"I would, sir," Dillon answered at once, to his own bottomless surprise.
Several of the officers reacted audibly, but it was Macauley whose shock brought him to his feet. "You can't do that!"
"We're talking about what the commander in chief can do, General. Not what I can do."
Macauley opened his hands toward Eason. Eason in turn raised an eyebrow at Peters, the provost marshal. Peters stood up. "The lines are very clear, Mr. Secretary, both in traditional army regulations and in the air force charter of the National Security Act. Civilian and military spheres of authority are separate and distinct. The organization proposed here is a line organization, under the purview of the chief of staff, manned by military personnel. It is illegal to insert a civilian into that line. Mr. Dillon would have no basis in law for exercising authority over the air force men assigned to this organization."
Crocker leaned across the podium, seeming to peer at the provost marshal, but what he was seeing was his barn. "So the director has to be an air force officer?"
"That's right."
Crocker nodded slowly, full of grudging admiration for a structure that so refused to fall. If they couldn't stop an independent OSI from coming into being, they could stop it from being independent. "What rank would the director properly hold?"
Peters looked quickly toward General Eason, who, with a cock of his head, took over again. He said slowly, "Worldwide command? Responsible directly to my office? He would have to hold the rank of brigadier general."
Crocker was still nodding. "Thank you, gentlemen. That clarifies things for me." He abruptly straightened at the podium. His leg clicked. "My third recommendation to the President today will be to immediately have drafted proper legislation and lay it before Congress at once, commissioning Mr. Dillon an officer in the United States Air Force, holding the rank of brigadier general."
Thirteen
A special law was passed by Congress and signed by the President making Sean Dillon the youngest general in America. With Lafayette, he was one of only a handful ever to be directly commissioned at that rank.
Cass and Richard arrived in Washington by train on the morning of the ceremony. It was June 27,1948.
Sean was waiting on the platform. Cass saw him from the train window. He was dressed like an FBI agent, dark suit and hat, despite the sultry southern weather. She saw the anxiety in him as he stared the length of the slowing train. She had an urge to call out, but the window was closed firmly between them.
Richard was three, and he traveled whenever possible in his mother's arms. His face fell naturally into an expression of wide-eyed curiosity, but it looked at times like pure wariness, and that was the case now.
Cass came off the train carrying Richard. The child, at least, they had unambiguously in common. He wore a clip-on bow tie, a sleeveless sweater and perfectly polished Buster Browns. Like his mother, he watched carefully as his father approached.
Sean Dillon sensed his son's reticence more than Cass's, yet hers was what he'd worried about. As he drew close to them, stopping, he had an impulse to say to her simply, I have not learned yet how to be a husband and a man both.
He said instead, "Hello, Cass."
"Hi, Sean." She quickly and awkwardly kissed him, and he might have returned the kiss, but at that moment Richard burst into tears and buried his face in Cass's neck.
"It's Daddy," Cass said. "It's Daddy."
Sean reached to Richard and took him firmly into his hands. For a moment, the boy refused to relinquish his grip on Cass. She looked sadly at Sean, as if to say, It's not you. Then Richard did let go, and he transferred his hold to Sean's neck. Sean felt, as the boy's small arms encircled him, the release of a tension he had not acknowledged. How he loved this boy.
"He's grown," Sean said at last.
Cass smiled. "I hope we all have."
He had expected her to be withholding, but she wasn't. He had expected her to be nervous, intimidated by what was about to happen to him. But she was carrying herself between those bustling tracks like an arriving celebrity.
She was nearly ten years older than when he first saw her in that rancid stockyard tavern, and though the decade had been unkind in many ways, its effect on her appearance had been to fulfill the early promise of her beauty. Was it her persistence in staying with Sean, despite his preference for worlds in which she was unwelcome, that drew out the fiber of her will, solidifying what before had been the erratic, untested core of herself? Sean sensed with fresh gratitude how, despite all that had passed between them, she had refused the Canaryville woman's role of long-suffering martyrdom. On the contrary, at that moment, in the flash of her arrival, she had become to him a woman of rare independence, able, if not to understand a husband's limits, to accept them. Dillon wanted to see her this way, and Cass knew it. And so she let him.
Her integrity, for her own part, consisted now in the firm knowledge that her love for Sean, as for her child by him, was a given, not dependent finally on anything he did to earn it. If he had been through an ordeal by which he had proved himself, so had she. She had learned the secret of real love, was determined to rebuild her life around it.
A porter had collected Cass's bags, and now led the way down the platform. Sean wanted to reach down with his free hand to take Cass's, but he didn't. "We don't have a lot of time. One of the first things you'll notice about my new situation, unlike my old one, is that they like to have wives around for the ceremonies."
"So someone ordered you to send for me?" Cass's stylish brown fedora obscured one eye, but the other held steady with what Dillon hoped was affectionate amusement.
"You are supposed to hold the Bible on which I take my oath."
Cass stopped and so did he. She opened her handbag to reveal the black leather Bible that Crocker himself had presented to Richard three years before.
Sean grinned broadly, realizing she'd been ahead of him, and like that the thick weather broke. "How the hell did you know?"
When Cass smiled, it was to let her pride show, pride in him. "A little bird told me." Her eyes flashed. "A sparrow."
Sean embraced her, and for a moment all three of them were joined in an overflow of feeling.
"I've arranged for Ellie Packard to take Rickie to the Smithsonian this morning. By the way, Mike Packard has come over to work for me at the Pentagon." Sean grinned at the boy. "You'll love the Smithsonian, buddy. They have Lindy's airplane and dinosaurs and Indians. I'll take you there myself one of these days. I'll take you a lot of places."
"Run me, Daddy," Richard said. That game of theirs, Sean carrying him like a football, cutting through the grass like a halfback. He hooked his arm around Richard's waist, and the boy hung at Sean's side. He'd gotten so big! Sean began to sing, "Cheer for the Redskins!" He took off, running down the platform, zigzagging around the posts and carts. Richard's squealing laughter echoed under the canopy.
Cass watched, aware that her terrible anxiety was gone. Her husband had asked her to come, that was all. And she had come. He was going to be sworn into a rare, important realm, and without understanding how such a thing had come to pass, she was going to hold the Bible for him. It was all so simple, suddenly. All he had ever had to do—of course, she always knew this—was ask her.
Cass and Sean came out of the old Willard Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue, just below the White House, in clear sight of the gleaming distant Capitol. They had dispatched Richard and Ellie, with her two kids, to the Smithsonian, then had showered in turn and begun to dress shyly in opposite corners of the room. At one point their eyes met, and with no more warning than that, Sean had crossed to her. He was wearing his trousers, but no shirt. She was in her slip. They kissed. He lowered the straps of her shift, and it fell. He pressed her against himself, her naked chest against his. It was only a moment, and that was all that happened, but that bare physical contact quickened more in each of them than the old longing.
Now they stood in the bright noon of a hot summer day. Sean, in
his best suit and the new tie Cass had brought from Chicago, had never seemed more handsome to her. In her mind they looked like one of the golden couples she had often seen coming out of the Drake.
Cass had chosen her clothing carefully, a dark green crepe dress, stylishly cinched, with sleeves to her elbows. The line of the airy ribbed cloth ran vertically, and she knew that it emphasized her height and slimness. The color of her dress set off the flecks in her eyes; her eyes hovered in what she hoped was the beguiling shadow of the soft wide brim of her new beige hat. When, in their room upstairs, she had finished dressing at last and had turned to face her stolid husband, he spoke his first words in all that time. He had been watching blatantly from across the room, and for a moment she thought he was going to come to her again. If he had, it would not have given her more satisfaction than what he did. He took his cigarette away to say simply, "Cass, you're the loveliest woman alive."
As they strode past the doorman toward the line of taxis, they were cut off by a newsboy, who was fiercely repeating some line of "Extra!" gibberish that Cass could not understand. He had a stack of fresh newspapers under his arm and was waving one. The headline, when she read it, hit her: "Russians Blockade Berlin; U.S. Forces on Alert."
Sean snatched the kid's paper and paid him, but he didn't open it until they were inside the moving cab.
"What does it mean?" she asked.
He ignored her to read, rudely, she thought.
When the cab had completed its circle past the Washington Monument, she asked again.
He read for a moment more, then said, "The Russians have shut down all the roads and train lines into Berlin."
"How can they do that?"
"They claim Berlin is theirs. Czechoslovakia last month, Berlin this month. They say they will let the citizens in the western zones of the city starve if we don't yield."
"But—"
Sean cut her off by snapping the newspaper shut. He looked out the window, away from her. "I'm sorry, Cass." As if the real danger was that Stalin might ruin their day.
A few minutes later, having left the cab, they stood before the building which loomed above them like something out of ancient Egypt. Cass's thought, as they walked up the broad esplanade of the river entrance, was, They'll never let me in here now.
But they did. She had never been inside the Pentagon. Entering, she felt none of the tourist's awe—three times the floor space of the Empire State Building! Instead, she felt a fresh dose of a citizen's wartime gratitude to the men in their handsome tan uniforms. As they brushed by her, she couldn't help but see them as soldiers who would go quickly now to Europe and die.
Far from stopping her, the military men seemed not to notice her at all, or Sean either for that matter. She kept expecting him, after all these months of coming here, to wave at someone or say hello, but the Pentagon men passed him as if he were invisible too. She felt a pang for him, as she realized how out of place he seemed here.
She had to move quickly to stay up with him, and at one point, rounding a corner, she clutched at his sleeve, to slow him. He ignored her, and she dropped his arm. Once they had to dodge out of the way of a messenger, who sped toward them on an oversized tricycle. His bell blasted and made Cass jump with surprise, which prompted Sean to take her hand. Even in his haste he smiled at her with what she recognized as the old affection, and for an instant—how little of him she needed!—she felt as though they were walking along the Oak Street Beach. We have been too hard on ourselves, she thought. For years we have been too hard.
"This is Mr. Crocker's office," Sean said, ushering her into a reception area.
Cass knew that Sean's one question had become, What is Berlin for me? But she had far more to take in than he. She quickly surveyed the soft blues of the carpet and drapes, a riotous bouquet of freshly picked zinnias on an end table, an oil painting of rocks along a nasty stretch of shoreline. The gracious room soothed her after the stark, bustling corridor, and the gray-haired, tailored woman at the desk stood up to greet Cass and Sean as if she were welcoming them to her home. Again Cass expected to be told to wait outside, but instead the receptionist led them both through the inner door.
As they entered Mr. Crocker's office, he was coming toward them from behind his desk, limping. Cass paid his leg as little mind as he did, for to her great surprise, he was opening his arms to her. Without hesitating she went into his generous, warm embrace. Sean had once said he was like a father.
"Mrs. Dillon," he said, his mouth at the brim of her hat. "How very good to see you."
She pulled back just enough to search his eyes. "You make me feel like a stranger, calling me that. Please call me Cass, Mr. Crocker."
Crocker laughed at the juxtaposition of their names, its perfect expression of the inequality which was a given between them, but which also failed to preclude their immediate mutual sense of intimacy. "I will with pleasure, Cass."
With a courtly flair, he showed her to one of two wing chairs that flanked a matching prim settee. Then Crocker faced Sean.
Cass waited to see his expression change, as if now, with a man, he would get serious. And indeed the words he spoke did address Berlin, but with an equanimity consistent with the mood of his greeting Cass. "We have an emergency situation in Europe."
"Yes, sir. I understand that."
"It's a moment I've been positively longing for."
Both Sean and Cass were confused by Crocker's burst of eagerness.
Crocker said, "At last the air force will have the chance to do something else besides destroy. We bombed Berlin into rubble during the war. Do you know what we're doing now, as of this morning?" Crocker leaned closer to Sean. "We're bringing in coal and milk and flour by air! Instead of bombs!"
"I assumed we would—"
"Break the blockade? Bull through it?"
"Yes."
"Stalin wanted us to, I'm sure of it. And the Red Army would have swallowed us whole. But we're leapfrogging them instead."
"How long can we—?"
"As long as it takes. We saw this coming. Spaatz and Eason had already convinced the President that our fliers could supply the city. I've been pushing the idea of an airlift with him since Zhukov first threatened the cutoff. Spaatz and Eason backed me up. Once President Truman had this option, he didn't consider tanks-through-the-turnpikes for an instant. The army, of course, had not given the thing a moment's forethought, and all they could propose this morning was to start shooting. General Marshall undercut Bradley completely by saying if we did that, we'd end up having to use the A-bomb on Berlin."
"To defend it?" Cass asked.
"That's what Truman said." Crocker snorted with pleasure. "We've called Stalin's bluff. The President is going to announce it at noon. C-54s started flying out of Frankfurt two hours ago, loaded with butter. Think of it! We're feeding people instead of killing them! Isn't that wonderful?"
To Cass at that moment Randall Crocker was wonderful. The energy with which he displayed the triumph to Sean made very clear the depth of their bond. Cass thought her husband wonderful too.
"Rhine-Main?" Sean asked.
"Yes, and Wiesbaden."
"But those are fighter bases. What are you flying?"
"C-54s up to now. We've been quietly bringing them up from Ram-stein and Evereux. The entire transport squadron based at Essex—C-54s and -47s—is crossing the Channel this afternoon. We'll have a hundred and seventy planes lined up to ferry in and out of Tempelhof by dawn." Crocker pulled his pocket watch out. "It's almost nightfall there now."
"Will you restrict to daylight?"
"To start with."
"What if Stalin just keeps the barriers up? We can't supply a city of three million from the air indefinitely."
"Two million, since we're talking about the Allied zones. And we'll keep it up as long as we have to." Crocker eyed his watch again, then put it back in his vest pocket. "You don't have much time, Sean. General Eason will be here at thirteen-fifteen sharp."
"We're going ahead?"
"Of course. We have to get OSI off the ground too, don't we? Maybe more than ever. Go get dressed." Crocker slapped Dillon's shoulder like a coach.
Dressed? Once more Cass was mystified. Sean was dressed. He never looked better.
"Oh, but Christ! Wait a minute, Sean. I almost forgot, you have to call Hoover."
"What?"
"J. Edgar Hoover. You have to call him."
"Why?"
Crocker's face broke into a sparkling grin. "He wants to know why he wasn't invited."
Dillon came back. "Invited to what?"
Crocker cast a look of mock exasperation at Cass, then said soberly to Dillon, "Your formal commissioning."
"You mean this?"
"This plus General Eason."
"What does Mr. Hoover think is happening? No one's invited."
Crocker smiled at Cass. "Not 'no one.'" He said to her, "Your husband's new status is not something we can exactly flaunt. You can have no idea how many 'bird colonels' haunt these corridors, all veterans of the Bulge or Bataan, all desperate for the star they will never wear." Crocker looked back at Dillon. "They will hate you."
Dillon answered, "And I won't blame them."
Crocker turned back to Cass. "A subdued, unnoticed observance is what's called for. Hoover's presence would call all kinds of attention to it, and would be widely misunderstood, to boot. In the minds of some, OSI is already too closely identified with the Bureau."
"That's an understatement," Sean said. "Those colonels out there think I'm Mr. Hoover's foot in the door of the Defense Department, that he plans to run OSI and ultimately expand it beyond the air force."
"Those colonels may not be the only ones who think of you that way, Sean." Crocker smiled smoothly. "Perhaps Hoover does. You have to make the phone call. Do it here."
Dillon did not move.
This was a last test. Crocker wanted Sean to refuse Hoover himself. It seemed a meaningless matter, but to the director, Sean's confirmation of Crocker's rejection would seem like betrayal. And to Crocker, it was an essential act of Dillon's independence. The OSI was not to be the Bureau's scouting party.
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