“You mean she’s not torn up that bad?”
“Don’t think so, sir. Her right gear collapsed, that’s all. The wing doesn’t look too bad, and you hardly bent up the prop. We don’t smell any gas, either, so it doesn’t look like she’s gonna burn. We’ve had worse damage than this fixed and back in the air the next day.”
Comforting as that was, Tommy still had to wonder aloud, “Why the hell would the gear collapse? It was a great landing, I thought.”
“Not sure yet, sir, but I think you hit some crap on the runway. Knocked the gear right out from under you.”
There was the drone of aircraft engines as more C-47s passed low ahead, breaking off their approach until the crashed jug was pronounced no hazard.
Tommy asked, “You’re going to check the runway, right? Someone else could hit what I did, too.”
“As soon as we get you out of here, sir. One thing at a time.”
Sanchez had the truck in position, the tire wedged firmly between the bumper and rudder. “Okay,” Tapper yelled, “give her just a little push.” Then he leaned into the cockpit and supported Tommy’s injured leg with both hands.
“I apologize if this hurts any, sir.”
Nothing seemed to be happening at first, just the noise of the truck’s engine revving as Sanchez eased in the clutch.
Then, with a lurch, her tail raised a few inches and the rudder popped free. In the cockpit, the pedals moved, too, following the rudder’s movement. That allowed Tapper to lift Tommy’s leg free.
“You okay, sir?” the corporal asked.
Through clenched teeth, Tommy replied, “Yeah. You were right about the hurt part, that’s for damn sure.”
“Like I said, sir, I’m sorry.”
“You’re forgiven, Corporal.”
With an assist from Miller, Tapper hoisted Tommy out of the cockpit. With the crash crewmen acting as human crutches, they walked him clear of the aircraft. An ambulance was racing their way.
“It’s just a bad sprain,” the flight surgeon said as he taped the ice bag into place on Tommy’s knee. “But you’re young. You’ll heal quickly.”
“You’re not going to take me off flying status, are you, Doc?”
The doctor laughed. “Son, those crutches are going to do that for me. And I don’t have time to do all that paperwork to ground pilots who aren’t even in my unit. You’ve got your own flight surgeon for that.”
“So you’re not going to make me stay at the hospital?”
“You’re free to go, Captain Moon.”
“You think I could have something for the pain, Doc…besides ice?”
“The ice isn’t for the pain, Captain. Not directly, anyway. It’s for the swelling.” He reached into a drawer, pulled out a small bottle full of aspirin and handed it over. “Here you go. I’m afraid you don’t qualify for the stronger stuff, Captain.”
Eddie Dugan was waiting outside. He’d already appropriated a wheelchair for his flight leader.
“Where do you want to go first, boss?” Dugan asked as Tommy stowed the crutches and settled into the chair.
“Let’s find the commo section and see if we can talk to Squadron back at Toul.”
“Figured you’d want to do that. I already know where it is.”
It was hard to miss the commo shack, sprouting telephone lines in all directions and long wire antennas strung from tall poles. Tommy gingerly asked the commo duty sergeant if they could raise A-90 on the landline, as if that might be an impossible undertaking considering the two hundred mile distance.
The sergeant laughed. “Sir,” he replied, “I can get you talking to London, if you want. Toul ain’t no big deal. You say it’s a Colonel Pruitt at Three-Oh-First Fighter Squadron you want to speak with?”
“Yeah, that’s the man.”
“Stand by, sir,” the sergeant said as he turned to one of his switchboard operators. “PFC Lenowitz here will have you all hooked up in a jiffy.”
Lenowitz pulled a patch cord from what looked like a bank of dozens, plugged it into a jack on the switchboard, and then spoke softly into his headset microphone. True to the sergeant’s promise, barely a minute had passed before he pointed Tommy to a telephone on an adjacent desk and said, “Pick up over there, Captain. Toul is on the line.”
“I’m sure glad you two are okay,” Colonel Pruitt said, his voice as clear as if he was in the next room. “We all got a little nervous when your other two ships showed up all by their lonesome.”
Tommy explained how they came to have two damaged aircraft on the ground at Eschborn and how he’d injured his knee in the landing.
Pruitt asked, “How long before you can handle a jug again, Half?”
“Not long, sir,” he said, hoping the uncertainty wasn’t showing in his voice. “Maybe a week, tops.”
“Okay, now tell me about this ramming incident. I want to hear every bit of it right now.”
Tommy related the story of the white Yak and her reckless, obnoxious pilot.
When he finished, there were a few moments of silence before Pruitt asked, “Are you mobile, Tommy? I mean, can you handle a non-flying assignment?”
“Yes, sir. I can get around. But it’s not an ASO job, is it? I don’t think I’d be very useful to the ground-pounders right now.”
“No, not as an ASO. It’s not your turn, anyway. But I think we’ve got something that’s right up your alley. I can’t talk about it over the landline, though. Get yourself some rest, and there’ll be a plane along to pick you up tomorrow morning. I’ll get an AWOL bag packed for you and put it on board.”
“Can you at least tell me where I’ll be going, sir?”
“No can do, Half. You’ll hear all about it tomorrow.”
“What about Dugan, sir?”
“Have him stay there and keep an eye on our aircraft. We don’t need someone using them for parts bins instead of fixing them.”
Tommy and Dugan stopped to look at the hulks of four FW-190 fighters parked in the weeds alongside an Eschborn hangar. They were still on their wheels, despite being so badly shot up by strafing aircraft that any return to airworthiness was out of the question. The American mechanics had pushed them out of the way to clear the ramp for the influx of USAAF ships.
Inside the hangar, they found both Eclipse of the Hun III and Marcy Jo among the birds being repaired. Eclipse’s right wing was held up by a tripod jack as several mechanics worked on her damaged landing gear. The maintenance chief, a master sergeant of gruff manner, with an unlit stub of a cigar between his lips, pointed to a damaged plank of Marston Mat laying on the hangar floor next to the aircraft.
“The line boys tell me the damn thing popped loose on you, Captain,” the sergeant said. “Don’t happen too often. You must’ve hit it just right.”
Like almost all senior maintenance personnel Tommy had come to know, the sergeant had a way of implying that anything bad that happened to an airplane was somehow the pilot’s fault. Words weren’t always necessary, either. Body language could say it all.
“Came up and hit your gear like a can opener, I hear tell,” the sergeant continued. “Blew your tire, ground up the brake, and then your downlock snapped right in half.” He removed the cigar from his mouth and then exhaled through rubbery lips, making a motorboating sound that usually meant annoyance. “Dragging that wingtip chewed up your flap and prop a little, too. But as soon as we get the parts for her, she’ll be ready to take her chances all over again.”
Dugan looked as if he’d taken offense at the sergeant’s comments, but Tommy had learned long ago to take such things in stride. After a good look at the damaged runway planking, he asked, “That leaves a pretty big hole in the runway, I suppose. They get it fixed yet?”
The sergeant screwed up his face like that was the dumbest question he’d ever heard. “No, Captain,” he replied, “that repair’s gonna take weeks. All those planks interlock, and the whole damn section’s gotta come apart just to put one little piece back in the middle.
So what we got at the moment is a runway that’s twelve hundred feet shorter.”
Tommy pointed to Marcy Jo and asked, “What about her, Sarge?”
“We can take care of the tin damage on the wingtip no problem, Captain. Gonna need a new prop, too, and a run-out check on the engine. And both ships will need a test flight because of the rigging we’re gonna have to do. Don’t imagine either of you are check pilots, are you?”
They both shook their heads.
“Well, then,” the sergeant said, “we’ll have to get one of them type aviators out here, too.”
Eddie Dugan sounded less than thrilled as he said, “Looks like I’m going to be here for a little while.”
Chapter Eighteen
Colonel Marchand placed the papers he’d been reading down on his desk. Sylvie couldn’t decide if the expression on his face was one of annoyance or disappointment.
Maybe both.
The uncomfortable silence in the colonel’s office seemed as though it would never end. Finally, he said, “I do wish, Sylvie, that you could manage to stay out of trouble just once.”
“Why do you say that, oncle? Have I not been doing a good job?”
“No, my dear, that’s the problem. You’re doing an amazing job. But in the process, you’ve managed to—”
His voice dropped off as he searched for the words to complete the sentence. He asked, “What is that expression your Americans use when they’re annoyed?”
“Do you mean pissed off?” she replied. “Who am I supposed to have pissed off? And why are they my Americans? I thought they were our Americans.”
His response was quick and cutting: “Not all of us are in bed with them, my dear niece.”
Even my uncle has adopted de Gaulle’s attitude toward women: we’re nothing but whores and typists.
“It’s entirely my business who I sleep with, oncle. But you haven’t answered my first question. Who have I pissed off?”
He shuffled the papers before him, found the one he was looking for, and held it up for her to see. “Oddly enough, Sylvie, it’s the Americans—and whether they’re yours or ours doesn’t matter at the moment. They think all your sleuthing around in the Schwabische Alb, looking for secret weapons factories, resulted in a waste of their precious time and resources.”
“I was tracking down theft of humanitarian supplies. I believe that’s part of my job, is it not? And it happened to lead to that secret factory. Was I supposed to simply ignore it without advising the proper agencies?”
“But according to their report, the objects you found were anything but weapons.”
“And how was I supposed to know that? I may be an expert with small arms and explosives, but I know nothing of rocketry. Regardless of what they bothered to write in that report, they told me those objects could have very easily become operational weapons.”
Marchand made a little show of scanning the report once more, as if trying to find something he’d missed. But, not surprisingly, he came up empty. “If only they’d said that on these pages, Sylvie. Now Affaires Civiles looks like a bunch of bumbling amateurs playing at intelligence gathering.”
C’est magnifique, she thought. In a matter of moments, my uncle has called me a whore and an amateur.
“Perhaps I should just go back to France,” she said. She’d meant it as a challenge made moot in advance, a threat to quit that Marchand would reject out of hand. But it came out sounding more like an admission of defeat.
“Probably not such a good idea, Sylvie. At least not now.” He picked up another piece of paper from the desk. “It seems the police in Nancy have a warrant for your arrest.”
That news stunned her to silence. She could not imagine what he was talking about.
“It says here that one Isabelle Truffaut, on 10 March 1945, physically assaulted and endangered the well-being of one Thierry Pillet, a hotelier of Nancy—”
“He was a tondeur, a head-shaver,” she blurted, “victimizing a poor woman simply for being a woman! I will not sit still while some bastard who was never a member of La Résistance—and a petty collaborateur, at that—suddenly develops patriotic fervor once he and his corrupt friends in the police feel it’s safe to do so. I’ve given too much for France to be treated like this.”
“So the charge is not false, Sylvie? You did assault the man?”
Her aggrieved silence was all the answer he needed. Rising from the desk, he took her in his arms. She tried to pull away but he held her fast.
“It is so terrible,” he whispered, “that wonderful young women like you—so brave, so intelligent, so beautiful—have to live amidst the horrors of war, to be shaped forever by them. Isabelle Sylvie Truffaut Bergerac, what have we done to you?”
She pushed aside his sympathy with a shake of her head. “What’s terrible, oncle, is that all we’ve done, all we’ve sacrificed—all I’ve sacrificed—is cast aside and forgotten so quickly.”
He expected her to cry. She didn’t.
Marchand said, “This charge against you…it’s merely a délit, a minor infraction. I’m sure General Tassigny can make it vanish without a trace. God knows we have soldiers committing far worse offenses every day, yet they are never held accountable.”
“Male soldiers,” she added. “They rape and murder with no fear of punishment. But a woman who gave her body to the Boche just to stay alive—that’s unpardonable. She gets beaten, humiliated, cast out.” She paused as if swallowing a bitter pill and then added, “And even gets charged with the assault of a tondeur.”
He smiled sheepishly; there was no arguing a double standard had flourished since the liberation.
“Of course,” he replied. “I won’t deny any of that. But I’m trying to help you now, Sylvie. But it may take a little time.”
“I have nothing but time, oncle.”
They unlocked from the embrace. Marchand perched on the edge of his desk and picked up the stack of papers once more. “Your work in the Schwabishe Alb is done, Sylvie. First Army will be calling for your unit’s services farther south in the next few days. You’ll be going into the Alps, very near Lake Constance. If it wasn’t for the Germans in the vicinity, it might seem a pleasant holiday. Perhaps you’d like a few days’ leave first? Maybe visit your American flyer? Surely he’s based somewhere in Germany by now.”
“I don’t know where Tommy is. And I don’t need any time off. I have work to do.”
The determined look on her face impressed Marchand at first. Then it worried him.
“You’re not going to be looking for any more secret weapons factories, are you?”
“Only if my official duties as grocer to the occupation leads me to them.”
Marchand wished with all his heart he could believe her.
“Am I dismissed, oncle?”
“I thought you might like some lunch first.”
“Sorry,” she replied as she hurried for the door, “but I’ve got to get back. There’s too much to be done.”
Before stepping out of the office, she stopped to glance back at the colonel. He was staring at her as if moonstruck.
“Why are you looking at me like that?”
“Because at this moment you look so much like your mother, may God rest her soul.”
Sylvie smiled, just a hint of sorrow mixed with the pleasure of the compliment he’d offered. Then she combined a kiss blown into the air with a careless salute before vanishing into the corridor.
Luc Vachon was waiting for Sylvie at the jeep. He was smiling broadly; she couldn’t imagine why.
“I checked in with a friend in the intelligence section,” Vachon told her. “He told me something very interesting.”
“What’s that?”
“They believe they found the rocket scientists from Engelhardt Farm. They got stopped at a checkpoint south of Stuttgart, not too far from here, in fact. Their trucks were obviously Boche military models, sloppily repainted to look civilian. And their papers weren’t quite up to snuff, either. Anyway
, they’re singing like birds now, my friend says. They’re telling stories about all kinds of secret projects going on in the mountains of southern Germany.”
She could hardly contain her excitement. “Are they giving any information where this work is going on?”
Vachon seemed delighted to play the wet blanket. “He couldn’t tell me that, now, could he? Why would that be any business of Affaires Civiles?”
But Sylvie could sense he was teasing her. He knows something more. I can tell.
“Don’t play games with me, Vachon. Out with it.”
“Hmm, there’s no fooling you, is there, Madame Bergerac? Oh well, here it is: the Boche scientists claim there’s a wonder weapon in those mountains, and it’s not like anything we can imagine. It makes long-range rockets and advanced airplanes seem like children’s toys in comparison. They say it can kill tens of thousands in a single stroke.”
“Really?” she replied, terrified yet fascinated by the news. “What kind of weapon would that be?”
Luc just shrugged; she could tell the gesture was an honest admission of ignorance.
“If he knew,” Vachon said, “he didn’t tell me.”
Chapter Nineteen
Fourth Armored hadn’t stopped for anything. They’d encircled and closed the trap on the Germans between Frankfurt and Hanau, ten miles to the east, and raced northward toward the boundary with US 1st Army. Beyond that boundary lay the road to Berlin.
But then they were ordered to halt.
“I’m not sure how to tell you this,” Colonel Abrams told the unit leaders of 37th Tank, “so I’m just going to say it flat out. Third Army has been ordered to reverse direction and—”
He paused to let the groans die down. Then he continued, “Yes, that’s right, I’m afraid. We’ve been ordered to head south now, way down into the Bavarian Alps.”
“Fuck me sideways, sir, but whose bright idea was this?” a staff officer asked.
Our Ally, Our Enemy (Moon Brothers WWII Adventure Series Book 3) Page 15
