Eagles at War (2 page)

Looking a decade older than his forty-one years, with thinning hair and smoke-yellowed teeth, he was an unlikely match for such a pretty lady. Years of squinting out of open cockpit planes had given his broad, high-cheekboned face the look of old leather. At West Point, he'd earned the cruel, accurate nickname "Hank the Hawk," in part because his hooked nose curved down toward an upturned chin, in part because of the bird-of-prey way he constantly swiveled his long neck, quick brown eyes missing nothing.

But now the Hawk's gaze was riveted on Elsie Raynor, drinking in the silky red hair bobbing around her oval face, seeking out the meaning of every expression of her green-flecked eyes, recalling how delectable he found her creamy skin.

The colonel moved with the vigor of a much younger man, despite a paunch that bourbon and a wretched officers' club steak-and-potato diet had added to his wiry five-foot seven-inch frame. A born organizer, he seldom needed to raise his voice, but when provoked he could bring an awkward squad to a halt from a block away. Sometimes his presence was too powerful—the energy channeled into his table-drumming fingers and tapping toes frightened less driven people. It had this morning.

Thirteen years younger and much more worldly, Elsie Raynor was still trying to ease the tension by playing up to Caldwell. She laughed at his jokes and even made him laugh, too—he hadn't laughed often in recent months. The young woman had a full-figured, well-toned body, and she carried herself with the silky grace of the dancer she had once aspired to be, seeming taller than her five-foot four-inches.

The chorus line would have been easy for her—she had succeeded on her own terms in a far tougher arena, the rough male world of aviation. Despite her father's wishes, she had not become a pilot. Instead she'd worked hard to learn what made aircraft factories tick, in the process discovering how to control the men who ran them. At the morning meeting in Troy McNaughton's suite at the Waldorf, she'd shown clearly that she was a person to be reckoned with. Her official title was "Personal Assistant to the President," but Troy McNaughton had not only depended upon her this morning for facts and figures, he'd looked openly to her for guidance at some of the tough management questions he'd been asked. And she had twice saved the meeting from degenerating into a fistfight.

Caldwell, sure of his position and anxious to impress Elsie, had started the Waldorf meeting with an abrupt announcement that Frank Bandfield was being recalled into the Air Corps, with the rank of major, and that Hadley Roget would join him at Wright Field to head up a new program he was calling "Operation Leapfrog."

Caldwell had reason to be sure of himself with Bandfield. He had arranged a commission for him as a captain in the Air Corps reserve and in 1937 sent him under cover to fly with the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War. Flying fighters supplied by Russia against the German Condor Legion had taught Bandfield much, and he'd become an ace in the process. When the war ground down to the bitter end, he'd escaped by flying from Guernica to France, after one last dogfight that still haunted his dreams. Caldwell knew very well that Bandfield was bored with running his aircraft parts factory and was dying to get back into the Air Corps, and had simply presented him with official orders.

It was different with Roget. He was a civilian, and Caldwell had no hold on him—except the job offer of his dreams. Roget was an intuitive engineer—an "imagineer" he called himself—and Caldwell was giving him a chance to run a program intended to force the development of a line of radical new aircraft. It all seemed cut and dry to Caldwell, and he'd moved immediately to discussing McNaughton's new fighter, the Sidewinder, without giving either Roget or Bandfield a chance to comment.

Roget had blown up.

"Goddamnit, Henry, you can't treat me like this, especially not in front of Johnny-come-latelies like Troy McNaughton and his girlfriend."

McNaughton, six feet tall and crackling energy from every pore, was Arrow-collar handsome except for a big nose broken in college boxing. His voice had a soft, cajoling quality, and he normally had the professional grin and easygoing manner of a first-rate salesman. But Roget's gibe—not his first—made McNaughton's neck veins bulge, and he moved around the table to confront Hadley. Elsie had stepped smoothly between them, straightening the narrow knot of McNaughton's paisley tie with one hand and thrusting a cup of coffee on Roget with the other.

Later there had been another outburst, over the Sidewinder's design. McNaughton had brought plans and illustrations. It was a beautiful little airplane, its shape obviously derived from his 1936 racer. Small, with a sharply pointed nose and tapered wings, the plane's innovations alone were enough to justify a contract from Caldwell. Unlike any other pursuit in the Air Corps, it had a novel tri-cycle gear. The liquid-cooled Allison engine was equally innovative, mounted in the fuselage
aft
of the cockpit and driving a three-bladed propeller via a shaft running under the pilot's seat. A big 37-mm cannon fired through the propeller hub, the heaviest armament for any fighter in the world. McNaughton waved four-color drawings that looked like pulp magazine covers, each showing the waspish little fighter shooting down formations of "enemy" bombers.

McNaughton glowed with pride. "It's going to be a world beater! It's plenty fast—four hundred miles per hour, and it's got long legs—it'll fly Nashville to Washington, nonstop."

Roget snorted and planted his gnarled finger on the plans where the fuselage connected to the wings, growling, "Four hundred miles an hour my ass! Goddamnit, Troy, you've made a hell of a mistake with this crate. Everything you gain in drag reduction by putting the engine midship, you lose at the wing-fuselage intersection. You've built a goddamn barn door in there, and you can't even see it. If you get three hundred out of this dog, I'll be surprised."

McNaughton responded savagely. "Look who's talking. You never did design an airplane anyone would buy, and you're telling me how to build them? We've got ten thousand wind-tunnel hours on this airplane, hard data, and I don't have to stand here and listen to your off-the-cuff bullshit."

Bandfield pulled Roget back as Caldwell dressed them down in his drill sergeant's voice. Even Elsie sat back, respectful and expectant.

"Shut up! There's a war brewing, and I'm going to need all of you. We're three years behind the Germans now, and I'm scared to think what a first-class outfit like Messerschmitt has in their shops. They're experimenting with everything over there, crazy planes and engines I can't talk even to you about."

Everyone was silent, cowed by the power of his conviction as he went on.

"I've been given responsibility for the procurement of aircraft for the new production programs. I've practically got carte blanche, as long as I take care of the Congressional sacred cows. Arnold, Spaatz, and Eaker are all tied up with developing the combat organizations—they're giving me a free hand in procurement. Bandy, you're one of the few people around who has both combat and manufacturing experience. I want you to be my right-hand man, to act as liaison with the field. You'll test-fly the airplanes, find the fixes, smooth out the red tape. Hadley, if we're going to try to catch up to Germany we've got to try some new ideas, stuff that's only been on the cover of
Popular Science
—flying wings, buried engines, rockets, tail-firsters, all sorts of crazy stuff. You are the
only
man for the job. And Troy, I need a company that will take chances and build unconventional aircraft. I need all of you, and I need you to get along. So stop your goddamn bickering and get serious!"

The rest of the meeting passed in an embarrassed haze as Caldwell ticked off the assignments for each of them for the next few months. At one point he pounded the table and said, "One thing for sure! We're going to fly every airplane we've got, and operationally, too. We're not going to sit back at Wright Field seeing the war through some goddamn file of reports."

"Hap Arnold will never let you fly operationally, Henry. You're too valuable to him."

"Wrong. We've already discussed it and he agrees. He's a smart guy, even if he is irascible as hell. He saw what happened after the last war, when guys who couldn't even fly walked all over Billy Mitchell."

At the meeting, in a severe black suit and white blouse, Elsie had been the hard-eyed executive, tracking the discussion carefully, quietly making points, keeping Troy out of trouble. After the meeting, Elsie had changed her clothes and her persona. Now, she was the genial hostess, making sure everyone had plenty to eat and drink, occasionally joking in a fake Southern accent. But all the while, she kept Caldwell in focus, seizing on his comments like a duck snapping at cracked corn, then passing them back moments later with a humorous twist.

Caldwell eased back in his seat for a moment, just to enjoy her freshness. God, he thought, what a perfect woman! Brains and beauty! And so wonderfully alive. The word "alive" brought Shirley to mind. A fleeting sense of guilt passed quickly as, involuntarily, he reached out to brush back a lock of hair that had strayed across Elsie's forehead. Desire crackled through him and he glanced around with embarrassment, aware that the pretense of their being "just friends" had long since been compromised. He called, too loudly, to his old pal.

"This your first World Series, Hadley?"

Baseball didn't mean much to Roget: it didn't have an engine or wings. He stood up slowly, stretching, his tall, rawboned frame creased with muscles tempered by long years of hard work. A Lincolnesque face crowned by a mane of silver hair ironically gave him, devoutly unreligious as he was, the appearance of an Old Testament prophet. His hair was his only vanity—he combed it constantly and would let no one but his wife, Clarice, cut it for him.

"Naw, I saw one once. It was in 'eighteen. The Cubs were beat then, too, by the Baahston Red Sox. Bandy's old man and me only went to see Babe Ruth pitch; he won two games that series. We didn't even know he was a big hitter back then."

Roget had worked for Caldwell at Wright Field long ago and later designed airplanes for sale to the Army, staying good friends even though Caldwell didn't buy many Roget airplanes. Caldwell hoarded' the Army's money as if it were his own, spreading it out among as many competing manufacturers as possible. He was totally dedicated to business and to taking care of his poor wife, who after an agonizing illness had died last year.

Roget watched cynically as Caldwell's eyes wandered back to Elsie. Roget felt sympathy for her. He'd known her father—spare, sour Jack Raynor. Jack had scraped out a meager living for his wife and two children by barnstorming Jennies around the country. He had taught his son to fly, but the boy died at sixteen, a victim of typhoid fever picked up in a farmyard well. Jack then tried to make a pilot out of Elsie. She was too young and too scared, so he gave up, using the little influence he had to get her a job at the old Hafner Aircraft Company. Since then she had grown from a novice secretary, almost too frightened to answer the telephone, into the confident young businesswoman she was today. As she had learned the business, she had become "close" to Bruno Hafner—Roget assumed that she was probably just as "close" to Troy McNaughton. He wondered if McNaughton was jealous of Caldwell, or vice versa. It was an interesting, multifaceted situation, revolving around a unique woman. There certainly weren't many around like her; flyers were notoriously tough on females. But, he thought, Caldwell won't stand much of a chance with her—who would?

He wiped the rim of the silver flask Caldwell handed him and took a throat-filling swig before offering it to Frank Bandfield. Bandy sat next to him, the stubble of beard on his chin smeared yellow with mustard as he wolfed his third hot dog of the game.

Roget was virtually a foster father to Bandfield, their relationship forged in the fire of years of collaboration in building aircraft that were always just a bit ahead of their time. They'd worked and played hard, arguing and raising hell with each other in the way that only old friends could achieve.

Munching the now stone-cold hot dog, Bandfield was thinking about the lovebirds sitting in front of him. A hot-blooded man himself, he readily understood Caldwell's feelings. Elsie exuded a cheerful sexuality. On another woman the plaid dress she wore might have been conservative, but on her it was provocative. Ever the movie fan, he saw her as a mix of Ann Sothern and Rosalind Russell, softly seductive but diamond bright. She was vibrant—and Caldwell was lonely.

Yet he wondered how much Caldwell knew about Elsie—or how much he cared to know. The man had worked too hard all his life, and Shirley had become ill just when they should have begun to enjoy themselves. It was time that Caldwell had a little fun—even at the risk of being involved with a contractor's employee.

The Yanks got down to business, with Lou Gehrig and Joe DiMaggio scoring to make it 6 to 3. With two outs, the Cubs sent Dizzy Dean in to pitch, past his Cardinal prime but still a crowd-pleaser. When Dean finally retired the side, the score was 8 to 3, and the Yankees were assured of their third straight World Series win. Roget stood up.

"Excuse me, folks, this here beer has persuaded me to go see a man about a dog."

Bandfield joined him. Roget didn't speak until they were standing in line within the dark, odorous confines of the stadium restroom.

"He's really besotted! I've never seen him behave like this!"

"No, but I'm glad he's having a good time—he's suffered enough."

They moved over to the row of dirty washbasins, where Roget became engrossed in combing his hair. It was a harmless vanity, one of the few things Bandfield didn't dare tease him about. Staring into the mirror, Bandfield dabbed away the mustard on his chin. At six feet, he was two inches shorter than Roget, but sturdier, with broad shoulders and a barrel chest that tapered down to a thirty-inch waist. His square face was creased with lines from long hours of flight—the airman's squint—but his curly black hair showed no signs of graying. His tanned skin was roughly textured from chicken pox in his childhood, but his brown eyes sparkled with humor and good health.