Aces

by T. E. Cruise

  Gold, exhausted, the side of his head throbbing from Hull’s punch, and thinking that this brawling wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, rolled away. He was at least gratified to see that Hull, the wind knocked out of him, lay sprawled, trying to catch his breath.

  “If what you’re saying is true…” Hull gasped, “… you were with the Red Baron’s Circus… when my brother and I were shot down, back in 1917…”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.” Gold gingerly explored his ear. It felt swollen, and it was still ringing. “You Yanks didn’t get into it until the spring of 1918.”

  “Nah.” Hull propped himself up on his elbows. “My brother and I didn’t want to wait for America to get involved. We volunteered for a French unit.”

  “Really? Where were you shot down?” Gold asked. He didn’t really much care, but he’d rather converse than fight. He saw Captain Bob leaning in his office doorway, watching and listening.

  “Near La Fère, on the Oise River,” Hull said.

  Gold forgot about his ear as he stared at Hull. “Near La Fère?— What were you flying? Nieuports or Spads?”

  “Nieuports…” Hull muttered.

  “Do you remember the airplane that shot you down?”

  Hull spit blood. “Of course I do, you dumb—”

  Gold was nodding, feeling more certain by the moment. “You and Lester were shot down by an Albatross D 5, weren’t you?”

  “We got shot down by an Albatross double-decker,” Hull reluctantly admitted, pushing himself up on his elbows. “But just because you knew what kind of airplanes the Red Baron’s Circus flew doesn’t mean that you were there…” he added quickly. He brightened. “Or maybe you were a ground mechanic?…”

  “Nieuports, Nieuports… Around La Fère…” Gold concentrated, trying to separate the images of that particular, unusual day from the jumble of memory. “Your squad number was N 111, yes?”

  “Oh, shit,” Lester Stiles sighed. Everybody looked at him, and then back at Gold.

  “The Albatross that shot you down was painted sky blue with yellow ovals on the rear side quarters, isn’t that so?” Gold persisted gleefully.

  “Shit, shit, shit!” Lester was mourning.

  “And painted on each yellow oval was a rearing centaur,” Gold said in triumph.

  “What’s a centaur?” Hull asked fearfully.

  “Half man, half horse,” Captain Bob eagerly volunteered.

  “Oh shit…” Hull groaned, lowering himself back down to the sawdust to stare up at the ceiling rafters. “That was you, in that airplane, Fritz?”

  “That was me,” Gold confirmed happily. “You and Lester were my numbers eleven and twelve.” He paused and shrugged. “Or vice versa.”

  “Hallelujah!” Captain Bob rejoiced, clapping his hands. “The Lord has seen fit to deliver unto me a bona fide Imperial race!”

  Gold got to his feet, brushing himself off. He extended his hand to help up Hull, but Hull pretended not to see it, and stood up on his own.

  “So what if he really was a German flier, Cap,” Lester Stiles argued. “Having him in the show would just piss ticket-buying Americans off. It’d cost us business—”

  Gold knew that what Lester had said made mournful sense. He could see that the Captain was pondering it as well. Gold was desperate. Everything depended on what happened next. He needed an idea—

  “May I tell you about my proposal for your show, Captain?” Gold asked.

  “All ears, Fritz.” Captain Bob nodded.

  “First of all, my name is Herman,” Gold firmly announced. “Now, as to my proposal…” He took a deep breath. Herr Rittmeister, he thought, wherever you are, please forgive me. “Captain Bob, are you familiar with William Cody?”

  “Buffalo Bill?” the captain snorted. “Course I am! Buffalo Bill is the patron saint of traveling show promoters. But how would the likes of you know about Buffalo Bill?”

  “I enjoy reading history,” Gold replied. “Then you are familiar with William Cody—Buffalo Bill’s—singlehanded duel and defeat of the Indian chief Yellow Hand during the Sioux War of 1876?”

  Captain Bob’s grin stretched from ear to ear. “Oh, the Lord has indeed delivered me a treasure! Buffalo Bill included a re-creation of his famous duel in his traveling Wild West show, didn’t he, son?”

  Gold nodded. “And we can put on an exhibition of the Red Baron’s final flight. The dogfight that cost him his life.”

  “So what do we need you for?” Hull Stiles grumbled. “Anyone of us could play the Red Baron as well as you—”

  “The fact that I was Richthofen’s comrade-in-arms would lend to the tableau a certain authenticity, I believe,” Gold added modestly. “Of course, if the captain doesn’t agree, I could offer my expertise to some other barnstorming troupe—”

  “Call me Cap, son,” Captain Bob said heartily. “All my people call me Cap.”

  (Two)

  Outside of Blue Field, Kentucky

  24 April 1921

  It was four o’clock in the sultry, partly cloudy afternoon. The barnstorming circus had been on the road for three and a half weeks.

  “Ladies and gentlemen—” Captain Bob shouted through his tripod-mounted megaphone. “Boys and girls!”

  The captain was standing in the center of a damp, clover-studded dairy cow pasture, separated from the deserted, two-lane macadamized road by barbed wire. Cow pies, as black and flat and round across as dinner plates, were everywhere. The fly population was astonishing.

  “The time has come for our feature presentation,” the captain barked through the ungainly, cardboard funnel. About two hundred and twenty-five people, most of them standing around the refreshments trailer, drinking lemonade and munching on candy apples or steamed red-hots, began to lazily applaud.

  “Captain Bob presents—‘The Demise of the Red Baron’!”

  Gold, strapped into the cockpit of his airplane, peeked over the front cowling. “That’s our cue,” he told his mechanic.

  The mechanic twirled the prop, Gold hit the ignition, and the Curtis JN-4D Jenny reluctantly rattled to life. The Jenny had a scarlet paint job, and German Crosses had been plastered onto her wings. A pair of fake machine guns, carved out of wood and painted black, had been mounted on her engine cowling. In case anybody didn’t get the idea, “The Red Baron,” painted in white block letters a foot tall, ran along both sides of the fuselage.

  Gold adjusted his goggles, checked that his white silk scarf was securely wrapped around his neck, and buckled the chin piece of his red, patent-leather helmet. The mechanic pulled the chocks from the wheels, and the tricked-out Jenny began to taxi. Gold steered her once around the pasture so that the paying customers could get a good look at “the Red Baron, in his deadly Fokker.”

  The spectators gawked, fathers taking their sons in hand and pointing as Gold rolled by. He drove the Jenny past the trucks, trailers, and passenger motorcars that made up the Circus, and then past the entrance to the pasture, a spot in the fence where the barbed wire had been snipped away and where Captain Bob’s big, lemon-yellow McFarlen touring car was parked. (“The very make and model the world heavyweight champ Jack Dempsey drives,” the captain liked to proudly point out.)

  Jimmy Cooper, the ex-newspaper reporter who acted as the troupe’s advance man, stood guard by the McFarlen and winked at Gold as the Jenny sputtered by. Jimmy sold the admission tickets, slipping the cash receipts through a slot cut into the locked metal trunk of the McFarlen, as if the car were the world’s largest child’s bank.

  As Gold finished his circuit he watched Captain Bob wildly gesticulating while yelling through the megaphone. One of the pilots, a snare drum suspended from his neck, was now standing next to the captain. The engine’s throbbing roar was too loud for Gold to hear what the captain was saying, but they’d rehearsed the bit so many times that Gold knew the captain’s spiel by heart.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls,” Captain Bob would repeat. “Imagine, now, that you have been tr
ansported from this great land of ours to the war-torn trenches of France…”

  At the far end of the pasture, Gold saw three more Jennys firing up. These were striped red, white, and blue, but armed with the same mock machine guns. In this particular demise of the Red Baron, Richthofen was going to be shot down by a trio of Yank pilots—never mind the fact that he was really brought down by the combination of British fighter and Canadian infantry ground fire—about nine months before the American military even stepped foot in Europe.

  Gold opened up the Jenny’s throttle. A rusty spray from the radiator hit his goggles. Scowling, he checked his water temp, tapping the glass to make sure the gauge’s needle was functioning. Radiator malfunction was one of the Jenny’s many Achilles’ heels. Satisfied that she wasn’t going to blow up just yet, Gold began to taxi the Jenny down the pasture in order to take off.

  “Before you is an authentic facsimile of the Red Baron’s infamous Fokker fighter plane,” the Captain would be shouting right about now. Gold found that pretty funny.

  The Curtiss JN-4D was almost ten feet longer, and had almost twice the wingspan of the Fokker Dr. 1 “tripe”: the machine Richthofen was flying when he went down. The Fokker had a 20,000-foot ceiling, could do well over 100 miles per hour, and was highly maneuverable. Most Jennys could make 6,000 feet on a good day, and their 90-horse-power Ox 5 engines had a top speed of 75 miles per hour. As far as maneuvers, a Jenny could go right and left, and up and down, as long as her pilot wasn’t too impatient.

  The Jenny’s saving grace was that there were a hell of a lot of them. The United States had manufactured more than 10,000 by the time the war had ended. Besides being cheap to own and maintain, they were two-seaters, which meant that you could use them to take folks for rides. Airplane rides formed a large part of the troupe’s gross.

  You could also modify a Jenny. The one Gold was flying had a 150-horsepower Hispano-Suiza engine stuck in her nose. This Hisso-equipped Jenny was the only one the troupe had; the Hisso engine was rare and expensive, but the captain had gone to the expense so that the “Red Baron” would have the power to do a loop and roll for the audience. The fact that the standard-engine Jennys lacked that kind of performance would also help to make the “Scarlet Ace of Aces” look even better in the air. Never mind that Richthofen disdained stunt flying in favor of the battle tactics of surprise and superior marksmanship.

  Right about now, the Captain would be introducing him, Gold thought.

  “The scarlet bird of prey you see before you now is being piloted by none other than Baron von Richthofen’s flying instructor; the Red Baron’s closest friend and comrade-inarms during the war; the man who himself is an authentic Imperial ace: the noble Count Fritz von Strohgruber!”

  Gold waved to the crowd one last time and made sure that his white silk scarf was dramatically streaming, like a flag in the breeze, as he steered into the wind in order to build enough lift for takeoff.

  Gold, alias the noble Count Fritz, was amused by the alias, and the tall tale the captain had fabricated, but then, as Captain Bob liked to say, the Good Lord had seen fit to bless him with a tremendous imagination. The Captain had apologized to Gold about the phony name and story, explaining that the truth just didn’t have enough pizzazz.

  Gold also guessed that Captain Bob wanted to protect himself. All the pilots in the troupe went under phony names such as “Wings Cuddy” or “Smoking Joe Falcon.” The names were featured on posters and in newspaper ads; “Count Fritz von Strohgruber: Richthofen’s Flying Master” was currently getting top billing. Captain Bob made up the phony monikers, and the employment contract every pilot signed made it clear that the Captain retained all rights to the “house name.” That way, if, say, “Wings Cuddy” suffered an injury or death in a crash, a new guy could be “Wings Cuddy,” and Captain Bob wouldn’t have to go to the expense of reprinting the posters.

  Gold pulled back on the control stick, and the scarlet Jenny left the ground. With her grand, double-decker wing-span, trussed together with enough rigging to outfit a four-masted schooner, she didn’t so much climb as waft into the air. A Fokker gained altitude like a cat clawing its way up the drapes. The Jenny rose as if lifted gently on the palm of a giant.

  Gold leveled off at 3,000 feet. Any higher and he’d be just a speck to the audience below, and that wouldn’t make for much of a show.

  As Gold banked the scarlet Jenny in order to circle the field, he watched below as the trio of striped airplanes took off. As the last plane left the ground, Gold pressed the stud on the stopwatch fastened to the Jenny’s control panel: the scene would end with the Red Baron’s demise in exactly ten minutes.

  Down below, Captain Bob would be setting up the scene: “Just days after his eightieth kill, the Red Baron again took to the air, to strike fear into the hearts of Allied troops.”

  Gold buzzed the field a few times, pretending to strafe the spectators. On each of Gold’s passes the pilot standing beside Captain Bob would be rapping his snare drum in a rat-a-tat approximation of machine gun fire.

  “Rising up to challenge the Red Baron were three valiant, young Yanks; brave Falcons of Freedom, every one!”

  Gold watched in his rearview mirror as the trio of striped Jennys locked on his tail and began to laboriously weave like swallows. Down below, he knew, the fellow on the snare drum would be just now mimicking a firestorm of machine guns. Gold opened up the Hisso and got the Jenny to pull a few stunts, always coming back to a period of level flight, so that the standard-powered Jennys could relock on his tail. He watched the stopwatch. Exactly eight minutes into the routine, as the Captain delivered the line:

  “The Yanks fire on the Red Baron, but the clever crimson Cur outfoxes them—”

  Gold put the Hisso-powered scarlet Jenny into a steep Immelman loop, coming around on the tails of the three red, white, and blue Jennys. The drummer, watching, would now be rattling off a long string of gunfire. Gold watched as the pilot of the rear, striped Jenny pulled the string on a smoke bomb attached to his fuselage.

  “Richthofen has scored again!” Captain Bob would be shrieking into his megaphone. “But the wounded young lad will be able to nurse his bullet-riddled flying machine back to his own lines, and land safely.”

  Gold watched as the “wounded young lad” dropped his Jenny in a credible imitation of a smoky fall. At 500 feet, he leveled off, to land in an out-of-the-way corner of the pasture. Gold checked his stopwatch. Nine and a half minutes had elapsed. It was time for his own demise.

  “The Red Baron has been cheated of his kill. And now, his time has come!”

  The two remaining Jennys were again on Gold’s tail. He kept his eye on his stopwatch, imagined the drum roll of gunfire going on down below, and at precisely the ten-minute mark pulled the strings that lit the signal flares mounted to the undersides of his wings. Tin plating, armoring the wings, protected the Jenny from catching fire, but from the ground the blazing signal flares would seem to engulf the scarlet plane, impressing the hell out of the paying customers.

  “Yes, those good American boys have done it!” the captain would be shouting. “They’ve killed the Red Baron!”

  Gold popped a couple of smoke bombs and began to play dead, swaying the Jenny like a falling leaf as he fell toward the ground. This part was dangerous. The falling-leaf maneuver could easily put the Jenny into a spin she might not be able to come out of. He wouldn’t have tried it at all if he didn’t have the Hisso to rely on. Captain Bob had told him that at this point the spectators went wild.

  At 1,000 feet he put the Hisso-powered Jenny into a split-S power dive, pulling out to just skim above the ground. The Jenny groaned, but she held together; Gold had designed and supervised the reinforcement of her structure to see that she would, and he personally went over her before every performance.

  By now the flares and smoke bombs had petered out. Gold slowed the Jenny down to her stall speed of 45 miles per hour and prodded her along low over the crowd, dipping his w
ings in salute. Now he could see for himself that the folks were applauding him. He could imagine their excited cheers.

  This was what really made it worthwhile for Gold: that he was helping to introduce America to aviation; that he was making airplanes a reality for people, many of whom had never seen a flying machine before. Tonight, over the dinner table, folks would be talking about what they’d seen. Later that evening, when the children went to sleep, their dreams would be filled with the vivid images of star-spangled and scarlet-hued airplanes cutting across the sky. Gold liked to think that he was spawning tomorrow’s aviators at every performance.

  Gold even thought that the good he was doing for aviation’s cause would have led Richthofen himself to forgive him. The idea of parodying his onetime idol had troubled Gold, but he’d decided that since the Herr Rittmeister had loved flying, he would not have wanted the advances in aviation to be lost in the postwar economic gloom that had gripped the world.

  Gold circled the field a final time, and then brought the Jenny down. He could see the crowd already leaving the pasture. The show was over for today.

  Captain Bob’s Circus had been here two days; the troupe stayed in one place as long as the crowds kept coming. Tonight Jimmy Cooper and the roustabouts would move on to the next town on the Captain’s itinerary, to nail up posters and prepare the field. The mechanics with their parts trailer would camp out here, to keep an eye on the planes, while the captain and the pilots would drive into town to put up at the hotel for the evening. Early the next morning the mechanics would do their maintenance work and gas up the planes. By then the pilots would be straggling back. The mechanics would move on, and the pilots would fly off, usually taking the time to perform a few antics over the towns neighboring the new show site, to drum up business.

  The better part of each show was given over to those profitable airplane rides, intermingled with stunt-flying exhibitions to keep the crowds entertained. Captain Bob’s grand finale was the Red Baron skit, and so it went.