Munich, Germany
Lieutenant Colonel Cameron Mitchell tried to make his way through the crowded and cavernous beer hall, a cacophony of music, language, eating, and especially drinking all around him. There were hundreds of American soldiers to be found in the streets of Munich. Half of them seemed to be out with German fräuleins and drawing the jealous attentions of the civilian men in the crowd who five years before might have been shooting at the same soldiers their sisters or daughters were now dancing with.
Still, the war had been over for four years and most people in the Western Zones of occupation seemed to want to move on, and Cameron was happy to let them. He had spent his wartime duty fighting the Japanese and didn't hold any grudges here. He was also blessed by the blue of his uniform, which in Berlin and the rest of the Western Zones told the population that he was one of those risking their lives every day to fly food, coal, and the basic provisions of life into the blockaded city of Berlin.
Among the crowd he soon spotted who he was looking for and he came up and settled in across from him. "Sheppard, only you would come to a beer hall in the greatest beer drinking city on earth and be there for the food."
Major John Sheppard, United States Air Force Reserve, did not look up from his bratwurst with sauerkraut and potatoes except to give him a grin. "Twenty-four hours from bottle to throttle, you know that, Cam."
"Don't you have two weeks' leave coming up? You aren't flying tomorrow."
"I'm hitching a ride into Berlin to see my girlfriend, might as well help drive the truck."
"This the woman you had here a few months back? Brown hair, green eyes, legs that go on forever…."
"That would be Elizabeth."
"You really are a glutton for punishment, Sheppard. How many times have you asked her to marry you and she said no?"
"She said no twice, and didn't answer me the other two."
"Didn't your mother ever tell you that stunned deer-in-headlights look was a no, John?"
Sheppard forced a smile, and pushed a few potatoes around the plate. "No, but she did tell me that if at first I don't succeed, try, try again."
Mitchell just shook his head. "What's she doing in Berlin anyway? I thought she was going to school in England."
"Cambridge, a doctoral candidate. She's doing research in Berlin and teaching at the Free University of Berlin. Principles of international relations. I tried to sit in on a class once but besides not being able to speak German I don't think I would have been able to follow her if she'd been speaking English."
"And she hasn't married you why? Aside from your scruffy and wild ways."
"Who's scruffy?"
"When was the last time you shaved?"
"This morning."
"Really, I thought it might have been 1945 by the look of it."
John just gave him a smile. "She says she doesn't want to settle down and be a professor's wife and attend math department functions. In fact I don't really think she's ready to go back to the States. I think her mother is setting those big iron bear traps all over the family estate to catch her at an unsuspecting moment by the way Elizabeth describes it." To emphasize the point he made a clam motion with his hand to imitate the cartoon traps from Warner Brothers shorts.
"How long have you been chasing this one?"
"Four… or seven years… depending on when you start counting."
"Do you ever give up?"
"Not a chance."
The next morning as John angled the Douglas C-54 Skymaster onto approach at Tempelhof he could see the hoards of young German kids lining the fence line. Handing control off to the other pilot he reached into a satchel, and as they passed over the children by thirty feet he tossed out a few handfuls of candy as had become his custom. Elizabeth had told him once that the children called all the pilots who did this Candy Bombers and he'd rather liked the idea.
The conversation the night before with Mitchell had him thinking more and more about Elizabeth and their on-again off-again on-again off-again relationship. She'd become almost coy about the entire marriage thing, and in truth John was pretty sure he understood why. He had trouble picturing her settling into life as the wife of a junior faculty member at the University of Chicago. He'd gotten the job after the war, and they had promised him it was waiting for him when he had been called up to reserve duty for the airlift into Berlin.
Elizabeth Weir wasn't ready to give up her own education for him, and she wasn't ready yet to give up being a spy. They'd joked a few times that she was married to the CIA, and that was why she couldn't marry him. He suspected that her family would disapprove of that even more than they disapproved of him. Elizabeth's sister was nice, but her mother seemed to live for disapproving of her oldest daughter.
And Elizabeth seemed to live to do things her mother would disapprove of.
As soon as the aircraft settled onto the ground the German laborers started to unload the bags of potatoes, flour, and sugar in the back. John said goodbye to the pilot and with his hat at a jaunty angle and shouldering his bag he started towards the airport gates, pausing when he got there and didn't see Elizabeth, but instead her boss, a genial Saxon running the department she was in at the university.
"Major Sheppard, did Elise come to visit you?"
John knit his eyebrows together. "Nooo, Herr Professor… why?"
The German looked disturbed. "Because she didn't show up for class three days ago."