The Colonels, page 8
part #4 of Brotherhood of War Series
And besides, this was not your typical Rebel broad, ready to jump into the bed of her dashing lover. This one was a lady; married, Cramer had told him, to a former football hero now running the peanut mill. She would not be interested in fun and games with Craig Lowell.
“Hello, Barbara, what can I do for you?” he said to the telephone.
“Southern’s having ‘equipment problems’ again,” Barbara Bellmon said. “The next flight to Dothan is at 11:15 tonight.”
That translated to mean that General Bellmon was stranded in Atlanta, Southern Airways having decided again that safety required that they delay their flight to Columbus, Georgia, Dothan, Alabama, and Panama City, Florida, until they were reasonably sure the wings of their DC-3 wouldn’t fall off.
“How can I help?”
“Bob tried to call MacMillan,” she said, “so Mac could fly over and pick him up.”
“Mac is on the golf course,” he interrupted.
“Where else?” she laughed. “So when he couldn’t get him, he called me and asked me to find Mac and see if Mac could arrange to have somebody else come pick him up. Get a plane from the school fleet I mean. But he can’t.”
“Let me call you back in a couple of minutes,” he said. “I think I can fix this.”
“I hate to bother you, Craig,” she said.
“No problem,” he said. “I’ll call you right back.”
He told Jane Cassidy that if there were any calls, he would be in Colonel Roberts’s office.
Roberts’s office, which occupied the left rear corner of the two-story concrete block building, was guarded by Florence Ward. Florence was a heavyset, southern Alabama farmer’s wife who, like Jane Cassidy, had “gone out to the post to see if she could find some kind of work.” She had surprised everybody, including herself, by turning into a crisply efficient administrative assistant.
“Is the colonel in, Mrs. Ward?”
She didn’t reply, but instead went to Roberts’s open door and asked if he could see Major Lowell.
“Come in, Lowell,” Roberts called.
Lowell walked in the office and saluted.
“What can I do for you?” Roberts asked.
“I know I just got here, Colonel, but could I take a couple of hours off?”
“Still getting settled, are you?” Roberts asked. “I don’t think the place will collapse if you take off. It is New Year’s Eve.”
“I want to go to Atlanta,” Lowell said.
“How’re you going to do that?” Roberts asked, puzzled, and then answered his own question. “In your airplane, of course.”
“Barbara Bellmon just called,” Lowell explained. “Southern cancelled, and Bob’s…the general…is stranded.”
“Isn’t that a shame?” Roberts said, dryly.
“Barbara asked me, Colonel,” Lowell said.
“Well, we can’t turn her down, can we?” Roberts said. “Go ahead.”
“You’re going to go up and come right back?” Florence Ward asked.
“Yes,” Lowell said. “I’ll be at the party.” Then he realized that wasn’t what she had been asking. “Colonel, could I take your secretary with me?”
“Sure,” Roberts said.
“Thank you,” Florence said to Colonel Roberts.
“I’ll see you tonight, Lowell,” Roberts said pointedly. Earlier that day Roberts had “suggested” to Lowell that he make sure he came to the New Year’s Eve party. Lowell had no more wanted to go to the officers’ club party than he was thrilled with the notion of taking the fat farmer’s wife for a ride.
“Thank you, sir,” Lowell said. “Mrs. Ward, when you’re ready, will you come to my office?”
“I’ll be right there,” Florence said.
Lowell returned to his office in the hangar and told Jane Cassidy to call Mrs. Bellmon.
“Problem’s solved,” he said, when she came on the line. “Where’s Bob now?”
“In a phone booth at the airport, waiting for me to call back.”
“Tell him to catch a cab to Fulton County Airport,” Lowell said. “I’ll be there in about an hour, maybe a little longer.”
“I am now forced to become a dishonest wife,” she said.
“I don’t think that’s a proposition,” Lowell said.
“He said I was not to ask you,” she said. “You know how he feels about your airplane.”
“Then screw him,” Lowell said. “Let him wait for the 11:15.”
“Then he would miss the party,” she said, plaintively.
“OK. So I’ll go get him,” Lowell said. “I’ll think of some imaginative excuse which requires his riding in my airplane.”
“Oh, Craig, would you?” Barbara asked, happily. “I’d really be grateful. I’ll pay you for the gas, or whatever, of course.”
“You want to fly up with me, Barbara?” Lowell asked. “That way you could face the wrath of your righteous husband.”
“Oh, I can’t, Craig,” she said, laughing. “I’ve got to have my hair done. And a hundred other things.”
“Coward,” he said. “But all right. You call him back, and tell him somebody’s on the way to pick him up at Fulton County. You don’t know who.”
“Craig, you’re a darling,” she said. “I owe you one.”
“One what?”
“You bastard,” she laughed, and hung up.
Lowell hung the phone up and looked at Jane Cassidy. She had listened to—and understood—what the call was about.
“Call Sergeant Kowalski and ask him to bring my airplane to Base Operations, will you, please, Mrs. Cassidy?”
She nodded.
And then Florence Ward appeared.
“Ready any time you are, Major,” she said.
Lowell saw the surprise on Jane Cassidy’s face, when she realized that Florence Ward was going with him.
“Would you like to come along, too, Mrs. Cassidy?” Lowell asked.
“Would there be time?” Jane Cassidy heard herself replying. “Before quitting time I mean?”
“God willing,” Lowell said, mockingly pious. He immediately regretted it, thinking that either or both of the women were likely to take offense.
“I don’t know if I should,” Jane Cassidy said. She had joined the officers’ club as soon as she had been promoted and she and Tom would be going to the party at the officers’ open mess tonight (in black tie and formal dress), instead of the one at the Enterprise country club.
“Come along,” Florence Ward said.
“I’ve got to get ready for tonight,” Jane said. “We’re going to the club.”
She knew she was lying. All she had to do to get ready was take a quick shower and put on her dress.
“Another time,” Lowell said. He wasn’t sure if he was disappointed or relieved.
“I’ll go,” Jane said, suddenly.
“Fine,” Lowell said.
Florence Ward had commandeered Colonel Roberts’s staff car for the thousand-yard ride from the Board building to the hangar, and then for the second thousand-yard leg from the hangar to Base Operations. Although Lowell moved as far as he could to the left, there was not room enough in the back of the Chevrolet for the three of them. His hip and upper leg were pressed against Jane Cassidy.
At Base Ops, Sergeant Kowalski, the noncom in charge of the Aviation Board’s flight line, was standing, beneath a bad oil portrait of Major General “Scotty” Laird, Jr., which was next to the double glass doors to the transient aircraft parking area.
Shortly after they had given Scotty Laird his second star, the week before the $97 million main airfield complex had been completed, Laird had picked up an H-13 in front of post headquarters. Climbing quickly, his mind apparently on other things, he had forgotten to turn on the caburetor heat. His H-13 went down in the woods just the other side of the golf course, within sight of his brand-new two-starred flag flapping from the Rucker flagpole.
The airfield had been named for him: Laird Army Airfield. But the Morse code from the Omni identifying the field had remained what it had been, OZR. Everytime Lowell heard OZR on his earphones, he thought of Scotty Laird, a passenger in Lowell’s H-13 on the way to Bad Godesburg, Germany, immediately after Laird had turned down an assignment as deputy commander of the 2nd Armored Division to become, at forty, an aviator.
“She’s all ready to go, Major,” Kowalski said.
“You want to load the ladies aboard while I check the weather and file the flight plan?” Lowell replied.
“I want to watch that, too,” Florence Ward said firmly, and marched after him into the plotting room. Jane Cassidy, after hesitating, walked after them. Both women bent over the map as Lowell showed them how he plotted the flight. Over the years Lowell had flown back and forth between Atlanta and Fort Rucker so often he could do the flight planning from memory; but, rather enjoying his role of high priest explaining the mysteries to the novices, he went through it step by step for them to watch.
Once, in bending over to see what Lowell was writing, Jane Cassidy’s breast brushed his arm. He looked at her, more in annoyance than anything else, and saw her face flushing.
It’s all right, Madame. I not only understand that that was quite accidental, but I have personally given my word of honor as an officer and a gentleman to the post commander that I will not go within ten feet, sexually speaking, of a married woman.
“I’m not going in there,” Florence Ward laughed, when Lowell invited her to sit in the cockpit. “As fat as I am, I’d bump into something important.”
Afer she settled herself in one of the chairs in the cabin, Lowell thought that Jane Cassidy would sit in the one opposite her. She did not. She elected to ride in the copilot’s seat—and that pleased him, somewhat to his dismay.
There were airline-type lap belts in the seats in the back; and Lowell saw that Florence had figured out how they worked. But the pilot’s and copilot’s seats had over-the-shoulder harnesses, which Jane Cassidy had to be shown how to fasten. In the process, his arm brushed against her breast; and his hand, more or less, had to be placed in her crotch when he snapped it all together. Close enough to be aware of the softness of her thighs.
Down, boy! Don’t you dare forget that you are now Sir Pure of Heart, who took the vow, if not quite of chastity, of nonadultery.
He adjusted his own harness, saw that Kowalski was standing by with a fire extinguisher, yelled “contact” at him and hit the switches. The left of the Aero Commander’s engines coughed into life, smoothed out; and in a moment, the right engine too belched blue smoke and caught.
Lowell put on his earphones and pressed the mike switch.
“Laird, Commander One Five in the transient area for taxi and takeoff, VFR, direct Atlanta Fulton County.”
Jane Cassidy looked around the cockpit and located a set of headphones on a hook over her head. She had ridden in private planes before—though none as plush as this—but Tom had always managed to sit beside the pilot. It was now her turn, she thought. She put the earphones on in time for her to hear the tower giving Lowell taxi instructions to the active runway.
This is exciting, she thought. Going to Atlanta after lunch and still getting back before supper. And the airplane itself was impressive. Her previous experience had been in single-engined airplanes upholstered in plastic. This was something like a miniature airliner; it had a separate cockpit, airline-type seats upholstered in leather, and even a row of stainless steel thermos bottles, one of which Sergeant Kowalski said he had filled with coffee.
Jane was surprised at the roughness of the ride as they moved along the taxiways. At the end of the runway itself, Major Lowell stopped the airplane and raced the engines, one at a time. To make sure they were working, she supposed.
“Laird,” the earphones said, “Commander One Five on the threshold of the active for takeoff.”
It took her a moment to understand the voice in her earphones was Major Lowell’s. It had been clipped, metallic sounding, and hadn’t sounded like him.
“Laird,” the earphones said, in another voice, “clears Commander One Five as number one to go on three eight. The time is one five past the hour, the barometer is two niner niner niner. The winds are negligible from the north. There is traffic at one mile to your left.”
Lowell’s hand reached for the stalks in front of him and pushed on them. Jane understood, as the engines began to roar, that these were the gas pedals.
Lowell’s voice came over her earphones: “One Five rolling.”
The airplane began to pick up speed at an alarming rate, accompanied by even more alarming rumbling sounds and the roaring of engines. And then, all of a sudden, the rumbling noises stopped. And the ground, which had been rushing past them, dropped away. Jane glanced at Lowell and saw him flip a lever. There was a whining sound, and then a little sign on the dashboard lit up WHEELS UP AND LOCKED.
They were flying.
She glanced at Major Lowell. His face bore the same look of concentration it had when she had gone into his office. She wondered what he was doing when he threw switches and adjusted levers, or soon after when he was making little notes on a clipboard that was attached to his leg with what looked like a bicycle clip.
During the fifty-five minutes before they landed at Fulton County Airport, Jane Cassidy several times caught herself glancing over at the face of Major Craig W. Lowell.
(Two)
Fulton County Airport
Atlanta, Georgia
1550 Hours, 31 December 1958
Brigadier General Robert F. Bellmon and another officer Lowell didn’t recognize at first were waiting to be picked up at Martin Aviation, the private aviation operator at Fulton County Airport.
Bellmon, a medium-size, athletic looking man, was standing just outside the door, drinking coffee from a plastic cup. He was wearing a grayish pink trenchcoat over his greens. There was an overseas cap on his head, with the solid gold piping of a general officer. There was a star on the cap, and also on each of the trenchcoat epaulets. The second officer, Lowell saw, as he turned the Aero Commander into line with the other transient aircraft, was wearing one of the new brimmed caps, which provided for gold embellishment (“scrambled eggs”) on the brim to identify field-grade (major through colonel) officers.
He got another look at the other officer, and recognized him. He was a portly man of fifty with a pencil-line mustache and eagles on his epaulets.
It’s that horse’s ass of a Pentagon press agent, Colonel Tim F. Brandon. What’s that sonofabitch doing here?
He cut the engines and took off his headset.
“If you’d like to go to the rest room, Mrs. Cassidy,” he said, “or you, Mrs. Ward, this is your chance.” And then he added, to Mrs. Cassidy, “I think the general will rank you out of your seat on the way home, Mrs. Cassidy.”
“You’ll have to help me out of this,” Jane Cassidy said, angry rather than embarrassed that she couldn’t unfasten the harness itself.
He unfastened her harness, carefully avoiding her breasts as he worked, and then waited for her to walk down the aisle to the door. She didn’t know how to open that, either, of course, and their bodies made contact again as he squeezed by her to do so.
He let the women off the airplane first. Then he followed.
He saluted Bob Bellmon.
“Good afternoon, sir,” he said. Bellmon and Brandon returned his salute.
“I didn’t expect to see you here, Craig,” General Bellmon said, evenly.
“I was taking the girls for a little ride,” Lowell replied smoothly, “and they got on the horn and told me you were stranded in Atlanta, and asked if I would come and get you.”
“I see,” Bellmon said.
“I didn’t expect to see Colonel Brandon here,” Lowell said, with a smile. “Not on New Year’s Eve.”
“When you’re in public communications, Major,” Colonel Brandon said, “you learn to go where you’re sent on a moment’s notice.”
While the rest of the army sits home by hearth and fireside, right? You fatuous sonofabitch!
“The Chief of Information thought it would be a good idea,” General Bellmon said dryly, “if Colonel Brandon personally kept an eye on the public relations picture as the armed helicopter story develops.”
“I see,” Lowell said.
“What kind of a plane is that?” Brandon asked.
“An Aero Commander, Colonel,” Bellmon said.
“I don’t quite understand,” Brandon said. “It doesn’t have any markings.”
“Army markings, you mean?” Bellmon asked.
“Yes, sir,” Brandon said.
“That’s because it’s not an army aircraft,” Bellmon said. “We are about to be hauled to Fort Rucker through the courtesy of Major Lowell.”
“Oh, you mean you talked the manufacturer out of the airplane, Lowell?” Brandon said, approvingly.
“Sir?” Lowell asked, not understanding.
“I checked you out, Major. And you are an operator.”
“All it took to promote that airplane, Colonel,” Lowell said, smiling, “was my usual charm, and a check.”
Brandon was astounded.
“You mean you personally own that airplane?” he blurted.
“Yes, sir, I personally own it,” Lowell said.
“You surprise me, Colonel,” Bellmon said. “I thought everybody knew Major Lowell owns Manhattan Island.”
“You’re kidding, of course, General.”
“Just the part from Washington Square to the Battery,” Lowell said.
Bellmon laughed, and Colonel Brandon took the opportunity to get out of deep water by joining in. He knew that his leg was being pulled, but he didn’t know how. Bellmon had laughed because a few years ago he had seen the Counterintelligence Corps/FBI Complete Background Investigation report on then Second Lieutenant Craig W. Lowell:
“Without access to Internal Revenue Service records, it is impossible to develop an accurate estimate of SUBJECT’s total financial worth. Information obtained, however, from the Securities Exchange Commission and the Village of Glen Cove, L.I., reveal that SUBJECT owns 43.6% of the outstanding stock of Craig, Powell, Kenyon and Dawes, Investment Bankers, Inc. (13 Wall Street, New York City, N.Y.) and property in Glen Cove (“Broadlawns,” which SUBJECT has designated as his Home of Record) which has been appraised for tax purposes at a value of $3,935,000.”
