Trophy for Eagles (12 page)

Plainly pleased with herself, Patty climbed out of the cockpit,
pulling off her helmet to shake out a silken avalanche of glistening blond hair. She pinched her nose, forcing back pressure to clear her
ears.

Dompnier melted when he looked into her amethyst eyes. They
were large, one just slightly oval, one slightly round, the piquant
mismatch adding interest to beauty.

"How was that?" she asked.

"You've gone far enough. What more can I teach you?"

His flesh tingled as she reached up and caressed his face.

He went on hurriedly, "No more about flying, but tonight I'll teach you something else."

"My French Valentino, you are greedy, not needy! If you are going to teach me anything, you're going to have to go to America with me. My stepfather doesn't know it, but he's going to have a new copilot—me!"

Her words startled him.

"Never. Too dangerous, Patty, even for you."

She looked at him quizzically. "I thought we were never going to
tell each other what to do."

He smiled, backpedaled. "Your mother would not permit it."

"No, she would not, but I'm over twenty-one, and I can wrap my
stepfather around my finger. He'd see that a father—sort of—daughter team would make headlines." She blew a kiss at him and
walked off in the air force flying suit she had wheedled from him, and had altered to fit.

Stephan watched her glide over to her car, a huge slope-nosed Renault, enjoying the movement of her hips beneath the taut fabric. It tantalized him until he realized that half the enlisted men were watching her, half watching him watch her.

He snarled at a sergeant for smoking near the aircraft, and busied
himself with the log. Surely her mother would never let her try to fly
the Atlantic! He would follow her to New York, and they'd have to
marry. They had traveled throughout France together, stopping at
inns he knew to be tolerant, where the proprietors were too sophisti
cated to ask embarrassing questions. She told him that it was different in America, that people were, as she put it, "nosy."

Stephan wanted to marry her, to take her off the market, to make her his own while she still was captivated by him. It did not matter that his parents would not be happy. For years it had been assumed
that he would marry Angelique, the daughter of a family friend whose father happened to own a few thousand acres in the Loire Valley. It would have been a good match.

***

Chapter 2

Roosevelt Field, Long Island/May 19, 1927

Bruno Hafner was angrier with the doctor attending him than with Bandfield. The young physician, just out of school, was worried about the effect the wound might have on Hafner's ability to
undertake a long flight, and insisted on keeping him under observa
tion. When Hafner protested too loudly, the doctor resorted to sedatives.

Hafner's enforced "vacation" was viewed by Dusty Rhoades with
mixed emotions. It left him with little to do—and that always led to
trouble, to the futile fight against his habit. He spent the morning trying to distract himself, elbowing his way through the good-
humored, excited airport crowd that was only lightly sprinkled with
pickpockets and con men. One enterprising salesman had a folding stand from which he sold "autographs of all the flyers" on regular
penny postcards. You could buy a Richard Byrd for a dollar, a Hafner for seventy-five cents, a Lindbergh for fifty cents, or a
Rhoades for a quarter, reflecting the flyers' fame and an assessment
of their chances. Since the fire, Bandfield's cards had been marked down to a dime. Rhoades toyed with the idea of telling the police
the truth, that none of the signatures were genuine, but decided to live and let live.

His charitable feelings stemmed in part from his own guilty
feelings about his increasingly forced relationship with Hafner. He
wanted to make the flight; he didn't want to make it with the
German. He recognized that it was his own fault that there were so few alternatives, yet he entertained the wistful fantasy that Hafner would develop both a complication and a conscience and tell him to
go on alone.

He saw Lindbergh walk toward him, then suddenly duck in the
hangar. Slim was apparently trying to keep his distance from every
one to avoid taking sides in the argument. Relentless, Rhoades followed him inside and caught him at the door.

"Got a second, Slim?"

Lindbergh's thin voice was stern, like that of an aging high school
teacher whose patience has been exhausted. "Not really, Dusty. After what's been going on, I need all the time I can get just to do some thinking."

"Yeah, me too. That's what I wanted to talk to you about. You know Bandfield. Do you think he's all wrong about Hafner?"

The tall pilot stood, arching his back to stretch, eyes surveying the
end of the field. Rhoades was Hafner's copilot, and Lindbergh didn't know the motive for the question. He decided to play it safe.
"I was in flying school with Bandfield. He was first-rate, and would
have made a good officer. I can't believe he's simply going off
half-cocked. Nor can I believe Hafner is an arsonist."

"Me either."

"Both men have behaved pretty well since. Bandfield wouldn't
apologize, but he dropped the idea of an investigation. And I
understand Hafner just wants to forget the whole thing and get back
to the field."

"Yes, that's what Charlotte tells me."

Lindbergh's expression didn't change. "Look, I've got to run. I think Hafner's right—everyone should let the matter drop. I'll just
be glad when I get off from here, and get away from the crowds and
the intrigues."

Rhoades watched him walk off, feeling pangs of envy that Lind
bergh had a plane of his own, and gentlemen backers. As he watched, the jealousy turned, as modest as an early-morning bird
song, into the first quiet signals of his driving need, a delicate
early-warning message sent along the nerve endings of his extremi
ties. For the thousandth time, Dusty told himself that he would not give in, that he would change the downward spiral of his life.

Almost immediately he felt the hunger settling in, bird song turning to a claxon. The quiet quiver escalated, as if its thermostat had been turned up, turning into a burning at his fingertips and at the base of his skull, an implacable warning flush that said "Feed me!" even as it drenched his psyche in a repellent combination of need, greed, sin, and self-disgust.

He fought it as he always did, trying to think of other things.
Gentlemen backers, he thought. My backer is no gentlemen, but he
is a source. Rhoades felt the fabric of his willpower shredding even
as he tried to turn his attention away from the thought of the kit he kept in his car.

"Holy Mary, Mother of God, help me." In the last four years he'd
repeated those words a thousand times, and poor Mary had never been able to help, nor had anyone else.

Lots of people had supplied answers to the wrong problems. He'd
been told that he ought to get married, have a family, get out of
flying into something steady. He knew he never would. The anony
mous drifting from one job to another, the total freedom from
responsibility except when actually working on a plane or flying it,
and the easy comradeship were accessories to the addiction. The
idea of going back to St. Louis to work in the Bemis Brother Bag
factory, supervising young hillbilly girls fresh from the Ozarks, sickened him. He had seen what happened to his dad, working for Anheuser-Busch, drunk on his gallon of beer every day, until
Prohibition drove him into amateur bootlegging. He was away from
all that, and lucky to be flying at all.

And yet he knew it wasn't luck at all, but Hafner's calculation. Hafner needed him to do things that were not ordinarily done for hire, and would have him only on the terms of a dependency.

Hafner had introduced him to cocaine first, and later heroin, all the
while supplying him with money, responsibility, and guilt. Now he
was hooked—on all three.

The whole sorry process had been fostered by his asocial existence. Until a few months ago, the free-and-easy women he
bumped into in blind tigers around the country got about as close as
he wanted women to come. He preferred purely physical relationships, just two bodies, two sets of organs working each other over, to climax not as lovers but as strangers. The thought of
marrying someone, being responsible for her well-being and maybe
even having children, had been frightening to him. Now that was changing, and he wasn't sure he could handle the new requirements.

Rhoades upended a wooden Coca-Cola crate, trying to stave off the moment when he would give in, and rethinking Lindbergh's guarded answers. He felt guilty around Lindbergh, knowing how
much he would disapprove of Rhoades's habit if he knew of it. And then too, Lindbergh was not easy to like, too reserved and somewhat
pompous. Yet Rhoades admired him. For a young guy without any
previous experience, he did a great job with the reporters and with the public, who'd gone absolutely crazy about him.

That's what made the brush-off hurt. In the past Lindbergh had been equally courteous to everyone, generously sharing the information on prop settings that the Standard Propeller Company had sent him, or telling what he'd learned about flying the great-circle route over the ocean. Lindbergh had known that Hafner had hired an ex-Navy man to teach him navigation, but he had wanted to share the new information with Rhoades anyway.

Then he felt his resolution bursting into desire like a match thrown into a fire. Dusty went to his Model A and drove to a rural
lane not far from where a farmer's stand was waiting for the first of
the spring's produce. He pulled the front seat out and extracted the
leather kit Hafner had provided him, just as he provided the supplies
for it.

The fever was coming fast. While he did not yet
have
to have a
fix, he didn't want to delay. He was worried about timing. If Hafner
came back tomorrow, he'd expect him to be ready to fly. There was a note in his own handwriting in the kit, placed there during some earlier futile fit of conscience. It said: "A shot in the head is worth two in the arm." He grimaced. Maybe it would come to that someday, but now the shot in the arm was sufficient.

He spent the afternoon in pleasant aimless puttering. Balchen invited him to town for dinner, but he declined; he wouldn't need Balchen or anyone for a while. He ate a beefsteak covered with
greasy onions and edged with watery mashed potatoes at the local cafe, drinking a bottle of Moxie with it. He went back to the hangar
to wait. Around nine, he stretched out on the cot. He had barely closed his eyes when Murray shook him.

"Whatsa matter?"

"It's three-thirty, and they just brought Lindbergh's plane over from Curtiss Field. I thought you'd want to know."

Rhoades was instantly awake, thanked him. "Any word from the
hospital?"

"No. I talked to the nurse and she wouldn't let me talk to Captain Hafner without the doctor's permission."

Dusty ran to the operations shack, raised a sleepy operator on the
phone, and called Hafner's house. No answer. Rhoades slammed the receiver down, then called the hospital. The nurse gave him the
same answer she had given Murray, but he wheedled the number of
Hafner's doctor from her.

The phone rang for a long time before a woman's voice answered
sleepily.

"Is Dr. Poole there? This is an emergency."

"Dr. Poole is on a train to a medical convention in Chicago. Have you called the hospital?"

Rhoades groaned, then called the nurse again. This time she put
him through to the doctor who was on duty. "This is an emergency,
Doctor. Captain Hafner is needed at the airport. We're about to make our flight to Paris."

He could tell that the doctor was young—the answer confirmed the impression of his voice.

"Look, Mr. Rhoades, I understand what you are saying. But this is Dr. Poole's patient, and the chart indicates that Captain Hafner
had a sedative about nine o'clock. I'm not going to release him,
especially not to go flying. You can talk to the hospital administrator
in the morning."

Rhoades gave in. It was always possible that Lindbergh would turn back. He might have a fuel problem, or the weather might be
worse. He decided he'd be prepared in case Hafner suddenly showed
up.