Winter broke in, "Hey, he's trying to sideslip it back on course."
They watched in amazement as the Fisk slid like a lopsided stack of pancakes toward the bay. The engines roared as the pilot poured the power to it, but the triplane just edged wingtips first into the water, dissolving like a graham cracker in a glass of milk. As soon as they saw the crew swim free, they rolled on the ground, laughing.
That night Bandfield walked past the crumpled remains of the Fisk, a battered, ruptured duck with only Hoot Gibson's face still identifiable. The face was a reproach; the more Bandy flew, the more conservative he became, the more concerned about improving the slapdash engineering of most civilian planes. Even a professional firm like Lockheed could no longer afford to rush an airplane from the production line to a major race.
The accident jolted him into really taking a close look at his own plane. He walked around the Breese, sitting with its fabric peeled back, a drip pan full of oil under the engine, one tire slightly bald, the Varney Air Lines logo still visible under the hastily applied coat of paint. It was marginal, but he and Hadley would have it in shape for the race. They had solved the problem with strap iron and savvy, not with engineering elegance. Even if they won the race, it wouldn't mean anything for aviation, nothing like if Jack Winter's Lockheed did.
Suddenly missing Millie, he, walked down to Winter's immaculate Vega, where a mechanic was painting its name, Miss Duncan's Golden Eagle, on the highly polished yellow-painted skin.
Millie was there, excitedly studying a clipping from the Oakland Tribune showing a cutaway diagram of the plane with its life rafts, drift meter, fuel tanks, emergency rations, radios, just about every modern convenience. Jack Winter was taking no chances.
Their wedding date was set for December. He had the feeling that all the details—or even the awareness—had not been assimilated in Green Bay, where a winter wonderland ceremony was supposed to take place. Jack, true to form, immediately told them that his wedding present would be the prize money for winning the Pineapple Derby. This immediately changed their honeymoon plans from Philadelphia to Havana.
It also changed their thinking. Bandy had planned on winning the $10,000 second prize, and spending it all on the honeymoon and building a house back in Salinas. Now, with the prospect of an additional $25,000—Winter was sure to win—they were talking about forming a partnership with Hadley and setting up a first-rate aircraft factory.
There was one fly in the ointment of love. In spite of the fact that their friendship and frustrated passion gave them a happiness usually found only in the last reels of a Mary Pickford film, he was jealous of the coverage the press was providing her. Petty as he knew it was, it was undeniable. It was bad enough that Lindbergh, his old flying-school chum, was world-famous. But his girlfriend, not even a pilot? The injustice rankled even though he knew it shouldn't.
"Great shot. You look like you're ready to fly without an airplane." She didn't notice the sarcasm, exhibiting an ingenuous delight in her photo with Jack standing by the propeller and looking mystically skyward.
And there was another element, more serious than jealousy or a lover's pique. Bandy didn't know how to tell her that the endless round of publicity was also affecting her judgment. He felt she was being drawn irrevocably into the flight, and wouldn't be able to withdraw even if she wanted to at the last moment. He wanted her to be very sure of what she was doing, aware of the risks involved before it was too late. But nothing he said seemed to matter. Jack had fitted her out in a cute military costume, an officer's tunic with Sam Browne belt, jodhpurs, and cute knee socks with clocks around the top. She looked absolutely darling, and couldn't walk two steps without having a reporter asking a question or a photographer firing a flash of powder at her.
The press treated Jack Winter well, but Millie was the real celebrity. And even worse than Bandy admitting his jealousy to himself was that she knew it, and kidded him unmercifully about it.
California was like old home week for Bruno. Women with whom he'd slept in his early-twenties barnstorming tours but whose names he'd forgotten began descending on Oakland as soon they saw the headline "Famous German Ace Arrives." Hafner smiled as he wondered if Nungesser was looking down from some pilot's heaven, checking to see if any of his old girlfriends showed up.
Bruno's bulk filled a chair to overflowing in the little office overlooking the field. He scratched Nellie's head as he read Cy Bidwell's column in Aviation Age, for once agreeing with him. Bidwell argued that the Pineapple Derby was twice as important as the Lindbergh flight, because it was more than twice as difficult. The route was shorter, but Hawaii was just a dot in the middle of a vast ocean. A minor navigation error would send a plane off into a vast, empty Pacific.
Hafner put down the magazine and assessed the problem. If he had agreed to bring Dusty along, one man could have used the sextant while the other flew. But the furor over Lindbergh clearly showed that the press was for the solo pilot, and he was still glad that he had left Dusty on Long Island. Navigation wasn't his long suit, even though he had practiced in New York, while preparing for the Atlantic race. The problem was that he hadn't really been serious, for he hadn't worried about it, knowing that if he missed France he had an entire continent to aim for. The fact that two planes had already flown the route didn't change anything. The Army plane, Bird of Paradise, had special radio equipment and three engines. Then some dumb civilians, indifferent to the prize money, had taken off in mid-July in a Travelair monoplane and wound up in a treetop on some little island next to Oahu. It proved his point about flying solo. The press commented briefly on the flights, then turned its attention back to Lindbergh. The two flights didn't seem to affect interest in the Pineapple Derby, either.
Right now, though, he had other things on his mind. Winning didn't mean much in the way of dollars to him, but the prestige was critical for building airplanes and selling them. The option he had on a factory at Roosevelt Field had fallen through; the company was tied up in litigation, and he couldn't take possession. Charlotte was working on another deal; maybe she could pull it off.
God, they had a strange relationship. He wondered what his mother and father, both stiffly formal, would have made of it. If Germany had won the war, where would he be? Commanding a squadron in an African colony somewhere, with a proper wife back home in Germany and a sleep-in native girl. He laughed—Charlotte was his sleep-in native.
But she was good. They generated a magic that was hard to duplicate. Other women were fun, but none provided the obsessive intensity of Charlotte's lovemaking. And he needed her. She not only carried the business in her head, she knew where to go for money when they needed it, and brought the right people into the factory. Charlotte had made friends with Igor Sikorsky out on Long Island—he wondered just how good their friendship really was—and Sikorsky had provided leads on some magnificent engineers.
And when Sikorsky's business fell off, as it did after the Fonck crash, Charlotte had even leased the ramshackle facility they were using and hired many of his junior engineers and mechanics, just so they'd have paychecks.
He rolled an ashtray shaped like an automobile tire back and forth on the desk, feeling edgy. The business with Bandfield had been unsettling. He was glad it was behind him. It was curious, but Charlotte had never inquired about the fire, never asked what he thought about it.
The magazines and newspapers were filled with talk about the "modern woman." Hell, he'd married one. It was a good arrangement, one that suited them both. But he didn't know how long it would last. One or the other would tire of it, unless the business expanded and served as a safety valve. They could stay together for as long as they were wealthy, busy—and frequently apart.
He knew that one of the saving graces would be her enjoyment of being a businesswoman, of having a say in matters normally reserved for men. Charlotte was as totally dependable as a business partner as she was unreliable as a spouse. He needed her for the day-to-day work; he could do the long
-range planning. More important, their tumultuous relationship embraced a particular level in which he valued her respect, and she in turn demanded his. As earthy as their partnership was, he could never comprehend it in any but the most abstract engineering terms. If it was as if they were two essential gears in the clockwork of life, each gear fitted with teeth of totally different sizes and shapes, yet somehow still meshing at certain speeds and certain times.
It was strange, after all their intimacies—and they had been intense beyond telling—and all their fights, he had never told her how he felt. It was something he would like to have done, if he could have known the response in advance, if he could be assured that she would not ridicule him.
The nasal-toned Oakland operator had been promising to put the call through all afternoon, but he still jumped when the phone rang.
"Hello, Charlotte? How are things in Long Island? What time is it there?"
Charlotte cradled the French-style phone between her head and neck.
"Don't yell, Bruno, I can hear you fine. It's seven here. I'm calling from the New Jersey office."
She reached down and ruffled Dusty's reddish hair. He kissed her bellybutton with sucking sounds that caused her to clasp her hand over the mouthpiece.
"What's going on at the plant?"
"Plenty. That's why I called. I need a decision from you right now. A special situation has developed with the Aircraft Corporation. I can get controlling interest for us for almost nothing. Curtiss is trying to buy it and Ned Dorfman doesn't want to sell it to them. You remember how Curtiss cheated him on that bomber contract. He hates them."
Rhoades looked up at her and grinned, mouthing the words "Say hi to him for me."
Hafner snorted. "Who doesn't hate Curtiss? They've screwed everybody in the business. What does Dorfman want for it?"
"He'll swap stock with Hafner Aircraft on a one-for-one basis, and one million cash on the side. He really just wants out. Says he's going down to Florida to waterfront property. We can swing it, but we'll be short of cash for a while." Rhoades ran his tongue up and down her thigh.
Bruno was enthused, shouting into the mouthpiece, "Wonderful! We won't have to build a new building. And he's got some great engineers there, more of the Russians Sikorsky brought over and couldn't find work for. We need the factory space." Hafner gazed out at the flight line, his mind racing ahead. "And we can use most of his working people. They're the best in the business with aluminum construction. We'd have to let most of the management go, all except the guy running contracts—his name is Ferguson, I think. He knows how to soft-talk the brass at Wright Field."
Charlotte fluttered her eyes at Rhoades, put her finger to her lips. "So you think it's okay to go ahead?"
"Ja, go ahead. I'll be back as soon as I can to help work out the details."
Rhoades moved between her legs, slid up to her.
"What's that? I can't hear you, Charlotte. Speak up—this is a bad connection."
Charlotte shifted to ease Rhoade's access. "It must be the line, Bruno. I don't hear anything."
Her hips began to move. Rhoades moaned. Charlotte put her hand over the mouthpiece.
"Hang up, dammit," he gasped.
"Just keep moving," she whispered back.
"Charlotte, are you there? I can barely hear you."
"I can hear you fine. The real beauty of acquiring them is that they control both the Mead & Wilgoos Engine and the Premium Propeller companies, and have a big chunk of Federated Airlines. We can build a plane, put our own engines and props on it, and fly it on our own airline."
"Go ahead and give him a handshake, Charlotte. Have the lawyers draw up some papers and we'll settle it when I get back."
He carefully replaced the earpiece into the hook, pleased once again at how well Charlotte served him.
The same was true for Dusty. As the line went dead, Charlotte wrapped her legs tightly around him, ratcheting him to her with convulsive undulations.
"I'm sorry about that, but it took him a long time to get a call through, and I had to talk to him."
Rhoades laid his head by her cheek, moving, oblivious to everything. She stared at the ceiling. The airplane business was so risky; you went from one design to the next, with everything riding on how well it did. You could never be safe, never take it easy. Maybe that was why she liked it.
Elated by the conversation, sexually stirred by Charlotte's voice, compressed and distorted as it was by the phone, Bruno Hafner flexed his arms, trying to work out the recurring ache laid across his shoulders ten years before by a British bullet. He'd spent only four days in the hospital before going back to his unit. Now, after long flights, the pain returned.
He glanced out the window to where Murray was fussing around the Miss Charlotte, supervising the installation of the radio. The question of radios had come up on Long Island; he'd decided against it because of the weight involved. There was no question about making landfall across the Atlantic. In the Pacific he'd need all the help he could get to reach Oahu. He glanced down at the U.S. Hydrographic chart spread out on his desk. There was nothing between San Francisco and the little arc of islands that was Hawaii, and damn little beyond. Except for a lot of water.
Murray had really done a good job investigating what Hegenber-ger and Maitland, the two Army pilots of the Bird of Paradise, had done, and scouted the market, finally coming to him as eager as a puppy with diagrams for both a transmitter/receiver set and a direction finder. He had agreed to the direction finder, but said no to the transmitter/receiver. He wasn't very good at Morse code—taking it in English rather than German somehow intensified the difficulty—and would be busy enough with the sextant. Murray tried to tell him that it was the wrong choice, that the Army plane hadn't been able to use the direction finder very much, but Bruno was adamant. There was no sense carrying something he couldn't use.
It was, after all, only a matter of risk, something he'd grown used to flying on the Western Front. There the degree of risk had been constant, even though the kinds of risk had changed. At first, flying against the French in a quiet sector, the danger was mostly the risk of crashing from inexperience. Then as he gained flying skill, that risk declined, but his unit was transferred to where the British were operating, and combat risk went up.
Even as he gained experience and victories, the risk stayed very small. He would go into battle eagerly, pursuing his lust for killing with confidence in himself, but concerned about the quality of his airplanes. Late in the war, even the good designs like the Fokker were flawed by bad materials and sloppy workmanship. He remembered when they finally got the D VII fighters. Wonderful machines, barely fast enough, but very strong and able to hang on their props and fire straight up. Things still would happen. He closed his eyes and it was like yesterday, flying with Fritz Frederichs on a test hop. They had played around in mock combat, and were coming back to land when the ammunition cans in Fritz's Fokker exploded, turning him into a burning cinder in seconds. A stupid design error had placed the ammunition boxes where the heat of the engine had ignited them and blown up the fuel tank, snuffing out the life of his best friend.
The risks were different here. He knew his plane and engine could make the flight; the only imponderable was his navigation skills. He thought they were sufficient; if they weren't, so be it.
He yawned and stretched pleasurably. That's what the weaklings couldn't understand, the necessity of having your senses heightened, to take valid risks to make life worth living. He didn't mean stupid things like racing a car across a train crossing, but something worth doing. He could have let Murray put the little time bomb in Bandfield's plane back in Long Island, but he'd done it himself, partly because he wanted to be sure it was done right, and partly because he enjoyed the danger involved.
There wouldn't be any need to bother with Bandfield. That loudmouth Roget had selected an ancient crock for him to race this time. Hafner could see the tail of the Breese, set up on a tripod and sticking out of Roget
's canvas hangar. It was a piece of shit, just right for Bandfield to fly.
*
Oakland Municipal Airport/August 16,1927
Tension draped across the field like the tendrils of a Portuguese man-of-war, the sudden bark of an engine running up breaking the thick silence like an exploding paper bag. The airplanes were marshaled in a semicircle less than two hundred feet from the field's edge. To get as nearly a racehorse start as the field would permit, the first plane was to taxi to the start line, and the second into the waiting circle, both marked in lime on the sand. The entrants would then sequence from the marshaling position in the order in which Millie Duncan, the uncontested queen of the contest, had drawn them from an old felt hat.
Precisely at twelve noon, with a wave of his checkered flag, the starter shattered the tension like a crystal vase hitting the floor. A Travelair monoplane, the bright-blue-and-orange Oklahoma, was first off, to the spontaneous cheers of the crowd.
Bandfield sat in the cockpit of his battered Breese, for most of the week the only airplane in the contest not to have some brave name lettered on its side. Earlier in the week, he and Hadley had talked about a comic name—Miss Blivet, Miss Hap, Hawaii or Bust—but finally settled on Salinas Made, too unhappy with the plane to make more than a gentle joke about it. Vance Breese had dropped by and with Roget had spent the last two evenings trying to talk him out of the flight, telling him the airplane wasn't sound and the margin for error was too small. Roget, always cranky, had gotten almost belligerent, yelling, "This time 17/ burn the goddam airplane."
Bandfield listened to them respectfully; Breese was a famous name, and Hadley was in many ways a genius. Finally, he broke in. "Gents, I appreciate what you're saying, and I know what I'm risking. The problem is, we need the money to stay in business. If things go right, I plan to land in Hawaii within two hours of Jack Winter's arrival. If things go wrong, then I won't have to listen to any more of Hadley's rotten jokes."
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