The Last Mission Page 10

  His pencil notes recall his demand that I produce Roger Wilson for questioning. I promised to bring Roger into the station or to arrange for Browning to meet him in my office at the base. That meeting occurred a few days later.

  I had promised Roger that I would get him an all-day pass from our legal officer. He could meet with Browning for a few minutes at the police station and then spend the rest of the day in town. He wasn’t interested in getting involved with the local police, so I had upped the ante. He could take my car for the day and use it to drive out into the countryside. I sensed him weakening. Finally I promised to try and get him a date with one of Angela’s friends. He began spit shining his military cordovans.

  But the legal officer nixed the deal. Any interview with outside authorities would be in his office, in his presence, he had insisted. Then he had spent ten minutes reminding me just whose side I was supposed to be on.

  “You tell your Limey policeman to go piss into the wind. If he wants to talk to our people, he’ll have to go through channels, and that means he’ll have to go through me.” I told Browning that I had arranged an interview at the base and took full credit for making Roger Wilson available. I didn’t want him locking onto our legal officer, or ever bringing Angela onto the base.

  Browning wasn’t satisfied with the interview. His official entry reported: “Captain Wilson admits freely that he was very taken by Mary Brock and did become intimate with her. He was adamant that she had never requested any money for her favors, and had never mentioned his military insurance. Captain Wilson claimed he was heartsick when Miss Brock suddenly disappeared, and devastated by the news of her death.”

  His handwritten notes tell a different story. He didn’t believe that Wilson was sharing all that he knew. Roger, he speculated, knew of Mary Brock’s other relationships, and so expected no special loyalty.

  I keep plowing through the records, wondering if Browning will come any closer to the truth. I find a copy of what appears to be a court order, allowing him to examine Mary Brock’s bank records. I’m curious where that trail might have led him, but it’s late and I want to rest before my meeting with Arthur Lyons’s friend. I return the files and drive back to the Travelers Inn.

  Herbert Little is ironically tall and gaunt, with a bullet-like head and thick, horn-rimmed spectacles. He is hollow chested and round shouldered, and continually sucks cigarettes through a nicotine-stained moustache. The smoke is annoying, but not nearly as annoying as the meaningless giggle that follows his every statement. We sit at the bar while Arthur Lyons drops into the conversation between his customers. After an hour of smoke, giggles, and cocktails, I’m beginning to wish that Arthur had never introduced us. I keep asking about Sergeant Browning and Little keeps trying to answer, but he keeps getting distracted into stories that take him far from my questions. It’s obvious that he is a professional busybody as well as an amateur historian.

  “Now, John Browning,” he suddenly says, as if the name was new to our conversation, “put in his papers in ’61. Or maybe it was ’62. Early sixties, anyway,” and then he giggles without reason. “Good man, old Brownie. Made sergeant when he was a youngster, but never got any higher. His own man, you know. Wouldn’t kiss up to the authorities.”

  “His own man” describes Sergeant Browning perfectly. He wouldn’t kiss up to the military either. “Did he stay here in Whittingbridge?” I ask.

  “Oh, sure. This place was his life. He might not have been popular with the higher-ups, but he had lots of friends in town.” Another giggle. “He was buried out of his house over on River Street. Left a wife and two sons. Fine family.”

  “What happened to them?”

  “Well, of course the missus died a few years later. Summer of ’67, I think. And then the boys drifted off to their own lives. Only one of them stayed in the area. Martin, I think. Yes, Martin. He lives up in Norwich.”

  I keep digging for details, but it seems there was nothing remarkable about Detective Sergeant Browning or any of his family. “Fine people,” Herbert Little keeps repeating, and adding stories of their neighborliness and service to the community. All he can do is confirm my own fond memories of the sergeant.

  “Did you know the Priests, by any chance?”

  Little nods and then gestures to Lyons for another whiskey and vermouth. “Over on the Bridge Road,” he says. “Thomas, Sarah, and their daughter. Kept to themselves, mostly. I didn’t get to know Thom until after Sarah died. Then he’d come in every now and then for a pint.”

  Arthur Lyons is setting Little’s drink on the bar when the man giggles briefly and then says, “The daughter left after her mother died. She was very close to her mom. Took up with one of your Yank flyers during the war, and I guess he deserted her. She never had much of a life of her own, at least not while she was living here.”

  Lyons happens to be looking at me and sees the streak of pain that crosses my face. His expression tells me he knows that I was the Yank flyer. He’s in the process of figuring out that Thom Priest’s daughter is one of the reasons why I’ve come back.

  Then

  We knew we were going to the Ruhr. The target hadn’t been announced, so we hadn’t yet been confined to base. We hadn’t been told the special code names or issued the new codebooks or secret radio frequencies that would be employed to keep the Germans bewildered. But, as was typical of the military, everyone knew. We used to say that if you wanted to know the target of the next raid, all you had to do was ask one of the madams in London.

  There was no particular reason to keep the mission secret. The Germans knew better than we did that it was an important industrial center, and they had surrounded it with antiaircraft guns and fighter fields. So they would be there waiting for us, whether we told them or not. Then we had signaled our interest by mounting a three-hundred-plane raid on the factories in the early summer. It had been a disaster, with eighty planes lost over the target, our formations scattered, and two thousand tons of bombs dropped on junkyards half a mile from ground zero. As one wag put it, the Nazis would have paid us to pulverize their scrap metal. Somebody had to grind it up before it could be used again.

  The logical answer to a failed three-hundred-plane raid was a five-hundred-plane raid, or so someone in communications surmised from the number of addresses on each piece of traffic. “Every squadron in England is going,” was the way the rumor had it, and those kinds of numbers meant the Ruhr. It was an important military target. Steel, chemicals, electrical components—certainly things you need to fight a war—but it was even more important to the Air Force generals as a psychological target. They needed to prove that we could bomb it in daylight with pinpoint accuracy.

  I didn’t mention the place to Angela. In fact, I didn’t even tell her that we were standing up for a mission. But there must be a tone change in your voice when you’re frightened, or a mannerism that indicates you’re not telling the whole truth, because she had pretty much figured it out. Not the target or the details of the plan, of course, just that I was about to take off on a different kind of mission and that there was every chance I wouldn’t be coming back.

  We had been together twice since our meeting in the police station. We met again at her home, where she looked through stacks of U.S. officers’ mug shots. It was clearly a business meeting, as evidenced by the fact that she did pick out the men who had been with Mary Brock, but it turned social when her mother asked me to stay for supper and her father dusted off a treasured bottle of scotch whiskey. We had a few minutes alone when I could have said something personal and important, but I blew it badly and ended up promising to call her if we needed any more photos reviewed.

  Our next meeting was probably our first date—a double date with Michael Carberry and a girl Angela knew from school. We arrived in the Austin, just filled with two weeks’ of gas from the carpool sergeant who had already used the car twice. “Run it harder than an American car,” he advised us. “The engine is smaller than the motors we use in vac
uum cleaners, and don’t try to get laid in the back seat. It can’t be done, even if you and your girl are both trying.” That, of course, wasn’t on the agenda at all. Michael was desperately loyal to a girl named Alice, whose picture was on his desk, and I wasn’t about to betray Kay, whose picture was on my desk, with Michael as a witness. We were just out for a day of clean, happy fun. A moment of peace away from the war. Or at least that’s what we decided to tell one another.

  Angela and her friend had put together a picnic basket with four bottles of bitter, some apples, and a stack of crustless sandwiches. We spread our blanket at the turn of a stream, or the edge of a marsh. They’re the same things in East Anglia, where much of the land is a tidal marsh. Then we began with safe conversation. Michael allowed that there was a spot just like this back in North Dakota. He talked about the crops they raised and the dairy cows they kept. Angela’s friend laughed at everything he said. Angela and I were mostly quiet.

  Michael and the girl went for a walk, at his urging. She may have been hoping that he was trying to get her alone for a little romance, but I knew he was simply trying to give Angela and me a chance to be alone. As soon as they were gone, we began talking. She had lived here all her life and found the area boring and uneventful. She had finished her secondary schooling in a brick school in Norwich and gone on to a business and secretarial school. She wanted to move to London, which her parents opposed, and then the war had made the move impossible, so she was biding her time.

  Yes, she had a boyfriend whom she had met in secondary school. They were fond of each other, but not really in love. He had volunteered and joined up with the commandos. They had stopped writing soon after. No, I wasn’t the first American she had been out with. There had been a fighter pilot that she met at a base dance, and he had taken her out. She didn’t really like him and tried to cut him off, then she had felt terribly guilty when she learned that he had been lost in combat.

  I had taken my turn and told her about being born in the suburbs of New York City. As I described it, I realized it wasn’t much more exciting than her experience in Whittingbridge. I went to a public grade school, then to a religious prep school, and started college. Then I volunteered for the Army Air Force.

  Yes, I had a girlfriend, who was three years into her college education, and yes, we wrote to one another. We were neighbors and classmates—good friends rather than lovers. It had been at that moment that I realized it was true. Kay was wonderful, but it was habit that was keeping us together, and there really wasn’t any reason to assume that we would take up where we left off when I got home. And that was our date: an exchange of résumés revealing that neither of us had yet begun to live.

  Now we were together again, this time alone, spreading another blanket at the bend in the river. It was only two weeks later, but already the marsh grass had taken on a deeper, greener color. The sky was deep blue, with puffy clouds rolling in from the North Sea. I didn’t own a casual shirt, so I was in a uniform khaki with the collar open and the sleeves rolled up. She was in a colorful cotton dress, with no stockings, and wearing flat shoes that she kicked off as soon as we sat down.

  I had picked up a bottle of white wine that I assumed was good because the label was in French. Angela had fashioned small sandwiches out of cucumbers and spent much too much on pastry. The mess sergeant had contributed fresh oranges, a rare treat on the base and a totally unknown commodity in wartime England. We sat by the water’s edge, where the wine was chilling, cutting up the oranges that we had decided would be appetizers, and talked about the fates that had led us to this spot. And fates they seemed. It had taken a world war to rip me out of suburban childhood in America and carry me across to England, and it had taken a murder to bring her to the police station where we met.

  While I uncorked the wine, she distributed the sandwiches. I watched her as she took an infinitesimal bite. At that moment, when both our hands were occupied, she leaned forward and kissed my cheek. A quick, gentle kiss, because there were breadcrumbs on her lips.

  “Don’t be frightened,” Angela told me.

  “Frightened of a kiss?” I set the bottle down and reached for her, but she went on with her work of setting out the pastries.

  “Not the kiss. Whatever it is that has you so tense. Don’t worry about it now. This time is just for us, and we’ll take the next thing when the next thing comes.”

  “Maybe it’s just that I want to kiss you and I’m afraid you won’t let me.”

  She laughed. “That’s nothing to be afraid of.” Then she turned serious. “You have another mission coming up, don’t you? One that’s very dangerous?”

  I turned on the standard flyboy bravado. “They’re all dangerous, but this is what we’re trained for,” and so on.

  She listened, nodded, but saw right through it. “It must be terrible. I suppose you can never get it out of your mind.”

  I may have bristled at the suggestion that I could be afraid of anything, because she hurried to add that she was afraid herself, and with much less reason. “A few years ago,” she said, “when the German planes were coming over every night, I really thought I was going to die. Even when the Germans were headed for London, our planes were trying to stop them, so there was shooting and explosions. Sometimes the bombs would drop right around us, or a burning plane would crash in the street. At night we could see the fires burning in London. And then there was all that talk of a German invasion…”

  I poured her second glass of wine and mumbled a few words about how brave they all were. That wasn’t what she wanted.

  “I thought I would be killed,” she said, “and what frightened me was that I hadn’t really lived yet. I’ve been raised and educated and taught practical things like…” She raised the sandwich she was eating. “…like how to make cucumber sandwiches. But now what do I do with all I know? What kind of a life will I live? I was afraid I’d die before I ever found out.”

  “But you’re past that,” I said. “There are no more German planes and nobody is dropping any bombs around here.”

  “Do you know what you want your life to be like?” she demanded.

  I began telling her that I was studying science and thought I might like to be an engineer.

  “No, not what kind of work you’re going to do.” She cut me off. “What you’re going to be? What it is that’s going to keep you alive?”

  I knew instantly. It was her. Angela was what my life was going to be. This time I was the one who leaned forward, and she let me kiss her on the cheek, and then gently on her lips. But she pulled away as I pressed closer.

  “Why?” I asked.

  She focused on our blanket. “Because I don’t want us to care too much for each other. There are things you don’t know about me. I don’t want you to be disappointed, and I don’t want to be disappointed.”

  “Like with the American fighter pilot?

  “No, I was never for even an instant in love with him.”

  “Does that mean you’re in love with me?” I was teasing more than asking.

  “If we cared about each other…and then something happened…I’m afraid of what I’d feel.”

  “Don’t people in love always have to take a chance?”

  “Not like this. Not when you don’t really know me. When you might just decide to leave me. Or if something happened to you…”

  She looked up hopelessly, baffled by the riddle she had just posed.

  “Then it would be harder for both of us,” I said, completing her thought.

  She nodded. “That’s why we can’t let ourselves…plan. We just have to take the moment for whatever it is, don’t we? We can’t ask too much of each other.”

  What’s so obvious to me now is how young we both were. We were still children, led to this point in our lives by the decisions of others. We didn’t know what was coming, so like children, we were afraid of the dark. We had a big step ahead of us, and I think Angela was asking: Was I ready to step into adulthood? I think
she was telling me that she was ready, and asking if we might not hold hands as we walked.

  At the time I wasn’t open to deeper meanings. I was trying to get myself ready for our raid to the Ruhr.

  It had to be close to six hundred planes. We took off at first light and were still assembling our battle formations at 0930 as planes and squadrons and groups groped in a murky sky, trying to find their proper positions. Colonel Mast’s voice was like a whip, keeping his herd moving in line until we were bumped up next to another group of B-17s. Then a group of B-24 Liberators moved in next to us. The rumors were correct. Just about every American bomber in England was headed for the industrial heart of Germany—or at least any bomber that could make it into formation at twenty thousand feet.

  The radios were alive with problems. One squadron came out of the clouds and found itself in the middle of another squadron, climbing to a higher altitude. There were two collisions, sending four burning bombers plummeting down to the marshes. All around us wing tips were brushing wing tips, followed by radio blasts of swearing. Two of the close calls had to pull out because of damage to control surfaces, then a Fortress rode up on one of the Liberators and ground a tail off with its propeller. Pieces of the tail hit another Liberator, crashing through the glazed nose and killing two of its crew. Just in our attempts to get organized, six aircraft were destroyed and five more were crippled.

  Then there were the usual mechanical problems—engines running hot, low hydraulic pressure, loose bomb in a bomb bay—that sent another dozen planes back to base. Each one had to move down carefully through the formations that were assigned a lower altitude. More tipped wings, more swearing, more time lost. It was 1015 before the armada was out over the Channel.