The Romanov succession

by Brian Garfield

  The plane was an Army C-39, the military version of the DC-2 passenger liner; inside the fuselage were sixteen seats in single rows on either side of an aisle in which Alex had to stoop when he made his way forward. Pappy Johnson had a word with the two-man flight crew and when the engines began to chatter Johnson came back to his seat and remarked, “That guy trained half the kids in my squadron. It’s him you want for this job, not me.”

  “Has he ever dropped a bomb on a mocked-up tank?”

  Johnson gave him an interested look. “No…”

  “Then you’re the one I want.”

  3

  The transport landed them at Logan Field at four in the afternoon and Alex came down the stairs ahead of the others and saw the three winged behemoths parked in a row beside a trio of C-47S at the end of the runway. Spaight and Johnson emerged from the passenger door and Pappy Johnson said, “Dear sweet Jesus.”

  John Spaight said, “They look like alligators with wings.”

  “You wait till you see them in the air. That B-Seventeen’s the best combat aircraft ever built.” Johnson came down the four metal steps eagerly and all but plucked at Alex’s sleeve. “Those for us?”

  “Yes.”

  “You mean it? All six of them?”

  “That’s our Air Corps.”

  Johnson stared at the three majestic aircraft with disbelieving awe. They dwarfed the Dakota transports beside them. “You do know how to make a man happy, Skipper.”

  Alex saw John Spaight wince. The two Secret Service men came down onto the concrete and Alex said, “This is where we leave you two.”

  “Not until you’re airborne, General. That’s the orders.”

  A civilian DC-3 was taking off, lifting and turning toward the south, beating up through a patchwork of clouds that hung out over Cape Cod Bay. Spaight said, “Let’s don’t gawk all day, Captain.” He prodded Johnson’s elbow and the five of them walked into the terminal.

  An officious Army major had all the paperwork laid out in the airport ops room. Alex had to put his signature on a dozen documents. The major kept talking in a clipped angry voice: “I’m not sure where you gentlemen get your drag but that’s nearly a million and a half dollars’ worth of airplanes. Every air squadron in the country’s screaming for up-to-date bombers and the War Department in its wisdom decides to send these to goddamn England. Okay, I’ve put up six copilots and six flight engineers and five pilots out of the Ferrying Command pool-I gather one of you gentlemen will be lead pilot on the formation?”

  “Me,” Pappy Johnson said.

  The major’s acidulous attention flicked across him. “You’d better meet your crews then-Mister…?”

  “Colonel,” Alex lied gently. “Colonel Johnson.”

  The major didn’t turn a hair. “Okay then Colonel. They’ll want you to file a flight plan upstairs while you’re at it-but meet your crews first.”

  Johnson ducked out of the room and the round-shouldered major came back to the desk and glanced through the papers Alex had signed. “I supposed it’s all in order. But it’s understood that you people are personally responsible for these aircraft. It’s damned irregular.” He turned stiffly past Alex and around behind the desk; reached forward and stacked the signed documents neatly. Finally he said, “Just take care of those Flying Forts. We haven’t got a whole lot of them to spare.”

  They waited in a private lounge behind the ticket counters. The two Secret Service men drank coffee and read newspapers. Spaight was smoking a cigarette. “Alex, you can’t just leave me in midair with my ass upside down.”

  “I can’t make exceptions. I’m sorry.”

  “Then you’ll have a lot of people indulging in speculations. Putting the pieces together I come up with a bombing attack on the Kremlin. Is that the plan?”

  “No. That would wipe out some artwork and a few upstairs flunkies.”

  “Then I don’t follow it. How can you get at Stalin from the air?”

  “I’m sorry John. It’s on a need-to-know basis.”

  “You’re a pill, you know that?”

  “Yes.”

  Johnson came in wearing a flattened Mae West over his flight jacket. It was a leather jacket with a big mustard fur collar lying open across his shoulders. Under the straps of the life jacket his pilot’s wings could be seen. He tramped his lambskin-lined boots against the floor and beamed through his sweat. “Let’s get some altitude before I swelter to death.”

  Spaight stubbed out his cigarette; Alex reached for his grip.

  Pappy Johnson said, “Thanks for that impromptu promotion.”

  “I’ll see if I can make it stick.”

  “No need. I don’t care that much about rank-I fly airplanes is what I do.” He pivoted toward the door, talking over his shoulder: “We’ll refuel at Gander, be in Inverness tomorrow afternoon. Coffee and sandwiches on board. You’ll have to ride the nose seats in my plane-those Dakotas are jammed with stinking big crates of stuff, they took all the seats out. All that junk belong to us?”

  “That and more coming by convoy,” Alex said.

  The Secret Service guards went outside ahead of him. When he came through the doorway something chipped splinters out of the jamb beside him and something whacked his thigh like a sharp small hammer and then he was down and sliding.

  4

  He caromed against the backs of the Secret Service man’s legs; the man went down and his automatic pistol fell from his hand. His partner was down on one knee with his pistol extended at arm’s length, looking for a target.

  Spaight and Pappy Johnson went belly-flat on the pavement. There was no cover except back through the doorway and the sniper had that zeroed in. He was somewhere across the runway in the tangle of scrub; there was a road beyond that, parallel to the runway, and then the Bay.

  The guard was scrambling for his dislodged gun but it was close to Alex’s hand and he picked it up by instinct because it was there: he put four fast shots into the scrub a hundred yards away, spraying from left to right, not because he expected to hit anything but because he wanted to rattle the sniper and throw off his aim. The. 38 automatic bucked mildly against his palm, slipping on the sweat. He couldn’t see where the bullets went; he hadn’t expected to.

  The other guard was sprinting left, breaking and zigzagging, angling toward the litter of weeds and shoulder-high scrub. It was probably his run that flushed the sniper: there was a quick crashing in the brush and then it all went still. The running guard was halfway across the runway and still zigzagging; the first man was drawling in Alex’s ear, “You all right sir?” and reaching for his pistol. Alex handed it to him.

  They heard the roar of an automobile and the sickening grind when its gears jammed into first; the screech of tires and then Alex had a glimpse of the moving black roof of the car. The guard beside him fired the last two out of his pistol and went into his pocket for a new magazine. His partner was pounding into the scrub across the field but the car had gathered speed; it wheeled inland to be absorbed into the Boston traffic.

  “Shee-yit,” said Pappy Johnson.

  It took five hours and a telephone call to Washington before the Boston police allowed them to take off and even then all of them had to sign affidavits. A nervous doctor wanted to put Alex into hospital for observation but he managed to veto that. A big splinter from the doorjamb had gone straight through the fleshy outer part of his right thigh, drilling a subcutaneous tunnel and shredding the skin on the way out; the doctor ran an alcohol swab clear through it to cauterize the wound and taped it up with heavy bandaging. It hadn’t bled much; there weren’t many blood vessels in that part of the anatomy. Nor were there many nerves. A muscle had been frayed. It was more stiff than painful when he moved it.

  The doctor said, “Best thing to do is sit on it. Tourniquet effect. Wad something up and put it under the bandage. Move it every ten minutes or so. An hour or so you’ll go into minor shock-don’t worry about it if you spend the next twelve hours asleep. But ke
ep as warm as you can. Have you got heat in that plane?”

  Pappy Johnson said, “No. We’ll be using electrically heated flying suits.”

  “Set his up as high as it’ll go.”

  They had dug the bullet out of the wall inside. It was a jacketed. 30’06-the standard hunting and military caliber; they’d been sold by the millions in war-surplus ever since 1919. The police were sending it to the FBI lab along with whatever other clues their technicians had discovered in the sniper’s shooting position but that was seacoast sand and it hadn’t held footprints or tire tracks. They weren’t going to learn anything.

  It was still daylight when they drove him down the runway to the hardstands. Pappy Johnson chinned himself up into the forward hatch of the leading B-17 and reached down for the luggage and then Spaight was boosting Alex up inside the cramped forward cabin of the bomber. He had to go under the pilots’ seats into the Plexiglas nose of the plane where the bombardier and navigator usually sat. It was a matter of picking a path across a tangle of boxes and cables and fire extinguishers and the exposed inner structurings of the airplane. Spaight gripped his elbow but Alex said, “All right, I can walk,” and climbed forward slowly; he’d been injured enough times to respect the practicalities.

  Above him he saw Johnson hunch into the austere cockpit, splashed with its hundred droplets of glittering instrument faces. The copilot was a young man with gangly grasshopper legs and red hair; he was reaching for a clipboard. “Six-tenths stratocumulus at five thousand feet, Captain.”

  “Okay. Wind ’em up if you’re done with the preflight.”

  Spaight helped Alex into the wired jump suit and the parachute pack; they settled into their seats while the engines hacked and wheezed and came alive one by one. Spaight handed him the flying helmet and he put it over his head: stiff leather chin cup, fur-lined visor, throat mike, earphones, goggles strapped up against the forehead. Now he could hear the pilots’ chatter again and presently the tower said, “Army Seven Nine Six, runway four, you’re cleared for takeoff,” and the airplane began its ponderous roll, bouncing on its tail wheel. He felt the tremors against the raw wound in his thigh.

  The Flying Fortress roared down the runway. Tugged upward by the vacuum created above its cambered wing surfaces it lifted off, banking steeply; the city of Boston tilted and swayed beneath him and then they were climbing out to sea with the long arm of Cape Cod curving away like a crab’s claw.

  They ran up the Maine coastline with cloud tendrils slipping past the wings. The synchronized engines sent smooth tremors through the plane at rhythmic intervals. Pappy Johnson came on the headset:

  “We’ll do this lap at ninety-five hundred feet. You won’t need oxygen. How’s the patient?”

  “Still respirating,” Alex said.

  Spaight reached over to check the dial of the thermostat on his suit. Alex was still sweating from the ground-level heat and he pushed Spaight’s hand away. Spaight switched off his throat mike and leaned forward to be heard above the racket:

  “That had to be the same people that killed Devenko.”

  Alex nodded.

  Spaight said, “They won’t quit after one bad try, Alex.”

  “Next time we’ll give them a little bait, I think.”

  “What?”

  “Let’s take the next one alive, what do you say? I’d like to hear the answers to a few questions.”

  “You can’t hear much if you’re dead.”

  He felt near it by the time they came down over the lakes of Newfoundland into the barrens of the wilderness base at Gander. He was awake again but only just; all his joints were stiff with cramp. When the engines died out the silence left him with a lightheaded sensation of nightmare unreality.

  There wasn’t much feeling in his fingertips but he got the parachute pack unbuckled and stumbled to the hatchway. They lowered him gently to the gravel and he started walking aimlessly in the dawn with Spaight at his shoulder trying to conceal his troubled concern. “Should you be walking on that?”

  “If I don’t I’ll have bedsores,” he said drily.

  “I hope you were kidding about baiting them into another try.”

  Alex shook his head, trying to clear it. The air was cool and sharp with a damp chill; the sky was half clouded with a band of red spreading above the dreary eastern horizon. He shivered a little. “If they’re going to try anyway I’d just as soon have it on my terms.”

  “They could be sighting in on you right now.”

  “In Labrador?”

  “Who knows who they are, Alex? Who knows how many they’ve got? They reached Devenko in the Pyrenees-they reached you in Boston. They’ve got a hell of a net.”

  “Or a handful of people with good sources of intelligence.”

  “We need to know where to look for them. Haven’t you got any ideas at all?”

  “The field’s too wide. I haven’t got time to waste on it. The other thing comes first.”

  “Not if you’re killed it doesn’t.”

  “We’ve been around that bush before. We’ll just have to see to it that I don’t get killed, won’t we.”

  Spaight said morosely, “Isn’t that a little like asking the sun not to come up in the morning?”

  The rest of the planes trickled down to base within the next ten minutes and it took nearly an hour getting them all ready for the long nonstop transatlantic jump. Alex went into the ops shack and sat by the round metal stove in the middle of the room. The place had the flavor of a pioneer camp but air traffic roared in and out incessantly: it was the intermediate stop for aircraft to and from England-British planes, Americans, Royal Canadian Air Force. Pursuit planes came in and out with wing- and belly-tanks for extra fuel range; some of them could make the jump and some of them had to fuel again in Greenland and Iceland. Convoy patrols and sub-chasing PBY amphibian Catalinas chugged across the field at steady close intervals and there wasn’t a ninety-second silence between any of the takeoffs and landings. On top of the ops shack a radar dish swiveled and six radio controllers kept moving up and down the tower steps with coffee and cigarettes. They had grey weary faces like combat veterans who’d been too long in the front lines.

  Finally Pappy Johnson came in and took a seat beside him, wrapping his hands around a hot coffee cup. “Copilot’s filing the flight plans. How you making it, Skipper? You look a little like a ghost right now.”

  “I feel a little like one.”

  “You going to be all right?”

  “I’ll sleep my way over. I should be all right by the time we get to Scotland.”

  “That thing going to leave you a limp?”

  “No.”

  “I reckon you’re a little more used to getting shot to pieces than I am. I mean those scars all over your neck and all.”

  “You’ve never flown combat, then.”

  “Naw-I got into this lunacy from flying airmail. I started out with air shows and then got work doing the mail. In those days we got our weather reports by phoning the next airfield and finding out if it was raining there.” Johnson grinned. “More reliable than the met forecasts we get now.”

  Alex knew them all over the globe-the barnstormers and bush pilots who made their livings walking the wings of fabric-and-wood biplanes and slept out under the wings of their Jennies. “I’m surprised you opted for bombers then.”

  “No future in single-seaters, Skipper. The war ain’t going to last forever. When it’s over they’re going to need cargo pilots, not peashooter jockeys. Old Pappy’s always thinking ahead, see.” He shook his head. “Besides I’ll tell you something else-if I’m going to get shot at while I’m up there I’d just as soon be in one of these babies.”

  “It’s a big slow target for the enemy.”

  “But a Fort’s damn near impossible to shoot down with anything less than a direct artillery hit. You can knock out three of the four engines and the son of a bitch will still fly. You can knock off half a wing and still keep it airborne. That’s a forgiving
airplane, it ain’t like a lot of these slapped-together military designs-the thing about a Fort, it wants to fly. There’s never been an airplane like that B-17. Probably never will be again. And you’ve got ten machine guns poking out of those turret-blisters all over the airplane from nose to tail and top to bottom. I’d hate to be the Nazi peashooter that had to go up against a flying gun platform.”

  Tickle Johnson in his enthusiasm and he was off like a candidate on the Fourth of July. Alex listened with half his attention and soaked up the warmth of the cozy rustic room.

  Then Alex said, “All right, Pappy, suppose I give you a target about nine feet wide and eighty feet long moving at anywhere from twenty to sixty miles an hour-on the ground, in a straight line. Suppose I paint a big bright X on top of it. Can you hit it with bombs?”

  “Skipper, I could drop a doughnut into a coffee cup from ten thousand feet with a B-Seventeen and a good bombardier. What is it you want me to hit? Sounds like a bus.”

  “Something like that. But it’s not a matter of hitting it two out of three or nine out of ten. You’ve only got one crack at it. What gives you the best odds of destroying it?”

  Spaight came in and sat down on the bench, listening with interest. Pappy Johnson said, “Just one bus, right? Not a whole convoy of them.”

  “We’ll start with one. What’s your opinion?”

  “Well ideally you’d want a squadron of planes. That way you’d cancel out the chance of error.”

  “You know how big our bomber force is, Pappy.”

  “Three planes. Well that’s plenty, what the hell, one target? One lousy bus?”

  “You’ve got to train my people to hit that target, Pappy. That’s your job.”

  “Then I’d go in treetop and set delay fuses on the bombs. Armor-piercing noses on the bombs so they’ll penetrate the roof of the bus instead of bouncing off.”