Glory Boys (29 page)

Weather was an issue of course. There were no phones in Ruxion, and no telegraph closer than the station telegraph fifty bone-crunching minutes away. But even if Willard had had a phone, he wouldn’t have known who to call. All he could do was gaze up at the sky, which was cloudless and still.

‘It don’t get better than this,’ Ben the Pilot had commented. ‘In summer, you get the dry spells, only the air’s so busy, it’s like driving over rocks.’

Willard knew what he meant. Warm weather could create violent turbulence which made for rougher flying than fine, cold weather. If the weather held, it should be good to fly in.

The route, of course, was an unknown, but the two pilots had bent down over Ben’s route maps in the smoky room. The older pilot (who didn’t seem to be vastly unwell, in Willard’s cynical opinion) talked through the route in detail, marking hazards on the map as well as possible emergency landing sites. ‘Get clear over the border and you shouldn’t have too much trouble taking her down if you have to. ’Course, you’ve always got the ’chute.’

Willard had never used a parachute, though in some of his films a stuntman pretending to be Willard had made jumps.

‘It’s up there? In the cockpit, is it?’

Ben the Pilot nodded slowly. ‘Yah! You used one before?’

Willard hesitated. He never liked revealing the extent to which stuntmen had carried him through his movie career. Besides, a parachute was just a knapsack with a bit of string to pull.

‘Yeah, sure. In the movies. Used ’em plenty.’

Ben wrinkled his mouth as if to spit. ‘Yah. Well, try not to use it today, willya?’

The only real awkwardness had been over fuel. When Willard had fired the engine up, he’d noticed the fuel tank was only a quarter full. He slid angrily down the stepladder to demand a full load.

Mr Chatty said, ‘You got a quarter tank there. Plenty to take you over the border.’

‘Right. And you’ve got the rest of it right there.’ Willard pointed down to the row of fuel cans, painted in the bright Standard Oil red. ‘It belongs in the plane.’

‘Ben never likes to take that much on board.’

‘Ben isn’t flying this crate.’

‘He generally takes more fuel on just over the border. Enough to take him on to Shakeston.’

‘I said I want more fuel.’

There was a moment of eye-to-eye confrontation. Willard refused to back down. A full fuel load meant safety. It meant more time to find a landing site if he were forced down early.

Mr Chatty dropped his eyes. ‘OK. It’ll take a while.’

They’d fuelled the plane. Willard had rooted around in the stove room and found enough bread and ham to serve as lunch and dinner. Then he’d taxied the plane out of the hangar. She was an ugly brute, but both engines (a pair of 400-horse Liberties) and instruments all looked and sounded fine. The runway was long and clear, the weather still good. But for all that, Willard felt the anxiety curling and breathing in his stomach.

He looked down. The four Ruxion men stood by the plane, arms folded, muttering to each other – talking about Willard, he had no doubt. He turned back to his instrument panel. Ignition on this monster was automatic: the propellers stood too high to be swung by hand, in any event. He put his hand to the throttle, which already trembled with the interior life of the airplane. Down below, he could almost hear Ben the Pilot crowing ‘Willard T. Thornton, America’s favourite flying ace!’ through his brown and stinking teeth.

He was about to push down, ready to begin his forward roll, when his fear suddenly sprang up, the way a gasoline fire can flare up from nothing. All of a sudden, Willard was trembling violently, desperately eager to be out of the cockpit, on the ground, holed up in Ruxion for the entire Canadian winter, if need be. If he hadn’t been so far down the line, if he hadn’t actually been in the cockpit, engines on, hand on the throttle, he would have done just that.

Vanity doesn’t sound like a major-league emotion. It sounds like it belongs down there with the tiddlers, like boredom, irritation or curiosity. But not always. Not all the time. On this occasion, vanity fought with fear and vanity won.

Willard eased the throttle forward, adding power slowly to both engines. It was the right way to handle machinery: firmly but steadily, without haste.

That was his error.

He knew it within seconds, by the time the runway was sliding by, by the time the plane had picked up speed, by the time the dark-shadowed pine trees at the end of the runway were starting to show their real height, by the time the grey rocks began to gather shape, size and mass.

He should have stopped. He should have aborted the take-off. He should have snatched power from the engines, done everything he could to slide to a halt.

Because, although the plane was on maximum throttle, although the engines were screaming at maximum power, although everything was just as it should be for a normal take-off, the tail was heavy. The wings weren’t buoyant.

The plane wasn’t taking off.

60

Sam Young, a farmer from just outside Independence, came in to Hennessey’s store to pick up a new axe handle for himself, a bolt of printed calico for his wife.

‘What d’you know,’ he said, as he leaned up against the counter, a wad of chewing tobacco plugging his cheek. ‘I was clearing some land yesterday, brought down some of them old oak trees down there in the creek bottom. The oaks got kinda tangled with the phone wire, must have pulled down maybe one, two hunnert feet of the stuff.’

‘Easily done,’ said another local farmer. ‘Them phone people oughta think about things like that when they put up the poles.’

‘But that ain’t the strange thing. The strange thing came this morning. When I got back down to the creek bottom to fix things up again, the phone line was gone. All two hunnert feet, mebbe more. Doggone thieves.’

‘That so? Folks these days…’

An acute observer might have noticed a look pass from Sam Young to Hennessey. A look that said ‘job done’, an answering flash of acknowledgement. Only maybe not. It was dim in Hennessey’s store, and it was hard to read such things.

If Independence was cut off, then so was Marion.

Abe found out when he landed back from a long reconnaissance flight, checking out the Coastguard stations north of Brunswick, not just those on the Georgia coast but right up all the way to Wilmington in North Carolina. It had been a long, exacting day, but one that had revealed a lot of valuable information.

Abe landed in a steep side-slip, levelling out only just before the ground. The coastal winds, the mangrove forests, and the short runway made landings in Marion a connoisseur’s art and one that both Abe and Pen had brought to a high pitch of perfection.

Mason was on the gound waiting with undisguised impatience.

‘Hey, buddy! Good day?’

‘Yep. A long one.’

‘Not too long, I hope.’

Abe shrugged.

‘You know what them loused-up neighbours of ours have gone and done? They’ve brought down the phone lines, would ya believe it?’

Abe shrugged again.

‘Listen pal, I know you’ve had a long day an’ all, but I got business to communicate kind of urgently, business that’s just a little private for the public telegraph.’

Mason had letters in his hand.

Abe shook his head. ‘I’ve flown a lot today, so has Sue. She needs a clean and an oil-change before she’s taking off again.’

‘Anything I can do to help, you just let me know. I’ll have a hot meal brought out to you here.’

‘Hell… Where do your letters need to go?’

‘Jacksonville. Miami.’

Abe sighed, letting his genuine tiredness show through, and keeping his delight at Mason’s eagerness to hand over his secret correspondence strictly under cover. He noticed too, not for the first time, how he and Pen had a special status with Mason. Anybody else, even the freighter captains, Mason would just have told to do something. It would have been an order, that no one would have dared to disobey. Abe wiped his eyes, feeling the rim of dust, sweat and oil left by his flying goggles.

‘OK. We’ll be off again in thirty minutes. Some hot food would be good. Also cold beer.’

Mason grinned like he’d been given the gift of a lifetime. He put his little clutch of letters on Sue’s lower port wing with a flourish.

‘Cold beer. You got it, pal. And thanks. I appreciate it.’

In thirty minutes, Abe was off again, but not straight to Jacksonville. On the way, he made a small detour to a north Florida farmstead, and a cornfield still stubbled and spiked with the stumps of the harvest. The corn spikes were rough on Sue’s wheels, but OK. At the end of the field, a man in a dark suit advanced on Abe.

‘Haggerty McBride,’ he said, introducing himself. ‘Colleague of Jim Bosse.’

‘Abe Rockwell.’

The two men shook hands, but lost not a moment in getting down to business. In the cockpit, Abe had already steamed open Mason’s letters. He’d clipped the orginals to his map boards, top and bottom to avoid them ripping apart in the wind, then made copies. McBride first verified each copy against the orginal, then initialled each page and signed the final one, ‘Authenticated against the orginal, Haggerty McBride, Nov 12, ’26’. The letters themselves were, in effect, routine business letters, but Mason’s business was never exactly routine. There was a letter to a railroad official notifying him of dates when the coastal freight train would need to stop at the Marion spur line and how many railcars it would need to add to its line. There was a letter to Mason’s Jacksonville bank, dealing with money transfers to Cuba. There was a letter to an individual in Miami dealing with the ‘product import’ schedule for the coming month. There was a letter to the most senior cop in Jacksonville, arranging a date to negotiate new ‘sponsorship arrangements for the Police Support Fund’.

Haggerty McBride didn’t say much, but when he saw the last letter, he snorted and said, ‘This is good.’

‘You know how long the lines will stay down?’ asked Abe.

‘No. We don’t want to contact the phone company direct. Too risky. But we’ve pulled line down in two dozen other spots, all of them higher priority than Okinochee County. We reckon on weeks, not days.’

‘Good.’

McBride then took from a wrapped wooden box a flat-iron, with hot coals smoking inside. Without wasting time, the two men gummed Mason’s letters closed again, then used the iron to eliminate any creasing or other signs that the letters had been opened.

That was it. The two men nodded goodbye, then Abe climbed back into the cockpit, taxied until he had his nose in the wind and made a swift take-off.

He’d liked McBride and trusted him instantly. It was a good mark for Bosse’s commitment to doing things right. Abe felt reassured.

And down in Miami, the same thing.

Pen carried the air mail from Miami to Cuba. Most of it she didn’t read. Some of it she did. They knew now which bank conducted Marion’s business in Havana. She looked out for letters to that bank; to Frank Lambaugh or any of his cronies; to any of the booze suppliers who crowded the island. Sometimes she found nothing. Other times she did. When she did, she opened the letters, copied them, had them authenticated by one of Bosse’s men down on a beach east of Havana, before continuing her flight to her usual airfield.

Bit by bit they were accumulating information. And still Abe took his photos. And still Pen gleaned all she could from the repellent Frank Lambaugh. Jim Bosse’s list of information requests began to seem less daunting by the day.

No matter which way they looked at it, they were getting closer.

61

Clocks are stupid.

Clocks think that every second is like the next, every minute like any other. But, fortunately for the world, fortunately for Willard, nothing could be further from the truth. If every second were like any other, Willard would have died in Ruxion.

Here was the situation.

He was flying a Martin C-1 biplane. Its theoretical takeoff speed was approximately fifty-three or fifty-four miles an hour. Willard was travelling at fifty-six miles an hour down the runway and the plane was refusing to lift. If he’d had enough clearance to stop, he would have stopped. But the clearance wasn’t there. By the time Willard was certain that he had a problem, the end of the runway was too close to let him. Willard guessed the grey rocks at the runway’s end to be a little over three hundred yards distant. That gave him twelve seconds – plus or minus – to figure out how to get his plane to fly. If he failed, he’d be running into that rock-strewn gully at more than fifty miles an hour, in a five-ton airplane, brimming with hundreds of gallons of highly flammable gasoline.

And that was when time changed.

What did Willard normally get done in twelve seconds? It took him longer than that to add sugar to his coffee. It could take longer than that to light a cigarette. It took Willard more than ten times that long to comb his hair in the morning.

But time changed. Willard’s brain came alive in a way only danger makes possible. Perhaps only pilots and racing-car drivers truly understand the transformation. Willard’s brain raced, but more than that: his hands were ahead of his conscious mind. By the time he’d understood something, his hands were already doing whatever it was that needed to be done.

And the first thing was this.

Willard mustn’t try to make the aircraft fly.
It sounded illogical. It sounded so illogical that many pilots would have killed themselves attempting to haul the plane into the air. But although Willard could adjust his elevators to increase lift, every increase in lift also caused an increase in drag. Willard’s attempts to lower the tail and tweak the nose into the sky had been slowing the aircraft, and if anything could save him now it would be speed. He kept his hand clamped down hard on the throttle, to make sure that every last ounce of power was getting to the engines. Apart from that, he did nothing to try and nudge the plane upwards. Nothing except pray.

The runway raced away beneath the Martin’s wheels. The grey rocks in the gully sped ever closer. Beyond the gully, there was a broken slope and a scattering of pines. Already, Willard’s mind noted the trees. Lifting the plane into the air wouldn’t do much for his life expectancy if he were only able to run it into the trees. But he put that problem out of his mind. His twelve seconds were running away.