W E B Griffin - Men at War 1 - The Last Heroes

by The Last Heroes(Lit)

  They had walked about half a mile when a Ford station wagon came down the road toward them. When it reached them, it stopped and a trim, attractive woman got out.

  "Well, I'll be damned," she said. "Look who just dropped in out of the sky." She advanced on Ed Bitter, grabbed his arms, and gave him her cheek to kiss.

  "Aunt Genevieve," he said. "May I introduce my roommate, Lieutenant Richard Canidy? Dick, this is my aunt, Mrs. Brandon Chambers."

  "How do you do, Mrs. Chambers?" Canidy replied formally.

  "Oh, call me Jenny," she said. "Eddie, and maybe his father, are the only stuffed shirts in the family."

  "He would make me call him sir," Canidy replied. "But I outrank him."

  "Oh, I'd like to be in a position to order him around," Genevieve Chambers said, laughing. "Now, what's this all about? I don't think it's a social call, dressed the way you are in those overlarge boys' rompers.

  Canidy laughed. He liked this woman.

  "I had a little engine trouble," Ed said. "I'm going to need some tools, and then the telephone."

  "Hop in' " Jenny Chambers said. "That's no problem. I've got Robert with me. Robert can fix anything with a coat hanger and a pair of pliers."

  The house was even larger than it looked from the air.

  "Is this where they made Gone With the Wind?" Canidy asked innocently.

  "Of course," she said. "Clark Gable made us a deal on the house when they were finished with it. It comes apart for shipment."

  Canidy was aware that he was getting another of Ed Bitter 9 S looks of shocked disapproval. He smiled at Jenny Chambers.

  "Actually, it's quite old," she said. "Antebellum. My husband 9 s father restored it."

  "It's gorgeous," Canidy said.

  "It's a shame that no one lives in it," she said. "It's just a vacation place. My husband hunts from it, and the wives and children get to use it when there's no hunting."

  Robert turned out to be a very large black man in a pinstripe suit.

  "Hello, sir," he said. "Was that you scaring hell out of the chickens?"

  "How are you, Robert?" Ed Bitter relied.

  "Robert," Jenny Chambers said, "this is Lieutenant Canidy. He's Eddie's friend, and his commanding officer. He can actually tell him what to do."

  "Oh, I'd like to be you," Robert said. He shook Canidy's hand.

  "Robert's been taking care of me, keeping me out of the clutches of evil, since I was a baby," Jenny Chambers said. Robert beamed with affection at her.

  "I understand you might be able to come up with a wrench for us," Canidy said. "I'll settle for a pair of good pliers."

  "They'll probably send a maintenance crew from Mobile," Bitter said.

  "We should stop that gas from dripping all over the plane," Canidy replied. "I think it'll be all right to fly out of here."

  "I got some tools in the car," Robert said.

  "Why don't you get on the horn, Eddie, and call in and tell them what's happened. Don't tell them to send anybody till we have a chance to take a good look at it."

  "Yes, sir, Mr. Canidy, sir," Bitter said. He gave Canidy a mock salute. But there was something not entirely joking about the exchange.

  "And I'll see, in the meantime, what I can fix for you to eat. A sandwich, at least. Robert and I just came down this morning. I don't know what's here, but there should be enough for a sandwich," Jenny Chambers said.

  The car was a 1939 Lincoln coupe with Alabama license plates. A very expensive car, in keeping, Canidy decided, with Tara. And Eddie was a member of the family. That was very interesting. It also explained a number of things about him, not only his Buick Roadmaster convertible.

  The trunk of the Lincoln held a toolkit, with a set of open-end wrenches in individual compartments. Tightening the fuel line connection--even taking great care to make sure the wrench didn't slip and spark-took no more than a minute. Robert handed Canidy a rag, and he wiped the line down. There was no drip, and therefore no reason Eddie couldn't fly the Stean-nan.

  Canidy was aware that he was disappointed. It might have been interesting to have been forced to spend the night here. There was a moment's rebirth of hope when he thought that the gasoline might have dripped into the fuselage, where it would have formed dangerously explosive vapors. But when he looked, he saw that it had fallen onto a solid piece of the aluminum, and from there down the solid aluminum wing root to the ground. Once an hour had passed to allow any chance vapors to disperse, the plane would be safe to fly.

  Canidy ordered the student pilots into the Lincoln's backseat, and rode with Robert back to the mansion. Jenny Chambers had opened a tinned ham, and made sandwiches and tea.

  "I'd love to offer you something stronger than tea," Jenny Chambers said, "but Eddie has told me that you can't drink and fly."

  "Not very far, anyway," Canidy replied. "But I appreciate the spirit of your offer."

  : She laughed. "I like you, Lieutenant Canidy," she said. "And is it really true you can order Eddie around?"

  "Yes, ma'am," Canidy said. "Is there anything you would like me to have him do for you?"

  "Order him here for the weekend," she said. "All of you, of course."

  11 don't..." Eddie began.

  "Tell him to let me finish," Jenny Chambers said.

  "Let the lady finish, Lieutenant," Canidy said.

  "Or he'll clap you in irons she said, and then she went on. "MY daughter, who is in college, up north, Bryn Mawr, is coming here with two friends," she said. "So there would be people about your own age. And my husband used to be a pilot, and loves to talk flying. And then your cousin Mark is coming up from Mobile, Eddie, with his wife. You haven't seen them in years, either."

  "T'he girls are a little young for Dick, Aunt Genevieve," Ed Bitter said.

  "Just the right age," she argued. "I'm five years younger than your uncle."

  "And you're putting Dick on a spot, you realize."

  "Not at all," Canidy said.

  Dick Canidy suddenly got out of his chair and walked to a photograph sitting on a table just outside the dining room.

  "Can I get you something, Dick?" Jenny Chambers asked.

  "I thought this photograph looked familiar," he said. It was a picture of Sue-Ellen Chambers and her husband.

  "And is it?"

  "No," he said.

  "That's my son, Mark," Jenny Chambers said. "And his wife, Sue-Ellen."

  "You'll meet them this weekend," Ed Bitter said. "Since it has been decided we're going to come up here."

  If he were a gentleman, Dick Canidy thought, he would say sorry, he'd already made plans for the weekend. But he said nothing. He wanted to see Sue-Ellen again.

  Did this reveal, he wondered, yet another previously undetected dark and unpleasant facet of his character?

  He took another look at Sue-Ellen Chambers's deceptively innocent face, and turned around.

  ,We'd better be going," he said. on the half-hour flight from Mobile back to NAS Pensacola, Ed Bitter was unhappily aware that the engine trouble he had had at The Plantation by now had come to the attention of the brass, who were likely to find out that he had violated regulations by doing acrobatics under five thousand feet.

  But it had not been a crash landing, so he felt sure he could get away with having the incident officially determined to be an "unscheduled, precautionary landing," rather than an "emergency landing." Unscheduled, precautionary landings occurred all the time, the precaution generally having to do with an airsick student, or a piss call for an instructor who had forgotten to take a leak before taking off.

  So he would probably be officially off the hook. Where they landed was then going to be the real problem, since the students, Ford and Czernik, were likely to rush back to the student BOQ to regale their fellows with the fascinating tale of landing at a private airstrip, near a mansion that, no shit, belongs to Mr. Bitter's family.

  So he would have to explain the situation to them, and ask them as a personal courtesy not to tell the story.
He probably still couldn't keep it all completely quiet, but he probably could keep it from being a sensation. If he could talk to them about it the right way.

  Fortunately, there was a ritual after this particular exercise, which would give him the opportunity to talk to the students. On the satisfactory completion of their last training flight in primary training, Ensign Paul Ford and Ensign Thomas Czemik had stopped being "Mr. Ford" and "Mr. Czernik" to their instructors and became fellow officers, who could be addressed by their first names and permitted to drink with the instructor pilots as social equals.

  It was in a sense more of a rite of passage than either their first solo flight had been (about a fifth of all students who made their solo flight were subsequently busted out of primary for inaptitude) or the official awarding of wings in the parade on Friday would be.

  "Dick," Ed Bitter suggested as the two instructors and the two students turned in their parachutes to Flight Equipment, "why don't you take Paul and Tom over to the club and buy them a couple of beers, until I can fill out my reports and get there?"

  "I think you'd better lie about your altitude when the engine quit," Dick Canidy said. "We'll back you up, if they ask."

  Czemik and Ford nodded willingness.

  That was embarrassing. Officers were expected to be wholly truthful. But Canidy was right. Unless he lied, he was going to be in trouble.

  "Thank you," he said barely audibly, and then forced himself to smile.

  The officers' mess served a two-quart pitcher of draft beer for thirty-five cents. Canidy and the two students had just started on their second pitcher-enough beer to give Paul Ford courage to raise the question of what had happened to the Kaydetwhen a Marine orderly appeared in the room. Canidy glanced up and then ignored him. He could think of no possible reason that a Marine orderly who ran errands for admirals would be interested in him.

  But the orderly, after the bartender identified him, headed directly for Canidy's table.

  "Mr. Canidy?" the orderly asked crisply.

  "Yes," Canidy said.

  "The admiral's compliments, sir," the orderly snapped. "The admiral regrets the intrusion. The admiral will be pleased to receive Mr. Canidy at Mr. Canidy's convenience."

  "You sure you have the right Canidy, son?" Canidy asked.

  "The admiral's car and driver are outside, if Mr. Canidy would care to make use of them to make his call upon the admiral, sir."

  Canidy was wholly confused. He had seen the admiral (there were several flag officers at Pensacola, but only one "the admiral," the base commander) only twice in his life, once when his aviator's wings were pinned on him, and once again when the admiral had given the new draft of instructor pilots a five-minute ritual pep talk before they had begun their training.

  He could think of nothing he had done, good or bad, to merit the admiral's attention. Lieutenant junior grade instructor pilots in primary training came to the admiral's attention only when they killed a student, or vice versa.

  He stood up and looked down at Ford and Czemik.

  "Gentlemen," he said, mockingly solemn, "you will have to excuse me. The admiral requests my professional judgment on a subject of vital importance to the Navy, and, indeed, the nation!"

  Ford and Czernik smiled. Bitter looked at the Marine orderly. The Marine orderly was not amused. He marched out of the beer bar, and Canidy followed him out to the admiral's car, a two-yearold Chrysler driven by a natty young sailor who held the door open for Canidy and then closed it after him.

  Canidy decided the whole thing was going to turn out to be a hilarious case of mistaken identity. There was probably a Commander Canidy on the base somewhere, or maybe even a Captain Canidy (who probably spelled his name Kennedy), and the admiral had asked for him with his false teeth out, and the aide had misunderstood him.

  The car drove under the portico of the admiral's residence and stopped. The Marine orderly leaped out of the front seat and raced aroun the front of the car to open the door for Canidy.

  I wonder, Canidy thought, if after they find out they have the wrong guy, I'll have to walk back to the 0 Club.

  The admiral's aide-de-camp, a full lieutenant, opened a side door to the residence.

  "Canidy?" he asked.

  "Yes, sir," Dick replied.

  "You would have been here somewhat sooner, Mr. Canidy," the aide said, "if I thought to tell the orderly to try the beer hall first." He waved Canidy ahead of him into the kitchen, where a whitejacketed Filipino steward was tending an array of bottles.

  The admiral's aide stepped around Canidy and pushed open a swinging door to the dining room.

  "Mr. Canidy, Admiral," he announced.

  "Come on in, Canidy," a gruff voice ordered.

  There were two ruddy-skinned, gray-haired men sitting at a long, brightly polished dining-room table. A large candelabrum had been pushed aside to make room for some manila folders (obviously service records), lined pads, a telephone, and two ashtrays. There was a cigar box and coaster, on which sat glasses dark with whiskey.

  Both the middle-aged men were wearing insignialess khaki shirts and trousers, and it was a moment before Canidy was sure which of them was the admiral.

  "Lieutenant Canidy reports to the admiral as directed, sir 9 Canidy said.

  "I have one official thing to say to you, 14r. Canidy," the admiral said, looking at him with unabashed curiosity. "What you see in this room, what you hear in this room, you will not relate to anyone, in or out of the service, without my express permission. You got that?"

  "Yes, sir."

  So it wasn't a case of mistaken identity- He was expected and something very unusual was about to happen. This was, obviously, one of the wild days Canidy had infrequently experienced in his life. For months, or sometimes years, everyt1hing went according to some dull plan, and then, all of a sudden, strange, unexpected, and exciting things happened, one after the other-This insane day had begun with Eddie g4oddamned near killing himself, and then he had learned, in a Southern plantation mansion, that Sue-Ellen Chambers was Eddie's cousin's wife; and now he was in the admiral's dining room.

  The admiral looked at him from rather cold gray eyes for a long moment, and then he raised his voice. "Pedro!"

  The Filipino steward pushed open the swinging door.

  "Tell Pedro what you'll have to drink, Canidy," the admiral said. "And then sit down. Close. This old birdman is as deaf as a post."

  "Fuck you, Charley," the other gray-haired man said, smiling, and without rancor.

  "Sair?" the steward asked, wanting Canidy's drink order.

  "Bourbon, please," Canidy said. "Over ice."

  "Yes, sair," the steward said. The admiral held up his glass and looked at the other man, who nodded.

  The steward ducked back into the kitchen.

  "Canidy, this is General Chennault," the admiral said. "Of the Chinese Air Force."

  That didn't surprise Canidy either. Then he remembered who Chennault was. He was a former Army Air Corps pursuit pilot, one of the old-timers, who had gone to China to help the Chinese in their war with the Japanese.

  "For the way you emphasized "Chinese,"' General Chermault said, "fuck you again, Charley."

  "As you may have guessed, Canidy," the admiral said, "General Chermault and I go back a long way together. But this isn't a social call. General Chermault is here with the express permission of the Commander in Chief."

  "Yes, sir ' " Canidy said, because he could think of nothing else to say. It took him a moment to realize that the admiral was speaking of the Commander in Chief, not the commander in chief of naval aviation training, or even the chief of naval aviation training, or even the chief of naval operations. He was speaking of the President of the United States.

  "Aren't you just a little curious, Lieutenant?" General Chennault asked.

  "Yes, sir, I'm curious," Canidy said. "But I'm also a junior grade lieutenant."

  Chennault chuckled. "Before they retired me from the Air Corps," he said, "I wa
s a captain. Before I was a captain, I was a first lieutenant. I was a first lieutenant, your grade, for fourteen long years."