Armageddon_ A Novel of Berlin - Leon Uris [263]
“Be right over, General.” He set down the phone and looked at his astonished wife. “That’s the name of the game,” he said.
Chapter Eighteen
IT RAINED A DELUGE. Rhein/Mud was a lake.
Miserable teams of displaced persons and drenched airmen prepared the line of Skymasters for flight. Hiram Stonebraker’s car, bearing a limp wet flag with two stars, stopped before Operations, 7497th Airlift Wing, as bloc time approached.
On sight of the general, the sign regarding Ball Breaker’s Feed and Coal Bin was stashed away for display at a more appropriate time.
Stonebraker, shaking the water off him, entered the chief pilot’s office.
“You going to run us up to Berlin, Captain?”
“Yes, sir,” Scott Davidson answered. “We’ll be number fifteen in the bloc.”
“When you reach Tempelhof Airways, tell them I want to try out a ground-controlled approach.”
Scott studied the wicked downpour outside. “Couldn’t of picked a better day for it, General.”
“See you at the briefing. By the way, Scott, getting enough flying time?”
“Plenty ... sir.”
As Stonebraker stepped back into the hall two pilots were reading the Task Force Times and laughing. The cartoon depicted the weatherman having hung himself and two pilots on seeing the body commented, “Oh-oh, the weather’s bad again.”
Thirty crews drawn from a cross section of squadrons filed into the briefing room. The weatherman stood before his map.
“The European Continent is under the influence of a deep low off the British Isles causing a prognosis of bad flying weather for the next forty-eight hours.”
A grumble around the room.
“Ceilings will vary from zero to five hundred feet, visibility from zero to one and a half miles.”
“Lovely,” Nick Papas mumbled.
“A tight pressure gradient causing strong winds aloft from the northwest, three hundred fifteen degrees. Winds will be forty to forty-five knots.”
It would be a long day.
Scott Davidson stood before the men and briefed them on new VHF radio installations and beacons in the center corridor, then gave a lecture about being fed up with the numerous little accidents on the ground which were causing great time waste. He spoke of the tricks of taxiing heavy loads, executing turns, and braking carefully to handle the delicate nose wheel of the C-54.
As Hiram Stonebraker heard him speak he felt smug about his hunch on Davidson. Scott had been able to charm commanders’ wives, con and duck responsibility in the past, but was quick to recognize that with Stonebraker his luck had run out, temporarily. Then, keeping the big birds in the corridor and getting tons into Berlin became like wartime all over. The mudhole of a base, the urgency of the Airlift, and the endless challenges were turning him into a fine chief pilot. Scott ended the briefing by repeating his own dislike of cigar smoking in the cabin ... for Nick’s benefit.
Stonebraker and Clint Loveless waited in the staff car near the craft as the rain pelted down on the team of a dozen Polish displaced persons and the American sergeant in charge of the loading. They became drenched beneath their ponchos as they filled the ship with sacks of coal, barrels of asphalt, and married the load to distribute it evenly with a number of lightly packaged cartons marked DANISH CHEESE.
Stan Kitchek and Flight Engineer Nick Papas walked around in ankle-deep water in the pre-takeoff inspection while Scott signed his clearance forms at Operations and picked up a flight kit.
The steps were rolled up and they all boarded. Clint sat in a jump seat installed in the rear of the flight deck. The general stood behind the copilot. Up and down the hardstands trucks drove off, stairs rolled away, wheel chocks were pulled, engines coughed to life, and the line of birds started taxiing carefully on the wet taxiways.
As bloc time approached Scott watched as the tower released the first plane. As its engines revved to takeoff power, sheets of water gushed off the wings. It sloshed down the runway leaving a high spray and went