Rocket Science

Chapter One

When my best friend Floyd Bellamy came home from the war in Europe, Augusta, Kansas had a parade for him. The city meant to honor all the returning veterans, but the parade happened just as Floyd got off the troop train at the Santa Fe depot on the east side of town. There he was — healthy, tanned, fit, blond hair and white teeth gleaming in the Kansas summer sun, turned out in his best khakis with a chest full of medals and a jaunty scar on one cheek.

Floyd’s Nazi bayonet instantly won the loyalty of every boy in town, while his casual good looks won the heart of every girl. Mary Ann Dinwiddy had a prior claim that she quickly enforced with a long, slow kiss in front of Mayor Cooper, Bertha Shore from the Augusta Daily Gazette, and various assembled dignitaries on the reviewing stand.

So Floyd stood there in front of the reviewing stand on the bricks of State Street with Mary Ann, prom queen of 1940, hanging on his arm in her best silk stockings and a polka dot dress. He waved at the high school band, smiled at the Masons and the Shriners, saluted the VFW. Half of Butler County was out to watch the parade, and Floyd took center stage in their minds.

Later, we sat in Lehr’s having coffee and cherry pie, on the house for Floyd. The whole restaurant bustled around us, dishes and steam and the smell of fryer grease conspiring to leave a little zone of respect and quiet for the war veteran and his friends. My bad leg bothered me more than usual, the ghost of childhood polio, and I felt crabby from the heat. Floyd and Mary Ann looked as if they had stepped out of a Hollywood poster. He’d picked up a couple of female admirers, who managed to ignore me completely — even Lois, who I’d taken out from time to time over the years.

The way it had always been with Floyd.

He was telling us about the Battle of the Bulge, him trapped in burnt-out tank while half the German army marched by in one direction, then marched back the other two days later. “You should have been there, Vernon. Half the gosh darned Wehrmacht — oh, golly girls, I’m sorry. Pardon my French.” Floyd actually blushed. I remembered him in junior high school, practicing that blush in a mirror. He could wiggle his ears, too. Anything for the girls.

Sometimes I hated my best friend.

“I’m trapped in this tank with these two poor Gusses who got it when our tank took a shell, and—”

“Floyd,” I interrupted. I’d had enough. “You were in the Air Corps. What were you doing inside a tank?”

Floyd gave me one of his patented double-edged looks, the kind that had promised Indian burns or wedgies when we were kids. “I was on detached duty. Intelligence work, you know.” He winked at the girls. “They had a picked crew of us flyboys on the ground looking for secret German aeronautical stuff OSS thought was hidden in Belgium. Hush-hush, can’t discuss.”

Floyd was no pilot, I knew that for sure. He had shipped over as a mechanic, maintaining those big Pratt & Whitney engines on the B-24. But I wasn’t going to bother my best friend with facts again. He had a story to tell, and he was going to tell it come hell or high water.

Floyd cleared his throat. “As I was saying, I’m trapped in this burnt out tin can with two dead GI’s — God rest their souls.” He paused to bow his head in a brief moment of respect. “There I am peering out through the driver’s periscope, watching the Jerries beat a retreat from our boys, when something really unusual went by.”

“What did you see?” asked Lois, on cue. Floyd was getting her best face for free, the look that I had to pop for a dozen roses and dinner in Wichita to see. I loved Floyd like I loved my brother Ricky, but right then I could have blackened both his eyes for him. Of course, my brother broke my arm once, before the big creep went off and got killed under MacArthur on some jungle trail in the Philippines.

“It was a cargo convoy, pretty small — just three vehicles. But there were SS troopers escorting it, and the troops were letting it by. That was kind of unusual, you see. By that time in the war the Germans were having a rough time of it, so combat units always got top priority. The SS had better things to do than ride herd on supplies.”

“What was on the trucks?” asked Mary Ann.

Floyd winked again. “I can’t rightly tell you. That’s a matter of national security and I’ve been sworn to secrecy. But you can bet I followed those trucks and snooped a look at their cargo that night.”

As a matter of fact, I did have a security clearance, because of my work in the aircraft industry. I knew perfectly well that people involved in security matters never talked about it. All through the latter part of the war, since I graduated from Kansas State, Lois thought I was a parts manager at the Boeing plant in Wichita. I really did that job, part-time, but I had actually been working with a combined team from Boeing and North American on improving ordnance deployment from bomb bays. Still, there wasn’t much point in stopping Floyd when he got going. I could tell from the soft, shiny look in Mary Ann’s eyes that Floyd was going to get whatever he wanted tonight.

Floyd settled back in at his parents’ farm out east of town, about halfway between Augusta and El Dorado on Haverhill Road. His dad’s health had broken while Floyd was away, so like the good son Floyd pitched in with fixing the run-down farm equipment that was all Mr. Bellamy could afford. Harvest time wasn’t far off, even in August, and Floyd was needed.

I was proud of him. Whatever Floyd had or hadn’t done in the war, even if he was the biggest liar God ever placed on His green Earth, Floyd loved his folks and did every dirty, nasty or just plain dumb job that had to be done on a small farm. All of it without a word of complaint, not even to me in private. Every Saturday night he would come into town in his dad’s Willys pickup truck. He and Mary Ann and me — and sometimes even Lois — would drag State Street, just like we were back in high school again. If we were feeling flush, we’d pile into my ’39 Hudson 112 and head to Wichita for steaks and beer.

Fall came and brought the end of the Pacific War with it, along with the harvest. Ever since I went off to college, I had managed to avoid working the fields. First there was school, then the war work. But V-J Day had come and gone, with Harry S Truman’s atomic gamble paying off handsomely. Being from Missouri, Harry S was almost a Kansas boy, so we were as proud of him as if he were truly one of our own.

Now, with the war over, things were slowing down. I managed to keep my job at the plant, working full-time as a parts buyer now, but I had evenings and weekends free for the first time in years and a chance to use up some vacation time. So I took two weeks off to help the Bellamys with their corn harvest, bad leg and all. Heck, they’d done so much for me over the years it was the least I could offer.

“Hey, Vernon,” Floyd puffed from the top of the silo. Poor or not, the Bellamys had a lot of corn. “Guess what?”

I killed the clattering engine of the battered Farm-All tractor, leaned on the steering wheel and wiped my forehead. “What?”

“Remember that German convoy I told you kids about?”

Floyd had never mentioned the Battle of the Bulge again, so I figured the whole story had been bravado, the returning hero showing off for his hometown chums. “Yeah…” I said cautiously.

Floyd had his exasperating I’ve-got-a-secret grin. “Borrow one of your old man’s trucks tomorrow. I’ve got something coming on the Kansas City train.”

My dad ran an on-again, off-again cartage business and had a couple of old medium-duty Mack trucks — a 1932 AC model and a 1929 off-highway AP model — which more or less worked. If you were lucky and it hadn’t rained lately. “What — a panzer tank?”

“Nah,” said Floyd, still smirking. “Something much better. Trust me, you’ll love it.”

I drove the grumbling old AC stakebed up to the freight platform at the Santa Fe depot. Though my bad leg was on the gas pedal side, I never was much for the pressure of a clutch, but Dad’s old monsters speed-shifted anyway. Kansas weather is unpredictable in late September, and Wednesday’s warm fall day had turned into a damp, windy Thursday. If it started raining, the Mack might well decide to develop one of its innumerable electrical shorts and refuse to run until Thanksgiving. The weather bothered my game leg as well, tugging at the muscle and joints like a pair of harsh hands until simply bouncing along in the cab was sheer torture.

Floyd was already at the station, sitting on hood of the rusted Willys pickup rolling a cigarette. “Hey, Vern,” he called, waving his handiwork. “Smoke?”

“No, thanks. Trying to quit.” Truth be told, I had never enjoyed cigarettes much. Floyd didn’t drink or smoke before he went off to Europe, but nearly four years in the Army Air Corps had turned him into a connoisseur of bad habits.

“Train’s late,” Floyd said. He cupped his cigarette to light it in the damp wind.

“I can see that.” I stretched my back and studied the ragged gray sky. How soon would it rain?

Floyd finally got his cigarette lit and took a deep drag. “You didn’t tell your old man what you were doing with the truck, did you?”

I laughed, trying to disguise the bitterness. “He was sleeping.”

Floyd smirked. “Drunk again?”

“Yeah, drunk.” I didn’t like to talk about that. Dad’s drinking was one reason I took a room in Mrs. Swenson’s boarding house on Broadway Street. I hadn’t liked stepping over him on the hall floor, or under the kitchen table, or on the porch steps — wherever he was when his drinking finally overcame his muscle control. My polio had disturbed him enough — Dad always called it “the disease that ruined my son.” But Dad had given up and crawled inside his bottles since Mom died.

Floyd studied the railroad tracks. “What are you gonna do now?”

“About Dad? Not much I can do.” Except clean his side of their joint cemetery plot, I thought.

“No, no,” Floyd waved a hand. “I mean, the war’s over, America’s getting back on its feet, all that stuff. Everybody will go off rationing soon, the service is discharging a million guys just like me, jobs are tough to get. What are you gonna do?”

Floyd knew I had a good job at Boeing, and a college degree and pilot’s license to go with it. I figured he was really talking about himself. Floyd didn’t much like to ask for help, or even advice. I spoke carefully. “Well… I figure I’ll marry the right gal, maybe buy a house here in town. Keep working in Wichita.” Watch my Dad die from drinking. “What about yourself? Got plans with Mary Ann yet?” Plans more complicated than condoms and a mattress in the back of the Willys, at any rate. He kept both in the barn at home when he wasn’t planning to use them.

“Yeah, we’ve talked.” Floyd flashed me his million-dollar smile. He really ought to move to California and go into movies. “She wants kids, dogs, a flower garden. I don’t know…”

Floyd was rarely uncertain of anything. It was almost charming to watch him wonder. Every now and then I could still see the rough-edged farm boy who’d carried me around school and town on his back, that first year after the polio got me. “So, what’s on your mind?”

“Well, you know… take you, Vern.”

I hated being called Vern. He knew that.

“While I was off getting my gourd shot at in Europe, fellows like you were safe back here going to college and getting swank jobs you could keep after the war. A poor Gus like me, never even finished high school, I don’t have a chance unless I want to run my father’s farm. Any fool can see that’s a losing game these days.”

I was too surprised at Floyd’s comment about high school to be angry for what he said about me. We’d get back to that later. “Floyd, you finished school. I remember. You were sick for graduation, but so what?”

Floyd shook his head, then took a deep drag off his cigarette. “No. That was just a story. I failed senior English and American History that spring. I was ashamed, so I didn’t tell no one. Then I went off in the service the week after everybody graduated. It never came up again.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, but I tried. “Still, a guy like you — you’ve got a clean service record, you know aircraft engines. You could get on at Boeing or Beech Aircraft in Wichita real easy. I can put in a word for you in personnel if you’d like. Maybe get you on my team, even.” I tried to sound enthusiastic. He might be the nearest thing I had to a brother these days, but Floyd working under me was not high on my list.

“Yeah, well, about that service record…” Floyd broke off and stared down the tracks. He looked like he might bust into tears right there. Then we both glanced up at the scream of a train whistle, coming in from the east.

“What happened?” I asked gently.

“Nothing.” Floyd wiped some dust from his eyes. He gave me another million-dollar smile. “I’ll tell you sometime when we’ve got nothing better to do. There’s plenty of work coming for both of us on that train.”

The Santa Fe Baldwin 4-8-4 oil-burner sat just past the platform, chuffing and wheezing. It was a big steam engine, fairly new, black as Tojo’s heart with white and gold lettering. Even though my life was about aircraft, I appreciated the design compromises and manufacturing know-how that had gone into that magnificent beast belonging to the previous century. This was the age of flight, and my heart always wanted to soar.

Odus Milliken the railway agent, a cadaverous veteran of the Spanish-American War who seemed likely to live forever, had told us that this route would be getting the new diesels soon, so we’d better say goodbye to the steam trains. As much as I admired the old machines, I could live without the noise.

Odus and Bertie the switchman had conspired to drop two flat cars off onto the depot’s freight siding. One was loaded with an enormous crate, the other had something bulky secured under a tarp. Floyd and some of the old guys from the Otasko Club strained with the swing-arm block and tackle on my Dad’s stakebed truck to shift the massive crate from the first flat car. With my bad leg and all I stayed out of the way. The crate was almost too big for the truck — easily large enough to contain a small omnibus. I couldn’t imagine what something so massive and heavy could actually be. Had he shipped home artillery? I wouldn’t put it past Floyd.

Odus stood with me, shaking his head and laughing in his creaky old-man voice. “Those boys are idiots,” he said. “They ought to trot over to the lumberyard and borrow a forklift. It’s gonna take them all day to get that crate off. Plus he’s got that other load, too.”

I hadn’t realized that both flat cars were for Floyd. Where had he gotten the money for the freight charges? “What else does he have?”

“Come on,” Odus said. “Let’s have look.”

Odus and I walked around the flat cars, staying out of the way of Floyd’s work party. Odus untied the lashing that held one corner of the tarp to the second flat car. We lifted the canvas and saw a massive rubber tire. I peered up. “It’s a truck.”

“Really?” asked Odus. “I never would have guessed.”

I eyed the four-foot drop off from the flat car to the rails below. “How are we going to get this onto the ground?”

“Well, if they’d listed this correctly on the manifest, I would have had it off already,” said Odus sharply. “I’ve got a ramp we can drop at the end of the car. You just drive it off. Why don’t you pull the tarp off it while I go set it up?” He trotted away.

I tugged and pulled to get the tarp off the truck. The tarp was huge, heavy and damp, and nearly smothered me when it finally slid off. That was when I discovered it wasn’t a truck. It was a halftrack. Definitely German — field gray with the big black cross on the doors. Floyd had shipped himself a German army vehicle complete with bumper numbers and swastika. But it was the weirdest halftrack I’d ever seen — nothing like those newsreels of troops riding in an armored box over muddy, cratered landscapes.

The front looked just like any truck built in the last fifteen years — I didn’t recognize the make, of course, but it had to be German. The tracks in back looked a whole lot like an old Caterpillar 60 with extra wheels in the middle to extend the tread length. But the body on top was planed and angled like it was meant to fly away. There wasn’t a vertical surface anywhere on the back of the halftrack. I cocked my head, studied the thing. It really did look streamlined, or perhaps as if it had been meant to deflect explosion.

“Oh, Floyd, what have you done?” I whispered to the halftrack.

It started raining as soon as we left the depot and headed out of town, and it poured all the way back to the farm. I kept praying that the creaky old Mack would make it without sputtering to a halt. I didn’t look forward to dragging the truck and Floyd’s monstrous crate down muddy dirt roads with Mr. Bellamy’s ancient Farm-All. Lucky for me the spirits that moved the old truck smiled, and it kept turning over in spite of the dampness.

Somehow we got the vehicles all the way to Floyd’s place without attracting attention from the Butler County Sheriff. We parked both Dad’s truck and the German halftrack in Mr. Bellamy’s ramshackle barn. All but a few of the cattle had been sold over the summer, because large animals had become too difficult for the Bellamys to manage. In addition to a whole gallery of rusted plows and spreaders, generations of rotting hay and Floyd’s recreational mattress, the barn now sheltered an inbred tribe of resentful cats, three blank-eyed heifers, a single goat, and some stray bantam hens with one nasty little rooster. That left plenty of space for us.

Floyd got out of that weird halftrack and leaned on the fender, flashing his million-dollar grin. He patted the Nazi vehicle. “What do you think, Vernon? Hometown boy makes good.”

“Smuggling back a Wehrmacht halftrack hardly counts as the crime of the century,” I snapped.

“Hey,” Floyd said. “It’s not just a halftrack. It’s a Feuerleitpanzerfahrzeug auf Zugkraftwagen.” He rattled off the German tongue-twister like he’d been speaking the language all his life. “Adapted from the Jerries’ V2 control post.”

That explained the shape. It really was a blast deflector.

“Cheer up,” Floyd continued. “The f-panzer’s just a souvenir. What’s inside it, and inside the crate — those are the real prizes.” He paused, mock serious. “And they may well be the crime of the century.”

“Really.” I couldn’t decide if he was crazy, stupid or pulling my leg in a very big way. Maybe all three. The war addled people.

“Come on, take a look.” He walked to the back of the halftrack and stepped up onto the ladder that hung from the hatch at the rear of the strangely-angled cargo box. A huge stainless steel padlock secured it, with an eagle engraved on the lock body. The bird was so large I could see it from ten feet away. Floyd took a key ring from his pocket and fit one in.

“That lock looks like it’s worth a fortune all by itself,” I said.

“Oh, probably.” Floyd shrugged. “Some kind of special SS lock. You want it?” He turned to face me, open lock in his hand.

“Nah, keep it. It’s yours.” His words about wartime stay-at-homes like me taking all the good jobs still stung, in part because there was a measure of truth to them. I figured Floyd was going to need all the valuables he could get in life. Unless the truck was full of diamonds. Or something worse.

Floyd pulled open the latch and swung the door wide. He stepped up inside, calling, “Get in here.”

I stepped up the ladder to peer in. There was a profusion of radio and electronic gear in the truck, much of it obviously installed in haste. Loose wires trailed everywhere, and a box of stray vacuum tubes was jammed under an operator’s console. A hooded glass screen was bolted to one side of the van, while racks of gear lined the other. It looked like a radio operator’s idea of heaven.

Or maybe hell. I wasn’t sure which.

“What does it all do?” I finally asked. He’d mentioned the halftrack was an adapted V2 launch controller, but as far as I knew they were ballistic rockets — nothing that would require all this radioelectronics.

“I got no idea,” said Floyd cheerfully. “That’s why you’re here.”

“Floyd, I am a materials science engineer specializing in aeronautics. I know how to refine aluminum, how to machine wires and struts. I can find my way along the parts list of a B-29 in the dark. I don’t know anything about electronics, past winding a radio crystal.” I waved my hands around the van. “This might be a television studio for all I can tell.”

Floyd didn’t seem perturbed. “Vern, you’ll do fine. The boffins I… well, got this from… they said the German word for this thing translated as ‘telescanner’ or ‘farseer.’”

I knew about radar, from my work at Boeing, but it wasn’t common knowledge in the fall of 1945, so I didn’t say anything. But this truck certainly seemed as if it could have been used to control a German radar installation, perhaps out in the field.

Floyd looked at me, waiting for me to answer. I just stared at the electronics and wondered how long we would both spend in the stockade at Fort Leavenworth for this. After a few moments, Floyd spoke again. “You haven’t seen the best part yet, old buddy. This f-panzer is just a sideshow. Let’s open my crate.”

I followed Floyd back out of the control center, whatever it was. I carefully shut the door behind me. Floyd had removed the shiny German lock. I looked around for him, but he had disappeared, only to return a moment later with two long-handled crowbars and an axe.

“We’ve got to tear this baby down,” he said, handing me one of the crowbars.

“Uh, Floyd, let’s talk this over first.”

“Sure, sure, Vernon. What’s on your mind?” Floyd was obviously feeling expansive. I might too, if I’d swiped a German secret weapon.

“Look, I don’t know how to say this, but… I don’t want to look in that crate.”

Floyd’s eyes crinkled as his mouth turned down. It was like he was acting out his emotions. “I thought you’d love this stuff.”

“Oh, I could love it, believe me. Only, what’s in that telescanner truck of yours is enough to get us both put away for a long, long time. That’s a military secret Floyd. I don’t know where you got it, I don’t know how you got it, and I certainly have no idea how you got it all the way from Germany to Kansas, but it’s—”

“Belgium, actually,” Floyd interrupted.

“Gosh darn it,” I yelled. “I don’t care if you bought it in the camel market in Timbuktu! That thing is trouble, great big heaping buckets of trouble. Either you go and drop it in a quarry, or we call the authorities in Wichita and hand it over to someone in a position of responsibility. I don’t want to know anything more about it. Ever.” I turned my back on him.

Floyd made me so furious, sometimes. For years, he had gotten everything he wanted on charm, good looks and athletic ability. But the war was over, we weren’t in high school any more, and Floyd’s thoughtlessness was really starting to show through. I couldn’t even begin to imagine how Floyd had thought stealing some Nazi secret weapon and shipping it back to Kansas would be a good idea. Not even he could be that dumb.

“Vernon.” Floyd spoke in his small voice. I was about to hear the I’m-so-sorry-it’s-all-my-fault-it-will-never-happen-again speech. I could recite that one from memory. “I’m not going to apologize for what I’ve done,” he said.

He surprised me. Floyd really did. Maybe he was growing up after all. “What are you going to do?” I asked, turning to face him.

“I’m going to ask you to do me one more favor. Then, if you don’t want any part of this, walk out of the barn and go home. Just forget the whole thing. I’ll never say another word, you’ll never be involved again. If there’s any trouble your name won’t come into it. Promise. Honest injun.”

I knew from long experience what Floyd’s promises were worth. He was sincere — he was always sincere — but somehow things never quite worked out. Now he was taking a whole new approach to conning me into something he knew I didn’t want to do. That made me curious. The scam was obviously huge. Being an idiot, I took the bait. “Maybe. What’s the favor?”

Floyd smiled again, flashing that million-dollar grin. He played lousy poker because you could always tell when he knew he had won. “Just take a look in the crate. One peek, I promise. After that, either you’ll be in or you’ll be out. And I guarantee you’ll know what you want the second we open that crate.”

I shook my head, but I couldn’t stop from cracking a smile. “Floyd, I’ve got to hand it to you,” I said. “You could sell ice makers to Eskimos.”

He handed me one of the crowbars. “Take that end of the crate,” he ordered, “and I’ll work the other. We can pull this face off all at once.”

We dropped the wooden stakes off the right side of my Dad’s old Mack truck. With a strain on my gimpy right leg I got up on back of the bed where I pulled and tugged with the crow bar on my end of the crate. It had been nailed shut by an expert, that was for sure. The wood groaned and splintered before the first nails loosened. As I worked, I noticed that the crate had the words “Scrap Metal — Sharp Edges” stenciled on the side. I wondered if that was a sample of Floyd’s sense of humor.

With a mighty grunt, Floyd heaved at his end of the crate. The wooden wall came swinging down. I jumped back out of the way, falling off the truck onto my butt on the littered floor of the old barn. That hurt like blazes, and it was a miracle I didn’t get punctured by some old nails or worse. There was a resounding crash as the wood hit the floor, sending loose straw and dust clouds flying and bringing outraged squawks from the bantam hens. It darn near nailed me, too.

As the dust settled I stood up off the floor on my shaky legs and craned my neck to look into the crate. After a moment, I knew two things.

First, even though I couldn’t properly see the oddly twisted and curved lines of the thing, I knew I was looking at the most gorgeous aircraft I had ever seen. It looked as if it had been milled out of solid titanium, so smooth I couldn’t even see the joins.

Second, I was going to find a way to fly it or die trying.