A senior officer. He stopped in his tracks, turned to Charlie, and became aware of his heavy breathing and the knot of rookies watching.
Charlie’s face was red, and he massaged one of his hands. “What are you thinking? You’re acting like a schoolboy.”
Jack bit back the “he started it” on his lips, because Charlie was right. He couldn’t get in a fight. He had to set an example. And like it or not, Babcock outranked him.
“I know you’ve never gotten along with him, but you’ve never let him get to you before. I thought you were working on your pride.”
“My pride?” Jack shook a finger at Babcock’s little motorcade. “This isn’t about me, it’s about Ruth. He can’t talk that way about my future wife.”
“Wife?”
“Yeah.” His arm drifted down. “I asked her last night. She didn’t say yes, but she will.”
Everything about Charlie narrowed—his mouth, his eyes, even his cheeks pulled in. “Not this again.”
“It’s not what you think.” Jack strode up to his friend. “It’s not like before. I don’t want to change her. I just want to love her.”
Still that skeptical look.
Jack held his hands before him as if he held the answer in a box. “I finally got it. Love isn’t getting her to meet my needs. No.” He shook the box. “Love is meeting her needs.”
Charlie’s face relaxed. “She’s fine with this?”
Jack groaned and looked away to a dribbling tree next to squadron HQ. “Not yet. I have to admit, the idea of a—a platonic marriage—it takes some getting used to. But she’ll see. I have to do some romancing and a whole lot of praying, but she’ll see.”
Charlie puffed out his breath and walked around Jack. “I’ve got to hand it to you. You never give up, do you?”
“Dead right. I thought I was in love before, but no, this—this is love.” He walked next to Charlie and lifted his chin to let the rain tickle his face. “I can’t tell you how good it feels to do something for her, not for myself.”
Charlie grunted. He’d worn the same expression the night he said he wouldn’t fly with Jack again.
Annoyance surged up, but Jack wrestled it down. Charlie had been right that night, and today he deserved a hearing. “Say it, Charlie.”
He shrugged. “How can it be for her if she doesn’t want it?”
Jack stuffed his tongue in his cheek. Charlie hadn’t seen the way Ruth melted in his arms the night before. He hadn’t seen the love in her eyes.
It might take a while to convince her. It might take longer than the lousy war. But someday she’d see.
Prestwick
Saturday, April 15, 1944
“Nurse? Got an aspirin? Ethel Merman’s giving me a headache.” The corporal pointed across the airfield tent hospital to Dottie, who sang “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’” with gusto.
Ruth smiled down at the boy on the cot. With his red hair and green eyes, he resembled her brother Chuck, and he couldn’t be much older. “Do you really need an aspirin?”
“Not really, but it ain’t even morning yet. Can you make her stop?”
“No, but if you figure out a way …”
He grinned. “I’ll be sure and let you know.”
“I’d appreciate that.” Ruth had already received the doctor’s preflight report on Cpl. Arthur Thompson. While loading 500-pound bombs into the belly of a B-24 Liberator, the corporal had been pinned by a loose bomb, which crushed his pelvis and femur.
Ruth squatted beside his cot. “Have you ever flown before, Corporal?”
“No, ma’am. Been inside a bomber a million times, but never in the air. To tell the truth, a man’s meant to stay on the ground. I’m a farmer, ma’am. A man of the earth.”
She smiled. His farming experience probably consisted of riding on Pa’s knee on the tractor. “How long did it take you to get to England?”
“Almost two months, ma’am, zigzagging around them U-boats.”
“Mm-hmm. Well, tonight you’ll have dinner in New York. You may change your mind about flying. And wait till you see the view.”
“Oh, I won’t look down, ma’am.” His skin became almost as green as his eyes.
Just the kind who might get airsick. She’d only had one case among her patients so far, but the smell led half the other men to throw up. Corporal Thompson would go toward the front of the plane where the motion was calmer.
Ruth laid a hand on his arm. “You have nothing to fear. The Air Transport Command pilots are gentler than the bomber boys you’re used to. They go out of their way to avoid turbulence.”
“Turbulence—that’s rough air, right?”
“Mm-hmm. Sometimes it feels as if you’re on a rocky road in an old jalopy, but you’re not. Besides, there’s nothing to hit up there.” She gave him a big smile.
“Still …” He rolled the brown blanket between his fingers.
“We also have life rafts and jackets, full emergency equipment, and hours upon hours of training, which we’ve never once put into practice.”
The corporal’s face relaxed. And if he got worked up on the flight, that’s what phenobarbital was for.
“I tell you, ma’am. Your boyfriend’s a right lucky man.”
“Thank you.” Ruth stood, and a rush of dizziness made her stumble. She’d responded to that line many times but never with a “thank you.” What was that supposed to mean? Jack wasn’t her boyfriend.
She lifted her stethoscope from around her neck to take the corporal’s vitals. Wouldn’t Jack have loved her response? He remained convinced she’d marry him, and he wrote such romantic letters they broke her heart, because someday his heart would be broken.
She loved him too much to let him deceive himself, but how could she persuade him? He’d disemboweled her two best arguments, her family and her aversion, and he’d stuck his knife in the third. His last letter reminded her how God used people to do his work, so why couldn’t he use Jack to protect Ruth, provide for her, and love her?
It was too logical. It wouldn’t do.
All that remained was the flimsy, indefensible gut knowledge that she could not marry him. She couldn’t even explain it to herself. She just knew it.
Ruth wrote Corporal Thompson’s vitals on the flight manifest and checked the cast that encased most of his lower body. He’d go in the forward lower left bunk.
Only distancing would work with Jack, but how could she bear to lose his friendship? Since she held May at arm’s length, Jack was the only one she could confide in, who believed her and supported her.
Ruth groaned and tucked the blankets around her patient. “Is there anything you need before your trip home, Corporal?”
“I could use a smoke, ma’am. Might settle my nerves.”
She groaned again. “I’m sorry. We’re out of cigarettes. The last shipment was short.” That was Army life. One week quartermasters had to drive all over the U.K. scrounging up scraps of gauze, and the next week they had so much gauze the nurses joked about making it into curtains for the barracks.
“You need some cigs?” Sergeant Dugan walked down the next aisle with a tray piled with bandages. “Burnsey’s in the med room. He’s got a crate.”
“Oh, she wouldn’t go to Burnsey,” Dottie called out with a glare at Ruth. “She’d have to say something nice about him for a change.”
Ruth glanced toward the med room. “Black market, I bet,” she muttered.
“What was that?” Dottie said.
Corporal Thompson tugged her sleeve. “Black market, white market, I don’t care. I just want a smoke.”
Ruth held her breath. They’d heard her? Would that be considered a complaint? What if it got back to Lieutenant Shepard? Ruth plastered on a smile for the boy who looked like her brother. “If cigarettes will help you through your first flight, I’ll be glad to get them.”
She headed down the aisle and pushed through a flap into the medication room. Burnsey was alone, his blond head bent over rolls of gauze.
He looked up. “Well, hi there. What’s up?”
It hurt to speak. “I heard you have cigarettes.”
A smile stretched across his face. “Only a matter of time until you came to me to meet your needs.”
Bile rose thick in her throat. “Not for me. For a patient. Do you have them or not?”
“I have everything you need.” He reached into a crate by the supply cabinet. “What do you want? Camels, Lucky—”
“I don’t care. Whatever the men like.” She pulled her coin purse from her pocket and fumbled with the clasp. She refused to have a patient pay for something the Army was supposed to supply as rations.
Burnsey sauntered over with a pack. “I tell you what. I’ll give it to you for free if you go out on the town with me tonight.”
Ruth stepped back and bumped into the steel supply cabinet. Why hadn’t she moved toward the door flap?
“You get yourself dolled up, no one will know you’re an officer. And I’ll show you a swell time—New York’s finest dining, dancing, a Broadway show, whatever you want.”
“I want—you to leave me—alone.” Her breath puffed out in short bursts, and she held out a quarter with a trembling hand.
“How can I? I can’t resist girls who play hard to get.”
He stood so close, Ruth smelled his toothpaste. “Leave me—alone.”
“No one plays hard to get better than you do, gorgeous.”
Ruth molded her back to the cabinet and stepped to the side, but Burnsey took her arm and blocked her. The bile congealed and plugged her throat.
“Keep your money. You’ll pay me back someday.” He tucked the cigarettes into her shirt pocket, touching, exploring.
She shrank back, tried to cry out, and gagged.
Burnsey was gone with a wink, out the door.
Ruth stood, mouth wide open, her lips groping for air as if she’d been hit in the solar plexus. She slid down the cabinet to the floor and hung her head between her knees. Her breath returned in convulsive gasps.
He couldn’t get away with it. He couldn’t get away with it.
She hugged her knees and sucked in lungfuls of medicinal air. Yes, he could get away with it. He already had.
Ruth couldn’t tell Lieutenant Shepard, or she’d lose her job. Burnsey knew that.
She couldn’t tell May, or her friend would worry. And what if May intervened with the chief? Ruth would still lose her job, and May would be in trouble as well.
Worst of all, she couldn’t tell Jack. When she leaned on him, she fed his fantasy. What she wouldn’t give for Ma’s comfort and Pa’s wisdom.
Her quarter tinkled to the ground, and silver coin blurred with gray concrete. Ruth blinked back her tears, but they left dark spots on her blue wool trousers.
“Oh Lord, you’re all I have.”
Sunday, May 7, 1944
Early afternoon sun glinted off silver as P-51 Mustangs cut S-patterns a thousand feet above the bomber formation. Jack would never take the Little Friends for granted.
He massaged the four throttles in his grip to get the right rpm out of each engine. As the lead Pathfinder for Third Division, he had to keep his course and speed steady and true. Two of his ships headed each group in Fourth Wing on the way to Berlin, the ideal maiden run for his newly trained squadron. A cottony blanket obscured the ground, so if they hit the target, the H2X “Mickey” radar would be solely responsible.
Jack studied the fuel gauges. All looked good for
My Macaroon
. Charlie teased him about the name for the H2Xequipped B-17G since Babcock almost got a black eye for calling Ruth “one hot cookie.” But Jack’s nickname for Ruth was affectionate. She liked it.
Or did she?
Her letters had grown sporadic, short, and impersonal, with no mention of Burns or the chief, and no arguments to his watertight reasons they should get married. She just ignored them.
Jack hardened his abdominal muscles to stop the queasy feeling. Why was he thinking about Ruth? He had a mission to fly.
“Navigator to pilot. We should be near the IP,” Pete Gustafson said from down in the nose.
“Mickey operator to pilot. Wow, you should see the images I’m getting. Beautiful, beautiful.”
Jack smiled under his oxygen mask. He could almost see Nick Panapoulos’s bright, doughy face leaning over the radar scope in the radio room. “Do you agree with Gus?”
“You should see this, the crook in the Havel River clear as can be.”
“The IP?”
“Oh yeah. IP coming up.”
Jack chuckled at Nick’s enthusiasm for his toy. A round plastic radome protruded from
Macaroon
’s belly where the ball turret used to be. H2X radio waves flowed from the radome and bounced off the terrain back to the scope, where a practiced eye could distinguish water from land and built-up areas from earth.
“Mickey operator to pilot. We’re at the IP.”
“Navigator to pilot. I concur.”
“Roger. Fire two yellow flares,” Jack said to Marvin Cox, the radio operator, who would fire the flares through the roof hatch of the radio room to signal the rest of the squadron.
“Bomb bay doors open,” Oggie Drake said from the bombardier’s chair.
Jack put
My Macaroon
into a thirty-degree turn. The H2X was almost unnecessary, because flak marked Berlin’s boundaries. Instead of looking down at the largest sheep in the world, Jack now felt as if he hovered over a giant Dalmatian, except this dog’s spots leaped up and nipped at him.
“Down, boy,” he said, but the flak gunners aimed low.
Shells rumbled like thunder and added to the ship’s vibrations. Today the Germans had plenty of targets. For the first time, the Eighth dispatched over one thousand bombers. In addition, 750 fighters performed escort duty.
So far flak hadn’t claimed any victims, and the Luftwaffe hadn’t come up. The relentless growth of the Eighth Air Force had tipped the scales of air superiority, and now the Luftwaffe picked their fights. Some days they didn’t show, and others they mounted savage attacks.
A flak burst waggled the Fort’s wings.
“Steady, girl.” Jack’s control of the wheel soothed the trembles. If only he could soothe Ruth as easily. The woman was skittish, he knew that the day he met her. But now it didn’t make sense. He’d dealt with all her concerns, yet he had the uneasy feeling she was slipping away.
Why? The night of the party shimmered in his memory. That night he was certain she loved him. But now?