"Jesus!"

"Grab what you can while you can, Geoff," Lowell said. "There's not much out there."

Geoff didn't reply.

"Do I get to meet her?" Lowell asked.

"Shit, I want you to," Geoff said. "But I think now would be a lousy time."

"I understand," Lowell said. "Let's go talk to Mommy. I've still got to go to Rucker tonight." (One) Miller Army Aiirfield Fort Benning, Georgia 190S Hours, 24 December 1961 Lowell parked Bill Roberts's wife's Volkswagen in a spot reserved for colonels' automobiles and then went into Base Operations. He gave the keys to the noncom on duty and told him that as far as he knew, General Roberts would be returning to Benning early Thursday morning.

Then he checked the weather. He had seen the jeep driver comfortably curled up on a cot with Action Comics, and decided it wouldn't hurt him to leave him there and walk to the aero commander. He thought wryly that he had nothing else to do anyhow.

The commander was parked some distance from Base 0ps, in a parking ramp behind the hangars, where it wouldn't be quite so conspicuous among its olive-drab brothers. He had walked no farther than the end of the parking ramp in front of Base Ops, where the VIPs' airplanes and transient aircraft were THE BEItETS 233 parked, when he glanced at the line of aircraft and stopped short.

He was as much upset at what he would now have to do chew ass, and rather intensely, on Christmas Eve as at the violation itself. He turned and went back in Base 0ps. "Where's the aerodrome officer?" he asked.

"He's taking a nap, sir. Can I help you?"

"Wake him up," Lowell said.

"Yes, sir."

The aerodrome officer, a captain wearing the infantry center insignia, appeared, sleepy-eyed, a moment later.

"Can I help you?"

"There's an armed Mohawk on the line," Lowell said. "Who does it belong to?"

The aerodrome officer did not know who the guy in the Tyrolean hat was, and he was annoyed at having been roused from his nap.

"We don't talk about armed Mohawks," he said. "May I ask who you are?"

"I'm Colonel Lowell, and we don't park armed Mohawks on the transient ramp. I asked you who it belonged to, Captain."

"Sir, I don't know," the captain said. "But if it's important, Colonel, I'll see if I can find out."

"Get to it!" Lowell ordered sharply.

The captain was on the telephone when another captain in an International Distress Orange flight suit walked into Base Ops carrying a flight helmet and a Jepp case. An embroidered cartoon insignia of the Mohawk was sewn to the flight suit.

"Who the hell parked that Mohawk on the line?" he demanded angrily.

"Who are you?" Lowell asked.

The captain looked at him and after a moment recognized him.

"I'm Captain Witz, Colonel," he said. "I'm to take that Mohawk to Rucker. But I didn't expect to find it on the line."

"Neither did I," Lowell said. "Why is it going to Rucker?"

The captain visibly considered for a moment Colonel Lowell's Need to Know, and decided in the affirmative. He knew Lowell to be in the small group of brass in charge of what was going on. "The story I get is that half of the black boxes are out, and that they gave up on fixing them here. Major Brochhammer's arranged to have SCATSA fix them tomorrow at Rucker. He told me to take it down there and make sure that it was fixed."

"Guns and all?" Lowell asked.

"I guess it was time, sir. It'd take three, four hours to get them off."

"When did all this happen?"

"Major Brochhammer called me about half an hour ago, sir.

"Taking you away from your family on Christmas Eve?" Lowell said.

"Yes, sir."

"If you'll loan me your orange rompers and your hat," Lowell said, "I'll take it to Rucker. I presume they expect it?"

"Yes, sir. I'm to taxi right to the SCATSA hangar, Colonel."

"I think I know what happened," Lowell said. "The people who couldn't fix it were anxious to get home on Christmas Eve. So instead of waiting for you to show up at the hangar, they had it pulled out here so they could lock the hangar up and go."

"That's probably it, sir," the captain agreed.

"We can't have that," Lowell said. "So before you go home, Captain, you will find out if that's what's really happened. If it is, you will call the sergeant I think it's a warrant officer, come to think of it out here, and really eat his ass out. We simply can't have the air force finding out what we're doing. That's really more important than whoever was in charge disobeying his orders."

"I understand, Colonel."

"If it turns out that he got permission from his commanding officer to do what he did, call Major Brochhammer and turn the incident over to him. And tonight. I want some ass chewed tonight."

"Yes, sir," the captain said.

"Beneath his friendly smile," Lowell said, "behind the smoke screen he sets up from that smoldering root he keeps in his mouth, Major Brochhammer can be one mean sonofabitch when aroused. I think he should be aroused tonight. To repeat myself, more is involved here than somebody taking off early because it's Christmas Eve. If the air force can prove we're putting guns on these things, we're in trouble."

"I wasn't aware the colonel was checked out in the Mohawk, sir," the captain said carefully.

"Captain," Lowell said with a smile, "I'll have you know I was co-pilot on the famous, very first acceptance test of the very first Mohawk. It was famous because Lieutenant Colonel Rudolph G. MacMillan, who was driving, got us as far as the threshold of the active before he set the brakes on fire. We had to be towed ingloriously back to the hangar."

"I'd heard about that, Colonel," the captain said, chuckling. "But I didn't know it was you with Mac."

He pulled the heavy plastic zipper that ran all the way down the front of the flight suit, and started pulling the suit off.

"Oh, to hell with it," Lowell said. "No one's going to see me in civvies on Christmas Eve. Just loan me your helmet and help me turn the airplane on." He turned to the aerodrome officer. "I presume there's an APU in place?" (Auxiliary power unit, a trailer mounted gasoline engine electric power generator, necessary to start aircraft engines.) "No, sir," the aerodrome officer said. "No one asked for one."

"If you weren't napping, Captain," Lowell said, "you would have seen that Mohawk on your line and known that either a tractor or an APU would be required. Get one out there!"

"Yes, sir."

"What do we put on the manifest, sir, authorizing you to replace me?"

"I'll sign it," Lowell said. "I think everybody but Jim Brochhammer and I are gone. In that case, the rules of seniority probably put me in charge."

They walked out to the Mohawk. There were those who considered it an ugly airplane and those, Lowell included, who thought it was beautiful, in the sense that function is beauty. It was a no-nonsense, businesslike airplane, the first "real warplane" the army had ever had.

He was in large measure responsible for the army having it at all. When he was flying a desk in the Pentagon, he had been the money man in a conspiracy involving himself, Bill Roberts, then still a colonel, and Brigadier General Bob Bellmon.

Roberts and Bellmen had had the idea, and he had found the money in available funds. The other piece in the pie was the marine corps.

The marine corps had been authorized to look into a new observation airplane to replace the Cessna L19, a two-seater single-engined airplane. The navy pretty well left the marine corps alone when it wanted new equipment, exercising control through control of funds. And the marine corps was not restricted as the army was, to a very limited aviation role. The marine corps was authorized fighters and fighter-bombers and had unquestioned right to twin-engined airplanes, if that was what they thought they needed and if they could get the money from the navy.

The marines had been concerned about "twin-engine reliability." They wanted an observation airplane that could continue to fly if one engine failed or was damaged by ground fire while the plane was directing artillery over enemy-held terrain. They had been looking at a Cessna idea. Cessna proposed to put two engines on a version of its single-engined civilian model 172.

It was a good idea. Instead of mounting an engine on each wing, which would have required beefing up the wings to take the strain and would have been enormously expensive, they planned to mount the second engine in the rear of the cabin, in line with the engine in front. There were several advantages to this: For one thing, it would be very easy and cheap to design and build two thin booms which had only to be strong enough to support themselves to replace the existing single tail and make room for the propeller arc of the second, rear-mounted engine.

Reinforcing the existing cabin to take the second engine would not be a major expense. And the airplane could be flown by anyone who could fly a single-engine airplane. With the engines in line in a "push-pull" configuration, all that happened when either one of the engines quit was that the airplane flew slower. When a wing-mounted engine quit, the plane immediately made a sharp turn toward the dead engine. Training pilots for this eventuality was both expensive and dangerous, for the only way to demonstrate the condition was to shut one of the engines down.

The army placed an order for half a dozen of the marines' push-pull Cessnas for test purposes and to put the air force to sleep. And after Colonel Bill Roberts and General Bob Bellmon had some discreet talks with some old friends in the marine corps, the Deputy Chief, Plans and Requirements Section (Fiscal), Aviation Maintenance Section, Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Logistics an obscure office under the command of an anonymous major named C. W. Lowell quietly made available to the marine corps almost nine million dollars of the funds available to his office.

Nine millions of dollars, in other words, that would have gone to purchase aviation fire trucks, avionic maintenance vans, hydraulic stands, tools, APUs, and the other paraphernalia of aircraft maintenance, went instead to the marines to fund a "Joint Project in Engineering Feasibility Studies for Twin Engined Observation Aircraft."

Grumman Aircraft of Bethpage, Long island, longtime supplier to the navy and marines of fighter and utility aircraft for use from aircraft carriers, quickly came up with engineering drawings of a strange little airplane that looked like neither a fighter nor a utility airplane but contained features of both.

There were twin engines not little gas-poppers but turboprops of one-thousand-shaft horsepower each. They had been proved on Grumman utility aircraft long in use flying mail and passengers onto aircraft carriers. There were two seats, side by side, up in front of the engine. There was originally a single vertical stabilizer on the tail, but this didn't work out, and two additional vertical stabilizers were added.

Because the marine corps was not denied armed aircraft, provision was made in the wings and fuselage for "hard points" of sufficient strength to take machine guns and other weaponry.

The marine corps knew that the navy would never give them the money to buy aircraft like Mohawks for observation purposes or even, with weapons mounted, for use as close ground support aircraft. But the marines also knew that if the army got the aircraft into production, should a war come, there would be no problem in ordering their own. In the meantime the army had made a gentleman's agreement to loan a number of Mohawks to the marines immediately on the opening of hostilities.

It had thus been in the Marines' interest to keep the air force in the dark, too, and the Marines are good at keeping secrets.

When the first Mohawks were delivered to the army, the army announced that they were unarmed electronic surveillance aircraft to study the battlefield with an array of radar and infrared sensing devices. A twin-engine aircraft was needed to carry all that electronic equipment.

That was true.

And it was also true that it would have cost an enormous amount of money to remove the weaponry-capable hard points from the wings and fuselage. The army assured the by now alarmed Air Force that they understood perfectly well that the Key West Agreement of 1948 specifically forbade them armed aircraft. The army promised to continue to abide by that agreement.

This was not true.

Roberts and Bellmon and some others believed that once the army got armed Mohawks into battle, the air force would look pretty silly beating its breast and pulling its hair and complaining that the army was breaking the rules. The army was actually shooting at the enemy, and they'd have to be ordered to stop.

The problem was to get the Mohawks into battle without letting the air force know they existed. And a kind warrant officer wanting to turn his troops loose because it was Christmas Eve could blow the whole thing.

Under an interservice agreement, air force planes routinely refueled at Miller Army Airfield, and their pilots routinely took a good look around to see what the army was up to. Any air force pilot, not just one sent to have a look, would have been fascinated to see one of the army's turboprop "reconnaissance" planes sitting in front of Base Ops, festooned with a rocket pod under one wing and a machine gun pod under the other.

Lowell walked around the plane doing the preflight as an APU in a jeep trailer was plugged into the airplane and fired up.

With his story that he had been co-pilot on the first acceptance test flight of the Mohawk, Lowell had given the Mohawk pilot the impression that he was highly experienced in the airplane. That was some distance from the truth. He had gone along with Mac that first time because all Mac had planned to do the first time was take it up, circle the field, and bring it down. It had been more a ceremony than a real test flight. The plane had just been delivered from Bethpage by a Grumman test pilot. It had performed flawlessly. Lowell's ceremonial ride was a bone tossed to a hungry dog: He would not get command of the OV-1 Observation Platoon (Provisional, Test) that was shortly to be formed, although he had done everything but wag his tail and beg for it. He would continue shuffling paper. Bellmon had told him pilots were a dime a dozen, but "staff men" of his caliber were one in fifty thousand.

His checkout and subsequent experience as a Mohawk rated aviator (a total of thirty-five hours) had been much of the same thing: "Check him out in it; make him feel he's part of the team."

He had never before actually flown a Mohawk solo, although on paper he had. It had all been done with great finesse: "We know you can fly it, so take Lieutenant So-and-so to Benning, drop him off, and pick up Captain So-and-so."

C. W. Lowell, Lieutenant Colonel, 25 hours total Mohawk time, pilot in command.

Lieutenant So-and-so, 250 hours total Mohawk time, "passenger."

He wasn't sure if they were concerned that he might bend the bird or that he would hurt himself while bending the bird. The Grumman line was rolling Mohawks out in a steady stream; the aviation school was turning out a steady stream of pilots. But "staff men of his caliber were one in fifty thousand."

He put the Mohawk pilot's flight helmet on, stood on the hood of the jeep, and climbed into the cockpit and plugged the helmet in.

He flicked on the main power buss and heard the gyros come to life. There were a number of red flags on the panel, and he examined each one carefully. With the exception of a malfunctioning ADF, all the problems were in the black boxes on their shelves in the fuselage. These had nothing to do with the engines, controls, or navigation aids of the airplane itself.

He looked down at the ground and gave a thumbs-up signal. The Mohawk pilot, who was manning a huge wheeled fire extinguisher, nodded.

Lowell reached for the Port Engine Prime control and worked it. Then he held down the Port Engine Start toggle switch. The engine started smoothly, and the blades began to whirl. He primed the starboard engine and pushed down the starboard Engine Start switch.

The ground crewman disappeared from sight to pull the chocks from the wheels and then reappeared.

"Miller," Lowell said to the boom microphone, "Mohawk One-One-One at Base Ops for taxi and takeoff."

The tower operator came right back.

"One-One-One, you are cleared via Taxi One to the threshold of one-eight."

Lowell waved to the people on the ground and put his hand on the throttles, advanced them, and started taxiing.

He lowered the canopy in place when he came to the threshold of the runway.

"Miller, One-One-One on the threshold of one-eight. Request takeoff permission, VFR direct OZR."

"One-One-One is cleared for takeoff. There is no reported traffic in the local area. The winds are negligible, the altimeter is two-niner-niner-eight, the time is five to the hour."

Lowell turned the Mohawk onto the runway, locked the brakes, put the flaps all the way down, and ran up the engines.

"One-One-One rolling," he said, and took off the brakes.

The force of the acceleration pressed him hard against the seat. The airspeed needle hesitated, then sprang to life, indicating seventy. When it reached eighty, he eased back on the stick and felt it almost jump into the air. He pulled the gear and the flaps and farther back on the stick.

Fort Benning and Columbus dropped beneath him. There was enough light to see U.S. 431 below him to his left. He broke off the climb and dropped the nose. The altimeter was at 2,500 feet. The sonofabitch climbed like a rocket. He took it down to 750 feet and put the highway on his right.

The airspeed indicator had climbed to 350.

It was a pity, he thought, that at that speed he would be over Dothan in twenty minutes. It would be nice just to fly for a while.

Napof-the-earth flying was forbidden without specific authority.

"To hell with it," he said aloud, and pushed the nose down again.

The altimeter indicated less than one hundred feet, but he wasn't looking at it. He was looking out to make sure he didn't run into a power line or over a cow.