Casualties of War: The Advocate Trilgy Page 21

  “Where the blazes is Chillingham?”

  “East Sussex, a few hours south of here. They were the unit that took such a drubbing about a week or so ago.”

  He nodded. He wasn’t bothering with feigned disinterest now; the story had been sold. “Who’s the poor bloke on the P.M. table?”

  “I don’t know yet. Quite honestly, I’m surprised I’ve gotten this much. It’s been like trying to infiltrate the 33rd Degree of Masons. This isn’t just people not talking. It’s been tightening. The press officers have gone from keeping a secret to building walls.”

  “As if they’ve come across something they didn’t know they had at first.”

  I nodded.

  “Any idea who’s running this show for the Yanks?”

  “There’s a JAG major named Voss. He has a couple of legmen: a captain named Ricks and a Lieutenant Grassi. I’ve heard Grassi’s name before and not by favorable mention. Bolshie, anarchist, Bluebeard — ”

  “Not well loved, then, eh?”

  “Hardly. But the indications are that all the big movements — the lip-tightening, the new walls — are not coming from this Voss bloke.”

  “That JAG dandy? Ryan?”

  “Perhaps even higher. Earlier this evening they were all at that nest they have under Grosvenor Square.”

  “Intelligence?” He frowned. “What would Intelligence have to do with...well, with anything criminal?”

  “My question exactly. And when they came out, they were all looking quite off. I got the distinct feeling something had rattled their cages. But to your point about whos directing the show; immediately afterward, Ryan made expeditiously for a very tête-à-tête meeting at General DiGarre’s digs after which, within an hour, the new silent curtain fell.”

  “When was this?”

  “As I said; early this evening. About seven.”

  “Hm. That was when Fleet Street started getting the calls from the War Office to be on best behavior. Quite queer, eh? One wants to think a murder, all the elements seem there. That could be a sensitive bit, but it hardly seems dodgy enough to justify all this, eh? All this business with Intelligence, and caballing with DiGarre.”

  “You think there’s something else about?”

  “I’m inclined to think there’d almost have to be.”

  “Seems worth carrying on, eh? Just out of ‘academic curiosity’?”

  Himself smiled briefly, sympathetic to the notion, but then the smile vanished, and he grunted to his feet. “Afraid not, my son. The ‘request’ has been made by those on high, and as dutiful Englishmen, we have agreed.”

  I stood with him. “Need I remind you, I’m not English.”

  “You’re still a citizen of The Empire. Leave it be, my son. You’ve done a good job. Shame to turn it off, but...Jump in the kip, sleep late. You owe yourself a reward. Then back to work. I think you’ve covered your last snooker championship.” He smiled, then, and began to leave, but stopped in the doorway, well understanding the dramatic effect of the pause. He cast a condemnatory eye round my hovel, settling it at last upon the now-still skillet of kippers. “Do try to get the old girl back, my son. The bachelor life isn’t for you.” And he left.

  The kippers looked rather less appetizing after lying half-cooked in the skillet than they had in their tin. I hesitated before I relit the flame. I turned out the lights so I could cook with the heavy curtains pulled back. Another drink helped dampen the dissuading effects of the kippers’ smell and shriveled appearance.

  I was not happy the story had been killed, but I was reconciled. It was not the first time; it would not be the last. In fact, I gave more thought to Himself’s acknowledgment that I now rated better than royal teas and flower shows. By the time my head hit the pillow that night, I was giving the matter of the killed story very little thought at all.

  Chapter Seven – The Varangians

  About the time I was having my little confabulation with The Boss, Harry Voss was arriving back at the Annex, his head still awhirl with his latrine face-to-face with Ryan. He made the long trudge up the stairs contemplating the splendor of falling face forward onto his bed without the bother of disrobing or washup, but the door to his quarters swung open and there he unhappily saw Ricks and Grassi.

  Ricks sat in the rooms one chair — the one at Harry’s escritoire — and had moved it a few inches away from the desk, turning it respectfully away from the writing surface to show he had no interest in Harry’s personal affairs. Grassi, on the other hand, was sprawled across Harry’s bed as if it were his own, atop the pile of mail left there by the orderlies, leafing through Harry’s newly delivered copy of Life.

  Ricks saw the befuddlement on Harry’s wan face as he groped through the cobwebs of fatigue for some reason for them to be there. “You told us to wait for you here, sir?” he offered. “Back there at the briefing room?”

  Harry remembered with a moan.

  “Would you like us to come back?”

  Harry shook his head, then went to the loo to splash some water on his face.

  “Whaddaya think, Boss?” a leering Grassi asked when he returned to the room. “You think she’s really naked under there?” Grassi had the magazine turned to a doublepage spread of Hollywood showgirls and his blackened eye narrowed in a particularly lewd squint. There was Gene Tierney who, according to the caption, servicemen considered “The Girl We’d Most Like to Guard on a Lonely Pacific Isle.” Veronica Lake was “The Girl We’d Most Like to Make Our Objective.” Grassi’s attention was devoted to Maureen O’Sullivan: “The Girl We’d Most Like to Ride with on a Bumpy African Road.” In Miss O’Sullivan’s photo, she was bare-shouldered, looking down into a mirrored tabletop that obscured the rest of her body from view. Grassi’s thumb was caressing the naked shoulders. “How ’bout it, Boss? Hey, Cap’n, whaddayou think?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Are you sure? How do you know?” Grassi brought the magazine closer to his face. “She could be naked under there. You see that little thing she wore in those Tarzan pictures? She’s the type; I wouldn’t put it past her. She should be bare-ass naked under there!”

  Ricks shook his head. “You are a sick individual, Lieutenant. Sick.”

  Grassi responded with wagging eyebrows and “whoo-hoo”s co-opted from Daffy Duck cartoons.

  Harry ended the performance with a backhanded slap across the lieutenant’s thighs. “Get off my mail!” Grassi popped off the bed and Harry angrily snatched his Life back. “Get your own damned magazine!”

  “My, my, don’t we get grumpy when we’ve missed our nap,” Grassi said, but found himself a perch on the windowsill.

  Harry took a seat on the bed. “And now,” he said, kicking off his shoes, “if it’s not too much trouble, do you think we could get to work?”

  Notebooks flipped open, throats were cleared, and then Ricks and Grassi briefed Harry on what they’d learned of the five young men who’d flown against Helsvagen on August 15.

  Name: First Lieutenant Raymond Daniel Jacobs

  Born: October 11, 1917

  Place of Birth: Quincy, Washington

  Not shy, but deliberately quiet and reserved, the man from the Washington forests never allowed an address more informal than “Raymond.” His nominal birthplace was a spot found only on the best and most detailed map, but Quincy was listed more for the convenience of record-keepers than for accuracy. Jacobs had been born and spent his early years some miles away, actually, amid the tall trees and crags of the Cascades.

  His mother, of whom little was known, had died with his birth, and his father was a flinty, spare man who eked out a living hunting, skinning, and occasionally scouting for logging companies. While Jacobs never explained what drew him out of the mountains, one could guess at a typical adolescent restlessness fueling a desire to see if there was more to the world than the monastic life he shared with an uncommunicative father in a rustic cabin walled in by timber and steep cliffs, and capped by the dark, tumultuous skies of
the American Northwest. In any case, at the age of fifteen he came down out of the mountains to Quincy and never looked back. At the time of his enlistment nine years later, in 1941, Jacobs could not even answer as to whether or not his father was still alive.

  While there are no records of formal education, Jacobs was, evidently, sufficiently self-taught so that when he appeared in Seattle in the early 1930s he was competently equipped with the abilities of reading, writing, and math. And, perhaps from his association with the lumbermen with whom his father sometimes worked, and from toying with the various machines that served their trade, he also evidenced by that time a fair ability with things mechanical. It is a measure of those skills that, young as he was, and at a time when lines of men looking for work were more common than work, he soon found positions as an apprentice engineer among the coastal steamers plodding up and down the West Coast from Alaska to Panama.

  Another gap in his sketchy record leaves unanswered the question of what moved him from steamers to aeroplanes, but by late 1936, Jacobs was no longer signing on with any further crews. After another blank in his chronology, he surfaced as an aeroplane maintenance engineer at Los Angeles Airport in 1938. Soon after, he signed on with Chennault when the flamboyant general began enlisting personnel to fight for the Chinese as the American Volunteer Group, known more colorfully as “The Flying Tigers.”

  Jacobs served in China until Pearl Harbor, when America formally entered the war and most of the AVG personnel gravitated back to the States to serve in the American military. Jacobs’s performance, according to Chennault’s staff, was commendable. The AVG fields were always undermanned, ill equipped, and badly supplied, but Jacobs proved a wizard at scavenging — or forging — the parts to repair what most mechanics considered irreparable. On returning to the States he, like many of his fellow AVG alumni, enlisted with the Air Corps and put in for fighter pilot training. Despite his lack of formal schooling, his service with Chennault stood him in good stead and he was accepted. He struggled a bit with the book-work, but proved himself able enough in the air and completed training at the fighter pilot school in San Antonio in mid-1942, in time to be assigned to the then-forming 351st Fighter Group.

  Jacobs’s record with the 351st showed an unexceptional but reliable pilot, a bit more unflappable and less reckless than most, a product of his natural reserve one would guess, or perhaps due to his comparative maturity, there being an average difference of five years between him and the scrappy Young Turks filling most of the group’s cockpits.

  There was an earnest, if light-hearted, respect among the younger men for his ability and a service record that extended back to the legendary AVG. They called him “Pappy” and “Methuselah,” and subjected him to his fair share of pranks. And, while he did not join his comrades on their excursions to pubs and whorehouses, nor indulge in their rabid pranksterism, keeping to himself much of the time, he did overcome his natural reserve to tolerate the jibes and tricks with good nature.

  After all, he had come from the hot flats of Texas with them, fought their first battles with them, and despite any difference in personality or background, any gap in age and experience, they had been bloodied together. It would not have bothered his solitude, one might think, to know that he had come to rest with many of them as well.

  Name: Second Lieutenant Andrew Paul McLagen, Jr.

  Born: May 19, 1924

  Place of Birth: Boydton, Virginia

  Even after his facing German fighters (and downing two of them), soaring tracers, and ugly blotches of flak in eleven sorties over the Continent, even after his drunken, giggling mates had trundled him down to a Brighton brothel to celebrate his nineteenth birthday with the end of his virginity, “Andy” McLagen still retained enough of his native shyness that, in conversation even with his closest acquaintances, he would still avert his eyes, shuffle his feet, mumble his drawling responses.

  He was second born — first to survive — of six children delivered of God-fearing Baptists, his father being a tenant farmer on a stretch of tobacco land not far from the North Carolina border. Mother and Father McLagen taught their children to pray before every meal, and at night before climbing into the straw-filled pallets the young ones shared, and when they woke every morning, especially on Sunday when they hiked en masse down the red clay road to a sun-baked clapboard church where they sweated through hours of sermonizing by a flushed-faced, button-straining minister. If they forgot to pray, or did not pray with accepted sincerity, they were ordered to bend over a rail fence and spirituality was branded on their bottoms with a whipping cane.

  As the eldest, it was Andy’s responsibility to shepherd his siblings down that same road every day, rain or shine, hot or cold, in mud and dust, to the one-room school-house standing across from the church, and shepherd them home in the afternoon, after which he took his place by his father in the fields. At night, by the light of a kerosene lantern (electricity was a luxury held only by the most affluent Boydton townspeople) he did his lessons and practiced his reading on passages of the Bible until Mother McLagen was satisfied and ushered him off to evening prayers and bed.

  He showed a flair for machines as a young boy. His father and the other tenants would squat on their haunches, scratching in the dust with twigs as they stared dumbly at the inert tractor they shared, but young Andy could puzzle out a function, remove and dissect its pieces, and replace them healthy and whole.

  Out in the fields, he looked across the sprouting tobacco leaves and saw crop dusters seaming the fields with their sprays, rising in and sliding out of the sky with the ease of the angels cited from the pulpit every Sunday. As he had puzzled out the tractor’s engine, so he puzzled out that his mechanical talents could take him beyond the world of a sharecropper’s tin-roofed shack.

  A likable and deferential sort, and quick to learn what he didn’t already know, it was easy for young Andy to find work with the itinerant fliers. It was not long before he knew his way round the engine of a Curtis Jenny as well as that of a John Deere tractor. To his parents’ dismay, however, the boy was all too willing to exchange his work not for badly needed cash, but for a ride in the forward cockpit with the control stick in his adolescent hand for a brief minute or so. Such dereliction earned him a caning or two, but he considered that a fair price for an exhilarating, if stomach-churning, trip through a high, ascending loop from whose peak he could see that the few square miles of Virginia he knew were just a small corner of the world; not the whole of it.

  On December 7, 1941, men on horseback rode through the countryside round Boydton to spread the word received through the few wireless sets in town: The U.S. was at war. Andy, along with nearly every other male in the county, including his fifteen-year-old brother and forty-five-year-old slope-backed father, gathered at the church that night to pray and await the Army enlistment clerk who arrived the following morning.

  Father McLagen took his rejection with stoic resignation, compensating himself with the unbounded pride of Ills eldest boy’s enlistment. He and Mother McLagen prayed for their boy’s safe return, escorted him to the Boydton train station, thrust the family Bible in his hands, warned him against fancy women and liquor, then wished him well and reminded him not to forget his daily prayers.

  Though Andy McLagen had not completed his formal schooling, his mechanical skills were plain and his experience valued. His battery tests placed him in aircraft mechanic school, and by the end of 1942 he was proudly writing his parents in his simple, block lettering that he had earned his sergeant’s stripes. The following year, the “Flying Sergeants” program was instituted to cull flightworthy noncoms from the ranks to replace the growing losses in the expanding air offensive against Hitler’s Festung Europa. Andy McLagen was accepted into the program, earned his wings, and by spring 1943 was transferred to a fighter pilot replacement pool in London. Just a few weeks before the 351st began combat operations, he was assigned to the group to replace a lost wingman (the ill-fated Wayne Donophan, ironica
lly enough).

  He quickly proved his mettle, gaining a reputation as one of the steadiest of the new pilots. On his third mission, his element leader’s aeroplane was struck in the engine. The leader ordered McLagen to stay with the group while he tried for home. Albert Markham, who was leading the mission, issued the same order, taking on the responsibility of escorting the crippled ship home. But Andy McLagen didn’t go, and when a gaggle of FW-190’s pounced he didn’t flinch, fighting them off alongside Markham.

  A few days later, Markham and Colonel Adams called the youngster into the CO’s office. “The kid was so nervous I thought he was going to pee in his pants,” Korczukowski chuckled, as he relived the story for listeners some time after. “I guess he thought Al and the old man were going to prang him for disobeying orders. And they knew he was sweating, too. They let him sit out in my office and stew, and when they finally called him in they were sitting there stone-faced. Like the Inquisition.”

  When finally McLagen was admitted, Adams cowed him immediately, declaring, “I’ve got the best boys in the world flying for me! They’re too good to have some low-rent striper flying on their wing!”

  “I swear,” Korczukowski told me, grinning, “you could see that kid’s arms flinch, like those sergeant’s stripes were biting him.”

  Then Al Markham, without so much as the flicker of a smile, handed Andy the gold bars of a second lieutenant. “There,” he said. “That takes care of that.”

  The battlefield commission was a long way to come for somebody from a family that had yet to produce a member who had finished his schooling or seen much beyond a few miles of Virginia and North Carolina. Andy’s mates were just as proud of him as he was of himself. He became something of a mascot to them, being the youngest in his squadron, and, arguably, the most naive. For all the miles he’d logged he’d seen precious little: mostly military installations and a few tentative, excitingly sinful forays into saloons with his comrades. The story went that even on the excursion to the Brighton brothel, wherein his squadron fellows conspired with a prostitute to finally deflower the lad, Andy remained a gentleman behind the closed door of the lady’s boudoir, exchanging nothing more than conversation with her. When affectionately badgered about the encounter, he blushed and dissembled for, whatever the truth of the matter was, he still remained too much the good child of his parents to divulge details of his personal affairs.