Armageddon (78 page)

“Guess we’re not too much on falconry.”

“By the way, Clint, M.J. is having cocktails and dinner for some of the staff and wives who are particularly angry at me. Why don’t you join us at the dining room at seven.”

“Sounds like a winner, sir.”

Clint dug into the agreement, now happy he had returned to work. His phone rang.

“Colonel Loveless.”

“Suh, this is Sergeant Bufford,” a Texan drawled. “I’m here at Rhein/Main at the Lost Wives’ Club. We got us a Mrs. Clinton Loveless who came in by commercial aircraft. We reckon she belongs to you, suh.”

Clint blinked with disbelief. “Has she got two pale kids with her?”

“Ma’am, you got two pale kids?”

Judy took the phone. “Clinton. Will you
please
come over and get us.”

“I’ll be damned.”

The general grumbled that the agreement would be late reaching his desk, but nevertheless gave Clint his own staff car and had his aide contact the hotel to arrange a suite.

Judy didn’t know for sure if she had done the right thing by coming to Germany without telling him, but when they embraced and he sniffled while he hugged the children, she knew it was all right

Tony and Lynn were deposited in a bathtub the size of a small swimming pool while the travel-weary wife collapsed with a martini.

Clint got the children fed. They were terribly impressed by the waiters in formal suits who scraped and bowed and carried on with a great deal of pomp. He unpacked and got them off to sleep.

Judy revived herself and came back to the parlor looking, feeling, smelling all woman and ready for love, but Clint was pensive.

“You aren’t happy I came.”

“We have a lot of rivers to cross.” There hadn’t been an exchange of letters for six weeks, except the one Clint had gotten from Milt Schuster. Judy had been to see him about a divorce.

“I was hurt and angry when I went to see Milt. And when the anger passed I was just plain lonely. Clint, doesn’t the fact that I came here say that things will be your way. I guess I just don’t like an empty bed.”

“You’d have no trouble filling it with someone who shares your ideas about getting up in the world.”

“I can’t, Clint ...” He stood and turned away from her. “I’ll make it up to you, honey,” she said. “We’ll get a little house here ...”

“Dammit, Judy. You don’t just walk down the street and get a little house.”

“What are you trying to say?”

“In the past six weeks I’ve been more alive than at any time in my life. We have an airman at a base outside Munich who figured out how to renew spark plugs for twenty-one cents a copy. New, they cost sixty cents. We use fifty thousand of them a month. A young officer in Headquarters across the street has worked out a load calculator that helps us carry up to five hundred more pounds of cargo on every flight. We have displaced persons who can unload ten tons of coal in twenty minutes. We’ve done all kinds of miracles here ... but we’re whipped. I know my girl Judy. She doesn’t like a loser.”

“Clint, I love you. I’ve just started to learn why and how much. There’s a part in this for me too.”

He nodded and began to pour his heart out and Judy knew what she had to do. She could take him away from this awesome thing for little snatches at a time, brace him up, send him back to battle.

“That nasty old man is the greatest person I have ever known ... and he’s going to die. He’s got a time bomb in his chest.”

After a while Clint was happy that she had come. He stretched out on the bed. It was kind of like the early days when they scratched to make ends meet; she was so wonderful then.

“Let’s make a baby,” Judy purred.

Clint agreed.

The phone rang.

“Clint, get over to Headquarters right away.”

Clint didn’t bother to ask what particular problem was annoying the general.

“And we’ll be flying out to Berlin tomorrow in the second time bloc at Rhein/Main.”

“What about my trip to England, sir?”

“It will have to hold. They got the ground-controlled approach equipment in operation at Tempelhof. The weather is closing in again. We’ve got to look it over and break that bottleneck.”

“Be right over, General.” He set down the phone and looked at his astonished wife. “That’s the name of the game,” he said.

Chapter Eighteen

I
T RAINED A DELUGE
. Rhein/Mud was a lake.

Miserable teams of displaced persons and drenched airmen prepared the line of Skymasters for flight. Hiram Stonebraker’s car, bearing a limp wet flag with two stars, stopped before Operations, 7497th Airlift Wing, as bloc time approached.

On sight of the general, the sign regarding Ball Breaker’s Feed and Coal Bin was stashed away for display at a more appropriate time.

Stonebraker, shaking the water off him, entered the chief pilot’s office.

“You going to run us up to Berlin, Captain?”

“Yes, sir,” Scott Davidson answered. “We’ll be number fifteen in the bloc.”

“When you reach Tempelhof Airways, tell them I want to try out a ground-controlled approach.”

Scott studied the wicked downpour outside. “Couldn’t of picked a better day for it, General.”

“See you at the briefing. By the way, Scott, getting enough flying time?”

“Plenty ... sir.”

As Stonebraker stepped back into the hall two pilots were reading the
Task Force Times
and laughing. The cartoon depicted the weatherman having hung himself and two pilots on seeing the body commented, “Oh-oh, the weather’s bad again.”

Thirty crews drawn from a cross section of squadrons filed into the briefing room. The weatherman stood before his map.

“The European Continent is under the influence of a deep low off the British Isles causing a prognosis of bad flying weather for the next forty-eight hours.”

A grumble around the room.

“Ceilings will vary from zero to five hundred feet, visibility from zero to one and a half miles.”

“Lovely,” Nick Papas mumbled.

“A tight pressure gradient causing strong winds aloft from the northwest, three hundred fifteen degrees. Winds will be forty to forty-five knots.”

It would be a long day.

Scott Davidson stood before the men and briefed them on new VHF radio installations and beacons in the center corridor, then gave a lecture about being fed up with the numerous little accidents on the ground which were causing great time waste. He spoke of the tricks of taxiing heavy loads, executing turns, and braking carefully to handle the delicate nose wheel of the C-54.

As Hiram Stonebraker heard him speak he felt smug about his hunch on Davidson. Scott had been able to charm commanders’ wives, con and duck responsibility in the past, but was quick to recognize that with Stonebraker his luck had run out, temporarily. Then, keeping the big birds in the corridor and getting tons into Berlin became like wartime all over. The mudhole of a base, the urgency of the Airlift, and the endless challenges were turning him into a fine chief pilot. Scott ended the briefing by repeating his own dislike of cigar smoking in the cabin ... for Nick’s benefit.

Stonebraker and Clint Loveless waited in the staff car near the craft as the rain pelted down on the team of a dozen Polish displaced persons and the American sergeant in charge of the loading. They became drenched beneath their ponchos as they filled the ship with sacks of coal, barrels of asphalt, and married the load to distribute it evenly with a number of lightly packaged cartons marked
DANISH CHEESE
.

Stan Kitchek and Flight Engineer Nick Papas walked around in ankle-deep water in the pre-takeoff inspection while Scott signed his clearance forms at Operations and picked up a flight kit.

The steps were rolled up and they all boarded. Clint sat in a jump seat installed in the rear of the flight deck. The general stood behind the copilot. Up and down the hardstands trucks drove off, stairs rolled away, wheel chocks were pulled, engines coughed to life, and the line of birds started taxiing carefully on the wet taxiways.

As bloc time approached Scott watched as the tower released the first plane. As its engines revved to takeoff power, sheets of water gushed off the wings. It sloshed down the runway leaving a high spray and went nearly to the end before becoming airborne. It disappeared immediately into the weather.

Stan intoned the check list.

“Nose wheel.”

“Centered.”

“Parking brake.”

“Set.”

At a three-minute interval the second bird disappeared into the gray overcast.

“RPM.”

“Eight hundred.”

“Fuel pressure.”

“Seventeen.”

“Oil pressure.”

“Seventy.”

Nick told Clint Loveless to buckle in because it was going to be rough. Clint hated it. Nick plugged into a jack and gave the general a pair of ear phones.

“Main tanks.”

“On.”

“Booster pumps.”

“High.”

“Cowl flaps.”

“Trail.”

“Generators.”

“On.”

Nick pushed against the windows to make certain they were locked. They were, but they were leaking.

By the time Scott was nearing the end of the runway he could see that rain had slowed the interval of takeoff.

Stan called the tower.

“This is Big Easy Fifteen calling Rhein/Main Tower for taxi and takeoff instructions.”

“Big Easy Fifteen, this is Rhein/Main Tower. Bloc time is changed to zero seven three seven. Take off on runway two six. New altimeter setting is three zero, zero, zero. The time is zero seven three six, zulu.”

“Roger.”

“Big Easy Fifteen, clear to line up and hold.”

Scott coaxed the bird into position at the end of the runway.

“Big Easy Fifteen, this is Rhein/Main Tower. You are cleared for takeoff.”

As he pushed the throttle forward the multithousand-horsepower in the Pratt Whitney engines leaped to life. He felt the strain of the great engines plowing through the water and he knew he would need most of the runway.

Stan Kitchek called out the speed. At eighty Scott eased the yoke back, tilting the nose wheel off the ground.

“Ninety, ninety-five.”

Scott pulled the yoke and the bird lifted cleanly into the sky and was in an instant submerged in the weather and flying on instruments. He flew to nine hundred feet, banked south toward the Darmstadt Beacon, which his copilot had tuned in, crossed it, began his climb.

The ship bucked violently. Clint Loveless broke into a sweat. Stan asked for and received clearance to go up to six thousand feet. Scott fought the yoke as the turbulence threw the bird around, trying to gain altitude for the forty-five-mile run to the Fulda Range.

Over the Fulda Range on the edge of the Southern corridor the planes in the bloc checked their time with each other and adjusted their speed to set up the precision chain into Berlin.

He turned to a heading of 057 degrees and subtracted 10 degrees to crab into the wind, which was hitting from the northwest at forty knots and pushing him to the right of course.

Clinton Loveless wanted to die. He tried to think of other things to take his mind off his misery ... about getting back to Wiesbaden and making love to Judy. Even that didn’t help.

Nick Papas sipped coffee from a thermos, offered some to the general. He thought that two flights to Berlin today would be rougher than hell. There was a big card game on tonight in Frankfurt ... with luck he would make it.

Scott and Stan were too busy keeping the bird on course to think about anything.

Hiram Stonebraker felt it was a perfect day to try out the new ground-controlled approach system up at Tempelhof. After they landed, he planned to watch the GCA system land the next bloc from Wiesbaden, and then spend the day in Berlin with Clint on a number of problems.

Hiram Stonebraker had few flyers’ superstitions. One of them was that on each of his twenty flights to Berlin, he flew with Scott Davidson.

They reached the midway point in the 211-mile run in the corridor. While radio contact would be at a minimum, the general tapped Stan on the shoulder, took the copilot seat, and switched on the intercom.

“Good day to try out the GCA.”

“Yes, sir ... a lulu.” Scott nodded over his own shoulder. “Looks like Colonel Loveless’d rather be somewhere else.”

Clint’s chalky lips seemed to mumble prayer between the pitches and rolls.

“He’s a good engineer. He should know how safe these birds are.” Stonebraker produced a long cigar. “Mind if I smoke, Captain?”

Scott hated cigar smoke in the cabin. Nick, who always chewed an unlit cigar, shoved a light to the general’s, then lit his own cigar with a sigh of comfort. Scott grimaced.

The general saw the sweat glisten from Scott’s forehead from battling the yoke. He could almost feel the ache in the flyer’s hands and shoulders. The boy was doing a beautiful job of flying.

“How about that GCA landing, Scott. Can you handle it?” the general prodded.

“You can bet on it, General.”

Scott crabbed into the wind again. “In weather like this, General, I’d like to see us carry a heavier load of gas.”

Stonebraker pondered. The C-54’s held large wing tanks. Clint and the production people had worked it so that in the short hauls of the Lift they would carry only 20 per cent capacity. This would make weight for greater cargo loads. At six pounds a gallon, this meant many hundreds more pounds of cargo.

“What’s your reckoning, Scott?”

“In this kind of turbulence, the fuel splashes around violently. It’s causing the tanks to split.”

Gas leaks were a nemesis and they were having trouble sealing the tanks. He made a note to look into Scott’s suggestion.

Scott flicked on Tempelhof. “This is Big Easy Fifteen calling Tempelhof. I want a center-line check, over.”

“This is Tempelhof calling Big Easy Fifteen. You are one half mile right of center line.”

Pretty slick, Stonebraker thought, pretty slick flying.

In Berlin the radarscopes, which could look through clouds and obstructions, were being blanked out by the rain pattern and were losing airplanes.

Inside the radar shack, the NCO made a frantic call for the officer in charge.