The excitement was beyond the sexual. He had experienced no erection, no orgasm, no genital sensation at all, but no caper in bed had ever given him the same wild rush of pleasure. It had been a cerebral release, a mind-clearing exaltation, a searing soul-cleansing mixture of triumph and survival that he had never felt before but knew that he must experience again.
After that, ordinary honors were bland, even the notice that he'd won the Blue Max. At first, he'd tried to talk to his colleagues about his feelings, confident that they must have felt something of the same. They were embarrassed. They had no idea of what he meant, but were uncomfortable in the suspicion that whatever it was, it was unnatural. So he never again mentioned that he found that his real enjoyment was simply in killing. What had begun as a patriotic keen-edged hyper-hunting experience became an addiction, a thirst that he assuaged every flight, either in a fight against another airplane, or in a quick sweep behind the Allied lines, looking for staff cars, marching troops, anything on which to spend his bullets. Goering had reprimanded him officially for needlessly risking his life and a valuable airplane. It made no difference. He couldn't help it, and it gained him a reputation for wild bravery that was totally unjustified. He knew he was brave enough, but the exploits, the balloon-burning, the wild dives down the trench line, were compulsion, not courage. And he'd come to learn the hard, blinding rules of a compulsion to worship destruction.
Without it, life had no bite. When he first came to America, the differences, the challenge to succeed, had temporarily replaced the urge to kill. It had passed, and he tired of the continual posing, the sham of playing the good-natured German nobleman who enjoyed nothing better than competing with American pilots. The Berlin charm he turned on like beer from a spigot was devastating to American women; he had only to kiss their hands to feel their underclothes dropping with their inhibitions. Even American pilots had come to have some sort of inverse appreciation for him as a German ace. He couldn't understand it. Maybe it was because they had won the war, and wanted their opponents to have been worthy.
He felt his black mood turn the corner. Once he forced himself to think about the killing, to realize how much he missed the feeling, he could gather the energy to bound out of the car and again assume the well-paying role of a tennis-playing knight of the air.
Murray came back, with Nellie prancing on the end of her leash. Hafner took the bit of steak he had had wrapped the night before and bent down. A tender look suffused his face. "Roll over, Nellie. Even you must work for your supper."
The battery acid that passed for coffee at the field cafe finally jolted Bandfield awake. He paused at the door of the tiny operations shack to check the weather. Long Island's verdant greens amazed him; spring had already faded from the hills around his Salinas, California, home. A single deceitful ray of sunshine bled through the rolling gray clouds, brightening the pale green crayon stipling of new growth on the trees lining the field before drowning in a fresh drumroll of rain. A transparent veil of water peeling off the wings of a big trimotor was clear evidence that there would be no flying today. He eased the door open and entered self-consciously, as if this were his first day in school. In a way, it was.
Inside, he straightened his shoulders to a good military carriage and stretched to his full six-foot height. Lean at 165 pounds, a shock of curly black hair showing no sign of the combing he'd just given it, the twenty-two-year-old Bandfield looked tired and worn. He sat down, tight muscles creaking in harmony with the fragile squeaking wooden rungs of the chair, tilting back to survey the room. He had breathed better air in his dad's smokehouse, but in all the world this was the best and only place to be, surveying his competition. The stale odor of cigarettes, unwashed bodies, and oil-stained leather jackets underscored a salty sporting tension. Four men were already dead in this game, and the two Frenchmen, Nungesser and Coli, were missing, probably lost at sea. It could happen to some of the others here.
The low-ceilinged room was fifteen feet wide by twenty-five feet long, its bare-stud walls decorated in standard ops-shack style with old calendars and oil-company advertisements. Sprawled on wooden chairs and boxes were the handful of men who were the fulcrum on which the entire American aviation revolution balanced.
For a decade after the war, pilots and aeronautical engineers had watched everyone else—stockbrokers, radio repairmen, car salesmen, bootleggers—make money. One cynic, with fifteen years invested and no return, mused that there was plenty of money in aviation—he'd left all of his there. Another quipped that the only real danger in aviation was starvation. Bandfield's casual walk to the operations shack convinced him that east or west, it was the same: too many men scrambling for too few jobs in flying. Aside from some trainers, the only signs of activity were the planes gathered to compete for the Orteig Prize. Half the buildings were empty, fading signs lamenting famous names of long-gone aviators, optimistic victims who thought they could make a living flying. All across America, in every other industry, the economy was booming and the sky was no limit. In aviation, the sky was a sure pathway to bankruptcy. Cal Coolidge said that the business of America was business. It didn't apply to flying. And it was Coolidge who had suggested that the Air Service buy only one airplane and let the pilots take turns.
But it wasn't Silent Cal's fault that the profession was torn by a never-ending battle between cost and revenue. Airplanes were expensive, and sometimes lasted only a few weeks or months. Crashes were common, and hangars were usually ramshackle tar-paper buildings littered with oil-soaked rags, easily victim to casual cigarettes or faulty wiring. The investments of many a lifetime had gone up in smoke. Insurance was costly and hard to come by. Maintenance costs were high, and neither passengers nor cargo yielded profit.
Inevitably, management sought economies in pilots' salaries and the workplace. Pilots who complained were ruthlessly replaced. Youngsters were always coming up, glad to subsidize the company—manufacturer, air-mail carrier, no matter—for the privilege of gaining a few hours of flying time. Every airfield office Bandfield had ever seen had been just like this one, inadequately furnished, poorly heated, an offense to the eye. A masochistic glee hung over the whole discipline of flight, a perverse reasoning that if you really wanted to fly, you wouldn't mind being miserable. It was a price most pilots gladly paid, trading ten hours of labor on the ground for every hour in the air.
Even the Orteig race planes, supposedly the best in the business, confirmed his view. He knew the problem was the same he'd had with Hadley Roget—a lack of engineering discipline. Airplanes were designed by people who loved them blindly without targeting what they were supposed to do, never realizing that it was pointless to build the best-looking airplane in the world if it couldn't earn its keep. They were all going to try to fly the Atlantic, and if they all succeeded, it still wouldn't prove a thing. What the world needed was safe airplanes that could make money, airplanes like his own.
There were so many hazards, from engine failure to losing control in a storm. Few of the airplanes had decent instrument systems, and fewer pilots had any experience with the sort of weather they'd find over the North Atlantic. Bandfield glanced around, estimating that the sea might claim half of the men in the room. They all knew it, but not one of them would have been anywhere else in the world.
He watched Lindbergh's strong, slender fingers tear up an orange crate and hand the bits of wood to tiny Richard Byrd, who stuffed the splinters into the gasping coal stove as carefully as if staving off an arctic wind. Last year, the slightly built Navy commander had been the first man to fly over the North Pole; this year he intended to be the first across the Atlantic. Neither man spoke, each preoccupied with thoughts as bleak as the weather.
Lindbergh noticed his old friend and came over to introduce him.
Bandfield thanked Byrd for the use of his hangar. The explorer smiled and said, "Glad to do it. I looked in this morning; you've got a nice-looking airplane."
Bandfield flushed with pleasure. "It's the
best thing I've flown, sir. I'd be glad for you to fly it sometime."
Byrd's smile faded like ice in a cup of coffee. Little worry lines appeared on his brow as he murmured, "No thanks. Not until I'm back from France, anyway."
Bandfield realized that his plane had shifted the warmth just as it had the odds. Before, Byrd had clearly been the leading contender; now the race was up for grabs. As Lindbergh introduced him to the other pilots, the same feather edge of resentment surfaced. It was understandable. He was a wild card flying a slick airplane, and the record time he'd made across country, just under twenty hours, had superheated the competitive tension already searing the room. The other planes—a Bellanca, a Ryan, and a Fokker—were roughly equal to one another in performance, and the race could have been won by the first one off. The rotten spring weather that had kept them grounded was the only thing that had made it possible for him to compete. If it had broken even slightly in the last week, they would have leaped off on the flight to Paris, and he would never have left Salinas.
Bandfield sat down again, balancing on the back legs of his chair, his head braced against the rough wall. He wished that Hadley could see him, meeting pilots they'd only read about. Shaking hands had hurt the raw red creases that split his knuckles into a map of pain. The only thing that would get hands clean was a corrosive mixture of gasoline and Spic and Span cleaner that removed the skin along with the grime and turned nailbrushes into medieval instruments of torture. He needed some Jergens or vaseline, but he knew he wouldn't get any, and that his knuckles would still be sore on the next takeoff. It was an occupational hazard to be ignored, like missed meals, lost laundry, and empty pockets. Still, the barren room seemed cozy compared to the interminable night flight from St. Louis. A sudden burst of warmth from the stove, seen rather than felt, helped him transform past fear into present pleasure. He blew his breath down into his plaid flannel shirt, recycling warmth back into his system, listening to the sharp staccato chatter of the men he was going to beat to Paris.
The aviators were as different in backgrounds as in builds, alike only in their gut desire to hammer out a living in a profession in which it was easier to earn death than a dollar. Bandfield smiled as he tried to analyze their personalities. Though most had things in common—wrinkled clothes, no glasses, and quick reflexes—each man was unique, and each one somehow resembled the airplane he flew.
Take good old Slim, whom he'd known only too well in flying school. Despite his serious, almost worried demeanor, Lindbergh was always playing wild practical jokes, from lacing a canteen with kerosene to putting itching powder in the first sergeant's shorts. But he was a professional pilot, shy despite an obvious competence. Lindbergh was a born leader, and definitely a contender to be first across. He could have been a success in anything—medicine, law, even following his father into politics—but he'd given his life totally to aviation. Like most of them, he was broke, in hock to his backers. He was tall, lean, and gawky, somehow handsome in spite of it, just like his airplane, the Spirit of St. Louis. Aesthetically, the silver Ryan's wing seemed too long for its stubby fuselage, and the windowless nose had a blind, salamander look to it. The landing gear was joined to the wings by a wild Erector Set of struts, yet it looked capable.
Richard Byrd was entirely different, compact and contained, with a handsome face lit up by a smile he switched on and off like a light bulb. He viewed his real profession as exploration. Flying was only a tool that let him leapfrog over older, more famous competitors. Bandy had read endlessly about the Virginian, whose generosity with the hangar had made him a friend for life. Byrd was an enigma, adored by the public and yet treated with frosty reserve by those who should have known him best. A patrician, he'd chosen the equally elegant Fokker trimotor, a big airplane to suit a big ego, one he wouldn't fly but would command.
Byrd had selected two crew members noted for their capabilities and frailties, neither one of them likely to accept orders easily. The first was tall, mustachioed Bert Acosta, a wild man irresistible to the ladies and a superb pilot—as long as the sky was blue. The other was the popular Norwegian Bernt Balchen, quiet, handsome, and an excellent instrument pilot. A good combination, and hard to beat, given that they had an excellent airplane.
An important member of Byrd's team hovered in the background. The Tony Fokker stood quietly by the coffeepot stoking himself with granulated sugar licked from a spoon. It was an addiction; the soft-featured Dutchman often ate a bowl of sugar for dessert, and nipped at it constantly during the day. In 1914 Fokker had sold his services to Germany, and by 1918 had created the war's best fighter, the coffin-nosed D VII. At the Armistice, the twenty-eight-year-old multimillionaire fled to Holland with trainloads of planes and engines. After a booming success in the Netherlands, he expanded his operations to the United States. Self-trained, willful, and as much a pilot as any man in the room, Fokker preferred others to make the record flights, as long as they made them in his planes.
Bandfield couldn't understand why Byrd, with his superior airplane, had not yet departed for Paris. Nor, apparently, could Fokker, who didn't bother to conceal his disapproval of the famous explorer.
The door burst open, a barking dachshund preceding a blond giant with a hundred-watt smile that seemed to light up every corner of the room. There was a chorus of "Bruno!" as he apologized for being late.
"I was helping a young lady start her engine"—an obviously familiar line that set the other pilots hooting and rolling their eyes.
"Come meet our newest entrant, Bruno." Byrd looked like Jeff steering a husky Mutt as he guided the huge German to Bandfield's side. "Mr. Bandfield, Captain Bruno Hafner, late of the Kaiser's air force, now a well-known junkman about town."
Bandfield stuck out his hand. Hafner's precisely measured hesitation in returning the grip was exactly long enough for a jagged electric charge of mutual dislike to streak between them. Bandfield had seen the look before in the eyes of the fraternity men at Berkeley whose cars he'd fixed, vapid John Held caricatures who tendered him the ignition keys as if their fingers were tongs. Hafner marked Bandfield down as the troublesome sort of enlisted man, the smart noncommissioned officer whose "sirs" were always a half beat away from courtesy and who always had to be reminded of his place.
The big man nodded abruptly and turned away, leaving Band-field standing, once again a green freshman embarrassed by what he was wearing, how he looked, and where he was from. In a single glance Hafner had charted the difference between haves and have-nots, nobles and commoners, the adept and the maladept.
If the chemistry had been different, Bandfield would have told Hafner that in flying school he had learned all about the German's wartime career, and had even seen him in person once before. The Germans had evolved a unique "star" system in which the most promising young aces gravitated to Jagdgeschwader I, a conglomerate of four Jastas—squadrons—that formed the great aerial flying circus of Baron von Richthofen. Hafner had been summoned after his first fifteen victories; he had quickly gained five more to earn the Pour le Merite.
The guns on the Western Front had scarcely fallen silent when a Hollywood promoter had gone to Europe searching for "authenticity" in his war films. It hadn't taken much talking to bring Hafner back, along with the French ace Charles Nungesser, now missing over the Atlantic. They had made a few two-reelers in the early 1920s, then toured the West Coast, flying fake dogfights out of country pastures, drinking homemade wine, and screwing the local women. In the beginning they had used planes like those they'd flown on the Western Front, Nungesser in a Spad XIII and Hafner in a Fokker D VII. By 1923, when Bandy had leaned across the barbed-wire fence to see them in Salinas, both warplanes had crashed and the men were flying Jennies. Nungesser's white JN-4 was decorated with wartime French cocardes and his macabre personal insignia, a black heart illuminated with a skull and cross-bones and mourning candles. Bandfield remembered vividly the roughly painted oversize black iron crosses on Hafner's Jenny, an odd contrast to the almost deli
cate rendering of a white winged sword.
Hafner began speaking quietly in German to Tony Fokker. Band-field sat back down, swallowing a rage he didn't understand, angry with Hafner for the snub, but more with himself for caring. Covertly he studied Hafner, whose square-cut face was dominated by a huge jaw, along which ran a thin white scar. Hafner's bushy eyebrows occupied the high ground of the ridge that ran across his forehead like a small visor. An aquiline nose was poised sharply over his fleshy lips. As he watched, Bandfield saw that all the separate elements of Hafner's face operated independently of his emotions; his lips could smile without any trace of humor in his eyes, or he could frown while seemingly amused. On either side of his mouth were small dimpled lines which acted as signals for his feelings. If he was going to smile, the little dimpled lines would react first, their ends pointing up. If a frown was coming, the little lines would become an inverted V.
Watching Hafner cooled Bandfield's anger, and he resumed his inspection of the competition. Dusty Rhoades was at his left. Of medium height, with wavy russet hair, Rhoades leaned against the wall, his left leg tucked up for support, a target for the rolled-up Aviation Age nervously drummed against it. Arrow-collar handsome, he could have been cast as the hero in a Western. He wore a uniform of his own devising, an exotic cross between an RAF tunic and a state trooper's motorcycle garb. A year ago he had flown with the marines in Nicaragua, using an ancient DH-4 to dive-bomb General Sandino's troops in the jungle. Rumored to be a great pilot and an even better mechanic, Rhoades led a charmed life, surviving more bailouts from air-mail planes than even Lindbergh. Bruno Hafner had picked him from a dozen candidates to fly as copilot/ mechanic in his airplane, the Bellanca Miss Charlotte. Once again the pilot/plane physical comparison held true. Giuseppe Bellanca was an Italian, but his airplane was as Teutonic as Hafner, square-cut wingtips and tail disdaining any effort at streamlining, cutting through the air on brute power and lift.
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