The Captains Read online

  Captain MacMillan’s instructor pilot spent thirty minutes showing him the mechanical construction of the Bell H13. Then they climbed inside the plexiglass bubble, where he spent another fifteen minutes explaining the controls and the layout of the instrumentation. He figured he would give this guy, who seemed pretty cocky, a thirty-minute demonstration to convince him beyond any doubt, reasonable or otherwise, that he was really going to have to bust his ass before he could fly a chopper.

  Following the instructor’s step-by-step instructions over the intercom, MacMillan fired up the engine, and checked the instruments one by one to make sure the indicators were all within the safe operating range (“in the green”) indicated by stripes of green tape on the instruments.

  “Now,” the IP said, “it’s going to get away from you. Expect it to. Just don’t overreact. Try to figure out how you’re under-or over-controlling.” MacMillan nodded. “Ease up, very gently, on the cyclic; and remember, you’re controlling the throttle.”

  MacMillan nodded again and did as he was told. He picked the bird straight up. He didn’t like the feeling, so he picked it up another couple of feet. He tried out the rudder pedals, to see how sensitive they were. Then he looked over, unaware that he was in a near perfect hover, just out of ground-effect.

  “Now what?” he asked his instructor pilot.

  “How much bootleg chopper time do you have, MacMillan?” the IP demanded. He did not like being made a fool of.

  “None,” MacMillan replied. “I’ve always been afraid of the goddamned things. Can I try to fly it?”

  “Be my goddamned guest,” the IP said. He had never until this moment believed there was such a thing as a natural helicopter pilot. MacMillan dropped the nose, moved across the field ten feet above it, and then, increasing the pitch, soared into the air, a disgusting look of pure pleasure on his face.

  (Five)

  This time, Bellmon’s classmate in the Office of the Assistant Chief of Staff, Personnel, was not so obliging. There was absolutely no chance of MacMillan being returned to the Far East, much less to Korea, as a chopper pilot.

  “For one thing, you’re a returnee. You have to spend a year in the States,” the lieutenant colonel told him.

  “I’ll waive that,” MacMillan said. “Jesus Christ, Colonel. They want to make me an IP. I couldn’t take that.”

  The lieutenant colonel showed him the letter from SCAP in the Dai Ichi Building, addressed somewhat baroquely to “My Dear Comrade Ellsworth” (the Assistant Chief of Staff, Personnel, who was not fond of his first name and signed himself “E. James Brockman”) and containing the SCAP’s reluctant conclusion that Captain MacMillan’s assignment to duties “which would place him in the jeopardy of the instant situation in Korea” would not be in the overall best interests of the army.

  “As painful as it will surely be for a warrior of MacMillan’s caliber to turn a deaf ear to the sound of the battle trumpet,” SCAP wrote, “I’m sure that, once the situation is explained to him, he will discharge his training or administrative duties with the same dedication he has so often demonstrated under fire.”

  “Bullshit,” MacMillan said. “I’ll quit flying before I let them make me an IP.”

  “General Brockman said to give you a choice between here and Fort Polk,” and lieutenant colonel said.

  “Polk? In Louisiana? What the hell’s going on there?”

  “It was just reactivated as a basic training center.”

  “Oh, Jesus Christ, Colonel!”

  “Where you would be aide-de-camp to General Black.”

  “Black’s a pretty good general,” MacMillan said. “What the hell did he do wrong to get sent to Fort Polk?”

  “Korea’s an infantry war,” the lieutenant colonel explained. “They’re not going to send any armored divisions over there. I suppose the thinking is that if the balloon goes up…in Europe, I mean…he could activate an armored division at Polk.”

  “What would I be doing here?” MacMillan said. “I’m almost afraid to ask.”

  “Presidential Flight Detachment,” the lieutenant colonel said. “Flying choppers.”

  “I heard about that,” MacMillan said. “And I heard you needed a thousand hours, minimum, no-accident chopper time.”

  “To fly the President or the VIPs you do,” the lieutenant colonel agreed.

  “So what would I be doing?”

  “You would be very decorative around the White House,” the lieutenant colonel said. “Especially in a dress blue uniform or mess kit. Wearing your medals, not your ribbons.” He paused, and then said, wryly: “You’d really be something in a mess kit, MacMillan.”

  The mess kit was an ornate, formal dress uniform for evening wear. Most officers hated it.

  “Did anybody bring my name up to General Black?” MacMillan asked.

  “You’re OK with him, if that’s what you’re asking. He said that after you get a little more experience, he’ll even let you fly him around in your whirlybird.”

  VII

  (One)

  Schloss Greiffenberg

  Marburg an der Lahn, Germany

  12 September 1950

  Peter-Paul Lowell, half shy and half glowering, his bunched fists pulling his mother’s skirt off her hips so that it was evident she was wearing only a half slip, looked at the woman his mother was affectionately embracing.

  “Got a kiss for me?” Sharon Felter asked, squatting down to his level. He buried his face in the familiar warmth of his mother’s tweed skirt.

  “Aunt Sharon’s known you since you were a tiny baby,” Ilse von Greiffenberg Lowell said. “Give her a kiss.”

  Peter-Paul von Greiffenberg Lowell, known as P.P., stuck his tongue out at Sharon Felter and then let go of his mother’s skirt, turned and ran up the shallow stairs and into the open door of the large villa.

  “A chip off the old blockhead, I see,” Sandy Felter said to Ilse, and kissed her on the cheek. Felter was in civilian clothing. In civilian clothing few people suspected he was a soldier. He looked more like a lawyer, a CPA, a member of any number of sedentary professions.

  Felter raised his head toward the Schloss, which was enormous, although not quite the sort of building that comes to mind with the word “castle.”

  “What time is the changing of the guard?” he asked.

  “It’s even larger than I remembered,” Ilse said. “And it’s even worse because most of the furniture is gone.”

  “What happened to it?” Sharon asked, innocently. Ilse was embarrassed. “Did I ask the wrong question?”

  “I think Ilse found out that the furniture was ‘liberated’ by the Americans,” Sandy said.

  “It’s not important,” Ilse said. “What are we standing here for? Come on in, I’ll get you something to eat and drink.”

  “I need the you-know-what,” Sharon said. “My kidneys can’t take thirty miles of cobblestone roads.”

  Ilse took her and the Felter kids off to the toilet. Sandy Felter was left alone in what obviously had been the library. The walls were lined with empty shelves, and in a corner, obviously awaiting a rail to roll along, a library ladder rested against the wall.

  “My dear Captain Felter,” a male voice cried in English, “you must forgive my manners. Have you been left all alone?”

  “It’s very nice to see you again, Graf von Greiffenberg,” Felter said, in German.

  “You are our first guests,” the Graf said. “Which seems, under the circumstances, and despite the condition of the house, very appropriate.”

  “You’re very kind to have us,” Felter said.

  The change in the Graf von Greiffenberg since Felter had seen him last was remarkable. On June 26—he remembered the date because it was the day the North Koreans had come across the 38th parallel—he had met the Graf at the Marburg exit of the autobahn. Less than thirty-six hours before that, the Graf had come across the East-West German border, finally released from Russian imprisonment. The Gehlen Organization kept peopl
e at the border points, and an hour after he had crossed, while he was still en route to the returned prisoner camp, Felter had been informed by telephone of his release.

  The colonel had taken it upon himself to get off the train at Bad Hersfeld to see an old friend, and they’d had a hell of a time finding him, even with agents of the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps enlisted to locate him. The CIC had found him. They had agents waiting for him when he walked out of the bahnhof in Marburg. Felter had been notified, at Kronberg Castle, the U.S. Army VIP guest house outside Frankfurt am Main, where he had been waiting with Lt. Colonel Bob Bellmon and Craig and Ilse Lowell, and he’d gone and picked him up.

  The cadaverous, musty smelling survivor of five years in Siberia—five years under an “official” death sentence, five years of not knowing if today they would take him out and garrot him, or shoot him, or run over him with a truck, or otherwise take his life in an “accident” or “while trying to escape,” five years of not knowing what had happened to his family, or if he still had a family—had been reunited with his daughter at Kronberg Castle. He learned not only that she had survived the war, but that she had married and borne a son. And that his daughter’s husband was a wealthy investment banker with sufficient political influence to have a French entry visa waiting, so that the colonel could be flown by chartered aircraft to Paris, where he would “be more comfortable.”

  The Graf von Greiffenberg was still thin, three months later, but no longer cadaverous. His eyes were no longer either sunken or bloodshot, and he smelled, Sandy thought, of expensive soap and aftershave. He was dressed in a blue, open-collared shirt, gray flannel slacks, and American loafers. But he was, Sandy thought with one corner of his mind, obviously both German and an aristocrat. Somewhat nastily, Felter thought that money could indeed work miracles—and was ashamed of himself as quickly as the thought popped into his mind.

  The Graf looked around the room, and gestured at the empty shelves.

  “I missed my books, most of all,” he said. “In the East. And I miss them now. Furniture can be replaced. Walls can be repainted, floors refinished. But there were books in this room that simply…” He cut himself off, and went to a cabinet beneath the empty shelves, opened it, and came out with a large, leather-bound book and put it in Felter’s hands. “The Nazis, and then Americans, and finally the democratically elected government of Land and Kreis Marburg left me this,” he said. “Ironic, isn’t it?”

  Felter took the book and opened it to the title page.

  “Russian,” the Graf said. “They didn’t take the Russian books.”

  “Reminiscences of the Crimean Campaign,” Felter read. “By Major General the Grand Duke Alexander Alexandrovich, Commander of His Imperial Majesty’s Kiev Guard.”

  “My late wife’s kinsman,” the Graf said. “Great, great uncle, I think.” He spoke in Russian, then said what he was thinking. “Your Russian, my dear Felter, is better than mine.”

  “My great, great, great uncle,” Felter said with a smile, “was probably a conscript in the Grand Duke’s infantry.”

  “And do you find your command of Russian valuable in your military career, my dear Felter?”

  Felter met his eyes, and paused a moment before replying. “Often of great value,” he said.

  “I no longer know anyone whom I might contact,” the Graf said. “But I have thought, over the years, that my knowledge and experience might be of some use.”

  “I’m sure it would be,” Felter said. “Perhaps after you get your feet on the ground, and the word gets around that you’re home, something will turn up.”

  “Perhaps,” the Graf said. “Forgive the imposition, after everything you’ve done for me, Felter, but I was hoping that you…”

  “I have reason to believe that you won’t have to ask for work, Colonel,” Felter said.

  The Graf was pleased. He nodded, and changed the subject. He had been determined to bring the subject up with Felter, who was an intelligence officer, but he was afraid that he would appear too eager, and be thought an anticommunist zealot. At the upper echelons of what he wanted to do, there was no room for zealots. He wondered what Felter knew, but he knew he should not, could not ask. He would have to let them come to him.

  “Ilse heard from Craig today,” the Graf said. “A letter mailed five days ago in Korea, delivered here today. The world is shrinking.”

  “What did he have to say?” Felter asked.

  “His unit is about to be reequipped with M46 tanks,” the Graf said. “The…what is that marvelous word you Americans use? The pipeline. Craig wrote that ‘the pipeline was apparently finally in place and beginning to spew forth a cornucopia of materiel.’”

  “Craig should have been born a hundred years ago,” Felter said.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “In the days when noblemen raised their own regiments,” Felter said.

  “Yes,” the Graf said and smiled.

  “Colonel the Duke of Lowell’s Squadron of Dragoons,” Felter said. He chuckled. “They would have ridden unscathed through the Valley of Death at Balaclava.”

  The Graf chuckled with him.

  “They call him that, you know,” Felter said. “They call him ‘the Duke’ and he loves it.”

  The Graf laughed out loud. “I didn’t know that, but it doesn’t surprise me at all.”

  Sharon Felter and Ilse Lowell appeared at the door to the library, and saw the two men laughing. They looked at one another, and wordlessly agreed not to disturb them. They turned and walked back down the wide corridor. Ilse Lowell put her head into the kitchen (like the rest of the house, it showed the signs of rehabilitation: mason’s and painter’s and carpenter’s tools and equipment put away over the weekend) and asked a plump, gray-haired woman if she would make tea, “and ask Rosa to serve it in the garden.”

  Then the two women went into the garden and sat down at an obviously new wrought-iron table under a striped umbrella. Ilse took a cigarette from her purse, held it up in offer to Sharon, and when Sharon shook her head, “no,” put the pack back in her purse.

  “Go ahead,” Sharon said, “if it makes you feel good.”

  Ilse lit the cigarette. She told Sharon of the letter she’d had that morning from Craig. A maid, Rosa, delivered tea, which was actually a selection of cold cuts (all beef and veal, in deference to the Felters) and cheese and breads, in addition to the tea.

  Sharon surreptitiously examined the bread, and found it without fault. It occurred to her that she was a long way here from the bakery on the corner of Chancellor Avenue and Aldine Street in Newark, New Jersey, where she had grown up two doors down the street from Sandy.

  Sharon Lavinsky had been a year behind Sandy Felter all the way through school; she literally could not remember a time when she did not sense they belonged together. And she had known that Sandy was someone really special, smarter and stronger than anybody she had ever known.

  His brains had gotten him into West Point. The congressman had gotten in trouble about passing out appointments to the service academies, and had announced that from now on he would make all appointments on the basis of competitive examinations. Sandy walked away with the exam, getting fifteen more points than the man in the second place.

  Sandy’s parents and Sharon’s parents were of a mixed mind about Sandy taking the appointment when it was offered to him. With a brain and an academic record like his, he could really make something of himself: a doctor, a lawyer, even a judge. Even a dentist or a CPA was better than being a soldier. On the other hand, the war was on, and as long as he was at West Point, he would be safe. Sandy was the Class of 1946, and by then the war would be over and he wouldn’t have to go.

  What the Felters didn’t know, nor the Levinskys, nor even Sharon herself, was that Sandy wanted to go to West Point because he wanted to be a soldier. He was going there to go to war, not to get out of it. His parents and hers, and Sharon herself, began to suspect this after a while, but they told each other
that he would grow out of it, that he would come to his senses.

  Sharon believed this. When they went up the Hudson to see him in his plebe year, he looked like a dwarf around the others, most of whom looked like football players. He didn’t look as if he belonged.

  And then he did something that made everybody, Sharon included, think he had lost his mind. When he came home on his Christmas leave in 1944, he told her that if she loved him, she was going to have to trust him to do what he thought was right. At first, Sharon thought he wanted them to do something together they shouldn’t. She thought about it a moment, and decided that if that’s what Sandy really wanted to do, all right.

  But it wasn’t that (Sharon and, she was sure, Sandy, too, went virginal to their wedding bed). It was a lot worse than that. Sandy, who was always reading anything he could get his hands on, had come across an army regulation which authorized the direct commissioning of linguists. He spoke Russian and German and Polish and had studied French for four years in high school, so he spoke that, too, although not as well.

  They tried to talk him out of it at West Point, and actually got pretty nasty about it, he told her, before they finally gave in. But they gave in.

  On 1 January 1945, while the Battle of the Bulge was still raging in Europe, Cadet Corporal Felter was discharged from the Corps of Cadets of the United States Military Academy at West Point, and immediately commissioned into the Army of the United States as Second Lieutenant, Infantry (Detail: Military Intelligence as Linguist). They swore him in at the breakfast formation, and the band played “Army Blue” (“We Say Farewell to Kay-Det Gray and Don the Army Blue”) and “Dixie.” Then, as the Corps of Cadets marched off to breakfast, Second Lieutenant Felter was driven to the railroad station. At four that afternoon he was over the Atlantic, en route to the 40th Armored Division, “Hells’ Circus.”