Air Force Eagles (9 page)

She was tense in his arms, her anxiety causing her to exude a musky scent that excited him. He let his fingers drum on her deliciously soft inner thigh, tapping a little song of love.

"Stop that." Saundra sat up and turned on the lamp. The light made a halo around her loosened jet-black hair. She tucked the sheet modestly around her.

"Are we ever going to settle down and live any kind of a normal life? What if I'm pregnant, what happens then? What if I'm pregnant and you get killed?"

He tugged the sheet down, letting her breasts spill out. "Well, you've still got Banjo to take care of you."

She tucked the sheet up angrily and snarled, "Damn it, be serious with me."

He kissed her brow. "I hope you are pregnant. I'll be back before the baby would be born. And I'm not going to get killed, I'm an old pro at this. When I come back, I'll start a little business, a flying school maybe, out in California. There must be lots of guys like me who want to fly."

She nestled back in his arms. "I'd like that. But how many colored boys would have the money to pay for flying lessons? How many white boys would take lessons from a Negro pilot? If you are going to start a business, do something I can help with. Start a little store, hardware, or maybe even groceries. Something that I can be with you every day." Her voice was earnestly beseeching, sending out an emotional SOS.

Reaching out, his finger traced the outline of her breasts, circling her nipples as they blossomed beneath the sheet.

"That's what we'll do. A little store, just you and me," she said.

He rubbed her nose with his own and said, "Honey, you have to understand. I can't give up flying, not ever. I've been in combat, I've flown rocket planes! Not many men, white or colored, have done that. I'm not going to wind up selling apples from a cart or pushing a broom in a factory!"

She melted against him, and their mouths met. How funny, he thought. She's so shy in so many ways, but her tongue is so aggressive, as if it has a mind of its own, as if there were fires burning in her that hadn't warmed him yet. He toyed with the idea of telling her about her tongue, then decided not to—it might make her stop. And he didn't want her ever to stop.

She broke free and whispered, "Put Banjo out of the room and close the door."

*

Nashville, Tennessee/April 15, 1948

The big man sat like an unwashed Buddha, stewing in his own rank heat, brown splotches staining the sweat band of his fedora, sleeves rolled up, folders piled around him. Baker's round face was pockmarked and shady with a day's growth of beard; his small, mean brown eyes had the expectant look of a bird dog with a quail in its mouth, eager to be rewarded but reluctant to give up its trophy.

McNaughton had hired him as chief of security in 1945, and he hadn't done an honest day's work since. But he'd done many dishonest ones and that was why McNaughton paid him $15,000 a year, more than his best test pilot made. Porterhouse steaks and bourbon whiskey had padded Baker's big frame just as blackmail and bribes had padded his bank account.

They watched each other as carefully as two sumo wrestlers about to grapple. McNaughton eyed Baker's horse blanket-plaid sport coat, his white plastic belt, and brown and white shoes.

"Rushing the season a bit, aren't you?"

"Nah, this is my Little Rock outfit, looked right at home there." He sipped his drink watching McNaughton carefully, trying to see how much Troy already knew, how little he could tell and get away with, selling his information as a dishonest bartender dispenses drinks, short-measured and watered.

"It's all there, Chief, enough to send this cockie to the chair."

"Proof?"

"Chief, if I'm lying, I'm dying! It ain't like this guy was no Sherlock Holmes or nothing. He never could've gotten away with this if he didn't have the coroner and the chief of police in his pocket. He's got to be a little bit nutso."

Baker had worked with Naval Intelligence during the war, an inquisitor running "special" security checks on people in sensitive positions. It was better than a college education; he learned how to pick locks, break into homes, bribe police officials and in general acquire the criminal talents necessary to be a skilled private investigator. Baker assumed all his subjects were guilty; if they weren't, he was content to frame them. He cultivated evidence like a crop, and if the yield was poor, he planted more.

McNaughton interrupted. "Dick, how do you
know
that?"

Baker lolled back in the chair, picking his nose with practiced enjoyment. "I talked to her beauty operator, a good-looking doll named Leah Fanning. Mrs. Ruddnick stops coming in, and when Leah calls, old man Ruddick tells her, 'Mrs. Ruddick is not well. She tried to kill herself.' Other people said the same thing."

"When was all this?"

"Hell, that's the amazing thing—he started this whole caper in 1942, worked on it for years. I checked with their druggist, nice old guy named Kallme. 'Kallme for Drugs' was the sign for his shop. She was getting more and more prescriptions filled for all kinds of stuff—bromides, morphine, everything."

"He told you this?"

"No, Chief. I talked to him first—then I had to break in and look through his records. Everything neat and tidy on three-by-five cards. All the prescriptions were from the coroner. I checked him out; he's a rummy on old Milo's payroll."

"Go on."

Baker paused to finish his drink, handing the glass to McNaughton to refill. "Anyway, Ruddick spreads the rumor a couple a' times about her killing herself, once even has an ambulance come out and haul her to the hospital to pump her stomach. Then one day she's found in the garage, the old La Salle's engine running, vacuum cleaner hose attached to the tailpipe."

"Any autopsy?"

"Not so you could notice. Papers full of her 'long brave battles with illness,' lots of stuff like that. So he inherits everything."

"Pretty well fixed?"

"Yeah, on paper. But he's land poor, and he has lots of expenses. I don't know who all he's paying off, or bribing or what, but I think he's hurting for cash."

McNaughton's eyes went up. "I guess you busted in the bank, too?"

Baker smirked. "No, but I did go through his desk drawers; found his checkbooks, all of them, back for years. He's got neat handwriting and keeps good records. He's spending a
bundle
on art, all to a New York importer, and he's tunneling dough to a lot of local politicians, plus he's funding the state Ku Klux Klan organization all by himself."

McNaughton paused to savor the information. Even if the murder was impossible to prove, the stuff on the Ku Klux Klan was dynamite. If he was still running for Congress, it wouldn't keep him from being reelected—hell, it might help—but it might prevent him from getting confirmation for a presidential appointment.

"What a fruitcake! How'd you find out about all this stuff, the art, the Klan, all of it?"

Baker belched, then tossed a handful of peanuts in his mouth. "I was busier than a one-legged guy in an ass-kicking contest. Mostly I found out from the checkbooks, but Little Rock's a one-horse town. The Railway Express guy likes White Owl cigars and beer as much as he likes to talk. Said it was amazing how much artwork gets shipped in to Ruddick, all out of New York. The name of the company he gave tallied with his checks. I'll get more dope on it if you want me to."

"Yeah, he's proud of Ruddick, like he's bringing culture to Little Rock. He's a Klansman himself, and he sort of sounded me out, real clever like, asking me what I thought about niggers, before telling me all about it. I had to walk finally; he was telling me more than I needed."

They were quiet for a while, the silence broken by Baker's munching and slurping. He got up and fixed himself another drink, long on bourbon, short on water. McNaughton sighed, saying, "Help yourself, Dick. What about the children?"

"You know the daughter is from his wife's first marriage. The boy flew your airplanes during the war; he's running a little airport now. Seemed like a nice guy, kind of quiet. Everybody I talked to had a good word for them both, although they hinted the girl was a hot number. One guy sniggered something about 'backseat Ginny.' "

McNaughton rifled through the folders, as a silence fragile as gratitude hung in the room. Finally he looked up and said, "Baker, your expense account is pretty high for just giving out White Owls and beer. Don't you have any conscience at all?"

It occurred to Baker that having a conscience would be inconvenient at this point, inasmuch as he was fucking McNaughton's wife regularly, and he replied, "Christ no, boss, look who I work for. How about my raise?"

McNaughton shook his head. The information might be worth millions in the long run, but Baker mustn't know that. With a reluctant grunt of resignation, he muttered, "Two grand a year. Don't spend it all in one place."

*

Ekron, Israel/May 29, 1948

"I feel like a popsicle." Sitting with two other pilots, blankets draped around their shoulders, Marshall prayed for the dawn even as the chill stiffened his weary muscles.

"Chocolate-flavored," came a voice from the background. Marshall took no offense at the joking tone. In the ten-day crash course in Prague to check out in their aircraft, he and the other pilots had quickly grown close because each of them was a pro they could trust in combat.

Like the others—an American, an Englishman, and four Israelis—Marshall had entered training with a false name and false identity papers. The Czechs were so glad to get hard American currency for the planes and the training that they only glanced at his passport, even though a Negro pilot was an obvious oddity. Marshall regretted not being able to wander around war-damaged Prague, poverty-stricken yet beautiful in its melancholy, but the pace at the school was too swift. Instead, they'd gone directly from the long sessions at the airfield to their shabby rooms at the once-magnificent Flora Hotel, where barely edible food was served in absurdly tiny portions.

The Czech instructors had been a saving grace. Most were ex-RAF pilots who spoke English well enough, and who were following the new Communist line only because they had to. Many of them had flown Spitfires, and they bitterly derided the brutish Avia S-199 fighters they were teaching them to fly. Lacking the standard Daimler-Benz DB 605 engines, the Czechs had shoehorned in surplus bomber engines, great Junkers Jumo 21 IF power plants that made the already fractious Messerschmitt design even trickier to handle. The Czech pilots had rightly nicknamed it the "Mezec"—mule.

Yet as tough as it had been in Prague, the last seven days in Israel had been real killers. As soon as the course was over, they'd flown to Israel nonstop in a war-weary Douglas C-54 crammed with the parts of a disassembled fighter plane. It transpired that he hadn't been hired as much for his flying skills as for his maintenance officer experience. Three more C-54s had shuttled in to spill out their cargos, a bewildering assortment of wings, engines, and parts. Marshall and a small team of mechanics had worked night and day to assemble four of the hybrid Avia/Messerschmitts, painting them in Israeli colors with the Star of David insignia.

Now, completely outfitted in captured Luftwaffe flying gear, Marshall waited for a signal to fly in the defense of the new nation of Israel. It would be the first takeoff on the first combat mission of the first Israeli fighter squadron. The "Messers," as they'd come to call them, were in camouflaged revetments along a runway that was no more than a strip of roughly flattened sand. The Egyptians had complete control of the air, and the primitive birthing of the Israeli fighter force was being conducted in absolute secrecy.

Marshall felt the tension more than anyone. Before his trip to Prague, he'd never seen a Messerschmitt except through his P-51's gunsight. A translator had helped him decipher the few German technical manuals that the Czechs had sent along, but assembling the airplanes had been mostly a cut-and-dry operation, facilitated by good mechanics willing to die from overwork. Now they were waiting to go out on a combat mission, and not one of the Avias had been test-flown, nor had any of their guns been test-fired! He wasn't sure that the bombs would come off—or that the wings would stay on.

The squadron commander, "Moddy" Myers, limped over to brief them, still favoring a leg injury an Arab car bomb had inflicted on him. Short and bald, he spoke with a lion-like ferocity.

"We'll take off just after dawn. Egyptian troop columns are moving on Tel Aviv. Less than two hundred fifty Israeli soldiers are available to block them. If we don't stop the column from the air, the war is over."

He paused and roared at them, "Over, do you understand? Israel will be gone, a two-thousand-year dream destroyed. We've got to delay their attack until reserves are scraped up from somewhere."

"We're supposed to stop them with these firecrackers? What are they, two-hundred pounders?" The speaker, an American who'd joined them only yesterday, ran his hands over the small bombs under the Messer's wing.

Myers shrugged and turned his hands palms up. "Seventy kilos. It's all we've got. If you're on target, they'll take out a tank. Follow me and do what I do."