Trophy for Eagles (5 page)

Byrd had selected two crew members noted for their capabilities
and frailties, neither one of them likely to accept orders easily. The
first was tall, mustachioed Bert Acosta, a wild man irresistible to the ladies and a superb pilot—as long as the sky was blue. The other was
the popular Norwegian Bernt Balchen, quiet, handsome, and an excellent instrument pilot. A good combination, and hard to beat, given that they had an excellent airplane.

An important member of Byrd's team hovered in the background.
The
Tony Fokker stood quietly by the coffeepot stoking himself with
granulated sugar licked from a spoon. It was an addiction; the soft-featured Dutchman often ate a bowl of sugar for dessert, and nipped at it constantly during the day. In 1914 Fokker had sold his
services to Germany, and by 1918 had created the war's best fighter,
the coffin-nosed D VII. At the Armistice, the twenty-eight-year-old
multimillionaire fled to Holland with trainloads of planes and engines. After a booming success in the Netherlands, he expanded his operations to the United States. Self-trained, willful, and as much a pilot as any man in the room, Fokker preferred others to make the record flights, as long as they made them in his planes.

Bandfield couldn't understand why Byrd, with his superior airplane, had not yet departed for Paris. Nor, apparently, could Fokker, who didn't bother to conceal his disapproval of the famous explorer.

The door burst open, a barking dachshund preceding a blond
giant with a hundred-watt smile that seemed to light up every corner
of the room. There was a chorus of "Bruno!" as he apologized for being late.

"I was helping a young lady start her engine"—an obviously familiar line that set the other pilots hooting and rolling their eyes.

"Come meet our newest entrant, Bruno." Byrd looked like Jeff steering a husky Mutt as he guided the huge German to Bandfield's
side. "Mr. Bandfield, Captain Bruno Hafner, late of the Kaiser's air
force, now a well-known junkman about town."

Bandfield stuck out his hand. Hafner's precisely measured hesita
tion in returning the grip was exactly long enough for a jagged
electric charge of mutual dislike to streak between them. Bandfield
had seen the look before in the eyes of the fraternity men at Berkeley
whose cars he'd fixed, vapid John Held caricatures who tendered
him the ignition keys as if their fingers were tongs. Hafner marked
Bandfield down as the troublesome sort of enlisted man, the smart
noncommissioned officer whose "sirs" were always a half beat away
from courtesy and who always had to be reminded of his place.

The big man nodded abruptly and turned away, leaving Band-
field standing, once again a green freshman embarrassed by what he
was wearing, how he looked, and where he was from. In a single
glance Hafner had charted the difference between haves and have-nots, nobles and commoners, the adept and the maladept.

If the chemistry had been different, Bandfield would have told
Hafner that in flying school he had learned all about the German's wartime career, and had even seen him in person once before. The Germans had evolved a unique "star" system in which the most promising young aces gravitated to
Jagdgeschwader
I, a con
glomerate of four
Jastas
—squadrons—that formed the great aerial flying circus of Baron von Richthofen. Hafner had been summoned
after his first fifteen victories; he had quickly gained five more to earn the
Pour le Merite.

The guns on the Western Front had scarcely fallen silent when a Hollywood promoter had gone to Europe searching for "authenticity" in his war films. It hadn't taken much talking to bring Hafner back, along with the French ace Charles Nungesser, now missing over the Atlantic. They had made a few two-reelers in the early 1920s, then toured the West Coast, flying fake dogfights out of country pastures, drinking homemade wine, and screwing the local women. In the beginning they had used planes like those they'd flown on the Western Front, Nungesser in a Spad XIII and Hafner
in a Fokker D VII. By 1923, when Bandy had leaned across the
barbed-wire fence to see them in Salinas, both warplanes had crashed and the men were flying Jennies. Nungesser's white JN-4 was decorated with wartime French cocardes and his macabre
personal insignia, a black heart illuminated with a skull and cross-
bones and mourning candles. Bandfield remembered vividly the roughly painted oversize black iron crosses on Hafner's Jenny, an odd contrast to the almost delicate rendering of a white winged sword.

Hafner began speaking quietly in German to Tony Fokker. Band-field sat back down, swallowing a rage he didn't understand, angry with Hafner for the snub, but more with himself for caring. Covert
ly he studied Hafner, whose square-cut face was dominated by a huge jaw, along which ran a thin white scar. Hafner's bushy
eyebrows occupied the high ground of the ridge that ran across his
forehead like a small visor. An aquiline nose was poised sharply over
his fleshy lips. As he watched, Bandfield saw that all the separate
elements of Hafner's face operated independently of his emotions; his lips could smile without any trace of humor in his eyes, or he could frown while seemingly amused. On either side of his mouth
were small dimpled lines which acted as signals for his feelings. If he
was going to smile, the little dimpled lines would react first, their ends pointing up. If a frown was coming, the little lines would become an inverted V.

Watching Hafner cooled Bandfield's anger, and he resumed his inspection of the competition. Dusty Rhoades was at his left. Of medium height, with wavy russet hair, Rhoades leaned against the
wall, his left leg tucked up for support, a target for the rolled-up
Aviation Age
nervously drummed against it. Arrow-collar handsome, he could have been cast as the hero in a Western. He wore a
uniform of his own devising, an exotic cross between an RAF tunic
and a state trooper's motorcycle garb. A year ago he had flown with
the marines in Nicaragua, using an ancient DH-4 to dive-bomb
General Sandino's troops in the jungle. Rumored to be a great pilot and an even better mechanic, Rhoades led a charmed life, surviving
more bailouts from air-mail planes than even Lindbergh. Bruno
Hafner had picked him from a dozen candidates to fly as copilot/
mechanic in his airplane, the Bellanca Miss
Charlotte.
Once again the pilot/plane physical comparison held true. Giuseppe Bellanca was an Italian, but his airplane was as Teutonic as Hafner, square-cut wingtips and tail disdaining any effort at streamlining, cutting through the air on brute power and lift.

Bandfield watched Hafner's copilot closely, to see if he was infected with his boss's arrogance. Bandy had heard that Rhoades
was terribly underrated, a brilliant pilot whose natural manner kept
him out of headlines, but who could be counted on to do the work.
By all appearances, Rhoades was the most relaxed man in the room,
humming an off-key version of "One Alone." Yet Bandfield sensed
a quiet, desperate tension revealed in the grimaces Rhoades made as
he repeatedly glanced out the window to check the weather.

All the other men were legends to Bandy. He wanted to become a
legend to them. He had more to gain. They could all use the
$25,000 from the Orteig Prize; he needed the fame. There would
never be enough flying jobs to go around, but if you were first across
the Atlantic, you would always have work.

Byrd strode in front of the group, taking command as if it were a
natural right. As he talked his right hand, index finger crooked, kept
time, waving an invisible conductor's baton.

"You've heard that a reward has been offered for anyone who
locates Nungesser and Coli. If we were ready, we'd begin a search
mission today, but there are some more tests I want to do." Tony Fokker glowered in the background.

There was no reaction; they were here to compete, not to fly
rescue flights. Besides, most of them had written the Frenchmen off
as fish food. Byrd changed the subject. "We'll need a little wind to
dry the ground. I walked it yesterday, and it's just like last Septem
ber." The explorer's Southern heritage came through clearly in his soft voice.

Bandy asked, "What happened in September?"

Byrd's icicle eyes speared him. "That was when Captain Fonck crashed."

Bandfield felt stupid. Fonck, the Allied ace of aces with seventy-
five victories, had been the first to compete for the Orteig Prize. He
had been trying to lift his overloaded Sikorsky off from the same wet field when a jury-rigged auxiliary wheel collapsed. Digging in like a
scraper blade, it sent a protesting spray of mud that screamed to stop
the flight. The stubborn Fonck pressed blindly on with the takeoff until the big biplane lurched over a gully to crumple and burn not half a mile from where they sat. Fonck and one man got out; two
others did not, the first in a procession of victims in the quest for the
Orteig Prize.

Byrd stepped back from the stove, a slight limp adding to his
distinction. He reached down and flicked a spot of ash from his
polished high laced boots, and then tugged his spotless windbreaker
around him. His manner was a stippling of contradictions. Apparently instinctively modest, he nonetheless frequently alluded to his Arctic experience as if it confirmed his right to be there.

"Somehow, I never get warm enough anymore." He flushed, as if
this were an unseemly personal revelation. Byrd raised his voice and
went on. "The weather bureau called—someone will be along in an hour to give the latest report. There hasn't been much change. Fog from here to beyond Newfoundland, rain all the way."

Fokker's expressive snort said the weather was adequate for the
flight. Always a businessman, he now regretted selling the airplane to Byrd. They had agreed that Balchen was to be the pilot, and fog was no problem to him. Yet Byrd was too cautious to leave, and
Fokker fretted that his big trimotor would be beaten across by the
single-engine Bellanca, or worse, by Lindbergh's Ryan. Bandfield's
fast airplane presented a new threat, and he was nervous.

Fokker's Dutch accent came through as he said pointedly, "For some people, the fog wouldn't be any problem. My airplane is designed to fly through weather like this."

Byrd busied himself breaking up another box for the fire, ignoring
Fokker as he ignored all critics.

Lindbergh circled around to stand between Rhoades and Band-
field. Rhoades spoke: "If we hadn't had a fuel leak, the Baron and I would already be in Paris, counting our twenty-five grand." Hafner
looked over, smiling—he wasn't a baron, but felt he should have been. Rhoades knew how to keep him happy.

Balchen tossed him a pack of cigarettes. "Here's some Twenty
Grands. That's about as close as you two will get."

At the beginning of the month, only Hafner's Bellanca had been ready to try for the New York-Paris race. Then it developed a fuel leak that couldn't be found until they'd disassembled the entire fuselage tank, working night and day while the weather changed from good to bad. Now there were four planes ready, and the weather kept them all on the ground.

The room was quiet. Lindbergh signaled with his eyebrows to
Balchen. Yawning and pretending to stretch, Lindbergh swept his
foot in an arc to knock the legs of Bandy's chair out from under him,
flopping him on his back. Laughter broke the tension.

Lindbergh doubled over, holding his sides, saying, "Bandy, if you spin in like this in a chair, what will you do in an airplane?" Fokker
looked the other way, chuckling. Balchen threw his head back, braying.

Only Byrd moved to help him up. "You must be careful, Mr. Bandfield. It's quite a problem for us to get insurance."

They laughed again. It was the first joke Byrd had ever cracked.

Bandy grinned weakly at the roughhouse acceptance ritual. He was now one of the boys. Flying humor was never subtle.

Byrd turned serious. "Shall we all meet back here at one to get the full weather report?" The men nodded, and Byrd walked out, followed closely by Fokker. Tony intended to do some nagging.

The others left to check their aircraft one more time. Lindbergh grabbed a chair, turned it around, and straddled it, his eyes crinkling with good humor. "Sorry, Bandy, but I couldn't resist." He
had just a trace of a polished Scandinavian accent, which gave his
rather high voice a ministerial tone. "It's been a long time."