by Bill Mesce
Van Damm’s pointer floated into the ray of light and toward the screen as Grassi fed the first photo into an opaque projector.
“These were taken just about three hours ago,” Van Damm began. “They’re of the general vicinity where Markham claims he was bounced by kraut fighters. The photo passes were made at about five thousand feet, which allowed us to cover a good amount of area in the least amount of time. That seemed the best way to handle the run since we didn’t know how long the krauts were going to let us dawdle out there.
“That we didn’t find anything doesn’t prove much either way. Markham’s not sure where the intercept took place. We’re working on a best-guess and that means we could’ve missed the actual crash site by miles. We’ve got the added problem that we’re not looking for much: wreckage from two burned-out fighters. Two days after the fact those Thunderbolts could’ve already been carted off for scrap, so, even if we were in the right spot, there might not be anything there left to see.” Van Damm signaled to Grassi with the pointer and the lieutenant ran several aerial photographs through the projector, each showing an unblemished checkerboard of cultivated fields and irrigation ditches, each accompanied by his announcement: “See? Nothing...Nothing...Nothing...”
Van Damm had Grassi turn off the opaque projector, and the film projector sitting next to it flickered to life. “What you’re going to see now, gentlemen, is Captain Anderson’s gun film from the mission on August fifteenth, two days ago.”
The grainy film image was disorienting, fields and trees moving closely beneath the camera so swiftly as to be only slightly more than a blur.
“Here’s his first pass,” Van Damm told them. “The approach is low, under a hundred feet maybe, as down in the grass as you can go without wheels, and he’s coming in flat out, maybe four hundred per or more. Chances are they never heard or saw him coming. He’s coming up out of the southwest. You can’t see the village, it’s too low, on the other side of the fuel dump. All you’re going to be able to make out are the tanks. You’ll just have a second — ”
Van Damm’s pointer darted at some gray smudges and then the image shuddered, the picture flashed and white columns streaked from both sides of the screen, converging on the image’s vanishing point.
“OK,” Van Damm said, speaking urgently now. “These are the trails from Anderson’s rockets and these here, up in the corner, those are from O’Connell’s — And boom, there go the fuel tanks!”
The image shook again: The gray smudges vanished in two enormous, swelling mushrooms of fire.
Ryan’s chair stopped rocking. Grassi whistled appreciatively. Ricks’s voice was a prayerful, “Good God...” Harry looked back into the dark toward where Halverson was sitting, but there was no sound; just the sporadic pulsing of the general’s cigarette tip.
Harry turned back to the screen. The camera angle was shifting sharply skyward, clouds darting by, capturing Anderson’s extreme maneuvering to avoid the fireballs that were still rising, spreading, licking at the edge of the frame.
“Now he comes around, steadies himself, and this is his second and final pass. According to Anderson’s debriefing statement, at this point O’Connell’s already on his way home. Now here, he’s working over this line of buildings across from where the tanks used to be. There’s not much left. You can see they’re already burning, but he hits them anyway, first with the rest of his rockets and then with strafing. You can see his tracers working them over: headquarters, comm shack, barracks, motor pool, so on.”
The image quivered from the recoil of Anderson’s wing guns. Harry saw little balls of light, the tracers, floating earthward to disappear into the maelstrom of smoke and flames and fresh explosions that now completely obscured the ground. In a gap in the smoke he caught a fleeting glimpse of a human figure, the only one he’d seen, then the tracers kicked up a line of dust enveloping the man. The figure’s knees began to buckle, but before he could hit the ground the camera had moved on.
“Lieutenant? Can you freeze it? Yeah, that knob there. Run it back a bit, then hold it. See these? All these little blobs? Here, here, and here? Tracers from the ground. AA fire is sporadic and uncoordinated. These little bitty ones, that’s machine-gun fire. These bigger ones, I would guess twenty-millimeter. There’s nothing heavier coming up. Probably wasn’t much left to shoot back with after those tanks went up, but — you should remember for later — they still had working guns down there.
“OK, Lieutenant, roll it ahead but stop when I tell you. Right there! Freeze it! Take a good look. This is the tail end of Anderson’s pass. The run along the building line is a diagonal, southeast to northwest. You can see he’s climbing after the run and banking hard over to his right. That points him toward the town. Look up here in the corner. You can just see a piece of the village. Lieutenant, kill it and turn the opaque back on. Take the top picture out of that next file. OK, good. This is a blowup of that last frame you saw from Anderson’s gun film.”
Grassi turned the photo on end: Now the village was sitting properly on the horizontal. The enlarged grain of the 16-mm motion-picture film broke the image into dissoluble bits of light and dark. Only Van Damm’s guiding pointer tip held shapes together, outlining cottages, walk-ups, the dark finger of a church steeple truncated just before the pinnacle by the frame’s edge.
“What is it you don’t see here?” Van Damm asked. No one offered an answer.
“Remember Markham and Anderson’s debriefing. O’Connell’s already gone. Anderson makes his last run, then heads out after O’Connell. What happens to Markham and Angel Red? Markham says they abort the rest of the attack. Angel Red dumps their rockets and takes off after Anderson and O’Connell. That’s what they say.”
The pointer tapped the screen. “Now take a good look at that town. What you don’t see is smoke, fire, any perceptible damage. That place is intact.” Van Damm gave them a moment to make the required study. Then, “Lieutenant, next folder please. Start with the top picture. Gentlemen, this is Helsvagen less than three hours ago.”
Van Damm went silent. Any comment or analyses would have been redundant. Even a novice like Harry could decipher the image now on the screen. In the lower left-hand corner of the picture, where Harry guessed the burning fuel depot was, smoke poured diagonally up and across the frame, devouring space like a rampant cancer. Thick and invasive as it was, there were still gaps. Through them Harry could see that the neat grid of streets that had comprised the village had been violently disrupted. Streets ended in jumble, as if the loosely knit grain of the enlarged film had disintegrated. Building facades abruptly broke off. The smoke hovering over the village did not all come from the burning depot. Several pyres pointed downward inside the perimeter of Helsvagen.
Twenty years earlier, in the sun-baked square of a Mexican village, I stood looking up at the bloated bodies of six Villa sympathizers hanging from a cottonwood tree, left there the week before by Huerta’s men under the order that the corpses hang until they rotted. That was the first time I looked into the animal eye of Man. One doesn’t react at first; there’s no shock, no pity, no revulsion. There’s not even anger. One can’t react until one can comprehend, and those first moments of that first encounter defy comprehension — there is no answer to Why this?
And so Harry sat curiously impassive to what was presented on that wobbling screen. In fact, he seemed more affected relating this all to me later on.
Harry looked about to see how the others were responding. Van Damm’s pointer dropped, like the dipping of the colors at a passing funeral cortege. In the light spill from the projector Grassi was for once — astoundingly — speechless. Ryan remained a cipher, the darkness in the room so complete as to conceal his face even though he sat at Harry’s shoulder. Harry heard him sag into his seat with a wheezing sigh akin to that of a collapsing balloon.
Van Damm took a breath, and his pointer returned to the screen. “This is from about five thousand feet — ”
“Jesus Christ o
n a crutch!” Halverson’s oath was almost lost in the explosive sound of one chair violently colliding with another, and then both splintering on the hard floor.
A startled silence followed. Harry looked in Halverson’s direction. The glow of the cigarette was gone. Presently, a match flared, bright and alone, and Harry had a brief glance of painfully narrowed eyes, a jerky nod of the head to Van Damm to proceed.
Van Damm cleared his throat and resumed. “Here’s the depot down here in the lower left-hand corner. The tanks must’ve been at or close to full capacity for them to still be burning after all this time. The wind is out of the southeast, blowing the smoke toward the town, and that makes it hard to get a clear picture. Here, We’re just starting to lose the sun, but through these holes in the smoke you can see fires inside the town. And through here what appears to be battle damage. Next picture, please.
“This is lower, somewhere around three thousand. Through these gaps you can see better. This isn’t a collapsed building; look at the way the debris sprays across the street. That indicates explosive impact. Here, more fires.
“This last picture is down around fifteen hundred feet. These are the fields northwest of town, out from under the smoke. Field hospital here, though by this time most of the wounded have probably been evacuated to Brussels. Tent city here, this looks like a field kitchen, water trucks here. Now this blotchy-looking area looks to be freshly turned earth. If I had to guess, under these circumstances, I’d say a mass grave. Look by this bulldozer. See this ditch? Lined up here, nearby, these are bodies, apparently under blankets. Next picture, Lieutenant.”
“How do you know — ” General Halverson began, then stopped, as if uncertain he wanted to hear the answer. Then, “How do you know that those ‘bodies’ aren’t wounded men?”
“You don’t cover a wounded man’s face and leave him out in the open for two days.” Van Damm said it emotionlessly. “Look closely here. See these men working down in the ditch? They’re spreading something around, something light-colored. Quicklime would be my guess.” Van Damm paused again.
After a moment, the general tiredly asked, “Anything else?”
“The first radio intercepts we had of calls for assistance to Helsvagen were disproportionate to the number of military personnel we estimated on-station, but they would seem consistent with the apparent damage to the town. Those transmissions went out in the clear. I guess they were pretty desperate that first day.”
“Any follow-up to that?” the general asked.
“No, sir. They probably restored hard-line communications within hours.”
“What about civilian radio? Nothing on the propaganda broadcasts? Goebbels would have a field day with something like this.”
“That was my first thought, too, sir, but it’s not going to do Joe Goebbels and Fat Hermann and the other boys any good for their people to know that American fighters are roaming free and clear and hitting civilian targets at will. In the last year the krauts have lost North Africa and Sicily, and we’ll be in Italy in a month — which I’m sure they expect — and the Russkies have been kicking their collective ass pretty steadily since Stalingrad. Goebbels is having enough problems explaining to Mrs. Shickelgruber what Allied bombers are doing over Germany, let alone fighters roaming around Belgium. And he’s got Hamburg to account for.”
At the mention, Harry heard Halverson stir in his seat. “That’s not for here, Major.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Do we still need that?”
Van Damm knew what he meant. He had Grassi kill the projector while he found the room lights. The cold fluorescents flickered on.
As Harry’s eyes adjusted he could see all the players now. Ricks was leaning forward, his forearms propped on the writing arm of his chair, his eyes lost to some point on the walls. Grassi, too, was remarkably introspective, but Harry saw his eyes (one still framed by a bruise from his unsuccessful boxing stint) darting here and there, his predatory instinct already working at the double-quick. Van Damm stood by the blank screen rolling his pointer idly between his fingers. He began to reach for one of the cellophane-wrapped cigars in his breast pocket, but with his fingers hovering over his pocket he thought better of it.
Halverson was slumped in his seat, cigarette smoldering in one hand, his other slowly massaging his forehead. On the tier below him two broken chairs lay where they had tangled after the blow from his foot.
“The point is,” Van Damm continued, “the krauts might figure that what they gain in outrage they lose in panic. And, you’ve got the embarrassment factor here. The air-defense commanders for this area have to explain how our guys flew halfway across Belgium unmolested and took this place out. It’s even possible that Berlin doesn’t know about this. An air commander who lets this happen, and lets that news get back to the brass...that guy could definitely find himself trying to improve his work skills against the Russians. It wouldn’t be hard to localize this: a place out in the middle of nowhere, not on any of their major supply routes, and since the dump is a storage facility, not a fueling station, it’s rarely used. Other than the dump, Helsvagen has no real military value. As rigidly controlled as the information flow is over there, public and military, if they don’t tell anybody, chances are nobody outside the immediate area is going to know about it.”
A long minute went by before Halverson spoke. “How do you account for the two missing pilots?”
“Jacobs and McLagen? That gets a bit more problematic. There’s no sign of them in these pictures, but if they went down in the town, well, they might just be lost in all the mess. Remember: Even after the fuel tanks went up, there was still working double-A fire coming up from the dump.”
“Enough to bring two planes down?”
Van Damm shrugged.
“Or maybe they’re not there at all,” Halverson said.
“Maybe. Maybe they really did get bounced on the way home; maybe they’re down somewhere else. On that point, there’s nothing we can find to corroborate or refute Markham’s story.”
“What about this Anderson fella?” Halverson asked Harry. “He must have something to say.”
Harry shrugged. “If he does, he’s keeping it to himself. Since his initial debriefing, he’s clammed up. At this point, knowing anything he says is probably going to be self-incriminating, I doubt he’s going to supply us with anything useful.”
Halverson nodded grimly. To Van Damm: “Tell me about the recon flight.”
“We used a three-plane flight out of Manston. Mosquitos. One camera ship, two flying cover.” Van Damm turned to Harry and Ryan. “We use the Mosquitos on a lot of BDA runs because they’re long on range, fast, maneuverable, and primarily made of plywood, which means a low radar return. Poststrike, the krauts are usually looking for a recon flight, so if you can get in and out without provoking them — ”
“Mosquitos,” Halverson mulled uncomfortably. “Does that mean an RAF involvement?”
“The Mosquitos are on loan. It was our people in the cockpits.”
“Can they keep their mouths shut? The crews?”
“They’re my people, General. They keep their mouths shut all the time.”
“How much do they know?”
“To them, this was a routine BDA flight consequent to a routine attack mission on a legitimate target.”
“I don’t want them to think otherwise.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Where are the crews now?”
“The crews from the camera ship and one of the cover planes are waiting for debriefing.”
“The third crew?”
“Well, like I said, the krauts are looking for a poststrike evaluation. Our boys saw FW’s coming up from the fighter field outside Ghent, made their last fly-by — We’re lucky they got the pictures they did — and lit out. They had to mix it up before they could duck into the clouds. One of the cover ships got chopped up a little bit. They made it back, but both those boys are in the hospital.”
“
They’ll be all right?” the general asked, his voice strained.
Van Damm paused, weighing how much to say. “They’ll be laid up for a while,” he said, trying to make his voice casual, “but they’ll be OK.”
Halverson nodded, relieved. He cleared his throat and sat erect in his chair. When he spoke, his voice had regained the hard burnish of command. “Major, are these pictures everything you have?”
“These are the best from the run.”
“Are the rest secure?”
“In my safe, sir.”
“I want you to take all of the pictures, the gun film, the negatives and all prints, everything you’ve got on this, and I want them in that safe, too.”
“Yes — ”
“Nobody — and I mean nobody — gets access without a written and confirmed order from me.”
Before Van Damm could answer, Grassi’s hand was up. “General.” Grassi drew himself up to what there was of his height. “We’re going to need those pictures.”
Harry winced. It was a legitimate point, but it was delivered with the tone of a flat and discourteous demand. Harry wasn’t sure, but later he’d swear to me he heard Ryan whisper, “Oh-oh.”
Halverson slid his long legs out from under the writing arm of the desk and stood. He walked casually down the center aisle of the auditorium, absently tugging at the hem of his tunic, pulling the wrinkles out of the fabric. He walked directly past Grassi, making no sign he was even aware of the lieutenant’s presence. The general stepped into the speaker’s area, dropped his cigarette on the floor, and gently snuffed it out with the toe of his polished shoe. Pulling a fresh smoke from the pack in his breast pocket, he spoke quietly to Van Damm. “I’m going to need your room for a few minutes, Major, if you don’t mind.”
“Of course, sir.” As Van Damm scooped up the pictures and film from the projector stand, Harry thought the major seemed relieved at the dismissal. From the look on Grassi’s face Harry thought, for a moment, that the little lieutenant was going to say — or worse, do — something to stop Van Damm from removing the material. He almost sighed audibly in relief when the briefing-room door closed behind the major without incident.