Air Force Eagles (46 page)

"Saundra, they couldn't. I never told the Commies anything useful. And before we went into combat, when the intelligence guys briefed us about capture, they never told us we had to die! Sometimes they said, Tell them only your name, rank and serial number' and sometimes it was Tell them anything they want to know.' But they didn't give us any poison pills, or anything. Besides, most of us didn't know anything the Communists didn't already know."

"You don't have to convince me, John, you just have to convince a board of white officers who probably already think you're a trouble-maker because you're claiming to be an ace. Damn it, think about it! Will they pick Langford Uppercrust the Third from Harvard to be a sacrificial lamb, or will it be poor John Marshall, a jigaboo from Cleveland?"

He sat with his head in his hands. The prospect of a dishonorable discharge was too much.

"Okay. You're right. I'll resign my commission." She hugged him, saddened at the thought that this, the smart thing to do, was going to make him unhappy for the rest of his life.

*

Little Rock, Arkansas/April 1, 1954

Baker ran his hands uneasily over the DeSoto's chrome and plastic steering wheel. "You realize we could get arrested for this?"

Josten snorted with impatience. "For what? Sitting peaceably in a car?"

"Loitering in a car by a schoolyard. If some old woman reports us, the cops'll be down in a minute, figuring we're waiting here to flash our weenies at the kids."

Josten sulked as Baker put the car into gear, turning down the first street away from the schoolyard.

"I just wanted to see where my son will go to school."

Baker glanced at Josten in troubled silence, uncertain how to handle Josten's growing schizophrenia. More and more it seemed as if he were working with two totally different men. One was a brilliant planner, a leader who inspired the Storm Klanners, rational, courteous, sometimes even pleasant to get along with. The other was a man hurtling toward madness, obsessed with the idea of reclaiming his wife and his child.

With an abrupt gesture, Josten stuck the clawed fingers of his hand under Baker's nose and launched into a tirade that had become familiar in the last few weeks.

"See these burns? I spent many months on my back in a hospital, not knowing whether I'd live or die, whether I'd ever walk again.

The one thing that sustained me was the thought of my son, that I had to live to take care of him. Do you think I'm going to let some stupid American pilot take my place, to serve as his father?"

Baker eased into the parking lot of a drive-in root beer stand. When these moods struck—and they did with increasing frequency—their conversation fell into a pattern: Josten's complaining, and Baker trying to calm him. "Look, Helmut, you're not the first guy whose wife divorced him and took the kid. It happens all the time."

Nothing impaired Baker's appetite, and he ordered two hamburgers, french fries, and a root beer float for himself, a coffee for Josten. Eating methodically, licking his fingers between bites, Baker said nothing, contemplating the situation. As long as he still needed cover, he'd have to put up with Josten's growing craziness. The Air Force inspectors had torn McNaughton's paperwork apart, and Elsie performed exactly as Ruddick had instructed her to, preferring charges against Baker with the local district attorney. It satisfied the Air Force, which backed off to concentrate on getting McNaughton's production procedures straightened out.

He enjoyed working with the Klan, feeling superior to most of the members, and seeing many ways that he could profit from it in the future. His duties for Josten were light, and he liked the entertainment he found in the bawdier sections of New Orleans, going down for a week or two at a time, feasting on oysters before nosing around the red-light district, looking for new young girls just in from the bayous.

While he ate, the other man watched him with amused contempt, realizing that Baker could have no inkling of what it was like truly to love some one, or what it meant to have your son stolen from you. He looked on Baker as his senior non-commissioned officer, a good sergeant who did what he was told. It didn't matter that he was a pig—uncultured, ill-mannered, unread—for he did not want him as a friend. He needed him only as an instrument, an extension of his own crippled arms and legs.

As Josten slowly regained his composure, he realized that he would have to say less about his feelings for Lyra and Ulrich—he was giving too much away, and while Baker might be a good worker, he had no illusions about his loyalty.

As they drove back to Pine Bluff in silence, Josten realized that he was better far off here than at McNaughton. The work with the Klan suited his own needs perfectly, giving him time to recover his health, and to plan for his reunion with Lyra. He already had his first objective well in hand, making the Storm Klan into an elite unit. In a way it was his apology for his disloyalty to Hitler. There had been too many men like himself, who had not supported Hitler at the most crucial moments, when the war might still have been won. Now half of Germany was occupied by Russian peasants, the other half by predatory Westerners who bled the country dry. Negro music rang in the dance halls, German girls were bearing half-caste babies; it was exactly what Hitler had predicted—the degradation, the "nigrification," of Germany.

Now Josten was beginning the expansion of the elite Storm Klan concept to other Klan "Realms," as the state organizations were called. In its decline, the Klan had splintered, disintegrating into local, autonomous chapters. The Kleagles—organizers—enjoyed their power and had been suspicious of previous suggestions that they cooperate. But in the past few weeks, Ruddick had brought several of them in to see how well things were working in Pine Bluff, and now there was even talk about affiliating to create a United Klans of America. From there it would be but a step to a political party.

The idea of a party made it essential that he create a plainclothes force, and he had recently spent days interviewing likely ;Storm Klanners, trying to see which ones would have the intelligence and the presence to insinuate themselves into responsible positions in the community. It was tough going—most of the Storm Klanners were Neanderthals, much more willing to fight with a club or fists than with their brains. But there were a few who made good candidates, and they were recommending more. One was already a deputy sheriff in Pulaski County, and another was on the school board. Several were in the National Guard. It was a start.

But more important than anything was planning his personal mission. He would not allow someone else to take his rightful place. No one else had any right to Lyra and Ulrich.

*

Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio/ April 15, 1954

The giant base spilled like an upset Monopoly board along the Erie Railroad and the Mad River, extending from the old Fairfield Air Depot over ten miles of farmland to the runways at Wright Field. Bits and pieces of logic were evident in those few acres where streets were laid out in nice rectangles, and sweeping drives approached handsome headquarters. But most of the area was filled in with a crazy quilt of buildings, some ugly because they were quickly and cheaply built, others strange-looking because they had unusual test functions to fulfill.

At the core of the complex was an array of bureaucracies acting as its central nervous system, fulfilling the age-old military needs of procurement and supply. These civil service fiefdoms, replete with manual calculators, file cabinets, and endless serried rows of clerks, labored on through the years, growing quietly, layering the paperwork into an immense, inedible baklava of rules and regulations.

Dependent upon this core were the many engineering divisions, experimenting with materials and processes, creating new test procedures, guarding the established standards. The engineering divisions provided a stability and a continuity to the field and had strong, productive contacts with its civilian counterparts. This layer grew, too, at a faster pace than the central core, but not so swiftly as the new stars of the expanding Wright-Pat galaxy, the Weapon System Project Offices, products of new management needs that had to keep all the many facets of a modern weapon system coordinated. There you found the bright young officers, the advocates who identified their careers with the complex systems they managed and took weapons from the cradle of inspiration to the grave of obsolescence.

Bandfield's first memories of the place went back to 1934, a simpler grass-field time when he'd flown the losing entry in a twin-engined bomber competition. He hadn't done too well then—he wondered how he'd do today.

"Riley, this place reminds me of a coral reef; always growing one new organism, one on top of another. An organization is created for a new project; it matures over time and becomes part of the foundation while a new outfit gets superimposed on it."

Riley laughed. "Yeah, it's been a real alphabet soup—AMC, WADC, WADD—always changing with the Air Force mission, with the weapons."

They walked down the shining corridors, so worn and polished that wood knots gleamed like voyeurs' eyes through the linoleum that dated the building to wartime construction. Bandy noticed it, and reflected how floors signaled when a government building was built—hardwood in prewar, linoleum in wartime, and asphalt tile in postwar, a downward spiral of aesthetics. The route took them past dozens of glass-walled partitions, which transmitted some of the light and all of the noise, toward the B-47 WSPO—the Weapon System Project Office.

"You satisfied with how things are going with the B-47?"

Riley took two steps and clicked his heels. "Christ, I'm happy as a clam because LeMay is happy. We'll have nineteen operational B-47 wings by December, and twenty-seven a year after that. The in-commission rate is good and getting better, and we've finally got a handle on the engineering change proposals. LeMay attributes it all to the fact that the WSPOs are working so good, and he thinks Bernie Schriever and I are geniuses for setting them up."

"What's the secret? You're working with the same people."

"The real reason is LeMay—people know he wants the system to work, so it does. It has what I call lateral leadership; the project officers can cut across the usual chain of command to get something done. You get a hotshot young captain cooking in here, and he can make things happen."

"Well, Bernie Schriever made brigadier last year—when are you due?"

Riley looked genuinely surprised. "Me make general? Are you kidding? There's more chance they'll court-martial me than make me a general."

He walked along, pensive. "Seriously, Bandy, I've never thought about it before. Hell, I haven't done any of the right things, gone to any of the right schools. They'd never even consider me."

"All you've done right is get next to LeMay and straighten out the B-47 program. You should ask LeMay to be the B-52 WSPO director—that should do it."

"We'll talk about it later."

They turned the corner, threaded their way through the battered and ill-assorted desks, some still wearing the NRA tags they came with during the Depression, to a series of offices lining the wall. The glass partitions here went all the way to the ceiling and the offices were reserved for lieutenant colonels and above. At the end, one office had been called a conference room; it was identical in size to the other four offices along the wall, but it had a long conference table, straight-backed chairs, and an overhead projector. Sitting around the table, faces long, were representatives from the various Wright-Patterson divisions—Engineering, Procurement, even Flight Test. In the center of the table, tagged like toes in the morgue, were the milk-bottle pins Bandfield had pulled from the Pinecastle B-47 crash the previous February. Next to them was a black three-ring binder, the kind school kids use.

Bandfield studied the men for a moment before Riley introduced him. This was exactly what Riley had devised his systems management and the WSPOs to overcome—the dogged inertia of the usual civil service hierarchy. He looked at them with a mixture of anger and sympathy. They were a classic Wright-Pat civil service team—five GS-12s, in rumpled suits from Sears, their stained birthday-gift ties worn and frayed, each man with a forest of pencils in his shirt pocket. Together they constituted an engineering Greek chorus, ready to back up past decisions or defer new ones.

Most of the engineering at the complex was a mere ratification of the manufacturer's proposals; a very few individuals, one or two in each office, were aggressive enough to stick their necks out a little to do some engineering on their own. More than anything else, they were skilled in a thousand ways to cover their asses.

The team leader came in a little late, a tired psychological ploy to show how busy he was, how unimportant he considered this meeting compared to his many other duties. Bandfield immediately pegged him as a GS-13 hustling for GS-14.

"I'm Chuck Baleske, and I'm chairman of this august group."

Baleske paused, clearly savoring his moment in the sun. Bandfield knew the type well, gunning for position, staking out a claim for the future while being fiercely defensive about the past. Baleske was sleekly vulpine, hair slicked back with too much Vitalis, the odor dominating the room. His round Santa Claus cheekbones contrasted strangely with his long, strong jaw that moved in chewing motions when he wasn't speaking.

"Colonel Bandfield, we appreciate the effort you went to have these milk-bottle pins pulled, but after a great deal of analysis, we have concluded that the accident investigation report was correct, and that these parts had nothing to do with it."

He handed Bandfield the black binder, who looked at it and said, "I didn't say that the accident investigation was incorrect or that the milk-bottle pins had anything to do with it. I said that they had deformed, and that a similar condition might cause an accident in another airplane."

The men around the conference table leaned forward as one. This was clearly what they were waiting for.