Eagles at War (36 page)

After a long, three-thousand-foot takeoff, the flight itself turned out to be totally uneventful. The Mamba was a delightful toy of an airplane, Bandfield felt, just a powered glider really, easy to fly and so quiet that there was a vibrating mechanism built into the instrument panel to keep the gauges from sticking.

In level flight at thirty thousand feet, he applied full power. Acceleration was glacial—four minutes crept as the speed built to a maximum. Spinning the celluloid dials of the E-6B computer with one hand, adjusting the airspeed indicator reading for temperature and pressure, he was surprised to see a true airspeed reading of 510 miles per hour.

510! Pretty good, for such a big airplane.

At thirty thousand feet there was no visual reference to gauge the speed, but it seemed high—the airplane was just too big and drag-ridden for such performance. He rechecked the instruments and the E-6B—same result. It was puzzling. Maybe without a propeller to disrupt the airflow, a jet was simply more efficient.

As he descended to land he realized that the Mamba was a real confidence-builder, something a young pilot right out of flying school could fly. If the performance figures were correct, then McNaughton had really come through—and Caldwell had been proven right again.

McNaughton, face bacon-brown, age-silvered hair flying in the desert breeze, was waiting for him with Lee at the runway's edge, bouncing up and down in the ankle-deep sand. As soon as the jet rolled to a stop he leapt up on the wing and helped open the canopy.

"Well, what do you say, Bandy? Isn't it a winner?"

Bandfield busied himself shutting off a few more switches, still puzzled by the figures.

"Well, Troy, I'll have to admit I'm surprised at the performance. Are you sure these instruments are calibrated correctly?"

Bandfield thought to himself, He's quite the company man now. Then said, "No, a little less than that at thirty thousand feet. I'd like to take it back up with a chase plane, and calibrate the airspeed indicator, then run some more checks."

"Good idea. We've got to pull the engines, though, and check the turbine blades and the combustion chambers. You could do it tomorrow."

"No, I'm due over at Lockheed. But, Jim, will you do it for me? Get a chase plane—a Mustang if you can—and get the airspeed indicators calibrated at ten, twenty, and thirty thousand feet. The Mustang can probably keep up with it at low altitudes, and you can throttle the Mamba back at thirty. But then do a full-out, highspeed run, and let me know what it does."

"No problem, Bandy. Glad to do it. I love to fly that sucker."

As usual, McNaughton couldn't contain his salesman's instincts.

"You tell old Henry Caldwell that you need about a thousand of these dudes—and maybe five hundred more, two-seaters, to use as trainers. That'll keep us busy until we get our new jet in production."

Bandfield was surprised. "You've got
another
one coming down the line?"

"Oh, yeah, didn't Henry tell you about it? It's really something else—it'll blow the Lockheed jet right out of the water."

McNaughton's sneering greed sent a tide of unreasoning anger over Bandfield. Lockheed had been a tremendous performer all during the war, and McNaughton shouldn't knock them. "The Lockheed isn't exactly our problem, Troy; it's the goddamn Messerschmitt jets that worry me. We're going to start running into them over Germany pretty soon, and unless you concentrate your efforts on the Mamba, we won't have a damn thing to oppose them with. You've fiddle-fucked with this heap so long that we might just lose the war."

The older man responded to Bandfield's open anger. "You think the Germans are going to be able to do something that we can't? I tell you,
Lieutenant Colonel
Bandfield"—he spat the rank out contemptuously—"you'll see McNaughton jets in German skies before you'll
ever
see Messerschmitt jets."

Bandfield had climbed out of the cockpit and shed his parachute. He was standing with his hands pressed into his back, trying to restore the circulation his seat-pack parachute had cut off, unable to curb his suspicions.

"Troy, you're not talking to some cub reporter from Nashville. You've screwed up the jet program royally for two years, and if the Germans get their jets in the air this fall, the bomber boys are going to pay for it. You'll be lucky to have the Mamba operational by next spring, and you know it."

McNaughton bridled, his suntanned face flushing red, his voice dripping with self-assured sarcasm. Lee backed away, uncomfortable.

"Well, now, you're entitled to your junior-birdman opinion, Colonel, but I'm going to have a word with General Caldwell about your attitude. We taxpayers pay your salary, and don't you forget it."

It was like watching an ancient motion picture of himself. Instinctively, involuntarily, his right hand had moved from behind him in an arc, heading toward McNaughton's chin.

Lee lowered his voice, shaking Bandfield's arm violently. "I'll tell you what I'm doing, you dumb bastard, I'm trying to save Caldwell's ass. He's in so deep with McNaughton that the only way to get him out is to get some decent airplanes from them."

"What do you mean, 'in so deep'?"

"What the hell do you think? Do you think the contracts on the Sidewinder or on the jet could stand scrutiny? Elsie's leading him around by his dick, and he's dumped forty million dollars into McNaughton's coffers."

Bandfield felt sick.

"You're supposed to be his friend—making this jet successful is the only way out for him, I swear."

He managed to get a line through to Patty that night, telling her all about it from the refuge of the booth in the dingy crowded lobby of the Hotel Burbank.

"He'll probably get me court-martialed for trying to take a swing at him, but it was worth it. I'm just sorry I didn't hit him."

"Thank God you didn't. And I've got something to tell you that will ruin the rest of your day."

"You can't ruin this one; I've done a good job myself."

"Well, just so you aren't caught short, I just heard from Hadley that Jim Lee's been promoted to bird colonel. Can you imagine that?"

Bandfield reproached himself for his human failings—the inability to control his suspicions, his anger, or his jealousy—for hours before dropping off into a fitful doze. But the next morning his mood improved radically as Kelly Johnson briefed him on Lockheed's amazing progress on the jet—they were calling it the XP-80. They had started work on June 23; the first airframe was taking shape, and the production lines were already being tooled up. It was nothing less than an industrial miracle. They had knocked off at noon to go to the Lockheed cafeteria when a young engineer named George Kidd caught up with them.

"Colonel Bandfield, there's some guy from some senator's office in our main conference room. He says he has to talk to you."

Kidd hustled him down the beige hallway, the walls covered with pictures of famous Lockheed aircraft, to the plush carpeted conference room. At the end of a long mahogany table, a tall young man, long black hair brushed back over a high forehead, with a totally disarming grin, sat buried in stacks of paper and briefcases.

He stood up when Bandfield entered, saying, "I'm Steve Chaudet. I work for the Special Committee Investigating the National Defense Program. Senator Truman has directed me to ask you some questions."

Jesus, Bandfield thought, here it starts.

*

Great Ashford, England/October 14, 1943

Major General Henry Caldwell responded groggily to the three-thirty wake-up call, slumping back on his cot before switching on a light. He stared for a moment at the unfamiliar uniform, then realized that for this one mission he was Major George White, an observer from the Fifteenth Air Force.

Muscles kinked and mouth dry, feeling every one of his forty-six years, he persuaded himself once again that he
had
to be there, had to find out for himself what was going wrong. Air Corps doctrine had been built on precision daylight bombing, and he had geared the entire B-29 program to it. Long ago, the British had told Arnold—and Spaatz and Eaker, too, and anyone else, whether they asked or not—that daylight precision bombing was impossible. Implicitly the message was: "If we couldn't do it, surely you can't." The British felt that they had learned early in the war that daylight raids didn't work, that the bloody losses of the Wellingtons and Hampdens proved that the German fighters and flak were too good. And the truth was that the USAAF was not getting enough bombs on the target. Caldwell hoped to find out why, today, over Schweinfurt.

Coughing, he swung his feet out of the bed and lit a Camel. In similar Quonset huts all over England, twenty-three hundred other Americans were getting ready to fight their way across Europe to the Bavarian city of Schweinfurt. Eleven centuries old, a sheep and cattle town until the industrial age, Schweinfurt was a vital manufacturing center for most of Germany's ball bearings.

The pace of the day picked up—a quick breakfast, a briefing, and then the silent ride in the Jeep to the hardstand. He was flying with Captain Chet Schmidt on
Bonnie,
crewed by young men with the strangely old look of twenty-nine-mission veterans. He had met them two days before and, despite his
nom de guerre,
most knew who he was, treating him with the easy familiarity they knew went down well with visiting brass. The one exception was the brand-new copilot. Major Malcolm McLean was a hotshot feeling his oats, just back from a tour in the Pacific, and replacing Schmidt's regular copilot, who had picked up a flak wound on the last mission.

McLean had spent the previous two days pissing off Schmidt's crew by telling them what an easy war they had in Europe, and how tough the flak and the fighters were over Rabaul. He was at first openly contemptuous of Caldwell's presence, mumbling something about "old guys trying to pick up medals." Caldwell didn't mind that; what he hated was the brown-nosing that started when McLean learned that the "old guy" was actually a general officer.

Feeling better as the day went on, Caldwell was glad to stand by unobtrusively, to help with the loading of gear, to take his place in the special fold-down seat that had been rigged for him aft of the pilots. It was one of those days when nothing else mattered. His whole life had been in preparation for this, husbanding the Air Corps resources, keeping the manufacturers alive, selecting the best airplanes, all for this moment. He wouldn't have missed it for anything.

A routine takeoff lifted them into a cloud layer briefed to be two thousand feet thick. Instead they staggered through six thousand terrifying feet of gray swirling mist filled with hundreds of other bombers and fighters boring upward like blinded swarms of gnats, from airfields all over east England. There was no attempt at ground control, other than spacing the takeoffs at individual airfields. Survival depended only upon luck and the vastness of the sky. Caldwell whistled with relief when they burst out on top of the clouds, the sun glinting off the hundreds of camouflaged B-17s as they wound round and round to get into formation, alerting the German radar even before they left the English coast.

The long lines of aircraft queuing up made for impressive pageantry, reminding him of the coronation films of King George VI. Individual aircraft circled gradually into squadron formation, then squadrons would join into the combat box, aircraft staggered in altitude and azimuth, positioned so that their 540 heavy machine guns had the greatest fields of fire. Then, streaming contrails, the boxes aligned themselves into a majestic ten-mile-long armada. Instead of pennants or flags, there were the proud tail markings of sixteen bomb groups, from the red checkerboard of the 385th, the slash of red and black triangle A of the 91st, to the ominously fitting black rudder of the "Bloody 100th." The planes, of course, had names—
Dry Martini, Cabin in the Sky, Eight Ball, Great McGinty, Gremlin Gus.

Republic P-47 fighters—affectionately called "Jugs" because of their bulbous shape—milled around above them. The bomber crews had joked at briefing about having fighter escorts all the way—P-47s to Aachen, then Messerschmitts and Focke-Wulfs to the target and back to Aachen. The briefing officer had concluded with, "This is a tough job, but I know you can do it. Good luck, good hunting, and good bombing." A gunner had immediately added, "And goodbye," and the room had broken up in nervous laughter.

Caldwell was glad no one knew how keenly he felt responsible for the absence of a long-range fighter. His conscience told him that if he had put out the same effort on the P-51 that he had on the Sidewinder, there would have been escort fighters in quantity. Now it would be next year before they arrived—and by then the German jets might be dominant. He
had
to do something before that happened.

If he got the chance. The damn Truman Committee was on his tail, not about the jet fighters—yet—but about the unsatisfactory Sidewinders. Bandfield had been allowed to tell him about his interrogation at the Lockheed plant. The committee had received rumors that the Russians were now going to complain formally about the Sidewinder's performance, which made Caldwell wonder what would happen to Scriabin. Members of the committee had gone to Nashville to investigate. It hadn't helped that when they arrived, two Sidewinders had just crashed, gone off the end of each of the two runways. What a stroke of fate; both crashes had been pilot error, but it had naturally soured the committee and set the course for the investigation. Caldwell would be lucky to last another six months before he was court-martialed. Maybe it wouldn't matter—maybe he wouldn't return.