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  But I’m convinced that what made this generation so great was their ability to take the hardships that confronted them and turn them into laughter-filled, self-deprecating, unforgettable, sometimes unbelievable stories of life. My father used to tell me, “Bill, it’s all how you remember it.” The stories in this book are how I remember my life. I think I could sit at that table in Fontainebleau now… and tell a story or two.

  CHAPTER TWO

  OPERATION VOLCANO

  SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS

  1966

  I pushed the spring-loaded knife back into the bottom of the black attaché case. It clicked firmly into place. Rotating the dials to the coded numbers, I turned the two buttons horizontally and the lid to the case popped open, exposing my Luger pistol and a twenty-round magazine. A spotting scope was lashed to the inside along with my passport and several thousand dollars in unmarked bills.

  Confident that everything I needed was there, I closed the case, checked the safe house one final time, and then stepped outside into the fading sunlight.

  Traffic on the street was light. I looked over my shoulder to ensure no one was following me. A lot was riding on this mission and there was only one thing that could stand in my way.

  “Bill, time for dinner!”

  Mom…

  “In a minute,” I yelled back.

  “Five minutes, no more. Your food is getting cold.”

  Pulling the spotting scope from the James Bond Attaché Case, I looked for my sidekick, Dan Lazono. Dan was supposed to be concealed in the bushes across the street, ready to provide backup if the mission went awry, but apparently his mom had called him back inside as well.

  Mothers.

  The sun began to set over the small military housing complex on the outskirts of Lackland Air Force Base. Home to about a hundred officers and their families, Medina Annex sprawled across the rolling hills that overlooked the Officer Training School.

  Every morning at sunrise the sound of reveille blared through the loudspeakers, echoing throughout the housing area, and every night at sunset the sweet, haunting sound of “Taps” told me it was time to stop playing and go home.

  Throughout the year, hundreds of young Air Force cadets arrived at the school, heads shaved, backs straight, purposeful in their gaze, Vietnam in their future.

  The mid-1960s was the height of the Cold War and ushered in the era of movie and TV spies: those men from U.N.C.L.E., Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin; Derek Flint of In Like Flint; Matt Helm; and of course, everyone’s favorite, James Bond. Being in Texas, you couldn’t escape Cowboys and Indians, but being a spy was so much “neater.”

  In addition to training new cadets, Medina Annex also housed a large ammunition storage facility—dozens of hardened, aboveground structures hidden in the backwoods far from prying eyes. These “Gravel Gerties” looked like small volcanoes, a hundred feet in diameter and rising twenty-five feet from the ground. Named after a character in the Dick Tracy cartoon, the bunkers stored every high explosive in the U.S. Air Force inventory, including nuclear weapons—if you believed Dan Lazono.

  Security around the ammunition site was extensive. Air Police with their K-9 dogs patrolled the area on a regular basis, checking in with the command post when anything irregular was spotted. Around the perimeter of the facility were three concentric eight-foot-high chain-link fences, each topped with barbed wire. The layered defenses would be quite a challenge, even for 007.

  “Have you been climbing in the trees again?” Mom asked.

  “No ma’am,” I said sheepishly.

  Lifting my shirt, she inspected the large bandage that covered my stomach. “The doctor said no strenuous activity for one month. Not until the wound heals. If you keep running around like this you will have a scar for the rest of your life.”

  I do.

  Three months earlier, while scouting out the Gravel Gerties for a possible spy mission, I climbed high into a nearby tree to get a good look at the security. Below me, Billy McClelland and Jon Hopper stood watch. Somehow, they always stood watch.

  As I slowly stepped out onto an old branch, it gave way, sending me plummeting twenty feet to the ground, but not before I ripped my stomach open on a broken limb that jutted out halfway down the tree. It was two miles through the woods back to my house and Billy took off running to get my mother. Jon, the youngest of the three of us, kept pressure on my gut while we walked as far back as we could to shorten the distance home.

  Mom arrived in the car just as Jon and I broke out of the tree line. A frantic look on her face, she piled me into the back of the old station wagon and raced to Wilford Hall Air Force hospital.

  Wilford Hall and I were old friends. It seemed like every week I was in the emergency room for something: a broken arm from falling off a large fence, a slit wrist from running through a sliding glass window (“You better stop running in the house or you’re going to crash through that window!” How did Dad know that?), a busted knee from Pop Warner football, a broken ankle from basketball, a broken nose from, well… we were well acquainted. But this accident seemed to top the rest.

  The branch ripped a ten-inch gash in my stomach, but fortunately, it didn’t puncture any internal organs. The doctors stitched me up and put a large bandage over my stomach. All of this would have been fine, except a month later while riding the Air Force shuttle bus home from the new James Bond film, I fell out of the bus (it’s a long story) onto the street and ripped open the sutures.

  Back to Wilford Hall.

  “Give me that rock,” Billy said, pointing to a shot-put-sized stone in the nearby creek. He brushed a small lock of blond hair out of his eyes and with a determined look tossed the heavy stone into a bucket suspended from a tall oak. The bucket slowly began to sink, bringing with it the rope that lowered the “drawbridge” onto our island fort.

  “Nice toss,” Jon yelled. Jon yelled enthusiastically about everything. To him, everything we older boys did was exciting.

  I grabbed the rope and pulled down on the counterweight. The wooden plank settled easily between the mainland and the island—which was only separated by four feet, with a water depth of two feet. Any one-legged man could have forded our moat, but after building an elaborate tree fort, we had to find a way to protect it.

  We were ingenious. The tree fort was a miracle of wooden engineering. Every usable piece of plywood and two-by-four we could find went into its construction. Four walls, two windows, a solid floor, and a door that said KEEP OUT!!!

  We ran out of nails before the fort was complete, so the pieces of two-by-fours forming the ladder on the side of the tree were just the sort of thing my mother would not have liked. Billy climbed up the wobbly rungs and announced his arrival in the fort.

  “I’m in. Come on up!”

  I quickly scaled the tree and joined Billy. Jon stood at the bottom peering through his glasses, trying to gather his courage to make the climb.

  “Come on, come on. We don’t have all day,” I said.

  Jon grabbed the first step and began to climb. His knees were shaking and he squinted through the glaze of his fogged-up lens. Jon was a follower, and our club of three needed at least one good follower. Always working to overcome his fear of the woods, the rules we broke, and the trouble we might get into, Jon still followed us, and as young boys trying to be men, having a friend like Jon made us stronger.

  As Jon reached the final rung, Billy grabbed one side of his belt and I the other and with a noticeable grunt we hauled him into the fort.

  We had come to the fort to make final preparations for our upcoming mission—a mission to infiltrate the ammunition storage facility.

  It seemed like a good idea—at the time.

  We were certain that there was something nefarious going on at the Gravel Gerties, something that was a threat to U.S. national security. It was up to us to save the world.

  I pulled out the makeshift map and began the briefing.

  “We’ll call this—Operation Volcano,�
�� I announced.

  Billy and Jon smiled broadly. It was a cool name. “M” and Moneypenny would have approved.

  “Billy, we’ll need to move the planks into place tomorrow. Can you get your dad to bring them to the fort?”

  “Sure,” Billy said. “I told him we needed some extra wood to reinforce the treehouse. He said he could bring it by on Saturday, but we’ll have to move it from the fort to the outer fence.”

  “Are you sure the planks are long enough?” I asked.

  “I think so,” Billy said, not filling me with confidence.

  “They have to be long enough to stretch from the top of one fence to the top of the other,” I said. “It’s the only way we can get past the electric fence in the middle.”

  “Electric fence?” Jon said.

  “Of course it’s electric,” I said. “They always have an electric fence.”

  Billy nodded. Of course they did.

  “Jon, what about your dad’s binoculars?”

  Jon squirmed uncomfortably.

  “Never mind,” I said. “I’ll get my father’s deer hunting binoculars. He won’t miss them for a day.”

  Jon sighed and glanced downward.

  “It’s all right,” Billy said. “You have a real important part of the mission. You are going to be our security.”

  Jon liked that.

  “You have to keep alert, alert at all times,” Billy said. “If the APs catch us we’ll be in real trouble.”

  Jon wiped the sweat from his forehead and adjusted his glasses. “Do you think we’ll get caught?”

  Billy and I looked at each other. Frankly, the thought had never occurred to us. I mean, how much trouble can you get into breaking into a high-security compound?

  “Nah, we won’t get caught,” I said with conviction.

  “Who’s bringing the hot dogs?” Billy asked.

  “I have two whole packages,” I answered.

  The hot dogs were essential. Once we scaled the outer fence and used the planks to bridge across the two other fences, we would need something to protect us from the K-9s. Jon thought we needed steaks. Every movie hero used steaks, he argued, not hot dogs. Big steaks, T-bones, I think. Jon’s point was a good one. No self-respecting spy used Oscar Mayer hot dogs—ever. But my mother just didn’t understand why we needed steaks at the “clubhouse,” and I couldn’t tell her about the mission, so the hot dogs would have to do.

  And it was a fort, not a clubhouse.

  “It’s agreed, then,” I said. “We will meet tomorrow afternoon at my house and begin the mission.” Everyone nodded. “This is going to be great! Just like the movies.”

  “Who’s going to be James Bond?” Jon asked.

  It was something else we had never thought about. But it had to be decided. Billy was actually way cooler than I was. All the girls at elementary school liked him, he had a pet raccoon, and his dad drove a Corvette Stingray.

  “We can both be James Bond,” Billy offered.

  “You can’t both be 007,” Jon countered.

  I thought about it for a second. “I’ll be Napoleon Solo, and Jon, you can be my sidekick, Illya Kuryakin.”

  Everyone was happy. The plan was complete. We were ready for Operation Volcano.

  “Don’t move,” I whispered.

  The eyes of the big diamondback rattlesnake were firmly fixed on Jon. The snake, curled tightly in a striking pose, was five feet from Jon’s face, its rattle high in the air warning our three-man patrol to stay clear.

  “Back away,” I said.

  Jon followed my instructions.

  Slowly I reached down and picked up a piece of limestone shale that formed the bedrock of the washed-out gully we were in.

  “Don’t do that!” Billy said in a raised voice. “Don’t do that!” he repeated.

  Ignoring his warning, I tossed the flat shale rock in the direction of the snake. The rock landed just in front of the rattler’s head, and the snake launched forward, scattering us in three directions.

  “Ahhh!” Jon yelled as the snake slithered past him into another clump of rocks.

  I started laughing uncontrollably.

  “It’s not funny,” Jon said.

  “I know, I know,” I apologized. But it was funny.

  Snakes were part of life in Texas, and all of us had grown up with some story of rattlers or moccasins creeping into our backyard, hiding underneath a woodpile, or crossing our paths while we were hunting deer. And this washed-out gulley was full of rattlers. In the heat of the day they would come out to warm themselves on the rocks. Unfortunately, the only way to get to the ammunition depot undetected was down this dry creek bed.

  The walls of the creek bed were about six to eight feet high, with rocks and old tree roots jutting out of the soil, providing good footing to climb out quickly. Ten feet wide in some parts, the creek bed narrowed to a few feet as it approached our exit point. In the spring the waters that filled the gully would rush through, creating a funnel effect.

  The three of us were well armed for the mission. Jon had Old Betsy, a Davy Crockett rifle that he carried slung over his back, and he wore a coonskin cap, which was far too big for his head and was always falling off.

  Stuffed into my holster was my Roy Rogers pearl-handled cap gun, and Billy was armed with the best weapon of all: a Red Ryder BB gun.

  After the snake scare, I took the lead and Billy and I put Jon in the middle. As we moved farther into the woods the noises of the nearby neighborhood began to fade away. There was an eeriness to our surroundings even though we had walked this path a dozen times before.

  “I hear a truck!” Jon yelled.

  “Be quiet,” Billy said. “Listen.”

  It was a truck all right, and not far away. I pulled out my six-shooter, motioned to Billy and Jon to stay put, and climbed up the side of the creek.

  The truck was moving slowly in our direction, but I couldn’t see anything through the thick mesquite trees.

  “What do you see?” Jon whispered nervously.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Give me the binoculars.” I had entrusted Jon with my dad’s binoculars and he had dutifully packed them away in his knapsack.

  Billy grabbed the binoculars from Jon and scurried up the side of the hill to deliver them to me. “Look, over there,” he said.

  There was a break in the tree line and the truck had come to a stop about fifty yards away.

  “Oh shit,” Billy said, inching closer to the fallen log I was hiding behind.

  We all liked to say “shit.” It was the only cuss word we knew and we said it often.

  I looked through the binoculars. In small letters on the side of the blue pickup truck were the words Air Force Police. Inside the cabin I could see a gun rack with an M-1 rifle and a shotgun hanging on the hooks. The Air Policeman driving the vehicle opened the door and stepped out.

  “What’s going on?” Jon asked.

  Billy backed off from behind the log and waved at him to be quiet.

  On the other side of the vehicle, the Air Policeman stood motionless for a few moments. I adjusted the zoom on the binoculars. Smiling, I handed the binoculars to Billy.

  “He’s just taking a pee,” Billy said, snickering.

  We watched as the airman finished his business and began to get back into the cab.

  Suddenly from behind us there was the loud snap of a branch breaking, and I could hear Jon tumbling down the hill. The sound echoed through the woods, and beside the truck the airman paused to listen. Billy and I froze.

  My heart was pounding, and even though we were not inside the perimeter fence, I knew this was a restricted area. After a few seconds the airman hopped into the truck and drove off. Billy and I hustled back down the slippery hill to see if Jon was all right.

  “My cap. Where’s my cap?” Jon said, wiping the mud off his face.

  Hanging on the broken branch like some bushy-tailed squirrel was Jon’s coonskin cap. We retrieved it and continued our patrol. Thirty minutes l
ater we arrived at the planks of wood that Billy and I had moved earlier in the day. Jonny Quest was on TV at ten o’clock or Jon would have helped us move the planks, but we knew that he never missed Saturday morning cartoons, and certainly not Jonny Quest.

  “Are you sure we should do this?” Jon asked.

  Billy and I looked at each other, hoping one of us would acknowledge it was a bad idea. But we didn’t.

  “Just grab the first plank,” I said.

  We had scouted out this location over the past few months. The woods were thick on both sides of the fence line and I knew that there was a Gravel Gertie about seventy-five yards away. I had seen it three months earlier, right before the branch gave way, sending me to the hospital.

  Grabbing the first plank, we laid it at a forty-five-degree angle against the fence. Billy pushed against the wood to see if it was secure.

  “Okay, who’s going first?” he asked.

  Both Billy and Jon looked at me. After all it was my idea, my plan, my mission, and even though I wasn’t the designated James Bond, it was my responsibility.

  “I’ll go,” I said, stepping onto the bottom of the plank.

  The Chuck Taylor high-tops I was wearing seemed to grip the wood well. Slowly, I climbed my way up the board until I reached the top, balancing myself with one foot on the barbed wire and one foot on the plank. I could now see the top of the Gravel Gertie rising above the trees.

  “Quick, quick. Hand me the next plank!”

  Billy and Jon picked up the next board and started to hand it to me.

  “It’s too short,” I yelled. “Give me the next one.”

  Every board was too short. The distance between the fences was way too long, but we had come too far to stop now. The world still needed saving.

  My feet were beginning to wobble and it was hard to stay balanced eight feet in the air with nothing to hold on to.

  Suddenly the Chuck Taylors lost their traction. My left foot slipped out from under me and I teetered on one leg, waving my arms frantically trying to get my footing.

  “Jump! Jump!” Jon screamed.