The Fly Boys Read online

  Horton and the Soviet officer were still jabbering at each other in Russian. Gold began to worry. In rehearsal the exchange had never taken this long.

  “What’s the problem here, Major?” Gold interrupted, trying his best to sound gruff and angry instead of frightened. In rehearsal Gold had been coached that an authentic senior officer would react aggressively and in frustration to any delay caused by the Russians.

  “The colonel here seems to think that three vehicles are too many to be covered by one pass,” Horton muttered. “He wants us to leave one truck behind.”

  Gold nodded. Some petty bullshit from the Russians had been expected. The Russians knew that the United States Army had been hamstrung by President Truman. The new President, preoccupied with domestic policies and the ongoing war with Japan, was not prepared to face down Stalin. Despite that, it had never occurred to the stateside planners that the Reds would try and cut down the convoy’s size. Both trucks were needed if the convoy was to have enough room for Froehlig and his six scientists.

  Gold glared at the Russian officer as he spoke to Horton. “Major, you tell this fella that these stars I’m wearing means that I’m an important United States Army officer, and that I don’t even go to the fucking latrine without an escort this size.”

  As Gold had hoped, he saw a flicker of a smile cross the Russian’s face. The guy may not have known proper English, but he’d picked up on Gold’s indignant tone and his use of the obscenity. No matter where you were born or what language you spoke, you had to understand that only a VIP could take such imperious liberties.

  The colonel listened as Horton conveyed Gold’s message. Meanwhile, Gold was hoping that the Russian officer would realize that he had overplayed his hand, that an ill-tempered United States two-star general could not be stripped of his retinue without causing an international incident.

  The Soviet colonel was nodding. He briefly said something in Russian as he handed back the papers to Horton.

  “The colonel has agreed to let us pass, sir,” Horton told Gold.

  The Russian yelled a command toward the half-track. The armored vehicle started up. Its tank treads churned mud as it backed away, clearing the road.

  Horton put the jeep in gear and drove on. The trucks followed.

  “Nice improvisation,” Horton softly told Gold.

  “I just figured that since our pass is valid, the colonel was only authorized to push us until we resisted and then back off. I’m just glad it worked.”

  “I guess it did,” Horton said, sounding uncertain as he glanced in his side rear-view mirror. “He’s just standing there, watching us.”

  “To hell with him—we’re past him,” Gold said firmly. He paused. “Although it is a bad omen that he tried that bullshit with us.”

  Horton shrugged. “No point in worrying about it now. Let’s just hope somebody else is on duty when we come back,” he sighed.

  Gold shook his head. “I never count on luck.” He patted the briefcase, which he had removed from beneath his seat and put on his lap. “I—”

  Gold’s words died in his throat as they left the Russian-held airfield behind, moving into the urban battleground that had once been a thriving city. My God, Gold thought. What has been done here?

  The devastation was unbelievable. High dunes of rubble lined both sides of the road, and the stench of raw sewage filled the air. Overhead, black, cawing scavenger birds wheeled and danced like furies.

  As the convoy turned onto the Mehringdamm, it had to slow down in order to snake its way through a narrow canyon cut through the high walls of rubble. Gold had plenty of time to study the gaunt women and children dressed in filthy scarecrow rags. The people were moving like zombies as they picked what they could out of the garbage. The soldiers in the trucks who had been chatting and laughing became subdued as the convoy passed the women with their silent, staring children. Gold wondered what the men were thinking as they made this journey through this city of the dead.

  The convoy drove across a bridge spanning the trash-strewn, oily waters of the Spree. Mounded rubble was everywhere, with the occasional standing, skeletal remains of a building jutting against the sky, framing bright rectangles of blue within the confines of its gutted windows.

  Horton led the convoy around the desolate city for a couple of hours. He wanted to kill time and to discover whether the Reds had graced the convoy with a tail. If there was a tail, the meandering route would hopefully convince the snoops that the convoy really was on a mission to survey Berlin.

  They were driving through the Tiergarten when Horton glanced at his watch and said, “Okay. It’s time.” He quietly asked Gold, “Can you get us back to the Friedrichstrasse?”

  Gold didn’t answer, too overwhelmed by the fact that the Tiergarten, the lovely park that had been the emerald in the center of Berlin, was ruined. Where there had been trees and lawns there were now just clusters of jagged stumps rising up from the scarred earth like the stumps of amputated limbs. In the distance, surrounded by killed trees lying on the muddy, littered ground, the twisted gazebos creaked in the wind. The carousel sat silent and rusting, as if in mourning over its intricately carved wooden horses splintered by shrapnel.

  “Herman? I’m lost,” Horton was muttering. “You remember Berlin, don’t you?”

  “Remember is the right word,” Gold said despondently.

  “Come on, help me out here.” Horton pointed to a small map clipped to the jeep’s dashboard. “I’m looking for the Friedrichstrasse.”

  “Street names don’t mean much around here anymore….”

  “What’s your problem?” Horton hissed.

  “How can you ask that? Just look around!”

  “Hey,” Horton said, eyeing him, “don’t go soft on me, all right? Sure, what happened here is terrible, just like it was terrible what happened to London during the blitz.”

  Gold shook his head. “It’s not the same. I’ve lived in Berlin. Germany was my home….”

  “Yeah,” Horton said, lowering his voice even further. “But let me remind you that you’re a Jew, my friend. If you’d stayed here, this very same city you’re currently feeling sorry for would have shipped you off to a—”

  “Okay, you’ve made your point,” Gold said sharply, cutting him off.

  Horton nodded. “You’re all mixed up inside. I can understand that. Being here can’t be easy for you.”

  “It’s not,” Gold said gruffly as he busied himself studying the map. He looked around for some kind of landmark to tell him where he was. “Take this next right,” he said. “And then your first left.”

  They traveled another couple of miles, and then Horton, consulting his map, turned left onto an unmarked side street. He pulled up in front of a bomb-crumpled building. The trucks ground to a halt behind the jeep. From what was left of the sign over the door, Gold knew that the building’s ground floor had once been a butcher shop.

  “This shop has a meat locker in its basement,” Horton confided, unable to suppress a grin.

  “What’s so funny about that?” Gold demanded.

  “Don’t you get it?” Horton demanded, grabbing his carbine as he got out of the jeep. “That’s where we’ve got Froehlig and his boys stashed, in the meat locker.”

  “Very funny,” Gold grumbled.

  “All right, sarge!” Horton was shouting at the NCO who was climbing down out of the cab of the first truck. “You’ve got your orders. Let’s move it.”

  Soldiers were moving down the street to keep watch for Russian patrols as Gold got out of the jeep. He followed Horton around into the alleyway alongside the partially collapsed shop building.

  “Watch your step,” Horton called over his shoulder. “These cobblestones are slick with some kind of grease.”

  Gold nodded. The alleyway was dark and narrow. It was littered with garbage and reeked of rotting meat. Gold shuddered as movement in the dark shadows caught his eye. Rats, he thought, as he heard the scrabble of claws scratchin
g against the cobblestones and a dark shape skittered across his path almost under his feet.

  Horton used the snout of his weapon to push away the debris blocking the cellar’s wooden bulkhead door. A cloud of flies rose up out of the cellar’s entrance as Horton hauled the door open. Horton took a flashlight out of his field jacket pocket, switched it on, and began moving down the dark cellar steps. Gold followed him down.

  The stench was even worse inside the musty, windowless cellar. Horton played his flashlight around the small room, illuminating a double sink with a dribbling faucet standing next to a dirty chopping block. There was a wall of shelves laden with rolls of butcher’s paper and twine and dented or broken cans of lard. The meat locker’s wooden door was against the far wall.

  “This way,” Horton muttered. “Watch yourself—”

  A rat’s eyes glowed red in the flashlight beam. The rat backed away, humping its back and spitting against the light.

  The meat locker door suddenly swung open on squeaking hinges. The rat darted past Gold to hide beneath the staircase as a flashlight beam stabbed out from the locker’s interior.

  “Wer ist es?” a man cried out weakly. “Who? Who is it?”

  Gold heard a metallic click! echo against the stone walls.

  “Get down!” Horton hissed sharply. “That sounded like a gun being cocked!”

  Gold was afraid to drop to the ground—a rat might jump at his face—but he didn’t want to get shot. He went into a semicrouch, his shoulders hunched and his eyes squeezed shut against the impending bullet. “Heiner! Heiner Froehlig!” he called out. “Ich heisse Herman Gold! I’ve come to take you to America!” he continued in German. “It’s all right, put down your guns.”

  “Ja! Natürlich!” a voice called out from the locker.

  There came a rasp, and then the tiny flare of a match. The Germans were lighting candles. The wavering flames cast flickering, ghoulish shadows against the cinder block. A thin, sickly-looking young man with a month’s worth of beard staggered out of the meat locker. He was dressed in a stained, dingy suit. A Luger pistol dangled limply in his hand. Horton moved quickly to take away the gun.

  The man pointed back at the meat locker. “Herr Froehlig izt in zere,” he said in thickly accented English. It seemed as if the mere effort of walking and speaking had exhausted him. Horton caught him as he began to sag to the basement floor.

  “Get the medics down here,” Horton ordered as soldiers with flashlights began tramping down the stairs. Some of the men were carrying duffel bags that had been stowed under the benches in the trucks.

  Gold tried not to gag from the smell of excrement as he walked into the meat locker. Inside, amid the garbage and rusted pails of God knew what else, Heiner Froehlig and five others were sitting huddled in the far corner of the chamber.

  Froehlig was in his sixties, but he looked a hundred years old. He was barefoot, dressed only in a dingy gray undershirt and a pair of torn trousers. He was coated with grime, and his head was wrapped in a filthy, bloodstained bandage. Some of the blood had run down to crust his scraggly, ivory-colored growth of beard.

  “Hermann,” Froehlig began, “danke schön. Ich bin sehr dankbar—”

  “English!” Gold said sharply. “We’ll speak English!”

  He would not speak his native tongue. He was afraid to speak it here in the Fatherland with his one-time friend. Gold needed to speak English in order to latch on to some familiar, present reality that would keep him from being swept away into a past as suffocating as the fetid air in this nightmare cellar.

  “Yes, English it shall be, Herman,” Froehlig said. “Thank you,” he repeated. “I am very grateful you came….” He smiled weakly, revealing a mouthful of green-tinged teeth. “Forgive me for not standing up, Herman, but I don’t think I can.”

  “Let’s go! Let’s go!” Horton was urging his men as they unzipped the duffels, pulling out canteens, soap, and towels, folded U.S. Army uniforms, helmets, and boots. “Get these guys cleaned up and dressed, and help them to the trucks.”

  Horton turned to Gold. “I don’t think this is going to work,” he muttered.

  “Hell of a time to tell me.” Gold glared.

  “We had no idea these guys would look so bad,” Horton complained. “We knew that we’d have to hide the old guy Froehlig, but we thought these younger guys would be able to pass as GIs.”

  “We haf been down here since der Russians kommen,“ one of the Germans volunteered in faltering English. He was wearing a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles with one of the lenses cracked. He lay limp as a rag doll while two soldiers wiped the worst of the dirt from his face and dressed him as if he were a child. “Almost a month im Dunkein … in the dark.” The German broke off in a fit of coughing.

  “Is that not funny, Herman?” Froehlig demanded as one of the medics attended to him. “Is that not ironic?” He began to cackle. “Heiner Froehlig, Göring’s deputy, and all these bright young scientists, the cream of Germany’s manhood, reduced to hiding in the dark for weeks and weeks like vermin. Like Jews—” Froehlig abruptly froze, eyeing Gold fearfully. “Herman, forgive me. I am delirious.”

  “Shut up,” Goid said, turning away.

  “I’m a sick old man who doesn’t know what he’s saying,” Froehlig continued babbling, offering a horrendous smile.

  “Just shut up!” Gold shouted, whirling around. His fists were clenched as he advanced on Froehlig. “Damn you! Look what you have brought upon yourself! Upon Germany! Aren’t you yet satisfied? Can’t you just shut up?”

  Horton put a restraining hand on Gold’s shoulder. Froehlig, mewling in fear, was curled in the corner of the locker with his hands held up as if to ward off a blow. The soldiers were all staring. Gold could feel himself shaking in anger and grief.

  And guilt—

  What was a Jew doing rescuing these people? To hell with them, and with GAT, if need be. These Nazi bastards were criminals who ought to be turned over to the Russians to be hung.

  But the Russians would not hang these men, Gold reminded himself. The Russians would put them to work at drafting tables and aircraft factories, just the way the United States intended to put them to use.

  Remember that Froehlig had nothing to do with the crime against the Jews, Gold told himself. Froehlig was just a pencil pusher in the Air Ministry. He built airplanes. All these men here built airplanes. That’s all they did.

  “You okay?” Horton was asking him.

  “Sure,” Gold sighed. “I’m okay.” I’m an intelligent man, he added to himself. I can rationalize my way out of anything. So I’ll always be okay.

  “Yes, Herman, I will shut up,” Froehlig was whining meekly. “I will do anything you say—”

  Gold leaned close to Froehlig so that only he could hear. “What you’re going to do is work for me, designing jets for America,” Gold fiercely whispered.

  But Froehlig seemed not to hear. He was looking past Gold and had a dog’s grin of supplication on his face. “We will all do what everyone says, ja?” Froehlig whimpered like the vanquished and broken man he was. “And you will take us to America, ja?”

  “That old guy’s the last one, sir,” the sergeant told Horton.

  “Dress him up and get him loaded,” Horton replied. He came over to Gold and whispered, “Like I said, no way are they going to pass for GIs.”

  Gold shrugged. “It was a long shot, anyway,” he said calmly.

  Horton watched dolefully as Froehlig, swimming in his U.S. Army clothing, was carried out of the basement. “Sarge, have the men put up the canvas siding on the trucks,” Horton ordered. “And remember to stash these Germans way in the back. All right, let’s get out of here!”

  Gold felt calm during most of the ride back, until the convoy began the last stretch of the Mehringdamm before Tempelhof airfield. Suddenly Gold was finding it hard to swallow. He realized that he was sweating, that his hands were trembling.

  God, he was scared! The realization amused him. Oddly,
he welcomed and was relishing his fear. It had been so long since he’d felt the adrenaline rush that put the coppery taste in your mouth and sharpened your senses, reminding you that you were alive. Over the years he’d experienced more than his rightful share of love and elation, and plenty of anger and frustration as well, but he’d not been visited by fear’s needle-sharp flutters for over two decades.

  Not since he’d ridden into the sky to do battle from the cockpit of his Fokker triplane.

  Gold smiled. Back in those days Heiner Froehlig had also been present, working for Gold as a mechanic. Soon Froehlig would be working for him again….

  The convoy was approaching the airfield entrance checkpoint. “That half-track is still blocking the road,” Horton said.

  “Honk the horn,” Gold said forcefully. “Take the offensive.”

  “Huh?”

  “There’s three rules to dogfighting: hit first, hit hard, and get the hell out.”

  “What are you talking about?” Horton demanded, perplexed.

  Gold winked at him. “I’m talking about acing this. Trust me, I’ve got a feeling this is going to work out okay.”

  Horton shook his head. “I’m glad you’re feeling so confident,” he grumbled. “Because there’s good old scarface still waiting for us.”

  The Soviet colonel was standing with his hands on his hips and a stern expression on his ruined face. He began speaking Russian to Horton as soon as the jeep pulled up.

  “He wants to know why the siding is up on the trucks,” Horton relayed to Gold.

  ‘Tell him because we wanted it up,” Gold snapped, pretending to sound peeved.

  The Soviet colonel cocked his head like a parrot to fix his one good eye on Gold.

  “Take it easy,” Horton cautioned Gold. His voice was light, and he had a big smile plastered across his face, but Gold could read the concern in Horton’s eyes.