The Girl in the Blue Beret Read Free

morning with an urgent message. He remembered Robert letting his rucksack fall to the floor, then reaching in like a magician to produce cigarettes or a few priceless eggs. Once, he pulled out an actual rabbit, skinned and purple. From inside the lining of his coat came thin papers with secret messages. Whatever happened to him after the war?

3.
    M ARSHALL ALWAYS ARRIVED EARLY FOR HIS FLIGHTS. HE TRIED to nap in the pilots’ ready-room at Charles de Gaulle Airport. He hadn’t slept well, his final B-17 mission blending in his dreams with the 747 he would be flying across the ocean for the last time. He read the newspapers and stoked up on coffee and peanuts. In his experience, peanuts balanced the caffeine turbulence without cutting the uplift of the caffeine itself. He wanted that uplift today. The night before, several of the crew had taken him out for a retirement wingding, complete with a late-night frolic at the Folies de Pigalle. He could hardly pay attention to the titillation, for thinking of his visit in Belgium.
    Today his first officer, Erik Knopfler, who was twenty years Marshall’s junior, caught him trying to nap. “Hey, old man, getting your beauty sleep? That’s what you get for staying out late partying.”
    “Yeah, they’re telling me I’m old. ‘Happy birthday, here’s your burial plot.’ ”
    Carl Reasoner, the flight engineer, joined them. He said, “I know we’re always razzing you senior guys, but Marshall, I’d rather fly with you than most of these guys today coming out of Vietnam.”
    “That goes for me too,” said Erik.
    “Well, thanks, guys. I appreciate that. I walked all the hell over Paris yesterday, and my heart runs like a top. Yet they say I’m too old.”
    “Oh, we have to get rid of you, you know,” said Erik with a laugh. “We don’t want you old guys hogging all of the seniority.”
    “That’s diplomatic,” Marshall said. “Just wait till you hit the big six-O!”
    In the washroom, Marshall spruced up and gave himself the once-over in the mirror. Loretta would have wanted him to look good on his final flight. He couldn’t be sixty , he thought.
    At the dispatch office, he checked the weather forecast and worked out the fuel load. Then he stopped at scheduling, where he gave the crew his captain’s briefing. He tried to be august as he presented the flight plan and ran the crew through routine checks. He dwelled too long on ditching procedures, but he didn’t want to slight anything. And instead of leaving it to the first officer, he would do the damn walk-around himself this time, he thought. He wanted to kick the tires. One last time.
    After the briefing, Erik ogled an attractive flight attendant in a short skirt as she descended the stairway.
    “I’d like to see her twist down the aisle of the plane like that,” he said. “But man, the girls on my last flight must have come from the Salvation Army.”
    “They were better in the old days, huh, Marshall?” Carl was teasing him again. “Everything was better then, I hear.”
    “Naturally.”
    Marshall set off for the plane, his travel bag in one hand and his “brain bag”—his flight manuals, maps, flashlight, and hijacker handcuffs—in the other. He felt pleased by the respect the younger guys gave him. “Bus driver!” his son, Albert, then a teenager, had once taunted him.
    Marshall was prepared for hijackings, bombings, unruly passengers. He had to be ready with his skill, his sang-froid , his instantaneous judgment, his focus. He had learned to make his eyes radiate alertness. He practiced unblinkingness. He could go sixty-four seconds without blinking. He had to ease up a bit when he began to need artificial tears. He hated having to carry a bottle of eyedrops.
    He jokingly called the younger pilots whippersnappers. He had been one himself. The one who crashed the B-17. He quickly corrected that thought. He was the one who safely brought down the wounded bomber.
    THAT MORNING HE was