The Last Mission Read online

  She did become part of an informal ring of thieves. There were bars and dance halls that we Americans frequented and there were women who made a profession of hanging out in those places. They must have talked among themselves and exchanged experiences, but there was no master plan. Fun and money were there for the taking. They brought a lot of women together.

  Angela hadn’t met her fighter pilot at one of the hangouts. Rather, she had gone as a hostess to a well-supervised church dance and she had broken the relationship off precisely because the young man was in a hurry for her favors. She had pulled his hand out from under her skirt and warned him. On the next date, when it had happened again, she had gotten up and left. Maybe he thought that the insurance assignment was the key to getting her into bed. Maybe he planned to show her his beneficiary form before he tried taking off her clothes, but it never came into play. His P-38 Lightning had disappeared in a ball of fire.

  The insurance money had been a surprise to her, and Browning’s allegations a shock. She was, as she told me over and over again, frightened out of her mind. It was all so unfair. Mary was conning dozens of Americans and not getting caught. Angela had gone out on just two dates and was now entrapped by an overzealous investigator.

  “How many guys did he have you working?” I asked.

  She stopped walking and looked up at me with a flash of anger. “How many?”

  I realized how I must have sounded. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that you were trifling with me, but I couldn’t have been the only one that Browning was after. There must have been others…from other bases…”

  She accepted that my question wasn’t meant as an accusation, and we continued our walk around the colleges. “Maybe he had other irons in the fire, but in the Mary Brock case there was just one base. Sergeant Browning already knew who the murderer was. His problem was that he couldn’t arrest the man. He was looking for a way to make the man give himself up.”

  Now I stopped abruptly. “He already knew? Then what…”

  “Mary Brock’s murderer was untouchable,” she said, “but the sergeant figured that if he could build a plausible case against someone else, the real killer would come forward. Devious little man, wasn’t he?”

  “So who was this killer that was untouchable?”

  “Colonel Mast,” Angela told me.

  I felt my face go blank. Angela’s eyes showed anxiety. I was trying to come to grips with the charge that my mentor and protector might have beaten a woman to death. She was unsure of what my reaction might be.

  “Colonel Mast? That’s impossible.” I stumbled to a park bench and sat down, my eyes still staring blankly. “Colonel Mast?”

  “It was Reg, not Rog,” she said when she eased down next to me, “and I saw him the night he took her off to kill her.”

  “But…” I had nothing to argue with. Mast was a marvelous leader, a brave pilot, and in the last seconds of his life he had proven the heroism that I always suspected. It was inconceivable that he could have brutalized a woman. I had never speculated on his defense in the killing of Mary Brock. I didn’t know where to begin.

  “Angela, please. How do you know this?”

  “From Mary, and something she told me. And from Sergeant Browning, who had to change his tactics after you left. Browning decided that he would never close the case. He thought he should tell me why.”

  Before I arrived in England, Mast had found out about the insurance. No one was sure exactly how, but there were so many possibilities that I had no difficulty believing that part of the story. One of his officers might have gone to him and told him about a dead friend who had changed his insurance. “She’s just some local girl, Colonel. I think he really would want the money going home to his mother.” Or it might have been one of the squadron clerks. “Colonel, I processed three killed in actions this morning. And two of them are sending their insurance money to the same woman. It struck me as strange, sir. Maybe even down right rotten. So I thought you ought to know.”

  Most likely he found out himself. Mast used to pull the records of the killed, missing, and wounded after every mission. He tried to add something personal about the boy to the form letter that would go home under his signature. “Your son flew extra missions to help us keep shorthanded planes in the air.” Or, “You will be proud to know that in addition to his combat duties, Gino assisted the Catholic chaplain in church services.” He thought it was bad enough that he had led a young man to his destruction. He didn’t want the families destroyed with him.

  When he learned, he probably ran his own investigation, and that would be when he found out about Mary Brock. He wouldn’t have seen anything innocent in the laughs and good times she had provided for his men.

  Mast practically walked the halls at night, wringing the blood from his hands, but his voice on the radio had no heart at all. A bomber would explode, sending engines, tails, and wings cartwheeling through the air. His young men would be tossed out into the sky, some of them trailing fire, some limbless, most just inert. Often the parachutes would open, carrying their passengers to unknown fates. Death under torture. Mutilations by citizens, mad from the bombings. Hunger and abuse in a prison camp. Sometimes the chute would open in shreds, incapable of arresting a falling body. Sometimes it would catch on fire. But Mast never let fear or horror into his voice. “Marron, move up to Leary’s place. Jacobs, take over for Marron.” Methodical, dispassionate, almost cold.

  Yet he remembered how every plane had been hit, and if the crew had made a mistake, he would point it out in his briefings. He remembered every letter he wrote. Mast could name every one of the young flyers who had passed through his command, and he fought back the tears over each of them. The thought that Mary Brock was playing on their fear and loneliness just to fill her bank account would have driven him to madness.

  He had a courier deliver a letter to her at her job. In the letter he told her that he wanted to meet with her to discuss the insurance money she had received from men under his command. Mary had mentioned the letter to Angela, treating it lightly. “Some officer who probably figures that with all the money his men have given me, he ought to be getting a little something for himself.”

  Angela had advised her to be careful, but Mary Brock was like a character out of the yellow journals. “I’ll cross my legs and give him a peek at my undies. Or maybe lean forward so he can see my titties.”

  “Mary, for heaven’s sake, this could be serious.”

  “Angela, how often do I have to tell you? You’ve got the answer to all their problems right between your legs.”

  “Mary!”

  “Don’t worry, Angela. Who knows? Maybe he’ll want to put my name on his insurance, too.”

  I knew what would have happened. In his mission commander’s voice, keeping his emotions behind clenched teeth, Mast would have warned her. He might even have threatened her and demanded the money returned so he could send it to the dead flyers’ families. And Mary Brock, queen of the tabloid lifestyle, would have made light of it. She probably struck a provocative pose and offered him a little entertainment for his troubles.

  Somewhere in the exchange, Colonel Mast would have remembered the final seconds of his pilots. He would have seen whole crews vanish in a flash of light. He would have watched a falling body struggling with a parachute, only to have the silk plume burst into flame. And Mary would have been orchestrating all that agony with an obscene laugh. At that point, I could easily visualize the colonel grabbing her throat and banging her head against a stone wall until he realized that he was spattered with her blood.

  “Colonel Mast.” I said to Angela, “When did you know?”

  “After your colonel crashed his plane. The sergeant wanted me to know that it was all over, and that the name I heard Mary call into the window of the staff car was Reg, and not Rog.”

  “When did Browning know?”

  “I’m not sure. He was suspicious when he introduced us, but he put it all together probably around t
he time you were sent home. I remember him wondering why anyone who tried to help him was sent back to the States at the first opportunity. That told him that someone at the top was trying to cover things up.”

  “But he said nothing. His notes just stop before the case is solved. In his official reports, he’s still looking for clues in the personnel records.”

  “He was in a bind of sorts,” Angela reminded me. “Quite clearly he would never be allowed to arrest the commanding officer of a bomber squadron that was helping win the war. His superiors wouldn’t have even let him file a charge. That’s probably why he didn’t mention the colonel in anything that his superiors might see. All he could do was keep up the pressure and hope that at some point Mast would come forward.”

  “But he never did?”

  “In a way he did. He killed himself so his plane wouldn’t crash into a house, or maybe a village. Browning said Mast had tried himself and made full atonement. The colonel became an English hero, and Sergeant Browning wasn’t going to dishonor his reputation. He didn’t want to leave a stain on all that the man had done for England, so he left the case open and his memoirs incomplete.”

  I sagged in disbelief. “Then Sergeant Browning was the one who broke us apart.”

  Angela agreed, but added, “He was also the one who brought us together.”

  “Just a simple, sentimental journey back to my war days. To tie up a few loose ends…”

  “I thought you should know. I hope you don’t mind my telling you all this.”

  We were in the car on our way back to her home when Angela suddenly asked, “Jim, do you think you’re going to hate me?”

  “What? Why would I hate you?”

  “Because I never told you. In all the months we were…seeing each other, I knew why we had been introduced. I could pretty much guess what was going on behind the scenes. I owed it to you to tell you the truth.”

  I agreed. “I suppose you did.”

  “But I loved you. Each time I tried to tell you, I thought it might be the end of us. And when you were suddenly gone, without a word, I assumed you had found out. I hoped you would come back, or call, so I could tell you how terribly sorry I was. So I suppose that’s what I want to say now. I’m sorry. I owed you better.”

  A few miles rolled by in silence, then I told her, “And I’m sorry. I owed you better.”

  There was nothing more to say, really. It had taken a world war, a murder, and an English investigation of an American war hero to bring us together. Certainly nothing we could have done by ourselves. Those very same events had torn us apart. We shouldn’t feel guilty. There was nothing we could have done about it.

  Now

  I leave Angela at her front door, pleading my need to get around the city to Heathrow as an excuse for not staying to dinner. We have chatted all the way back from Cambridge, exchanged addresses and phone numbers, and promised to write and call one another frequently. Trying to keep conversation fresh through another dinner would probably strain the two of us. As I get back into my car, I wonder whether we will really stay in touch. Does either of us have anything more to say to the other?

  My hotel is right on the airport grounds, so I’m able to book the next morning’s flight while I’m checking in. I lay out my travel clothes, shower, and wait until early afternoon—New York time—before I call Kit.

  “Where have you been?” she demands by way of greeting.

  “Did I miss curfew?”

  “Sorry, it’s just that I tried to reach you yesterday. You’d checked out of the inn and the people at the desk thought you had gone to the airport to catch your flight.”

  “No, I went up to Cambridge. An old friend is buried there.”

  “Well, the damn airlines wouldn’t tell me whether you were on one of their flights.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t know there was any rush.”

  “It’s Todd,” she says.

  I interrupt her. “Has he gone to Canada?”

  “Canada? No? Why would he go to Canada? He has his appeal hearing on Monday.”

  She explains that Bob Bacon has called in a political favor and has gotten an appeal hearing on Todd’s sentence. Todd has promised to wear a tie, eat crow, and to avoid all mention of cleaning park benches. Bacon has lined up two character witnesses: one a clergyman, and the other a member of the bar committee. I know both of them vaguely, but I can’t imagine what either of them could say on behalf of Todd. “Mr. Bacon is hoping you’ll refresh their memories with anecdotes about Todd’s activities. He says a bit of family schmoozing will certainly help.”

  I give Kit my arrival time and then call Bob Bacon. His secretary says he’s gone for the day, so I call his home and tell his recorder how grateful I am. I promise to be available to meet with anyone at any time. Then I spend the evening trying to remember stories about Todd that will reflect to his credit. I have plenty of them before his teen years, but uplifting events during the years when the minister would have known my son are tough to come by. Or at a minimum, they would certainly be subject to interpretation.

  There was the time, for example, when he was passionate about destroying all the world’s nuclear weapons. Certainly that would stand him well. But he and a group of his associates in disarmament jumped the fence at Electric Boat, broke into one of the assembly yards, and painted slogans in blood on the hull of an Ohio-class boomer. I wonder how impressed the judge would be by that incident, or the bar member who was going to be a character witness.

  Or the time when he chained himself across the VIP gate at the United Nations to keep the president of France from entering. That was when France was running nuclear tests out in Tahiti. He was a hero to the environmentalists, but I’m not sure how it will go over with the deans of the establishment. I remember that at the height of my business career, I regarded Todd as a pain in the ass. The people hearing his sentence appeal will think that was undue praise.

  In the morning I’m out to the gate, and after the usual international hassle, seated comfortably aboard a 747. We’re down the runway and into the air in a matter of seconds, then we’re climbing effortlessly to altitude. I think of Colonel Mast’s last flight. He would have been using every bit of power he could muster just to keep his Flying Fortress in the air.

  He had dropped his bombs, so the plane was relatively light. But on two engines, climbing was difficult, and with fuel spilling out of the lines from his wing tanks, it would have been foolhardy. What was the point in burning gas to climb higher? What he needed was every bit of range he could muster to make it back across the Channel.

  Below him, the American and British forces were in the process of closing the gap between Falaise and Argentan, encircling an entire German army group. There would be no antiaircraft fire and the Allied fighters had destroyed the Luftwaffe. Mast didn’t have to worry about being jumped by German fighters. He did his best to hold five thousand feet of altitude and ran his engines lean, to milk as many miles as possible from each gallon of fuel. When he broke out over the Channel, heading north to Dover, he was safely in Allied hands, but ditching at sea was no simple matter. The plane might break up, sinking in seconds, or it might cartwheel, battering the crew to unconsciousness. The best chance he could give his men would be to get them over land and find an open field for them to parachute into. Worst case would be a sprained ankle. Mast kept droning to the north, turning back the fuel to the carburetors, and giving up altitude a bit at a time to maintain his minimum airspeed.

  I can visualize what happened when he crossed over the shoreline. His fuel gauges were reading empty, but the two good engines were still running. He had no idea just how much aviation gas was left in the lines. Could he get another five minutes of power? Or would the engines quit within the next ten seconds? Could he land the plane with all hands safely aboard? Or would he stall, nose over, and take his crew to a fiery death?

  The colonel’s first concern was the men. He wouldn’t take any chances with their lives. He saw cle
ar fields coming up, ordered the bomb-bay doors opened, and told his men to get ready to jump. There were protests. His copilot would want to stay with him. The flight engineer would argue that he was needed. But there would be no discussion. “I said bail out,” Mast would say in a voice that put his decision beyond question. He would drop the flaps and the landing gear and hold a steady course into the wind while the chutes filled beneath him. His crew would land gently on friendly soil.

  Then he would have headed for the base. If the fuel held out, he would return the plane to its ground crew. Maybe they could repair it. At worst, they would scavenge it for spare parts. By committing to bring the bomber back, he accepted the dangerous consequences. If the tanks ran dry before he could line up his landing, he would have to stick with his plane. He wouldn’t be able to abandon it over the villages of East Anglia.

  He had probably crossed the Thames east of London, leaving his last chance for water ditching behind as he crossed into Essex. He was down to about two thousand feet and heading inland of the base to set up a landing into the wind. Somewhere along that line, one of his engines sputtered. He added fuel, hoping that there might be a few ounces left. Then the other engine shut down. Mast could feel the wings begin to tremble as they lost lift.

  On the ground, faces would have snapped upward. The drone of returning bombers was commonplace, and the English had seen all kinds coming in under all conditions. But the pop of a failing engine sounded their alarms. A plane was about to crash, hitting like a bomb into the pastoral countryside. People were suddenly in great danger.

  Colonel Mast eased the nose down, giving himself just enough airspeed to keep the big plane airborne. He glanced at the landscape that was coming up quickly. There was no time to pick and choose. He needed a field where he could see for himself that there were no houses, no barns, no roads, no place where an innocent civilian might be waiting. He saw one to the north, at the very extreme of his glide path, and turned the falling bomber toward it. The altimeter rolled down. The forest between him and the field rose up quickly. The only sound was the creaking of the airframe as it tried to obey the pilot’s will and stretch the crash out for another hundred feet.