Air Force Eagles (18 page)

Fitzpatrick's personality suited the current situation perfectly. Coleman, Fitzpatrick knew, was easy to manipulate and was beginning to be resentful about the things his patron, Ruddick, did for him. Coleman wanted it both ways—to have Ruddick's help but not to have to feel obligated to him for it, and that made Coleman value Fitzpatrick as his right-hand man.

Now Fitzpatrick played his part as usual, as eager to please as a dachshund puppy, tipping his field cap with his hand and letting it bounce down his arm.

He knew it wouldn't be him. They were good friends, but Coleman needed a dependable operations officer—and that was not Dick Fitzpatrick.

"We'll do it the Army way—the next senior guy."

"For Christ's sake, that means old Bones himself! You're not serious are you? The troops won't stand for a nigger ops officer."

Coleman played the devil's advocate as usual. "Hell, I don't like it any better than you do—but you know the pressure is on all over the Air Force to treat niggers like white men."

Fitzpatrick grinned disarmingly. "If you make him ops officer, he'd be in line to get a squadron. Then what would old man Ruddick say?"

*

K-10, Korea/August 24, 1950

Four hours before, he had put his head down on his maintenance officer's desk to take a brief nap, still soaked in sweat from the hands-on exertions of repairing a shot-up Mustang. Now the barking sounds of engines running up dragged him from a sexy dream about swimming nude with Saundra, a torrid mixture of an Esther Williams film and their wedding night. Not that Saundra would ever have been uninhibited enough to swim nude. He worried sometimes about the strength of his erotic dreams—just the image of the pliant mound of hair between her legs was enough to awaken him, rigid with desire.

But now fatigue soaked him like oil in a wick. He had been rousing himself to a peak two or three times a day flying ground-support missions against the North Koreans, and it was difficult to sustain the high level of energy needed for his other work. He was still doing the maintenance officer's job, and trying as hard as he could to satisfy Coleman as operations officer. From a career standpoint it was great; the operations officer really ran things for the commander. If he could handle the work and get a good performance evaluation, it could get him promoted, maybe even get him a squadron someday.

But Coleman had changed so much since his promotion. He'd never been friendly before, always making snide little jokes, different than he was with his white friends. With them, he was almost too agreeable, seeming to try to get along with everyone. He had a talent for taking what they said and feeding it back to them in some crazy fashion. He'd been particularly funny kidding about regulars staying home and the reserves doing all the fighting.

Almost everyone in the squadron had arrived by different routes. Few were regular Air Force. Marshall had requested to return, and, after incredible delays—he suspected the problem was that he was Negro—had finally been called up. Coleman had been involuntarily recalled—he talked unselfconsciously about the big salary he'd been making at McNaughton Aircraft, obviously not caring that Marshall had been fired from the job he'd filled. There were only a few guys like Fitzpatrick, lifers who'd stayed in only for the flying. What a pair they were—Fitz had the guts, but didn't want any glory; Coleman surely wanted glory, but Marshall wasn't sure how much he had in the way of guts.

Ever since Coleman had become commander, he'd proved impossible to work with. The other men didn't seem to be having the same problem, but then they didn't have the same responsibilities.

It had been tough enough just being maintenance officer. The airplanes had all the routine difficulties of old equipment—leaking seals, corrosion, and no spare parts—and the runways caused continual problems. They were made of PSP, pierced steel planking, sheets of mild steel perforated with round holes that allowed the viscous Korean mud to squish through. Interconnected and laid on a dry field, PSP was adequate to spread out the fighter's footprint. But when the rains came, the PSP sunk in, buckling and rolling like a living thing under the weight of the overloaded Mustangs, expressing geysers of mud through the steel like blood from a wound. The long nose of the F-51s (he still couldn't get used to the change in nomenclature; they'd been called P-51s till 1948) wiped out all forward visibility on the ground, so you S-turned as you taxied to be able to see forward. All the slipping and siding looked comical, but it ripped the tires like cheese on a grater and imposed crippling side-loads on the landing gear. Taking off was bad and landing was even worse, for brakes became useless on the slime-coated runways.

The Mustangs were worn-out hulks scabbed from wherever they could be found. Some were from Dean Hess's "Bout One" unit, which had been trying to train the Republic of Korea Air Force. The rest had been pulled grudgingly, like hibernating bears, from storage in Japan. More were supposed to be on their way from stateside National Guard sources.

The Mustangs were in use because, in staff jargon, they were the only assets available. It was hard to imagine. Only five years before, the United States had the greatest air force ever seen, with 243 groups and almost seventy thousand brand-new airplanes. Now they were flying scrapyard rejects. The few Lockheed Shooting Star jets stationed in Japan couldn't operate out of the primitive Korean fields. The F-80s had to fly out of Itazuke, Japan, to Korea to patrol over the Han River area, then return. Their lack of range was exactly the same problem the German fighters had encountered against Great Britain, only here the waters of the Korean Strait were even colder and bleaker than the English Channel.

Worse than the old airplanes was the infernal combination of bad weather and low standards of training. The Air Force was literally killing itself in Korea, throwing itself repeatedly upon the sword of unpreparedness. The week before there had been seven accidents in thirty-five minutes—eleven men killed—when fog suddenly shut down the airfields at the end of a strike mission. No one had seen anything like these Korean fogs, far worse than any English pea-souper. They would generate spontaneously, submerging the base in an impenetrable blanket of moisture redolent of the human night soil used as fertilizer by the Korean farmers.

This week they'd already lost two pilots to bad weather. The prevailing northwest winds dragged in frigid Siberian moisture to clamp the humid Korean summer down on them with heavy cloud cover and torrential rains. But weather didn't make any difference to Headquarters—air power was the
only
thing slowing the North Koreans down, and that meant the Mustangs had to launch on call, whatever the conditions.

The F-51's primitive instrumentation often malfunctioned; the artificial horizon would tumble in a sixty-degree bank, then take minutes to recover. The pilots were forced to employ the rudimentary techniques of prewar air mail flying, using needle, ball, and airspeed to penetrate weather. For navigation, they had only the defective Detrola automatic direction finder, whose needle pointed the same way whether you were going to or from the station. The Detrola was suspected as the prime cause in both of this week's accidents—it looked as if the Mustangs, lost in the clouds and low on fuel, had followed the needle
away
from the station into a barren hillside. Marshall had to go to the crash sites to see if there was anything to be learned, but there wasn't enough left of men or machines to conduct an investigation. In a few weeks, the poor pilots' families would have the closed-casket funerals back home, unaware that the military coffin would contain only scraps of flesh and 150 pounds of sandbags to simulate the weight of the body.

Marshall rolled over on his back and stared up at the droplets of moisture gathering on the tent ceiling like sweat on an elephant's belly. What was it with Coleman? Was it the race business all over again, just like it had been at McNaughton? Or was he getting to be too sensitive, too quick to plead racism as an excuse? He seemed to be popular enough with the other guys in the squadron.

Marshall wondered if it was because Coleman felt defensive about having taken his job at McNaughton. Good Lord, if anyone should be angry, it should be him! He'd lost his job and a chance at the history books.

The tent flap opened and Fitzpatrick stuck his head in. "The skipper wants to see us on the double."

Wordlessly, Marshall followed Fitzpatrick, splashing along the PSP path leading to the operations tent where Coleman greeted him with, "Sleeping in, Captain? Maybe if you didn't spend so much time eyeballing the white nurses, you wouldn't be so tired."

Marshall wanted to throw himself at Coleman, but controlled himself. "What the hell are you talking about?"

"I heard all about it—last night a couple of nurses came in the club and you damn near went crazy."

"Major, for your information I wasn't even in the club last night. And if I was, who I look at and how I look at them is my business."

"Mind your tone, Captain. I've got the book on you, and you know it. The Air Force may be integrated, but we haven't reached the interracial dating stage yet. Now shut up and listen."

Blood pounded in Marshall's head, but he kept silent. It was like a nightmare from the past, his father's old warning about
never
looking at a white woman, never talking to one first. But someone had made this up—Fitzpatrick?

"We just got a frag order in—two Mustangs to recce a valley near the west coast—here are the coordinates. They have reports of a column of friendly Korean troops ambushed and cut up."

He handed them the flimsy and pointed to the spot on the map, just north and west of Pohang. "A column of ROK troops is retreating down this valley. A forward air controller just sent us word of a possible ambush there by North Korean People's Army troops. The FAC is flying a T-6 right around the valley, reporting no flak, but suspicious movement on the hillsides." He tapped the valley with his finger. Marshall noted that Coleman's nails were clean, manicured. He was glad he was wearing gloves over the ground-in grease of his hands.

"I want you and Fitzpatrick to check it out. Even if you don't see anything, go down and plaster the side of the hills with machine-gun fire to see if you can raise any action. If you see something, call the FAC and we'll launch another flight."

Marshall said, "Right. Who will take over the scheduling and briefings for me this morning?"

'Til find somebody who can manage it in his spare time."

Face burning, Marshall saluted, spun on his heel and walked out of the tent. Coleman was goading him, trying to get him to be insubordinate. Why didn't he just fire him? But as he walked, he thought, I can take everything that bastard can dish out.

Fitzpatrick had been silent the whole time, but sloshed out behind him in the rain, a grim smile on his face.

Even in the driving rain, the old Mustangs looked pretty, with the blue flashes painted along their sides, the jagged bolts of lightning on the tails. Marshall was flying
Zero Hero,
the name left over from World War II, just like the plane. Someone had put some tuned pipes on a shackle under his wing—in a dive it gave off a tremendous howl that was supposed to frighten the North Koreans.

Despite Coleman's emphasis on the importance of the mission, Marshall expected a cancellation call to come. The lowering black clouds spilled rain like a burst water balloon, and visibility was less than one hundred yards down the muddy runway. Fitzpatrick taxied behind him at a distance in
Eighter From Decatur,
avoiding the swirling spray of liquid mud being thrown up by the propeller of Marshall's Mustang.

"All right, Captain Marshall, let's go. What are you waiting for?"

Marshall shook his head at the insulting transmission and called "Dallas One rolling," as he applied power. The Mustang skidded to the left until speed made the rudder effective. He took scant comfort from the fact that Fitzpatrick was following in a muck cyclone.

Thirty minutes later, they contacted "Boxcar," the forward air controller. Marshall didn't envy the FAC's job, flying an unarmed T-6 trainer low and slow over enemy territory, usually with an airsick Army officer in the backseat to evaluate the opposition forces.

Boxcar vectored them to clearing over the valley north of Pohang. Marshall led Fitzpatrick in a gentle bank at ten thousand feet; below he could see a two-mile line of stopped traffic along the winding valley road. There was no shooting.

"Dallas Two, I'm going to make one low-level pass to take a better look. Watch for flak."

Marshall metered his speed carefully, letting down to arrive at the entrance to the canyon at four hundred miles per hour. He flashed over a road filled with trucks, tanks, and jeeps, a few burned out, most of them filled with troops.

The troops weren't moving. Could they
all
be dead? He pulled back sharply on the stick, letting the G-forces build in a climb back toward the entry point.

Marshall hated to go back down. If there were any antiaircraft, they'd be waiting. But he knew Coleman would want to know numbers, dispositions, estimates of casualties, the whole mess. Deliberately he let down slowly to traverse the column at two hundred miles per hour.

The carnage reminded him of the old Budweiser painting of Custer's last stand. The North Koreans had ambushed the convoy, killing the first and last tanks, then slaughtering the troops with heavy machine gun and mortars. It must have been over in seconds, for only a few bodies littered the ground; most were clumped in the center of the trucks, as if they were trying to hide under each other. Others hung over the vehicle sides, some head and arms down, held by just a leg, others bent in the middle like sacks of flour. Great splotches of blood, black in the valley's shadows, drenched the sides of the vehicles and the ground beneath them. As he flew, his whistling passage seemed to shake a black velvet cloth ahead of him as successive waves of birds rose up from their feast on the dead. Breathing hard on the oxygen to overcome his nausea, he pushed the throttle forward to climb out.