“The first proposal is on the Secretary of the Army’s desk,” Jiggs said. “Thursday, maybe, and no later than one January, it goes to McNamara.”
“I know, I wrote it,” Lowell said.
“Do you know that McNamara talked to Bill Roberts and Jim Brochhammer?”
“I heard that he did,” Lowell said.
“That made a lot of people mad,” Jiggs said. “The Secretary of Defense is supposed to get his advice from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, not from a buck general and a major.”
“They didn’t go to McNamara,” Lowell said. “He sent for them.”
“Right. And if he sends for you, which is considered very likely, the Secretary will be told, ‘Sorry about that, he’s out of the country.’”
“Christ!”
“What they especially don’t want you to tell McNamara, Craig, is ‘In the proposal I wrote, I had twice this many aircraft in the division: 450.’”
“Four fifty-nine,” Lowell corrected automatically. Then he heard what Jiggs had said. “They didn’t cut the aircraft in half?” he asked.
“The proposal sent to the Secretary of the Army calls for 289 total, including zero armed Mohawks and zero rocket-armed Hueys.”
“And what’s the reasoning?” Lowell asked icily.
“That we shouldn’t be greedy, that it is better to ask for something we have a chance to get, something the air force can’t protest violates the Key West Agreement, rather than ask for something we have virtually no chance to get.”
“The old foot-in-the-door theory?” Lowell asked sarcastically.
“Sometimes called the old camel’s-nose-under-the-tent-flap theory,” Jiggs said. “It is believed we can always go back and ask for the rest later.”
“When we go back, it will be to defend what we have been given, not to ask for anything more. In the second round we’re going to lose, not gain. All this is going to do is increase the aircraft assigned to a division. That would have happened anyway, and it will not result in an air-mobile division, which is what I thought we were building.”
“Oddly enough, I said something very much like that when my opinion was asked,” Jiggs said. “That was just before I was told that Jim Brochhammer is being sent to Panama for a month to look into tropical operations, and asked where did I want to send you for a month.”
“Why don’t I just go on leave,” Lowell asked, “and happen to bump into McNamara in the locker room at Burning Tree?”
“You are not to go anywhere near Washington for the next thirty days,” Jiggs said. “They thought of that too.”
“McNamara wants more than recommendations on aircraft augmentation,” Lowell said. “He wanted a new concept. We have one to give him.”
“Hey,” Jiggs said, “you’re preaching to the converted. I’m telling you how it is at CONARC, DCSOPS, and with the Chief of Staff.”
Lowell looked at him but said nothing.
“Where would you like to go, Craig?” Jiggs asked. “On leave to Germany to see Peter-Paul? Or to Korea on TDY? What about Indochina? You could probably do something useful there, see what support we should send the H-34 and Otter Companies. Parker could probably use some help with his Mohawks too.”
“What about Parker’s Mohawks? Have they been disarmed too?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about, Colonel,” Jiggs said. “I am not privy to anything concerning the Twenty-third Special Warfare Aviation Department. They’re under the operational control of the Defense Intelligence Agency.”
The Defense Intelligence Agency was a creature of the Defense Department, staffed by personnel of the several armed services. It got some of its money from the CIA and some of it from presidential contingency funds. It did a good deal more than intercept radio and cable messages to and from Russian and Eastern Bloc nations, and it was not under the thumb of any of the individual services. If the Secretary of the Air Force or, for that matter, the Secretary of the Army tried to tell the four-star admiral who ran DIA that DIA’s Armed Mohawks violated the spirit and the law of the 1948 Key West Interservice Agreement on Roles and Missions, he would be politely asked, “Mohawks? What’s a Mohawk?”
If he persisted, he would be told, far less politely, that DIA answered to the Secretary of Defense and the Director of the CIA, and when either of those gentlemen wished to avail themselves of his opinion, they would send him a memorandum asking for it.
“Well, that’s something, at least,” Lowell said.
“I thought you knew, Craig,” Jiggs said.
“I guess the Mouse fixed that,” Lowell said. Then he said, “Parker’s not due there until the ninth or tenth. Can I do both? Can I go to Europe on leave and then go on to Indochina?”
Jiggs nodded. “Davis’ll have your orders by noon tomorrow.”
“I’ve got to get back to Benning,” Lowell said. “My airplane is there.”
“I’ll go with you myself,” Jiggs said. “It will give a chair-warmer such as myself a chance to drive the Mohawk. And I think I can make it to Benning in a Mohawk without scaring hell out of the natives.”
(Three)
Lufthansa Stadt Köln (Flight 228)
Over Massachusetts
2030 Hours, 28 December 1961
There were six rows of two seats on each side of the aisle of the first-class compartment of the Boeing 707. They were staggered. At the head of the left row of seats, there was a table with four chairs by it, installed for the convenience of businessmen wishing to work while en route; and there was a similar table at the rear of the right row of seats. There were only fourteen first-class passengers.
There were two kinds of first-class passengers: the regular kind, who had paid the first-class tariff and whom Lufthansa intended to make as comfortable as possible on the flight to Rhine-Main Airfield near Frankfurt am Main. The other kind were passengers who, in addition to paying the first-class tariff, were known to someone in the Lufthansa administrative apparatus as passengers who were to be treated just a bit more considerately than the other first-class passengers. They were identified to the air crew by a small slash mark on their boarding passes.
There were two slash marks on the boarding pass of the passenger named Lowell, C. W. His ticket had been charged to Craig, Powell, Kenyon and Dawes, a firm that spent a good deal of money with Lufthansa moving its executives (in first class) and its couriers (in tourist) around the world, and it was Lufthansa practice to put a slash mark on the boarding passes of any Craig, Powell, Kenyon and Dawes executive. It was also the Lufthansa administrative practice to compare the names of all first-class passengers against a company list of people to whom, for any number of reasons, the company wished to be especially hospitable. Lowell’s name had come up on that list, too, with the notation that he was related to Generalleutnant Peter-Paul von Greiffenberg, Retired, who sat on Lufthansa’s board of directors.
Two slashes.
When Mr. Lowell asked the senior cabin attendant if one of the tables was free, she told him it was, escorted him to it, told him they weren’t full, and removed the armrest between the two seats at the table so that he could stretch out across both seats if he wished to nap.
And when they were off the ground, he was the first passenger she went to ask if he would like some champagne or a cocktail. She smiled very warmly at him—and not only because there had been two slash marks on his boarding pass. He was a very good-looking man, in finely tailored clothes, and there was no wedding ring on his hand. The odds against his being both unmarried and smitten with her charms to the point that he would take her away from all this were enormous, but hope springs eternal in a cabin attendant’s breast.
In fluent, unaccented German he asked for a beer and salted almonds. When she brought these to him, he already had his briefcase on the table and had taken from it a number of folders imprinted Craig, Powell, Kenyon and Dawes.
“If you need anything,” she said. “Just ring.”
“Thank you,” h
e said, and smiled at her.
He didn’t mean to be nasty, she thought. But he didn’t see her as a young and reasonably attractive woman. He saw her as an airborne waitress. Which, she decided, was pretty much the case. Most of the passes made at her were made by men who had wives and children at home. Very rarely did men from whom she would like a pass make one. They had better prospects than airborne waitresses.
She would have to settle—by way of making this flight interesting—for second best. Second best was two movie stars bound for the Berlin Film Festival. They had settled themselves in the left front of the cabin.
Brian Hayes, who looked older, smaller, and stranger (with thick-glassed horn-rimmed spectacles on his nose) than he did on the screen, sat at the table with a bald, pleasant-faced Italian, carefully reading some sort of legal document. Georgia Paige, who looked older than she did on the screen but still uncommonly beautiful, sat alone against the window in the third row of chairs, with her feet stretched out toward the aisle. She had a copy of Time, which she was reading through enormous red-framed glasses. She had a bottle of Coca-Cola on the fold-down shelf in front of her.
When she saw the cabin attendant, she sat up, pushed her glasses up into her hair, and motioned the cabin attendant over.
“Can I help you, Miss Paige?”
“The gentleman in the rear,” Georgia Paige said.
“Yes, Miss Paige?”
“Is his name Lowell?”
“Yes it is,” the cabin attendant said.
“Would you bring me a bottle of champagne and two glasses, please?”
“Certainly, Miss Paige,” the cabin attendant said.
When she brought it and the cork proved difficult, Georgia Paige impatiently reached for it, extracted the cork with a grunt and practiced skill, and quickly poured the overflow into one of the glasses. She gulped this down quickly, jammed the cork into the neck of the bottle, and then stood up.
She walked down the aisle to the table in the rear of the first-class cabin and stood there until Lowell noticed her.
“Coffee, tea, or me?” she asked.
“Hello, Georgia,” Lowell said.
“Would you like a little of the bubbly, since you’re obviously disinterested in me?”
“I would love some bubbly,” he said, and shoved the folders on the table into the briefcase.
She poured the champagne.
“Would you like me to sit here, so we can stare soulfully into each other’s eyes? Or next to you, where we could play kneesy?” she asked.
“Whatever pleases you,” he said.
She sat down next to him, sitting sideways on the chair, and touched her champagne glass to his.
“Long time no see,” she said.
“To coin a phrase,” he said.
“Weren’t you going to talk to me?”
“I wasn’t sure you would remember me,” he said.
“Ha!”
“And I seem to recall that you are married to the gentleman in the spectacles,” Lowell said.
“I am,” she said, “but what has that to do with anything?”
“If I were married to you, I don’t think I would like an…‘old friend’…like me rushing up with lechery in his eye.”
“But you like women,” Georgia said.
It was a moment before he responded.
“Why did you feel you had to tell me that?” he asked.
She poured more champagne in his glass.
“A couple of reasons,” she said, shrugging. “Among them, I don’t want you shoving his head in a fire bucket.”
There was confusion on his face for a moment, and then he remembered.
“I’d forgotten about that,” he said.
“I really think you had,” she said, and laughed.
“I was under a certain emotional strain at the time,” he said.
“Brian is very nice,” she said. “I want you to behave yourself when you meet him.”
“Am I going to meet him?”
“If I stay here, he’ll come back. Not to be curious, but to be nice.”
“I am older and wiser, Georgia,” Lowell said. “Far less prone to violence.”
“We are all older, damn it,” she said.
“You have weathered the storm miraculously,” he said.
“Flattery will get you everywhere,” she said. “It’s not true, but I love to hear it.”
“You are a remarkably beautiful woman,” he said. “Even more beautiful than I remembered.”
“You did remember?”
“Oh, yes,” he said. “Often.”
“Do you know how long ago that was?” she asked, surprise in her voice.
“Ten years and two months,” Lowell said. And then he laughed. “The tank is in a museum,” he said.
“What?”
“The tank is in the Patton Museum at Fort Knox,” he said. “I was there a while back and saw it.”
She satisfied herself that he was serious, and then laughed herself.
“With a sign, no doubt, that says: ‘In this tank, then on the front line, Major Craig Lowell screwed Georgia Paige, September whatever, 1951’?”
He had forgotten how her foul tongue sometimes offended him. He had been offended by the foul language of her director when he had visited her on her set in Los Angeles, and had shoved his head in a fire bucket. The act, he had later been informed, had rendered the director emotionally incapable of practicing his art and shut down the company for the day, and thus had cost Craig, Powell, Kenyon and Dawes somewhere in the neighborhood of forty thousand dollars.
He had forgotten, too, that she had achieved prominence by going around without a brassiere. He checked. She was wearing one now. She saw him looking.
“They are not yet pendulous, to answer your question,” she said. “Not yet.”
“I’m glad,” he said.
“Why are you going to Germany? What do you do now?” she asked.
“I’m going to see my son,” he said.
“God, I’d forgotten you had one,” she said.
“He’s fourteen. That’s how long ago it was.”
“He doesn’t live with you?”
“With his grandfather,” Lowell said. “I’m still a soldier.”
“You’re still a soldier?” she asked in surprise, and then, before he could reply, she asked: “What are you now? A general?”
“Colonel,” he said. “Lieutenant colonel.”
“I thought you’d certainly be at least a general by now,” she said.
“So did I,” he said.
“That sounded more bitter than ‘Ha-ha,’” she said.
“A little of each,” he said.
The cabin attendant came and laid two trays of hors d’oeuvres on the table.
“May I bring a menu?” she asked.
“And would you ask my husband to come back here?” Georgia said. “We’ll eat with the colonel.”
When she had gone, Georgia said: “I want you to meet him.”
“I’m delighted,” he said.
“No, you’re not,” Georgia said. “But you’ll like him. He’s nice. And he’s understanding. I’m understanding, and he’s understanding.”
“I understand,” he mocked.
“You bastard!” she laughed.
She picked up a bacon-wrapped oyster and popped it in her mouth.
“Did you order these special?” she asked. “Do you need oysters now? You’re not as randy as you were when you were young?”
“Christ!” he said.
Brian Hayes came down the aisle and stood by the table. He had, Lowell thought, a gentle smile.
“Say hello to Craig Lowell,” she said.
“Hello, Craig Lowell,” Brian Hayes said.
His handshake, Lowell thought, was not quite John Wayne, but it wasn’t exactly pansy. He did not look like a faggot, either.
“Colonel Craig Lowell,” Georgia said.
“Oh,” Brian Hayes said, making the connection. He
smiled. “The man who extinguished Derek Nesbit in a fire bucket. I’m very happy to meet you, Colonel. How often, working with him, I have envied you.”
“I told the stewardess we’d eat here,” Georgia said. “Sit down.”
“How nice,” Brian Hayes said.
“Craig is going to see his son in Germany,” Georgia said.
“I see,” Brian Hayes said.
“I am trying to get him to abandon that noble duty and come to Berlin with us,” Georgia said.
“Sounds like a marvelous idea,” Brian Hayes said, after a moment.
He knows what she means, Lowell realized. And he doesn’t give a damn.
“I don’t think that will be possible,” Lowell said. “I’ll only be in Germany a week or ten days.”
“Then you’re going right back?” Georgia asked.
“Then I’m going on to the Orient,” Lowell said.
“If you and your son, and if there is a Mrs. Lowell—”
“Is there?” Georgia asked.
Lowell shook his head.
“You never got married again?” she pursued.
“I came close once,” he said.
“And…?”
“She left me at the altar,” Lowell said.
“Well, if you and your son could get to Berlin,” Brian Hayes said, “we could get you credentials for the film festival. Or doesn’t that sort of thing interest you?”
“I don’t even know what a film festival is,” Lowell said.
“It’s a bribing contest,” Brian Hayes said. “We all send films. And then we try to bribe the judges. The one who succeeds wins the prize. Since the prize sells tickets, votes cost accordingly. It’s very profitable to be a judge.”
Lowell chuckled. Georgia was right. He did like this man. He thought that he had sort of a rule: He did not screw the wives of men he liked. But did that apply here? Where the husband didn’t care?
“I thought you were an actor, not a producer,” Lowell said.
“You just said exactly the wrong thing,” Georgia said.
“Sorry,” Lowell said.
“I’ve produced the last three of her pictures,” Brian Hayes said.
“I didn’t know,” Lowell said.
“And you didn’t see the pictures either, did you?” Georgia challenged. His answer came on his face. “You sonofabitch!” she said.
The Berets Page 28
