Or Even Eagle Flew
Page 9
“Christ! Can our guys get away?”
“Soon as we saw ’em go oop, I came over here. T’boys know they’ve got trouble now. They’ll do what they can.” The corporal lit a cigarette and offered A.E. the packet. She shook her head. He rode back to the radar station.
And she … was all dressed up with no place to go. She looked toward her kite, and toward the mechanics still working on it. She could have been down in France herself, goddammit. She might have done Red some good.
More of the RAF men who stayed on the ground all the time started gathering at the edge of the runway with extinguishers and other firefighting gear. The shoulder-length asbestos gauntlets made A.E. suck in her breath. If you had to wear those to pull someone from a burning plane, would he thank you for it afterwards?
Four planes came back, all of them colandered with bullet holes, two with wounded pilots. “God bless the fucking planes,” one Yank said, sounding more than half drunk on adrenaline and terror. “They can give it out, and Jesus, they can take it. We all oughta be dead.”
“What happened … to the guys who aren’t here?” A.E. asked.
“They went down. If they’re lucky, they got out first. If they’re real lucky, they’ll run into friendly Frenchmen and get fed toward Spain and Portugal, and maybe we’ll see ’em again. Otherwise, POW camps. Or …” He didn’t go on, or need to.
Red Tobin wasn’t one of the Americans who’d returned. No one had seen him bail out. A.E. stumbled around the base in a mixture of grief and guilt. When he would have needed her most, she was stuck on the wrong side of the Channel.
What could you do now? You could get drunk, and A.E. did. Booze put a glass wall between what you were feeling and you. It didn’t go away, but you got some shelter from it. You could screw. You forgot everything else when you did, at least for a little while. If Andy’d been around, A.E. might have, and what Penny didn’t find out about wouldn’t hurt her. But none of the other Yanks in 71 Squadron interested her that way. At least nobody tried to jump on her after she fell into her cot.
The next morning, her head pounded as if she had a drop forge in there. Aspirins and coffee helped as much as they could: better than nothing, but not good enough. She went out to see how the mechanics were doing with her Spit.
“We’ve set it right, ma’am,” the flight sergeant in charge of the work crew told her. He smiled. “Good job we didn’t fix it yesterday, what? You might’ve got caught in France yourself.”
He meant well. She reminded herself of that before she could start shrieking obscenities at him. All the same, her stare made him flinch. “I wanted to be there,” she said in a low, deadly voice. “One of the two best friends I had left on this side of the ocean got killed yesterday. Maybe I could have done something to keep him alive.”
“I’m very sorry, ma’am,” the mechanic said, and got away from her as fast as he could. She didn’t suppose she could blame him.
Chapter Seventeen
What she’d heard in 609 and 71 Squadrons was true: oxygen did more for a hangover than anything else. She took the Spitfire out over the Channel on patrol, fiercely hoping to meet a German plane. Red deserved revenge. Who better to give it to him than she?
No Ju 88s or He 111s high up. No low-flying 109s trying a reverse Rhubarb, perhaps with a medium-sized bomb slung under the fuselage as an extra present for England. A few freighters crawled along down below, hugging the coastline like a life jacket. With most of the Luftwaffe tied up in Russia, the Jerries didn’t hit shipping the way they had the year before.
The year before … I’m still here, A.E. thought. Andy is, too. But how many are left from 609 Squadron now? To her shame, she wasn’t sure. She’d fallen out of touch with her old outfit after transferring to the Eagles. That was part of war, too. The past stopped counting. Only what you were doing right now meant anything. Tomorrow? Time to worry about tomorrow if you were still here then.
She flew through her assigned area. Seeing nothing out of the ordinary, she reported the nothing: one more blank piece on the puzzlemap of England and its surrounding waters. She hoped the rest of the countrywide map was just as untroubled.
When her fuel began running low, she swung the Spitfire back toward North Weald. Her landing was as uneventful as the rest of the patrol. Another day’s duty done. Another day like most days—except Red Tobin was dead; he wouldn’t make any more silly jokes, and back in Los Angeles his folks and his girlfriend would be getting the news they dreaded most.
They’d have to find a way to go on without him, the same as A.E. would. She knew he wrote to them all the time. Maybe that would help keep him alive in their hearts, or maybe looking at his letters would hurt too much to bear. They’d work it out one way or another. So would A.E.
If you weren’t going to go crazy, you had to. People, even people you cared about, people you loved, were around for only so long. If you happened to be left behind after they went, well, wherever they went, you mourned and you let time blunt the hurt and heal the wound and you went on. And when you stopped going on, other people would mourn you till time blunted that hurt, too. Life worked like that. It struck A.E. as a rotten game, but it was the one the world had.
She flew her patrols and reported her nothing back by radio till one day, a couple of weeks after Red didn’t come back from France, she reported something instead. A bomber was flying across the Channel, heading for England. It wasn’t far above the waves. If it came in low, English radar had a harder time spotting it.
This time, though, the good old Mark One eyeball had spotted it. “Am attacking,” A.E. said, and heeled her Hurricane over into a dive. It was a Ju 88, she saw, the best model the Germans used. It was both faster and better armed than the Do 17 or the He 111. Against a fighter, though, especially a fighter with the altitude edge, none of that was likely to do it much good.
The gunner at the rear of the cockpit opened up on her at the same time as the pilot started jinking frantically. As with the 110 that had been her first kill, one machine gun wasn’t enough defensive firepower. A few tracers flew close enough to make her want to duck, but she poured 20mm and machine-gun rounds into the starboard wing till smoke billowed from the engine and flames licked toward the fuselage.
She pulled back on the stick and did a long loop to set herself up for another run at the bomber. As soon as she got far enough around, she saw she wouldn’t need it. The Junkers had gone into the drink. How many men did it carry? Five, she thought. Well, they were five who wouldn’t give England any more trouble.
“Target destroyed,” she reported, remembering the radio. Easier to call it that. Then you didn’t have to think of the men inside at all.
“Well done!” came the reply. It was done, all right, well or otherwise.
When she landed back at North Weald—a bit earlier than she’d planned, since the full-power attack run used more fuel than routine flight—the squadron leader stood out on the grass to greet her. “I hear you got a bomber,” Flight Lieutenant Taylor said.
“Yes, sir.”
“How many is that for you now?”
“Three, sir.”
“You’ll make ace before you know it.”
“I’m still around, sir. That’s a big part of it right there.”
“You’re right.” Bill Taylor nodded vigorously. “You’re green as paint the first few times you go into action. Baptism by total immersion, nothing else but. If you last long enough to see what you need to do—grow your eyes on swivel stalks, mostly—you start to have a chance up there.”
“That’s about the size of it,” A.E. agreed. But part of it was luck, too. If some of the Ju 88’s machine-gun bullets had slammed into her engine, she would have gone into the Channel instead of the Germans. As at Monte Carlo, the odds were sure to bite you if you played long enough. Sooner or later, you’d roll snake eyes and crap out. You hoped for later. Hope was all you could do.
“How are you going to celebrate this one?” he asked.
“You got ’em. I wish everybody was so easy to please. But you don’t go out and tie one on like the guys, do you?”
“Not … very often,” A.E. said. “I’m more likely to do it on account of something bad. After Red didn’t come back, and Shorty before him …”
“I understand. Well, good job today, that’s for sure.” Taylor gave her a brisk nod. She saluted. He turned and went off to do whatever he needed to do next.
The other pilots in the Eagle Squadron congratulated her through the afternoon and at dinner. They teased her for not wanting to go out and get drunk, but they didn’t push her too hard. They’d got used to her ways, and to having her in the squadron. Maybe, now, they wouldn’t try to jump on her if they got pickled enough and horny enough. Or maybe they would anyhow. You never could tell.
They did do their best to stay quiet in the morning so she could enjoy her extra sleep. Since she hadn’t expected them to care even that much, she was delighted. Then life got back to normal.
It stopped being normal again on a chilly, cloudy day in early October, when she was glad she could find her way back to North Weald from her patrol flight and even gladder the clouds didn’t go all the way down to the deck. She landed inartistically, but not enough so as to damage her Spitfire. As soon as she saw the groundcrew men’s faces, she knew something was wrong.
She opened the cockpit and said, “For God’s sake, what is it?” even before undoing her harness and getting out.
They all looked at one another, which only frightened her more. At last, the senior man, a sergeant, licked his lips and said, “We got the word, ma’am, just after you took off. I’m sorry, ma’am.”
“Got the word of what? Sorry for what?” She didn’t like hearing her voice rise that way, but she couldn’t help it.
“That’s right—she don’t know,” one mechanic said to another in a low voice.
The crew chief licked his lips again. “Ma’am, last night Pilot Officer Mamedoff—no, Flying Officer Mamedoff, ’e was now—’e was taking a flight to a field on the Isle of Man. There was fog, worse there than it ’as been ’ere, and …” The words that mattered came out in a rush: “’E flew into the side of a hill, ma’am, and three more planes with ’im. They all died. It was over in a hurry, anyway.”
“Andy? No,” she whispered. Andy’d been smart. He’d been sensible. He must not have been smart or sensible enough, though. With agonizing clarity, she remembered how they’d consoled each other after Shorty bought a plot. She had no one left with whom she wanted to do anything like that now. And it was nothing she could talk about with anyone else. Instead, she said, “My God, his poor wife! Penny must be frantic. They only just got married!”
“Yes, ma’am,” the sergeant said. “Flight Lieutenant Taylor, ’e’s over there in Epping now, to break the news.”
That was a job A.E. wouldn’t have wanted for all the money in the world. Having to write letters of condolence was bad enough. To go tell a gorgeous young newlywed that she was suddenly a widow, to do it in person …
“It’s a rum go, ma’am,” the sergeant offered. “A rum go all around.”
“Yes. It is.” A.E. heard her own voice as if from very far away. She climbed out of the cockpit and hopped down from the wing to the grass. She had no idea what her face looked like. Whatever it was, it made the groundcrew men part before her like the Red Sea before Moses.
Maybe she looked like death itself. She wouldn’t have been surprised. She’d seen too much of it, this past year and more. In the Spanish Civil war, there’d been a Fascist general who led his troops into battle with the cry ¡Viva la muerte!—Long live death! Back in the States, she’d thought him an utter savage when she heard that. Now …
Now she just didn’t know. War was about killing people on the other side till the ones left alive did what you told them to. She’d come to Europe, come to England, to kill Germans. She’d damn well done it, too. And now none of the friends who’d come over with her was still alive himself.
You could drink yourself into oblivion every chance you got. You could screw like there was no tomorrow. Very often, there wasn’t. So much of war involved hiding from the grinning skull that lurked behind all the patriotic posters and songs and movies and slogans. War meant death. Everything else about it just covered that up.
She stumbled into the barracks. Some of the pilots were sitting and kneeling on the floor, redistributing wealth with a pair of dice. They looked up when she came in. Seeing her face, one of them said, “Guess you heard.”
“Yeah.” She managed a nod. Even to her, it seemed to have come from a mechanism that desperately needed oiling.
She pushed past the blankets that walled off her cot from the rest, lay down, and stared at the corrugated galvanized iron of the arched ceiling. No answers there. No answers anywhere. All you could do was go on. Sooner or later, something would stop you from even that.
She closed her eyes. What she saw on the insides of her eyelids was worse than corrugated galvanized iron, so she opened them again. The guys shooting craps were quieter than usual, perhaps out of sympathy.
After a while, someone else walked in. She thought she recognized Bill Taylor’s stride even before he said, “I saw Earhart’s kite on the field. Is she here?”
“Yes, sir,” one of the men answered. She heard him shift; he might have been pointing toward her corner spot.
Taylor came that way. Outside the blankets, he asked, “Can I come in?”
“Yes, sir.” A.E. sat up.
When the squadron CO did, his face told her something about what hers had to look like. “Bastardly news,” he said. “I mean, bastardly.”
“Yes, sir,” she repeated.
“I’m just back from Epping, and …” He didn’t go on.
“They told me you were there. I’m sorry you had to do that. I’m sorry about … about everything right now.”
“So is everybody who knew Andy. It’s a miserable business, that’s all. The past couple of hours …” Taylor shook himself like a dog coming out of cold water. “I think I’d rather have the Jerries shoot me down than go through that again.”
“I believe it. At least when the Jerries get you, it’s done fast,” A.E. said. It had ended fast for Andy. He’d never known what hit him—or rather, what he’d hit. That small mercy stood out in a world conspicuously lacking larger ones.
“Take care of yourself. We have to stay in the game any which way we can.” The squadron CO slid out of the blanket-walled cubicle.
Chapter Eighteen
The funeral was as bad as she’d expected. They buried Andy in a closed coffin, which meant the undertaker hadn’t been able to make him presentable. Behind black veiling, Penny Mamedoff looked shattered. A.E. wondered what Andy would think of spending eternity in an Anglican churchyard. Since he’d happily got married in an Anglican church, chances were he wouldn’t mind.
Along with the Office for the Dead, the minister read a sonnet called “High Flight.”
“The author, Pilot Officer John Gillespie Magee, Jr., is one of Flying Officer Mamedoff’s fellow Eagles,” he said. A.E. had seen the poem before; it got widely printed in papers and magazines. She didn’t think Pilot Officer Magee would put Shakespeare on the bread line any time soon, but she appreciated the sentiment.
And the war ground on. As weather worsened, flying time went down. On one patrol, she spotted a 109 with a bomb slung under its belly. But its pilot spied her, too. He dumped the bomb in the Channel and got the hell out of there. She decided to count herself lucky. If he’d decided to fight it out, an unencumbered 109 was a match for a Spitfire.
She was going in to dinner on a cold Sunday evening when another pilot came running up behind her shouting, “Holy jumping Jesus, the Japs have bombed Pearl Harbor—I just heard it on the radio!”
“Oh, my God!” someb
ody else exclaimed. “The USA’s finally in the war for real!”
All through the meal, the men gabbled excitedly about how the Eagle Squadrons were bound to get folded into the US Army Air Force sooner than soon. A.E. ate without trying to argue with them.
For one thing, though Japan had attacked the United States, Germany hadn’t, not really. Could FDR get Congress to declare war on the Nazis anyway? For another … If the States did get into the European war, she thought the Eagles had it straight. The USA would incorporate them into its forces. Them, yes. But her? England had been desperate, fearing the first successful invasion since 1066, but even then she’d had to browbeat the RAF into conceding that, yes, in this terrible emergency she might possibly make a combat pilot.
America wouldn’t be like that. She knew her own, her native land, much too well. The United States would set up as many training stations as it thought it needed, plus several dozen more for luck. Pilots would flow out of them in a steady stream and then, as things got rolling, in a flood. And every damn one of those pilots would be a man.
Women who already flew? They might let them ferry planes around, as the British did. They might even train some more. That would let them throw men into battle, where men belonged.
What about a woman who’d already flown in combat? What about a woman who had, in fact, flown when things looked worst? What about a woman who’d shot down three Nazi planes?
They wouldn’t have any idea what to do with her. A.E. could feel that coming like a rash. When she was flying around the world, she’d seen mudskippers near Singapore—little fish that climbed up on tree roots and mudflats and scooted along with their stiff front fins. That’s what she would seem like to the American authorities: something out of its proper element.
They’d win the war without her. She was sure of that. And she was sure as sure could be that they wouldn’t want to win the war with her.