The Last Mission Read online

  I read on for another hour, covering our further meeting and other phases of his investigation, admiring the skill with which he assembled the pieces—all but the one piece I had refused to give him until it didn’t really matter anymore.

  Then

  I steered her across the street, my fingertips barely touching her elbow, and nearly got us both killed when I looked the wrong way. Angela had to snatch me back from in front of a lorry that was driving on the English side and then hustle me onto the sidewalk. She made a moment of small talk about England standing alone in its driving habits, and then fell into an uneasy silence. She told me later that she was embarrassed, shepherding an American officer around in front of her neighbors.

  The English women were in a precarious position. As Colonel Mast kept reminding me, our air bases and our military economy dwarfed the hamlets and the lifestyle of East Anglia. So even though we were allies more or less sharing a common language, we were still an occupying force, not entirely unlike the Germans in Vichy, France. On the one hand, it was a patriotic duty to make the Yanks feel at home, but on the other hand there was an element of consorting with the enemy involved when a local girl took up with an American soldier.

  I suggested The Traveler, because we happened to be standing at its front door, and because I didn’t know of any other restaurant in Whittingbridge. She hesitated, and I should have caught the clue, but she let herself be guided through the front door. When I saw the registration desk and the key hooks for the half dozen rooms upstairs, I understood her problem. Someone out on the street could easily think the worst of her.

  We cut through the pub room, where enough heads turned to indicate that the Americans hadn’t yet taken over the place. The dining room was in the back, with tape strips securing the glass in windows that looked out over a garden. The wooden floor was contoured by perhaps a thousand years of travelers’ footsteps, and the tables were small enough to accommodate those who preferred to dine alone. Only one place was taken, by a scholarly type who had stacked several books where a second chair was pulled up to the table and who was eating his dinner around the pages of a volume that held his undivided attention.

  Rationing wasn’t just a patriotic gesture in wartime England. Food was actually in very short supply. In The Traveler, you could choose from any number of ales and whiskeys, but you had to pick either shepherd’s pie, which was nearly meatless, or fish and chips that were short on fish. We both ordered the pie, and then Angela busied herself with taking in the details of the room, while I sat dumbly and stared at her.

  “I hope I can be of some help with the photographs,” she finally said to remind me of the intended reason for our being together. “I met only a few of Mary’s friends; none of them are in the photograph.”

  Browning’s investigation. Of course! That’s what we could talk about. I jumped right in with mindless chatter about how I could best gather the photos for her to review. I could pull files on all the officers who had ever been at the Bridge, and working with her description, eliminate the ones who were completely wrong. Then we could meet every few days and she could look through the ones I had been able to gather. I made it sound as if it would require several meetings. I wanted her committed to an ongoing relationship.

  My heart nearly stopped when she mentioned the other bases. Was she also meeting with the public-affairs officers of the other squadrons? It made sense that she would be, since Browning wasn’t really sure of the American’s unit. The thought that some other American lieutenant might be spending even a minute with Angela was terrifying. I had no intention of sharing her.

  “What other units?” I demanded.

  “I’m not sure. Sergeant Browning thinks the unit at Whittingbridge is the most likely, but he asked me if I would be willing to talk with other Americans.”

  “But you haven’t…yet…”

  “No,” she said, “not yet.”

  I knew I had to start paying attention. I had to listen to her descriptions and make damn sure I kept the Bridge looking like a very promising source.

  Over the pies, which were truly awful, she described a few other officers—men in their early twenties and apparently head over heels in love with Mary Brock. With one, they had double-dated, she going with Captain Dan something-or-other, and Mary with a lieutenant named Howie. It hadn’t been a memorable evening. Dan had immediately drunk himself into a vulgar caricature, and Howie had talked Mary into leaving less than an hour after they arrived at the party. She couldn’t recall that he had ever directed a word to her. She would certainly recognize Dan, although she hoped she wouldn’t have to meet with him again. She had left him facedown on a table, and had seen herself home.

  Another time, Angela had come into a community dance and seen Mary in the arms of the American officer, scarcely moving their feet to the big-band sound. When the music stopped, she followed Mary and her friend over to a table where two other Americans were sitting. It seemed natural for Mary to invite her to join them, but Mary had paid very little attention to her. Then, when one of the offers invited her to sit down, Mary had announced that Angela had other plans.

  “I saw her several times with American officers, and I know she was seeing quite a few of them. She seemed to have a date nearly every night. At least she said she did. There’s a lot of overtime work, and all of us can use the extra money, but Mary never put in for overtime. She always seemed to be hurrying home to dress.”

  When we finished the pie, they brought a pot of tea and a pitcher of milk. Angela showed me how to pour, apologizing that there was no sugar and no cream. “It’s not at all the same,” she said, “but I suppose we’ll just have to get used to it.”

  I took her hand, surprising myself as much as Angela. Her eyes opened wide and there was a second when I thought she would pull her hand away. She had every reason to. Touching her was a confession of my true purpose in asking her to dinner. It was an announcement that I didn’t give a damn about Mary Brock’s suitors and I wasn’t at all interested in learning how to pour tea. She was my only interest. Angela didn’t respond, but neither did she take her hand away.

  It wasn’t a gesture of intimacy. At the time, I didn’t have a single carnal thought. What I had done was take hold of a lifeline, and I was clinging to it, just as I was trying to cling to myself. It was only years later, when I was living a very different existence, that I realized that was the instant when I fell most completely in love. That’s what love is, I think: the inability to distinguish between yourself and another person. Or, in a positive light, the realization that you and another person are inseparably entwined. I knew that my life was hers, and I hoped that her life would be mine.

  It didn’t matter that we didn’t know each other or that we were from two very different worlds. It didn’t imply anything about the future. In that place, at that time, there was no past—and there certainly was no future.

  Airmen were vanishing every second, and vanishing is exactly the right word. A plane with ten men aboard would be cruising beside you. Then there would be a flash, a puff of smoke, and they were gone. Everything was gone. The plane. The giant engines that powered it. The men you had seen in the cockpit and peering out through the glazed nose. Puff! They were gone, as if they were props in a magician’s trick.

  Most often you never even got to see the flash or the puff of smoke. You came back from a mission, stuck your head into a friend’s sleeping quarters, and saw the mattress turned up, the closet empty. He was gone! Vanished into thin air, never to be seen again—not by his friends, nor his parents, nor the girl he had left behind. He had been a person formed by the details of a past and aimed by the magnetic pull of his plans for the future. Now he was nothing. Absolutely nothing.

  Soon, there was no longer a magnetic pull. It was ridiculous to think about a future that extended beyond the next mission. The next takeoff was the only future that was assured, and when the future vanished, the past became irrelevant. The past has meaning because i
t brings us to where we are. Once we vanish, the past has brought us to nowhere.

  In East Anglia, in 1944, there was only “now.” Right now! You were here for reasons you couldn’t understand. You were climbing aboard a primitive machine loaded with high explosives, which made no sense at all. In an instant you were going to be gone. All that made sense was the breath you were drawing, and if you were lucky enough to see outside yourself, the hand you were holding. At that instant, Angela’s hand was the only thing that was real. It was my connection to something beyond the mindless insanity I was living.

  I clung to her hand as I walked her home along Bridge Street, past the windows that were hidden behind blackout curtains. She brought me in and introduced me to her parents, who eyed me suspiciously while they were inviting me to have tea. I accepted, solely for the opportunity of spending another few minutes with Angela. We talked, but I have no recollection of the conversation. Angela saw me to the door, with her mother peering over her shoulder and her father peering over her mother’s shoulder. I was halfway down the walk when I realized that I had no idea of how I could contact her again.

  Her mother answered when I knocked, then Angela came down the steps at the sound of my voice. “The photographs,” I said, trying to sound as if I was on official business. “How will I reach you so you can review them?”

  They had no telephone, and there would be no new installations until after the war. We couldn’t pick a time and place, because I had no idea when I would have time between missions. “I’ll contact Sergeant Browning,” I suggested, and for an instant that was our plan.

  “You could call me at work,” she suddenly remembered. “If you were calling from your air base on official business, they’d have to put you through. That’s what my company does, you know. We construct air bases.”

  She wrote a phone number and pressed the paper into my hand. When I reached the street, I stole a look back and saw her light go on in a second-floor window. Then I noticed her mother peering out from behind a ground-floor curtain and her father’s face just behind her. I knew they were both hoping they had seen the last of me.

  I walked halfway to the base and then hitched a ride with a supply truck that was bringing in the next week’s ration of vegetables. All the way home, I pondered the miracle of finding her in this dark, desolate war, and planned how I would see her again. Assembling a few photos was no problem, and I had a telephone number to reach her, but I was taking over command of my first crew, and between training and missions there wouldn’t be much time for my collateral work as community-relations officer. There was also a transportation problem. I was dependent on our military shuttle runs to get into town, and couldn’t count on being lucky enough to catch a supply truck when I was returning after hours. Most daunting was the problem of where I was going to see her. So far we had been together in a police station, a public house, and her parents’ parlor. None were suitable for our next meeting. I needed to find a private place, where I could tell her exactly what was happening to me. I had to find something a little more intimate so I could explain that she had become my only reason for breathing. I tossed all night with the reality that there was only one transportation run, and that the only place it went was into Whittingbridge. There really was no place where we could escape together. But then, only a few hours later, my problems were solved by a stroke of fortune. Michael Carberry sat down next to me at breakfast.

  Like myself, Carberry had just gotten command of a B-17. He had been at the Bridge a few months longer than I, and had been copilot on two different ships. His first ride was with Captain Butch Thomas, who had flown the first mission out of Whittingbridge and who ran up twenty-two raids over Europe. When he had reached the magic number twenty, earning a return to stateside duty, they had increased the number to twenty-five. He returned from his twenty-second raid with uncontrollable shakes in his hands and had spent a full week in the base hospital. When they tried to release him, he cut his wrists with a surgical blade and was shipped back home to recover. Carberry probably would have taken his place, but on that same mission Lieutenant Lew Ott, another twenty-one-year-old veteran, had brought a wrecked Fortress in for a crash landing and the plane had split in half. Lew needed a mount and was given command of Butch Thomas’s plane.

  Carberry was stuck in the right-hand seat until four new Fortresses were delivered. He got one of them and I got another. Two planes that were left in another bomber squadron were moved in to fill the holes in our squadron, and a completely new squadron—with its own crews—flew in to join us. Everyone was bumped around except Colonel Mast, who was on his twenty-eighth mission and his third Flying Fortress. He was still flying in the last box, where he could look down and see all the players.

  That morning, while we were pushing powdered eggs around our plates, Michael told me about the car he had almost bought. “Ugly little thing with a pug nose and oversized bumpers, painted piss yellow, but it’s as clean as the day it left the factory, and the motor looks like it was done with a toothbrush.”

  He had seen the advertisement posted in a sweet shop, and then had followed the owner around back to a garage. “Full of cartons and old baking machines, with the car covered by a tarp in the center. I almost threw up when I saw the color, but the more I looked at it, the more I liked it.”

  It was a four-door sedan, quite comfortable by British standards, but unbelievably cramped compared to American cars. Four people probably could have gotten in for a short trip, but only one of them could bring luggage. The trunk, or the “boot,” as the owner kept calling it, was too small for a two-suiter. It had been bought sometime during the phony war, when England was technically at war with Germany in protest over the invasion of Poland. Then, when the shooting started for real and gasoline became more valuable than gold, it had been put up on blocks for the duration.

  The storekeeper wanted two hundred, and Carberry offered one fifty. They settled for one seventy-five, and Michael had gone back to the base to work out a deal for gasoline at the auto pool and get his life savings out of his sock.

  “The sergeant at the garage promised me four gallons a week if he could use the car whenever I didn’t need it. He’s a mechanic, so I knew he’d take good care of it. It seemed like the perfect deal, so I went back to the sweet shop with the money in fives and tens. I was figuring I’d get him to throw free garage space in on the deal, but the Limey just laughed at me. He wanted a hundred seventy-five pounds, not a hundred seventy-five dollars. That’s almost eight hundred bucks. Christ, I could get a real Ford or Dodge for that kind of money!”

  “If there was a real Ford or Dodge for sale in Whittingbridge,” I reminded him. And then it hit me. A car was the solution to my problem. With a car, I could take Angela out into the country for long walks and picnics. We wouldn’t always have to be under the scrutiny of her neighbors or in the presence of her parents. A car was a gift from heaven.

  Of course there would be problems. Carberry and I would be on the same schedule, so we’d probably both want to use the car at the same time, and double usage meant twice as much gas. I’d have to work out my own deal with the sergeant at the motor pool, but those were just details.

  “What do you think is the lowest price he’d let it go for?” I asked Carberry.

  “I don’t know. It wasn’t easy to get him down to one seventy-five. Maybe one sixty.”

  “What if you promised to rent the garage space from him? That would be more money for him that you wouldn’t have to come up with all at once.”

  He agreed that a promise of rental income would make a difference. “Maybe then one fifty would do it.” Then he remembered the heart of the matter. “But that’s still pounds. In real money it would be close to seven hundred dollars. All I’ve got is two fifty…maybe two sixty.”

  It was then that I suggested a partnership. I had three hundred in my footlocker, and another fifty coming in on payday from guys who had lost in a poker game. We were up to six hundred. That,
plus five pounds a month for the garage space, was a pretty good offer for a car that wasn’t going to go anywhere without American gasoline.

  The mission that day was, in truth, one of our easiest. We were up to the German submarine pens again, and the fighters were with us all the way. We came in from the North Sea, so we didn’t see a single puff of flak until we were over the target. German fighters scrambled, but only a few got through our fighter screen, and only one did any damage. One of our planes got two engines shot out and had to ditch off the Dutch coast. The Brits had already picked up the crew by the time we got back to base.

  It was a frightening day for Carberry and me, because we were both taking off in the left seat for the first time. We each had our own plane, and each was fully responsible for the nine guys flying with us.

  I remember trying to hide my fear from my crew. I tried to swagger a bit, the way I remember Brombeck walking to the plane. I slipped a stick of gum into my mouth before I tossed my parachute up into the hatch and pulled myself up after it. My copilot, Ron Brown, was even greener than I was. A twenty-year-old lieutenant with peach fuzz that didn’t even need shaving, his entire combat experience was two missions in the right seat, next to Colonel Mast. In the world we were meant to grow up in, we would have been working as soda jerks, or maybe trying to smuggle two coeds into a college frat house. Instead, we were firing up four balky engines on the fragile wings of a primitive flying machine. A few feet behind us were three tons of high explosives, and scattered all around us were other children who more or less were entrusting their lives to us. We were going to take this hollow tube of bare metal, with all our lives and its lethal cargo, up four and a half miles into the sky. Then, using navigational aids that weren’t much more advanced from those used by the Vikings, we were going to fly that creaking structure out over the North Sea to a very specific point of land.