Air Force Eagles

by Walter J. Boyne

  *

  Santa Monica, California/September 25, 1952

  The telegram lay crumpled on the floor beside her. Saundra slowly sagged into a chair as its full import hit her. John had been missing since the 22nd, shot down in a dogfight.

  The message was infuriating—it didn't say what the circumstances of his loss were, what the chances were that he was alive, or when she would learn anything else.

  She began sobbing, bitterly aware that he wouldn't have received her letter, that he might have died thinking they were through.

  Her hands shaking, she went to the refrigerator where John had put a bottle of gin months before, poured a cold syrupy inch into a jelly glass and drank.

  Maybe he was a prisoner of war. He could have ejected and been captured. She wondered how the Koreans would treat a Negro.

  The telegram also said that the personal affairs officer from George Air Force Base would be getting in touch with her. Maybe he would know something.

  There was a knock at the door. Her heart leaped, for she knew it would be Fred Peterson. She wanted to see him desperately, to draw on his strength as she had always drawn on John's. And she knew that she must not, not now, not ever; as much as she like him—as much as she wanted him—it would now never be more than strictly business.

  *

  Nashville, Tennessee/September 27, 1952

  Elsie McNaughton walked naked down the crooked narrow aisle of Baker's trailer, swiveling her hips to move between cases of beer and chairs piled high with old clothes and cardboard boxes. The oil stove wasn't on, but the damp air hung heavy with the smell of kerosene, dirty laundry, and booze. They had just made love, but the deep sense—and scent—of his primal presence excited her again.

  "A pig wouldn't live here, Dick. Can't you clean up that bathroom sometime?"

  Baker rolled over on the bed tucked into the far end of his thirty-two-foot-long TravelKing.

  "Bring me a beer, sugarbaby, then you go clean it up. Do a good job, I'll be checking on you."

  It was the answer she expected—and wanted. Her excitement rose as she obediently complied. She hadn't done any housework of her own for years, but Baker's demands gave her a perverse pleasure.

  He was fat, none too clean, totally inconsiderate, and unquestionably dangerous. Yet beneath his crudity, Baker had a rollicking sense of humor; he had made her laugh more than any man in her life. When Troy was out of town, they occasionally went out to dinner or a movie. Then Baker was a different person, kind, considerate, gallant, even. But here in his own domain, their little "sex palace" as he called it, he played to her need for mastery, dominating her completely.

  As she swabbed the shower vigorously with Lysol, trying to make a dent in the mildew, she contrasted him to the fastidious Stan, so conscious of his manners, so immaculately clean, so anxious to please, so humorless. Baker stirred her, got her excited with just a phone call, and knew exactly what to do to satisfy her—if he chose to. Usually, he let her satisfy him first, then wait on him all day in a sustained heat, but before they parted he would make love to her with a powerful energy that left her totally fulfilled.

  She knew, too, that she loved him in part because he treated her exactly as her first lover, Bruno Hafner, had. Bruno had often been brutal, sometimes pleasant, very rarely tender, but always dominant. She liked that in a man, and she rarely found it. Most of them were flowers and candy guys; she craved pretzels and beer and an occasional rough shove if she got out of line.

  "Come here, doll, I want to talk business with you."

  She ran back gladly and slithered under the sheet. He jerked the sheet away, cocking his hairy leg across her thigh.

  "You know Troy ain't going to be with us long."

  Staring at him like a child, she nodded. Troy was effectively dead already, as far as the business was concerned. He no longer came to the office—he hated to be seen wearing the dressings on his face and neck—and she kept him informed only of the positive things happening, like being awarded the modification contracts taken from Roget Aircraft.

  "Well, that'll make you a widow. What say we get married?"

  To Elsie, sexual slavery was one thing, business was another. "Are you crazy? Why would I marry a swine like you? I'm never going to get married again."

  "Come on, Elsie, you need me. We'd be a great team. Besides, if you don't marry me, I'm going to cut you off."

  "Be the best thing that ever happened to me."

  "You know you can't live without me. Now roll over on your stomach, I'm going to teach you to be nice to me."

  As she rolled, he slapped her ass, barking, "Move it, bitch."

  While the two of them were romping, Troy McNaughton had summoned the strength to drive himself to the little park he had created on the far side of the airfield. In the last few months, he had enjoyed the park more than any of his other possessions, even the plant that had delighted him so long.

  His chauffeur usually drove him, bringing along a sack of the dog chow the ducks liked better than bread. The park was deserted in the evenings, and the ducks amused him with their pecking order feeding, reminding him of board meetings he'd held.

  This evening, he had only a coffee can of chow, and he sat on the pier, carefully tossing the food so that the smaller ducks got their fair share. For the hundredth time, he saw that duck society was no different from his own—the bigger ducks greedily ate up all they could, shoving the smaller ones aside, turning to chase them away, plucking viciously at their tail feathers. There was one little mallard that he identified with, calling him Lumpy, because he had a swollen open sore on the side of his head.

  "Come here, Lump—looks like your tailfeathers are all gone, poor guy. Just like me."

  He made sure that his favorite got a full ration, luring the larger ducks to one side with a few chunks, then tossing a handful out for Lumpy to sluice greedily out of the water.

  When the can was nearly empty, McNaughton took the last three pieces and tossed them to his favorite, using Dick Baker's favorite phrase: "All gone, kid, if I'm lying I'm dying." Then he stretched out on the pier, his head protruding over the side. He placed his .45-caliber Colt automatic under his chin, positioning it precisely where he felt the pain gnawing so relentlessly. He hesitated only a moment, as a brief feeling of regret passed over him that he hadn't gotten the flying wing into production. Then he pressed the trigger, blowing his cancer and his brains into the water. The frightened ducks flew away, quacking. Lumpy left with the rest of them.

  *

  Pyoktong, North Korea/October 10, 1952

  Bones slept in all his clothes, bright blue cotton jacket and pants over the canvas outfit they'd given him after he crashed. Frozen stiff as freezer beef, the cold congealing his very marrow, he grudgingly awoke from a poignant dream of a forgotten time. He hadn't thought of it in years, but in his sleep he had re-created a rainy warm afternoon when his father had told him about the British surrender at Yorktown, when the redcoats had marched out to the tune, "The World Turned Upside Down."

  Yesterday a chance meeting had turned his world as a prisoner upside down. Walking with his guard back from the benjo, the filthy slit-trench toilet fifty feet from his mud hut, he met a white man and a Negro soldier.

  He thought he was hallucinating when the white man said in an English accent, "Good evening, I'm Alan Burkett; this is Sergeant Taylor. You must be Captain Marshall."

  They shook hands. Marshall peered at him, thinking how warm the quilted jacket and the big waterproof boots must be. The man's broad red face was peering from a Russian-style fur hat and a wide checkered scarf wound around his throat and face like a snowman's.

  Bones stole a quick look at the guard, who was ignoring them, obviously afraid of the Englishman.

  His high voice filtered up from his well of cosseted warmth. "I'm a correspondent for the Liverpool Daily News. Sergeant Taylor was with the 1st Division. How are they treating you?"

  Marshall was on his guard at once—the m
an was too friendly, the situation too strange. He answered by asking, "Sergeant Taylor, how are they treating you?"

  "You know how it is, Captain, they treat us Negroes as good as they can, while they feed us all this shit about racism in America. We eat about as good as they do, and that's bad enough. No sense in starving to death."

  Marshall nodded as if he agreed with the words.

  "Have you met any other pilots?"

  "No, sir, they keep the white pilots locked up and starving. They beat them up pretty bad."

  Burkett broke in. "Nonsense, Taylor, that's just hearsay. I damn well know for a fact that they treat them well."

  Taylor raised his eyebrows. It was enough.

  "Captain Marshall, I'd like to come over and interview you some day, if I may?"

  "I don't know what the rules are about that. I'd appreciate it if you'd get word to my wife that I'm alive."

  "Certainly." Taylor raised his eyebrows again, and they walked on, leaving Marshall deep in thought.

  Breakfast had been the usual—a tin GI cup of tea, a large bowl of rice with some kimchee, and a small bowl with some roughly chopped squares of meat, boiled to a gray-white hue and spiced with red pepper. Marshall considered it a starvation diet until he saw how enviously the guards looked at it.

  Normally, he forced himself to eat everything to keep his strength up for an escape, but today he placed the food aside.

  His watch had been stolen at the crash site; timepieces were obviously in short supply, for he had not seen any Korean below the rank of colonel wearing one. For the most part he ignored the hour, content to plot the day's monotonous course in the ruthless busy-work of prison routine, the guards changing and the bugles blowing. But he always knew when it was precisely ten o'clock, for that was when Colonel Kim came in, ostentatiously looked at his wrist, and began his interrogation.

  After the blowup at the airplane, the colonel had been scrupulously correct, even friendly. Each day, he would pull out his little black notebook to ask the same questions of Marshall. At first Marshall told him his name, rank, and serial number and nothing more. In time, Marshall found it was smarter—and easier—to eat up the interrogation time by talking at length on any subject except military matters. Kim seemed to enjoy it, especially when Marshall spun out the plots of movies and books, improvising when he didn't remember, telling him fantastic stories about American motion picture stars or baseball players. In time he exhausted all he knew, and made up stories freely, combining the plot of Gone With the Wind with Snow White, or Frankenstein with Dawn Patrol. Kim loved them all, but as the time grew to a close, he would again ask him how many aircraft were in his unit, and where various Air Force units were located. Marshall would decline to answer, and Kim would put the notebook away, shrugging.

  Toward the end of the session, Kim would bemoan the unfortunate lot of the Negro in the United States. It was bad propaganda, straight out of Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Marshall could have given him much sadder, more blatantly unfair examples if he'd chosen to. Instead he told him extravagant lies about his father and mother, and how fortunate they were and how well they lived. Kim had routine intelligence information on Marshall, but he tried to be subtle with it, asking Marshall innocuous questions about his background and utterly refusing to believe that his father was a minister and actually owned his own automobile.

  The session always closed with Kim giving the same short lecture on the importance of confession in "rehabilitation," and the fact that there were some unfriendly ways to get cooperation. The threats were softened by smiles, as if it were a pro forma speech, something he had to say but that they mutually understood would not happen.

  This day, as he rose to go, Marshall reached out and grabbed his arm. "I demand to see my fellow pilots. I will protest to the UN if you don't end this solitary confinement. I demand to be treated exactly like white pilots are treated."

  Kim stood up, perplexed and obviously transfixed with horror that Marshall had touched him. Mumbling, he used his favorite expression, "No, this is not relevant."

  On impulse, Marshall picked up his tin cup of tea, cold now, and poured it down the front of Kim's pants. "I demand to be placed with my fellow officers!"

  His face blank with incomprehension, Kim turned and ran from the room. Marshall never saw him again.

  *

  Washington, D.C./October 25, 1952

  There were few satisfactory places in Washington to bring a European to eat, but at Harvey's, the beef and the seafood were always good.

  Harvey's had another advantage—your privacy was respected. No matter which of the regulars were there—Congressman Dade, J. Edgar Hoover, whoever—none would do more than flicker an eyebrow in recognition.

  He'd asked for a table where they could talk without fear of being overheard. Josten had a shrimp cocktail and a T-bone steak; Ruddick ordered the same. They drank scotch before, beer with, and cognac after.

  Milo was pleased with the man. He was doing well at the McNaughton plant and still covertly maintained his contacts in Germany with other art collectors. To his surprise, Ruddick had found that the large portfolio of paintings by Hitler was proving to be the most valuable Josten had sent to him, serving a double purpose. To the collectors, they had an immense intrinsic value. There was apparently no price they would not pay. More important, the paintings were a very powerful tool when used as a gift, or a reward, with certain of the most powerful figures he was dealing with on Klan matters. They were almost as potent a political symbol as was the Blood Flag—a treasure for the future.

  With coffee and the Dutch Master cigars, Milo guardedly began to talk business as Josten cradled the cognac glass in his hands.

  "With Troy dead, things are a little uncertain at McNaughton. You'll have to stay there for a few months, but then I'll have some other tasks for you."

  Josten sniffed the cognac, nodding, his eyebrows raised. "What do you have in mind?"

  "I need your help in revitalizing the Klan. It's become a redneck debating society run by beer-drinking bullies. It needs to be stripped of the old rituals and given a new purpose. I want to rename it, get rid of the stupid costumes, and narrow the focus of interest."

  Josten's face was impassive. "How will you narrow it?"

  "Concentrate only on the Negroes and the Jews. Catholics are no longer an issue."

  "So. And what will you call this new organization?"

  "I'm not sure—it has to have a catchy acronym. Right now, I'm thinking about the National Order of White Workers—NOWW. And I'd like to use your party's old slogan, 'Awake.' "

  Josten considered this a moment. "And what am I supposed to do?"

  Milo leaned forward enthusiastically. "You have great organizational ability; we can use that. But I really want you to inspire the Klan, to tell them what was done in your country. You have no idea how they would look up to a Luftwaffe colonel, a real Nazi."

  Josten's scarred face twisted into a grin. "A real Nazi. Oddly enough I was never a Nazi, never belonged to the Party. I thought that Hitler was crazy. I loved Germany, of course, and did all I could to win the war."

  Ruddick looked at him, appalled, and Josten went on. "After the war, confined for months to a hospital bed, I realized how wrong I was. Everything Hitler had predicted came true, from Russian rapes to Negro music blasting on the radio, the country in ruins. I should not have betrayed him."

  Mind racing, anxious to show his sympathy, Ruddick said, "It's just like Hitler himself, after the first war. He was gassed, you know, and hospitalized, just like you were."

  Josten nodded slightly, amazed by Ruddick's insight. He was absolutely correct—his belief in Hitler had begun to grow in the hospital, too late for it to benefit Germany.

  The American went on. "Do you see the similarities in Hitler's policies and what I'm trying to do with the Klan?"

  "Of course—you're using the working class to put across an ideal. He tried that and failed because of people like me."

&nbs
p; There was a silence and Josten asked, "Do you intend to win elections, or make a revolution?"

  "Neither. The Communists have fostered a growing liberal tide in this country. That's why the military services were forcibly integrated, against the advice of all the generals and admirals. It was a desperate attempt by Truman to gain votes."

  "Ah, but it worked, for him, and for the Negroes. How does Eisenhower stand on the issue? He is a general's general."

  Ruddick snorted in frustration. "I don't know, but I doubt if even he could do anything to reverse integration in the military. But it won't be long before the Jews will be advocating other craziness—integrated schools, open elections. The blacks outnumber us in the South—they will simply swamp us. That's what the Jews want."

  "What do you want your organization to do?"

  "Create a backlash. I want my people to do so much violence to the Negroes that they will rebel. I want the Negroes to come out of their houses, out of their subservience, and demand their rights. But I don't want them to do it peaceably. I want them killing whites."

  "Presumably the other whites will then rebel themselves?"

  "They always have, they will again. We need Negro-led race riots, whites dead in the streets, white houses burned, white churches blown up. Then this liberal nonsense will subside."

  "Why not have your own people do it and blame it on the Blacks?"

  "Do you think someone stupid enough to wear a white sheet and a megaphone on his head could be that subtle? No, I'll have to harness their natural instincts."

  Josten carefully tapped his cigar against the ashtray, as Ruddick went on. "The sad thing is that, stupid as they are, their natural instincts are correct. If they still had the power, and the tacit support of the government, they would soon sort out the Negroes and the Jews. But the Klan has become a laughing stock, a magnet for the screwballs."