the jet left—I'd be cold meat, he thought.

The jet had
not
left.
Oberst
Helmut Josten crouched like a hungry lion in the seat of a preproduction 262 just issued to the operational test unit. Now nicknamed the "Turbo," the 262 had for months been the single last hope for the Luftwaffe and Germany, the one instrument that might restore air superiority. Once he had dreamed of leading hundreds of 262s into battle—now he was resigned to working within the jumbled bureaucratic system, aware that no matter what happened, it was too late. Josten was weary. He had drunk too much last night, but there had been eggs and white bread for breakfast, with some unbelievable real coffee, captured months ago in Africa from the Americans. The bombers going down had raised his spirits. Now he had only to deal with this cripple.

God, he thought, when the Turbo is right, it is wonderful. The jet was silkily responsive to his touch, the radical new engines purring, a thin trail of black smoke tracing his progress. Josten felt again the long lost sense of command, fluid and powerful, so different than the crawling anxiety that seized him before making an attack in the old piston-engine 109s. It was like fighting against Poland again, or against France, flying invincible equipment against junk.

Josten's shallow curving dive brought him in level with the battered Mustang, three hundred meters to its left rear. But what's the point? he thought. Nothing had gone right since the week before the Ploesti fiasco. Things had grown even worse with the shattering raid on Regensburg-Pruefening. The precious turbine blades, the jigs, and the tooling had all been destroyed. Ironically, so had the recalcitrant Messerschmitt and Junkers managers, along with Fritz, all dying when American bombs had pulverized the "exclusive" company bunker. Kurt Weigand had emerged from the ruins, physically unhurt but with his nerves shot. In the employees' bunker, the old woman had been killed, but he and Hafner had survived. For what, he wondered?

The 262 program was still stumbling along; as Hafner had predicted, there were still no planes coming off the Messerschmitt production lines. The war was clearly lost. Now he was just hoping to survive to reconcile with Lyra. If there were no war, no politics, it might happen.

Low on fuel, Josten knew that he had no time to waste. He couldn't make it back to Augsburg. He'd have to land at Muenster-Handorf or Vokel—he could get J2 fuel at either place. He searched the sky above him. With marauding American fighters everywhere it was deadly dangerous to be low and slow, but he wanted to revenge himself on this spoiler. He eased his throttles forward, letting the 262 accelerate slowly. The Mustang grew in size. He had not seen one up close before. Pictures had shown it to be a pretty airplane, but this was a Flying Dutchman, a derelict twisted out of alignment, its left landing gear halfway extended like a broken-legged stork. Something—a gear door, probably—was stuck in the horizontal stabilizer like a cleaver in a round of cheese. The canopy was gone, and the pilot was leaning forward to avoid the wind blast.

Mechanically, Josten checked to see that his guns were armed. This wouldn't take long.

Lyra's last letter had started with similar words—"This won't take long." But it had, four pages of a bittersweet mixture of love and hate. She said as much, that she once loved him, he had changed, that he'd lost the humane quality that had attracted her. "You don't feel anything anymore—you've grown to be like Hafner."

There was some truth in it. The war turned everyone into Hafners. But he still had feelings. He knew how that poor bastard in the crippled Mustang felt, trying to keep his airplane flying, worrying about running into flak or fighters. Why doesn't he look around?

He closed the range, approaching from the left at a twenty-degree angle, dropping flaps so that he could stay behind the Mustang, now flying erratically at about three hundred kilometers per hour. The black and white checkerboard nose of the shiny silver fighter was streaked with oil and exhaust stains. He let the Mustang fill his sights. He could see the pilot, bare-headed, hunched down in the seat, probably pissing in his pants with terror. Just a press of the button, and it would be over.

The American swiveled his neck to the left. The 262 was in so close that he could see underslung jets, the cordite stains around the cannon apertures, the greasy stream of exhaust behind it. Instinctively he'd started to bank into the assailant, then stopped, knowing that if he reefed the airplane around it would stall and he'd spin in. This is it, he thought. At least I'll see it coming.

Josten remembered the August day in Russia when the tough I-16 pilot had forced him to bail out, then come back to shoot him in his parachute harness. The poor bastard is barely flying—he has just got to sit there and take it. I know how he feels. Josten slid level with the Mustang, staring into the pilot's face.

"Damnit, Lyra, I
do
feel."

A sudden blinding apprehension hit him, he was vulnerable, low and slow, and there were enemies about. Without a smile or a wave, he slid back, framed the Mustang in his sights and fired the cannon. The shells tore the cockpit apart, set the engine spinning off to the right, the wings folding together before fluttering down. The aft portion of the fuselage broke away flaming. Within the debris the dead pilot fell toward the earth.

Josten smoothly applied power to the two jet engines, soaring effortlessly up and away, sorry for the American. He whispered to himself again, "Damnit, Lyra, I
do
feel."

***

Chapter 12

Omaha Beach/June 12, 1944

Dead men make you feel small, and young dead men smaller still. Henry Caldwell shrank within his brown leather A-2 jacket as he surveyed the only sign of order on the beach, bodies stacked like cordwood in two piles. The American dead were covered with tarpaulins, waiting to make the journey back across the Channel. The Germans lay in stiff embraces in the open, slated for a temporary mass grave scooped out by a bulldozer.

Omaha Beach looked as malevolent as a Salvador Dali painting of an exploding junkyard. The receding tide had bared Rommel's landing obstacles, one triumphantly impaling a derelict LST, the others monuments to the folly of defense without air cover. Like sunken Civil War monitors, the already rusted turrets of foundered tanks poked out, the guns streaming Vs of seaweed. Caldwell wondered if the bodies had been recovered from them yet and had a quick mental image of the poor drowned souls, arms outstretched, blindly bumping about with the tide inside the tanks' dark interiors. A landing craft had rammed a coil of barbed wire into a right angle running from the sea to the beach, changing it from a barrier to a seine for flotsam, snagging rubber rafts, disintegrating boxes, and bits of clothing. The very air was corrupt with the rank odor of war, a nauseating mix of spilled oil, cordite, and burning rubber that even the rolling green sea could not clean. Firing was still steady inland, but the sounds were blotted out by the exhaust-barking trucks lumbering by, stuffing ever more men and materiel on the beach.

He felt a tug on his arm and turned to see Hap Arnold beaming at him.

"By God, Henry, who would have believed something like this back in 1939? Here, have something to eat."

Arnold pulled him aside, handing him a can of K-rations. Just ahead, Eisenhower was proudly showing General Marshall and Admiral King around what he was referring to as "my little realm," the inner core of the hard-won perimeter of land edging out past the bluffs of Omaha Beach.

"We wouldn't be here, Hap, if you hadn't made things happen."

"You mean if I hadn't let you make things happen. Look up there."

Arnold pointed with his mess spoon to the steady stream of Allied aircraft heading for the front. "There's not a goddamn Kraut plane in the sky, Henry, and it stems directly from your hard work in the lean years. I want you to know that I just finished telling Ike that."

His next words were lost in the sharp whistle and crack of shell fire. Water spouts erupted one hundred yards off Mulberry "A," the floating concrete dock where the U. S. S.
Thompson,
the destroyer in which the little group of leaders had crossed the Channel, was tied up-Looking pleased to be under fire, Hap said, "That's Jerry's twelve o'clock allotment—there's an eighty-eight battery that fires off five rounds every hour on the hour—must be low on ammunition." "I'll bet their commanders eat their hearts out when they see our materiel. Did you see the crummy clothes on those dead Germans? Their boots were made out of some kind of cardboard! But their equipment looked good. Better sidearms than we have." "Yeah, it's a good thing they're short of everything now."

Caldwell nodded, mentally thanking God that the Germans were short of jet fighters! It would have been a far different war if the Luftwaffe had had a few hundred jets to put over the battlefield.

*

London/June 18, 1944

It was absolute hell being away from Elsie this long. The loneliness stoked his recurring depression. He had never been so mesmerized, so enchanted by a woman before. The longer they were together the more intense it became, a yearning offset only by Arnold's warm praise. Maybe all the crazy gambles he'd taken—and was still taking—were worthwhile. He stood gazing out the window toward the Guard's Chapel, gnashing his teeth in frustration as he caught his breath from the fast ten-block walk from his hotel. Now, for the third time that day, he was being kept waiting to talk to some Deputy Twit.

The Wellington Barracks office was the typical dignified anthill of wartime Great Britain—dozens of shabby desks crowded into an area where one glorious desk had once stood in solitary splendor, ashtrays filled to overflowing, tin trays of smudged teacups littering the floor. The acrid tobacco smoke was like a whiplash to his lungs, causing him to salivate in a fit of nicotine hunger. In New Orleans, Elsie had made him promise to quit smoking. It was tough, but she had insisted, and he always gave in to her.

The huge walnut double doors leading into the Deputy Minister's office were open for the stream of smartly uniformed young officers running in and out with sheaves of multicolored paper in their hands, each one nodding to Caldwell as he shot by, as if to say, "What I'm doing is obviously more important than what you are here for."