Trophy for Eagles

by Boyne, Walter J.

He nodded, sleep dimming his reflexes, requiring a gathering of will for any act. He leaned his head to the edge of the windscreen, letting the rush of air tug at his goggles. He opened his mouth and the rushing wind blew his cheeks wide, drying the saliva so that his lips stuck to his teeth.

  His exasperation with Hafner's following him had long since worn off. Hours ago he had been stretching, twisting his neck to get some circulation going, when he saw the unmistakable angular outline of the Bellanca silhouetted against the lighter evening sky. His first reaction was elation at having the loneliness of the Pacific broken; then he realized Hafner was coming along for the ride, letting him do the navigation.

  Just like that square-headed prick, he thought. It puzzled him until he sorted out the strategy. Hafner would figure he could loaf along until he got in sight of Hawaii, or until his direction finder picked up the Maui beacon. Then he'd put his nose down, pour the coal to it, and land first.

  But Hafner didn't know Bandy had dropped the gear. Now he was at least as fast as the Bellanca, maybe faster. It was still a horserace, and this time Hafner would be the horse's ass.

  *

  Aboard Miss Duncan's Golden Eagle

  10:00 p.m. PST, August 16, 1927

  The airplane was incomparably better than anything Jack Winter had ever flown, a real thoroughbred. Gordon had sent a note forward, giving their position and their fuel consumption; they were flying eight miles an hour faster and burning three gallons an hour less fuel than he had planned. He thought about advancing the power a little, to get even more speed, but decided against it. Things were going so well he wouldn't change anything.

  The moon had risen twenty minutes earlier, and now the band of low clouds below, soft hillocks of moisture, were bathed in a gorgeous yellow light. He scribbled a note and sent it back to Millie on the little string pulley they'd rigged up.

  She read: "In ten years, passengers will be paying $500 to do this, and you are doing it first, free!"

  She creased the note and put it in her bag. There was a book in this flight, and she was going to need all the material she could get. She could get ideas from Bandy, too, loafing behind them somewhere—she hoped.

  Millie reached over and pulled on the canvas curtain Jack had rigged for her privacy until it closed. It was dark and the engine drowned out any noise, but she still felt uncomfortable using the little hospital bedpan that she had brought on board to relieve herself. She struggled out of her clothes, wondering how she was going to write about this part of the flight in her book.

  *

  Aboard the Salinas Made

  10:03 p.m. PST, August 16, 1927

  Bandfield roused himself with a shudder; he'd drifted off to sleep, and wakened to a searing sense of desperation and fear. He moved his flashlight around the cockpit, checking the instruments. Ahead, the exhaust-collector ring glowed cherry red, the staccato flash of the exhaust stacks winking continuously around like a demented sign in Times Square, the mellow blue-and-yellow flames telling him that the engine's fuel/air mixture was correct.

  He had drifted up to about 5,500 feet; now he let the airplane glide down toward 5,000, where he leveled off and allowed the airspeed to build to 120 before throttling back. The Salinas Made settled down to cruise at 5,000 feet and 108 mph. The airplane was on "the step," flying at an attitude where drag was minimized. He brought the mixture lever back, slowly, listening to the beat of the engine. There was a sudden pop, and he pushed the mixture lever forward slightly until the engine smoothed out.

  He was wide-awake and totally depressed. He glanced back to see Hafner's plane still in position above and behind him. He ran another check on the radios, tapping out a request for a position. In quick succession, he got replies from the USS McDonough and the S.S. Manulani. His Morse-taking capability was rusty, and the Manulani had to transmit three times. The last time the radio operator, either careful or sarcastic, transmitted so slowly that it was almost a dot or a dash at a time. Then a third call came from the S.S. W. S. Miller, giving him a line that intersected the other two in a tiny triangle, right on course. With a sigh of relief, he put the sextant back in its case; no sense in even bothering with it.

  The leaden weight of depression tugged at his eyelids. He yawned constantly, as his psychology went through a demanding game with his physiology. When he grew irrepressibly sleepy, he would take his hands off the controls. The plane would drift off course and a jolt of adrenaline would trigger him awake. But it was a process of diminishing returns. He had no idea what his adrenaline reserves were, but they were much reduced, and the flight was only half finished. He toyed with the idea of dropping down below the cloud deck to fly along the surface of the sea, to try to get some exhilaration from chasing waves. He didn't know the height of the cloud base, and decided against it.

  The hours passed into an opaque tunnel of boredom. The instrument panel did tricks, growing larger and larger in his vision until his eyes seemed to be resting on the altimeter, then growing smaller and smaller until he felt he needed a telescope to see it. Pain didn't help. He slapped his face and bit his lips, chewed the inside of his mouth. The pain registered at a very low level, not intruding on the overpowering desire to sleep.

  He made hourly course corrections, tracing that invisible great-circle line over the globe that was the shortest distance to Hawaii. He was only five thousand feet up in the ocean of air; beneath, the ocean of water went down what—ten thousand feet, twenty thousand? He wished Millie were with him; she'd know. He'd ask her when they got to Hawaii.

  He ran a routine fuel check and snapped fully awake, terror gouging his adrenal glands. He had not yet transferred any from the rear main tank, but the gauge read half-empty. The gear must have punched a hole in it when it pulled free. The big question was where the hole was. If it was in the bottom of the tank, he was lost. He'd never make it to Hawaii or back to California. Even if the leak was halfway up and he didn't lose any more, all his reserves were gone. He picked up the charts and rechecked his navigation. There was no margin to spare.

  In the past, he had always grown more awake flying when night fell, the sense of quiet beauty summoning concentration for the task. Now, with the fuel worries, the old habit was reinforced, and he felt as if he'd never sleep again. Yet there was nothing to do except plod ahead, and as usual with long flights, he drifted into erotic daydreams, aroused by his thoughts of Millie. He was glad they were waiting until they were married to make love. It was old-fashioned, but proper, and his love for her was truly proper. He wondered what kind of a guy the navigator, Gordon, was, if he would try to flirt with her. It wouldn't do him any good, and Millie would never tell even if he did, because she wouldn't want to create a problem. He'd already gotten a reputation as a hothead by hitting Hafner.

  Bandfield's chemistry stabilized, and he began to analyze his fuel situation. He drank some of the tepid water in the other flask. It tasted brackishly of coffee. Hadley must not have rinsed it well when he filled it. He took out one of the drying ham-and-cheese sandwiches. When he'd finished, he reached into his pocket for a Hershey bar.

  The chocolate reinforced his irrational contentment. Alone, over a truly trackless ocean, with fuel and position indeterminate, he nonetheless felt like a king, for he was flying, and that itself was enough. The higher, the farther, the faster you went always made it better, for there was the supreme sense that you were alone in a place no other man could be. He checked the rear tank fuel again; it seemed to have stabilized. Maybe things were going to be all right. Even Hafner's tailing along behind him was no longer an affront.

  Bandy was surprised at the charity of his thoughts, guessing it was the intoxicating euphoria of flight, the relief that the leak was apparently stopped. The layer of clouds below now seemed higher. An idea began to form. He'd just play a little joke on Hafner, to see how he liked it.

  He reached down and felt along the instrument panel till he found the switch for the navigation lights. He turned them off, then pulled t
he throttle back, letting the Breese nose down toward the clouds. He'd drop through to five hundred feet; if he wasn't in the clear, he'd climb back up. If he was, he'd scoot along beneath the clouds, leaving Hafner on his own. It would do him good, make a navigator of him.

  The clouds enveloped him like a wet gray sweatsock. He wondered what the base was and whether he'd break out at all. Hadley had told him a long shaggy-dog story about a girl whose legs had run all the way to the ground—maybe the clouds were like that, running all the way to the water.

  *

  Aboard the Miss Charlotte

  2:30 a.m. PST, August 17, 1927

  Hafner checked his watch again, and scanned the horizon ahead. When he glanced down, the Breese was gone.

  Anxiety clutched him, and he rocked the Bellanca into a 360-degree turn, thinking he might have overflown Bandfield. There was nothing, just the pale yellow moonlit surfaces of the clouds.

  He resumed his course of 240 degrees magnetic, fiddled with the direction finder. It was dead.

  Ach, well, he thought. I've done dead reckoning before. I'll just fly out the time and the distance and let down. If I can't find the islands, I'll find a ship. If I can't find a ship, I'll land this bloody bastard and sail it to Hawaii.

  Hafner knew that he had courage to spare when it came to things he could control. The problem was that he wasn't sure he could control the navigation problem, and a faint rinse of sour-tasting fear touched the back of his throat. Now he wished he hadn't brought Nellie along.

  *

  Aboard the Salinas Made

  4:30 a.m. PST, August 17, 1927

  The cloud cover combined with the night to turn the five hundred feet of clear air over the sea into a gelid black mass, a palpable solid through which he passed without disturbance. Bandfield had tried to let down to wave-chase the surface of the sea, but there was no light at all, no way to avoid simply flying into the ocean. He climbed to four hundred feet, flying on instruments.

  It was enjoyable at first, the challenge of glancing quickly from the altimeter to the airspeed indicator to the compass to the turn-and-bank needle and then back again, keeping him awake. He soon tired of it, and climbed back up to two thousand feet, well within the clouds. Without any turbulence, without any icing, it was as easy to fly in the clouds as below them; he wanted to wait a bit, to get a little farther from Hafner before he popped up again.

  Sleep nibbled again at his consciousness the way coffee spreads through a sugar cube, seeping up by capillary action, soaking, softening, until the entire cube crumbles. He began to doze, fighting it by closing first one eye then the other, then closing them both and counting to ten, before opening them wide. Once, at the count of eight, the cube crumbled and he fell asleep.

  The whistle awakened him. He started, shedding sleep like confetti. The plane was spinning nose-down into the clouds. The instruments were in wild disarray, the turn needle tucked to the right, the ball skidding to the left. Desperately off balance, the bitter coffee bile rising in his mouth, he tried to make sense of the maverick instrument pointers. The airspeed was constant at seventy miles per hour, the unwinding altimeter screaming his spin toward the sea.

  His throat muscles contracted in fear; altimeters lagged, so he didn't know how high he was above the beckoning Pacific. In a single motion, he brought the throttle back to idle, booted left rudder, and pushed the stick forward slightly. The ball and needle came together and he felt the controls bite the air. He shoved the throttle forward, hoping that the carburetor had not iced up, and pulled back strongly on the stick.

  The murky gray parted and he was peering down into a polished black saucer that reached up to merge on all sides with the clouds. He tugged harder on the stick, the G forces pushing him to his seat; he could feel the seat braces bend, hoped that he had welded them of strong enough material. He knew he couldn't believe his senses, but the black mass seemed to be shifting bit by bit from straight below to straight ahead and the Salinas Made bottomed out, its belly just above the slashing waves, the priceless Whirlwind engine surging with power as if nothing had happened.

  A black web of fear set him shivering, teeth chattering uncontrollably, hands thrumming on the controls. The airplane quivered in concert as the instruments came back into range and the sloshing fuel began to quiet.

  He settled down, checking the airplane over very carefully, then began a long instrument climb back to altitude. He tried to compute how far he'd been from death. One hundredth of a second, no more. If he hadn't dropped the gear early in the flight, it would have caught the wave tops and slammed him into the sea. As it was, a single instant more and there would have been nothing left but debris and an oil slick on the surface of the Pacific.

  He climbed slowly until he broke through the cloud layer, now down to five thousand feet. The moon beamed like a Hollywood searchlight, and he flipped on his navigation lights, searching the sky for Hafner's Bellanca. Having even an enemy in view would be comforting after the sickening spin. Hafner was nowhere in sight.

  As his nerves steadied, Bandfield tried the radio again for another position fix, squinting to get the tiny white lines and numbers of the frequency dials properly aligned. It was dead, probably displaced and wires disconnected during the wild spin. He wondered if the compass was still working right. It had been spinning like a top, and had just settled down when he'd turned to a 235-degree heading. He'd have to go the rest of the way on dead reckoning, a term too appropriate for the task, given that he was lost, short on fuel, and totally without communications.

  The blessed sun rose right on time, 6:34 a.m., spreading the clouds first with a shimmering pink, then orange, then bursting through to turn the sky bright blue. He ate another sandwich and drank some water, waiting for the clock to run out, for Mauna Loa to poke its sweet smoking head up through the clouds.

  A sense of utter loneliness came over him. Hafner had not reappeared, and he had seen no other living thing, ship, plane, or bird. Maybe he was dead, down in the sea, and this was all some sort of dream. He'd long since let the noise of the engine and propeller grind into an anonymous white silence. He brought his hand to his mouth and bit down hard, letting the pain and the tooth marks prove him to be alive.

  *

  Aboard the Miss Charlotte

  8:00 a.m. PST, August 17, 1927

  The dawn had been welcome for Hafner, too. He took a carefully measured sip of cognac from the flask he kept in his navigation case, then washed it down with a pint of water. He picked through the food Murray had prepared, settled on a waxed-paper-wrapped piece of chicken.

  He passed half back to Nellie and sat munching, aware of how much better the sunlight made it. Last night he'd gone through tremendous strain, fighting back the fears of a lifetime that had somehow squeezed into the cramped cockpit of the Bellanca. He had never once been sleepy; instead, his strength was drained by the constant dry aching fatigue of fear, the numbing realization that Bandfield had deserted him in the twin oceans of air and sea, and that there was no recourse, no alternative available to him. The course he'd chosen was purely guesswork, a process of elimination that factored in all the information he had, most of which was many hours old.

  Periodically, he would rack the Bellanca, lighter and more spirited now that fuel had burned off, into a tight turn, and he'd scan both the sea and the sky, hoping to see an airplane or to find a break in the undercast that would reveal a ship or even a flock of birds, anything to give him a hint of his direction. Each time there was nothing, and each time the clutching spasm of fear would draw him a little more tightly together, his scrotum contracting, his stomach twisting.

  It bothered him most because the danger was not proximate; it would be hours before the real life-or-death choices would be put to him. Often in the past, in combat, in acrobatics, he had been only seconds from death, not caring because he held the answer in his hands and feet, able to move the controls, fire the guns, exert control over the situation. Now the only control he had w
as negative; he could end it all in a plunging dive to the sea, something he knew he'd never do. Or he could wait, and hope that his course was correct, that a ship would appear.

  He vacillated between hoping that Bandfield had crashed and that he would suddenly pop up somewhere, on course to Hawaii. When—if—they met again, Hafner swore to kill him, face to face, man to man.

  *

  Aboard the Salinas Made

  1:30 p.m. PST, August 17, 1927

  The strain of needing to see the islands had wakened him thoroughly. Millie and Jack would be on the ground in Hawaii by now, surrounded by hula girls and reporters, accepting the first-prize money. A pang of conscience went through him as he wondered if he had left Hafner to die; he dismissed it. The fuel check was easy now that he was down to the main tanks. Either he found land in the next two and a half hours, or he would be sailing the worst yacht in the Pacific.

  There was something on the horizon—two gentle smudges, pressing through the clouds as a young girl's breasts bud through a summer frock. He sighed in relief at the anticlimax. All he had to do was steer to them, Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea, then turn north and west again past the shores of Maui and Molokai and on into Oahu. He pulled a map from the satchel on the floor, and located the Army base at Wheeler Field. It was almost at the center of the western end of the island.

  He ran a fuel check. It would be close, but he'd make it. The Wright Whirlwind and the ancient Breese airframe suddenly seemed to glow with charm; they were bringing him to Oahu, to Millie, and to $10,000. Not bad for a lash-up that Hadley had advised him not to fly. He was going to beat the navigation problem and the fuel problem. He was going to live!

  The clouds were breaking up, and he could see the surf curling on the shores of Molokai, the island of lepers and Father Damien, as he went by. He turned in toward Oahu and Wheeler Field at one thousand feet, letting down slowly, looking for other airplanes. When he crossed over the coastline the airplane seemed to take on a palpable solidity, as if the ground below had stiffened it in all the right places. Except for an Army training plane, wings bright yellow, off to his left, he had the sky to himself. Below, the green beauty of Oahu spilled out before him, ten times as attractive as he had imagined, more inviting than any land he'd ever seen.