Eagles at War (35 page)

Caldwell smiled despite the pain of the memory. He'd picked up an ashtray and hurled it across the room at Bandfield. Bandy had torn the clock off the wall and tossed it at him—the flailing cord had caught him around the neck like a lasso, damn near strangled him.

They had both been so embarrassed that the argument died. But Bandfield had made his point, and Caldwell had given in, agreeing to divert engines to North American; it looked like they'd have Merlin-engine Mustangs arriving in Europe by January 1944.

The news from his other projects was mixed. Production of the B-29 was finally getting under way. Lockheed was making rapid progress on its jet fighter. But people—the pesky Truman Commission in particular—would ask some tough questions about McNaughton's failures when the word got out. One of the things Caldwell hoped to get from Bandfield's trip to the coast was a positive report on the possibilities of using the McNaughton as a jet fighter trainer. It would be a loophole, a shield against criticism if it was used.

And the secret data on the V-weapons was encouraging. McNaughton had established a "deep black" super-secret study group, operating solely with private funds. The group's preliminary reports indicated that a scaled-up V-2, one with intercontinental range, could be ready by 1948 or 1949, revolutionizing warfare. It would be a perfect encore to his success with heavy bombers—not a bad legacy to leave his country!

There was another bright spot on the horizon. After weeks of effort, his last briefing on the jets had finally persuaded Ira Eaker to let him go on a deep-penetration bombing mission in Germany. They were going to give him a bogus set of identity papers, so that if he were shot down the Germans wouldn't know who they had.

He really needed to go. Building bombers in wartime required firsthand knowledge; you can read all the reports in the world, but unless you analyze them in the context of personal experience, you could draw the wrong conclusions. Eaker understood that, and so did Arnold. They also knew they owed him this.

He snorted to himself. It was a rationalization. He wanted combat as an antidote to this Elsie-madness. The more he doubted and distrusted her the more he loved her and wanted to own her. She had changed, and he was certain that it was because she'd learned that Bruno was alive. He wondered for the thousandth time how she ever could have loved a man like Bruno—and he knew in his heart that she loved him still.

Caldwell didn't know how to please her. He had just bought her a secondhand 1940 eight-cylinder Oldsmobile Custom Cruiser sedan for $800, and now she was talking about a farm. She was always practical about her future. There was an antebellum house with 150 acres of land, outside Nashville, which was on the market for $9,850; she wanted him to buy it for her. He would probably do it—he had never been so hopelessly in love before.

Sitting next to Caldwell, Hadley Roget was sunk in his thoughts, his face drawn and haggard under the new recruit's crew cut. During the long weeks of Clarice's illness, his silver hair had grown longer and longer. The day after she died, he'd gone to the base barber shop and told them to cut it off. No one knew that he'd arranged to have his hair buried with her—it was a foolish gesture, one she would have laughed at, but it meant something indefinable to him.

Now, edged back on the seat, Hadley had a good view of Caldwell, kneeling, head down, lips moving as if in prayer.

They had talked earlier about their common failings—how little they had appreciated their wives when they were alive, how they had essentially exploited them, and how they hoped their spouses would be happier in the next world.

Didn't take him long to find someone else, though, Hadley thought. He's sure hooked on Elsie Raynor. One thing for sure, there's nobody out there for me—not that anybody would be interested.

Roget felt compassion for his friend. In all the Army Air Forces, no one had been right so many times, or had put his neck so far over the line as Henry Caldwell. It took enormous courage to bet all the country's resources on an unknown bomber program like the B-29. No wonder he was praying—if the B-29 program was wrong, then heaven help us! And that was only one part of Caldwell's grand vision of airpower. The fantastic buildup of industry, of the training command, of the combat units all stemmed back to the measures he'd taken years before, often exceeding his authority to do so. The man was a hero.

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.