Armageddon - Leon Uris

Clint got the children fed. They were terribly impressed by the waiters in formal suits who scraped and bowed and carried on with a great deal of pomp. He unpacked and got them off to sleep.

Judy revived herself and came back to the parlor looking, feeling, smelling all woman and ready for love, but Clint was pensive.

“You aren’t happy I came.”

“We have a lot of rivers to cross.” There hadn’t been an exchange of letters for six weeks, except the one Clint had gotten from Milt Schuster. Judy had been to see him about a divorce.

“I was hurt and angry when I went to see Milt. And when the anger passed I was just plain lonely. Clint, doesn’t the fact that I came here say that things will be your way. I guess I just don’t like an empty bed.”

“You’d have no trouble filling it with someone who shares your ideas about getting up in the world.”

“I can’t, Clint ...” He stood and turned away from her. “I’ll make it up to you, honey,” she said. “We’ll get a little house here ...”

“Dammit, Judy. You don’t just walk down the street and get a little house.”

“What are you trying to say?”

“In the past six weeks I’ve been more alive than at any time in my life. We have an airman at a base outside Munich who figured out how to renew spark plugs for twenty-one cents a copy. New, they cost sixty cents. We use fifty thousand of them a month. A young officer in Headquarters across the street has worked out a load calculator that helps us carry up to five hundred more pounds of cargo on every flight. We have displaced persons who can unload ten tons of coal in twenty minutes. We’ve done all kinds of miracles here ... but we’re whipped. I know my girl Judy. She doesn’t like a loser.”

“Clint, I love you. I’ve just started to learn why and how much. There’s a part in this for me too.”

He nodded and began to pour his heart out and Judy knew what she had to do. She could take him away from this awesome thing for little snatches at a time, brace him up, send him back to battle.

“That nasty old man is the greatest person I have ever known ... and he’s going to die. He’s got a time bomb in his chest.”

After a while Clint was happy that she had come. He stretched out on the bed. It was kind of like the early days when they scratched to make ends meet; she was so wonderful then.

“Let’s make a baby,” Judy purred.

Clint agreed.

The phone rang.

“Clint, get over to Headquarters right away.”

Clint didn’t bother to ask what particular problem was annoying the general.

“And we’ll be flying out to Berlin tomorrow in the second time bloc at Rhein/Main.”

“What about my trip to England, sir?”

“It will have to hold. They got the ground-controlled approach equipment in operation at Tempelhof. The weather is closing in again. We’ve got to look it over and break that bottleneck.”

“Be right over, General.” He set down the phone and looked at his astonished wife. “That’s the name of the game,” he said.

Chapter Eighteen

IT RAINED A DELUGE. Rhein/Mud was a lake.

Miserable teams of displaced persons and drenched airmen prepared the line of Skymasters for flight. Hiram Stonebraker’s car, bearing a limp wet flag with two stars, stopped before Operations, 7497th Airlift Wing, as bloc time approached.

On sight of the general, the sign regarding Ball Breaker’s Feed and Coal Bin was stashed away for display at a more appropriate time.

Stonebraker, shaking the water off him, entered the chief pilot’s office.

“You going to run us up to Berlin, Captain?”

“Yes, sir,” Scott Davidson answered. “We’ll be number fifteen in the bloc.”

“When you reach Tempelhof Airways, tell them I want to try out a ground-controlled approach.”

Scott studied the wicked downpour outside. “Couldn’t of picked a better day for it, General.”

“See you at the briefing. By the way, Scott, getting enough flying time?”

“Plenty ... sir.”

As Stonebraker stepped back into the hall two pilots were reading the Task Force Times and laughing. The cartoon depicted the weatherman having hung himself and two pilots on seeing the body commented, “Oh-oh, the weather’s bad again.”

Thirty crews drawn from a cross section of squadrons filed into the briefing room. The weatherman stood before his map.

“The European Continent is under the influence of a deep low off the British Isles causing a prognosis of bad flying weather for the next forty-eight hours.”

A grumble around the room.

“Ceilings will vary from zero to five hundred feet, visibility from zero to one and a half miles.”

“Lovely,” Nick Papas mumbled.

“A tight pressure gradient causing strong winds aloft from the northwest, three hundred fifteen degrees. Winds will be forty to forty-five knots.”

It would be a long day.

Scott Davidson stood before the men and briefed them on new VHF radio installations and beacons in the center corridor, then gave a lecture about being fed up with the numerous little accidents on the ground which were causing great time waste. He spoke of the tricks of taxiing heavy loads, executing turns, and braking carefully to handle the delicate nose wheel of the C-54.

As Hiram Stonebraker heard him speak he felt smug about his hunch on Davidson. Scott had been able to charm commanders’ wives, con and duck responsibility in the past, but was quick to recognize that with Stonebraker his luck had run out, temporarily. Then, keeping the big birds in the corridor and getting tons into Berlin became like wartime all over. The mudhole of a base, the urgency of the Airlift, and the endless challenges were turning him into a fine chief pilot. Scott ended the briefing by repeating his own dislike of cigar smoking in the cabin ... for Nick’s benefit.

Stonebraker and Clint Loveless waited in the staff car near the craft as the rain pelted down on the team of a dozen Polish displaced persons and the American sergeant in charge of the loading. They became drenched beneath their ponchos as they filled the ship with sacks of coal, barrels of asphalt, and married the load to distribute it evenly with a number of lightly packaged cartons marked DANISH CHEESE.

Stan Kitchek and Flight Engineer Nick Papas walked around in ankle-deep water in the pre-takeoff inspection while Scott signed his clearance forms at Operations and picked up a flight kit.

The steps were rolled up and they all boarded. Clint sat in a jump seat installed in the rear of the flight deck. The general stood behind the copilot. Up and down the hardstands trucks drove off, stairs rolled away, wheel chocks were pulled, engines coughed to life, and the line of birds started taxiing carefully on the wet taxiways.

As bloc time approached Scott watched as the tower released the first plane. As its engines revved to takeoff power, sheets of water gushed off the wings. It sloshed down the runway leaving a high spray and went nearly to the end before becoming airborne. It disappeared immediately into the weather.

Stan intoned the check list.

“Nose wheel.”

“Centered.”

“Parking brake.”

“Set.”

At a three-minute interval the second bird disappeared into the gray overcast.

“RPM.”

“Eight hundred.”

“Fuel pressure.”

“Seventeen.”

“Oil pressure.”

“Seventy.”

Nick told Clint Loveless to buckle in because it was going to be rough. Clint hated it. Nick plugged into a jack and gave the general a pair of ear phones.

“Main tanks.”

“On.”

“Booster pumps.”

“High.”

“Cowl flaps.”

“Trail.”

“Generators.”