by Noel Hynd
“If I had hit it, you wouldn’t have had to ask, brother.”
“What’s the safe clearance?”
“Between six inches and twenty-four feet.”
Taylor looked down as they passed over it.
“Great. Damn. Are those skid marks on the roof?”
“Most likely.”
“Goddamn!” said Glenn Taylor. Taylor started to laugh. “You know in ‘45 after the fighting stopped, I flew over the Himalayas a few times and didn’t come that close.”
“Smart of you.”
“I thought so.”
“I’m falling fucking asleep,” Lafferty said. “Want to take the controls while I snooze?”
“Sure. Why not?”
“Stay in the corridor. If we stray over Red territory there could be trouble. They send Yaks up sometimes. We don’t need it.”
“Yeah, sure. I’ve heard,” said Taylor. “Still got any smokes?”
“Always,” Lafferty said, handing over another half-pack. “There’s always a couple of packs that fall out of cargo, you know?”
“Got it.”
They flew for more than an hour in a freezing, droning aircraft over Soviet airspace, Taylor navigating one small morning thunderstorm and two ferocious wind shears, one each on the front end and back end of the squall. Happy to be in the air again, wide awake, it was all in a night’s work.
Soviet air traffic control was silent over Soviet-occupied territory. The next radio voice they heard was in English from the Western Zone, but it was unwelcome. USAF air traffic control had diverted their flight to Wiesbaden, the American base twenty-five miles further. A few minutes later, the sky turned pale pink with the beckoning dawn. Awake again, Lafferty tried to protest but ground control was hearing none of it.
Exhausted, both now nearly broken with cold and fatigue, they finally set down their Gooney Bird in Wiesbaden as dawn turned the tarmac pink. They stepped out and found themselves facing another colonel, another base commander.
“Welcome, men!” was the first thing the young pilots heard from Air Force Col. Bertram C. Harrison, commander of the 60th Troop Carrier Group. Harrison had a wide smile. “See any goddamn Reds up there?”
“Didn’t see anyone except my co-pilot, sir,” Lafferty said.
Nutsy Taylor kept quiet for a moment.
“No Yaks?” the colonel asked.
“None,” Lafferty affirmed.
“You? New guy, you seen any Russians?”
“Zero Yaks, sir. Just the right number.”
A pause from Colonel Harrison, then, “You guys know what you just did? Didn’t you get a briefing?”
“No. They just sent us to Tempelhof from Rhein-Main at twenty-two hundred last night.”
“You should have been briefed. The Soviets said they’d shoot down anything that flew through that center corridor.”
The two flyers looked at each other.
“Maybe the T-storm kept the Reds home in bed,” Taylor said.
The colonel looked them back and forth, then beamed again. He shook the hands of both men. “Well, congratulations again! In case you’re unaware, you just successfully flew the first mission of the Berlin Airlift!”
It took two days of sleep before Lafferty understood what his commander had been talking about. Glenn Taylor, on the other hand, wrote home immediately.
Chapter 18
Cambridge – June 1948
They met at the reserved table at The Hero of the Thames the following Sunday evening at seven, Bill and Laura Cochrane and Irv Goff, their mutual friend from the American intelligence community in New York and Washington.
Cochrane had not seen Irv in five years, not since Goff had gone a separate route at the end of an operation in Switzerland and Italy and had returned to North Africa where he remained busy fighting Nazis until the war ended. Wisely, Bill and Laura had left their daughter in the care of Victoria that evening.
Bill and Laura arrived early and seated themselves, Bill carefully taking the chair with the view and seating Laura on his left, the position affording the second-best view of the room. Goff arrived punctually at seven-thirty, bearing a smile and gifts – flowers for Laura and a bottle of good Irish whisky for Cochrane.
Everyone was smiling. Goff gave Laura an embrace as both Cochranes stood to greet him. The two men exchanged a sturdy handshake. From the corner of his eye, Cochrane could see Edward at the bar. The barman was chipping a new block of ice with a six-inch pick and was keeping an eye on Cochrane and the visitor.
American intelligence had undergone an overhaul since the end of the World War. There were those who disputed whether a democracy needed a foreign intelligence service in peacetime and felt that one should not be established. On the other extreme were those such as J. Edgar Hoover who had directed U.S. domestic counterintelligence during the war and now wanted to bring foreign intelligence-gathering under FBI control.
The situation was fluid, made more so by President Truman, who saw OSS chief William Donovan as a political rival and had no inclination to keep him in a top government post. The OSS had been abolished in 1945. Its intelligence-gathering role had been taken over by the Department of State while its analysis section went to the War Department. The latter dissolved into the Department of Defense in September of 1947.
Donovan had hoped to set up a united intelligence service, submitted a plan to Truman, and had the plan rejected quickly — most likely because it had his name on it. So now things were vague in addition to being fluid. And they were all part of the grand accumulation of circumstances that led to Irv Goff being seated in front of Bill and Laura Cochrane at a cozy pub in Cambridge.
“Hello, Irv,” Laura said to Goff.
“Hello, Laura,” Goff said. “You keep looking younger. Don’t know how you do it. Must be the company you keep.” Then, turning to Cochrane, “You don’t look so bad either, you old goat,” he said. “Dulles tells me you’re not only bulletproof but on a sabbatical. Dulles must be right.”
“Dulles is always right except when he’s mistaken,” Cochrane said.
“Ha!” Goff said. “I might have some brawn, Laura,” Goff said, preparing to sit, “but Bill here has the brains. We all know that. For a secret smart-ass, he’s pretty damned brilliant.”
“Do tell,” Laura said, settling back into her seat. The men sat after she was comfortable. Helen, the barmaid, passed by immediately. Within another two minutes, everyone had a glass of Scotch going and had placed orders for food.
Laura had mixed reactions to Irv. She wasn’t keen on his left-wing politics, but he was a trustworthy friend and she admired that. On the other hand, he was always putting her husband in danger. Someday, she feared, Irv Goff would get Bill killed. Such was her deepest dread. Then again, he hadn’t even gotten himself killed yet
“You ever hear from that girl that you rescued in 1943?” Goff asked Cochrane after several minutes of small talk. “You don’t mind me asking, do you?”
“I don’t mind at all and I heard she’s doing well.”
“Fascinating. Who do you hear from?”
“Bill Donovan. Do I hear directly from Frieda? No. And there’s no official reason why I would.”
“Just asking,” Irv said. “Impressive young lady. I’m glad it turned out okay.”
“We all are,” Cochrane said.
There was a silence at the table. Goff’s eyes traveled the room via a sideways glance. “Who’s the little geek with the wire glasses and the pseudo-Lenin cap?” Goff asked.
“His name is Egon,” Cochrane said without looking. “A local pest to be indulged. He was the previous tenant of our current landlady here in Cambridge. He stole a painting from her.”
Goff grinned. “So in addition to being a loudmouth, he’s also a thief?” Goff laughed.
“That’s never a good mix.”
“It’s something I intend to look into,” Cochrane said. Then, he turned fully upon Goff and held him in a gaze. “All right, Irv,” he said
. “Something has come up or you wouldn’t be here. What is it?”
“Bill, we need you to go back to Berlin,” Goff said.
“Who is ‘we’?”
“Dulles. Donovan. Harry Truman. Jim Forrestal. The people who run things.”
“Why Berlin? Why now? I hear the place is about to explode.”
“The powers that be in Washington and at Foggy Bottom would like you to extricate a certain woman from the current hellhole. You have a certain delicate touch for that sort of thing.”
“Don’t flatter me, it won’t help. Who’s the woman?”
“An old friend of yours. The woman is Bettina Schneidhuber. She helped you, she helped us, in 1943 and -”
“I don’t need to be reminded,” Cochrane said.
Laura knew the name and the woman’s role in the success of Cochrane’s most recent visit to Berlin. Laura listened and said nothing.
“Do we know for sure that she’s still alive?” Cochrane asked. “I’ve often wondered.”
“We don’t know anything for sure.”
“Would she be in Soviet custody?”
“We don’t know anything for sure,” Goff said again. “There’s a file. Sketchy. One page. Three paragraphs. Mostly bullshit. Pardon my language, Laura.”
Laura sighed and found a moment’s solace in her Dewar’s.
“Where would I find this file?” Bill asked.
“Glad you asked,” Goff said. He reached to his inside jacket pocket and drew out an envelope. It was white, business-sized, and sealed. It bore the address of the United States Department of Defense in the top left corner, with the initials J.V.F. handwritten in blue ink above the gothic government lettering.
Cochrane accepted it, not convinced whether to move forward with or step back from Goff’s request. He set the envelope down on the table.
Irv’s gaze steadied upon him. “Bill, don’t be vulgar,” Goff said. “No good American turns down his country’s request in wartime. Open the damned thing.”
“It is no longer wartime, Irv,” Cochrane said with an edge, “and it is not the country’s request. More realistically it’s that of Allen Dulles or Bill Donovan. So let’s keep things clear from the beginning.”
“It’s always wartime, meatball,” Goff said, reaching for his pack of cigarettes and lighting another. “Listen, I carried this letter all the way from Washington for you. You should feel honored. Jim Forrestal pecked the contents out on his office typewriter. The contents aren’t even cleared for those cute typists he and Dulles always seem to find.”
Cochrane picked up the envelope and ripped it open. He read.
There was a cover note on top of the one-page status report. It made Cochrane blink. It was handwritten by the Secretary of Defense. Cochrane knew Forrestal via introductions that had led to further introductions during the war’s final weeks. Forrestal had even consulted with Cochrane over some financial developments in Germany and Austria after the fighting stopped in 1945. It was unspoken between the two men that Forrestal knew about Cochrane’s pursuit of a Nazi saboteur with the code name of Siegfried in the late 1930s, a would-be assassin who had targeted Roosevelt. Since Roosevelt had come out of New York State politics and had mentored Forrestal at one point, the Roosevelt-Cochrane-Forrestal relationship had a certain balance. If FDR owed his survival to Cochrane, then Forrestal owed his career to him, also.
The note was addressed to him personally by his first name. “Dear Bill,” it began. “My personal apologies for interrupting your much-deserved downtime in England, but we have an issue with which you may be able to help.”
Cochrane’s mind spun in many directions as he read. Forrestal was making a personal appeal to Cochrane and had used a trusted old friend, Irv Goff, as the messenger. That was significant. Cochrane processed a lot at once: Forrestal’s background, current position in the government, and access to President Truman.
The one-page status report didn’t say much. It gave Bettina Schneidhuber’s last known address in Berlin, the address where Cochrane had stayed while guiding a “person of importance” – Frieda Koehler — to a “destination of greater security.” It gave Frau Schneidhuber’s last known employment in Berlin in 1946, some sort of god-awful medical facility with a mortuary. The correspondence implied that she was still alive and strongly suggested that she was more than the sum of her parts, hence should be kept out of Soviet hands, at least if still alive. If this weren’t accurate, meaning if Bettina Schneidhuber was dead, confirmation of such would be appreciated as sort of a macabre consolation prize.
“Laura, why are you looking at me like that?” Goff asked in response to daggers that Laura, arms folded, was sending his way. Bill meanwhile was reading through the correspondence a second time.
“I fear you’ll get my husband killed someday. That’s why.”
Goff shrugged. “We all got to go sometime, Laura. We’re all on borrowed time.”
“That’s not the reassurance I was looking for, Irv.”
Cochrane’s attention rose from the truncated background page and interceded.
“All right. Let’s boil this down. You, or the powers that be, want me to go to Berlin, give my best efforts, see if I can find Frau Bettina Schneidhuber, and get her out of the area if possible. Or confirm that she’s dead. That’s it, that’s all, then I return?”
“That’s it, meatball. Should be a milk run. You either find her fast or you don’t. You find her, you scoop her up, bring her back to the Western Zone, or, if need be, to England.”
“What you’re really saying is keep her away from the Russians.”
“You could phrase it that way.”
“What if she doesn’t want to go?”
“You bring her anyway. Get it?”
Cochrane sighed and folded the letter away in his inside jacket pocket. Husband and wife exchanged a glance.
“How do I get to Berlin?
“You fly. Like a goose. There’s going to be an airlift, you know. Keep the Western Zone alive. More extension of rotten, capitalist, American influence, but I don’t make policy I just help it along, even if it’s ill-conceived and misbegotten, which most of it is.”
Before Cochrane or Laura could say anything else Irv added some details.
“I’ve recruited some special aviators. Pilots. You’ll like them. They’ll be part of your transport and backup team.”
“Do you think an airlift can succeed?”
“At pissing off Joe Stalin? Yeah, it will succeed at that. Feed Berlin and keep Berlin heated during the winter? Don’t be silly. They’re better off under Communism anyway.”
“Your opinion,” said Laura.
“That’s just looking out the window at the world today, Laura. Sorry but it is.”
“And how does my husband know that with your political orientation, Irv, you won’t be tipping off some of your Red friends about the operation?”
“That’s an obnoxious, insinuating question, Laura.”
“But it’s one that needs to be asked, so I asked it. And Bill is too much the gentleman to raise the question, so I did.”
“I hate to say it but it’s a valid question, Irv.”
“And the answer is that you know me well. I may have a worldview and a notion on world politics. Sure, I’m a lefty. Unlike some people, though, my loyalty to old friends aces everything else. If I had to shoot a Soviet colonel to protect you or Laura, I’d do it. I’d even shoot a few of them for you, meatball. And you know I would.”
“Why me?” Cochrane asked as the food arrived at their table and as they began to eat.
“You’re probably the only one in our entire service who would recognize Bettina Schneidhuber, again assuming she’s alive.”
“You wouldn’t?”
“Never met the woman in my life,” Goff said. “And I probably never will. Look, Bill. The eye-to-eye recognition is crucial. The Soviets use moles and assume identities these days.”
“I’ve heard the stories,” Cochrane
answered.
“Of course, who knows what she looks like now,” Goff continued. “The German ladies didn’t get treated too well when the Russian soldier boys came to town. We all know what went on. Pretty revolting if you ask me.”
Bill looked at Laura in exasperation. She returned the look.
Cochrane turned back to Goff. “Irv, do me one favor,” he said.
“Sure.”
“Don’t say another damned word till we finish dinner and we’re out on the street. Or until I tell you that you may speak again. Understand?”
Goff fell silent with a nod. They finished their meal without speaking.
Chapter 19
Cambridge – June 1948
Tempers cooled over the next half-hour. Goff picked up the dinner bill, still didn’t say anything, and Cochrane broke the silence by thanking him. They were then back out on King Street walking westward town the university center. The June night was balmy and the streets were filled with students.
“So what’s it going to be, meatball?” Goff finally asked, putting out one of his cigarettes against the outer wall of a sixteenth-century building. “Do we take the next step or do I get back to Secretary Forrestal and tell him that you went belly up on us?”
“For this evening, you do neither,” Cochrane said. “I’m inclined to turn you down flat, something I would take great glee in doing. But I want a night to think it over.”
“I’m at the Regent Hotel.” He pointed up ahead. “You can probably see it from here. Phone me tomorrow before noon. I’ll need to phone the U.S. embassy in London to relay your response. They’ll phone Washington and let Secretary Forrestal know whether we have an agent or not. Keep in mind that without you, we’ll just have to leave this poor Bettina Schneidhuber woman to her fate. So let me know.”
After a pause, Goff gave Laura a polite embrace. Then he turned back to Cochrane. “Oh, and listen,” he said. “Here are a couple of background documents on postwar in the Eastern Sector. Not long, not overly complicated. Maybe another five minutes of reading. Might help you frame your response, okay?”
Goff handed a second envelope to Cochrane. Not for a moment did Cochrane flirt with the idea that Goff had almost forgotten to turn it over to him. It was all part of the pitch and all three of them knew it.