Amerika (48 page)

When we reached cruising altitude, we flew in silence for a long minute, while I tried to loosen the iron grip I had on the yoke, as if somebody had welded my fingers to its Bakelite surface. But finger by finger, I finally succeeded.

Ava voice was shaky but calm. ‘That was a first.’

‘And a last.’

‘Had to close my eyes toward the end.’

‘Don’t blame you.’

‘Glad you didn’t.’

I wiggled the control wheel. ‘Need to dial up an RDF station.’

Ava took over. ‘Find something good to listen to. No preachers, okay?’ I saluted her and made for the radio operator’s table. From long habit I was flicking power switches on the transmitter and receiver before I even sat down. I started tuning the radio direction finder, but then noticed its big round dial wasn’t lit. Neither were the frequency dials and indicator lights on the transmitter and receiver. Tried again.

Nothing.

To Orlando and Mason, ‘Check your radio breakers.’

They flicked them on and off. Nothing. Without power the transmitter and receiver were useless boxes. Ditto the RDF. And without RDF we couldn’t fly the frequency to our target. Futile, I know, but just to be sure I checked the cable connections by pulling on them one by one, especially those leading to the power supplies. I almost overlooked the one curled around a lower stanchion then disappeared into the fuselage wall.

I got down on my hands and knees and squirmed underneath the table to reach it. I gave it a quick tug, expecting the same resistance, but it came free from its socket like a rotten tooth.

One look at the tangled mass of torn and stripped wires and I felt like somebody had punched me in the head with a brick. What should have been a tightly-bound bundle of color-coded wiring carefully soldered into a large multi-pin, screw-on connector, was nothing but a tangled mess. The connector was still screwed into place, minus the cable that somebody had intentionally yanked out and then stuffed back to make them look okay.

After Orlando examined it he said, ‘No way can we fix it.’

‘What if we had the wiring diagram?’

‘Something like is a division-level repair item. They’d just swap it out.’

‘Can we guess where the wires go?’

His silent stare made me regret my stupid comment. Then he said,

‘Look, even if we did have the diagram, we’ve got no soldering tools.’

‘Can’t we just wedge them in somehow?’

‘Sam, stop it.’ He shook his head. ‘The radios are dead. Either move on to a Plan B or turn this girl around.’

I couldn’t let go just yet. ‘Were the radios okay when you stood watch last night?’

He shrugged. ‘They were turned off, but they looked okay to me.’

‘And they were working when I was there. And when Ziggy was there too.’ I dropped my voice to a whisper. ‘Who the hell did this?’ He shrugged. ‘Bad guys for sure.’

‘But who?’

‘You’re asking the wrong person.’

Before I could stop, my mind took off like a bloodhound, sniffing with suspicion  at  everything;  the  Sentinel  Island  crew  working  around  the clipper, the old-timer guard I’d talked to before I came on board last night, any one of them could have ripped the wires out and disabled the radios.

But whoever it was, he’d done a good job. Gone was simply finding a radio station’s frequency and homing in on it. Had we been flying with a full crew and lost our radios, this would not have been the end of the world. Our navigator could have plotted our position with a combination of dead reckoning and celestial navigation.

Orlando nudged me. ‘Got that plan yet?’

‘Getting there.’

I unwound myself from underneath the radio operator’s table. Ziggy stood there with his hands on his hips like a sidewalk superintendent.

‘Problems?’ he said.

I decided not to feed the flames. ‘Radio’s not working.’

‘But we need it to find the target, right?’

‘Not anymore.’

He looked pained. ‘You mean the mission’s off?’

I didn’t answer him because I didn’t have an answer… yet.

Seconds later, with a prayer running thorough my head, I rummaged around the drawers beneath the navigator’s plotting table. Had this been anything but a Pan Am plane I wouldn’t have bothered doing this, but Dutchman Preister was good at training his crews to be prepared for any and all contingencies.

Since Pan Am flew over empty oceans and seas, this included a fat- barreled flare pistol and eighteen flares clipped to the wall for firing downwards towards the water to determine wind drift. Was it in there?

Check.

Add to this, the more prosaic navigator’s tools: parallel rulers, sight reduction tables, plotting sheets, dividers, sharpened pencils and a stopwatch. Were they there?

Check.

And in the third drawer beneath the long chart table, a thick blue book lettered in gold: 1942
Air Almanac
. I breathed a sigh of relief. Fine to have a church, but this was the bible. Even so, we needed the ‘preacher’ or we were sunk. I took a deep breath, opened the next drawer, and for a moment saw nothing and my heart sank.

Then I reached further back and my fingers brushed against a wooden box with a hinged lid. I pulled it out, held my breath, and opened the lid. The
Spencer, Browning and Rust Company
bubble octant rested peacefully in its blue-velvet home. The polished brass instrument felt cool in my hands as I carefully lifted it out of its resting place. It would warm up when I put it to use.

Ziggy said, ‘What the heck is that?’

I turned it over in my hands and silently thanked our navigator Stone, back on Couba Island, either dead or alive, for following Preister’s rules to the letter.

‘Something we need.’

I left him and went forward to bring Ava up to speed. I had her make a timed turn over a fixed point on the ground so that I could get to work.

‘Can you plot our course with dead reckoning?’ she said.

‘Not as accurate by itself. Washington’s too far a reach and besides, the weather’s never going to hold long enough. Look out there.’

The moonlight lit up a faraway, soft silver wall of clouds to the northwest.

‘Maybe we can climb above it.’

‘Doubt it. That’s why I want a star fix right now.’

I fished around inside my pocket and pulled out a slip of paper upon which I had scribbled something I always automatically did as a captain:

33°03'23.00’ N 114°44’44.09’ W

From long Pan Am habit I had noted the latitude and longitude of Sentinel Island from the chart in the
Desert Queen
. It’s not that I didn’t trust my navigator to get it right, but because in my early career I had spent many a bullet-sweating hour as a navigator trying find out where the hell we were in time and space. I knew how important that first fix can be.

Written beneath our starting latitude and longitude, I had written that of our target in Hanford, Washington:

46°38’45.33’ N by 119°35’47.60’ W

Two small dots on a map, eight hundred-twelve miles apart as the crow flies. All I had to do was connect them.

Ziggy jumped out his seat when he saw me open the rear door of the flight deck bulkhead leading to the astrodome.

‘Where you going?’

‘To get a star fix.’

He scurried over. His face reminded me of a boy scout ‘Mind if I watch? This kind of stuff really interests me.’

‘So I’ve noticed.’

He winked. ‘You’d be surprised what strange things you need to know in my business.’

‘What exactly is your business?’

‘Two words.’  He raised one finger, then another as he chanted,

‘Make….believe.’

The navigator’s astrodome was a multi-windowed, streamlined teardrop housing protruding eighteen inches above the fuselage surface. And by standing on an aluminum stepstool in the baggage passageway, I had just enough room to fit my head, hands and bubble octant.

Ava held us on a steady course, but the occasional light chop made it difficult to work the instrument and keep my balance at the same time.

‘Grab my belt in the back and steady me,’ I said.

‘Wilco.’

‘And when I say go, start the stopwatch.’

‘Roger.’ A brief pause. ‘I know this sounds ridiculous, but I’m really having fun.’

I swung up the octant and centered the bubble on the night sky. The moon was long gone behind a high bank of clouds to the east, making it useless as a sighting target. So I turned my attention to the western sky which remained clear. An infinity of stars to choose from. At first just a confused jumble of pinpricks of light; some clustered, others as separate and alone up there as I was down here.

But then, the way you suddenly recognize a lover’s face in the midst of a crowd, I spotted the Orion constellation. Named the ‘Hunter’ for the way its stars suggest a hunter stalking his prey, I quickly found the three that make up his belt, the two his bow, the four his club, and finally at the top, the bright star Betelgeuse, his ‘shoulder.’

But I was hunting bigger prey tonight; the Big Dipper, in particular its bottommost star that makes the dipper’s cup because it points directly to the gleaming friend of navigators throughout the western hemisphere: Polaris, the North Star.

It took only seconds to rotate the octant’s mirror to ‘pull’ the reflected image of Polaris to the horizon. The ease with which I did, a miracle in a way, seeing as how I hadn’t done any hard navigation in years. That’s what RDF’s can do to you; make you forget how to find your way around the sky when they go belly up and you’re far from home.

The mirror image of the star swam around at first, but then steadied on the horizon.

‘Start your stopwatch.’

I quickly climbed down and played the flashlight on the face of the chronometer installed on a rack next to the astrodome.

‘Stop your watch.’

Surrendering to Ziggy’s questions, I explained how the chronometer was set to Greenwich Mean Time, and I would compare its exact time to tables in the Nautical Almanac that listed the position of each heavenly body  for  every  minute  of  every  day  of  the  year.  From that I could determine the
Dixie Clipper’s
position along a fixed continuum.

‘And then you’ll know where we are?’

‘More or less.’

He shook his head. ‘Amazing. So that means we’re still doing the mission?’

‘Unless something else happens.’

I played my flashlight past the mail cages to the relief crew sleeping quarters.  Behind them lay the baggage compartments. Kind of creepy seeing the space empty like this. On a normal clipper flight it would be packed to the gills with expensive luggage and steamer trunks, along with the snores of crew members blending in with the engine roar.

‘Ziggy, when you were on watch last night did you check back here?’

‘Checked the whole plane. Why?’

‘See anything out of the ordinary? Hatches loose? Anything?’

‘Just this. A big dark nothing.’

‘Think I’ll check again.’

He grabbed my flashlight. ‘Go plot your course, captain. Leave this to me.

His Boy Scout enthusiasm made me laugh.

‘Okay, but be careful.’

He
s
tuck out his chest. ‘I may be small but I pack a big punch.’

I gave Ava the new heading and she dialed it into the autopilot like she’d been doing it for years.

‘You’re a quick study,’ I said.

‘It’s all an act.’

‘Don’t believe you.’

‘That’s what good acting’s all about.’ Her toothy smile gleamed red from the cockpit’s night lighting. She adjusted rudder trim and her smile disappeared. ‘I’ve ridden horses that pulled this hard for the barn.’

‘You’ve got five thousand of them now.’

Because we were flying on three engines, the combined propeller torque from the two engines on our port wing kept pulling us in their direction. The rudder trim tab skewed us straight, but even so, we were still flying slightly sideways through the air, the way a car with a bent frame does on a highway.

Ava said, ‘Time to target?’

I laughed. ‘You sound like you’re in a war movie.’

‘Wish to hell I was.’

‘A little under seven hours if the wind and weather hold.’

‘Neither of which we know much about, correct?’

‘Roger. We’re flying blind in that department.’

‘And the radio department too. Any idea what happened?’

I told her what I thought, which wasn’t much beyond the obvious. But what seemed worse, as I spoke, is that I realized that the protective little bubble we seemed to have been floating inside of had burst the instant I yanked on that damned cable.

Ava heard me out, thought about it for a while, and then said, ‘I wonder if they know where we’re going.’

‘Could be.’

‘If so, that means they’ll be waiting for us. The surprise factor will be gone.’

‘Then we’ll have to figure out a way to surprise them.’

‘Such as?’

‘I don’t know yet, but I’ll think of something.’

She grinned. ‘That’s what I like about you, Sam. Even though you don’t have a clue, you always act like you do.’