Trophy for Eagles

by Boyne, Walter J.

  Hafner patted the intelligence report in his flying-suit pocket. Two I-16s had reinforced Bilboa; one of the two pilots was an American volunteer. Hafner grinned to himself. It had to be Bandfield, it must be Bandfield!

  Five thousand feet below, Baumer muscled the Ju-52, keeping the airspeed and altitude constant, aware that a deviation would bring a rocket from Henke. The observer's signals to turn right or left were marked by a red or green light on the panel. At the beginning of the war, the bombardier had sat in a hole chopped in the floor and dropped the bombs by hand. Things were improving a little, bit by bit, as they learned their way. It would be better in the next war.

  Behind Baumer, three other flights of Junkers, all loaded with 550-pound high-explosive bombs, were readying to drop. The big bombs would break the buildings into kindling, open the gas mains, prepare the way for the fires. Then they would return in the third wave, carrying incendiaries.

  Unheard below the bombers, the church bell ringing the air-raid alarm sent a few of Guernica's population into the crudely built bomb shelters. More crowded into the church, with contradictory hopes. The first hope was that they wouldn't be hit in a church; the second was that if they were hit, their death in church would assure salvation.

  Lacalle had led Bandy to the north to gain altitude, then back in a sweeping climb to ten thousand feet. Flying the Mosca was like balancing a marble on a pencil, and Bandy was not yet comfortable in it. Below them lay Guernica's houses, built wall to wall so that streets meandered through them like water through a rocky field.

  Unaware of the approaching Russian fighters, Baumer felt a sense of quiet satisfaction. All of the long efforts—the trips from Germany, the training, the sweat and hard labor—all were made worthwhile at the press of Henke's bombardier's button that sent the bombs hurtling toward the town. It was a signal to the other planes, whose bombs cascaded down, tumbling from their vertical storage to course clumsily into alignment.

  Henke's string of bombs, falling in pairs, hit the Hotel Julian, then walked explosion by explosion across the street to the railroad station. Erich Tauber depressed his gun as far as he could and fired a burst into the streets.

  Father Alfonso stumbled as he watched the bombs from the second wave of bombers smash into the church, crumpling the steeple and throwing the altar forward across a line of kneeling women, turning prayers into screams. The priest's eyes were streaming tears as he raced to his church, his people.

  Lacalle signaled and dove, accelerating to five hundred kilometers per hour before firing. Lacalle aimed for the number-two man in the formation, Bandy for the lead airplane. As he dove, he knew the only thing that would make being here worthwhile would be finding Hafner in one of the German planes. He was too tired to feel fear anymore, too jaded to enjoy a victory.

  Baumer was surprised by the controls jumping in his hand in concert with the metallic clatter of the heavy Russian machine-gun bullets cutting through his wing. He banked his Junkers into a gradual turn to the left, trying to keep the formation together as he saw the two green Russian-built single-seaters chandelle up ahead. He felt the vibration of Tauber's gun—the youngster's bursts were too long, he'd burn out his barrel.

  "I-16s," he called to no one.

  Lacalle's target started to smoke. He turned to the left and attacked its wing man. Bandy dove to attack the lead plane again. The Junkers grew big in his sights, and he put a line of bullets across the corrugated skin of the fuselage. He still had respect for the German gunners, having seen more than one of his comrades go down from their fire. The Junkers's top gunner was huge, sticking much farther up into the slipstream than usual.

  Where are the damned fighters when we need them? Baumer thought as he jerked the Junkers into a shivering right-hand turn. He wondered if Erich, for all his talk of fighting, was hitting anything. Even if he didn't, just the act of firing would be a deterrent. Where were the fighters?

  Below, Galland was pulling up; even in a full-throttle dive the Heinkels couldn't catch the I-16s. He was going to have to climb, and try to cut them off from their base in Bilboa.

  Hafner circled above the fight, choosing his time. He could not tell which airplane Bandfield was flying, but he had ammunition enough for them both. When the lead Mosca dove again, Hafner swung down in a tight arc that pulled white trails of condensation from his wingtips. The ugly little Russian fighter grew in his sights. He raised his nose, fired, saw the hits registering directly in the cockpit; smoke and flames erupted in a violent wind-lashed stream.

  "Kaputt," he said, and arced back into a roller-coaster climb to his perch above the combat. He would have liked to stay on the Mosca's tail, following it down, pumping more bullets into it. But there was still an enemy—and it might be Bandfield. He would get them both and be sure.

  The fight had drifted away from Bandfield after his first attack, and he was sitting at altitude, seeking the next target, when the cameo battle unfolded beneath him. He had seen Lacalle's masterful attack, smashing the Junkers and then deftly disposing of the defending Heinkels like an aerial Cyrano de Bergerac, a fencing master sliding in and out among the Germans. Then Bandfield watched the red blur of metal scything down to attack. It was a Messerschmitt just like the one he had flown back at Augsburg.

  He saw the quick burst—no more than ten seconds—that shredded Lacalle's airplane, and swore as the Messerschmitt converted all the speed and energy of its dive into altitude.

  Lacalle's smoking airplane straightened out and began to fly level. It was surrounded by Heinkels driving in and firing as leisurely as if it had been a target sleeve. Below, flames were already boiling up from the city.

  Bandfield's thoughts came clattering like bullets even as he reacted. The Messerschmitt was faster and could climb more rapidly. It didn't matter; he was plunging headlong into the Heinkels, trying to save his friend Lacalle if he could, to draw the Messerschmitt down on him if he couldn't. It was the worst way to engage—low, in an inferior airplane, against a host of enemies—but he had to try.

  Hafner watched the Mosca dive, irrationally sure now that it was Bandfield. He saw the streams of smoke from its cowling and wings. He waited, letting the Heinkels engage the enemy as it went past, each little biplane turning and darting to fire either at the first Mosca, now burning brightly, or at the second one, which had just broken through the melee.

  The German hunched forward. There was a line of Heinkels behind him now, ready to cut off the Mosca if he missed. He would not miss. He shoved the Messerschmitt's nose forward and dove, seeing the Mosca turning toward him.

  One of the Heinkels had been good, turning behind Bandfield to shatter his windscreen, punching a line of holes across his instrument panel that terminated in a wide pulsing wound in his hand. He pushed his bloody fingers against the throttle, blood squirting against the windscreen. He glanced at his ammunition counters—they read zero. He checked an impulse to test the guns—if there were any bullets left, he wanted to put them into the Messerschmitt.

  The gleaming red Messerschmitt came dropping down in a vertical arc, curving in for the attack, an all-white winged sword gleaming behind the cockpit. In a surge of pleasure no different from instant, urgent sexual arousal, Bandfield leaned forward, anxious to fall on the neck of his foe. He had smelled it, he knew that it was his old enemy Hafner, and the insignia confirmed it. Bandy raised his nose, worrying about losing airspeed, but unable to turn away. He could see a bright winking on the cowl of the Messerschmitt, felt the slugs ripping through his fuselage. Bandfield mashed on his gun button, heard the clatter of air as the pneumatic charging system pulsed the empty guns. The Messerschmitt's fuselage flashed by overhead, and Bandfield turned instinctively to follow, knowing that he could not dive away without the German pouncing on him like a leopard.

  Hafner pulled up and rolled over to look down at the battered Mosca. This was Bandfield, no question. A flight of Heinkels appeared. He whirled on his wingtip to fire a warning burst in their direction. They u
nderstood, pulling away to the north.

  This pigeon belongs to me, he thought. Bandfield was below, slow, hurt, and apparently out of ammunition. Hafner felt a glowing sense of excitement, a realization that it was going to be better than he had planned, better than he could have dreamed. He would snip at this upstart American like an Oriental torture master, slicing bits from him until he flew him into the ground.

  Bandfield watched the Messerschmitt ease in next to him, flying in formation. He lolled his head to the side as if he were wounded. Jesus, he thought, the bastard is going to whip me again. Patty is really going to be mad at me about this.

  Hafner's Messerschmitt disappeared behind him. Bandfield had turned to stare to the rear when a shadow blanked out the sun. He looked up, and smiling down, just as he had so long ago in Peru, was Bruno Hafner's huge head, with its hooked nose and its fleshy lips stretched into a smile.

  Hafner looked into Bandfield's shattered cockpit, smeared with oil and blood. Bandfield glanced up and pushed away, but a hint of pressure on the Messerschmitt's controls let Hafner follow. This stylish victory would do him no harm. The younger pilots would talk about the quick kill of one Mosca, and then this complete domination of the other.

  He checked his fuel gauge; not enough remained to fly Bandfield into the ground. It would have to be an execution, better than he deserved.

  I'll drop back now, he thought, and give him two twenty-second bursts. He waved a slow salute—flip, not correct; Bandfield wasn't worthy of a correct salute—and reached down to check his gun-charging handles.

  Bandfield gazed up at Hafner's coarse and heavy face distorted by the helmet and the strain of combat. There was not much he could do. His hand crept to the side, moved the lever; the heavy landing gear, screaming in protest, thundered down into its extended position, slowing him abruptly. Simultaneously, Bandfield chopped his throttle, raising his nose a hair. The Messerschmitt shot forward, and Bandfield's propeller nicked through the light metal of Hafner's fin and rudder. In the milliseconds in which it sliced through frame and formers, the exploding effect of the 250-mile-per-hour wind blew the Messerschmitt's rudder off at the stump.

  Hafner's first sense was that the Mosca had somehow disappeared, his second that his rudder pedals were slack. The Messerschmitt snapped, then spun crazily, pinning him to the cockpit side. Above, two of the Heinkels milling in amazement locked wings and began an earthward plunge that matched the Messerschmitt's. Hafner pushed against the canopy, trying to overcome the G forces pinning him inside. He snapped his seat harness loose, straining to get out, his thoughts kaleidoscoping to match the whirling brown and green of the land below. Spinning in his mind were images of Germany, of his father's house, of Charlotte, of the Bristol fighter he'd shot down in 1918, of Charlotte again and Nellie, and of the Bristol again and the Bristol again and the Bristol, Nellie, the Bristol, he was merging with the Bristol, spinning down, locked with the Bristol.

  Bandfield's aircraft shuddered and bucked as the damaged propeller threatened to tear the engine from its mounts. He shrugged, popped the throttle full forward, and dove for the sea, for France—and for Patty.

  ***

  EPILOGUE

  Paris, France/May 1, 1937

  Only nine years and 345 days too late to win the Orteig Prize, Frank Bandfield woke up in the American embassy, his first conscious thought of Patty, his second that this was surely not the room Lindbergh had slept in.

  He passed his throbbing hand over his forehead. He had crash-landed on the beach near the village of Saint-Jean-de-Luz, out of fuel and anxious to be on solid ground. The local doctor—if he could be called that—had poured cognac into the hole in his hand and bound it up with a cheap gauze bandage. The doctor stationed with the embassy had gasped in horror and spent the afternoon snipping at the wound with scissors and muttering about blood poisoning and French medicine before sewing it up.

  Henry Caldwell had used the time he'd spent with the doctor profitably, firing question after question to Bandfield about the Russians and the Germans. Caldwell had been apologetic about the shabby treatment from the embassy—officially Bandfield did not exist, was not in France, had never been to the embassy. The ambassador was not worried about what the Germans would think, having this "mercenary" on the premises, but the French were, and it had taken two days to get custody of Bandfield, and another to have him transferred to Paris.

  One more interrogation was scheduled for this morning. After that, Caldwell had promised a quick trip to Le Havre and then a luxury voyage home on the Normandie.

  After washing up, Bandfield peered up at the single window near the ceiling of his dingy room. Last night, he had propped himself on a chair and looked out over the rooftops of Paris, wondering how it had looked to Lindbergh in May of 1927. Roosevelt Field was an eternity away in time, a universe in distance. So much had happened. When he landed on Long Island, primed to be the first to fly from New York to Paris, he'd felt he had the hottest airplane in the world, the original Roget Rocket, good for 125 miles an hour. A few days ago, he'd abandoned an airplane that could fly twice as fast and was already obsolete.

  It had started out the Lindbergh decade; it was winding up the war decade. Aviation had promised an El Dorado of riches in 1927—you simply had to fly faster or farther or higher, and money would flow in an endless stream. A few people had made money; many times that number had lost their fortunes and often their lives. He started to count the friends he had lost. The number grew too high, and he shook the thought away as morbid, grateful that Patty and Hadley had survived. He jumped nervously at a clatter in the hallway; some scurrying maid dropping a tray of dishes had thrown him back to the puffy skies over Guernica on his last mission, the mission he'd flown repeatedly in his dreams since his landing on the beach. He remembered the bitter frustration of being once again at the point of defeat at Hafner's hands, his screaming outrage at losing again to a brutal traitor who had destroyed so many people close to him. In a single desperate move, renouncing life, Patty, the future, everything, he had lowered his gear to brake his airplane and send the smug, grinning Hafner slashing over him. He'd felt his prop claw through the Messerschmitt's fin, severing it cleanly. The German fighter had shot in front of him like a car accelerating from a stop sign, then begun its wild, snapping spin to the earth around Guernica.

  He had felt no elation, only a sense of being clean and free. He had beaten someone who had deserved it badly. If the Heinkels had not been there, he would have tried to follow Hafner down, to watch him impact. He doubted if Hafner could have bailed out of the wildly gyrating airplane. But Bandfield's sluggish Russian fighter had almost been blown to bits around him, and the drumming, clanking noises had told him that he could not fly for long. He had dived, ignoring the vibrating engine, the propeller screaming a banshee accompaniment to the bagpipe songs of the wind whistling through holes left by German bullets.

  The remaining Heinkel fighters had been disorganized, unable to react. One flight of three had anticipated his line of retreat and dove, firing at him, but their bursts had fallen far behind. Far out over the Bay of Biscay, he had flattened out, racing along the ocean's surface for the first thirty minutes. Then, cautiously, he had throttled back, afraid that the engine would quit, trying to understand the meaning of his new freedom, oblivious to the beauty of the Mosca's shadow hurtling over the bright blue waters, and to the surprise on the faces of the sailors on the small sail boats. His fuel gauges had long read empty when he had seen a spit of beach that he knew must be French soil. He had flown low over the sand once, to be sure there were no idling lovers in his path, then bellied in, the I-16 sending a spray of sand and water geysering behind it.

  Two stoic French fishermen had watched him crawl out of the cockpit, bleeding and throwing up in response to the release of tension. When he had finished, they had launched their boat and sailed away, still staring. For the first time, his hand had begun to hurt, and he had waded out to rinse it off in the surf, letting th
e bite of the salt water act as a counter to the pain. In a few minutes, a black Citroen traction avant had pulled up, driven by two members of the gendarmerie. After an hour of voluble, incomprehensible French, windmilling arms, and accusations of everything from invasion to smuggling, they had impounded the airplane and taken him to their local clinic. Three days later, he had reached Paris.

  His propeller had sawn through his obsession as cleanly as it had through Hafner's rudder. He felt free for the first time since the confrontation with Murray Roehlk back in Dayton, when all the suspicions, all the dark thoughts, about Hafner had been suddenly

  turned into reality. Now all he wanted to do was return to Patty, to some semblance of a normal life.

  A knock on the door brought him back to France. It was Caldwell, carrying their breakfast on a tray.

  "Sorry about the service, Bandy, but you know the ambassador is in a bind about this. He was good to let us use the embassy at all; he's under a lot of pressure from the French government to get us out of here."

  Bandfield picked up a croissant. "This will never replace ham and eggs."

  Caldwell nodded, munching. "We've just about finished, but I've got some good news for you. I think I can swing some contracts for Roget Aircraft from the French. They're ready to buy anything the United States will send them, and your transports would be a godsend."

  "God, that's great! Old Hadley will have to get a new stock of jokes for the French customers."

  "Better than his American ones, I hope. Say, Bandy, you've been coy about how many victories you had. Give me the straight story, now. I'm going to propose that you tour all the Air Corps pursuit units and talk to the pilots, and that's the first thing they'll ask."

  "Henry, with the exception of the last fight, I hate to think about it. Let's say it was nine, counting Hafner. Have you been able to get any confirmation that he was killed? It would be just like that bastard to bail out and land in some Spanish whorehouse."