Romanov Succession Part 13

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 c.o.c.kpit, splashed with its hundred droplets of glittering instrument faces. The copilot was a young man with gangly gra.s.shopper legs and red hair; he was reaching for a clipboard. "Six-tenths stratoc.u.mulus 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 s.h.i.+vered 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 h.e.l.l 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 d.a.m.n 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 b.i.t.c.h 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 n.a.z.i 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 h.e.l.l, 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."

"Treetop?" Spaight said. "In a four-engine bomber?"

"Skipper wanted to know the best odds. I'm giving them, General. I didn't say it was the only way to do it. But it's the best."

He came awake just once. The sun was drilling right down through the nose perspex. Hard silver reflections shot back against his eyes from the ocean far below. John Spaight said, "Christ look at all that water."

"That's only the top of it."

Pappy Johnson's voice crackled on the intercom: "You want to get out and walk back to Texas, General?"

"I wouldn't mind. I'm beginning to get the feeling I've signed on with a pack of lunatics."

"Just keep that in mind," Alex said. "It'll probably help explain some of the things you're going to have to do." Then he went back to sleep.

PART FOUR:.

September-November 1941.

In the lat.i.tudes of northern Scotland there was daylight until after ten o'clock and they made landfall by twilight with the formation intact, the three Fortresses in a V-triangle with the three transports riding below and behind them.

Alex stretched his limbs one at a time in the confined s.p.a.ce.

Spaight was muttering in the throat mike: "If you wanted a sardine why the h.e.l.l didn't you draft one?" Spaight had that trait: every morning he made a joke-a sour joke about the weather or a caustic joke about the food. Somewhere in him was a core of bitterness; underneath the hard competence there was dissatisfaction. Alex hadn't got too close to it but he had the feeling Spaight had been born with an impulse toward perfection and felt unfulfilled whatever he did. He was introspective and if he'd been more of a golfing backslapper he'd have had two or three stars instead of one but the fact that he had one at all was testimony to his extraordinary talent for organizing people and commanding their loyalty. He lacked a head for imaginative tactics but he had the genius of a first-rate staff officer: if you told him what had to be done he would produce everything that was needed for the job and put it all in the right place at the right time. Spaight was married and thrice a father but he kept his family rigidly segregated from his professional existence and he hadn't once mentioned his wife since they'd left Was.h.i.+ngton. He was a soldier and she was a soldier's woman and that was the way the game was played.

Pappy Johnson came on the headset. "Picking up some radio chatter from the Channel. I'll cut you in."

Static in the earphones and then he picked up the voices, quite distinct-a very calm crisp Welsh voice, "Break right, Clive, the b.u.g.g.e.r's on your a.r.s.e."

He could hear the banging of the cannons and the fast stutter of machine guns above the whine of pursuit engines and then the same voice again, still dispa.s.sionate: "I've taken some tracers-on fire. I'm bailing out. Due east of Dover-I can see the cliffs. Someone save me a pint of bitter and a pair of dry drawers."

In his imagination he could see the Spitfires and Messerschmitts in the twilight wheeling among the barrage blimps; the Heinkels in ponderous formation lining up for London and the Hawks and Spitfires trying to get at them before they could drop their sticks of bombs through the swaying beams of the searchlights.

There was a break in the static and Johnson said, "Sorry, I've got to change the frequency and get landing instructions."

Spaight said, "You've got to hand it to those b.a.s.t.a.r.ds."

They were dropping across the mountains of Scotland in slowly fading twilight; the hillsides were indeterminate, dark and heavy. The B-17 thundered lower between the ranges and finally he saw the lights of the runway through the perspex. The bomber descended toward them like a climber on a sliding rope.

The runway was rough; the plane bounced and pitched along the center stripe between the cannister lights. A small van came shooting onto the gravel and curved in to intercept, running fast down the edge of the runway with a big FOLLOW ME sign across its rear doors, Turning on its tail wheel the bomber went along slowly after the van, unwieldy and awkward on the ground. Pappy Johnson was complaining into his radio: "This runway's got a surface like a G.o.dd.a.m.n waffle. This Jesus s.h.i.+t airfield wouldn't get certification from the civil air board of the corruptest county in Mississippi!"

The FOLLOW ME van circled to indicate their parking place and Johnson cut the engines. It was dusk now and the tower was carping in a crisp Scottish voice: "Let's get the rest of the wee birds down now, lads-we want to switch off these lights, don't we now."

He inched painfully to the hatch and lowered himself by his arms. The leg had gone very stiff. Ground crewmen climbed into the bomber and Pappy Johnson stopped by the running board of the van to look back at it the way he might have looked at a woman.

The driver gave a palm-out salute. He saw to their seating and drove them down the gravel strip and decanted them beside a wooden hangar, and sped away to meet the next plane.

Felix was there with his compact movie-actorish looks and his readiness to laugh or spill tears or burst into rages; he emerged from the hangar in an immaculate white uniform his tailor must have worked around the clock to build.

Alex saluted him. It made Felix grin like a schoolboy. "Welcome to the toy shop, Alex."

"Where's our headquarters?"

Felix indicated the decrepit hangar behind him. "Right here, I'm afraid. Well then come in, all of you. My G.o.d that's a big ugly monster of an aircraft." He turned around with a casual wave that drew them all inside and walked through a small door cut into the hangar's great sliding gate. Over his shoulder he added, "I've got Sergei off in search of billets for you and your friends."

Alex suppressed a smile. Felix was playing the game to the hilt: he'd already taken over. They'd given him a new role-leader of men-and it looked as if it was the role Prince Felix had been waiting for all his life.

Black felt curtains overhung the hangar's few small windows; the high naked lighting within was harsh even though the building was so huge that the farther corners were in shadow. "It used to be a service shop for aircraft on North Sea rescue patrol," Felix told them. "They've moved most of that over to Scapa Flow now. It's obsolete and cobwebby but it's ours."

The room wasn't far short of an acre in dimension. Vertical steel supports sprouted from the cracked concrete floor here and there; the ceiling was a skeleton of metal and the roof above it was an arched tunnel of corrugated steel gone rusty in patches so that it looked like camouflage paint. Without the clutter of aircraft for which it had been designed the floor s.p.a.ce looked infinite; the scale was intimidating, it dwarfed them all.

In the front corner a plywood part.i.tion seven feet high marked off an office that might have been used by the maintenance director at one time; it had an open doorway and Alex could see the end of a desk within. The remainder of the huge room was undivided except by the eight steel pillars-two-foot-square I-beams, the sort they built bridges out of.

It had been Va.s.sily Devenko who'd obtained the use of it and he must have done a good deal of very fast talking because even if they'd intended to abandon the building they'd have wanted to demolish it for sc.r.a.p.

Along the south wall under the blackout-draped windows were stacked dozens of wooden crates with consignment bills-of-lading taped to them. Two men in English uniforms with slung rifles stood sleepily near the door; they were not Englishmen, they were White Russians; Alex recognized them both from Finland. When they saw his face they both stiffened almost imperceptibly-the gesture of coming to attention; he nodded to them both as he went by them.

He made introductions; he said to Pappy Johnson, "Prince Felix is the man you're going to train to drop the lump of sugar into the cup of coffee. He's our lead pilot."

Johnson was startled, then dubious, then polite: "Fine-that's just fine." He essayed a smile.

"You don't mean to tell me I've got to fly one of those b.l.o.o.d.y four-engine battles.h.i.+ps?"

"Felix is a first-cla.s.s pilot-don't let him fool you."

Johnson was squinting. "You're the Prince Felix Romanov that won a couple of air races."

"In racing planes, Captain-not stinking huge blunderbusses."

"You rated to fly multiengine?"

"I've flown twin. Never four."

"You'll get the hang of it," Alex said. But Pappy Johnson did not look happy.

A short man-very wide but not fat-emerged from the corner office and strode forward in a British uniform with a colonel's pips on the shoulderboards.

Felix said diplomatically, "Colonel Tolkachev has been showing me around."