Bandy hadn't told Hadley about Jack's generous offer to invest the prize winnings in a plant. Long ago, he'd learned the hard way not to believe anything until he had it in hand; when he and Millie had the checks, they'd tell Hadley.
Deep down, he knew the prize money was secondary to getting another shot at the big time, a second chance he'd never thought he'd have when the Rocket had gone up in smoke at Roosevelt Field. Hadley and Breese had been right about the airplane—it was a fucking dog, apt to come apart in flight. But more than anything else he wanted to be in Hawaii while Millie was enjoying the celebrations. He feared what success might do to her if he were not there, and the thought of seeing her go by in a parade, as he had seen Lindbergh, was too much to bear.
Hadley, his usual foul mood drowned in tight-lipped apprehension, was just finishing testing the radio. Totally self-trained, Hadley had an indomitable approach to life. When they couldn't find a transmitter/receiver set on the West Coast that they could use, he'd worked out a deal to "borrow" one from the Army. It amused Bandfield to see the usually grouchy Roget turn on the charm when he wanted something. By the time he'd finished telling a few jokes—the one about "three pieces of strange pussy a day is no record, but it ain't a bad average" getting the biggest laugh—the Army master sergeant from Crissey Field who'd worked with the Bird of Paradise crew practically insisted they take the radios. It was another reason he had to make it. There was no way the sergeant could explain the shortage if he went down at sea.
The Dallas Spirit taxied to the line. Bandy waved at Captain Bill Erwin; in the back, strapping himself in was Al Eichwaldt. Bandy had been upset at first with Erwin. The older man had practically adopted Millie when she arrived. If he hadn't been an eight-victory ace from the war—and on Spad XVIs, the worst plane at the front—Bandy would have been angry. But Erwin was so good-natured, so fatherly, and so friendly to Bandy that they finally got along well. They were in a Swallow, and Erwin had complained more than once about the way it flew. It had been a rush job, and just didn't seem to be put together correctly.
Erwin saluted again as he applied power, and the Dallas Spirit hustled down the runway, lifting off from almost exactly the spot where the Oklahoma had broken ground. Bandy wished them good luck.
Roget nudged him as the roughly finished El Encanto lined up. Norm Goddard had modified a surplus Navy two-seater Vought observation plane into a crude cabin monoplane, stuffing it with fuel everywhere, including a big bulging tank strapped to its belly like a suitcase on a luggage rack. The El Encanto had barely reached a grudging fifty miles an hour when it veered into a wild ground loop, scattering dust in a circle that drifted toward the bay. The landing gear folded as the airplane slid off the field toward the spectators, tumbling until it came to rest. The crowd hung back, expecting a fire, but Goddard had cut the switches, and the El Encanto lay there, its wing thrust like Ahab's arm toward the sky. Bandy's heart went out to him.
Hafner grimaced; one less to worry about. He was sweating from the heat of the sun filtered through his Pyralin windows, and glanced nervously back at Nellie. Long used to engine noise and vibration, she was sleeping quietly in her special case. Murray had fashioned it out of thick cork sheets for both insulation and flotation purposes.
Livingstone Irving was next off in a later-model sister ship to Bandy's airplane, the Breese Pacific Pabco Flyer. More experienced and more cautious than Goddard, he sensed that the airplane was not accelerating properly, and cut the switch to coast to a stop. A tractor towed him back to the starting gate.
Bandfield was worried. Two of the first three airplanes had been too heavily loaded to get off. Where did that leave him?
His stomach constricted as Millie's airplane, the Lockheed Vega Miss Duncan's Golden Eagle, entered the starting gate. He wondered what she was thinking; they'd had time only for the briefest good-bye, kissing more for the benefit of the photographers than for themselves. At precisely twelve-thirty the Vega started its roll.
Bandfield watched, praying as it swiftly gathered speed, sending a drifting spray of dust over the crowd. He tried to see Millie in the back as it went by, but the tiny square window where she sat was just a blur. Winter pulled it off the ground, and the Lockheed climbed strongly, the high-pitched resonance of its engine bidding a plaintive farewell. Bandy remembered one of Tony Fokker's aphorisms: if an airplane looks right it would fly right. The Vega certainly looked right. Millie would be safe in it.
He watched with a mixture of hatred and respect as Hafner taxied his Bellanca Miss Charlotte to the line, his arrogant winged-sword insignia emblazoned on its side. Bandfield's emotions had become mixed. The man was daring, no question about it, and a master pilot. And if he had set the Rocket on fire, he had also inadvertently set up Bandfield's romance with Millie. Who knew what would have happened if he'd gone on to Paris, to do as Lindbergh was—flying all over the country? Somebody else surely would have scooped Millie up.
Hafner was delayed when the Dallas Spirit reappeared, a huge section of fabric flowing behind it. Erwin made a beautiful wheel-on landing. As the plane passed Bandfield he could see that the stitching must have come loose just behind the cockpit; the fuselage fabric was peeled back like the skin of a banana. It was a miracle that it hadn't fouled the tail and sent the plane crashing into the ocean.
Bandy could see Hafner's arm sticking out the side of his cabin window, pounding the fuselage side, and knew how he must be boiling with rage at the delay. When the flag went down, he got away quickly, climbing out as swiftly as had the Vega.
Bandy was surprised to see that the Miss Duncan, fast disappearing, had climbed to at least six thousand feet and was on a course that would carry it to the north of the Farallons. Winter had been diligent about attending the weather briefings; he must have seen something about the wind that others missed.
Martin Goebel was right behind Hafner in the Buhl biplane Sunrise Special.. Both planes stayed low over the bay until they disappeared, one dot extinguished after the other, beyond the Golden Gate.
Roget slapped Bandfield on the back and climbed down. Bandy guided the Breese carefully to the start line, making cautious wide turns to avoid straining the landing gear. An old habit, intended to relieve nervousness, caused him to count the airplanes on the field. On the right were almost twenty civil types ranging from a Jenny to a Travelair. On the left were six military DH-4s and a Martin bomber. The starter, all duded up in plus fours and boots, stood with the checkered flag. Sweat glistening in his palms, throat dry, he glanced over at Roget, who was waving the oil-stained "good luck" straw hat he always wore at big events.
The flag went down, and Bandy stood on the brakes, pushing the throttle to its limits. When he felt the brakes about to slip, he released them and the Salinas Made lurched forward. It rolled straight ahead, so slowly that he could look to the side and identify the cars where the crowd stood cheering—an Essex, a Studebaker, a Chandler. Reacting sullenly to the torque, the Breese started to turn to the left, and he fed in right rudder, keeping it straight.
It pounded down the sandy runway, gaining some speed, fifty, fifty-five miles per hour. The furrows of all the other aircraft were in the sand ahead of him, all showing the three marks of the wheels and tail skid, then two, as flying speed lifted the tail. His own tail skid was still down, firmly planted. He pressed forward on the stick, and the nose came down. Out of the telltale trails ahead of him, he saw two of the wheel marks stop, showing him where the Vega had broken ground. On the right was the twisted, broken El Encanto. He passed it, his plane beginning to feel light for the first time. Ahead was the bay. He pressed on, feeling the wheels leave the ground, bounce, leave again; he was airborne but didn't dare climb, letting the Breese wallow along in ground effect, just a few feet high. If his engine coughed, he would get wet for sure.
***
Chapter 3
Aboard the Salinas Made
1:30 p.m. PST, August 16, 1927
It was a pig, a stinking, wallowing
pig. Bandfield swore at the ill-mannered Breese monoplane, hoping to shame it into becoming more manageable as the fuel burned off. In exasperation, he stopped trying to fly it, letting it go on its own like a huge, fuel-burdened model airplane. He sat with his legs spread, feet on the floor, hands off the stick. With 450 gallons of fuel sloshing back and forth, the airplane bobbed and weaved, nosing around like a drunken bear, never quite falling off on a wing, never quite stalling, simply lumbering through the air, wobbling from side to side like the cheeks of a fat lady's ass going upstairs. The extra surface area it presented added induced drag that kept the airspeed oscillating between 75 and 85 mph.
At that rate, he'd finish a laughable dead last. He glanced at Hadley Roget's innovation tucked into a panel on the floor. It was a simple T-handle, painted red and safety-wired, connected to four bolts that held the landing gear on. If he removed the safety pin and pulled the handle, the landing gear would fall into the sea—or so Hadley predicted. It meant he'd have to land on the belly when he got to Hawaii, but it might mean that he'd get to Hawaii, and faster at that.
Bandy had protested the installation. It added weight and it hadn't been tested. Worse, if only one side released, the gear would bounce in the slipstream until it beat the plane to death.
"Fuck it." He reached down and pulled the T-handle. The left bolts slipped out, then the right followed. The gear gyrated back up to rip along the fuselage side and lodge on the horizontal stabilizer, the wheel gouged into the fuselage fabric. The airplane, now unbalanced and configured not for flight but for death, bucked desperately upward like a harpooned whale.
"Goddammit, Hadley, you and your goddam cockeyed ideas."
Bandfield was pushing forward on the stick, trying to keep the nose from climbing further to a stall and spin that would sling him like trash into the Pacific.
"Think, goddammit, think!" He tried to shield the grossly overweight airplane from further stress. Any maneuver that would shake the gear loose would tear the airplane apart. Sweat popped out on his forehead as he leaned into the stick, managing to hold the nose below the point of stall. He had full power on, and the airplane was trembling, rattling, threatening to go into a head-snapping dive. It quivered, and he brought the throttle back; he felt the landing gear move again, and the nose came down, enough to break the stall and let him advance the throttle again. He had stabilized the stricken airplane in a mushing knife-edge between flying and falling.
He considered turning back, trying to minimize the distance between himself and the shore, but each time he entered a bank the airplane shuddered as if it would destroy itself.
There was another jarring clatter. The nose came down and the gyrations stopped. He watched in gratitude as the airspeed picked up first to 100, then to 105 mph. The gear must finally have broken loose from its near-fatal embrace.
The sequence of events puzzled him until he thought it through. The gear could have weighed only about one hundred pounds, but it represented a lot of drag and surface area. When it lodged in the back, it had upset the center of gravity and added an enormous amount of drag. It was a wonder he hadn't crashed. Once the gear was gone, though, the airplane was cleaner than it had ever been. No wonder it flew better. Right after he throttled Hadley, he'd pat him on the back and tell him what a good job he had done!
*
Aboard the Miss Charlotte
1:30 p.m. PST, August 16, 1927
Bruno Hafner was sweating, moving the controls around the cockpit as if he were stirring a giant bowl of cake batter. Nellie was whining and coughing; she was probably airsick. The fuel-laden Miss Charlotte, normally so sweet to handle, was flying nose high at 80 mph, right on the ragged edge of a stall.
He looked down in disgust at Bandfield's Breese monoplane plodding along below, a bright silver cross against the deck of clouds that hid the surface of the sea. "If that Schweinerei doesn't start moving, I'm going to leave him."
Hafner was already impatient; he'd flown a great wide circle to bring him back to cruise in Bandfield's blind spot. He knew how to navigate and had a direction finder, but he didn't want to miss the dot that was Hawaii. Murray had told him about Hadley's coup with the Army radios; he planned to take advantage of it and fly above and behind the Breese for most of the trip, cross-checking his own computations with the route of Bandfield's flight. When Hawaii was in sight, he'd simply pour on the gas and pass him, for the Bellanca was at least fifteen miles per hour faster than the Breese.
Something fell away from the tail of Bandfield's airplane, a twisted cross that disappeared into the clouds. The Breese leaped ahead.
Puzzled but grateful, Hafner pushed his throttle forward to maintain station, high and to the rear, letting the airspeed build. The Miss Charlotte became docile once again, and Hafner reached back to scratch Nellie's ears through the wire of her cage. He thought briefly that he probably should have left Nellie home with Murray.
He was almost sure that Murray took good care of her; it was too bad dogs couldn't talk.
*
Aboard Miss Duncan's Golden Eagle
5:30 p.m. PST, August 16, 1927
Millie awoke for the fourth time since they'd left. The trip out to the Coast had been exhausting, and she had gone to parties almost every night. It was incredible now to be on her way, actually en route to Hawaii and to "being someone." Flying wasn't yet the poetry she'd imagined it would be, but at least she wasn't feeling sick.
Scottie Gordon, the navigator, smiled at her, showed her the chart. The Vega was clipping along at 123 mph on a true course of 252 degrees. He leaned over and yelled in her ear: "You slept right through the only ship sighting we've had. About half an hour ago the clouds opened up and there was a Japanese ship down below. I used the binos and it was something like the Tachiband Maru."
She glanced at the red X plot marks. "Aren't we a little north of course?"
"We're creeping along the edge of a high-pressure zone; we'll cut back south later."
"How's Jack doing?"
"Happy as a clam. He's already eaten two sandwiches and drunk a cup of coffee."
She sat back in her chair, trying to figure where Bandy was. The Vega was twenty miles an hour faster than the open-cockpit Breese; they'd been gone five hours, so he was about a hundred miles behind them. She tried to imagine how he looked, goggles down, wind blowing his hair wildly as it had on the double-decker buses in New York.
By bending down, she could see forward to the back of Uncle Jack's head. He was so generous. This morning he'd said that he would come in on the factory with Bandy and Roget; with the prize money, it meant that they'd have enough capital to get started.
*
Aboard the Miss Charlotte
7:00 p.m. PST, August 16, 1927
The spectacular setting sun had turned the Salinas Made briefly into a brilliant orange ball. Then the plane had lumbered on below, shedding its colors until it disappeared against the flat gray of the undercast. Hafner sighed in relief when the navigation lights of the Breese winked on, two dots, one red, one green, above the endless gray clouds that hid the ocean.
He had sat high above other airplanes on other days. In 1918, Bandfield would have been cold meat, perfectly positioned for a diving attack. Hafner reached forward and cocked imaginary machine guns, waggling his wings. How sweet it would be to drop down and send two lines of bullets through the common little upstart! With all the gas he was carrying, he'd burn like the flaming coffins the Americans called observation planes late in the war. One squirt and they were alight, the flames fanned to white heat by the rush of wind.
It was ironic. During the war he had routinely killed young men he didn't know, with whom he had no quarrel save that they were flying planes marked with roundels instead of crosses. The chaps in the Bristol, for example—he probably had had much in common with them. Below was a vicious little man who had cheated him out of the Orteig Prize. It would be amusing to dive down and frighten Bandfield, but the Miss Charlotte was still far to
o heavy to do anything but fly straight and level. A sudden movement, and the extra Gs would pull the fuel tanks right out through the belly, like an elephant dropping a calf.
He wondered where the others were. He'd seen the Oklahoma limping back to the field with black smoke trailing from its engine, obviously out of the race. Winter's Vega was far ahead. He checked his watch.
An hour later, sleep began to steal up on him. He bit his lips and pounded his fist against his thighs, then strained to reach back and pour Nellie a drink of water. He glanced at the diagrams Murray had drawn for him. The Signal Corps had installed a transmitter at Fort Windfield Scott at the Golden Gate, and another on the island of Maui. Each transmitter put out two lobes of signals, a dash-dot for N on the right and a dot-dash for A on the left. The course line lay where the two signals overlapped to form- a continuous tone. It had worked well just out of San Francisco. He turned it on again. There was nothing, total silence. That goddam Murray had warned him that the system wasn't reliable; he was right again.
Edging the window open, he leaned forward to let the rush of air awaken him. The draft blew his charts back over his shoulder, past the tanks to lodge in the rear of the airplane, far out of reach.
"Donnerwetter! Now I have to stick to Bandfield!" Hafner was suddenly awake and a little ill at ease.
*
Aboard the Salinas Made
9:00 p.m. PST, August 16, 1927
Jesus, how did Slim do it? Bandfield asked himself. He groggily poured himself a cup of coffee. Lindbergh had flown for thirty-three hours and landed at night. He was only a little over eight hours into the flight and was already almost passing out.
Part of it was the night before, of course. He had slept very little, going over every element of the flight, wondering if Hadley was right about the risks. He'd been working long hours, trying to get the airplane ready; now it was catching up with him.
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