Armageddon_ A Novel of Berlin - Leon Uris [266]
Igor Karlovy had arrived early at the Berlin Air Safety Center so he could follow the progress of the day when he learned of the bad weather. He monitored the American and British confusion, and heard them sent home in defeat He smiled inwardly as his prediction came to pass.
Chapter Nineteen
CLINT WAS SO WORRIED that the general would have a seizure on the return trip that he forgot how rough the flight was. But the general was amazingly calm. The worst had happened. While the young hands floundered, his years of experience averted a crash. On the return to Rhein/Main he sat at Nick’s seat with a pad and pencil searching for an illusive bit of magic.
Clint Loveless was down as he had never been down. He hardly heard Judy’s cry for joy when he returned to the hotel. As luck, or someone else’s misfortune had it, an Army colonel from Camp Perry had broken with his wife and their house became available. Judy had seen it. It was a lovely six-room place on Gustav Freytag Strasse in a beautiful area where most of the American families lived in requisitioned houses.
What she did not know was that Hiram Stonebraker had threatened the housing procurement officer’s life if he failed to find a place for the Loveless family.
“What the hell’s the difference,” Clint said sourly, “we’ll probably be going back to the States soon. The Lift was finished today.”
“Oh, Clint ... I’m so sorry. The general?”
“He still refuses to believe it.”
A mantle of gloom fell on Airlift Headquarters as the Tonnage Board in the Control Center read ZERO for the second straight day as the weather closed Berlin down.
Hiram Stonebraker stayed in his suite and studied. The Lift in basic form was two one-way streets into Berlin, the North and South corridors. A single one-way street, the Central corridor, was used to leave Berlin.
Similar makes of aircraft flew in bloc times at the same speed and staggered altitudes of five hundred feet. Precision flying in the narrow air lanes through absolute power settings had become a science. It all narrowed down to a single bottleneck—the air over Berlin.
The ground-controlled approach system had put down the first three planes of the bloc cleanly. When Big Easy Four made two missed approaches it caused the rest of the bloc behind him to stack ... and then the breakdown in communications, radar control, holding patterns. The key lay somewhere in the behavior of Big Easy Four.
What was it? What was it? What was it?
M.J. broke up Hiram’s two-day meditation. There was to be a cocktail party and dinner to honor the arrival of his British counterpart, Air Commodore Rodman, for the formal signing of the joint Bases Agreement at Celle and Fassberg. He sent his chief of staff to meet the Commodore and his party at Y 80 and took him to the Schwarzer Bock Hotel.
Stonebraker stopped by at Rodman’s suite later and apologized for not meeting him earlier.
Rodman understood. “Bloody nuisance, this weather,” he said in the understatement of the year.
On the main floor of the Schwarzer Bock was a room rebuilt intact from a fifteenth-century castle. The general’s cocktail parties were held here, and on such occasions he baffled his staff by making a lie of the terrible stories about him. He was the epitome of charm to the ladies and his British guests.
Over cocktails:
Judy Loveless gushed with joy over the new house. M J. would be happy to go hunting for household wares.
Jo Ann Sindlinger, wife of the chief of staff, a tall, gravel-throated, happy Texan, gave Judy the word on where she might obtain a German maid. “They work for little more than room and board, you know.”
Clint and Group Commander Dudley speculated about the Burtonwood Base. Clint didn’t think that the base would be able to handle more than five craft a day on the two-hundred-hour overhaul.
Chief of Staff Sindlinger and Group Captain Cady were pleased with the way American/ British cooperation was shaping up.
Sid Swing, the logistics chief, talked to Lieutenant Colonel Mendoza, the maintenance