The Last Mission Read online

“Don’t talk. Please don’t talk. Just let me hold you.”

  We stood in the rain, locked together, oblivious to the people darting around us, oblivious to the war we were all fighting. At that instant, we both knew exactly what our lives were going to be. And knowing that much, neither of us had to be afraid of the dark.

  Now

  Arthur Lyons is behind the wheel of my rental car, and Herbert Little is in the back seat, directly behind me. It’s early afternoon, and we are driving toward Norwich on one of the modern highways, hemmed in by the striped concrete walls. Above the barriers, the countryside is familiar; flat rather than rolling, trees small and short rooted, and always the sense of the nearby sea. The sky is gray, not from clouds, but from the low angle of the midday sun. Evening will come around three p.m., and nighttime by four.

  “Sounded pleasant enough,” Little says of his conversation with Martin Browning. “Hasn’t been back in Whittingbridge in quite a few years and doesn’t remember me at all, so he could just as easy have told me to take a flyer!”

  Little went to the library first thing in the morning and searched the telephone directories for Sergeant Browning’s son. He called the man and told him about the mysterious American who was trying to “solve a case your father worked on, for whatever good that might do.”

  Martin had been baffled by any show of interest in his father, and had doubted whether anything he remembered would be of any use. “Very confidential, the old man was. Never brought his work home with him.” But then he had added that his father had been planning to write his memoirs, “as if anyone would want to read about petty crimes and misdemeanors in a backwater place like Whittingbridge. He kept himself busy, cutting and pasting. It gave him something to do.”

  Little knew I would be interested and held out the possibility that the Yank might be willing to pay for the notes. “Probably a wild goose chase,” he told me, but he didn’t seem surprised by my enthusiasm. It was likely that Sergeant Browning would have been more open with his opinions and speculations in his memoirs than in official police records.

  Martin Browning is a short man with the same intense features that I remembered of his father, and the same polite, almost deferential manner, but apparently he lacks his father’s daring and curiosity. He had become a bank clerk when still in his teens, and had recently retired from the same bank as a head clerk. His life, spent as a bachelor, hadn’t involved much of a journey at all. Certainly nothing more daring than his only change of residence—from Whittingbridge to Norwich.

  He offers tea that is as fussy as if served by a dowager empress, and biscuits bought fresh for the occasion. We sit in soft sagging chairs that were probably arranged just as they had been in his boyhood home. I suspect he’s sitting in the one his father favored. Herbert Little repeats his entire telephone presentation, explaining me and my quest all over again. He giggles after each statement of fact—a habit that seems to annoy no one but me. Then he gives me the floor and settles back into the cushions.

  I try not to repeat what he has said, so I elaborate on the personal friendship I had with his father. Martin well remembers the American base out at the Bridge and young men in their dashing uniforms who had taken over his town. “So gallant,” he chuckles, “like Knights of the Round Table. It really galled me that I was too young to join up.” He has no trouble understanding how an English policeman in his forties would be working in partnership with an American officer only a few years older than himself. “Strange times,” he says, shaking his head.

  “So I left your country before the case was ever closed, and I’ve always wondered was it really one of the men from my squadron. I thought I had identified the killer, but I didn’t know whether your father did. I suppose I’ve been curious all these years.”

  I think I’ve finished my presentation, but Martin Browning is obviously expecting more. Surely I didn’t come back half a century later just to slake my curiosity. There must be some pressing reason to find the answer, and probably some monetary reward. He’s waiting for something along the lines of the payoff that Herbert Little had mentioned.

  “That was an important time in my life,” I continue, “and it ended abruptly because of my wound. I want to know how it might have turned out. That’s why I’m so anxious to see your father’s notes.”

  He nods. “Go on.” His expression seems to be encouraging.

  “Certainly this will involved some inconvenience on your part, and I’m more than willing to…compensate you…for your time.”

  “Reasonable,” Herbert Little comments.

  The detective’s son allows that he could probably spare the few days it might take to answer my questions about his father’s papers, and he could commit to keeping himself available as I dig through the material. In my head, I try to total up the hours he has in mind. Even if he were to give me twenty or thirty hours, they wouldn’t add up to a substantial payment.

  “Is there any inherent value in the notes?” Little butts in. “I mean, as a researcher and writer, I know that material can be very valuable in itself.” He giggles.

  “Yes,” Martin Browning agrees. “I had been thinking that I might do something with the notes myself. Perhaps there is a story line that might be interesting…”

  He seems to have changed his mind about the degree of interest in the petty crimes and misdemeanors of backwater Whittingbridge. I tell him I have no plans to write anything about his father, so I wouldn’t be interfering with any prospects that he might have. I can tell he’s disappointed. “But,” I add, “I would certainly pay for access to the material, if only out of deference to your father’s efforts.” He looks pleased that we are finally getting to the reason for having tea together. I assure him that if there is anything that might be valuable as history, he would continue to have full ownership.

  “Fair. Reasonable,” Little decides, and follows with his giggle.

  So I move to a price. “Suppose I pay you five hundred pounds for a look at your father’s notes, plus another five hundred for your help. Then, if there is some particular point of interest that I want to be able to make use of, we can negotiate a price for that.”

  Martin decides that an unexpected and unearned thousand pounds is reasonable, particularly when there is the added hope of even more. He excuses himself and returns with two large manila envelopes, the edges stained with a hint of mildew. “Pretty much as he left them, I’m afraid. I just haven’t gotten around to putting them in order.”

  I have my checkbook out and write in dollars at the current exchange rate. I refuse his offer of another cup of tea, shake hands, and follow my associates out of his house.

  “Steep price to pay for a pig in a poke,” Arthur Lyons says as we climb into the car.

  I promise to stand a round of drinks in celebration as soon as we get back to the inn. I add a word of gratitude to them for helping me pick up the trail of the life I left behind. We are in a jovial mood when we reach the hotel and start into the pub until the desk clerk calls me back to tell me that I have an urgent message from home.

  It’s just a few words from my daughter, Kit. Todd has done it again, and is being held on $100,000 bail. She can arrange the money by putting up her house, but that will take a couple of days. Is there something else I can suggest?

  I read it to mean that my son has gotten caught in one of his insane drug buys and that Kit’s husband is not about to pledge his own net worth for a ne’er-do-well brother-in-law. Who can blame him? I put through a call to my attorney and golf partner, catch him in his Manhattan office, and make arrangements for the bond. Then I call Kit and tell her answering machine that I’ve covered the cost and will be home on the next available plane.

  When I reach the bar, Arthur and Herbert have taken the liberty of starting without me. “Not bad news, I hope?” Arthur asks as I pull up a chair to their table.

  “No, just business. But I will have to go back to the States for a couple of days.”

  “But you�
��ll be back,” Herbert pleads, “to finish your investigation.” I can see that I’m the hottest piece of history he has in the works.

  “Oh, I’ll be back. I haven’t really learned anything yet.”

  “In the meantime, maybe we can find the Priest woman you were asking about,” Herbert suggests.

  I look over at Arthur Lyons, who must have told Herbert his suspicions about the Yank flyer who left Angela Priest and never came back. Arthur blushes, caught in the act of sharing my confidences. “I’d appreciate that,” I say, “if you can do it without bothering anyone in the Priest family—or letting the Priest woman know that I’ve been asking.”

  “Oh, we’ll certainly be discreet,” Herbert assures, then he signals to the daytime bartender for another round.

  Then

  We’re late boarding because the mechanics can’t get one of the movie screens working, then we’re late to the runway because of a traffic jam of outgoing flights. Soon we’re on the end of the runway, and a few seconds later we’re climbing through ten thousand feet. Nothing to it!

  I still marvel at the capabilities of modern airliners. They have power beyond the comprehension of the wartime pilots flying out of East Anglia. You don’t have to coax them into flying like we did with our B-17s. On a 747, you just pull the nose up and the engines blast it into the sky. And the navigation systems! The onboard electronics are exchanging signals with satellites that fix their locations down to a few feet. Inertial navigation systems back up the satellites, and then the pilots are talking to ground controllers, who can give them a range and bearing to anywhere. They can’t get lost. But I wonder how the two heroes up in the front seats would have handled my first Atlantic crossing. In 1943, everyone got lost.

  We assembled at Mitchell Field on Long Island, the place where Charles Lindbergh took off on his history-making flight to France. Lindbergh was a topic of black humor among our briefing officers: “He had one engine and you guys have four. So how hard can it be? And you don’t even have to go all the way to Paris. In fact, you better not, or you’ll be greeted in German.”

  We were thirty officers, aged eighteen to twenty-three, all wearing the shiny new wings they had pinned on us in flight school. Of the thirty, only one had been out of the country before. He was a kid from Detroit who used to sneak into Canada for cheap beer. Half of us had never been outside our hometowns before the war.

  None of us had ever been up in an airplane. And here we were, each with little more than a year’s training, checking out the six new Flying Fortresses that we were going to fly across the Atlantic to bases in England. They weren’t our planes or our bases; they simply had to get aircrews over to Europe and replacement aircraft to bases in East Anglia. Some genius had decided that it made sense to use the crews to ferry the planes, and the planes to transport the crews. It made perfect sense, until you realized that inexperienced crews were the ones most likely to make a mistake, and that brand-new aircraft were the ones most likely to malfunction. It was a combination that would have gotten along much better on short flights with a choice of landing fields.

  There was no set route for getting planes and crews into the war. Some went by ship, the planes in crates strapped to the deck, and the crews turning green in their bunks below deck. That was probably the safest way to go, even though lots of ships were sunk during the crossing.

  Other planes flew the old Pan American Airways route down the coast of Latin America and then across the South Atlantic at its narrowest point to West Africa. This was the easy way, with fair weather in both winter and summer. But in 1943, the ownership of airfields in Africa was still being contested, and you had to fly around the Iberian Peninsula. Spain and Portugal were officially neutral, but more sympathetic to the Fascists.

  We were taking the third route. We would follow the coastline to the northeast—past Maine, over New Brunswick, across the Cabot Strait, and then out to Gander, on the northeast coast of Newfoundland—a flight of nearly thirteen hundred miles. That was one of the longest legs of the trip, but the easiest, because there would always be land underneath us. We would overnight at Gander, take on fuel, and get ready for the next leg up to Cape Farvel at the southern tip of Greenland. It was only eight hundred miles, but flown entirely over desolate sea.

  From Greenland we had two choices, depending on winds and weather. We could fly another eight hundred miles to Keflavik, in Iceland, and then continue down from Iceland another twelve hundred miles to the English Midlands. Or, we could go from Cape Farvel directly to the west coast of England. The first choice took us to the edge of the Arctic Circle, where the winter weather was less than attractive. The latter involved a lonely fifteen hundred nonstop miles over water. Run into headwinds and you could easily come up short.

  No routine had yet been established. The plan was to get to Gander, wait on good weather for the flight to Greenland, and then decide whether we were going to Keflavik or trying for England, based on the weather forecast. The problem was that there were no weather forecasts for the desolate stretches of the Arctic Circle. In reality, the mission chief made his choice on gut instinct or the flip of a coin.

  “You’ll have three pilots, a navigator, and a bombardier on each plane,” our briefing officer told us. “The bombardier will handle the radios and do relief stints as a copilot. The navigator will have his hands full. If you get lost, he’s the first thing you throw out to lighten the plane.” He laughed, until he realized that no one else was laughing. We had heard rumors about flights that had disappeared on route.

  “You’ll be carrying extra gas,” he went on. “And you’ll be light. There will be no bombs, no guns, no ammunition, and no gun crews. The gunners will be going over on the Queen Mary. They’re too valuable to risk in a transatlantic flight.” He chuckled again, and once more found himself the only one laughing.

  A communications officer briefed us on the radio frequencies. We would pick up Gander when we were over Prince Edward Island. There was a homing beacon, but we wouldn’t need it. There were a dozen visual checkpoints, and when we got out over Newfoundland, the airport would be easy to pick up. There wasn’t much else on the northern coastline.

  Cape Farvel was another matter. We would be over water all the way. The navigator probably wouldn’t get a noon sun line, because the sharp edge of the sun was generally obscured in fog. You were on dead reckoning until you picked up the radio beacon, usually about 150 miles out. Obviously, it was better to err to the north, because you would have all of Greenland ahead of you. If you were too far south, there was only more water—most of it frozen.

  Our crews were read off. Since all the pilots were second lieutenants, fresh out of school, they had established seniority by birth dates. I would be the copilot on the second plane in the formation. What was more important was our navigator, who turned out to be the youngest one assigned. At that point, I would have welcomed the sea voyage.

  And that was it. We would get the rest of our instructions in Greenland. Takeoff was set for 0800 the next morning. Inexperienced crews in untested airplanes, and we were setting out to cross the Atlantic.

  Lindbergh had a better chance.

  We slept on cots in one of the hanger buildings and walked across the field to an administration building for a breakfast of coffee and doughnuts. Then we waited three hours while truck parts and foodstuffs were found, identified, and loaded onto three of the planes. They were for the base in Gander, and someone had realized how costly it would be to send them by truck and then ship, particularly at a time of year when the northern ports of Newfoundland were iced in. We were shipping aircrews and planes through Gander. How much trouble could it be for them to bring along the supplies that the base needed? So three of our planes wouldn’t be traveling light, and the rest of the group wouldn’t fly any faster or any higher than those planes could.

  Our three extra officers decided to stay back in the radio room during takeoff, near the open gun ports and rear entry door. It wasn’t much o
f a confidence vote for the pilot and me, but I was still at the stage when every takeoff was an adventure. I still marveled that I could get the B-17 into the air and then back down again, so if I wasn’t in the copilot’s seat, I probably would have been back in the radio room. We were off with runway to spare, formed up over Long Island Sound, and cruised at ten thousand feet over Connecticut. An hour into the trip I saw the great hook of Cape Cod reaching well out to sea, a shape I remembered from my grade school geography book. Then we were out over water, running parallel to the shoreline over the Gulf of Maine.

  It was an easy flight, with light tail winds and unlimited visibility. Our nineteen-year-old navigator was down in the nose, plotting dead reckoning lines on his charts, but he didn’t need them. Anyone on the plane could tell exactly where we were, just by looking out the window. When we had Nova Scotia off the right wing, we dialed in the Gander homing frequency. It came in loud and clear, an hour before we were expecting to pick it up.

  Our radio direction finder was state of the art, but in retrospect, a telling indication of just how primitive our equipment was. There was a circular antenna that protruded through the top of the navigator’s station, and stuck up directly in front of the pilot. The navigator turned the antenna manually, listening to the homing signal it was capturing. The signal peaked when the loop was lined up with it. All the navigator had to do was read the bearing when the signal sounded the loudest.

  The problem was that the loudest wasn’t much louder than the next to loudest. It was sort of in the eye of the beholder or, more accurately, in the ear of the listener. A good operator could easily be ten degrees off at this range. Two different operators might disagree by as much as twenty degrees. And a twenty-degree error, stretched out over the four hundred miles we still had to fly, could be the difference between a routine landing and running out of fuel. So while we saw the loop antenna turning in front of us and heard the navigator’s recommended course, we continued to steer by what we could see out the window.