The Aviators
Page 45
"Flare out at three thousand," Captain Oliver ordered with what Rand thought was an unnecessarily smug self-satisfaction.
General Rand did his very best to comply with the order.
And, he thought, after he had dropped five hundred feet, and flared it out, that it hadn't been half bad.
Oliver would now crank the throttle open again, and they would resume the flight, possibly, even probably, dropping to two hundred feet over some convenient field, where he would auto rotate again and actually settle the helicopter, powerless, onto the ground.
But Oliver made no move to restore power to the engine.
"May I advance the throttle?" Rand asked as the controls grew mushy in his hands.
Sonofabitch! I'm going to have to autorotate again while the sonofabitch makes up his goddamned mind! I
"No, I don't think so," Captain Oliver said as Rand dropped the nose again to swap altitude for velocity. "Sit it down someplace, General, please."
"What?" Rand asked disbelievingly.
"Engines have a tendency to fail at higher altitudes," Oliver said, infuriatingly smug. "Find someplace to set it down, please, and set it down." Rand was aware that his hands inside the thin pigskin flying gloves were now sweaty. He looked out the windows, searching for someplace to land the damn thing, even as he watched the dials and the rotor rpm.
The altimeter unwound alarmingly. And he had been taught that the altitude indicated by the instrument was not their altitude at the moment, but what the altitude had been seven seconds before. And he realized suddenly that he had no idea how far above sea level the ground beneath him was. Altimeters indicate height above sea level, not above the ground.
For all practical purposes that goddamned altimeter is useless to me; I'm going to have to judge how far off the ground I am. by looking out the windows.
He dropped and flared and dropped and flared and dropped and flared, and finally dropped and flared one last time and HU-ID Tail Number 610977 ran completely out of the aerodynamic forces required for flight about four feet over the stubble of a cutover cornfield and returned to earth. There was a dull thump and the sounds of groaning metal.
Brigadier General George F. Rand looked over at Captain John S. Oliver.
Gross goddamned mistake number two.
"May I take off?" General Rand asked.
"I think I had better have a look and see if we broke something," Oliver said. "I don't think we did, but it will take only a minute to look. Just keep it running." He's about my size and weight, General Rand thought, and I have twenty years on him. But I still think I can punch his ass into next week.
No damage to HU-ID Tail Number 610977 as a result of what would be entered in the flight-log as a "hard landing" was detected by Captain Oliver.
Oliver climbed back in the copilot's seat, and as Rand watched, carefully noting the time on his aviator's chronometer, entered the time and circumstances, including who was at the controls, of the hard landing in the flight log.
"Well, Sir," he said, smiling smugly at General Rand "if you're feeling up to it, why don't you see if you can get our little birdie in the air again?"
This sonofabitch is trying to make me mad. Well, to hell with him. I won't let him. When General Rand-did not reply, Captain Oliver went on, as if talking to a backward six-year-old.
"Why don't we see if we can find E!lfaula? Take us to twenty-five hundred feet, please."
When they were at two hundred feet, Captain Oliver retarded the throttle to ground idle again. General Rand was so taken by surprise that he performed another auto rotation in the belief that this one was necessary, not a demonstration of his skill at performing the technique. Then he saw Captain Oliver's smile and understood what had happened.
"One never knows when there will be a loss of power," Captain Oliver intoned solemnly. "Therefore, it behooves one to always be prepared to execute an auto rotation maneuver.
That one was considerably smoother than the previous one. With what he recognized to be a demonstration of considerable willpower, General Rand kept his mouth shut, except to ask for permission to take off.
Over the next hour and a half, above the farms and pine forests of what is known as the Alabama Wire Grass, Captain Oliver called upon General Rand to demonstrate his mastery of the various flight maneuvers he had learned while a student in the senior officers' flight program. Though General Rand was reasonably but not entirely sure that he had performed them above minimum standards, Captain Oliver offered no comment, congratulatory or otherwise.
Finally they flew back to Fort Rucker and Hanchey Army Airfield, entered the landing stack without announcing a Code Seven was aboard, and landed. By the time Captain Oliver had observed General Rand going through post-flight procedure, Lieutenant Howard Mitchell walked up to HU-ID Tail number 610977 and announced that he had the car anytime me General was ready.
"Are you going to tell me how I did, Captain Oliver, or not?" General Rand asked.
"Sir, with respect, no," Oliver said. "General Bellmon specifically said I was not to offer an opinion. "
"Well, thank you for your time, Captain," General Rand said.
"My pleasure, Sir." General Rand, not without effort, managed a smile as he returned Captain Oliver's salute. And then he walked across the grass of the parking ramp and the concrete of the runway, and stepped into the staff car.
They had been at the Magnolia House ten minutes when the telephone rang. It was General Bellmon's secretary. She told Mitchell that General Rand's check ride, scheduled for 1500, was canceled and would he instead please come to General Bellmon's office at that time.
When he had relayed the message, Lieutenant Mitchell looked at General Rand with what could have been concern, curiosity, or pity.
"If I busted that check ride, Mitchell, which is what it looks like, I'm going to protest," General Rand said softly but firmly. "I may be a little rough, I may not have the finesse I suspect Captain Oliver expected me to have, but I can fly that thing. I'll demand another check ride. "
"Yes, Sir," Lieutenant Mitchell said uncomfortably.
At 1455 hours, General Rand, accompanied by his aide de-camp, presented himself at the office of the Commanding General of the Army Aviation Center & Fort Rucker, Alabama.
He was courteously informed that the General was tied up at the moment and then offered a cup of coffee" which he declined.
At 1500 hours the door to General Bellmon's office opened and Bellmon himself appeared.
"Come in, please, George," Bellmon said. "Lieutenant, you keep your seat.
Rand followed Bellmon into his office, turning to close the door after him.
"You want some coffee, George?" Bellmon asked, settling himself in the high-backed chair behind his desk. "Sergeant Major James just made a fresh pot. "
"No, thank you," General Rand said.
"OK
" Bellmon said. "I've heard one version of your ride with Johnny Oliver. Now let's hear yours."
"All right," Rand said. "I hoped you'd give me that opportunity. Bob, I'm forty-five years old. My reflexes are not what they were when I was twenty-five, and I have no illusions that I'm one of these people you hear about who are born to fly. I am not smooth, I have to work at it every damned second. And I readily confess that taking off without a chart was pretty damned dumb. Having said that-"
"You took off without a chart? I didn't hear about that," Bellmon interrupted, visibly incredulous. "How did you manage to do that?"
"I left the Jepp case in the back. I didn't think. I said it was dumb." Bellmon shook his head from side to side. "You did remember, George, to count the shoes on your feet?"
"But despite everything I did wrong today, and I'm not going to challenge whatever Oliver reported to you-"
"Well," I'm glad to hear that," Bellmon said, holding up his hand, cutting him off.
'He pushed a lever on his intercom. "Would you send those people in here, please?" Rand looked at him in confusion.
"What Johnny Oliver said to me," Bellmon said "was that you flew a lot better than he thought you would."
"He said that?"
"And he said you didn't get flustered, even when he did his damndest to shake you."
"I'll be damned." In the split second that he smelled perfume and sensed a feminine presence, a hand touched his, and there was breath against his ear, and his wife said softly "I told you, you were going to pass." He looked down at her and then around the office. Captain John S. Oliver had also come into the room, and Lieutenant Howard Mitchell, and a sergeant with a U.S. Army photographer brassard around his arm.
"Bring him over here, Susan," Bellmon said. "In front of this wall. I will shake his hand and smile benignly at him while you pin on his wings and Sergeant Sanderson records this momentous occasion for posterity." General Rand found Captain Oliver.
"You sonofabitch," he said, but he was smiling.
"George!" Susan Rand said. "Captain, I know you know he didn't mean that, but he shouldn't have said it anyway."
"No problem, Ma'am," Johnny said.
"I want you to know that I'm very grateful-"
"Hell, Oliver," General Rand interrupted his wife
"sum's I. "
"-because General Bellmon told me," Susan Rand went on "that if you didn't think he could safely fly, you wouldn't have passed him."
"This was rougher on him than it was on George," Bellmon said. "Johnny, why don't you knock off for the day?
And I mean knock off. Get off the post. Go see your girlfriend. No work, in other words.
XVIII
[ONE]
Ozark, Alabama
1545 Hours 10 July 1964
Marjorie Bellmon's MGB was in the gas station at the corner of Ozark Highway and Spring Street when Oliver made the turn to go to Liza's house.
He tooted the horn, and she waved, and then it occurred to him that despite Jose Newell's expert and continuing attention, that damned little car was broken again. He could think of no other reason she'd be in a civilian gas station. He turned around to go back, pulling up beside her as she was handing money to the attendant.
"Anything wrong?" he asked, a little ashamed at his relief to find that she had really stopped for gas. He was in no mood to have to fool around with the car.
"No," she said
"and yes."
"'No," she said
"and yes."
"Tell me. I was a Boy Scout and I remain sworn to be helpful to ladies in distress."
"Jack called the house, collect, and I wasn't there," she said. "I was working. So Mother called me and told me. No sooner did she get off the phone than Uncle- Colonel Lowell called me at the bank and told me he didn't know what was going on in detail, but Jack was in some kind of trouble and he thought I might want to know about it and maybe even go down there."
"To McDill? That's halfway to Miami." What did PFC Jacques Emile Portet do, punch out some arrogant second lieutenant?
"No. He's at Hurlburt Field," Marjorie said.
Hurlburt Field, the home of the Air Force Air Commandos, is on the Gulf of Mexico, in the Florida Panhandle, not far from the Alabama border.
Oliver said what popped into his mind.
"That's where the Air Commandos hang their funny little hats."
"I know," she said. "What would Jack be doing there?"
"Haven't the foggiest."
"I'm going down there," she said. "That's going to go over like a lead balloon with your old man. "
"I know," she said. "But I've got to go if he's in trouble."
"Why don't you come with me to Liza's," Oliver said
"and I'll get on the phone and call down there and see what I can find out."
"I wouldn't know where to call," she said. "I've got to go."
"I've got the afternoon off. Want some company?" She kissed his cheek.
"That's sweet, but I'm the one in love with him."
"I'm not granting- the point, but what if he is in trouble? What do you think you can do about it?"
"I don't know," Marjorie said. "Be there. If I need some help I'll call you." When she saw the look of doubt on his face, she added: "I will, Johnny."
"OK. "
"We're friends, right?" she pursued, and he smiled and nodded.
"Yeah. "
"So, friend, how's it going with you and Liza?"
"We're flying in circles, waiting for: the other one to run out of gas," Oliver said. "No change, in other words.
Catch-22. She won't marry me unless I get out of the Army.
And -I can't get out of the Army."
"You've thought about that?"
"That wouldn't work," he said. "If I thought it would, I would resign."
"You're like Daddy. I can't imagine either one of you doing anything else but being in the Army."
"Like I said-, Catch-22."
"Well, if I were Liza, I'd marry you
" Marjorie said.
"Maybe we could give Jack to Liza. He's really a civilian.
That would straighten our romantic problems." She laughed and kissed him on the cheek.
"Be careful, Marjorie," Oliver said as she climbed in her car.
"You, too." When he reached the house he was surprised to find Liza's car in the driveway. He'd expected her to be at work. It had been his intention to get out of his uniform, take a shower, pick Allan up at Mother Wood's, and fool around with him until Liza got home.
He really liked the little guy. And the reverse seemed to be true as well, which was understandable on Allan's part. A little boy likes a daddy. But he sometimes wondered if he wasn't, at least subconsciously, using Allan as a lever on Liza's emotions. Before he'd met the- kid, he'd thought that whoever had called small children house apes was right on the money. Whenever these uncomfortable thoughts occurred to him, he consoled himself with the profound, age-old wisdom that all's !air in love and war. And with the somewhat self-righteous notion that whatever the reason, he genuinely cared more for Allan Wood than Tom Chaney had ever cared for Johnny Oliver.
"You're home early," Liz said when he walked into the kitchen. It was more of a challenge than a question or statement.
And she said home, which is an interesting Freudian slip.
Allan, came running from inside the house and Oliver scooped him off the floor and growled in his neck.
"I spent the day giving' General Rand a check ride," he said, hoisting Allan so that he sat with his legs around his neck. "Bellmon turned me loose early."
"What did you say to your sister about me?" Liza demanded.
"Horsey! Horsey!" Allan said, pulling on Oliver's ears.
"What?"
"I said, what did you say to your sister about me?" Liza repeated coldly.
"You were there, baby," Oliver said. "What did you hear?"