Bandfield watched Hafner's copilot closely, to see if he was infected with his boss's arrogance. Bandy had heard that Rhoades was terribly underrated, a brilliant pilot whose natural manner kept him out of headlines, but who could be counted on to do the work. By all appearances, Rhoades was the most relaxed man in the room, humming an off-key version of "One Alone." Yet Bandfield sensed a quiet, desperate tension revealed in the grimaces Rhoades made as he repeatedly glanced out the window to check the weather.
All the other men were legends to Bandy. He wanted to become a legend to them. He had more to gain. They could all use the $25,000 from the Orteig Prize; he needed the fame. There would never be enough flying jobs to go around, but if you were first across the Atlantic, you would always have work.
Byrd strode in front of the group, taking command as if it were a natural right. As he talked his right hand, index finger crooked, kept time, waving an invisible conductor's baton.
"You've heard that a reward has been offered for anyone who locates Nungesser and Coli. If we were ready, we'd begin a search mission today, but there are some more tests I want to do." Tony Fokker glowered in the background.
There was no reaction; they were here to compete, not to fly rescue flights. Besides, most of them had written the Frenchmen off as fish food. Byrd changed the subject. "We'll need a little wind to dry the ground. I walked it yesterday, and it's just like last September." The explorer's Southern heritage came through clearly in his soft voice.
Bandy asked, "What happened in September?"
Byrd's icicle eyes speared him. "That was when Captain Fonck crashed."
Bandfield felt stupid. Fonck, the Allied ace of aces with seventy-five victories, had been the first to compete for the Orteig Prize. He had been trying to lift his overloaded Sikorsky off from the same wet field when a jury-rigged auxiliary wheel collapsed. Digging in like a scraper blade, it sent a protesting spray of mud that screamed to stop the flight. The stubborn Fonck pressed blindly on with the takeoff until the big biplane lurched over a gully to crumple and burn not half a mile from where they sat. Fonck and one man got out; two others did not, the first in a procession of victims in the quest for the Orteig Prize.
Byrd stepped back from the stove, a slight limp adding to his distinction. He reached down and flicked a spot of ash from his polished high laced boots, and then tugged his spotless windbreaker around him. His manner was a stippling of contradictions. Apparently instinctively modest, he nonetheless frequently alluded to his Arctic experience as if it confirmed his right to be there.
"Somehow, I never get warm enough anymore." He flushed, as if this were an unseemly personal revelation. Byrd raised his voice and went on. "The weather bureau called—someone will be along in an hour to give the latest report. There hasn't been much change. Fog from here to beyond Newfoundland, rain all the way."
Fokker's expressive snort said the weather was adequate for the flight. Always a businessman, he now regretted selling the airplane to Byrd. They had agreed that Balchen was to be the pilot, and fog was no problem to him. Yet Byrd was too cautious to leave, and Fokker fretted that his big trimotor would be beaten across by the single-engine Bellanca, or worse, by Lindbergh's Ryan. Bandfield's fast airplane presented a new threat, and he was nervous.
Fokker's Dutch accent came through as he said pointedly, "For some people, the fog wouldn't be any problem. My airplane is designed to fly through weather like this."
Byrd busied himself breaking up another box for the fire, ignoring Fokker as he ignored all critics.
Lindbergh circled around to stand between Rhoades and Band-field. Rhoades spoke: "If we hadn't had a fuel leak, the Baron and I would already be in Paris, counting our twenty-five grand." Hafner looked over, smiling—he wasn't a baron, but felt he should have been. Rhoades knew how to keep him happy.
Balchen tossed him a pack of cigarettes. "Here's some Twenty Grands. That's about as close as you two will get."
At the beginning of the month, only Hafner's Bellanca had been ready to try for the New York-Paris race. Then it developed a fuel leak that couldn't be found until they'd disassembled the entire fuselage tank, working night and day while the weather changed from good to bad. Now there were four planes ready, and the weather kept them all on the ground.
The room was quiet. Lindbergh signaled with his eyebrows to Balchen. Yawning and pretending to stretch, Lindbergh swept his foot in an arc to knock the legs of Bandy's chair out from under him, flopping him on his back. Laughter broke the tension.
Lindbergh doubled over, holding his sides, saying, "Bandy, if you spin in like this in a chair, what will you do in an airplane?" Fokker looked the other way, chuckling. Balchen threw his head back, braying.
Only Byrd moved to help him up. "You must be careful, Mr. Bandfield. It's quite a problem for us to get insurance."
They laughed again. It was the first joke Byrd had ever cracked.
Bandy grinned weakly at the roughhouse acceptance ritual. He was now one of the boys. Flying humor was never subtle.
Byrd turned serious. "Shall we all meet back here at one to get the full weather report?" The men nodded, and Byrd walked out, followed closely by Fokker. Tony intended to do some nagging.
The others left to check their aircraft one more time. Lindbergh grabbed a chair, turned it around, and straddled it, his eyes crinkling with good humor. "Sorry, Bandy, but I couldn't resist." He had just a trace of a polished Scandinavian accent, which gave his rather high voice a ministerial tone. "It's been a long time."
The two men looked at each other, remembering their days together at flying school. Lindbergh cleared his throat. "I never felt right about the way they washed you out. It could just as well have been me."
Bandfield nodded, pensive. It had been three years since he had slunk away from flying school, a failure in the only thing he'd ever really loved to do. The depressing smell of the San Antonio station came back to him, its rolling clouds of steam-laden coal smoke matching his utter dejection. It had been the most miserable day in his life, the end of his dreams, the end of his flying. Or so it had seemed at the time.
"What the hell happened, Bandy? I was as much at fault as you were."
"Banana oil, Slim!" Bandfield knew exactly what had happened, having lived through it in memory hundreds of times since then. He and Lindbergh had been flying single-seat S.E.5s in a practice diving attack against a solitary DH-4 observation plane. Lindbergh had disappeared beneath the target plane as Bandy sent an imaginary line of machine-gun bullets through it.
A jolt had turned the roaring noise of wind and engine into sudden silence. Twenty feet away, Lindbergh had stared wide-eyed across their locked wings. The two S.E.5s had collided, noses whipping together to splinter the propellers and stop the engines, crumpling the spirited fighters together like grotesque mating dragonflies. Pounding noise had given way to a silence flawed only by the broken-bone grating of the interlocked struts. He could have called to Lindbergh, but instead gestured with his thumb toward the ground. They had leaped into a welling terror, relieved at once by the groin-wrenching jerk of the parachutes opening.
"Slim, I already had two strikes against me. You only had one."
Lindbergh knew about his own strike; his outrageous practical joking had earned him enough demerits to keep him walking tours on weekends.
"What were your two strikes, Bandy?"
"You remember that the Cadet Squadron commanding officer, Captain Westerfield, was the presiding officer on the elimination board. He'd had a complaint about me from a girl's family in town. I had a tough session with him the day before the board met."
Lindbergh smiled. "Ah, Maria. I'll never forget her, Bandy, she was the prettiest little Mexican girl I ever saw. I always wished I had enough nerve to ask her out."
Bandfield knew that Lindbergh had never dated while he had been there; he wondered if he had later.
Maria worked in headquarters as a sort of roving secretary, backing up with her typing sk
ills the generally pathetic hunt-and-peck efforts of the typical squadron clerk. You could tell when she was coming or going by the ripple effect on the soldiers, and it had become a gentle custom for any marching body of troops to be given "eyes right" if they happened to be passing her. She ignored all equally and democratically, keeping her pleased brown eyes straight ahead, content just to be aware of the train of admiration in her wake.
"Westerfield thought so too. He'd been trying to make time with her for almost a year."
Lindbergh shook his head vigorously, and his voice went up half an octave. "No, he wouldn't have risked it! As career-crazy as that old mustang was, he wouldn't have fooled around with anybody like Maria."
"You didn't know Maria very well."
"Bandy, I still can't believe he'd wash you out for that. He was an iron-ass, but not a bad guy."
Bandfield's tone took on a sudden bitterness. "No, Slim, there was something else, a typical stupid goddam military balls-up, something I should have been smart enough to avoid. Westerfield asked me which of us—you or me—I thought was the better pilot. I was honest and said you were. He got all over me, saying that I would never make a good pursuit pilot, that a pursuit pilot always had to be convinced that he was the best in the world. He gave me the same stupid fucking spiel that every dumb-ass would-be Ricken-backer gives at every officers'-club bar in the world. Half of them couldn't fight their way out of a morning report, but they've got to act like they are killers."
Lindbergh was plainly surprised by the sudden vehemence. "Well, he asked me that too, but I knew what he wanted. I told him that I was the best in the world. I really thought you were, but there was no sense in telling Westerfield that. But I still can't believe that he'd wash you out about that, either. He was a dumb-ass, all right, but that wouldn't have done it."
Bandfield was somewhat mollified. "No, except that I got mad, and I told him that if the average pursuit pilot's brains were dynamite, he couldn't blow his nose."
Lindbergh laughed. "That would do it. But it still wasn't fair."
They were quiet a moment. Bandfield was painfully aware of the character flaws that made life difficult for him. He had a reckless drive to prove himself right at any cost, one that had marred his record at Berkeley, and probably stemmed from the dogged arguments he used to have with his father over everything he did. He didn't mind being wrong—but when he knew he was right, he was inflexible. And he hated to be pushed around, especially by a guy like Westerfield, who held all the cards. When he was pushed, he had to push back. He wouldn't have made a good officer.
"Let's get down to the important stuff. How far did you go with Maria? I could tell that she thought you were the bee's knees."
Bandfield grinned. He hadn't gotten very far with Maria, and it had pushed him damned close to marrying her, despite the fact that she was Mexican, Catholic, and only eighteen. One night he had brought her back from a long, tender, and chaste walk to find her father and three brothers waiting on the tumbledown porch of their frame shack. He'd been glad to get away with only her tears to worry about. He should have realized that the old man would have considered Captain Westerfield to be a real catch, not to be compared with some raggedy-ass cadet.
"We were pretty well chaperoned most of the time, and Maria was a good girl."
"What happened after that?"
Bandfield felt his good humor gradually being restored. As bad as he'd felt after washing out, things were working out for the best.
"I was really lucky, Slim. I got a job flying Douglas M-2s for Western Air Express when it was starting up. Ever flown one?"
"Yeah, I got to fly most all the different air-mail planes after I went back to civilian life. The M-2 is just a bigger, better DH-4. Of course, most anything's better than a DH-4. I've bailed out of two of them and crash-landed another."
Bandfield was silent, remembering the terror of his own parachute jump, wondering if he'd have the nerve to throw himself into the black void of a Midwestern night as Lindbergh had done. Slim had been lucky: his chute had worked each time. He had only to gather up the mail from the crashed airplane and catch the next train to his destination. It was only a little more than par for the air-mail course, flying rebuilt de Havillands at night, in weather, without instruments.
"Where did you get that airplane, Bandy? It makes my poor old Ryan look like a tin lizzie."
Bandfield flushed with pleasure. "Hadley Roget's a building fool, I tell you. A little stubborn maybe, but he can make airplanes."
"I heard about him when I was out on the Coast, working on the Spirit. He's supposed to have built some radical airplanes over the years."
"That's the guy. We designed it and worked on the drawings and the engineering for almost a year. We started cutting wood in March. It still needs some fine-tuning, but I think it's ready."
"Man, I know what you mean. We really threw the Ryan together in San Diego. The Ryan company was great; they did everything I wanted, if it could be done. If it couldn't, they would figure out something just as good."
Talking amiably, they walked over to where the Spirit of St. Louis was sitting, its tail on a trolley, waiting to have the compass swung.
Bandfield immediately liked the Ryan. The finish was superb, with the cowling and spinner sparkling with machine-turned knurling. The intersections of the struts were all taped and streamlined, and the forest of fuel lines was neatly laid out. "How come you forgot the windscreen, Slim? It must be tough to land this thing and not see out the front."
Lindbergh stretched, accustomed to being asked about the Ryan's unusual cockpit arrangement. There was no windscreen, no forward visibility at all, the pilot's usual position being replaced by a huge gas tank. "We did that on purpose, believe it or not. I don't want to be between the engine and the gas tank if I crash. The visibility's not so bad. You can't see out of the front of most airplanes on takeoff anyway, and on landings, I just make sort of a curving approach, and sideslip it in. When you're airborne, it doesn't matter much."
He paused, grinned, and said, "Out over the Atlantic I don't expect to meet anybody coming in the opposite direction, anyway. Let me show you something."
He opened the door and pointed. "I've even got a periscope, just like a U-boat."
"That's the berries!" Bandfield was impressed. The Ryan would be difficult to beat.
Lindbergh asked, "How does your ship fly?"
"It's a little goosey. We didn't have time to build a trimmable stabilizer, so I have to fly it with pressure on the stick most of the time."
"Just like the Spirit. That long wing and short fuselage make it unstable. Take your hand off the stick for even ten seconds, and the plane slips off into a spiral."
"That's bad. If you fall asleep, you'll be in trouble."
"No, that's good; I won't dare fall asleep."
Bandfield laughed and then said, "You know, it's funny, I like everything about the Rocket, but it still makes me nervous to fly. I don't know what it is. It gives me the heebie-jeebies."
Lindbergh picked up a rock and tossed it. "Closed cockpit."
"What?"
"Closed cockpit. You're used to having the wind and the rain blowing in on you. In a cabin plane all those signals are missing, and it makes you uneasy. It took me twenty hours before I got used to the Spirit."
They walked down the field talking, running through the litany of people they'd lost track of, their muddy shoes squishing through the thin mat of matted grass.
Lindbergh's look was somber. "You've really screwed up the odds here. Byrd and Balchen both had pretty long faces after they looked in your hangar this morning."
Bandfield tugged at his arm, and they stopped to watch a crew pull Byrd's big trimotor backward up a high earthen ramp.
"What are they doing, Slim?"
"Fokker figures that a rolling start is equivalent to adding five hundred feet to the length of the field. They're going to tie the tail wheel to a post with ropes. Acosta is supposed to be the pilo
t for the takeoff, and when he gets all the engines revved up to max power, he'll signal Byrd, Byrd will signal the ground crew, and they'll cut the ropes with an ax."
Bandfield shook his head wordlessly. It seemed very complex.
"In theory, the airplane will pick up speed down the ramp and be airborne before using half the field. After Fonck's crash, everybody wants as much runway as he can get, any way he can get it."
"I don't know, Slim. It looks like they're making a tough job tougher. How do you feel about going solo?"
"I wouldn't have it any other way. Jesus, Byrd's taking a crew of four in the America with him. Hafner's got Rhoades for his Bel-lanca."
He was silent for a moment, reluctant to say ill of anyone. "The problem is, nobody gets along with anybody. It's going to be tough enough flying for thirty or forty hours without fighting all the way."
"I agree. Besides, all the big planes are crashing. Fonck smashed up, and Fokker turned the America over on its back landing earlier in the year."
Bandfield couldn't tell whether they were just trying to pump each other up, rationalizing decisions they had already made, or whether they believed it.
"Did you hear about poor old Noel Davis?"
"No. He's the guy flying the converted Keystone bomber?"
"Yeah. He and his copilot, Wooster, went in at Langley. Killed them both."
"Jeez, maybe solo is better."
Neither man said what he really thought, that while two men might be all right in the cockpit, two men were one too many when it came to sharing the glory.
"Bandy, great talking to you. I've got to go fiddle with my prop pitch setting—I change it every day whether it needs it or not."
"What are you going to do tonight, Slim?" It was Bandfield's first trip East, and he wanted to see New York.
Trophy for Eagles Page 4
