Air Force Eagles (50 page)

"This ain't easy, pal, but I'm getting there. There's only so much fixing you can do with the paperwork. It's a damn good thing the crews are doing as well as they're doing legally."

Fitz, as always in a flight suit—Coleman wasn't sure he even owned a uniform—and still the incorrigible con man, the loner with a heart of stone, was in his element doctoring mission reports to improve the scores. He kept an array of pens and pencils at hand to match whatever the crews were using and had a forger's facility with handwriting. The ground school work was relatively easy; just a few pencil strokes were enough to raise the recorded grades.

The flying reports were another matter. Even with the best cheating will in the world, crews often failed to put down the near-perfect numbers required to make them competitive in the race to be number one in SAC. Some of the mission elements—radar bombing or electronic countermeasures, for example—were scored by the ground, and unless the crew found some way to cheat in the air, there was no way anyone, not even Fitz, could falsify the results. Actual practice bomb drops couldn't be fixed—there was no disputing the call from the ground on those. But other elements of the mission were fully controlled by the wing—the number of refuelings, the amount of fuel transferred, celestial navigation legs, nuclear weapons training—and these Fitz could improve as the situation demanded. His main problem was to make sure that any changes he made were kept coordinated with the rest of the reports on the mission. You could not, for example, record an in-flight refueling of forty thousand pounds of fuel, immediately followed by pilot proficiency work involving touch and go landings. The people reviewing the paperwork at Headquarters would know the aircraft would have been too heavy to land and immediately smell a rat.

"Listen, boss, we've got a real problem in covering maintenance. We're falling further and further behind, and just pushing a pencil doesn't fix the airplanes. Sooner or later, there's going to be an accident."

"What's bothering you?"

"Well, you got the maintenance officer signing off on the periodic inspections. We don't know how many airplanes have problems that have just been passed over."

"Look, these airplanes are almost brand-new—they can skip a few inspections and nothing will happen. Don't you worry about it."

Although they were equally good pilots, Fitzpatrick was much more attuned to airplanes. Coleman flew them and forgot them; Fitz became absorbed in them, understood all the complex systems, knew where failures could occur.

"You're a funny guy, Coleman. It used to be you always thought that your luck was running out, that you had to ration everything out to yourself. Now you act like there's no tomorrow, that you can cheat day after day and never get caught."

Coleman stared at him as old fears and memories stirred.

Fitzpatrick went on. "Just don't say I didn't warn you. We've got no idea about what corrosion or metal fatigue might do on these monsters. They're not built like the old-style airplanes, and they fly in a totally different flight regime."

Coleman was disturbed; Fitz normally never gave a damn about anybody or anything, just as long as he got forty or fifty hours flying a month. He frowned. "They should be better than the B-17s and the B-29s; look at all the experience behind them. Don't sweat it."

Holding up a red pencil to check its hue against the marks on the paper he was working with, Fitz shrugged and said, "We've been playing this little game now for over a year, and it takes more fixing everytime. The crews are getting lax. I don't know how long you can keep a lid on this—it's the old pitcher to the well bit."

"Don't talk like that. We only have to keep this up till the fall, when the list for brigadier general comes out. If I can keep this wing number one till then, I'm home free."

"What if the guy who takes over after you looks into the paperwork? What if the guys tell him what's been going on?"

Coleman felt his confidence return. "First, the guys aren't going to say diddly—they're in this as deep as I am—as
we
are
.
Second, there's not going to be any time for a new guy to learn the job and look over the paperwork from the past. All anybody will see is that when Coleman left, things went downhill fast. And that's how I want it to look."

Fitzpatrick went on with his work, and Coleman said, "Besides, who do they have who's as good a con man as you, Fitz? They'll never figure out what you've done."

Fitz nodded in agreement; the only reason he was doing it at all was just to beat the system.

*

Santa Monica, California/April 11,1955

John never felt comfortable in Saundra's plush offices, so much nicer than anything he'd ever had in his life. And it was worse because Prosperous Fred was there, dressed in his five-hundred-dollar suit and hundred-dollar shoes, face shiny as a bowling ball, oozing wealth at every pore, and so nice to them both. Marshall was jealous of him, and he resented that fact as much as he resented the man.

"Now listen, you two, old Fred's going to give you his last word on this crazy idea. I think you are nuts to get into the firefighting business, John—there's no proven market for it and it's got to be as dangerous as hell. And of all the businesses you could go into, there's none where being Black would make it more difficult for you. You'll be dealing with rednecks in every part of the country—and I don't think they'll want to deal with you."

Marshall was rested and well, his body hardened by the tough training he'd imposed on himself. Mentally he'd bounced back from the rough treatment the Air Force had given him, charging it off as just one more example of government racism. Now he spoke in a civil but determined voice.

"You've said all that before, Fred. You may be right. But I'm going to do it, whether Saundra gets involved or not."

Saundra turned in her tall-backed red leather chair, bristling. "I
am
getting involved—you both know that. I can afford to back you for a couple of years, if you start small. After that, we'll see.

Peterson shook his head and smiled. "All right. But you've got to set up a separate corporation, so that your liabilities can't hurt Marshall Products. John, it looks to me like you're going to be vulnerable to a lot of liabilities. What happens if one of your pilots gets killed flying your airplane?"

"We shouldn't lose any pilots; I'll train them myself. Besides, I'll have them sign a waiver when they're hired. Believe me, there's enough pilots looking for jobs that I won't have any trouble picking and choosing."

Saundra waited until he was finished and then spoke to Peterson sharply, something she never did before. John wondered if it had anything to do with the fact that Peterson had married two months before. Or that he'd married a white girl.

"Fred, we've been through all that. We'll set up a separate corporation, and I'll invest one hundred thousand dollars in it to get it started. That's settled."

"No, it's not. Since you insist on going ahead, I'll come in with you, on a couple of conditions. I'll add a hundred thousand to the pot, for a quarter interest—I think that's fair."

Marshall felt a grudging respect for the man. Peterson had argued vigorously against the whole idea, and now he was willing to put up as much capital as they—as Saundra—was putting up.

"Okay. My first condition is that I buy one of Roget's converted bombers to use as a flying headquarters. I want it fitted out with the best radios and whatever you use for flying in bad weather. And I want it to have couches that convert into beds, a full bathroom, no damn bucket in a closet, and a complete galley, everything. It won't have to carry a lot of people, three or four, but I want it to be able to carry them in comfort. I'll put up the money for the airplane and lease it to you for a dollar a year."

Marshall felt uncomfortable; he couldn't tell where this was leading. "We don't need anything like that, Fred. We could use the money better to buy more equipment. And one of Roget's airplanes is going to cost at least six hundred thousand, maybe more."

"John, don't try to tell me how to invest my money." Disdain dripped from his voice; he spent more on clothes each year than John had earned in the Air Force. "I'm telling you that you
do
need it. When the season starts and you start following the forest fires, you'll be heading into the Southwest and the South. You've got to have a place to stay; I can't have you sleeping by the side of the road if you're responsible for so much of my money."

Marshall flushed. He'd never even thought that he might run into discrimination in this business. Peterson was thinking ahead—maybe that's why he had so much money and John had so little.

Peterson went on. "But that's only part of it. I really want you to have an airplane capable of flying some of the Black leaders around the country on a moment's notice. When the airplane's not actively being used in fighting fires, I want to be able to use it as an executive transport for some very special people."

Saundra looked pensive. "I don't want to sound negative, Fred, but does this make sense? Wouldn't it be better just to give them the money to fly commercially?"

"It would if they weren't being watched by the FBI. Hoover has his eyes on them; he thinks they're all Communists. I want to use the airplane to give them free access to all parts of the country without being followed."

Marshall, remembering his own concerns, laughed too loudly. "Come on, Peterson, you're being paranoid. You think the government's shadowing some poor Negro ministers around?"

Visibly angry, Peterson snapped, "For Christ's sake, John, they let you rot in prison, didn't credit you for your victories, and hounded you out of the service because you were Black! And you don't think they'd watch our leaders? What the hell is the matter with you, anyway? Sometimes I think flying's turned you into an Oreo."

"An Oreo? What the hell's an Oreo?"

"He's a nigger who's black on the outside and white on the inside. You've got to wake up, John."

Saundra stared at them. Peterson had never used the word
nigger
before in her presence; John had never heard it said without taking violent exception to it.

Things were changing.

*

Wichita, Kansas/May 14, 1955

Seven hours before, 51-5214 had left Frederick Air Force Base on a standard SAC training mission. Now it swept along at 39,000 feet, stars glittering above it, the ground below masked by billowing thunderstorms glowing incandescent with lightning.

"Wichita, this is Nectar One Nine, over your station at thirty-nine thousand feet, request clearance for an approach and landing at McConnell."

"Roger, One Nine; you're cleared for standard jet approach to McConnell. Be advised that there are thunderstorms in the southeast and southwest quadrants."

Nectar 19's mission was to end at the Boeing plant in Wichita, where a more rugged landing gear was going to be installed. As its mission ended, another of SAC's 1,200 B-47s would be starting another. At any given moment as many as five hundred of them were in the air, practicing their war plan strikes against the Soviet Union.

They went through the familiar fifteen-step ritual carefully; dead tired after a seven-hour flight, throats parched and sinuses throbbing from breathing the arid oxygen, no one wanted to make a mistake.

The copilot read off the second-to-last item. "Gross Weight one-hundred-twenty thousand, Best Flare Speed one hundred forty knots." It meant that the pilot would have the airspeed at exactly 140 knots the moment they crossed the edge of the runway, poised to touch down.

"Roger, one-forty, gear down."

The pilot called "Wichita, Nectar One Nine departing angels thirty-nine."

At 305 knots indicated airspeed, the landing gear came down, effectively doubling the aircraft's drag, and the B-47 edged into a four-thousand-foot-per-minute rate of descent.

Four minutes later, Nectar 19 entered the thunderstorm at 23,000 feet, immediately encountering a steadily growing turbulence.

"Lookit that! St. Elmo's Fire."

The pilot looked out to see the greenish-gold tracery of the lightning's discharge dancing the length of the swept wings, covering the edge of the engines in a shimmering neon glow, perpetually moving over surfaces being swept by winds faster than any hurricane.

"Holy Christ, look at the wings!"

The wingtips were flexing up and down through an eight-foot arc; a few feet closer in to the fuselage, the outboard engines were writhing up and down in a twisting motion, as if they were screwing their way through the air.

The pilot frowned; a four-or-five-foot flap of the thin swept wings was normal; he knew that in ground tests the wings had flapped through an arc of seventeen feet without failure. Still, this was too much for comfort and he called, "Radar, it's rough as a cob in here; I'm going to slow down to two-fifty. What's the best heading out of this mess?"

"Try steering about one-forty for two minutes."

The B-47 turned to the southeasterly heading, which carried it through the center of the thunderstorm, into the line between two cells. One was a mass of violently rising warm air, carrying within it the scent of the fields below; the other was a dump of cold wet air, plummeting down headlong like a runaway elevator to burst out on the ground with cyclonic force.

"What's that ..."