Eagles at War (12 page)

"I've got the dope on a new airfoil Dutch should use—we've got to break away from the 1930 airfoils being used on the P-40."

The NACA had developed a whole series of brand new airfoils, thinner at the front than usual, with the thickest section farther aft. They promised to add both speed and range to airplanes using them.

Caldwell, mildly irritated that Roget had grabbed the leadership of the meeting from him, objected immediately.

"I've read those same damn reports, Hadley. Building a laminar flow wing calls for production tolerances beyond the capabilities of most companies. I don't want to buy fifty of these things, I want to buy five hundred, maybe five thousand."

The big numbers stirred Kindleberger, who was anxious to please Caldwell, and annoyed with Roget's trying to tell him which airfoil to use.

"We've got a good airfoil of our own, Hadley. I don't think we need laminar flow."

Roget shook his wild white hair, rolled his eyes to heaven, and raised his voice a few decibels. "You guys aren't listening. If you build this airplane, it's going to
have
to have a laminar flow wing to get the speed and range you want. Don't tell me you can't build it, Dutch. I've been talking to your best guys, Edgar Schmued and Ed Horkey, and I know they want to use it. You can build it, you're the best in the business."

In the end, he'd prevailed. Now the XP-51 was supposed to make its first flight before the end of the month—and everybody would see that he'd been right!

Dayton was suffering one of its dry summers, and the scanty patches of grass the Corps of Engineers had tried to plant were parched brown. A single tree struggled to survive in front of the laboratories of the Materiel Division, an example to the row of shriveled shrubs gasping along the curb. To Roget's left, dust rose from the grading being done for the new hangars and the Armament Lab's gun range. The whole field was in an ordered turmoil as new roads and buildings shot up, a reflection in miniature of America's industry springing into life, shaking off the decay
¹
of the Depression.

Overhead a steady procession of aircraft spaced themselves to come in to land, all taking care to avoid the construction work going on for Wright Field's first paved runway.

Damn, a paved runway, who would have thought it? He remembered, as he always did, that it was at the far end of the same field where Charlotte Hafner had crashed and burned in the Hafner bomber.

Roget walked into Building 12 and took the stairs two at a time up to the conference room by Caldwell's office. There was a steady roar that shook the glasses on the sideboard. He ran to the window and saw the huge Boeing XB-15 turning downwind. It was a good omen, for Caldwell was waiting to talk about its even bigger successor, the Boeing Model 345, the super secret XB-29. Roget wondered if anyone could build an airplane so advanced.

*

Dayton, Ohio/January 15, 1941

It was as wet and cold as only a midwinter storm in Ohio can be. The wind-driven clouds, overladen with moisture gathered over Lake Erie, were beginning to glaze the landscape below with a gravely dangerous mixture of sleet and freezing rain.

Clarice and Hadley were back in Salinas to settle on the sale of some property they held, and the Bandfields were alone in the big red house on Kettering Place, glad to have the place to themselves for a change.

Little George's first birthday party had gone well; the baby didn't know or care what was going on, but four-year
old Charlotte was happy to blow the candles out, monopolize the conversation, and in general be the star of the show. When the last bedtime song had been sung, the last glass of water delivered, and the last prayers said, Bandy went down to the living room. Patty's Christmas present had been a console record-changer from Sears, and he was busy stacking it with new records—"The Last Time I Saw Paris," "All or Nothing at All," "Taking a Chance on Love"—heavy stuff, he figured. With the kids in bed, the Rogets gone, some wine and sweet music, he felt he might have a chance at a little loving. He'd built a fire earlier and now stoked it to battle the moaning winds that sucked heat from the walls and windows.

Patty came in, hair pinned up and bundled into her old pink housecoat, fuzzy slippers slapping as she walked. Bandfield's desire ebbed a little; it was clear Patty didn't have loving on her mind tonight.

She nestled beside him, slipping under his arm as he continued to poke the fire.

"Do you realize this is the first birthday you've ever been home for either child?"

He kissed her absently on the side of the head and said, "Come on, now, this is the way fights start. I know I've been gone a lot, but it's not like I have a regular job. If Caldwell says go, I have to go." There was a welcome spurt of flames from the grate, and he added another lump of "smokeless" coal, gleaming black anthracite, the best you could buy.

"And it's not like he stays at home. He's on the go himself, all the time. He's off to Europe again."

"Sure, but he's a widower and his kids are grown up. How long before you leave again?"

"I'm not sure; he wants me to take an A-20 and drop down through Central and South America, to try to see what the German airlines are up to. Just show the flag, the usual stuff."

He poured wine, and they settled down on the battered couch that Hadley Roget had insisted be brought out from Salinas. It had been his only request—demand, really, for he was serious about it—and they had reluctantly given in. It was a big wooden-framed leather couch, the kind seen in the offices of ancient law firms, and the years hadn't treated it kindly. Clarice had tried to get rid of it more than once, but Hadley had always objected. Now it sat, tattered leather concealed beneath cotton throws, creaking in every joint as Patty snuggled tight and asked, "Did you ever think about what would happen to the children if one of us crashed?"

The question was cogent. Bandy was testing the newest aircraft, fighters and bombers, and Patty was flying around the country in a "civilian" Seversky P-35. Hap Arnold had called her "the best recruiter in the business," and she was always in demand at rallies to sell war bonds.

She pressed him. "What would you do if I were killed?"

"Jeez, Patty, let's not talk about stuff like this. I was hoping to get a little loving."

"You always want a little loving. But let's talk for a minute. If you get killed, I know I'll never marry again." Patty had lost her first husband in a racing accident.

"Well, it's pretty simple to me. If I get killed, you'll have to stop flying. The kids need somebody to take care of them. But if you got killed, I couldn't stop flying, not while there's a war on. So I guess you're the one who'd better stop."

"I wish I didn't think you were so right."

He kissed her, and she pulled away.

"You know the problem with you is that you don't need anyone, not me, not the kids, no one, not as along as you have your airplanes and your job."

"That's wrong. I need you and the kids a lot. It's just that men and women are different. It goes back to caveman times—the man had to be out in front with a club, fighting off dinosaurs, while the woman stayed by the fire with the kids."

"God, your knowledge of psychology is about as good as your knowledge of anthropology. There weren't any dinosaurs by the time the caveman was running around with his club."

"You know what I mean. And how about you? How much do you need me, when you're always off flying to sell war bonds?"

"It's different—I need you all the time; when I'm away, I ache for you. When you're gone, you probably never think about us."

"How'd we get into this? I spend a lot of money for new records, dig out the last bottle of claret from my trip to England, and you want to fight about who needs you. I'll tell you what I need, and that's a little of you."

He was tender with her at first, but the wine, the Rogers' absence, the kids all being tucked up in bed fast asleep, and the stark beauty of her body, recovered so swiftly from George's difficult birth, excited him.

She responded enthusiastically and they drove together, moving more and more violently, gasping for breath, whispering hot endearments into each other's ears. He asked, "Are you ready?" and as she screamed yes, Roget's old couch gave up the ghost to their flailing, disintegrating in a crash of splitting leather and flying splinters.

***

Chapter 4

Stockholm, Sweden/April 28, 1941

Palms sweating with nervousness, Countess Illeria Gortchakov forced herself to breathe deeply. She feigned interest in the small white-painted steamers bobbing at the quay below, staining the harbor sky with the ugly soot-laden black clouds of smoke. The passengers, mostly countryfolk from the north, scurried busily about with their rough bundles of luggage.

Breathing deeply made her feel better, as if Swedish air was cleaner than Germany's. She had just left the German legation, located only a few hundred yards from the hotel, between the National Museum and the Royal Automobile Club. The legation had a more relaxed attitude than she was accustomed to in Berlin, and she had been pleased to find some old family friends working there.

She was in Stockholm for a secret meeting with Henry Caldwell. To make her clandestine work easier, she had long ago acquiesced to a highly placed "special friend." It had not been difficult to persuade him to send her on a bogus mission to "check on propaganda material"—he thought she simply wanted a vacation and was happy to indulge her.

In the bitter four days after
Kristallnacht
in 1938, she had grown close to Henry Caldwell, who stayed at her side, using his position to try to wrest an answer from the obdurate German bureaucracy about the identity of the SA storm troopers who had harassed them. In the process the scale of the pogrom became obvious and she had steeled herself to fight the regime. Caldwell had sensed her feelings and bluntly asked her to spy for him. When she accepted, she volunteered that she was half-Jewish.

Caldwell had taken both of her hands in his and looked straight into her eyes. "Lyra, I want you to understand that espionage carries the penalty of death by beheading in Germany. And they would accuse Helmut as well."

"I realize that."

She still loved Helmut, responding physically to him as before, but it was increasingly difficult to accept his premise that he could be both a good human being and a good Nazi officer. His vision of technology saving Germany, at the same time somehow purging it of the Nazi regime, was overcast by his inveterate patriotism. Now all he really wanted was for technology to win the war.

In the three years since
Kristallnacht
she had communicated with Caldwell on five occasions. Each time he had initiated the contact, via a coded message in an advertisement in the
Berliner Tageblatt.
It was a primitive system, but it worked. And each time he had made a trifling request for innocuous information that he must have already had, or could readily have determined from open sources. She gradually realized that it was a testing and an incriminating process; he was seeing if she were sincere and, at the same time, gaining control over her. She'd already done more than enough to be accused of treason. The Gestapo was not fussy about whom it charged, nor about the validity of the charges.

Three floors above the veranda, Henry Caldwell had left his room door ajar, then gone back to adjust the motion picture projector he had borrowed from the American legation. He had arrived two days before from an abortive mission to Finland. The Finns had been very courteous, but their burning desire for revenge was obvious even as they refused his offer to supply McNaughton Sidewinder fighters. It was obvious to Caldwell that they were planning another war with Russia—and that could only happen if Germany invaded the USSR.

In Helsinki, he'd listened to more of the wild rumors on the progress of the German jet engine program. McNaughton was developing a jet engine and aircraft of its own design but had run into enormous problems keeping the turbine blades from melting from the fierce internal heat. Caldwell had to find out if the Germans were having problems, too.

He turned as Lyra slipped into the room, pausing only to check up and down the hallway before closing the door. They chatted briefly, and Caldwell got down to business.

"First, Lyra, I'm going to show you some raw British newsreel films of the Blitz. These have never been released to the public—just too horrifying. But I want to show you what Germany is doing to England, what it has done everywhere so far. And I want to show you what
will
happen to Germany, unless this war is stopped."

He started the film. "There isn't any soundtrack. This is London, during the raids on September eighteenth and twenty-second. The buildings you see are mostly workers' housing projects."