She and Andy, the medium-sized people, got into one plane. Red and Vernon Keough, the long and short of it, climbed into the other. “Remember, the throttle works backwards,” she said one more time before they closed the canopies. “Follow me if you can.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Red said, and gave her a wave that was half a salute. “See you in England.”
She strapped herself into the pilot’s seat. Mamedoff took the one behind it, which faced the other way and let him use the machine gun that defended the Potez against attacks from the rear. She hoped—she prayed, though not much given to praying—he wouldn’t have to.
At least he hadn’t tried to claim the pilot’s seat himself. She had more experience than he did, and the bit of French she knew let her make some sense of the instrument panel. Not all men would have cared about any of that, but he owned sense enough to know it mattered.
The spade grip on the end of the stick had a red button on it. That was for the plane’s forward-facing guns. Again, she hoped she wouldn’t need it. She’d done a lot of flying, but not in combat, not yet.
She checked the fuel gauge. If the Potez was dry, she had a whole new problem, and not enough C-notes to spread around to solve it. But the gauge showed the tanks were better than half full. Was that enough to fly 350-odd miles?
A.E. laughed mirthlessly. She’d find out. So would Shorty and Red. How much gas did their plane carry?
Where were the engine starters? She found them, or hoped she did. When she hit the one labeled G, the left engine roared to life. The one marked D fired up the engine and prop on the right. A moment later, the other Potez’s props began to spin. Red gave her a thumbs-up from its cockpit.
Gently, as if walking on eggs, she pushed the throttle in a little. That felt unnatural, but the plane began to roll. She hadn’t been so careful or so nervous since her first takeoff. She steered the Potez’s nose into the wind, not that there was much, and gave it more gas.
It bumped over the dirt and grass of the field. She was more used to that kind of takeoff than to the smooth sort that came on paved runways. Everything she did was by eye and by feel. When she pulled back on the stick, the Potez’s nose went up. As soon as she knew it would stay airborne, she let out an Indian war whoop.
From the rear-facing seat, Andy Mamedoff bawled, “Red got off the ground, too!”
When A.E. understood him, she whooped again. After gaining some altitude, she cranked the wheels up into their wells. There was probably a hydraulic system to do it the easy way, but she couldn’t find the control on the instrument panel. She didn’t care. This worked.
She flew north at what the airspeed indicator said was three hundred kilometers an hour. That was two hundred miles an hour, or a little less. The Potez was faster than her old Electra, but not a whole lot. Against a Messerschmitt or a Hurricane, it would be in deep.
She had a compass. She could see shadows on the ground. England was a big target. She figured she’d find it. Nothing to worry about on that score, not the way there had been when she and Fred Noonan found Howland Island, a tiny speck of sand sticking up a few feet out of the endless, endless miles of the Pacific. Even drunk, as he often was, Fred had by God known how to navigate.
The altimeter, of course, read in meters. A meter was a yard, close enough. She stayed between three hundred and six hundred meters—one to two thousand feet. That way, she didn’t have to worry about oxygen. And if she wasn’t up very high, fewer people on the ground would spot her. That could matter. By now, she had to be crossing territory the Germans had overrun.
This plane had a rearview mirror at the top of the windscreen. She’d never seen that in any civilian model. When you flew into combat, though, you needed to see what was coming up behind you before it shot you down. At the moment, the only thing behind her was Red’s Potez. They both buzzed along as serenely as if no one had ever heard of war.
But people had. There clogging a highway was a German column: tanks, halftracks, trucks, motorcycles, guns, horse-drawn wagons, countless foot soldiers in field gray. A.E.’s thumb slid toward the red button. If she put her nose down and shot them up … She knew it was a bad idea, but it tempted her just the same.
Some of the infantrymen waved up at her. Sure as hell, they thought her Potez and Red’s were Messerschmitt 110s. Instead of opening fire on them, she waggled her wings. If they thought her a friend, she needed to act like one.
She flew on. France was greener and more finely divided into fields than most parts of the United States. She eyed the fuel gauge. It had sunk under the halfway line, but she’d been going for more than an hour. She nodded to herself. She ought to have enough to get to England.
Did Red? He was still a few hundred yards behind her. He could make his own fuel calculations … couldn’t he? A.E. shrugged and kept going. If he ran out of gas, she couldn’t do anything about it.
After a while, she reached the Channel. She remembered the fuss people had made the first time an airplane crossed it. That was in 1909; she couldn’t recall whether Blériot’s flight came before or after her twelfth birthday. Now it was just a ten-minute hop, with England on the far side.
England … and the RAF. If a patrolling Hurricane or Spitfire spotted her plane, would the pilot take the Potez 63 for a Messerschmitt? Landing as soon as she could suddenly seemed like a real good idea. She cranked down the landing gear, hoping Red would notice.
The cold, choppy gray water down below gave way to land. A.E. saw no sign of the white cliffs of Dover—she had to be farther west. Well, that was all right. Everything down below looked green and lush, as it had on the other side of the Channel.
Find a meadow big enough to land in, she told herself. As soon as she did, she began circling and descending. She saw Red Tobin doing the same thing. She also saw, with some relief, that his plane’s wheels were down, too.
Here came the ground. It wouldn’t be as smooth as it looked. It never was. The plane touched, bounced, touched again. She slowed to a stop, remembering one more time to pull the throttle out instead of pushing it in. When they were just about stopped, she killed the engines, first the left, then the right. The props slowed to immobility. Silence seemed strange after the droning roar that had filled her since dawn.
“Good job, boss,” Andy Mamedoff said. “You can pilot me any old time.”
“Any landing you can walk away from is a good one,” A.E. said. Red Tobin brought his Potez down. He landed rougher than she had, but he didn’t do a noseover or a ground loop. After he shut down his engines, he waved to her. So did Shorty from the rear seat. She waved back.
When she opened the canopy, the air was fresh and cool, noticeably cooler than it had been down in Tours. And a farmer was stumping across a meadow toward the planes. He carried only a pitchfork, but he carried it with as much determination as if it were a Tommy gun.
“Don’t try to get away!” he shouted. “I’ve called the soldiers, I have!”
“Good.” A.E. unstrapped and climbed out of the cockpit. “They can take us to London. We’re friends.”
Her voice and her looks stopped the farmer in his tracks. “You’re—you’re … her,” he said. “I seen you in the newsreels, I did. Never thought you’d come down on my back pasture.”
Three cars pulled up to the edge of the meadow. Helmeted men with rifles spilled out of them and trotted across the grass. A.E. ran a hand through her short, red-gold curls. The gesture was calculated to make them notice her, and it did. Like the farmer, a couple of them recognized her, too. She could watch word of who she was spread through the Englishmen.
Still, one of the soldiers began to raise his rifle. An older man with three chevrons on his sleeve—upside-down chevrons, to A.E.’s way of thinking—knocked the muzzle to one side. “Them ain’t Germans,” he said, and then, to the Americans, “Just who are you, and what are you doing here?”
Backed by Andy Mamedoff, A.E. began to explain. Red and Shorty walked over from their Potez and chimed in now
and then. The longer the soldiers listened, the bigger their eyes got.
Chapter Six
London. A.E. had thought her troubles, and the other Americans’, would be over when they got to London. Instead, she found them just beginning. Colonel Charles Sweeny was not in town. Apparently, he’d been in France, though she’d never heard from him while she and the others were there. His nephew—who, just to confuse things, was named Charles Sweeny, too—was, but he carried less clout with the British than the more senior man did.
She and her friends made headlines. Typical was the one that said AMELIA, 3 OTHER YANKS FLY OUT OF FRANCE ONE JUMP AHEAD OF THE NAZIS. The younger Sweeny was delighted: that kind of publicity would draw more Americans across the Atlantic to fly for England. For the same reason, the US embassy was furious. By the way Ambassador Kennedy talked, he expected the swastika to fly from Buckingham Palace any day now, the way it was already flying from the Eiffel Tower.
The RAF … The RAF blew hot and cold. At first, they wanted nothing to do with any of the four newly arrived Americans. Then they decided to let Red and Shorty and Andy train up to fly fighters … but not A.E.
She had an unpleasant interview with Air Vice Marshal Trafford Leigh-Mallory, who seemed to have the power to bind and to loose. “Why won’t you let me fly for you?” she demanded, blunt as usual. “I’ve got more flying time than my three friends put together.”
Leigh-Mallory was a plump little man; he looked more like a clerk than a warrior. “The answer should be obvious,” he replied. “You’re a woman.”
“So what?” she said. “Do you think the airplane will care?”
He steepled his fingertips. “Have you any experience whatever in fighter planes?”
“About thirty hours in the Curtiss Hawk,” she replied. “Someone I know in the US Army let me try it out last year.”
Leigh-Mallory made a sour face. He hadn’t got the answer he wanted. “The Hawk’s not up to snuff over here, you know. We have women ferrying aircraft from base to base. You may do that, if you like.”
“You’re wasting people that way. How many flyers have you got to spare?” she said. When he didn’t come back right away, she knew she’d struck a nerve. She went on, “How much bad press in the States will you get if you don’t let me try now?”
He turned a dull red. “That’s blackmail.”
“Not a bit,” she said, thinking It sure is. “Let me try, doggone it. Send me to the same training school where you sent Red and Shorty and Andy. If I wash out, I wash out. But I bet I don’t.”
Could Leigh-Mallory have shot down planes with his glare, not a German fighter would have stayed airborne within five miles of him. “All right. All right!” he growled. “You’re on my back, the bloody politicians are on my back, everyone’s on my back. If you’re so keen on getting yourself killed, I’ll send you to Croydon. See how much you like it when your kite’s on fire and you can’t open the canopy to get out.”
“This is what I came for,” A.E. said, and wondered if she meant it.
The Operational Training Unit at Croydon was about ten miles south of downtown London. Everything in England felt next door to everything else when you were used to the USA’s wide open spaces. The barracks at the OTU were packed tight with apprentice pilots from England, Canada, South Africa, Poland, Czechoslovakia, France, and the three men from the USA.
As the French had at the base near Tours, the RAF rigged her a tent outside the building. With summer arriving, it wasn’t too bad. Even if it had been, A.E. would have gone to hell before she complained.
She found out from Red Tobin what Air Vice Marshal Leigh-Mallory had meant when he snarled about politicians. “Yeah,” Red said. “Somebody told me to talk to a guy named Robbie Robertson. He’s an MP—you know, a member of Parliament—and he kind of specializes in getting foreigners into the RAF. So I talked to him, and I guess he pulled whatever strings he could pull, ’cause here we are.”
“Here we are,” she agreed.
They trained on Miles Masters. The two-seaters looked like undersized Hurricanes. Shorty Keough had to use a cushion under his behind and another at his back so he could see out and use the foot controls, but he managed. So did A.E.
“You have a notion what you’re doing in the air, all right, ma’am,” said the instructor who’d got into the raised rear seat, a sergeant old enough to have flown Sopwith Camels in the last war. “Almost embarrassed me to go up with you.”
“I can fly,” she said. “Shooting, though, and using that funny deflection sight …” The Master had one machine gun in the right wing, to give trainees a taste of aerial shooting. Real fighters usually carried eight.
“Formation flying, too, I expect,” the RAF veteran said. “Most civilian pilots haven’t done much of that, or used the wireless the way we do here. That’s why you came—that and so you could get into a Spitfire.”
“That’s why I came,” A.E. echoed. Even the trainer’s single machine gun reminded her this wasn’t a game. Past shooting a few rats in the barn with her sister’s .22, she’d had nothing to do with guns. And the rats in the barn couldn’t shoot back. The rats in the Luftwaffe, on the other hand …
“Won’t be long,” the sergeant pilot said. “We aim to get people into Spits quick as we can.”
“I know,” A.E. said. If the man’s offhand comment wasn’t a type specimen of British understatement, she didn’t know what would be. German fighters and bombers were pounding southern England harder by the day. With Churchill bellowing defiance at the Nazis over the radio, Hitler knew he’d have to invade England to get her out of the war. He’d never do that if he didn’t flatten the RAF first.
A.E. got her first chance in a Spitfire a few days later. The Miles Master, though pleasant to fly, was stolid like the family sedan. The Spitfire put her in mind of a sports car even before she climbed into the cockpit. It had the most perfect lines she’d ever seen on any airplane.
A smile stretched itself across her face. It got there before she realized it was even on the way. “When they look right, they fly right,” she said to the RAF sergeant.
He beamed and nodded. “That’s what they say, and for once they know what they’re talking about.”
The cockpit was cramped. It smelled of gasoline and oil and leather and sweat. The Spitfire wasn’t new. New planes went to the pilots who were using them against the Nazis. New pilots learned on old, beat-up machines. A.E. strapped herself in and started the engine. Time to learn.
When the big Merlin thundered to life, that delighted smile made her face shine again. This was power! A Spitfire weighed little more than a Master, but its engine had to have close to twice the horsepower. She’d known that before, but, as with a lot of things, there was a lot of difference between knowing and experiencing.
Flying the Spit was like driving a Jaguar, too, after years of sedately tooling around in Plymouths and Fords. Except for her brief stretch in the Curtiss Hawk, she’d never flown a plane that could break three hundred miles per hour. Even the Hawk had to huff and puff to do it. The Spitfire managed without breathing hard.
And, despise him as she would, she soon saw why Air Vice Marshall Leigh-Mallory looked down his nose at the American fighter. The Spit outclassed it in speed, in climb, in maneuverability, and in high-altitude performance. She had to brace her elbow against the side of the cockpit to work the Spitfire’s ailerons. Past that, it had no vices she could see.
She must have still had that silly smile on her face when she landed the Spit after forty-five exhilarating minutes, because the RAF instructor said, “Like it a bit, do you?”
“It’s terrific!” A.E. exclaimed. “Or whatever’s a step up from terrific!”
The sergeant chuckled. “It is a bit of all right. You can outturn a German in a 109 and get on his tail. And a Spitfire’s as fast as a Messerschmitt on the level, too, which a Hurricane isn’t.” He paused.
“But?” she prompted. “Whenever somebody stops like that, ther
e’s always a but.”
“There is. A 109 can outclimb you, and outdive you, too,” the veteran said. “If Jerry comes at you from above and behind, you’re in trouble. And if he’s in trouble, he’ll dive away from you and you can’t catch him. A 109 has fuel injection. It doesn’t hiccup in steep dives or climbs the way a carburetor does.”
“I’ll remember,” A.E. said.
By the way the sergeant’s eyebrow quirked, he had his doubts. “You’d better,” he said, “or your people back home will get a telegram they don’t want.”
She’d flown into danger before. If Fred Noonan hadn’t found Howland Island before the Lockheed Electra ran out of gas, the ocean would have swallowed the plane and left never a trace. But that kind of danger was impersonal, the inevitable result of natural circumstances. The men in the plane with the swastikas on their tails would be trying to kill her.
Air combat seemed a lot less romantic when you looked at it that way. From above and behind, the RAF sergeant had said. A fighter plane was nothing but a fancy, expensive tool for sneaking up on another pilot and shooting him in the back—before he could do the same to you.
Chapter Seven
By the end of July, the apprentice pilots at Croydon OTU had learned what they could there. A.E. knew she’d done better than most of the men. She also knew the RAF powers that be were liable to wash her out anyway, for no better reason than that she had to squat when she took a leak.
But they didn’t. Things in the air were getting more desperate by the day. Even the RAF brass could see they needed every man, and even woman, they could find who had half a notion how to fly a fighter plane. Along with Shorty, Andy, and Red, she got posted to 609 Squadron at Middle Wallop, a little north and east of Salisbury and Stonehenge.
Or Even Eagle Flew Page 3
