Air Force Eagles (12 page)

Riley relaxed. "I'm really glad to see you, General. This time I got in trouble just following orders. I had a job straight from General Varney to check out the various air forces in the Middle East. He got me duty with the Israelis—it was a hell of an experience."

"Why are you under arrest? I didn't make any calls yet because I wanted to hear the story from you."

"You must know Assistant Secretary of Defense Ruddick?"

"Sure, a treacherous bastard. A real cracker, but a powerhouse, he virtually runs the department. Christ, I hope you didn't get on his shit list; he's snake-mean and hard as a nightstick."

"That's it. He got me in the room alone with the Secretary of the Air Force and the Chief of Staff and chewed us all new assholes."

"What for? What did Symington and Vandenberg have to say? A cherry-assed captain like you might have to put up with that, but they don't."

"Well, they by-God did. Vandenberg was in a brace, and every-time Symington would start his smooth talking, Ruddick would yell 'Shut up, Stuf and up he would shut!"

"Spit it out, man. What the hell did you do? Knock up some A-rab's daughter or what?"

"It seems Ruddick's got something against the Israelis—he was yelling about them controlling the press and the films, and God knows what all. He said we shouldn't be helping them, we should be helping the Arabs because the Arabs have all the oil."

"Didn't he know you were under orders?"

"Sure, but he said we just tried and killed a whole bunch of Nazis at Nuremberg who were only obeying orders. He said I was a murderer, just because I shot down some Egyptian planes."

"Jesus. Doesn't he know that we're always looking for information like this? Hell, look at the Eagle Squadron. That was as much a training exercise for us as it was help for Britain."

"We tried that argument, but it backfired. Symington told him about our buddy Bandfield, flying for the Loyalists in Spain, then going on to be an ace for us during the war. I thought Ruddick was going to go through the fucking roof! He must know Bandfield from somewhere because he started yelling about getting that 'nigger-loving SOB.' "

"He must be going nuts."

"Yeah, but it turned out that the thing on Bandfield saved my ass. Ruddick damn near had a stroke, and sort of forgot about me for a while. And I just got word from the chief that Ruddick is cooling down, and that there won't be any court-martial."

Gunter smiled for the first time.

"Good, because have I got a job for you!"

***

Chapter 3

Berlin, Germany/May 13, 1949

"Let me remind you, Captain, that I did some extra-legal things for you."

"Helmut, you don't have to remind me. I'll never forget, no matter how much time I spend in Leavenworth."

Josten fumed as Riley told himself that it was better to be working for Gunter than being in some guardhouse back in the States. He'd arrived in Germany eager to wallow in the fleshpots of Europe and raring to do whatever buccaneering task Gunter wanted done—as long as he didn't have to cross Milo Ruddick again.

Of course, he'd not seen or spoken to the general himself since his arrival. His orders came down via a variety of adjutants, who simply handed him a sealed envelope. Inside, on a plain sheet of paper, would be a typewritten directive, undated, unsigned. At first they rained down, and Riley was in his element, bribing friend and foe alike to get the labor and materials that were unavailable through official channels. It was a basic market economy, where cigarettes, chocolate, gasoline, and coffee did well and U.S. dollars did marvels. The jokes at home were always about nylons and Frauleins, but little trading was done with hosiery except on a very interpersonal basis. For the bigger jobs, Riley used U.S. currency, though coffee would do. And someone in Gunter's office saw to it that he always had plenty of each to trade with.

No one in Europe had really known what would be needed for an airlift of this size. Before Gunter appeared on the scene, they were proud to be lifting 1,500 tons a day; by early September, Gunter's systematic efforts had raised it to 7,000 tons a day. Now there was no quota—it was just fly all you could, and they were dumping in close to 10,000 tons a day, 40 percent
more
than Berlin had received via road and rail before the blockade.

But the initial steep rise in tonnage had outstripped even the American resources, and it took all of Riley's piratical skills to keep the huge mechanism of the airlift lubricated. Of the many jobs Gunter had given Riley, two stood out in his mind, both had been with Josten, and one of them could never be admitted.

The first was probably the most important—against all the current rules and regulations banning fraternization, he'd found eighty badly needed German mechanics to work on the flight line. The men had been recruited by the same man now upbraiding him, a horribly disfigured ex-Luftwaffe colonel, Helmut Josten. Josten had barely survived a crash in a jet fighter at the end of the war, and he was now a free-booter on the black market. Riley hadn't asked any questions about his past, and Josten had come up with some of the best mechanics Riley had ever seen, hardened Luftwaffe veterans who were hungry for work. Later, of course, the prohibitions against use of German labor would be lifted, but at the time it was a major contravention of Occupation regulations.

Riley had been dismissive of Josten when they'd first met, thinking that he was just another one of the unlikable lot of defeated but unapologetic German officers. But early on, they had a minor disagreement about how Josten would pay the German workers he'd rounded up. Riley had been insisting on doing things his way when Josten had bristled, suddenly every inch a Luftwaffe colonel, staring at him with his lips pulled back in a death's head rictus of anger. Riley had quickly agreed to his proposal.

It was impossible, really, to like the man; coldly distant, he refused to talk about the war, except when Riley drew him out on Luftwaffe aircraft. Then he glowed with a vindictive pleasure, telling Riley how superior the German jets had been. In one argument they'd almost come to blows.

"The Messerschmitt Me 262 was the finest plane of the war. We could have had hundreds of them in 1943, if they had listened to me. And if we had had them, the war would have had a very different outcome, believe me."

"Yeah, we would have A-bombed Berlin instead of Hiroshima."

Josten did not speak to him for a few days, then, in an obvious attempt to make up, had brought in a photo taken in Sweden in 1944. It showed Josten, in civilian clothes, a beautiful black-haired woman, and their baby.

After that, Riley had tried to like Josten, but it wasn't easy, for his manner was as scarred as his face. When he smiled, his lips pulled back over his teeth in a mirthless grin that frightened even the omnipresent begging German children, long inured to wounded soldiers. Painfully thin and stoop-shouldered, he walked slowly, with a sidling, crablike gait. Thinning white hair framed a cadaverous oval face, and the bony ridges over his dark eyes cast shadows over his skull-hollow cheeks. Even dressed in his ill-fitting old army clothes, Josten was grimly impressive.

He had also helped Riley with the second, far more dangerous task, a totally illegal mission. The continuous rise in tonnage had made it necessary to open a new airport in November, at Tegel. A runway was made in record time with the brick debris created by Allied bombers from Berlin buildings only three years before. Although it was an important addition to the airlift, cutting the transit time down appreciably, it was dangerously flawed by a two-hundred-foot radio tower sticking directly up into the approach path to the runway, a hazard at any time, but a deadly menace to navigation in bad weather. The tower was in the French zone, but the radio station itself was operated by the Russians, who naturally refused to permit the tower to be relocated. Riley made an agreement with Josten—one C-54 load of coffee and a favor to be defined in the future—and the tower was mysteriously blown up. The Russians had raised holy hell, accusing the Americans and the French of an act of war, but they couldn't prove anything. The Germans enjoyed it immensely.

No one even noticed that the ten-fhousand-pound cargo of coffee was missing, for the paperwork at every level had been well-managed. But Gunter must have been spooked by the furor that followed the explosion, for Riley hadn't heard from him since.

Instead, he had been flying the Rhein-Main-to-Tempelhof run seven days a week. It would have driven him crazy if it weren't so amusing to monitor the universal hobby of the occupying forces, the exchange of German antiques, silver, art, and jewelry for American, French, and British food. Sometimes, he wondered if there could still be another cuckoo clock left in Germany, but there always was. A friend of his in Army counter-intelligence had tipped him off that his German colleague, Josten, was a principal in the process, specializing in the transfer of art works. And now he'd asked for his favor.

*

En route to Tempelhof/May 28, 1949

The four-engined transport groaned and wallowed in the sky, sluggish from its ten-ton load of macaroni. It was his last trip and Riley was restive, the boredom hanging in the cockpit as thick as the rank sweat from their unwashed flight suits. It had been better before, when Gunter was still using his special talents.

He called, "Air Force Six One Zero, Aschaeffenburg, six thousand," into his mike as the ADF needle swung over beacon—there was no reply, there never was if you were on course, on time, as you were supposed to be. As you'd damn well
better
be.

They were working him double on the last flight, making him give a line check. The new pilot, Major Don Wallston, had been pulled from his flourishing dental practice as reluctantly as a tooth from its socket to fly in the Berlin Airlift. A Rotary-club type who insisted on being called "Wally," Wallston was a ham-handed pilot, always following the airplane like a bad actor taking directions from a prompter. He'd just banked too steeply to the left and was now overcorrecting to the right as he brought the C-54 back near the assigned heading of 057 degrees.

Riley raised his eyebrows in disgust and whispered to Sergeant Bonadies, the crew chief, "Just so the fucker averages out."

Riley's hands were in his lap, but his right knee forced the wheel up, stopping the turn, as his left leg applied a little back pressure to the control column to ease them back up to their assigned six-thousand-foot altitude. Wallston didn't notice, just as he hadn't noticed Bear subtly compensating for his ragged flight path ever since the takeoff at Rhein-Main. A good instructor, Riley always tried to keep the student's confidence level up.

Leaning back to talk to the crew chief, Riley asked, "How long we been doing this, Al?"

"Seems like forever, Captain."

It had been almost a year since Riley had been forced into the right seat of a C-54, the last place a fighter pilot wanted to be. But within a few weeks he'd gained enough experience to become first an aircraft commander and then an instructor pilot. For almost a year they had been making two or three trips a day in the dreary twenty-mile-wide corridor through Soviet-occupied territory. Three minutes ahead of them was another of the big Douglas transports; three minutes behind was yet another, part of an endless 170-miles-per-hour chain that supplied two million Berliners day and night. What had started out as a Soviet grab of the German capital had turned into a display of Allied generosity and technical capability. In classic American tradition, the Air Force had pulled itself together for this supreme effort, draining resources from everywhere, but putting on such a show that the Russians were now desperately seeking a face-saving way out.

"You're doing fine, Major; I can see I'm going to have to give you a thumbs-up on this one."

"I'm not so sure, Bear; I've only flown this route a few times. And this weather is lousy."

Riley glanced out into the gray mess drooping like great sodden wads of cotton down to within four hundred feet of the ground. "It ain't so bad; you'll hack it just fine."

Wallston clutched the control wheel even tighter, leaning forward to fix the instruments in his gaze, as if he could wring skill and safety from them with his stare.

Riley opened a letter and pretended to read it under the shaded red cockpit light.

Perspiration beaded the other pilot's lip as his eyes stayed glued to the altimeter, trying to hold on to his altitude even as he drifted off toward the edge of the corridor. Riley surreptitiously nudged the rudder with his foot and pressed upward on the control wheel with his knee, edging the airplane back on course, thinking as he did so: The old Air "Farce" is in bad shape if it lets turkeys like this fly.

A solid sheet of rain smashed into the windscreen, laying in great flat droplets the size of his thumb.

Wallston nodded his head imperceptibly, summoning all his skill to fly the fifteen-minute straight-line course to the Fulda range, where he would have to brace himself for the turn for the long leg into Tempelhof. It was basic pilot training stuff, but he'd been behind the airplane since takeoff. Now he was desperately trying to stay on the center line, well inside the corridor, knowing that if he wandered off, he was fair game for the Russian flak. The Russian fighters weren't a problem in weather like this—they were strictly blue-sky warriors.

Riley watched the other man with scarcely veiled contempt. Why did guys ever try to learn to fly if they didn't like it? Hell, you could tell this man hated it. They wanted the glamour, the extra pay, but they didn't like the danger or the tedium, and there was always plenty of both.