by Janet Dailey
“Excuse me.” She sent the others out of the chapel while she stayed behind to move quietly into the pew. After a second’s hesitation, she sat on the smooth-worn seat, angling her body toward him.
“You’re Zach Jordan, aren’t you?” she guessed in a low voice, and watched him stiffen. “Rachel introduced us in New York. I’m Eden van Valkenburg.”
With a small turn of his head, he cast an identifying glance in her direction. “I remember.” The deep, haunting blue of his eyes glistened with a contained wetness while his patrician, proud features had the pinched-in look of grief to them, feelings sucked in tight.
“I can’t tell you how sorry I am … about Rachel.” Some of Eden’s bitterness came through—the resentment at the jeopardy all their lives were in because of slipshod maintenance and a poorly equipped staff of mechanics.
“I stood outside my barracks last night and watched the light the fire made in the sky.” His tightly clenched hands could not disguise the tremors that vibrated through him, but his expression remained stony. “A plane had crashed and burned, they told me. And I hoped Rachel hadn’t seen it. She was afraid of fire—afraid of seeing faces in the flames.”
His words made the image she carried in her mind even more horrifying. “She shouldn’t have died,” Eden insisted in a trembling, emotion-riddled voice, her anger resurfacing.
“After the war, we were going to have children … lots of children. We were going to go to Palestine—to Jerusalem. After the war.” His voice faded into the blankness the future held out for him.
His throat worked convulsively, then Zach turned from her and stood. He walked out of the chapel, still clutching the folded length of his cap.
The morning inspection of the aircraft was conducted by Jacqueline Cochran, her executive assistant, the squadron commander, Major Stevenson, a representative from the Air Safety Board, and the chief maintenance officer. From the sidelines, Mitch watched the group going over the engine logs for all of the A-24S.
Pragmatically, Mitch decided on another course to obtain the information and wandered into a hangar. A soldier slogging through the mud had a better knowledge of road conditions than a general flying over it at a thousand feet. A tall, rangy mechanic was bellied over the engine of an A-24. Perspiration made a wet stain on his greasy fatigues, ringing his underarms and making a dark patch between his shoulder blades. It took Mitch a minute to discern the chevrons amidst all the dirt and grime.
“Hello, Sergeant.”
The mechanic glanced backward in his direction. “Sorry, sir,” the mechanic drawled. “It’s kinda hard to salute when you got a wrench in your hands and a bolt half loosened. Be through here in a minute.”
“No hurry.” Mitch waited, observing the man’s clean, decisive actions.
“I suppose you’ll be wantin’ your plane rolled out.” The sergeant talked as he worked, occasionally punctuating his words with grunts of energy exerted.
Judging by the man’s apparent competence and rank, Mitch wasn’t surprised that the sergeant knew generally who he was. “No. Just some information.” Something clicked in his memory. “By any chance you wouldn’t be Sergeant Jackson?”
“Yes, sir.” He looked again at Mitch, silently questioning how he had known.
“Eden mentioned you.”
“Miss van Valkenburg? Yes, I know her, sir.” There was a small pause, almost deliberate as if considering the next words. “How is she? She was tore up the other night … saw the crash and … everything.”
“Fine.” Mitch couldn’t really comment on Eden’s emotional state, so he glossed over his answer. “The investigation going on now—what do you think they’re going to find?”
The sergeant stopped to wipe his hands, his wide, strong-boned face serious with concern. “It’s likely that they’ll find most of the planes are overdue for an engine overhaul—according to combat standards.”
“What do you know about the plane that went down?”
“It had five hundred hours on the engine—maybe two hundred tow-target missions flown,” he admitted.
“And?” Mitch prompted.
Bubba gave a telling shrug, and avoided stating an opinion. “Our orders are to keep ’em flying. Most of the time we accomplish that, even when we don’t have the spare parts, or the gas allotment gets shorted.” His head dipped for an instant, his glance darting away. “That canopy latch, it was such a small thing. Hell.”
“Right.” Mitch agreed with the mechanic’s assessment.
That afternoon, another meeting was convened by Jacqueline Cochran to relay the findings to her pilots. But it wasn’t to be the informal gathering of the previous night. She was accompanied by some of the top brass from the base. Eden had the feeling their director had chosen sides, and it wasn’t theirs she was on.
Brisk and businesslike, the dark-eyed, blond director of the women’s flying program read the engine time logged on the A-24S her girls were flying. The implication was clear that the aircraft were not as poorly maintained as they had believed. While it was true many of them were past due for overhauls, that criterion was mainly applied to combat planes. It wasn’t practical to expect that degree of maintenance on the planes flown at home.
As Eden realized they were being given the official explanation, she looked down the row of seated women pilots. Few liked what they were hearing but they seemed perforce to accept it. The Army officers were very plainly supporting their director, so there was no place to appeal the decision.
But Eden was in no mood to be bought off by a bunch of officers, no matter how much brass they carried. “That’s a whitewash, and you know it,” she called out, in open criticism of the aviatrix she had once admired.
Marty was quick to take up the cry. “The mechanics don’t pay attention to those engine logs. I doubt if they’re even up to date.”
But their protests were ignored. No one acted as if they’d even heard them as the commander of the base got up to speak, expressing his delight at having the women at his camp. After he had given his little spiel, it was the chief surgeon’s turn, then the public relations officers’, who promised them publicity.
When they filed outside after it was over, Cappy was waiting to hear the results. Their sullen faces told her almost as much as their words as they recounted what Eden regarded as a betrayal by their leader.
“The chief surgeon gets up there and says we have his permission to use the nurses’ quarters. It’s obvious the old fart doesn’t know that we’re already living there,” Marty muttered in her whiskey-rough voice.
“It was another one of the Army’s famous snafus,” Mary Lynn concluded, less bitter than the others.
“Do you know what snafu stands for?” Marty asked her in wry mockery. “Situation Normal—All Fucked Up.”
No one spoke of resigning as a protest to the Army’s response. They had been warned the assignment would be tough and dangerous, and long ago had learned they had to be better than the average male pilot. They couldn’t quit; it was a matter of pride.
Late that day, the UC-78 Cappy was piloting lifted off the ground, following in the wake of the AT-17 flown by Jacqueline Cochran. Mitch occupied the right seat, letting her silence run its course. They had barely exchanged five words beyond the requisite communication prior to takeoff.
His sideways glance studied the mutinous set of her jaw and the hard sparkle in her blue eyes. Her ire was aroused, and Mitch was fascinated by the animation it gave her face. She so rarely allowed her feelings to show.
“Why, Mitch? Why?” Cappy demanded once the aircraft was trimmed to its angle of climb. Flying over Cape Fear, they banked to the north. Far out to sea, ships steamed in a convoy, hugging the coastline. “Eden wasn’t lying about the shoddy condition of those planes.”
“No, I don’t think she was lying,” he agreed.
“Then surely something can be done.” It was a protest, and an expression of frustration. “You’ve been here. You’ve seen what’s going on.
Surely you—”
“Why?” Mitch interrupted, reacting to the disparaging emphasis she placed on him, as if he was some tin god she despised. “Because I have the general’s ear? What would you have me suggest? That he detour a shipment of spare parts and reassign mechanics from the battlefront? Maybe I could just have him call off the war while I’m at it.”
For an instant she didn’t respond. “Are you saying it can’t be helped?” There was a steely quiet to her voice.
“Yes, that’s what I’m saying.” He sighed heavily. “I’m not telling any tales out of school when I admit our planes are getting shot out of the sky faster than we can replace them. Maybe we have managed to drive Rommel out of Africa, but we’re still fighting a defensive war in the Pacific.”
“Why didn’t Cochran say that?” Cappy answered, subdued but still angry. “Why did she try to whitewash the whole situation?”
“It’s simple, really,” Mitch said, his gaze automatically searching the sky for air traffic. “She wants ‘her girls’ to obtain a lot of flying assignments besides ferrying aircraft around the country. You have no idea what she went through to persuade command to let those girls into the tow-target flying. Now she can’t admit it might be too dangerous, any more than she can admit that ‘her girls’ might not have the guts to take such risks. If this experiment fails—for whatever reason—her whole plan to broaden the women’s flying program will be set way back.”
“I see,” Cappy murmured, understanding yet not liking the situation any better.
“Satisfied?” A dark brow was quirked in her direction.
“Yes.”
“Well, I’m not.” He reached across the space between their seats and turned her head toward him. He saw the protest beginning to form as he leaned across to kiss her. His vision narrowed, like a camera lens closing in its focus on one object, until all he could see clearly was the unbroken line of her lips. His mouth moved onto them, meeting initial stiffness that soon gave, and the warm pressure was returned. Mitch suspected it was not so much a giving in to his wants as it was a giving in to her own.
When he pulled away, he saw her lashes lower to conceal the look in her eyes. But he welcomed such a concealment from Cappy, since it meant he had aroused some feeling she didn’t want him to see.
“I was beginning to wonder if you weren’t tired of me already,” Mitch said complacently. “I wondered whether you were regretting the other night.”
“I never do anything I’ll regret later,” Cappy stated emphatically.
His narrowed glance skimmed her, but he kept his response light. “Then you’re obviously a better man than I am.”
“Obviously,” she agreed and leveled the wings of the twin-engined craft as they attained the desired altitude.
Chapter XIX
LEAVING HER CAR parked on the firm shoulder of the beach road, Eden wandered across the dunes to the outer shoreline. The chauffeur had arrived with her car about two weeks before, two days after Rachel died in the crash.
Overhead, the morning sky was a sharp blue. Not even the brightly burning sun could warm the cool air that blew in from the sea. Her high-necked sweater of biscuit-colored wool held in her body warmth. The loose sand sifted over the tops of her shoes and collected inside them. On the hard-packed beach, Eden stopped and emptied them, standing cranelike, first on one foot, then on the other.
The tide had left windrows of seaweed, driftwood, and broken shells tangled together. Interspersed in the wrack were fragile treasures: the jewel-colored wing of a butterfly, a chip of emerald-green glass, and the pure white of a gull’s feather. The wet sand of the beach was cross-stitched with the prints of birds’ feet, the patterns running every which way on the spume-speckled shore. The restless ocean matched her mood and she turned her face to the salty breeze, letting it muss her red hair. Swooping, soaring gulls seemed to be everywhere, their strange cries punctuating the rhythmic rush of the waves onto the beach.
Two weeks had passed since the fatal crash. For the first part of the time, the women pilots had been grounded. Then it was back in the air for all of them, the same as before, checking out in the little L-4 and L-5 Cubs and graduating to the A-24S and tow-target missions. A new group of WASPs from the class behind them had arrived fresh from Sweetwater, ignorantly eager. Nothing had changed. They were flying under the same perilous conditions. Rachel’s death had served no purpose.
The solitude of the beach reached to her as she walked along the waterline, pensive and silent. The churning sea threw its waves at the shore, pounding the sand into hardness, then retreating to gather strength and come again. As the waters ran away, leaving their spume behind to melt into the sand, a few of the plovers, sanderlings and funny boat-tailed grackles gave chase.
Lifting her head, Eden looked far out to sea where a smoky haze obscured the horizon. Fear gripped her, made her ache and put a haunted look in her deeply brown eyes. Never in her life had she been confronted by this kind of mortal fear. So she walked, waiting for the quietude and the wild beauty of the coast to ease the rawness of her nerves.
Birds flew up, startled into the air by her leisurely approach. She watched them wheel and turn and land farther down the beach, lowering their landing-gear legs and back-flapping their wings. She dragged the windblown strands of hair from her face and continued plodding up the beach, mindless of the sea spray that dampened the legs of her fine wool slacks.
Twenty yards ahead of her a surf fisherman was casting his line into the foamy waves. Eden hesitated, nearly changing course to avoid contact with another human, but she continued on. Almost idly she observed his actions, the narrowing distance still giving her enough room to watch without appearing rude. With the line out, the rod was set butt-end on the sand and propped at an angle by a forked branch, relieving the fisherman of the burden of holding it.
He was wearing a pair of tough denim Levi’s, boots, and a water-resistant jacket, half unzipped. Nothing covered his head, and the wind was making free with a shaggy crop of dark hair. As the tall, lanky man lowered himself onto the sand behind his pole, something seemed familiar about him. The rumble of the surf onto the shore and the screech of the herring gulls overhead masked the sound of her approach. Eden was still trying to decide whether she knew him when he saw her and promptly came to his feet.
“Hello, ma’am.” He drawled the greeting, a keenness in his look.
“Hello, Bubba.” She smiled. “I almost didn’t recognize you without those greasy coveralls.”
“I know what you mean, ma’am.”
Eden avoided his gaze and looked out to the building waves, scraping the wind-twisted strands of hair from her cheek. “How come you aren’t in town with the rest of your buddies? I thought all you soldiers made a beeline there the minute you were given a pass.”
“After spendin’ nearly every wakin’ hour breathin’ in exhaust fumes and smellin’ oil, I get to needin’ some fresh air. And when you live on top of one another like you do in a barracks, there isn’t much allowance made for privacy. So it’s kinda nice just to come out here and be alone with your thoughts for a while.”
“I know what you mean,” she agreed with a wry, fleeting smile. Her hands were shoved into the side pockets of her jacket while she idly watched the tremor at the tip of his fishing rod. “Are you catching anything?”
“Naw, but I’m not really tryin’ yet. I only want to catch what I can eat, and if I do that too soon, I won’t have any more reason to stay here,” Bubba replied, a smile twinkling his eyes at such logic.
“That sounds reasonable to me.” Humor laced her answer, the shared kind that was so enjoyable. “What about you, Bubba? Where’s your home in Texas?”
For a moment, he appeared surprised by her show of personal interest. But his skepticism disappeared as he searched her friendly, open face.
“I come from a little town along the Gulf. It’s not likely you ever heard of it—a place called Refugio.” At his questioning look, Eden shook her he
ad, admitting her ignorance of his home town. “There’s more cows than people there. But I was always fascinated by motors. I grew up tinkerin’ with cars—anybody’s. My momma swore I was born with grease under my fingernails. I been diggin’ it out ever since.”
She laughed, but her eyes were noticing how different he looked from his usual workaday appearance. Without its usual grime, his sun-leathered face had a healthy vigor. And his thick, rumpled hair had a sheen to it now, instead of looking dull and flattened by his cap. Without the bulk of his fatigues to conceal it, his long body was flatly muscled, all sinew, tough and hard. There was an earthy aura to him that seemed to do away with all pretense and hone things down to the basics. He was so straightforward—and intelligent. Eden eyed him with close curiosity.
“Where did you get a name like Bubba?” she wondered, because it seemed to fit some hulking, dumb brute—not this man.
“Now, I tell you. I picked it myself,” he admitted with his head tipped back and one leg bent, putting all his weight on one foot.
“Why?” Eden laughed her surprise.
“Well, where I come from, a fella just never gets called by his right name. I was christened William Robert Jackson. Now, when I was growin’ up, I figured I had a choice of bein’ called either Billy Bob or after the General Jackson. I didn’t much like either one, but my daddy had a friend named Bubba who always used to let me mess around with his car. I liked him, so I took his name.”
“Is that true?” She eyed him skeptically.
He drew back in pretended dismay. “Would I pull your leg, ma’am?”
She studied him with wondering interest. “I don’t know.”
His expression became serious; a second later his glance was falling away from her. “Hell, ma’am, you know you can always trust me,” he insisted. But he seemed uncomfortable with her, nearly angry, and tried to conceal it by reaching inside his jacket for a cigarette. Bubba hesitated, then offered the pack to her. “Want one, ma’am?”
“Thanks.” She carried it to her mouth and waited for a light. “And, Bubba, please stop calling me ma’am all the time.”
