by Bill Mesce
Harry reached into his jacket for his note cards. He leafed through them as he and Korczukowski walked, checking to see if any points remained to be covered with the adjutant. Again, he had that sense of puzzle pieces all there but refusing to come together. He flipped to the cards based on his interview with General Halverson.
“There’s some chronology I’d like to get straight,” Harry said.
“Shoot.”
“The raid on Helsvagen was initially set for Saturday morning.”
“It rained Saturday, then we needed a day for the field to dry.”
“I know. General Halverson told me he sent his report — an assessment General DiGarre wanted on the group — Halverson sent that up to DiGarre on Friday.”
Korczukowski shrugged. “I guess.”
“You didn’t know about that?”
“I knew about the report. I helped Al put the info together for it, then sent it up to Wing. That would’ve been Wednesday, Wednesday night. I dragged my feet on it. We all did. We were figuring once DiGarre had the numbers in front of him he’d do something to make us scrub.”
Harry flipped through his note cards. “Did you ever hear from DiGarre’s office? Did anybody from GHQ ever contact Donophan?”
“Not that I know of. Something like that, especially if it had to do with the shape we were in, if it didn’t go through me I would’ve at least been party to it.”
“Did all the dealings with DiGarre go through Halverson?”
“That’s the normal chain of command. From us to Wing, Wing to Division. I don’t know why that’s bothering you.”
“I would think, considering how badly you were hit, just because of the extent of, well...” Harry held up his hand and offered the devastated aerodrome. “The general might’ve taken a more, oh, personal interest.”
“I do not pretend to be able to understand the minds of generals.”
Fair enough, Harry thought, but...“Halverson dragged his feet on that report, too. He saw things the way you did; that once DiGarre saw the report, he’d stand-down the 351st. Halverson didn’t send his report up to DiGarre until Friday, assuming that it would still be too late for DiGarre to do anything to interfere with the Saturday mission. But the mission didn’t go off until Monday. That seems like an awful long time for DiGarre to be sitting with that report.”
It was Korczukowski’s turn to frown. “It does.” He shrugged again. “Generals,” he said, as if that could explain anything.
They stopped before the two P-47’s parked wing tip to wingtip in a remote comer of the apron, their black-painted muzzles turned slightly toward each other. A half-dozen of the spit-shined Provost MP’s were picketed round the aeroplanes. Harry’s ID got him past the MP’s but the adjutant chose not to follow. Harry stood between the uplifted black noses of the Thunderbolts. Their cockpit canopies were peeled back, and the inspection ports in the wings were still open from when Scotland Yard’s ballistics personnel had extracted their guns. Harry stepped closer, standing beneath the two great propellers.
“Were all the ships in the group the same?”
“What?” Korczukowski hadn’t heard him; Harry had been unable to turn away from the cyclopean stare of the air intakes.
“Were all the ships in the group the same?” he asked again.
“We were phasing out the D-25’s with E’s,” Korczukowski replied. “There were still a few — ”
Perhaps it was the psychological effect of looking up at the two craft looming over him high on their landing gear, solid and thick with muscle, but when Harry thought back to the broken-backed wreck of O’Connell’s plane it came to him twisted and dwarfish.
“I saw O’Connell’s ship. It looked smaller.”
“Shouldn’t be.”
Harry moved closer. He could see the open ports in the wings where the guns had been set, and next to them where the ponderous metal-link ammunition belts had been neatly laid, fold upon fold. And there, under the wings, were the extraction slots where the empty casings tumbled out.
From a distance, the sun had given the ships a pristine glow, as if they’d come freshly poured from the foundry, but now Harry could see each ship’s battle wear. The shining aluminum showed scuffs, and around the exhausts were smoke and oil stains. The once smooth, ovoid bodies were blemished with dents. Patches of metal were bolted here and there on the wings and fuselages, and there was a scattering of small holes — bullet holes, he guessed — too fresh to have been patched. But even marred, unmanned, and unarmed as the planes were, Harry felt puny and vulnerable before them.
I’ve stood before a Thunderbolt and I’ve felt the same way. The P-47 looks as if nothing will get it off the ground. Its elliptical wings look too frail and short to generate enough lift to push the thick body into the air; it waddles about taxiways like a lost farmyard orphan. There was so much difficulty seeing over the bulbous nose that ground-crew men were required to stand to the side where they could be seen from the cockpit in order to guide the pilots along the tarmac. The men who flew her and the ground crews who cared for her had nicknamed her “the Jug”; and despite an evolving series of modifications since Number One had rolled off the production line two years before, in August of 1941, the Thunderbolt was still the largest, heaviest, and most heavily armored single-seat, single-engine fighter anywhere in the world.
She was also the ugliest. She’d been built a brute to do a brutish job, but if that made her stagger along on the ground like a wounded bird, she became a different animal in the air. The model in use by the 351st was powered by a 2000-hp Pratt & Whitney Double Wasp radial engine giving her a top-rated speed, in level flight, of over 540 kph, meaning that in those days the fattest, ugliest fighter in the world also happened to be one of the swiftest. The great weight that so bogged her down on the ground also meant that no other aircraft, with the possible exception of the twin-boomed Lockheed P-38 Lightning, could match her in a dive. (I’d heard that the “hotshot” pilots who’d first tested her had, off the record, pushed her diving speed close to 1000 kph.) She could cover over 1000 kilometers on the petrol she carried on board, and had wing and belly stations for either auxiliary tanks to stretch that range, or for bombs or rockets.
The truly brutish part of her job was to provide a platform for the battery of guns set in her wings: eight M2 .50-caliber machine guns sighted on convergent lines of fire and fed by 2400 rounds of ammunition. The manual will tell you that each of those weapons can fire a variety of steel-jacketed ammunition up to a maximum range of almost 7000 meters at a rate of 450 rounds per minute.
Smiling young men who a few months before were chasing pony-tailed bobby soxers told me that with as much pressure as it takes to flick a fly from your tea cake, a touch of the firing button, held for a three-second burst, will produce approximately forty kilos of lead. They will tell you that when forty kilos of steel-jacketed lead traveling at high velocity meets a German aircraft at the point where the eight lines of fire converge, a target disintegrates.
Harry had seen O’Connell’s body, the holes punched in his ship, through his seat and body armor. He had seen the Gresham household. He knew the capacity of the napping guard dogs looking down on him.
“We had more planes than pilots after the krauts hit us,” Korczukowski said. “A stick of bombs went right through the barracks quad where the pilots slept. That’s how we lost so many of them. The extras, the other planes, they’ve already been flown off as replacements to the other groups. Anderson flew that one. It wasn’t his, his was lost in the kraut raid. But Al flew his own ship.”
Harry edged toward the aeroplane with “Markham” stenciled below the rim of the cockpit. His kills had been laid out just underneath, canted swastikas arranged below the flags under which he’d earned them: one under the flag of the Spanish king, two under the French tricolor, twenty-one under the British jack, and six under the Stars and Stripes. Toward the nose, The Cleveland Indian had been painted in fire-engine red. Below was pictured a
hawkfaced caricature of an American Indian in a Cleveland baseball uniform, a brave’s feather stuck in his cap. The Indian was grinning feverishly, his mouth full of massive white teeth, as he cocked his bat and sighted on an oncoming baseball. The ball wore a swastika on its rear; on its front was a Hitler face full of horrified anticipation.
Korczukowski gestured at the artwork on the ship’s nose. “Some of these kids blew a month’s pay to get somebody to do a good job like that. But that was Al’s ground crew’s idea. Even the name. They were proud they were his crew, Voss. If you asked him, I’ll bet he couldn’t even tell you how many kills he has. I don’t think he wants to know.”
Harry pulled himself up on the low trailing edge of the wing. He walked along the root of the wing, his fingers tracing along the sun-warmed aluminum of the fuselage. The cockpit smelled of leather, oil, and sweat. The seat was faded and cracked by the sun, the leather indelibly imprinted with a human form impressed by hours of piloted flight. Peering into Dennis O’Connell’s cockpit two days earlier, Harry had been too distracted by other matters to notice the cramped quarters, but now, in Markham’s ship, he shuddered claustrophobically. He reached into the cockpit and his index finger rested on the firing button of the control stick. He looked over his shoulder to the open gun ports, assuring himself that there was nothing there, then pushed the button. It didn’t take much pressure at all. Even a child...
Korczukowski went for his Camels but the package was empty. He crumpled the package, prepared to toss it, but then thought better of it and tucked the crackling ball of cellophane into a trouser pocket. “Would you like to stop in and say hello to Fritz? We set him up in the mess tent.”
Harry climbed down from the wing. It took him a moment to recall the Katzenjammer reference. “Which one’s Fritz?”
“The nice one.”
“Ah. Captain Ricks. Where’d you put Hans Grassi?”
“Nowhere. He didn’t come in today. You didn’t know that?”
“No.”
“Maybe the little fella’s playing hooky.”
“If he is, the little fella’s going to get a good talking-to.”
They ended at Harry’s jeep, parked not far from the gate by the sentry MP’s. Harry proffered his own package of cigarettes. “They’re Players, I’m afraid.”
Korczukowski smiled appreciatively and drew one. “They’ll do. Thanks.” He lit the cigarette, then turned to where the backhoe was still at work. “I keep meaning to write to their folks. But forty-seven letters is a lot of letters to write. The way the Army does it...‘The Secretary of War regrets to inform you...’” The adjutant was referring to the little Western Union scooter that would put-put down a street, people growing quiet as they stood by their curtains to see if it would stop or go by. Then the put-put would cease and it was like counting until thunder came after the lightning, those few seconds needed to read the Army’s terse form of sympathy, then would come that high, pained wail. “Anybody deserves better than that. Even O’Connell. I don’t know what to tell them. Especially O’Connell’s folks.”
“I’d prefer you didn’t tell them anything. Any of the families. At least until this is cleared up.”
“Is that an order?”
With a call to Halverson’s office, Harry could’ve seen that it was. “A request,” he said, sliding behind the wheel of his jeep.
Korczukowski looked from Harry to the cemetery, then back to Harry. “OK, Voss. A request. Granted.”
Then Korczukowski was heading back toward the Headquarters building. Harry’s foot went for the starter but stopped.
His exhaustion rose up in him, and that and his exchange with the sad figure of the adjutant left him drained. He glanced at his watch; it was after three. He had less than two hours before Joe Ryan’s deadline for closing his investigation, and he was no closer to the key he had sought than he had been in the conference room seven hours earlier.
Were Harry an experienced criminal solicitor, the case might well have ended that afternoon, for Ryan was right: with means, opportunity, and even a serviceable — if arguable — motive, Harry had all he needed for a court-martial panel to put the accused promptly on the gallows.
But Harry was not an experienced criminal solicitor. His livelihood had been deeds and documents, legal swot work. Harry had lived by his ability to see every t crossed and each i neatly dotted. Sitting there in his jeep, contemplating his case, he kept coming across t’s that adamantly refused to be crossed, and i’s that would not dot.
Once again he pulled his note cards from his jacket. He would have preferred to lay them out on the grass of the aerodrome but images of himself chasing wind-tossed cards across the field to the amusement of the gate MP’s discouraged the impulse. He slipped on his reading glasses and flipped through the deck of cards.
Al Markham had murdered O’Connell; the physical evidence was clear. But everything Harry had learned about Markham indicated the flier would have been more likely to throw himself in the way of guns aimed at the luckless lieutenant than to be the man behind them. Harry could not accept the contention that a man who had fought courageously in two wars, survived nearly seven years of combat by his superb flying skill, had been cited by four air forces for his valor and leadership, and was a wizard pilot rated Double First as a commander by his peers, could have suddenly — and briefly — gone completely potty and downed O’Connell and attacked the Greshams.
Let’s dispense with the Markham-goes-berserk-for-two-minutes theory, he thought. He closed his eyes, and tried to send his tired mind back through his mental files. The shootings on the coast had seemed desperate. Anyone can be desperate: even a Markham. Desperation is simply the last act left to someone who considers all reasonable actions exhausted. But desperate to accomplish what? There was that troublesome question of motive again.
Back to basics, he thought. Why do people murder?
Rage. Anger. Revenge. Jealousy. Gain. Self-defense.
Doesn’t apply here. Why else?
Fear. To silence someone. To conceal something. A secret.
What would make Markham desperate enough to kill O’Connell so rashly when, where, and how he did would be to keep O’Connell from revealing something that had occurred earlier in the mission. That, in turn, meant the thing that required concealing — the motive — lay somewhere on the other side of the Channel.
“Excuse me, Major.”
The delicate poke at his shoulder snapped Harry’s eyes open. He turned and saw the concerned face of the MP sergeant from the gate.
“You all right, sir? You having a problem with the jeep again? I saw you — ”
“Fine, fine. Did you see which way Major Korczukowski went?” Then Harry was off to find the adjutant to ask him for use of a telephone.
Korczukowski escorted him to the field tent serving as communications center, then discreetly ushered the comm personnel out, leaving Harry alone with a telephone and his call to General Halverson.
“General, remember you said that whatever I needed to — ”
“I know what I said, Major. What do you need?”
“Well, it’s a pretty big request.”
“Go ahead.”
“I need an aerial photo reconnaissance flight, maybe more than one. Maybe a single flight can cover it all.”
“Cover what all?” The general’s voice was irritated. Harry couldn’t tell if it was the size of the request or its vagueness that was the cause.
“I need them to cover Markham’s return route from the Helsvagen fuel dump. At least the area where Markham says they were jumped by the Germans. And, I suppose, they should get pictures of Helsvagen, too.”
“You suppose?”
“They should.”
Thereafter, there were those who would say that Harry had acted recklessly, that his obsession to make a bigger case overrode any other consideration. But in truth, he had no real idea what he was after. He was just being his usual conscientious, diligent self. Despite his unifor
m, Harry was no soldier, and so had not even the experience to contemplate the eventual truth.
So, when General Halverson objected that such a recon was unnecessary because Jon-Jacob Anderson’s gun film plainly showed the attack on the fuel depot, Harry persisted that photos should still be taken of Helsvagen. He pushed not out of suspicion, but out of the very Harry-like desire to be comprehensive. “The gun films only cover the fuel dump,” he explained to Halverson. “I need pictures of the area around the town.”
Consequently, no one was more surprised than Harry when the recon photos came back later that day to show that the Belgian village of Helsvagen was burning.
Part Two – The Fall
Chapter Six – Ultima Ratio Regum
They were all gathered in the briefing amphitheater of the G-2 complex beneath Grosvenor Square. Voices rebounded harshly off the raw walls still awaiting a coat of acoustic tiles. Scuffed and cramped school writing desks were filling in for the planned padded seats, and raked desks with little attached reading lamps. The portals for the unfinished projection room were boarded over, and Major Christian Van Damm stood at the front of the room trying to make do with a small motion picture screen whose tripod tottered on the bare floor. Rough-hewn as it was, however, the briefing theater, off in a freshly dug but as yet uninhabited part of the subterranean sprawl, provided a measure of desired privacy.
Van Damm’s audience was sunk in darkness, betrayed only by curls of cigarette smoke snaking through the projector’s beam, and the clearing of throats irritated by the cement dust shedding from the walls whenever the muffled drills were at work elsewhere in the complex. Grassi was there, co-opted by Van Damm to operate the projectors set on a rolling cart, and so was Ricks, alone in a far corner of the room. Harry sat with Joe Ryan, close to the projectors. Harry’s attention was on the screen but he could hear the tap-tap-tap of the legs of Ryan’s chair as the colonel nervously rocked back and forth on the uneven floor. And General Halverson was there, sitting alone near the room’s center, above and behind them all, his only visible sign the glowing tip of his cigarette, pulsing like a stuttering heart.