Command Decision (9 page)

“Hold it,” said Brockhurst. “I want a shot of that.”

“We’ll get you a clean map, Brockie,” said Major Prescott.

“No. I want Kane himself, crossing it off…”

His own interest had betrayed him. Covering his enthusiasm now he concluded slowly: “…this is, if I do the story.”

“Now listen, Brockie…”

“Or maybe there’s another story, an inside story that I don’t see. But I’d have too see it all, exclusively.”

They all turned to see that Dennis had paused in the doorway, his eyes hard at the sight of the correspondent peering at the uncovered operational map. This time, however, he had his temper firmly in control.

“Preliminary count thirty-five missing with one group unreported as yet, sir.”

“About 32 per cent, sir,” said Major Prescott. And at that moment they were silenced by the rising vibrations of the last group of returning Fortresses.

2

Evans, waiting on call in the General’s anteroom, had decided it was about time to break up the meeting. Ordinarily he was delighted to doze at leisure through the brayings of the brass but today other considerations were stirring him. He needed freedom of action to remove the musette bag full of whiskey from the nonsecret filing cases in the crowded cubicle where he sat. Yet beyond even this consideration Evans found himself pondering whether the termination of the conference would be good for General Dennis. The discovery that he was concerned about the General’s welfare disturbed him.

For the dozenth time he reassured himself indignantly that he didn’t give a damn what became of Dennis or any other general. If he didn’t like this Garnett he would move on. He had long since learned that, with reason, a resourceful man could do whatever he liked in the army.

Regulars made a fetish of doing things they did not like in the name of duty, but Regulars liked being in the army and enjoyed kicking each other around. Evans felt that that was their business. Anyone who wanted to spend twenty or twenty-five years waiting for automatic promotions to change the ratio between the men he could boss and the men who could boss him was welcome to it.

In civil life Evans had been a lineman. He had enjoyed beating the draft systematically until the morning after Pearl Harbor. That day the company superintendent had come out to the pole yard and told the men they were not to worry. Line work was a vital facet of national defense and the company would take care of all of them. That afternoon Evans enlisted.

He had known that his occupational experience would lead him straight to the Signal Corps. He knew also that telephones were made for talking. Talking was not going to end this war and Evans had no intention of climbing poles for the government for sixty dollars a month. In the induction center he signed himself down as a clerk.

In the next six months three lieutenants, two captains, and one major had eagerly approved his requests for transfer. The major had debated between approving his request to go to gunnery school and trying him for the willful mishandling of government records. But the unit had to make up a quota of volunteer gunners. He had made an excellent gunner and, during his tour, an exemplary soldier. He knew that on at least two occasions he personally had saved the government three hundred thousand dollars’ worth of airplane, once over Munster and once over the Channel.

The lives of his fellow crew members did not enter this calculation because most of them had done as much for him at one time or another, which made it a private and human matter beyond the government’s province. He did feel, however, that two planes was a fair exchange for even his impressive ribbons. Many men had filed higher claims than his but Evans had observed that the ones who did were usually sent posthaste back to the States for teaching after their tours. He wanted no part of teaching. He considered that he and the government were now at honorable quits; they wouldn’t let him out of service of course but neither would they make him climb poles for sixty bucks a month, if he kept his neck in.

Until today his post-tour life had been complicated by no deeper purpose than enjoying his leisure and keeping the Regulars in their place. Now against all reason and experience he found himself pondering whether or not it would help General Dennis to have him break up the jawing in the office.

Crossing the anteroom toward the door, Evans too began to feel the rising roar of the last returning group. One of them, his experienced ears told him, was having a hell of a time. He stopped in his tracks, measuring the continuous increase and its internal communications carefully. The man had no more than two motors and was coming straight for them but he probably had altitude enough to clear the building. Evans hoped he had been able to get rid of his bombs.

***

Inside the office Evans found all three Generals, the Major, and the correspondent grouped tensely as they peered out of the window. The noise of the oncoming planes made it useless to speak. Evans took up his position by the door.

Dennis, even through the tension of his careful, habitual counting, had switched his eyes from their first glimpse of the crippled ship to the crash crews and ambulances waiting by the Ops tower. Everything was all right. The asbestos suits were buckled and steady streams of exhaust were pluming out of both vehicles. He saw that Major Dayhuff and Captain Getchell were both getting into the ambulance in white surgical coats and he made a mental note to speak to them that evening himself. He appreciated the instincts that made them both go rather than send their lieutenants but it was not their job.

Across the field he saw the long line of the Group’s noncombat personnel lined up against the barrier ropes, the long dark blur of their fatigues broken here and there by the white of cooks and mess helpers. Every man among them knew, was watching and counting as tensely as he was.

“…eighteen… twenty… twenty-one…” it looked a little better this time except for that one bad cripple and the fact that he still had not seen the uncorseted girl on the nose of the plane Ted was riding… “twenty-three…”

“God, that one’s low!” said Garnett behind him.

It was the cripple and even as he was trying to see whether the man had any undercarriage he could clearly hear Prescott’s fatuous remark.

“When a crew finishes a tour, sir, they always give the field a good buzz in spite of rules.”

The plane zoomed down at them, so low now that even the men across the field threw themselves on the ground. In the room, its sound had become a continuous thunder. Through it Dennis could hear the shouts of the men behind him and then the thudding of their bodies on the floor but he was scarcely aware of them. He was trying to measure the boy’s chances. As the plane cleared them with a crescendo of thunder perhaps two hundred feet above the building, Dennis saw that he had one sound motor and heard a second one catch with a rough, protesting response to the momentum of the zoom. It was skipping but as the noise receded Dennis could tell that the boy had recaptured some of the pull in it.

Turning back now from the momentarily blank sky he observed that Kane, Garnett, Brockhurst, and Prescott were still trying to get their noses into the floorboards, their elbows drawn tightly over their ears. Beyond them Evans was regarding the spectacle with a sardonic smile that vanished slowly from his face as they began to peer up into the relative quiet of the plane’s receding thunder.

“Colonel Martin’s group returning, sir,” said Evans dryly.

Kane gathered himself first and jumped up. The others followed sheepishly, the more chagrined to realize that neither Dennis nor Evans had left his feet.

“I’ll have that man tried,” said Kane. “After my orders about buzzing…”

Dennis, his face glued to the window, had to speak over his shoulder.

“He isn’t buzzing, sir. He’s in trouble.”

They had gathered again behind him and he could hear their dismay as the plane came back into sight on a wide, approaching circle.

“My God!” whispered Garnett. “Two feathered and one windmilling.”

“Half the tail’s gone,” said Prescott.

“How in God’s name is he turning it?” breathed Kane.

Dennis himself didn’t know. He was flying it in with his own tendons now. He could feel them flexing and giving with the yawing erratic course of the ship, even though his mind knew that the boy up there probably didn’t have a quarter of his controls left. Incredibly, though, he had not only turned but was actually managing to lift it a little as the increase in the vibrations began to hammer them again.

“Why don’t they bail out? She’s only salvage.”

He felt a sudden fury that Garnett, of all people, should presume to question anything that boy was doing.

“Probably wounded aboard,” he grunted.

As if in confirmation they suddenly saw the red rockets flowering out behind her and then, from the left waistgate, three balls appeared against the blueness of the sky.

“Look! They are bailing… two, three… look, they’re opening all right. Jesus! They didn’t have three hundred feet!” shouted Garnett.

Dennis had felt with his whole body the lifting of the ship as those jumping figures lightened it. Now his tendons were taut again with the climbing curve that boy still, against all possibility, maintained. To the last possible second of the feud between gravity and momentum the boy held that bank. Then, as gravity won and the ship had to sag heavily back to level or spin in, he saw her settling in a smooth straight glide and realized that the pilot had succeeded in lining her up for the Number Two Strip with geometrical precision.

“Good boy,” he breathed, “he’s going to try it.”

She was so close now that they could plainly see her markings. As her last motor throttled down a little for the final shaky glide, the growling of the gear in the ambulance beside the Ops tower broke through the slackening volume of sound.

“
Urgent Virgin!
” said Garnett.

“Why, that’s Captain Jenks’s ship!” exclaimed Prescott.

Her struggle was almost over now. Gravity was claiming her with harsh jerks that slewed her savagely from side to side against the failing resistance of momentum and the clutching suction of the cannon wounds. It was one of these helpless, sidewise flutterings that suddenly showed Dennis the condition of her right wheel. He shouted.

“Pick her up, boy! PICK HER UP!”

He knew it was hopeless and knew that the boy himself must know it. He should be getting them away from the glass of the window but he stood immovable, watching. The
Urgent Virgin
seemed to settle very slowly now. With a final birdlike gentleness she leveled off perfectly just as the broken wheel strut touched down. Game to the last, she even bounced a little as the strut sheered off, but the lame motor would not respond this time and the last one could not do it. As if in slow motion she teetered a little twice more at the crest of her bounce and then, at a long final angle, plowed herself in. The ripping, tearing noises faded slowly into silence and then the detonation fluttered the maps tacked on the wall. Fragments appeared, arching lazily upward out of the expanding cloud of dust and smoke.

Dennis made himself listen intently a second more but he could hear no screaming through the brief interval before the roaring motors of the crash truck and ambulance punctured the silence. He turned from the window, shoulders sagging limply, to find himself looking into the green fixity of Major Prescott’s face.

“There’s another statistic for you, Major,” he said harshly.

Haley appeared in the Ops room door.

“Left main gas tank. Category E, sir.”

“Can you get the others down here?”

“We’re taking cripples on Strip One and sending everything with enough gas to the 641st. There’s lots of room over there now, sir.”

“Any count on this gang yet?”

“Twenty-eight now, sir. There may be stragglers.”

He held Haley with his eyes, knowing it was no oversight which kept the Colonel silent now. Haley would have spoken at once if he had anything more to say. But Dennis could not help asking him.

“Anything on Ted himself?”

“Not yet, sir.”

“Get an aggregate for tomorrow’s serviceability from all groups as fast as possible.”

Haley vanished. Dennis faced Kane steadily.

“Looks like forty-two sir, with two in the ditch.”

“Worse than yesterday,” said Kane softly.

“They got their target, sir.”

Evans decided this had gone far enough. Stepping forward he addressed himself with a bland face to General Kane.

“Does the General want the photographers in here or outside, sir?”

Kane looked as nonplused as Evans had known he would. It was Prescott who saw his superior’s indecision and turned severely on Evans.

“What photographers, Sergeant?”

“From Division, Wing and Groups Publicity, sir.”

“Who ordered them and on what authority?”

“I did, sir. All generals have their pictures taken wherever they go. They say it helps the boys’ morale, sir.”

Prescott was still wondering how to deal with this straight-faced insolence when the General smiled appreciatively on Evans.

“Well, of course if it helps morale…” He picked up his cap, straightened his blouse a little, and extended the smile to Dennis. “We’ll be going along, General… probably drop in on some of your interrogations at the groups.”

Dennis picked up his own cap. “As you say, sir.”

“No, no, my boy. I wouldn’t think of taking you away from here just now. Get me that claims total as soon as possible and be sure to get good pictures of the battle damage today.”

“As you say, sir.”

Kane ushered the rest of them ahead of him now rapidly, and as they paused at the door to let him go out first he spoke hastily over his shoulder.

“Don’t send tomorrow’s field order until I get back.”

“Very well, sir.”

As the anteroom door closed on them Dennis whirled and put his head into the Ops room. Haley had his eyes riveted on the teleprinter and headphones on his ears but instinct brought him to rigid attention even before Dennis barked at him.