Armageddon (5 page)

University Rectors and Curators.

Labor Trustees. 40 blacklisted.

GROUP SIX: OCCUPIED COUNTRIES

Provisional Presidents. Reich Governors. 30 blacklisted.

Commissioner for Treatment of Enemy Property. Records are prime CIC target.

Head of Reichsstelle für Raumordnung (Dept. for foreign-area planning).

Chief of Military and Civil administration, occupied countries. 3,000 blacklisted for arrest.

GROUP SEVEN: MISC. CATEGORIES LISTED IN BOOK THREE

Police Presidents. 100 blacklisted.

Other key members police machinery. 320 blacklisted.

All members of the Nazi Party not accounted for otherwise holding rank of Beriechsleiter (group leader). 30,000 blacklisted for arrest.

Nazi Dozentenbund Officials (university lecturers).

Nazi Studentenbund (students bund). Nazi Kraftfahrer Corps Officials (motor pools).

Businessmen and others who have accepted Nazi honors

as Blut Orden (Blood Order)

or Ehrendolch (Honor Dagger)

or Ehrensold (Honor Pay).

Lists are very incomplete.

“Sean buddy, wake up!”

Sean’s head lay in the index book on his desk. Dante tugged at him. Sean’s head was full of annoying half dreams and pounding with overweariness. He lifted it, blew a breath. Dante Arosa came into focus. He smelled of whiskey and cigar smoke—and perfume from the show girl. “What the hell time is it?”

“Five
A.M.
You weren’t in the room so I figured you must have corked off.”

“Yeah ...must have dozed ...”

Dante helped him close the volumes, lock them in the safe.

“You’ve got the hard job,” Sean said. “All I have to do is give my opinion and watch it shoved down the drain. You’ve got to sit here and identify the pictures of these bastards. I was just about to explain why the Wehrmacht ... ”

“Get to bed You’re walking crooked.”

“Sometimes I sit here in the middle of all this puke and wonder what in the hell we’ve run into. Just one big goddamned daisy chain with eighty million players.”

Chapter Five

O
NE OF THE THINGS
Sean found so exciting about Nan Milford was her unalterable calm. He wondered if fire or flood could unnerve her. But now Nan showed visible signs of discomfort. “From the instant we met we have been working toward this moment,” she said.

“We didn’t invent adultery. It doesn’t bother some people. It bothers the hell out of us.”

“God, I’ve had a splitting headache all day.” She poured herself a cognac, felt it burn through her enough to soothe her leaping nerve ends.

Sean looked across the room at the omnipresent photograph of Major G. Donald Milford. “He’s a nice guy, isn’t he?”

“Donnie? Donnie is a lovely man. I shall tell you what kind of a man Donnie is. He would not only forgive me but he would understand.”

“It would be a lot easier if you were married to a rat. I’m a nice guy, too, Nan. You’ve gotten to me too deeply. We’re going to make a mess if we keep going.”

Nan forced herself to remain calm. Sean wouldn’t like a hysterical woman. What to say? How about me? I didn’t bargain for this, either. Donnie was comfortable. We were the same kind ... dull and comfortable. Can I say ... Sean, you make an animal out of me! I crave the things you do to me and make me do. They will never happen again to me ...

She spoke slowly and deliberately. “Donnie was gone for a year before he was taken prisoner in 1941. He was gone almost four years before I met you. That justifies nothing, of course. I would have gladly traded places with Donnie. Behind barbed wire he has no choice or conscience to fight. I think it is more difficult to be free and know you must voluntarily withdraw from the human race.”

It was hard to realize that Nan Milford didn’t have control of herself at every moment. Sean should have known. He should have known by the way she exploded, first in the darkness, and then here, in the dimmed lights of the living room.

“The children and I lived in the cellar every night for almost a year during the heavy bombing. I was finally forced to send them off to their grandmother. During the day I was that wonderful brave Mrs. Milford. A glorious example of stout British stuff. But when the bombs came at night I was alone ... alone in the gray world where you are not a person but a vegetable. It becomes so when you live in that gray world; for the want of feeling another human being you are jealous of every soldier and his girl in the street, even of the damned mating birds. Sean, you didn’t have a chance from the instant I met you.”

“Nor did I bargain for how I’d feel.”

“Nor did I. Should I be disgusted with myself because I’m not steeped in remorse or guilt? You know how you make me behave ... in there. I’ve never been that way before.”

Sean arose slowly and walked about the richly handsome room. Nan was neither nervous nor arrogant. She was just plain tired. “Sean, I am afraid of being alone again. You, me, Donnie ... I don’t know. I do know if you leave me I’ll have to have another man and God help me because I wouldn’t even care for him.”

“I guess we’re not supposed to be saints,” Sean said. “I’ve got to get going now. My brother Tim is down in London for the weekend.”

“Very well.”

Sean put on his topcoat slowly and walked to the door.

“Sean.”

“Yes?”

She was acid and angry. “You need not come back tonight. I shall be leaving in the morning to spend several days with the children.”

“Okay.”

“Will you be calling when I return?”

“Not if I can find the strength,” he said and he left.

The hall porter ushered him out into a billow of cold fog. He flicked his flashlight toward the pavement to find a path through the abysmal darkness. In a second the fog had swallowed him up.

“Sean!” a frantic voice pierced the black. “Sean ...”

He listened to directionless footsteps, leaned against a building trying to hide himself ... trying not to answer. “Sean!” her voice cried. “Sean!”

“I’m over here.”

Nan fell against him gasping for breath, wet and shivering and broken.

“You damned fool running outside without a coat ... you damned little fool.”

Nan trembled and cried. “Sean ... I know there must be a good-by ... but not now. I love you, Sean. I’ll pay any price for having you. I swear I shan’t care what shame or pain or risk will come from it. When you must go ... we will both find the courage, somehow.”

His coat was around her and he kissed her wet cheeks and pressed her into the strength of his arms. “I love you, Nan ...”

Chapter Six

S
EAN CAME IN OUT
of the fog at Henry Pringle’s Blue Hawk Inn. The Blue Hawk, named after Pringle’s World War I fighter squadron was the fighter pilots’ hangout. Henry Pringle himself was a mechanic and had yet to make his first flight. The pub was a shrine to the heroes he never ceased to worship.

The big room was cluttered with photographs of over two hundred British, American, Canadian, French, Polish, New Zealand, and Aussie aces and as many model airplanes hung from the black beams and rafters. The walls were studded with denuded bomb casings, squadron insignia, leather helmets, framed records of kills, machine guns and pistols, bits of wings and wheels. It was a whiskey and ale aviation museum.

Nelson Goodfellow Bradbury, an American correspondent gave Pringle’s Blue Hawk renewed prominence after a hibernation between wars. Bradbury reported the war from London long before Pearl Harbor. When the American volunteer Eagle Squadron flew with the RAF they discovered Pringle’s place. Bradbury wrote about it, and was held in reverence by the English only slightly less than the King. He built his shrine to the fighter pilots with words. One column each week was certain to be written from “Big Nellie’s” personal booth. The Blue Hawk was constantly mentioned in his deep-voiced broadcasts to America.

Despite Big Nellie’s bloated wartime salary he was almost always in hock. From the time the Eagle Squadron came to England he kept a special flat as a party place for weary flyers ... and picked up innumerable bar tabs for “his boys” ... floated uncountable loans—some never repaid because the pilots never returned from their missions.

Sean liked the rarefied atmosphere of the Blue Hawk. The flying talk, the unshaven chins, the crushed caps, the comradery; the nervous, bragging tension of men playing with death. It was far removed from the austere gloom of Queen Mother’s Gate.

Besides, Pringle had the best-looking barmaids in London, and fighter pilots were the glamour these days. Blue Hawk weddings were wild affairs—champagne corks went up like flak for three or four days.

There was too much information to be gotten around the place by a stranger. They were not permitted. Sean was no stranger; he sat down at Big Nellie’s booth. Nelson Goodfellow hunched like a grizzly bear over his typewriter, pecking out the end of his column over the din.

“Where’s Tim?”

“Out looking for poon. He said he’d see you here soon as he makes a connection.”

“What happened to the last broad?”

“Married a Canadian sergeant.”

Sean ordered a couple of drinks. “Tim owe you any dough?”

“A fin ... a tenner ... I don’t know.”

Sean paid his brother’s debt. The singers around the upright piano unloaded ...

Oh hallelujah, Oh hallelujah

Throw a nickel on the grass,

Save a fighter pilot’s ass,

Oh hallelujah, Oh hallelujah,

Throw a nickel on the grass,

And you’ll be saved ...

Big Nellie jerked his story from the machine. “You hear the combined voices of the Fourth Group ... Squadron Ten ...”

Big Nellie began to blue pencil through his story.

Got flak holes in my wing tips,

And my gas tanks got no gas,

Mayday, Mayday, Mayday,

Got six Messerschmitts on my ass ...

Oh hallelujah ...

“They’ve got to sing loud,” Nellie’s gruff voice said. “They’re missing three tenors, two baritones, and a bass. Strafing a bridge yesterday, tree-up level. The Krauts were laying up there behind a cloud. It was a turkey shoot. How’s things at Queen Mother’s Gate?”

“Three casualties. One cut from a stray paper clip, another with dirty hands from carbons, and a third got lost in the fog walking from building A to building B and hit a wall.”

Nellie’s laugh matched his grizzly-bear appearance. “How do you get along with General Hansen?”

“Yesterday or today?”

“Let me tell you something about Hansen, Sean. Very few armies in the world have a dozen generals who are too valuable to be wasted on a fighting command. Yes ... I said wasted. He’s a Jeffersonian in uniform. I remember covering the manpower hearings before a joint committee of Congress. That little son of a bitch looked right at one of the senators from South Carolina and said, ‘We can never fight a just or correct war so long as some of our citizens must fight it as mess-hall boys and ditchdiggers. Our skins may be different color but the blood the Negro offers his country is the same color as yours.’ ”

“I’d of pulled out of there a long time ago, Nellie, if I I didn’t feel that. A lot of officers like to brag about their men following them to hell. Hansen’s the only one I’d care to make the trip with.”

“I’m glad you feel that way, Sean. Hansen needs you.”

“That’s what I like about you, Nellie. You’ve always got information. I got here early on purpose so I could talk to you alone. What is Tim up to?”

Big Nellie’s wide puss faltered.

“Come on, Nellie. We’ve got twenty-five counter-intelligence men at Queen Mother’s Gate. Hansen uses them to spy on me. I use them to spy on Tim. There’s been some one-man missions out of his base.”

Nellie’s big paw engulfed the glass of whiskey. “German rocket bases.”

“That’s what I thought.”

“They are well hidden, they’re small, and can send up a snowstorm of flak. We’ve tried several ways to get at them. Right now we’re using Invaders and Marauders. They’re good birds but no hot rods. In elements of threes from medium altitude they’ve got a chance of getting in and out”

“Go on.”

“Our success has been limited. Tim talked his C.O. into letting him try a one-plane, low-level sneak attack. He got back from the mission all right. The plane looked like a sieve. But he demolished the target. So, your brother gets to take in another plane, solo next week.” He belted down the drink, signaled for refills. “When Tim flies low they tell me he likes to count the dandruff in the German scalps.”

Oh, there ain’t no fighter pilots down in hell,

Oh, the place is full of queers ... navigators ... bombardiers ...

Oh, there ain’t no fighter pilots down in hell.

Timothy O’Sullivan entered Pringle’s Blue Hawk with a big-busted redhead on his arm. Tim had a fetish for big-busted redheads.

Nellie and Sean watched him thread his way toward their booth amid the turning of heads, the bulging of eyes.

“Where in the hell does he find them?” Nelson Goodfellow Bradbury inquired with envy. “He’s only been in London for two hours.”

“Hell, look at him,” Sean said. Sean was prejudiced, of course. What woman wouldn’t go for a strapping, handsome, twenty-four-year-old black Irishman with a fast glib tongue and wild ways. Maybe it was all brotherly pride, Sean thought ... but then, Tim’s always had to fight the women off. He and Nellie arose as Tim and the big-busted redhead reached the booth and Tim mumbled a name like Cynthia or Penelope or something like that and she was pleased to meet them, particularly Nelson Goodfellow Bradbury, whom she knew by reputation, of course ... as who didn’t. They were seated, ordered drinks. Tim and Sean traded letters from home. A wordless exchange of glances told them they were worried about their father’s heart condition; he hadn’t come out of it since Liam’s death.