Ruddick was dressed in an expensive pinstripe suit. Bandfield had never seen a shirt like the one he was wearing; it had a white collar and long French cuffs, but the rest of the shirt was a deep blue. He didn't like it, but he knew it had to be expensive. Everything about Ruddick seemed expensive—especially his goodwill.
"So here's our elusive Colonel Bandfield. You know, Colonel"—it sounded like Cunnel—"when I call a military officer in, even a four-star general, they're usually pretty prompt."
"Sorry, sir. I was tied up with some business on the Berlin Airlift."
"A good answer, Colonel. Not true, but a good answer. But I've got some questions I want to ask you."
"About integration?"
"Yes, but later. Right now I want to ask you for a favor. You flew in. the Cleveland air races, I believe?"
"A long time ago." He didn't even like to think that it was sixteen years before.
"Well, a firm is modifying two McNaughton Sidewinders into racing planes. My son is supposed to fly one of them in the Thompson Trophy race at Cleveland."
"This year?"
"No, they won't be ready by September, they're shooting for 1949. Sometime between now and then, I'd like you to go out to Nashville and look at the racer. Then fly with my son and see if he has the skill to handle it."
"I'm sure General Varney will give me time to do that. But your son is probably qualified—you told me he flew McNaughtons during the war, didn't you?"
"Yes, but these are going to be highly modified. Frankly, they scare me. I'd like you to take a look. Now, tell me what you learned about integration."
Bandfield looked down and scuffed his foot on the thin carpet. "Mr. Ruddick, you're not going to like what I have to say. I talked to a lot of people around the country. I talked to Colonel Johnson at Lockbourne. It looks to me like the service is making a big mistake with segregation. We're missing out on a lot of talent, and spending a lot of money doing it."
"Well, it's a moot point. In ten days, the President is going to sign an executive order that will force integration in the services. So all this doesn't sound too bad to me; I don't mind those findings at all."
Varney looked relieved as Bandfield went on. "Yes, but I also found out that you're lying through your teeth when you say you don't oppose integration personally. You had my friend, John Marshall, fired at McNaughton, just because he was a Negro!"
Varney jumped in. "Colonel Bandfield, you're out of line." He turned to Ruddick. "I'm sorry, sir, I had no idea this would happen."
Not accustomed to sharp talk from subordinates, Ruddick stepped forward in anger, fists balled, then stopped to compose himself. After a teeth-clenched moment he grunted, "I'm sure you didn't, General. This is outrageous, and it makes me wonder if Colonel Bandfield has the good judgment required to fly Air Force aircraft. I'm going to have to look into this matter."
Bandfield strode toward the office door; then on impulse he turned around, to ask, "Does this mean you don't want me to go to Nashville and fly with your son?"
Varney shot toward him bellowing, "This is no joking matter, Bandfield. You shut up before I shut you up!"
*
Washington, D.C./July 23, 1948
The men who'd slaved under him in the China-Burma-India theater called him "Larry the Lash." Now Lawrence Gunter sat at his Pentagon desk, face flushed with anger, yelling, "Don't tell me he's under house arrest! Tell me you'll have him in my office in an hour. You understand, one goddamn hour!" He slammed the receiver down, cracking the black plastic.
The morning had gone well until now; his long-awaited appointment as commander of the Berlin Airlift had finally come through. Major General Gunter, with his patented combination of begging and threatening, had just finished wringing twenty of the best people in the Air Force out of personnel for Operation Vittles. But now he'd been told that the one man he wanted most was under house arrest at nearby Boiling Air Force Base, and "might not be available."
While he waited, Gunter reviewed the facts. The Russians, rattling tanks instead of swords, had clamped a blockade around Berlin on June 23rd, knowing that the United States didn't have the military power to prevent it. The United States had hung tough. On June 26th, aircraft under the command of Lieutenant General Curtis LeMay began airlifting food and coal packed in GI duffle bags into the beleaguered city of more than two million people. The "LeMay Coal and Feed Company" was doing a good job, using twin-engine Douglas C-47s to airlift as much as a thousand tons a day, and America was responding with pride.
LeMay was the combat commander who had burned Japan to the ground, but Gunter was a master of airlift, his training gained flying the Himalayan Hump. Gunter—and the men he'd just chosen—had more airlift experience than any other group in the world.
The papers on Gunter's desk were filled with the excitement of LeMay's efforts—the hustle and bustle at the terminals, aircraft lined up waiting to be loaded, tired crews staggering out for yet another flight, and maintenance doing miracles on the flight line. Twenty-four hours a day, long lines of C-47s and a few of the larger, more efficient C-54s passed through the crowded aerial corridor to Berlin, stacking up to orbit in great columns of traffic before letting down to land. And each day, the tonnage being lifted rose.
It made wonderful reading—and it was all wrong. Gunter knew that there shouldn't be any airplanes parked—they should either be in the air or in maintenance. The crews shouldn't be tired—they should be flying or resting. And there shouldn't be a stack of orbiting traffic; instead, the stream of aircraft should be regulated like a conveyor belt, moving at equal speeds, precisely spaced, and never deviating from standard procedures. If a plane had a problem, or got sent around for weather, it should simply plod back to the point of origin to rejoin the stream in a never-ending process flow. Gunter knew that you had a good airlift—and the airlift over the Hump had been the best—when it became a boring operation to watch.
The door opened and Bear Riley marched in.
"Captain Bayard Riley, reporting as ordered, sir."
"Sit down, Bear. At least they don't have you handcuffed and in solitary. What's going on?"
Riley relaxed. "I'm really glad to see you, General. This time I got in trouble just following orders. I had a job straight from General Varney to check out the various air forces in the Middle East. He got me duty with the Israelis—it was a hell of an experience."
"Why are you under arrest? I didn't make any calls yet because I wanted to hear the story from you."
"You must know Assistant Secretary of Defense Ruddick?"
"Sure, a treacherous bastard. A real cracker, but a powerhouse, he virtually runs the department. Christ, I hope you didn't get on his shit list; he's snake-mean and hard as a nightstick."
"That's it. He got me in the room alone with the Secretary of the Air Force and the Chief of Staff and chewed us all new assholes."
"What for? What did Symington and Vandenberg have to say? A cherry-assed captain like you might have to put up with that, but they don't."
"Well, they by-God did. Vandenberg was in a brace, and every-time Symington would start his smooth talking, Ruddick would yell 'Shut up, Stuf and up he would shut!"
"Spit it out, man. What the hell did you do? Knock up some A-rab's daughter or what?"
"It seems Ruddick's got something against the Israelis—he was yelling about them controlling the press and the films, and God knows what all. He said we shouldn't be helping them, we should be helping the Arabs because the Arabs have all the oil."
"Didn't he know you were under orders?"
"Sure, but he said we just tried and killed a whole bunch of Nazis at Nuremberg who were only obeying orders. He said I was a murderer, just because I shot down some Egyptian planes."
"Jesus. Doesn't he know that we're always looking for information like this? Hell, look at the Eagle Squadron. That was as much a training exercise for us as it was help for Britain."
"We tried that argument, but it backfired
. Symington told him about our buddy Bandfield, flying for the Loyalists in Spain, then going on to be an ace for us during the war. I thought Ruddick was going to go through the fucking roof! He must know Bandfield from somewhere because he started yelling about getting that 'nigger-loving SOB.' "
"He must be going nuts."
"Yeah, but it turned out that the thing on Bandfield saved my ass. Ruddick damn near had a stroke, and sort of forgot about me for a while. And I just got word from the chief that Ruddick is cooling down, and that there won't be any court-martial."
Gunter smiled for the first time.
"Good, because have I got a job for you!"
***
Chapter 3
Berlin, Germany/May 13, 1949
"Let me remind you, Captain, that I did some extra-legal things for you."
"Helmut, you don't have to remind me. I'll never forget, no matter how much time I spend in Leavenworth."
Josten fumed as Riley told himself that it was better to be working for Gunter than being in some guardhouse back in the States. He'd arrived in Germany eager to wallow in the fleshpots of Europe and raring to do whatever buccaneering task Gunter wanted done—as long as he didn't have to cross Milo Ruddick again.
Of course, he'd not seen or spoken to the general himself since his arrival. His orders came down via a variety of adjutants, who simply handed him a sealed envelope. Inside, on a plain sheet of paper, would be a typewritten directive, undated, unsigned. At first they rained down, and Riley was in his element, bribing friend and foe alike to get the labor and materials that were unavailable through official channels. It was a basic market economy, where cigarettes, chocolate, gasoline, and coffee did well and U.S. dollars did marvels. The jokes at home were always about nylons and Frauleins, but little trading was done with hosiery except on a very interpersonal basis. For the bigger jobs, Riley used U.S. currency, though coffee would do. And someone in Gunter's office saw to it that he always had plenty of each to trade with.
No one in Europe had really known what would be needed for an airlift of this size. Before Gunter appeared on the scene, they were proud to be lifting 1,500 tons a day; by early September, Gunter's systematic efforts had raised it to 7,000 tons a day. Now there was no quota—it was just fly all you could, and they were dumping in close to 10,000 tons a day, 40 percent more than Berlin had received via road and rail before the blockade.
But the initial steep rise in tonnage had outstripped even the American resources, and it took all of Riley's piratical skills to keep the huge mechanism of the airlift lubricated. Of the many jobs Gunter had given Riley, two stood out in his mind, both had been with Josten, and one of them could never be admitted.
The first was probably the most important—against all the current rules and regulations banning fraternization, he'd found eighty badly needed German mechanics to work on the flight line. The men had been recruited by the same man now upbraiding him, a horribly disfigured ex-Luftwaffe colonel, Helmut Josten. Josten had barely survived a crash in a jet fighter at the end of the war, and he was now a free-booter on the black market. Riley hadn't asked any questions about his past, and Josten had come up with some of the best mechanics Riley had ever seen, hardened Luftwaffe veterans who were hungry for work. Later, of course, the prohibitions against use of German labor would be lifted, but at the time it was a major contravention of Occupation regulations.
Riley had been dismissive of Josten when they'd first met, thinking that he was just another one of the unlikable lot of defeated but unapologetic German officers. But early on, they had a minor disagreement about how Josten would pay the German workers he'd rounded up. Riley had been insisting on doing things his way when Josten had bristled, suddenly every inch a Luftwaffe colonel, staring at him with his lips pulled back in a death's head rictus of anger. Riley had quickly agreed to his proposal.
It was impossible, really, to like the man; coldly distant, he refused to talk about the war, except when Riley drew him out on Luftwaffe aircraft. Then he glowed with a vindictive pleasure, telling Riley how superior the German jets had been. In one argument they'd almost come to blows.
"The Messerschmitt Me 262 was the finest plane of the war. We could have had hundreds of them in 1943, if they had listened to me. And if we had had them, the war would have had a very different outcome, believe me."
"Yeah, we would have A-bombed Berlin instead of Hiroshima."
Josten did not speak to him for a few days, then, in an obvious attempt to make up, had brought in a photo taken in Sweden in 1944. It showed Josten, in civilian clothes, a beautiful black-haired woman, and their baby.
"My son, Ulrich, and my wife, the former Countess Gortchakov. Isn't she beautiful?"
"Very. Is she in Berlin with you?"
"My wounds caused us to be temporarily separated. She is waiting for me to join her."
After that, Riley had tried to like Josten, but it wasn't easy, for his manner was as scarred as his face. When he smiled, his lips pulled back over his teeth in a mirthless grin that frightened even the omnipresent begging German children, long inured to wounded soldiers. Painfully thin and stoop-shouldered, he walked slowly, with a sidling, crablike gait. Thinning white hair framed a cadaverous oval face, and the bony ridges over his dark eyes cast shadows over his skull-hollow cheeks. Even dressed in his ill-fitting old army clothes, Josten was grimly impressive.
He had also helped Riley with the second, far more dangerous task, a totally illegal mission. The continuous rise in tonnage had made it necessary to open a new airport in November, at Tegel. A runway was made in record time with the brick debris created by Allied bombers from Berlin buildings only three years before. Although it was an important addition to the airlift, cutting the transit time down appreciably, it was dangerously flawed by a two-hundred-foot radio tower sticking directly up into the approach path to the runway, a hazard at any time, but a deadly menace to navigation in bad weather. The tower was in the French zone, but the radio station itself was operated by the Russians, who naturally refused to permit the tower to be relocated. Riley made an agreement with Josten—one C-54 load of coffee and a favor to be defined in the future—and the tower was mysteriously blown up. The Russians had raised holy hell, accusing the Americans and the French of an act of war, but they couldn't prove anything. The Germans enjoyed it immensely.
No one even noticed that the ten-fhousand-pound cargo of coffee was missing, for the paperwork at every level had been well-managed. But Gunter must have been spooked by the furor that followed the explosion, for Riley hadn't heard from him since.
Instead, he had been flying the Rhein-Main-to-Tempelhof run seven days a week. It would have driven him crazy if it weren't so amusing to monitor the universal hobby of the occupying forces, the exchange of German antiques, silver, art, and jewelry for American, French, and British food. Sometimes, he wondered if there could still be another cuckoo clock left in Germany, but there always was. A friend of his in Army counter-intelligence had tipped him off that his German colleague, Josten, was a principal in the process, specializing in the transfer of art works. And now he'd asked for his favor.
*
En route to Tempelhof/May 28, 1949
The four-engined transport groaned and wallowed in the sky, sluggish from its ten-ton load of macaroni. It was his last trip and Riley was restive, the boredom hanging in the cockpit as thick as the rank sweat from their unwashed flight suits. It had been better before, when Gunter was still using his special talents.
He called, "Air Force Six One Zero, Aschaeffenburg, six thousand," into his mike as the ADF needle swung over beacon—there was no reply, there never was if you were on course, on time, as you were supposed to be. As you'd damn well better be.
They were working him double on the last flight, making him give a line check. The new pilot, Major Don Wallston, had been pulled from his flourishing dental practice as reluctantly as a tooth from its socket to fly in the Berlin Airlift. A Rotary-club type who insisted
on being called "Wally," Wallston was a ham-handed pilot, always following the airplane like a bad actor taking directions from a prompter. He'd just banked too steeply to the left and was now overcorrecting to the right as he brought the C-54 back near the assigned heading of 057 degrees.
Riley raised his eyebrows in disgust and whispered to Sergeant Bonadies, the crew chief, "Just so the fucker averages out."
Riley's hands were in his lap, but his right knee forced the wheel up, stopping the turn, as his left leg applied a little back pressure to the control column to ease them back up to their assigned six-thousand-foot altitude. Wallston didn't notice, just as he hadn't noticed Bear subtly compensating for his ragged flight path ever since the takeoff at Rhein-Main. A good instructor, Riley always tried to keep the student's confidence level up.
Leaning back to talk to the crew chief, Riley asked, "How long we been doing this, Al?"
"Seems like forever, Captain."
It had been almost a year since Riley had been forced into the right seat of a C-54, the last place a fighter pilot wanted to be. But within a few weeks he'd gained enough experience to become first an aircraft commander and then an instructor pilot. For almost a year they had been making two or three trips a day in the dreary twenty-mile-wide corridor through Soviet-occupied territory. Three minutes ahead of them was another of the big Douglas transports; three minutes behind was yet another, part of an endless 170-miles-per-hour chain that supplied two million Berliners day and night. What had started out as a Soviet grab of the German capital had turned into a display of Allied generosity and technical capability. In classic American tradition, the Air Force had pulled itself together for this supreme effort, draining resources from everywhere, but putting on such a show that the Russians were now desperately seeking a face-saving way out.
"You're doing fine, Major; I can see I'm going to have to give you a thumbs-up on this one."
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