And, improbable as it seemed, perhaps a crook. There was just too much fishy stuff going on at McNaughton for Caldwell not to be involved in it. The firm had not yet built a fighter the Army would use, yet they got order after order. Their record with the jet fighter was appalling.
Well, I'll never fault him, Hadley thought. It's because he's goofy about that woman; better men than either one of us have had that problem before.
Hadley had his own problems. Not one of the advanced fighters in Operation Leapfrog looked as if it would work out. He'd spent a war failing in exactly the same manner he'd failed in peacetime—and now Clarice was gone, too. Life had little meaning now. He straightened up. Father Tedesco was beginning to speak; Patty had filled him in on all of Clarice's good qualities, and Hadley was ready to listen and agree.
*
Stockholm, Sweden/August 25, 1943
Ulrich Helmut Josten celebrated the first morning of his second week of life suckling his mother's breast, unaware that the first trauma he would ever know was about to occur: separation from his mother. Lyra was going to go back to work at the Legation, where she painstakingly translated English and Russian publications into German. Her Swedish doctor, Bjorn Walden, had tried to insist on two weeks of bed rest and at least one more week of recuperation, but too many conflicting pressures were driving her back.
The birth had gone easily; the greatest joy she had ever known, messy little red-faced Ulrich had popped out like a shucked pea from a pod after only four hours labor, a healthy six-pound baby boy. A joyous exhilaration coursed through her—even in the midst of a destructive war, even in a godless time, nature had rendered her a beautiful service. It made her even more unwilling to submit young Ulrich to his father's ideas. War or no war, Ulrich Helmut Josten was going to learn decent human values. She'd already resolved that she'd bring him up alone. If she could not do that she would see that he was raised in a Swedish home. This precious bundle of helpless love was never ever going to be a Hitler Youth, a Nazi, a military man like his father.
The man she had adored, the Helmut Josten of 1938, no longer existed. It was obvious that he loved her just as much as ever, but he had changed, not in his treatment of her, but in his basic values.
The war could not go on forever. If he lived, he might be humanized again. But she was not going to leave her darling Ulrich to chance.
Dr. Walden had arranged for young Greta Raaby to be her housekeeper. She was an unwed mother with a baby of her own, glad to have a job and a place to stay in exchange for taking care of Ulrich while Lyra went back to work. Greta's ample breasts had plenty of milk, and the doctor thought it would be a good thing if they both nursed little Ulrich—"Give him two sets of protection," was the way he put it. Lyra hadn't discussed it, but it was also a hedge against the possibility that she might be arrested or detained, and the baby left with Greta for long periods of time.
When she returned to work she found her office pulsing with excitement. Hans Thomsen, the Foreign Minister, was obviously interested in redeeming his failures as charge d'affaires in America by bringing off a rapprochement with Russia, and he didn't care who knew. Twenty minutes after she got back to work, she had been called in to see him. She jumped with the same automatic terror that seized her whenever there was a knock at the door or a telephone rang. She immediately assumed he knew about her dealings with Caldwell and others, and that this was the beginning of the end. It turned out to be nothing more than an urgent request for the translation of a Soviet magazine article, which hinted that a separate peace might still yield Polish and Sudeten territories to Germany. Thomsen was obviously excited; he insisted that she write out the translation on the spot, as he went on with a series of phone calls to Berlin, speaking unguardedly in front of her. Much of his conversation dealt with the rapidly changing conditions in Scandinavia—the increased Norwegian resistance, the signs of Finland's war-weariness, and the growing hostility of the Swedes, all events calculated to add to the desirability of a separate settlement with Russia.
She realized how fortunate she was that the Press and Information section of the Foreign Office was at once the most and the least Nazi of all the myriad bureaucracies that choked Germany. At the top, the bosses were handpicked, bona fide Nazis, intent upon imposing good Third Reich behavior on everyone. But the middle-level managers were mostly "aristos," like herself, members of a network that the Nazis despised yet could not do without. She knew that she would never have survived a year in Germany if her family had not been noble.
Now the aristocratic network had even extended to the Red Russians in the person of Madame Alexandra Kollontay, the Soviet Minister in Stockholm. The daughter of a Czarist general, she had known Lyra's father and mother in St. Petersburg and Moscow and even visited them at their estate at Alupka, near Yalta. A beautiful woman in her youth, a radical who proclaimed the joys of free love long before the Parisian existentialists, she had become an ardent Communist in 1917. Somehow she had overcome her royalist family background and risen to become a bright and shining star in Stalin's diplomatic bureau, important enough to attract continual attacks in the Voelkischer Beobachter, where Goebbels had styled her "the Commissar of all the Prostitutes."
Madame Kollontay had not hesitated to contact Lyra. Her beauty might have faded, but her will had not. She ran her Ministry with an iron hand, certain that no one would dare report her for dealing with a "foreigner." No longer well, perhaps aware that her time was running out, she had summoned Lyra to a private suite at the Grand Hotel. They had feasted on lobster Madame Kollontay had cadged from the British embassy—which bent over backward to please her—then spent an hour talking about "the old days" at court. At the end she bluntly asked Lyra to work against the Nazis.
"We know about your contacts with the Americans, Lyra; we are on the same side. We also know about your husband's relationship with the experimental work this man Hafner is doing."
The familiar terror stabbed Lyra. If the Russians knew, the Nazis probably did as well—when would they come for her?
"What can I do?"
"The Nazis are finished; it's only a matter of time. We hope that we can work with the Americans after the war, but no one is sure what will happen."
"I can scarcely work against the Americans."
"You can scarcely work against your Motherland." Silence, then, "Your husband's friend, Hafner, is at the center of a gigantic experimental web. We want to contact him; we know you can do it."
In the end, Lyra succumbed to the hard facts of her situation. The Swedes were desperately afraid that the Russians would invade as soon as they'd finished with Germany, paying off the debt of Sweden's support of Germany. If they did, then a promise from Madame Kollontay would be worth a great deal. Caldwell had offered the same promises, too, but she thought that the United States was unlikely to intervene in a Russian invasion of Sweden. For Ulrich's sake, she had to have as many options as possible.
*
Muroc, California/September 10, 1943
The early desert heat already soaked Bandfield's four-by-eight compartment in the Visiting Officers' Quarters. The warped green pine one-by-six planks of the rough wooden barracks inhaled the sand driven against it by the late summer winds, and everything from his shaving kit to his highly polished brown shoes were filmed over with white dust.
Jim Lee and Troy McNaughton came by his room to pick him up for his first flight in the McNaughton jet, the Mamba. Lee's appearance had changed—he was leaner and obviously matured by his combat experience, a lieutenant colonel now, rumored to be on Caldwell's list for full bird. His cocky, good-humored manner was as agreeable as ever, making it easier to endure McNaughton's relentless salesmanship. In many ways, Lee reminded Bandfield of Hadley Roget—sharper and more refined, but with the gut feel for engineering blessed with more common sense.
McNaughton asked, "Did my people give you a good enough briefing on the airplane, Bandy?"
"Sure did. Jim ran through all the charts
with me, then talked me through about an hour in the cockpit last night, figuring out what all the switches are for."
"The Mamba was a little disappointing for us at first, but our drag reduction program has most of the problems licked. My test pilots have been hitting over five hundred miles per hour true airspeed regularly, and we've got some changes planned that will add another fifty, at least. You've got to expect things like that—this is one of the first jet planes in the world to fly."
Lee saw the flicker of annoyance on Bandfield's face and quickly chimed in, "Maybe not the first, but one of the best. It's going to have to be, to beat the ones that shot our ass off over Ploesti. Anyway, it's the sixth type of jet to fly. The Germans have flown three, the Brits one, and even the poor old Italians one."
As they talked, Lee buffered McNaughton against some of Bandfield's sarcasm, going on point like a well-trained hunting dog when he saw Bandfield's dander rising, quickly changing the subject, or poking fun at himself.
They were silent until they reached the airplane, olive drab against the desert sand. Bandfield walked around the airplane with Lee and a McNaughton mechanic. The airplane was just a Sidewinder in disguise. The jet engines had been built into bulges at the side of the fuselage, which now contained almost nothing but fuel tanks. The wings looked as if they'd been pulled off an old Martin B-10 bomber—long, thick, and broad, and there was no question in Bandfield's mind that the lift they generated would be paid for in excessive drag.
After a long, three-thousand-foot takeoff, the flight itself turned out to be totally uneventful. The Mamba was a delightful toy of an airplane, Bandfield felt, just a powered glider really, easy to fly and so quiet that there was a vibrating mechanism built into the instrument panel to keep the gauges from sticking.
In level flight at thirty thousand feet, he applied full power. Acceleration was glacial—four minutes crept as the speed built to a maximum. Spinning the celluloid dials of the E-6B computer with one hand, adjusting the airspeed indicator reading for temperature and pressure, he was surprised to see a true airspeed reading of 510 miles per hour.
510! Pretty good, for such a big airplane.
At thirty thousand feet there was no visual reference to gauge the speed, but it seemed high—the airplane was just too big and drag-ridden for such performance. He rechecked the instruments and the E-6B—same result. It was puzzling. Maybe without a propeller to disrupt the airflow, a jet was simply more efficient.
As he descended to land he realized that the Mamba was a real confidence-builder, something a young pilot right out of flying school could fly. If the performance figures were correct, then McNaughton had really come through—and Caldwell had been proven right again.
McNaughton, face bacon-brown, age-silvered hair flying in the desert breeze, was waiting for him with Lee at the runway's edge, bouncing up and down in the ankle-deep sand. As soon as the jet rolled to a stop he leapt up on the wing and helped open the canopy.
"Well, what do you say, Bandy? Isn't it a winner?"
Bandfield busied himself shutting off a few more switches, still puzzled by the figures.
"Well, Troy, I'll have to admit I'm surprised at the performance. Are you sure these instruments are calibrated correctly?"
"Sure? Sure, I'm sure. Your own man, Lee here, oversaw the job himself. Tell him, Jim."
"Yeah, it's surprisingly fast and it doesn't feel like it, because there's no vibration."
"Well, it's really easy to fly. You could turn an Eagle Scout loose with this airplane."
Lee spoke up. "The Mamba is the best fighter in the world. What did you get out of it, five-twenty?"
Bandfield thought to himself, He's quite the company man now. Then said, "No, a little less than that at thirty thousand feet. I'd like to take it back up with a chase plane, and calibrate the airspeed indicator, then run some more checks."
"Good idea. We've got to pull the engines, though, and check the turbine blades and the combustion chambers. You could do it tomorrow."
"No, I'm due over at Lockheed. But, Jim, will you do it for me? Get a chase plane—a Mustang if you can—and get the airspeed indicators calibrated at ten, twenty, and thirty thousand feet. The Mustang can probably keep up with it at low altitudes, and you can throttle the Mamba back at thirty. But then do a full-out, highspeed run, and let me know what it does."
"No problem, Bandy. Glad to do it. I love to fly that sucker."
As usual, McNaughton couldn't contain his salesman's instincts.
"You tell old Henry Caldwell that you need about a thousand of these dudes—and maybe five hundred more, two-seaters, to use as trainers. That'll keep us busy until we get our new jet in production."
Bandfield was surprised. "You've got another one coming down the line?"
"Oh, yeah, didn't Henry tell you about it? It's really something else—it'll blow the Lockheed jet right out of the water."
McNaughton's sneering greed sent a tide of unreasoning anger over Bandfield. Lockheed had been a tremendous performer all during the war, and McNaughton shouldn't knock them. "The Lockheed isn't exactly our problem, Troy; it's the goddamn Messerschmitt jets that worry me. We're going to start running into them over Germany pretty soon, and unless you concentrate your efforts on the Mamba, we won't have a damn thing to oppose them with. You've fiddle-fucked with this heap so long that we might just lose the war."
The older man responded to Bandfield's open anger. "You think the Germans are going to be able to do something that we can't? I tell you, Lieutenant Colonel Bandfield"—he spat the rank out contemptuously—"you'll see McNaughton jets in German skies before you'll ever see Messerschmitt jets."
Bandfield had climbed out of the cockpit and shed his parachute. He was standing with his hands pressed into his back, trying to restore the circulation his seat-pack parachute had cut off, unable to curb his suspicions.
"Troy, you're not talking to some cub reporter from Nashville. You've screwed up the jet program royally for two years, and if the Germans get their jets in the air this fall, the bomber boys are going to pay for it. You'll be lucky to have the Mamba operational by next spring, and you know it."
McNaughton bridled, his suntanned face flushing red, his voice dripping with self-assured sarcasm. Lee backed away, uncomfortable.
"Well, now, you're entitled to your junior-birdman opinion, Colonel, but I'm going to have a word with General Caldwell about your attitude. We taxpayers pay your salary, and don't you forget it."
It was like watching an ancient motion picture of himself. Instinctively, involuntarily, his right hand had moved from behind him in an arc, heading toward McNaughton's chin.
Lee grabbed his arm and spun him around.
"Watch it, Bandy, you can't go around belting people."
McNaughton stalked off, enraged.
"What the hell are you doing? You act like McNaughton's puppet."
Lee lowered his voice, shaking Bandfield's arm violently. "I'll tell you what I'm doing, you dumb bastard, I'm trying to save Caldwell's ass. He's in so deep with McNaughton that the only way to get him out is to get some decent airplanes from them."
"What do you mean, 'in so deep'?"
"What the hell do you think? Do you think the contracts on the Sidewinder or on the jet could stand scrutiny? Elsie's leading him around by his dick, and he's dumped forty million dollars into McNaughton's coffers."
Bandfield felt sick.
"You're supposed to be his friend—making this jet successful is the only way out for him, I swear."
He managed to get a line through to Patty that night, telling her all about it from the refuge of the booth in the dingy crowded lobby of the Hotel Burbank.
"He'll probably get me court-martialed for trying to take a swing at him, but it was worth it. I'm just sorry I didn't hit him."
"Thank God you didn't. And I've got something to tell you that will ruin the rest of your day."
"You can't ruin this one; I've done a good job myself."
Bandfield was silent for a while, annoyed, but trying to be fair.
"Well, he's done a hell of a job, put his neck on the line a lot of times. He deserves it."
"So do you."
Bandfield reproached himself for his human failings—the inability to control his suspicions, his anger, or his jealousy—for hours before dropping off into a fitful doze. But the next morning his mood improved radically as Kelly Johnson briefed him on Lockheed's amazing progress on the jet—they were calling it the XP-80. They had started work on June 23; the first airframe was taking shape, and the production lines were already being tooled up. It was nothing less than an industrial miracle. They had knocked off at noon to go to the Lockheed cafeteria when a young engineer named George Kidd caught up with them.
"Colonel Bandfield, there's some guy from some senator's office in our main conference room. He says he has to talk to you."
Kidd hustled him down the beige hallway, the walls covered with pictures of famous Lockheed aircraft, to the plush carpeted conference room. At the end of a long mahogany table, a tall young man, long black hair brushed back over a high forehead, with a totally disarming grin, sat buried in stacks of paper and briefcases.
He stood up when Bandfield entered, saying, "I'm Steve Chaudet. I work for the Special Committee Investigating the National Defense Program. Senator Truman has directed me to ask you some questions."
Jesus, Bandfield thought, here it starts.
*
Great Ashford, England/October 14, 1943
Eagles at War Page 27