Aces

by T. E. Cruise

  Gold felt sick to his stomach. “This other group still around? Would I be in that sort of danger? I mean, flying in the dark looking for a hidden airstrip in the middle of nowhere is dangerous enough—”

  “This is not a coward’s business, Señor,” Ramos interrupted, sounding gruff.

  “How many times a night would I be expected to make the trip?”

  “I expect you will want to make it as many times as you can, Señor.” Ramos smiled. “Because each time you do I will pay you three hundred dollars.”

  Gold stared at him. “Three hundred per trip? You mean, if I could manage, say, three trips, I could earn nine hundred dollars a night?”

  “Or twelve hundred for four trips a night. And the next night, and the night after that, and so on, Señor,” Ramos said. “I am a supplier of alcohol all up and down the California coast. I can use all you can bring me.”

  Gold thought about all the guns in this room. “The air show will be leaving San Diego in ten days,” he began. Actually, Captain Bob was moving on to Los Angeles sooner than that, but Gold didn’t want Ramos to know the true date he’d be leaving. The bootlegger might decide that it made more sense to kill him rather than pay him for his last night’s work. “When the show leaves town, I’ll be going with it.”

  “As you wish, Señor.”

  “How come you haven’t recruited one of the military pilots based at North Island?”

  “Soldiers must account for their whereabouts to their superiors, Señor. Civilians do not.”

  “When would I start?” Gold asked.

  “Why not tomorrow night?”

  Gold took a deep breath. “You’ve got yourself a pilot.”

  (Two)

  Quinn’s Garage

  Doreen, Nebraska

  14 September 1921

  Erica Schuler stood quietly in the doorway of Teddy’s garage, watching him work. He didn’t know she was there. His back was toward her, and he couldn’t have heard her arrive in her car, due to the noise he was making removing the wheels of a tan, jacked-up Winston coupe. Parked next to the Winston was a green tractor with its partly dismantled engine spilling over the fenders. Erica knew that one of her father’s trucks was due into the garage tomorrow…

  Teddy was up to his neck in work, Erica thought. Maybe Herman should have stayed and become a partner in the garage…

  Teddy must have sensed her standing there. He turned suddenly, and smiled. “Hi, Erica! What brings you here?” he asked, setting down his lug wrench.

  “I was at the library reading up on something,” she said. “I thought I’d come say hello.”

  “Well, isn’t that nice! I’ll get us a couple of orange pops and we’ll chat.”

  “Thanks, but I can’t stay too long, Teddy. I’ve got chores at home.”

  Teddy nodded. “What were you reading up on at the library?” He winked. “Airplanes, I’ll bet…”

  Erica smiled, noncommittal. What she’d been reading up on were the facts of life; how babies get started, and how a girl could know if there was one taken root inside her. She knew a lot from growing up on the farm, but knowing how it worked with sows and mares didn’t help much when it came to the specifics of figuring out what was going on inside herself.

  She’d been feeling funny inside these last few weeks, and she’d always been as regular as clockwork when it was her time of the month. From the reading she’d done at the library (where she’d had to make up a humdinger of a yarn to get the texts without raising the suspicions of the librarian, who belonged to her mother’s sewing club), she’d confirmed her fears that the way she was feeling and the fact that she’d missed her period were pretty good signs she was pregnant.

  “Teddy, I was wondering if you’d heard from Herman.”

  “No, haven’t you?” he asked, frowning.

  “A postcard or two, nothing more. Nothing about his plans. Where he was going.” She shrugged, trying to sound nonchalant. “Or when he was coming back…”

  “Oh, so that’s it.” Teddy laughed. “Now don’t you worry, he’s coming back! From what I know of him, I’d stake my life on it! And don’t fret because he hasn’t written. Some men find letter writing easy, and some don’t. Just be patient. He’ll show up one of these days.”

  “Just be patient, huh?” She chuckled.

  “That’s what you’ve got to be, all right…”

  Erica caught him glancing at his work. “I’ll be going,” she said listlessly. “I know you’re busy…”

  “Erica? You sure you’re all right? That’s there’s nothing else bothering you?” Teddy asked, studying her. “You’re acting strange-like…”

  She thought briefly about confiding her predicament to him. No, she couldn’t do that. She had too much pride. Anyway, what could he do about it? It wasn’t his problem.

  She looked up at Teddy fondly. “You’ve got axle grease smeared all over your specs.”

  “Huh? What?” Teddy took off his horn-rimmed spectacles and peered at them. “You’re right, I do, but I can still see what I have to…”

  “You’re right, you can,” Erica said, smiling faintly. “But don’t worry about me, Teddy. I’ll be all right.”

  “All right, then, but you come see me anytime if you need to talk, you hear?”

  “You’re a good friend, Teddy.” She went to him and kissed him on the cheek.

  “Careful now! You’ll get yourself greasy—” he protested, getting all flustered.

  Erica could feet his worried eyes upon her as she left the garage. She got back into her roadster and drove slowly through town. It was a sunny day, and very warm for the middle of October. Indian Summer was lasting a long time this year, but the gold and crimson leaves on the trees lining Main Street were starting to fall, a harbinger of the brutal Midwest winter that was just around the corner.

  Summer’s over, Erica thought as she left the outskirts of town. Once she was out on the open road she began to push the roadster faster toward home.

  Summer was over, and so was her childhood, she thought. She was a woman now. An adult, and curled deep within her belly was an adult’s responsibility.

  She wondered how long before the baby would begin to show. She thought about going to her brother, who was a physician, in order to make sure the baby was healthy, but it wouldn’t be fair to involve him in her troubles, to ask him to betray the family by keeping her secret. She realized that there was no doctor in town who wouldn’t instantly pick up the telephone and call her parents. For now, going to a doctor was out of the question.

  She had one hope: that Herman would come back for her, to take her away from here before the pregnancy revealed itself to the world. If only that could happen, everything would be all right: she could be married and have her child away from her hometown, and nobody would know the truth, and her family wouldn’t be disgraced, and she wouldn’t have to break her parents’ hearts—

  The S-curve in the road loomed suddenly. She downshifted quickly, hitting the brake, almost losing control of the roadster as it swung around in a rear-end skid that sent gravel flying. She steered into the skid, managing to regain control of the car, and came out of the curve intact.

  When it was safe to do so she pulled off the road and sat, listening to the burble of the Pierce-Arrow’s idling engine and feeling her own heart pounding in her chest. She’d driven this damn road a thousand times. She knew that curve was there, but she’d been going much too fast; hadn’t been paying attention to her driving. That wasn’t like her. But then, it also wasn’t like her to be so helpless, waiting for a man to come rescue her from her predicament. She didn’t blame Herman for any of this. She’d wanted him to make love to her. It was just bad luck that this happened when it did. She was not used to bad luck, but she’d never backed down from a challenge, and she wouldn’t back down from this one. If Herman came too late, or didn’t come at all, she’d rescue herself. She’d borrow some money… maybe from Teddy… Then she’d get in her car and drive unti
l she’d left her family’s reputation behind, or her cash ran out. Then she’d sell the car, pay Teddy back what she owed him, and live on the rest until she could get some kind of job to support herself and her child. She could do something like that, if she had to: she’d had secretarial training in high school. Of course, she didn’t personally know any girl who had ever actually gotten a job. In Doreen, proper girls became wives and mothers; but then, she wasn’t very proper, not anymore.

  So she would manage a different sort of life, one step at a time. Maybe it would even turn out a marvelous adventure—

  But for now, she would trust in the rightness of her love. She would believe that Herman was coming. Maybe he was even on his way. She would drive on home and help her mother prepare dinner. Then she would eat a lot, because she was eating for two.

  But before driving home, she’d just sit here and cry. Just for a little while, Erica decided. Get the tears behind her and then get on with it.

  (Three)

  The desert outside of Tijuana, five miles from the U.S. border

  15 September 1921

  Gold signaled with his flashlight as he circled the field. He slipped the flashlight back into the big, bellows pocket of the ankle-length canvas duster Ramos had given him, and pushed his flight goggles up on the crown of his leather helmet, the better to see the answering blip of light from the ground that would tell him that it was okay to land. This was his fifth night working for Ramos’s gang of bootleggers, and his second trip of the evening. Gold was tired, but happy. He’d been making four round-trip flights—twelve hundred dollars—a night.

  The Standard J1 was a breeze to fly; a bigger, more stable version of the Jenny. She had some interesting modifications. Her skin was plywood instead of fabric, and she had a covered cargo hold where the front cockpit used to be. Gold could have flown the Standard in his sleep, which was lucky, because most of the time he was half-asleep. Flying in Captain Bob’s show during the day, and for Ramos most of the night, was exhausting him.

  It took Gold about an hour to complete each round-trip. He was in the air about twenty minutes, with the rest of the time taken up with loading and unloading the airplane. The airstrip on the U.S. side of the border was a hot-topped parking lot behind a warehouse on the outskirts of a little town called Chula Vista, a few miles south of San Diego. According to Ramos, the Chula Vista sheriff was in his pocket. Nevertheless, Ramos had armed guards keep watch while his work crews, the lights bobbing on their miner hats, swiftly unloaded the booze from the airplane into the waiting trucks. While that was going on Gold hung around and watched, drinking black coffee, or dozing. After the plane was unloaded, Gold would get paid his three hundred by Ramos himself, and then he’d take off for the return flight to Mexico, where he’d land and kill time until his plane was loaded up, and so on.

  So far everything had gone smoothly. Ramos had proved to be a man of his word. Gold was almost sorry that he’d broken his promise to the bootlegger about keeping the whereabouts of both landing strips a secret. He’d told Hull Stiles where the strips were. He’d wanted somebody he trusted to know where to begin the search for him in case something went wrong.

  But nothing had gone wrong, and tonight, although Ramos didn’t know it, was Gold’s last night as a bootlegger. Tomorrow Captain Bob’s Circus was moving on to Los Angeles. Good-bye and good riddance to a profitable, but short, career in crime.

  Somebody had finally gotten around to waving a light at him. Gold frowned. That wasn’t the agreed-upon signal. They were supposed to blink the light on and off three times to signal an all clear, and show no light at all if there was some kind of trouble…

  What the hell, he thought lazily, yawning. Whoever it was down there had probably been sampling the booze and was now too drunk to remember the proper signal. He’d seen the Mexican work crews passing bottles back and forth among themselves while they loaded the plane. The Mexican side was the weak half of Ramos’s operation. Discipline here was lax as hell. The workers were peasants. There were no guards, no guns, and nobody worth a damn in charge.

  Gold’s instruments were illuminated by a red light installed in the Standard’s cockpit. Now he checked his altimeter, taking deep breaths of the cool desert night air, trying to clear his sleepy brain. The landing strip was just a short stretch of hard-packed earth, bordered with barbed wire to hold back the chaparral and the coyotes. It was a hastily constructed fork off the twisty, rutted, burro path the trucks used to haul the booze out into the desert from Tijuana. If Gold were to misjudge his landing, he’d be up to his ass in sand and rattlesnakes before he knew it.

  Gold cursed as he brought the Standard in for his final approach. The crew down there was supposed to stand along both sides of the runway, turning on the lights on their miner’s hats to guide him in. Luckily it was a clear, moonlit night, and his eyes were used to the dark, so he could see well enough to make out the strip. The Mexican work crew was nowhere about. Gold figured they were napping. They did that a lot, curling up beneath the parked trucks clustered at the end of the runway that connected to the road, seemingly oblivious to the scorpions that scuttled through the sand under the cover of night.

  Gold brought the Standard in over the trucks, cutting his airspeed and angling his wings just to the point of stall. He felt the jolt as his wheels kissed the desert floor, and immediately stalled out into a pretty decent three-point landing, considering the conditions.

  He swung the rumbling Standard around and taxied back the length of the strip, to where the hooch-laden trucks were parked. Where the hell was everyone? Gold wondered as he pulled into the loading area.

  Headlights flashed on, blinding Gold. Something—a pickup truck—coughed to life and rolled toward him. “Federal agent!” somebody shouted at him from the bed of the truck. “Shut down that airplane! You’re under arrest!” The agent underlined his orders with a chattering burst from his tommy gun, which spit orange fire.

  Gold didn’t even think about it. He swung the Standard around to face in the opposite direction and opened up the throttle to try for a takeoff. As his airplane gathered speed he twisted around to look behind him. The pickup truck, headlights blazing, was pursuing him. Gold couldn’t hear the gun blasts over the sound of his own engine, but he saw tiny licks of flame as the truck’s occupants shot at him. He hunched his shoulders as bullets splintered holes in the Standard’s plywood skin. He glanced at the long-barreled revolver clipped beneath the instrument panel. He didn’t touch it. What kind of chance would he have in a shootout against a truck full of heavily armed G-men?

  He was almost at liftoff speed when a blast of gunfire from the fast-approaching truck chewed up his rudder. He wasn’t going anywhere.

  He cut his engine, slowing his airplane, hoping the agents would understand that he meant to surrender. As the sound of his own engine faded, Gold heard the buzzings of other airplanes hidden in the night sky.

  Gold saw a biplane diving at the truck. As the government men fired up at the airplane its pilot hurled down something that glinted in the moonlight as it trailed flame. The projectile hit the ground just in front of the pickup, erupting into a ball of flame.

  Gold smelled burning gasoline as liquid fire splattered the hood and windshield of the truck. He glimpsed the driver losing control as the man instinctively threw up arms. The truck swerved off the narrow airstrip, spilling its passengers as it crashed through the barbed wire to dip, out of sight, into a steep arroyo. Gold saw the G-men running and then heard the truck’s gas tank explode, sending up spirals of fire against the night. Thanks to the burning truck, and the puddles of flame across the airstrip, the scene was well-lit. Gold could now make out the bodies of the Mexican work crew sprawled along both sides of the runway. He wondered why the agents had found it necessary to kill unarmed men.

  For that matter, what were United States government men doing in Mexico in the first place?

  One of the biplanes set down on the airstrip and taxied toward Gold swerv
ing around the splashes of flame dotting the strip. The other plane stayed in the air to keep the agents occupied, strafing them with more gasoline bombs. The agents who hadn’t lost their guns in the crash fired back blindly as they scattered across the sand dunes.

  As the plane that had set down taxied close, Gold saw that it was one of Captain Bob’s yellow and black Jennys. “Get in!” the pilot’s familiar voice shouted.

  “Hull?” Gold shouted back. “Hull Stiles?”

  “Who’d you expect, Billy Mitchell? Get in, you dumb ass-wipe of a Hun!” Stiles swung the Jenny around alongside the crippled Standard.

  On impulse Gold pulled the revolver from the Standard’s instrument panel and slid the weapon into the pocket of his duster. He jumped out of the cockpit and ran for the Jenny as it rolled by. He grabbed a wing strut, hopped up, and swung himself into the front passenger’s cockpit. Gold expected the Jenny to pick up speed, but Hull kept her throttled down, rolling the brakeless airplane in a loose circle around the Standard. Above them the second biplane circled, keeping watch.

  “That’s Les up there,” Hull explained over the low grumble of the throttled engine. “He’ll keep them from ambushing us until some of that gasoline splattered across the airstrip burns out and we can take off.”

  Gold nodded to himself. They were going to need a straight run in order to build up enough speed to clear the trucks at the strip’s far end.

  Gold twisted around to face Hull. “Thank God you’re here, but how did you know I was going to need help—?”

  Before Hull could reply, one of the goverment agents appeared on the runway. He leveled his pistol at the Jenny and fired off a round. Lester Stiles buzzed the shooter, but didn’t throw a gasoline bomb.

  “The guy’s too close to us for Les to risk throwing a fire bomb,” Hull shouted, opening up the throttle to pick up speed as they rolled along the fiery runway. “We’ve got no choice but to take off, now! Keep your head down!”