Trophy for Eagles (51 page)

She had rolled away to face the wall. He began kissing her back.

He thought about what she had said. What would have happened? Where would they have been now? It didn't matter—he'd used good sense. If they had fooled around, and then Stephan had been killed, it might have ruined everything.

He browsed her body, nibbling behind her knees, lifting her breasts with his nose and kissing the soft, untanned flesh underneath, pressing his face into the back of her neck. "Do you know you have a lot of tender spots I want to kiss?"

"I hope so. I'll let you know if you forget any. And you've got a few I've noticed, too. I'll get to them."

He marveled at the suppleness of her lean body. Heredity had worked perfectly for her, letting her retain Charlotte's full figure,
refined to a taut perfection in a marvelously toned body. Her breasts
were large, with a ripe-melon firmness that kept them full even
when she was lying on her back. Her nipples, roseate buttons when
she was not excited, would grow in length and size to great luscious
grapes as her passion built.

All their reserve had disappeared, and he explored her body at length, eagerly, with a puppy-love ardor. He caressed and kissed
every inch of her, sniffing her so deeply to pull out her very essence
that she laughingly called him her little Hoover vacuum. After midnight, the peaks of passion came at greater intervals, and she said, "Was I too obvious with the 'sex symbol' remarks?"

"No, I was being such a dodo. Normally I'm not a slow starter."

"No, most pilots aren't. Mother says most pilots have this stupid mixup between penises and airplanes and flying and fucking, and they tend to jump on a woman the way they jump into a cockpit."

He stared at her. He'd seldom heard a woman use the word
fucking
before in casual conversation. The fact that they'd been clawing at each other like hungry hounds for five hours didn't diminish his surprise.

"Excuse my French, Bandy. I've been around flyers—and Bruno
and Charlotte—too long. Does it offend you?"

"Yeah, a little, but it makes me hot too. Let's try saying it in another context."

"Okay, but only if you promise to do that little trick again."

"Trick?"

"Yes, you know, where we're really passionate, and you think I'm
just about ready, and you roll over and put your toe in the electric light socket. That's a real treat."

Laughing, he said, "That's what I call my patented toe-in-socket sex—pretty shocking, huh?" The joking made them easy and con
siderate with each other, already familiar now, eager to be inventive
still, but enjoying just the closeness, the penetrating intimacy. They
would doze, then talk, then love, then talk.

He asked, "Is setting a record some sort of symbolic thing for you?"

"There's no sex symbolism in setting records. It's ego, pure and simple. I want to be the most famous woman flyer in the world."

"What does your mother say about that?"

"She understands, but she doesn't approve. She thinks that Bruno
has put a jinx on us with the press, that neither one of us will ever get the kind of recognition that Earhart gets."

She ran her fingers through his hair. "You know, as much as I
enjoyed making love to you—as much as I needed to make love to you—I like this part best. Let's get a little sleep, and then talk some
more."

"It's three o'clock. I'd better get out of here."

"No, stay. To hell with the maids. We're paying for two singles; if
we decide just to use a double, it's our business."

Her head fell to his chest, and in seconds she was snoring gently.

Cupping her bottom in his hand, he sighed, "I am one lucky son of a bitch."

*

Downey, California/July 4, 1934

Roget had insisted on delaying the first showing of the new RC-3
until the Fourth of July, to take advantage of the patriotic publicity,
and he was angered when a ripple of laughter went through the
crowd of reporters. Bandy had signaled the ground crew to open the
hangar only to find that the massive sliding doors, rust hidden by huge American flags, were bolted together by a strange square padlock.

"It's that goddam Hughes!" Bandy muttered to Hadley. "That smart-ass was over here fooling around this morning. Send somebody for a bolt-cutter."

Bandy went over and talked to the small group of reporters, who were grinning broadly over the doughnuts and coffee Clarice Roget
had provided.

A snap like a rifle shot signaled that Hadley had dealt with the
lock. On each side four men pushed the sliding doors rattling back on their bent iron tracks. Inside the hangar, ancient parachutes, patched and yellowed with age, hung like theater curtains to block the view; red-white-and-blue bunting gave a wistful holiday air to the scene.

Herb Hines, from the
Los Angeles Times,
said, "Getting pretty
Hollywood, aren't you, Bandy?"

The curtains parted and the gleaming silver Roget RC-3 rolled
forward into the sunlight for the first time, propelled by the hands of
every worker who could find a place to shove.

The normally vocal reporters went into a shocked silence, broken
by Hines's subdued voice: "Holy Christ. It's a flying hotel."

The tall nose of the RC-3 towered over the crowd of newspaper people, who swarmed around an airplane bigger, sleeker, and shin
ier than any they had ever seen. The passenger door opened and a
short ladder was extended. Ted Mahew stood proudly filling up the center aisle, and passing out press kits, with photos, specifications,
and the kinds of words he wanted to read in the papers.

"When's the first flight?"

Mahew's confident pose concealed his raging anxiety. "We're
going to begin a very leisurely test program—start with taxi tests, a
few lift-offs, and take everything very easy. There is so much new on
this airplane—retractable landing gear, landing flaps, controllable-pitch propellers—that it is going to revolutionize the aviation industry. We want to make sure we don't rush it."

Bandy smiled to himself at Mahew's words. Privately the Allied
president had been clamoring for a rushed test program, with delivery of the test airplane to the airline in thirty days. Bandy had calmed him by promising to let him fly in the right seat on the initial test flight.

Bandfield retreated to the cockpit to avoid the rush of questions,
but more to glow in the pleasure of at last having built an airplane
exactly as he'd always wanted to do, scientifically and systematical
ly. The competition to supply the engines had been fierce, so Bandy
had a white line painted down the middle of the engine bay, and let the two engine manufacturers, Wright and Pratt & Whitney, have a contest right on the factory floor. They had worked for weeks,
customizing the engines to the RC-3. For the time being, it looked as though Wright had won.

Mahew hung around for as long as he could after the press conference, fretting while the normal tuning process delayed the first flight. The brakes needed adjustment, the cowl flaps weren't
working right, and there was a shimmy in the tail wheel on the taxi
tests. It was all perfectly normal, but each delay jacked Mahew's blood pressure up another few points.

"You're just trying to outwait me, Bandfield. You know I have to get back to Chicago for a meeting with the board, and I know damn
well you'll fly this thing the day after I leave." He stormed off with a
flurry of threats, furious because he had to take the train. All the airlines, his own included, were grounded because of weather over the Rockies.

*

Downey, California/July 11,1934

At noon on the day following Mahew's departure, the entire staff of Roget Aircraft—four hundred strong—lined up to watch Bandy and
Hadley taxi out to put everyone's career on the line. They went through the checklist twice, everything checking perfectly. The engines delivered full power, the propellers changed pitch on cue, and the controls all operated properly.

The usual pretest nervousness gripped Bandy. He turned and
said, "Well, Hadley, I guess I can't put it off any longer. We've got a
lot riding on this. I hope it'll go okay."

Hadley gave a thumbs-up sign, and Bandy advanced the power. The RC-3 accelerated smoothly, the factory force cheering as it roared by. It broke ground and began to climb at ninety miles per hour.

Bandy and Roget had agreed not to retract the gear on this flight,
but when the left engine backfired and billowed black smoke, the
planning went out the window.

The usual "Oh shit, it's happening" thoughts went through the crew's minds as Bandy barked out orders.

"Pull up the gear, Hadley. What's going on?"

The right engine coughed, and the power fell back on both engines. The airplane staggered uncertainly, as if a grabbing hand were pulling it to earth. The leaden feel was spelled out on the
sagging needles on the manifold pressure gauges. The tachometers
surged, fell back, and then stabilized at 2,400 rpm. On the ground the crowd suddenly went silent. One reporter muttered, "It's going in."

Bandy fed in back pressure, caution tempering need, as he kept the nose high and the airspeed hovering around eighty-two miles per hour.

"For Christ's sake, Hadley, what is it?"

The big transport staggered toward an open field. Two pairs of hands flew like fan blades around the compartment, repositioning the controls, checking everything again and again.

"We got fuel pressure, Bandy, and I dipsticked the tanks myself, I
know the gauges are okay. The only thing I can think of is contaminated fuel—and I can't believe that. It came out of the same tanks we always use."

Time took on its familiar dual dimensions in the emergency: hours since the emergency started, only seconds since takeoff.

"How about putting her in that field?" Hadley nodded at an angular open area coming up on the right, nestled between an irrigation ditch and an abandoned farm- building.

"Not if I can help it—there's a gully that will tear it in half. I'm going to try to keep it flying long enough to get back home."

Sweat poured down his face, and his wet hands fought the wheel
to keep the airplane away from the ragged edge of a stall that would
snap them and the Roget Aircraft Company into a smear of burned blackness on the landscape.

His mouth was dry and his words garbled together. "Don't know
how accurate the damn airspeed indicator is. This thing could pay off any second. We're too low to jump, so strap yourself in good."

Hadley glanced out, saw that the ground was no closer.

"Keep it as level as possible, Bandy. When it's level, the engines
pick up power and we gain a few miles per hour on the airspeed."

Bandfield nodded and began a delicate stepladder dance, edging the RC-3 up foot by foot until they were three hundred feet off the
ground, alternately flying level to let the airspeed build a little, and
then trading a few miles per hour for ten feet more altitude. At three
hundred feet he began a shallow turn to the right. As soon as the right wing lowered in the bank, the left engine barked a series of
savage popping backfires. He hurriedly leveled the wings and the
engine smoothed out. He tried again, a five-degree bank, and the turn became like the climb, a slow ragged edging toward his goal, the north end of the runway.

"How long will it take for the gear to come down, Hadley?"

Roget, face ashen, thought before saying, "About fifteen to twen
ty seconds. Better allow for thirty, though."

"Okay. We're lined up. Drop the gear. I'm not going to use any flaps."

The gear came down and Bandy trimmed the nose up to get the eighty-mile-an-hour approach speed he planned. Both engines backfired.

"Put in thirty degrees of flaps."

Hadley started to protest, then ran the handle down. The engines
smoothed out as the lowered flaps rotated the nose down, and Bandy was able to add power to keep an even seventy-five miles per hour.
The engines seemed to be running right for the first time since takeoff as the runway rushed toward them.

Bandy touched down with both wheels, bounced, held back pressure on the wheel, and let the RC-3 dribble down the runway, sweat sluicing off him in the California sunshine. He let it roll straight ahead, then shut the engines down.

"So much for first flights!"

Roget said softly, "And thank God Mahew wasn't here. If he didn't have a heart attack, he'd have eaten us alive."