Comes the War

by Ed Ruggero

  “Is there a date for the court-martial?”

  Harkins sucked in his breath, laid out the bad news. “Gefner is pushing for the beginning of May.”

  “So, a week.”

  “Maybe,” Harkins said. “Let’s concentrate on what we can control. I’ve been talking to some people about the report that you had on you the night Batcheller was killed,” Harkins continued. “You said the Russians were the source of the information she used to write it. Said that it showed that the bombing campaign was not destroying German industry and that, in fact, production numbers for military equipment were going up.”

  “Production numbers were going up,” Cushing said. “She proved it.”

  “And you were trying to get this report to Ike’s headquarters because he needed it to make the strongest possible case for controlling all the air assets for the invasion.”

  “Exactly. The bomber boys don’t want to give the aircraft to Ike,” Cushing said. He looked down at something in his hands. When he ran it through his fingers, Harkins saw that it was a set of rosary beads. Patrick must have had them in his pocket.

  “Eighth Air Force planners want to keep going deep into Germany; claim they can win the war without a massive ground assault. Ike wants to use as much air power as he can to isolate the beachheads in France,” Cushing said. “Cut off German reinforcements and counterattacks after D-Day. Helen proved that the air force guys were wrong; that continuing to use every airplane deep in Germany wasn’t as important as what Ike wants. Because if the invasion fails, we’re fucked.”

  “I know I’ll be,” Patrick said.

  When Cushing looked at him, Patrick said, “I’m a paratrooper. First ones to the party.”

  “I talked to a guy from the Soviet Embassy,” Harkins said. “He more or less confirmed everything you told me.”

  “So where is the report?” Cushing asked.

  “My boss confiscated it, but there might be another copy.”

  “Let me guess,” Cushing said. “It’s with the Soviets.”

  “I think so,” Harkins said. “Did Batcheller say anything about being afraid of the Soviets? That they might be a threat to her?”

  “Not exactly,” Cushing said. “But I know she and her contact were being very careful. I guess they weren’t supposed to be cooperating.

  “Still,” he continued, “it wouldn’t make much sense for the Soviets to kill her. I mean, they’d be working against their own interests.”

  “It would seem that way,” Harkins said.

  The three men sat quietly for a moment; Harkins thought he heard something scratching inside the wall, maybe a rat.

  “Patrick, you asked me if maybe they were trying to recruit me as a spy. Maybe somebody tried to recruit Batcheller.”

  “But why would they kill her?” Cushing asked.

  “Because she turned them down?” Harkins said. “Maybe she could identify the recruiter.”

  “I don’t know,” Patrick said. “Murder seems kind of risky, you know, if they’re trying to be secretive about it.”

  “They tried to murder me the other night. A Russian woman set me up, almost walked me into an ambush. I haven’t figured out who’s behind that yet.”

  “Jesus H. Christ,” Cushing said. He looked at Patrick. “Sorry, Father.”

  “That was pretty much my reaction, too,” Patrick said.

  “I have another theory,” Harkins said, turning to Cushing. “It seems pretty clear the air force has it in for you, Major. It’s possible somebody in the air force might want to stop her, keep her from discrediting the air campaign.”

  “But would they stoop to murder?” Patrick said. “I can’t see that.”

  “Anyone else in the Eighth know who she was or what she was working on?” Harkins asked.

  Cushing shrugged. “I don’t know.” He looked down. “But I drink, you know? I can’t say for sure I didn’t talk about it when I was in my cups.”

  If Cushing had blabbed, that might explain how Gefner had gotten a whiff of the report.

  “How did you meet Batcheller?” Harkins asked.

  “She sought me out, ostensibly to interview me about the bombing campaign as part of the work she was doing for OSS. Turns out she knew about my reputation at the Eighth.”

  “That you were saying the bombing campaign was a bad idea?” Harkins asked.

  “That’s putting it mildly.”

  “Did you really feed information to the Chicago Tribune?”

  “Do I have to answer that?” Cushing asked. “You’re not my lawyer. Anything I tell you might wind up with the prosecutor, right?”

  “Fair enough,” Harkins said.

  The pilot stood, walked the three paces to the outside wall, where a window was just above eye level.

  “They used us as bait,” he said to the wall, the window, the sky. He put his hands behind his back, and Harkins could see that he was worrying the beads, rolling them in his fingers.

  “It was pretty clear to all of us right away that our Mustangs were far superior fighters. This past February and March the Eighth kept sending huge formations of bombers over Germany, and the Luftwaffe put up everything they had. The bombers were there to draw their fighters out into the open so the Mustangs could destroy them. Just knock them down right and left.”

  Cushing turned back to face the brothers. In the small cell, his legs brushed Patrick’s knees.

  “But our losses were huge, too. Thing is, we can replace our losses. More airplanes, more bomber crews, more fighter pilots. The Germans can’t do that, especially the fighter pilots. Hell, you could see it in their tactics, that we were facing guys with less and less experience. It was a plain old war of attrition. Effective, I guess, but in the meantime, we lost hundreds of aircraft. Probably thousands of crew.”

  Cushing sat down heavily on the bunk, his head low between his shoulders.

  “I ever tell you about my last mission? The end of my time as a pilot?”

  Harkins shook his head.

  “I stopped a mutiny,” Cushing said, managing a sad little smile.

  “A mutiny? On your airplane?”

  “No. On the ground. We came back from a mission pretty shot up, two dead, three wounded, the plane barely limping in, probably headed for the junkyard. We were in debrief, and some lieutenant colonel up front said something about the sacrifices being necessary. How we were shortening the war with every mission, how our families would be proud of us. America would be proud of us.”

  Harkins had no trouble imagining how poorly that kind of talk would sit with the men who had to pay the butcher’s bill.

  “My navigator had his sidearm with him. He pulled it out and started up the aisle. Racked a round into the chamber and started shouting something unintelligible. He was going to shoot that colonel, no doubt about it. So I tackled him. We rolled around on the ground a bit, everybody just kind of stunned, and I clocked him on the jaw. Knocked him out. Broke my hand, in fact.” Cushing studied and flexed the fingers of his right hand.

  “And that was the end of the line for you?” Harkins said.

  “Yeah. They’d been looking to get rid of me, I guess. My official letter of reprimand said I’d lost control of my crew and that I was a threat to good order and discipline because I was openly critical of the missions.”

  “They want to get rid of you badly enough to frame you for murder?” Harkins asked.

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” Cushing said. “And I don’t know, to tell you the truth. Everything I thought I was sure of has kind of gone out the window this last year.”

  He looked down at the rosary beads again, pulled them across his palm.

  “If they’re going to get rid of me,” Cushing said, “I’d rather go back up in a bomber, tell you the truth. Taking my chances up there has got to be better than swinging from a rope.”

  “I’m not going to let that happen,” Harkins said, though he was not entirely sure he could stop it.

  * *
*

  Patrick was not able to conjure up an aircraft for their return to London, so they wound up on the train again, one full of GIs on pass heading to London. Patrick fell asleep within minutes of their leaving the station. Harkins talked through what he knew so far with Lowell, both to fill her in and to turn the facts over in his mind, see if he could dig up something he’d missed thus far. He was staring out the window when Lowell spoke.

  “Your air force is part of your army, isn’t that right?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” Harkins said. Beside him Patrick snored, his arms folded across his chest, chin pointing to the floor.

  “Our forces are separate,” she said. “We have a Royal Air Force.”

  “I know,” Harkins said.

  “So if your air force wins the war by bombing, or at least has a credible claim to being very important, maybe they could win a separate status after the war.”

  Harkins looked at her. “A motive.”

  “Just a thought,” Lowell said.

  Harkins had read about the fierce battles over resources between the army and the navy in the Pacific, between the commanders in the European and Pacific theaters. As fast as stateside factories could roll out steel, the armed forces gobbled it up. The navy wanted more big ships; the army wanted more landing craft to get men to the beaches.

  “If the prize is a separate service after the war and the big budgets to go with it,” Harkins began.

  “That might be enough to get a woman murdered,” Lowell said.

  “That’s pretty good, Lowell,” Harkins said, pulling out his notebook. He wrote “Air Force” at the top of a blank page.

  He turned to another clean page and wrote, “Soviets.”

  “Maybe someone on the Soviet side didn’t want her to cooperate with you Americans,” Lowell said.

  “Could be that this person or persons didn’t know she was trying to help the Soviets, at least indirectly, by helping the invasion succeed with the right use of air power. Maybe they thought Novikov, her Soviet contact, had been turned and was giving her sensitive stuff.”

  Lowell yawned, used her hand to cover her mouth.

  “It’s been a long day,” Harkins said. “Why don’t you grab some shut-eye.”

  Lowell pulled her cap down over her eyes and leaned back while Harkins scribbled away. A few seconds later she pulled the hat away from one eye and looked at Harkins.

  “Maybe she was doing something, or threatening to do something, to the Soviets,” she said. “Something that scared them. You said she didn’t like them.”

  Harkins smiled and held up the page he’d been writing on, which read “Batcheller vs. Soviets?”

  Lowell smiled at him. “I think I’m getting a knack for this,” she said.

  “Yeah, well, writing stuff in a pocket notebook is a long way from slapping handcuffs on somebody. And you might just as easily be worried that you’re thinking like me.”

  21

  24 April 1944

  2000 hours

  “What’s it like?” Pamela Lowell asked Patrick Harkins. “Parachuting into battle like that?”

  The two of them were side by side on a hard wooden bench in the lobby of OSS headquarters. Harkins had rustled up three ham sandwiches at the officers’ mess, which they’d wolfed down. Then Harkins had run upstairs.

  “Terrifying, exhilarating,” the priest said. “Mostly terrifying.”

  “Do they have to force men onto the airplanes?”

  Patrick looked at her. “What?”

  “The Royal Navy used to send press gangs ashore to round up crewmen,” she said. “They got sailors by kidnapping them because they couldn’t get volunteers.”

  “It’s the other way around, actually. Last September we had a guy cut a cast off his arm and hitchhike to the departure airfield because he didn’t want his platoon going off without him.”

  Lowell tried to imagine having that kind of bond with the likes of Corporal Moore. Lieutenant Harkins, maybe, but not Moore.

  “What about you?” she asked.

  “Not easy for me to get a spot on board. There’s a limited number of spaces, limited number of aircraft, so the commanders want as many fighting men on there as possible. I don’t carry a weapon, so I’m not much help when the shooting starts.”

  “So how did you get included?”

  “The first time, the jump into Sicily last summer, I stowed away on the airplane.”

  Lowell raised her eyebrows. “Really?”

  “The pilot let me on board before the troopers showed up. I squeezed into the cockpit until they started taxiing. When I went into the back of the plane with the other guys, the jumpmaster was not happy with me, but at that point there was nothing he could do.”

  “I see you and your brother are cut from the same cloth when it comes to following rules, sir.”

  Patrick laughed, head thrown back.

  “What’s so funny?” Harkins asked, trotting down the stairs.

  “Young Lowell here has my number,” Patrick said. “Yours, too.”

  “Yeah, so does Major Sinnott,” Harkins said, sitting between them on the bench. “I just got off the phone with Major Adams.”

  “The lawyer we worked with in Sicily?” Patrick said. “He was a captain then.”

  “I sent him the statement Sinnott had me write up for the court, the one he had me revise a couple of times. Not surprisingly, it’s not going to help Cushing very much. Sinnott had me strip it pretty bare. And that’s not the worst of it.

  “My testifying at Cushing’s court-martial is subject to my availability. And this message was waiting for me upstairs.”

  Harkins showed them a handwritten note, “Warning Order” scribbled across the top. “Be prepared morning of 25 April for field exercise. More to follow.” Sinnott’s initials were at the bottom.

  “So if Major Sinnott sends you on some training exercise—and eventually sends you along on the real thing—you won’t be available to testify at the court-martial,” Lowell said.

  “How will the prosecution make a case?” Patrick asked. “It doesn’t sound like Cushing is about to confess to anyone.”

  “The classified documents,” Lowell said.

  Harkins nodded.

  “I thought those weren’t marked ‘Secret’ when you found them,” Patrick said.

  “They weren’t,” Harkins said. “But it might be hard to prove that.”

  “So even if the murder charge is fabricated, they might still get him for mishandling secrets,” Lowell said. “I imagine he could go to prison for that alone.”

  “Adams said he could get a life sentence.”

  “Jesus wept,” Lowell whispered.

  “Adams said that they might use the murder charge and all the sordid details about Cushing being a drunk just to prejudice the court against him. By the time they drop the bullshit homicide allegation and get around to his mishandling secrets, they’ll want to stick it to him good.”

  The three of them sat quietly for a moment, then Lowell said, “I have the original statements you wrote, sir. Before Major Sinnott made you change them.”

  “You do?” Harkins asked. Then, “Of course you do.”

  Lowell tried to suppress a smile. “They were in a canvas bag,” she said. “A map case you left in the car. I could get them to this Major Adams tomorrow while you go off on this training exercise. Maybe he can do something with them.”

  “He can at least get them to the defense attorney,” Patrick said.

  “I can do that,” Lowell said, trying not to sound too eager.

  The two brothers sat in silence for a moment, and Lowell imagined Harkins was considering whether he could trust her with her own mission.

  Don’t push too hard, she told herself. But finally, she couldn’t help it, and a moment later repeated, “I can do that, sir.”

  “What?” Harkins asked. “Oh, of course you can. Yeah, yeah, you do that. I was just thinking about something else.”

  Harkins l
ooked at Patrick.

  “Give us a minute, will you, Lowell?”

  She got up from the bench and was walking away when she heard Patrick say his pass was up at midnight. They were about to say good-bye, and all she’d been thinking about was her little adventure.

  “Jesus, Pamela,” she whispered to herself.

  She reached the far side of the lobby and turned around in time to see the brothers embrace. The whole war came down to this: people saying good-bye to those they loved.

  When Patrick headed for the door she waved, started to call his name. He looked her way, smiled, and gave her a friendly salute. She watched his back, wondering if he would have to force his way onto a plane leading the way to France.

  22

  24 April 1944

  2100 hours

  Beverly Ludington was in her front parlor with Tom Wickman when Harkins made it back.

  “Didn’t expect to see you here,” Harkins said to his partner. “Where have you been all day?”

  “Beverly and I have had quite an interesting afternoon,” Wickman said. He sat in a wing-back chair that would have been too small for Harkins; on the big lieutenant it looked like dollhouse furniture. “We learned a great deal about classification of documents and reports.”

  “Sounds thrilling,” Harkins said. “Can’t wait to hear it.”

  Wickman, clearly excited, looked at Beverly; she said, “You go ahead.”

  “We found a log of classified materials,” Wickman said. “Anything classified at OSS headquarters is recorded in it. Not descriptions of contents, just the date and names of who submitted the stuff.”

  “Things are supposed to be logged there,” Beverly said. “It’s a good, but not a perfect system.”

  “Right,” Wickman said. He smiled brightly and seemed terribly pleased with himself. “Anyway, nothing from our Major Sinnott.”

  “Meaning what?” Harkins asked.

  “The report he took from you, the one you found on Cushing, it wasn’t marked as classified when you gave it to Sinnott, right?”

  “Not that I saw.”

  “He could have had it classified after the fact, but he would have had to submit it for review and it would have been logged in; but it was never submitted, by him, by Batcheller, or by anyone else.”