Air Force Eagles (36 page)

There was no mistaking the colonel's joy.

Marshall went the next step, hesitating, then saying slowly, "All right. I'll confess that I parachuted rats out of my airplane. This is proof, I can't deny it anymore."

They escorted him back to his room, talking excitedly in Korean. Choi had a table and chair brought in, along with lined white paper and two pens. Marshall began to write, trying to be funny enough for American readers, but serious enough for Orientals.

Marshall added "from 40,000 feet, at 600 miles per hour, over defenseless villages in North Korea." Any American would see how absurd a concept it was; rats would freeze and parachutes rip apart under those conditions.

When he had done so, Choi snatched the paper and ran from the room toward a waiting truck. A guard handed Marshall a thin cotton blanket, the first he'd had in North Korea. He gave the guard his cigarette on the spot.

At midnight, Choi burst through the shoji screen of his cell. Marshall, curled on the floor in the minimal comfort of the blanket, groggily heard the screaming, then awoke in time to recognize Choi and see the boot arcing toward his face.

Marshall's body, inert as a rolled rug, offered no resistance, torn flesh and broken vessels absorbing the kicks. Bleeding and unconscious, one eye bulging from its socket, his magnificent lunch spewing bloodily from his mouth, he lay in a black void, insensible to cold and pain.

Gathering his strength, Choi kicked again. "Now, Captain Nigger, you'll never lie to me again!"

Marshall lay there, his shattered defense mechanisms flickering as his broken body made spasmodic last-ditch efforts to sustain his ebbing life.

Exhausted from his efforts, Choi stood over him and spat out, "Nigger! Nigger! Nigger!"

He reeled out of the room, as certain that Marshall was dead as he was that his own career was ended. The guards watched him go, then went back to sleep without even looking into the cell.

*

Little Rock, Arkansas/February 15, 1953

Stan had started divorce proceedings as soon as he got back to Little Rock from Korea, but Milo Ruddick had intervened with his usual directness.

"Stan, don't be a damn fool. You will
not
divorce Ginny. If you do, I'll hound you out of the Air Force and out of aviation. You know I can do it."

Coleman, intimidated as always by the man, fought back. "How would you feel if you came home and found your wife screwing a nigger? A servant?"

"She was raped, Stan, you know that!"

"Raped, my ass; if any raping was done, she did it!"

"It's all been hushed up; Nathan's moved away, nobody knows but us. Are you going to go into court and make a fool out of yourself?"

"Yes, I am, and you, too. It'll look great that you've got a whore for a daughter, out fucking whoever comes along."

Ruddick's voice was like chilled steel. "Shut up. I want you to stop and think for a moment. Do you believe that I would permit things to go so far? That I would allow
you
to put me in such a position?"

The contempt in the word
you
and the quiet menace in Ruddick's voice were convincing.

Then the familiar, throaty politician's coo returned. "Now, I don't want to be rough. If you go along with me on this, I guarantee that you'll become a general. You know I can do it. And then there is the estate—I'll see to it that you participate in its proceeds. And we can alter my will so that you'll get a one-third share after I die. Ginny's already agreed to this."

Coleman winced as he realized that either the threat or the bribes would have been enough. Putting them together had been an overwhelming argument.

"I can't live with her, not after this."

"Sure you can; half the successful marriages in this country are make-believe. You can live your own life, have your own women—just don't get a divorce and screw up your career."

A residual flame of defiance flared in Coleman. "And yours, too!"

"That will never happen, I assure you. If we gloss over this little untidy business, you and Ginny can both have good, productive lives. I'll see to it that you get the best jobs in the Air Force, promotions, and good contacts with industry when you retire. I can do that, you know I can."

Stan hung his head, hating himself for allowing Ruddick this ascendancy. There was no sense to it. He was a better pilot than most, a good officer; yet he still chose to depend upon this miserable man. He wanted to stand up and smash Ruddick, to send his fist smashing against that well-shaven jaw. Yet he looked at the floor, knowing that a deal had been made. Ruddick knew it, too, but he added, "If you don't cooperate, I'll be very unhappy—and so, my friend, will you."

*

Nashville, Tennessee/March 6, 1953

Elsie loved to walk the aisles of the plant on Friday—payday. Everybody felt good, there was a general air of expectancy, and she was sure to get some nice compliments, rendered respectfully from the foremen.

It must have been like this in the old days in the South, she thought, all the field hands looking on, the overseers paying their respects.

Elsie had their respect, in truth. Troy McNaughton had always been a mercurial sort and held himself distant from the workers on the floor. Elsie toured all the time, keeping her fingers on the pulse of the place. If somebody had a complaint, they could confide in her, confident that she wouldn't tell on them, believing she would help if she could.

The huge B-47 center sections and inner-wing panels were moving down the line, glistening in the sheen of their protective green paint. The subcontract was immensely profitable, for the terms had been computed on the higher wages paid in Seattle. In Nashville, McNaughton was making a killing.

But the parts were anonymous; they never moved down the line to assume the personality of a complete airplane to be flown away. Instead, they were sealed in long cocoons and shipped by rail to Boeing in Wichita or to Lockheed in Marietta, Georgia, where B-47s were completed.

She much preferred trooping the refurbishing line, where old airframes were given new life, and at the end of the process engines sputtered, props spun, and an airplane took off. She had asked Dick Baker to meet her there, and he was late as usual.

McNaughton's suicide had no impact on the plant's operation. Elsie couldn't truthfully say that she missed him; in the last years of his life even before his illness, he had been difficult to get along with. For some reason, missiles had taken his fancy, and it had bothered him that none of his missile programs got off the ground, literally or figuratively. And after he learned he was dying, he was impossible.

"Yo!"

It was Baker. God, if she could only bring herself to get rid of him! He'd slipped into being familiar with her in public, no matter how many times she'd reproached him for it. But that was nothing. She'd been going through some purchase orders at random—an old habit of hers—and had found out that Baker had authorized the purchase of some critical B-47 attachment bolts. Called "milk bottle pins" because of their shape, they were used to attach the inner-wing panel to the fuselage center section.

"Who the hell authorized you to get into the parts-buying business?"

"We already talked about that, honey. If I'm lying I'm dying! I told you I could improve on some of the prices and you said, 'We'll see.' Well, take a look. I got those parts for sixty percent less than we were paying before."

"What are they made of, putty?"

"No, this is first-rate material, and a first-rate producer. He's just hungry, wants to buy into the business. I had our quality control guys check it out real good."

"Don't ever do it again. Let me rephrase that. If you ever do it again, I'll fire you on the spot."

His voice dropped, threatening. "You'll never fire me, babe—you need what I've got, as often as I'll give it to you. And don't you forget it."

She shuddered, knowing he was right.

*

Salinas, California/March 9, 1953

"Damn, Bandy, we haven't argued like this for twenty years! Seems like old times."

"Don't old-time me, you silver-haired bastard! We're strapping these JATO bottles on whether you want to or not." Bandfield had installed the battery of two JATO bottles on each side of the amphibian's fuselage.

Roget slammed his fist against the hull of the Catalina. "Come on, be sensible. Weight is critical on this old dog."

Bandfield put down his wrench; the temptation to crack Roget on the head with it was too strong.

"Look, you con me into spending two weeks of my leave to fly this thing, and then you won't let me do what I think is right. It damn near doesn't make sense—you keep telling me weight is critical when you're going to be scooping up tons of water?"

Roget growled, "Of course we're going to scoop up tons of water—that's the whole idea."

Bandfield wasn't convinced that it was safe. Roget Aircraft had converted seven Lockheed Lodestars to executive aircraft, cleaning them up and selling them as "Roget Rockets"; they had a backlog of nine orders on the books. But Roget had acquired six Grumman TBMS, old torpedo bombers, two B-25s, and a gorgeous C-54—all intended to be made into water bombers for firefighting.

"Hadley, I think you're getting us in over our head, tying all this money up in inventory and development costs. The market just isn't there yet, and you know the Forest Service won't buy anything they haven't developed themselves."

"Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're always too conservative. The Forest Service is fiddling around trying to drop water from crop dusters—hell, you can't get a decent load in a little Stearman! I've been running some tests, and unless you can get two hundred gallons out in one drop, it's not worth it. They're bound to come around, and when they do, I'll be ready."

Bandfield shook his head; it was a familiar melody, one he'd heard for twenty years, all his adult life. The strange thing was that Roget was always right—it was just that he was always years ahead of his time.

Now Roget was looking five years downstream. Fighting forest-fires with water bombers was going to be a tough job. The amount of water even a C-54 could carry was limited, and the planes would have to be precisely positioned to drop at exactly the right spot, or else the whole load was wasted. And most of the time would be spent flying back and forth from the fire site to an airfield where they could retank with water.

That was the reason for their current experiment. Roget was determined to cut the turn-around time of the airplanes. He'd rigged the Consolidated PBY Amphibian with two scoops that dropped down on each side of the hull, snorkles in reverse. The plan was for the PBY to drop its load, then go and make a quick pass along a lake surface, touching down under power. The scoops would lower and open, water would be crammed into the tanks, and the PBY would be back over the fire site in minutes. Figuring conservatively, he estimated that his system would quadruple the utility of a fire-fighting airplane—if it worked.

Bandfield stepped back up on the stand and continued bolting the JATO bottle holder onto the fuselage. "Well, old man, I'll tell you what's really critical, and that's power. This old clunker hasn't got any. In the service it used to take off at eighty knots, cruise at eighty-five and land at eighty—I don't know what it'll do after you stuff it full of water."

"You're worrying about the wrong thing. It's the water scooper I'm concerned about."

"Don't worry about the scooper, pal, just worry about whether this tub has the oomph to get back off the water. If it doesn't we're going to wind up in the trees at the edge of the lake."

After a week of intensive work, they were ready for the first test of the system. Roget insisted on going along, overriding Bandy's objections.

"I may be a geezer, but I can still take care of myself. It's my idea—if something's wrong with it, I'm the guy who needs to see what happens so I can fix it."

"I'd rather have you in a boat at the lake, ready to fish me out if we go in."

"Don't worry, I've already made arrangements to have some of our people out there in a powerboat, if we need it."

Lake Sutherland was a 3,600-acre water management lake northeast of Salinas, nestled in a shallow ring of hills, with an adequate north/south approach and departure axis. Bandfield made two low practice passes, uncomfortable because he had only about ten hours in the airplane. Speaking through the intercom, he called, "Hadley, I'm going to try to put it down this time. Ready?"

"All set."

Bandfield skirted the lake's edge, wishing he had time to admire the blue-green contrast of trees and water at the edge of the pebbled beach.

His landing attempt was bad; trying to minimize the impact forces, he kept on too much power and shot across the lake's surface without ever getting low enough for the scoop mechanism to engage.

Embarrassed and annoyed, Bandfield growled, "I'm just going to drop this sucker in like it was a normal landing, Hadley. As soon as I touch down, you punch your buttons."

Taking his time, Bandfield made a long, low approach over the scrub pine and manzanitas that lined the north side of the lake, the first growth after the forest fire of two years before. He touched down a hundred yards from the shore and yelling "Scoops out!" applied full power.