Air Force Eagles (31 page)

Colonel Kim was repeating a favorite phrase, "Those is not relevant," as he turned in time to see the ejection seat fire and catapult the unfortunate Korean into the air. In mid-flight, the victim separated from the seat, falling like a sack of rice into the mud. The seat's trajectory carried it through a crowd of farmers, a huge square bowling ball obliterating human pins. Marshall learned later that three had been killed and six injured.

Berserk, Kim turned and struck Marshall across the jaw, knocking him to the ground, screaming with pain. His face contorting with hate, Kim reached down and deliberately twisted Marshall's left arm. The stabbing flood of agony shocked him into unconsciousness.

He awakened hours later, delirious with pain, stretched out in a stake-bed truck, his body penned in by fuel drums, two morose guards watching him.

After a long wait, they drove into the collection of mud huts that passed for a North Korean field hospital. The largest one had a power line running to it; Marshall found out later that it was for X-ray. They took him into the examining hut first, and a short, bespectacled doctor carefully checked him over before sending him to the next hut. He was apparently getting the same care given wounded Chinese and North Korean soldiers and was grateful just to be sitting quietly and not bouncing across the primitive Korean roads.

Bandaged patients either stumbled out of the operating room or were carried slackly by their arms and legs—he hadn't seen a single stretcher. After an hour's wait he was taken into the surgery and immediately, without any preparation, given ether as an anesthetic. He knew he had to have his arm set, but as he began to fade, he wondered if they would interrogate him. He was starting to protest when the blessed night took the pain away.

*

Santa Monica, California/September 25, 1952

The telegram lay crumpled on the floor beside her. Saundra slowly sagged into a chair as its full import hit her. John had been missing since the 22nd, shot down in a dogfight.

The message was infuriating—it didn't say what the circumstances of his loss were, what the chances were that he was alive, or when she would learn anything else.

She began sobbing, bitterly aware that he wouldn't have received her letter, that he might have died thinking they were through.

Her hands shaking, she went to the refrigerator where John had put a bottle of gin months before, poured a cold syrupy inch into a jelly glass and drank.

Maybe he was a prisoner of war. He could have ejected and been captured. She wondered how the Koreans would treat a Negro.

The telegram also said that the personal affairs officer from George Air Force Base would be getting in touch with her. Maybe he would know something.

There was a knock at the door. Her heart leaped, for she knew it would be Fred Peterson. She wanted to see him desperately, to draw on his strength as she had always drawn on John's. And she knew that she must not, not now, not ever; as much as she like him—as much as she wanted him—it would now never be more than strictly business.

*

Nashville, Tennessee/September 27, 1952

Elsie McNaughton walked naked down the crooked narrow aisle of Baker's trailer, swiveling her hips to move between cases of beer and chairs piled high with old clothes and cardboard boxes. The oil stove wasn't on, but the damp air hung heavy with the smell of kerosene, dirty laundry, and booze. They had just made love, but the deep sense—and scent—of his primal presence excited her again.

It was the answer she expected—and wanted. Her excitement rose as she obediently complied. She hadn't done any housework of her own for years, but Baker's demands gave her a perverse pleasure.

He was fat, none too clean, totally inconsiderate, and unquestionably dangerous. Yet beneath his crudity, Baker had a rollicking sense of humor; he had made her laugh more than any man in her life. When Troy was out of town, they occasionally went out to dinner or a movie. Then Baker was a different person, kind, considerate, gallant, even. But here in his own domain, their little "sex palace" as he called it, he played to her need for mastery, dominating her completely.

As she swabbed the shower vigorously with Lysol, trying to make a dent in the mildew, she contrasted him to the fastidious Stan, so conscious of his manners, so immaculately clean, so anxious to please, so humorless. Baker
stirred
her, got her excited with just a phone call, and knew exactly what to do to satisfy her—if he chose to. Usually, he let her satisfy him first, then wait on him all day in a sustained heat, but before they parted he would make love to her with a powerful energy that left her totally fulfilled.

She knew, too, that she loved him in part because he treated her exactly as her first lover, Bruno Hafner, had. Bruno had often been brutal, sometimes pleasant, very rarely tender, but always dominant. She liked that in a man, and she rarely found it. Most of them were flowers and candy guys; she craved pretzels and beer and an occasional rough shove if she got out of line.

Staring at him like a child, she nodded. Troy was effectively dead already, as far as the business was concerned. He no longer came to the office—he hated to be seen wearing the dressings on his face and neck—and she kept him informed only of the positive things happening, like being awarded the modification contracts taken from Roget Aircraft.

"Well, that'll make you a widow. What say we get married?"

To Elsie, sexual slavery was one thing, business was another. "Are you crazy? Why would I marry a swine like you? I'm never going to get married again."

While the two of them were romping, Troy McNaughton had summoned the strength to drive himself to the little park he had created on the far side of the airfield. In the last few months, he had enjoyed the park more than any of his other possessions, even the plant that had delighted him so long.

His chauffeur usually drove him, bringing along a sack of the dog chow the ducks liked better than bread. The park was deserted in the evenings, and the ducks amused him with their pecking order feeding, reminding him of board meetings he'd held.

This evening, he had only a coffee can of chow, and he sat on the pier, carefully tossing the food so that the smaller ducks got their fair share. For the hundredth time, he saw that duck society was no different from his own—the bigger ducks greedily ate up all they could, shoving the smaller ones aside, turning to chase them away, plucking viciously at their tail feathers. There was one little mallard that he identified with, calling him Lumpy, because he had a swollen open sore on the side of his head.

"Come here, Lump—looks like your tailfeathers are all gone, poor guy. Just like me."

He made sure that his favorite got a full ration, luring the larger ducks to one side with a few chunks, then tossing a handful out for Lumpy to sluice greedily out of the water.

When the can was nearly empty, McNaughton took the last three pieces and tossed them to his favorite, using Dick Baker's favorite phrase: "All gone, kid, if I'm lying I'm dying." Then he stretched out on the pier, his head protruding over the side. He placed his .45-caliber Colt automatic under his chin, positioning it precisely where he felt the pain gnawing so relentlessly. He hesitated only a moment, as a brief feeling of regret passed over him that he hadn't gotten the flying wing into production. Then he pressed the trigger, blowing his cancer and his brains into the water. The frightened ducks flew away, quacking. Lumpy left with the rest of them.

*

Pyoktong, North Korea/October 10, 1952

Bones slept in all his clothes, bright blue cotton jacket and pants over the canvas outfit they'd given him after he crashed. Frozen stiff as freezer beef, the cold congealing his very marrow, he grudgingly awoke from a poignant dream of a forgotten time. He hadn't thought of it in years, but in his sleep he had re-created a rainy warm afternoon when his father had told him about the British surrender at Yorktown, when the redcoats had marched out to the tune, "The World Turned Upside Down."

Yesterday a chance meeting had turned his world as a prisoner upside down. Walking with his guard back from the
benjo,
the filthy slit-trench toilet fifty feet from his mud hut, he met a white man and a Negro soldier.

He thought he was hallucinating when the white man said in an English accent, "Good evening, I'm Alan Burkett; this is Sergeant Taylor. You must be Captain Marshall."

They shook hands. Marshall peered at him, thinking how warm the quilted jacket and the big waterproof boots must be. The man's broad red face was peering from a Russian-style fur hat and a wide checkered scarf wound around his throat and face like a snowman's.

Bones stole a quick look at the guard, who was ignoring them, obviously afraid of the Englishman.

His high voice filtered up from his well of cosseted warmth. "I'm a correspondent for the Liverpool
Daily News.
Sergeant Taylor was with the 1st Division. How are they treating you?"

Marshall was on his guard at once—the man was too friendly, the situation too strange. He answered by asking, "Sergeant Taylor, how are they treating you?"

"You know how it is, Captain, they treat us Negroes as good as they can, while they feed us all this shit about racism in America. We eat about as good as they do, and that's bad enough. No sense in starving to death."

Breakfast had been the usual—a tin GI cup of tea, a large bowl of rice with some kimchee, and a small bowl with some roughly chopped squares of meat, boiled to a gray-white hue and spiced with red pepper. Marshall considered it a starvation diet until he saw how enviously the guards looked at it.

Normally, he forced himself to eat everything to keep his strength up for an escape, but today he placed the food aside.

His watch had been stolen at the crash site; timepieces were obviously in short supply, for he had not seen any Korean below the rank of colonel wearing one. For the most part he ignored the hour, content to plot the day's monotonous course in the ruthless busy-work of prison routine, the guards changing and the bugles blowing. But he always knew when it was precisely ten o'clock, for that was when Colonel Kim came in, ostentatiously looked at his wrist, and began his interrogation.

After the blowup at the airplane, the colonel had been scrupulously correct, even friendly. Each day, he would pull out his little black notebook to ask the same questions of Marshall. At first Marshall told him his name, rank, and serial number and nothing more. In time, Marshall found it was smarter—and easier—to eat up the interrogation time by talking at length on any subject except military matters. Kim seemed to enjoy it, especially when Marshall spun out the plots of movies and books, improvising when he didn't remember, telling him fantastic stories about American motion picture stars or baseball players. In time he exhausted all he knew, and made up stories freely, combining the plot of
Gone With the Wind
with
Snow White,
or
Frankenstein
with
Dawn Patrol.
Kim loved them all, but as the time grew to a close, he would again ask him how many aircraft were in his unit, and where various Air Force units were located. Marshall would decline to answer, and Kim would put the notebook away, shrugging.

Toward the end of the session, Kim would bemoan the unfortunate lot of the Negro in the United States. It was bad propaganda, straight out of
Uncle
Tom's
Cabin,
and Marshall could have given him much sadder, more blatantly unfair examples if he'd chosen to. Instead he told him extravagant lies about his father and mother, and how fortunate they were and how well they lived. Kim had routine intelligence information on Marshall, but he tried to be subtle with it, asking Marshall innocuous questions about his background and utterly refusing to believe that his father was a minister and actually owned his own automobile.

The session always closed with Kim giving the same short lecture on the importance of confession in "rehabilitation," and the fact that there were some unfriendly ways to get cooperation. The threats were softened by smiles, as if it were a pro forma speech, something he had to say but that they mutually understood would not happen.