Goering looked thoughtful. "Perhaps. But I'd prefer the Fuehrer not to know until you're successful. Then we can spring it on him, and he'll force Messerschmitt and the others into line."
"We won't fail you, Hermann."
"You may call me Reichsmarschall now; this interview is at an end."
As they were putting on their coats and hats, Josten laid his hand on Hafner's arm.
"Congratulations, Bruno, you got your way. But you are playing Hitler and Goering against each other. Is this how business is done in the Third Reich?"
Hafner, warmed by an inner glow, thought for a moment. Then he said, "Doing business here is like doing business anywhere—you do it any goddamn way you can, just so you get it done."
***
Chapter 8
Nashville, Tennessee/January 31, 1943
A bleak and palpable cold, no mere lack of heat but a fierce thermometer-crunching enemy of life, invaded the city, cracking its windows, bursting pipes, and freezing wandering strays into furry lumps of ice. The winds staggered the few pedestrians still brave enough to troop along Union Street, then whipped chattering on across the hills to sail southeast toward the glow of Berry Field. There, Sunday night or not, the skylights of the new and roughly built factory buildings gleamed against the winter: McNaughton aircraft were pouring off the assembly line, shiny bright and looking deadly as cobras.
Troy McNaughton, enthroned behind a huge Tennessee walnut desk, its polished top ornamented with a glittering onyx pen set, models of McNaughton aircraft, and a four-inch stack of papers worth untold millions of dollars.
"Absolutely amazing, Henry—you've really gotten the goods this time! The 262 is a beauty—we'll scale up the wing a little and put it on our next fighter."
He riffled greedily through the blown-up prints of the microfilm Hafner had sent Caldwell.
"And this A-4 or V-2, or whatever it is, that's the weapon of the future. If we can get development started on this now, we'll have a five-year jump on the rest of the industry. We won't have to worry about peace breaking out—we'll be ready for the next war."
Caldwell sat staring at the floor, roaring earthward on his psychic roller coaster. He knew he should be congratulating himself on a coup, one that could mean U.S. military dominance for the next fifty years. Instead his obsession with Elsie filled him with shame.
He had briefed Hap Arnold on the microfilm in Washington only four days before. It had been the worst meeting in Caldwell's life. Arnold, notorious for his irascibility and his grudges, had leaned on him as if he were humbling a recruit, starting off with a series of reprimands on the status of the B-29 and long-range fighter programs.
"Goddamnit, Henry, you've got the most important programs in the Army Air Forces and you're not delivering. I want to bomb the shit out of Germany and Japan—and I can't do it if your programs don't materialize."
Then Hap Arnold had gotten down to business.
"I'm coming directly to the point, Henry. I hear stories that you're fooling around with a woman who works for a contractor."
"General Arnold, with respect, that's my personal business."
"Goddamnit, Caldwell, I'll tell you what's your personal business and what's not! It's my personal business when one of my key people is accused of favoritism."
"That's not fair, Hap; I've never been influenced by this woman." It killed him to call Elsie "this woman."
Arnold did not look well; his once boyish face was haggard and drawn. Normally crisp in his movements, he was hesitant, as if overwhelmed by the weight of command.
"Henry, I'm leveling with you. You've got to stop seeing her. We can't afford to sacrifice an entire aircraft plant to some middle-age romance. For Christ's sake, you were married for twenty years, weren't you? What the hell are you acting like a schoolboy for?"
Caldwell, bruised into silence, looked at Arnold's choleric face, veins bulging, red-rimmed eyes wide. They'd warned Caldwell that the Chief was surrounded by a whole new group of staff ass-kissers who kept him isolated, playing on his irritability with rumors.
"I'm not giving you advice, Caldwell, I'm giving you an order. You will stop seeing this woman. If you were someone else, I'd ship you off to India or somewhere, but I can't do that. I need you. But I can't have people saying you're favoring McNaughton because you're screwing a secretary there."
"She's not just a—"
"At ease! Do you think I've got time to worry about your love life?"
There was a long silence, Arnold twitching, riveting Caldwell with his gaze, as if daring him to protest, so that he could physically attack him. A clock was ticking in the background; Caldwell hadn't heard it before.
Finally, Arnold said, "You've heard me. Say no more about it. What else have you got?"
It was a relief to talk about his triumph, the meeting with Hafner, the inside news on the jet engine and the "wonder weapons."
Arnold listened to him with diminishing attention. Halfway through the briefing he fumbled in his drawer, took out a tiny pill, and placed it under his tongue. When Caldwell, nervous and less convincing than usual, finished, he wasn't certain Arnold was even listening.
Finally, almost as if he wanted to get rid of him, Arnold said, "Your job is to get the B-29 and the long-range fighter going. Don't come to me with all this Buck Rogers crap, rockets and jets. The war will be over before any of that stuff will be developed."
"No, Hap, listen—"
Arnold's tone was less rigid. "We've got all the first-rate manufacturers loaded down. Douglas is overtaxed already, Lockheed and Republic have all they can handle, Boeing is straining to give us B-17s and B-29s; North American is pumping out B-25s and P-51s. We could spare Curtiss, but they're so fouled up I won't even bother. That leaves McNaughton. Why don't you give this stuff to them to see what they can do with it? They haven't helped us much so far in this war—maybe this is more their line. And if it doesn't work out, at least it won't do the war effort much harm."
Caldwell looked at him. One minute he was forbidding him to see Elsie, the next he was thrusting McNaughton back on him.
"I didn't pick McNaughton out of the air, Henry. I'm covering for you. I owe you too much. If the Truman Committee digs into the problems at McNaughton—the Sidewinder is over-cost and under-performance—you're in trouble, I'm in trouble. This way, I can say that we're using McNaughton for research and development."
Caldwell nodded dumbly.
"I know how you operate, you must have some smart young officer you can assign to the plant to get things going. But don't spend any time there yourself—you stay the hell away from that woman!"
When Caldwell brought up the amnesty for Hafner that had been worked out with Allen Dulles and the State Department, Arnold had flatly rejected the idea. "Why are you fooling with that guy? He's betrayed us once, he'll do it again. You're losing your grip, Caldwell!"
With that, he had been shown out of the office.
Caldwell knew that he'd drawn his last ounce of credit with Arnold. One more foul-up and all the efforts of the past would be forgotten; he'd be assigned to command some training base, watching cadets do close order drill.
Now, Troy McNaughton slapped his hand on the table. "Damnit, General, snap out of it. It's not like you're giving this to the enemy! We'll do a better job on this than anybody else. You're doing exactly what Arnold told you to do, and you're saving time getting started."
McNaughton persisted with his salesman-style encouragement. "We'll get jets over to Europe before Messerschmitt does, and we'll have long-range rockets before anyone else, too. If we don't invade pretty soon, the Russians will push the Germans all the way to the Channel. Then it will be our turn to fight them."
It was an uncanny replay of his own rationalizing—he was actually doing the country a service by getting the data to McNaughton. If he'd turned it in at Headquarters, the material would probably have been sent to Wright Field to be studied until it was obsolete. This way, at least, it would do some good.
His voice was weak and hesitant as he replied. "The little job, the flying bomb, worries me more than the rocket. If they build enough of them, they can stop the second front."
"Well, then, there's your way out! You've got influence with Arnold, and with Eaker, too. Convince them to bomb out the factories building the jets and the flying bombs. If you get me just six months, we'll have our jet ready to go. Just six months!"
Caldwell left, driving his Plymouth staff car down the icy streets and progressively converting his despair into anger with Elsie, blaming her for his situation, hating her because she had gotten him into this mess and because she had once been Bruno's woman.
More furious than the storm outside, he stomped through her front door, tracking snow across the knotted rag rugs, shouting like a madman. She stifled his cries with an embrace and led him upstairs, where he passively accepted the maddening insouciance of her kisses. In the sweetly familiar bedroom of her old-fashioned two-story frame house on the Murfreesboro Pike, he gazed at the $219 mahogany suite he'd given her, her dressing table filled with the perfumes he loved to inhale as he nuzzled her neck. She was wrapping him in breast-soft comfort, drowning his arguments in her mouth. Shaking off her kisses even as he let her pull off his clothes, he flung more accusations at her, telling her that she had betrayed him, that she was a whore.
She replied with more kisses and darting hands; even as he screamed at her, she unbuttoned his fly, pushing him back down on the bed to pull his trousers down, gently amused that he could curse her as he let her undress him.
Caldwell knew how stupid it was and how perfectly it fitted the bizarre pattern of their relationship. He had been faithfully married for twenty-two years to his high school sweetheart, even though Shirley's increasingly religious bent had muted their sex life. When she died, he'd been blessed or cursed with a sudden new adolescent capacity for love. He had fallen for Elsie with a coltish naiveté that made him more vulnerable than a teenager.
Caldwell tried to regain his anger, struggling to his feet, nude, detumescent, and she slipped behind him saying, "Oh, Hank, you can't be mad about Bruno. It was all such a long time ago, I was just a kid."
Her absolute tranquility appalled him. She felt no guilt or remorse; she was kissing and squeezing him as if she had genuinely missed him. Shamelessly, knowingly, without any regard for what had happened in the past or might happen in the future, she pressed herself on him with her always irresistible ardor.
The terrible, unreliable part was that he was responding in every way but the one that counted; he wanted her desperately, wanted to settle all the arguments by bolting himself to her and, bucking, spend himself within her, listening to her gasps of pleasure, not caring if they were real or not. But a countercurrent of quietly determined guilt swam upstream against desire, and he was impotent.
"You're acting crazy, Hank. You've been on a long trip, and God knows what you eat over there. Or what you drink." She looked up at him archly, "Or who you screw. Let me fix you a little bourbon and branch water."
She poured him a drink and said, "I loved Bruno, just like I love you. I still love his memory, poor dear. But that has nothing to do with us."
A wiser man might have expected it. He had felt for a long time that Elsie was strangely and genuinely an innocent, as ignorant of sin as she was of what others called virtue. Elsie was Elsie, enjoying life and making do with whatever circumstances provided her.
"I can't believe you'd say that, Elsie. How can you love a man who killed his wife, betrayed his country?"
"Who ever proved he killed her? Lots of people die in plane crashes. And his country is Germany, he's never betrayed it. Besides, look how he used to make planes for the government. You bought them yourself, just like you're buying McNaughtons."
He listened to her nonsequitur nonsense, sadly aware that of all improbable things, he was a romantic. "Tell me the truth, Elsie. Do you enjoy making love to me?"
She looked at him, sweetly patient with the absurd question. "Of course, darling, can't you tell?"
"Did you enjoy making love to Bruno?"
Her smile was the same. "Sure. The one thing doesn't have anything to do with the other."
He was silent and she said, "Look, Henry, you're just mad because little John Henry Junior there is having his temper tantrum. Let me talk a little French to him, and in a little while you'll be all better."
The ghastly thought struck him. "Do you have names for all of them?" It wasn't a question but a confession, a groveling admission of his subjugation to her.
Her expression was blank, fleeting. "Names for all of what?"
It was agonizing to ask, a painful extrusion of his soul through pressing rollers of pride and embarrassment. He spat it out. "Goddamnit, Elsie, did you have a name for Bruno's penis?"
She burst into laughter. "Lord, I haven't thought of that in years. Sure, it was Red Baron; he was an ace, too, you know. I thought it was cute. And Troy, he's Barney Google because he's got a . . ." Her voice trailed off.
"Jesus Christ, you're fucking Troy, too?"
"Don't use words like that, Henry. Especially not with the Lord's name. Of course Troy has made love to me. Wake up and get your belt through all the loops! Do you think I'd have a chance at a job like mine if all I could do was type sixty words a minute?"
He shuddered in revulsion. He had been so willing to believe that Elsie was "his" in some spiritual way. She had done so much for him, made him feel so good about himself—she was always approving.
It hit him like a sudden light in a dark room. That was it, he knew. Elsie had always approved everything he did or didn't do, unlike his parents, for whom nothing was ever good enough, unlike poor Shirley, who always felt he should pay less attention to his job and more attention to church. Elsie approved of him, so he approved of her—and to do that he had had to be blind to everything.
She moved around him, pressing against him, blowing on his neck.
"Come on, sugar, don't be like this. We're all babies at heart; you've just had your feelings hurt." She slipped her arm around his waist, gently grasping him with her hand, rubbing the rough velvet of her pubis against his bottom.
"Now, I can tell that little John Henry Junior is beginning to feel all better already. Why don't you just let me and him work this thing out; we know how to talk to each other. In a minute or two, you'll forget all this nonsense."
Major General Henry Caldwell, advisor to the President, a towering power in the Army Air Forces, confidant of major leaders in the aviation industry, stood transfixed, watching what was happening in the mirror over the bureau. He stood silently as a tiny bundle of nerves, a shapeless white ganglion smaller than a lima bean, disconnected him from reality as it responded mindlessly to Elsie's soft, wet coaxing.
He felt the stirrings, and he thought, I should walk out of here and never see her again. But he heard his mouth say, "Let's go over to the bed."
Elsie went to work busily, aware that she'd have fences to mend for the next few weeks. She was pleased with her comment about "typing sixty words per minute." If Caldwell was stupid enough to think that Troy McNaughton valued only what she could do on a Sealy or behind a Remington, that was all to the good. Even Troy underestimated her. She wasn't an engineer, but she was a manager and she knew what was going on. And she was not going to be left penniless when the war was over, when Troy no longer needed her and she'd be too old to work for someone else. No, she was going to take care of herself, and Henry Caldwell was going to help.
*
Burbank, California/March 15, 1943
The Lockheed plant had disappeared from the face of the earth. Lieutenant Colonel Frank Bandfield, the new silver oak leaves shining on his shoulders, cocked his Douglas A-20 on its wing and circled until he spotted the runway. The year before a Jap sub had shelled Santa Barbara, and Lockheed had covered the entire plant with camouflage netting. Now there was a huge network of false streets, fake houses, and phony trees that turned this part o
f Southern California into an incongruous slice of the Middle West.
It was the first leg of a two-stage journey to the South Pacific, one that might bail Caldwell out of his growing difficulties. The Merlin-engined Sidewinder was a failure. But because McNaughton had received all the Merlin engines, there wouldn't be any long-range P-51s in England until early 1944—and that meant heavy bomber losses for the rest of the year. In desperation, Caldwell had assigned Bandfield to go to Guadalcanal to fly P-38s, to see if his cruise control techniques and the new 310-gallon drop tanks could make it into the elusive long-range fighter for the European theater.
Patty had been furious. "I know you. You'll go on every damn mission, and you won't be happy unless you do some shooting. It's in your blood." "Don't say that, makes me sound like a killer." "You are a killer. You kill me every time you leave." It was a tough time for Patty. She'd stopped almost all of her outside activities to take care of the children—and Clarice Roget. After complaining about "the miseries" for months, Clarice had finally gone into the hospital for a checkup. The diagnosis had been quick and cruel: Hodgkin's disease, an incurable cancer of the lymphatic system.
Bandfield could tell that Caldwell had called ahead. Lockheed was completely prepared for him, designating their top test pilot, Milo Burcham, to check him out, and scheduling him for a visit with Clarence "Kelly" Johnson, the Chief Research Engineer.
Bandy had flown one of the pre-production YP-38s at Wright Field, but Burcham took him to new ground, a combat-ready P-38G. It was a beautiful aircraft, gleaming silver, the sleek needle-nosed twin booms bulging with the power of the supercharged
Allison engines, the central nacelle packed with four .50-caliber machine guns and a 20-mm cannon.
"It's an easy bird to fly, Bandy. The props are counter-rotating, so you don't have any torque problems to worry about. The only thing I'd warn you about is high-speed dives. It's so clean that it can run into what we call compressibility." Burcham went on to give him his first real insight on the tremendous forces involved when an aircraft approaches the speed of sound.
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