Trophy for Eagles (6 page)

The two men looked at each other, remembering their days
together at flying school. Lindbergh cleared his throat. "I never felt right about the way they washed you out. It could just as well have
been me."

Bandfield nodded, pensive. It had been three years since he had slunk away from flying school, a failure in the only thing he'd ever really loved to do. The depressing smell of the San Antonio station
came back to him, its rolling clouds of steam-laden coal smoke matching his utter dejection. It had been the most miserable day in his life, the end of his dreams, the end of his flying. Or so it had seemed at the time.

"What the hell happened, Bandy? I was as much at fault as you were."

"Banana oil, Slim!" Bandfield knew exactly what had happened, having lived through it in memory hundreds of times since then. He
and Lindbergh had been flying single-seat S.E.5s in a practice
diving attack against a solitary DH-4 observation plane. Lindbergh
had disappeared beneath the target plane as Bandy sent an imaginary line of machine-gun bullets through it.

A jolt had turned the roaring noise of wind and engine into
sudden silence. Twenty feet away, Lindbergh had stared wide-eyed
across their locked wings. The two S.E.5s had collided, noses whipping together to splinter the propellers and stop the engines, crumpling the spirited fighters together like grotesque mating
dragonflies. Pounding noise had given way to a silence flawed only by the broken-bone grating of the interlocked struts. He could have called to Lindbergh, but instead gestured with his thumb toward the
ground. They had leaped into a welling terror, relieved at once by the groin-wrenching jerk of the parachutes opening.

"Slim, I already had two strikes against me. You only had one."

Lindbergh knew about his own strike; his outrageous practical joking had earned him enough demerits to keep him walking tours on weekends.

"What were your two strikes, Bandy?"

"You remember that the Cadet Squadron commanding officer, Captain Westerfield, was the presiding officer on the elimination board. He'd had a complaint about me from a girl's family in town. I had a tough session with him the day before the board met."

Lindbergh smiled. "Ah, Maria. I'll never forget her, Bandy, she
was the prettiest little Mexican girl I ever saw. I always wished I had
enough nerve to ask her out."

Bandfield knew that Lindbergh had never dated while he had been there; he wondered if he had later.

Maria worked in headquarters as a sort of roving secretary, back
ing up with her typing skills the generally pathetic hunt-and-peck
efforts of the typical squadron clerk. You could tell when she was
coming or going by the ripple effect on the soldiers, and it had
become a gentle custom for any marching body of troops to be given
"eyes right" if they happened to be passing her. She ignored all
equally and democratically, keeping her pleased brown eyes straight
ahead, content just to be aware of the train of admiration in her wake.

"Westerfield thought so too. He'd been trying to make time with
her for almost a year."

Lindbergh shook his head vigorously, and his voice went up half
an octave. "No, he wouldn't have risked it! As career-crazy as that
old mustang was, he wouldn't have fooled around with anybody like
Maria."

"You didn't know Maria very well."

"Bandy, I still can't believe he'd wash you out for that. He was an
iron-ass, but not a bad guy."

Bandfield's tone took on a sudden bitterness. "No, Slim, there was something else, a typical stupid goddam military balls-up, something I should have been smart enough to avoid. Westerfield
asked me which of us—you or me—I thought was the better pilot. I
was honest and said you were. He got all over me, saying that I would never make a good pursuit pilot, that a pursuit pilot always had to be convinced that he was the best in the world. He gave me
the same stupid fucking spiel that every dumb-ass would-be Ricken-backer gives at every officers'-club bar in the world. Half of them
couldn't fight their way out of a morning report, but they've got to act like they are killers."

Lindbergh was plainly surprised by the sudden vehemence.
"Well, he asked me that too, but I knew what he wanted. I told him that I was the best in the world. I really thought you were, but there
was no sense in telling Westerfield that. But I still can't believe that
he'd wash you out about that, either. He was a dumb-ass, all right, but that wouldn't have done it."

Bandfield was somewhat mollified. "No, except that I got mad, and I told him that if the average pursuit pilot's brains were dynamite, he couldn't blow his nose."

Lindbergh laughed. "That would do it. But it still wasn't fair."

They were quiet a moment. Bandfield was painfully aware of the
character flaws that made life difficult for him. He had a reckless drive to prove himself right at any cost, one that had marred his
record at Berkeley, and probably stemmed from the dogged argu
ments he used to have with his father over everything he did. He didn't mind being wrong—but when he knew he was right, he was inflexible. And he hated to be pushed around, especially by a guy like Westerfield, who held all the cards. When he was pushed, he had to push back. He wouldn't have made a good officer.

"Let's get down to the important stuff. How far did you go with
Maria? I could tell that she thought you were the bee's knees."

Bandfield grinned. He hadn't gotten very far with Maria, and it had pushed him damned close to marrying her, despite the fact that
she was Mexican, Catholic, and only eighteen. One night he had brought her back from a long, tender, and chaste walk to find her father and three brothers waiting on the tumbledown porch of their
frame shack. He'd been glad to get away with only her tears to worry
about. He should have realized that the old man would have considered Captain Westerfield to be a real catch, not to be compared with some raggedy-ass cadet.

"We were pretty well chaperoned most of the time, and Maria was a good girl."

"What happened after that?"

Bandfield felt his good humor gradually being restored. As bad as
he'd felt after washing out, things were working out for the best.

"I was really lucky, Slim. I got a job flying Douglas M-2s for Western Air Express when it was starting up. Ever flown one?"

"Yeah, I got to fly most all the different air-mail planes after I
went back to civilian life. The M-2 is just a bigger, better DH-4. Of course, most anything's better than a DH-4. I've bailed out of two of
them and crash-landed another."

Bandfield was silent, remembering the terror of his own parachute jump, wondering if he'd have the nerve to throw himself into
the black void of a Midwestern night as Lindbergh had done. Slim
had been lucky: his chute had worked each time. He had only to gather up the mail from the crashed airplane and catch the next train to his destination. It was only a little more than par for the air-mail course, flying rebuilt de Havillands at night, in weather, without instruments.

"Where did you get that airplane, Bandy? It makes my poor old Ryan look like a tin lizzie."

Bandfield flushed with pleasure. "Hadley Roget's a building fool,
I tell you. A little stubborn maybe, but he can make airplanes."

"I heard about him when I was out on the Coast, working on the
Spirit.
He's supposed to have built some radical airplanes over the years."

"That's the guy. We designed it and worked on the drawings and
the engineering for almost a year. We started cutting wood in March. It still needs some fine-tuning, but I think it's ready."

"Man, I know what you mean. We really threw the Ryan together
in San Diego. The Ryan company was great; they did everything I
wanted, if it could be done. If it couldn't, they would figure out something just as good."

Talking amiably, they walked over to where the
Spirit of St. Louis
was sitting, its tail on a trolley, waiting to have the compass swung.

Bandfield immediately liked the Ryan. The finish was superb, with the cowling and spinner sparkling with machine-turned knurling. The intersections of the struts were all taped and streamlined, and the forest of fuel lines was neatly laid out. "How come you
forgot the windscreen, Slim? It must be tough to land this thing and
not see out the front."

Lindbergh stretched, accustomed to being asked about the Ryan's
unusual cockpit arrangement. There was no windscreen, no for
ward visibility at all, the pilot's usual position being replaced by a
huge gas tank. "We did that on purpose, believe it or not. I don't want to be between the engine and the gas tank if I crash. The visibility's not so bad. You can't see out of the front of most
airplanes on takeoff anyway, and on landings, I just make sort of a
curving approach, and sideslip it in. When you're airborne, it doesn't matter much."

He paused, grinned, and said, "Out over the Atlantic I don't
expect to meet anybody coming in the opposite direction, anyway.
Let me show you something."

He opened the door and pointed. "I've even got a periscope, just
like a U-boat."

"That's the berries!" Bandfield was impressed. The Ryan would be difficult to beat.

Lindbergh asked, "How does your ship fly?"

"It's a little goosey. We didn't have time to build a trimmable
stabilizer, so I have to fly it with pressure on the stick most of the
time."

"Just like the
Spirit.
That long wing and short fuselage make it
unstable. Take your hand off the stick for even ten seconds, and the
plane slips off into a spiral."

"That's bad. If you fall asleep, you'll be in trouble."

"No, that's good; I won't dare fall asleep."

Bandfield laughed and then said, "You know, it's funny, I like everything about the
Rocket,
but it still makes me nervous to fly. I
don't know what it is. It gives me the heebie-jeebies."

Lindbergh picked up a rock and tossed it. "Closed cockpit."

"What?"

"Closed cockpit. You're used to having the wind and the rain blowing in on you. In a cabin plane all those signals are missing,
and it makes you uneasy. It took me twenty hours before I got used
to the
Spirit."

They walked down the field talking, running through the litany of people they'd lost track of, their muddy shoes squishing through the
thin mat of matted grass.

Lindbergh's look was somber. "You've really screwed up the odds
here. Byrd and Balchen both had pretty long faces after they looked
in your hangar this morning."

Bandfield tugged at his arm, and they stopped to watch a crew pull Byrd's big trimotor backward up a high earthen ramp.

"What are they doing, Slim?"

"Fokker figures that a rolling start is equivalent to adding five
hundred feet to the length of the field. They're going to tie the tail
wheel to a post with ropes. Acosta is supposed to be the pilot for the
takeoff, and when he gets all the engines revved up to max power,
he'll signal Byrd, Byrd will signal the ground crew, and they'll cut the ropes with an ax."

Bandfield shook his head wordlessly. It seemed very complex.

"In theory, the airplane will pick up speed down the ramp and be
airborne before using half the field. After Fonck's crash, everybody
wants as much runway as he can get, any way he can get it."

"I don't know, Slim. It looks like they're making a tough job tougher. How do you feel about going solo?"

"I wouldn't have it any other way. Jesus, Byrd's taking a crew of
four in the
America
with him. Hafner's got Rhoades for his Bel-lanca."

He was silent for a moment, reluctant to say ill of anyone. "The problem is, nobody gets along with anybody. It's going to be tough
enough flying for thirty or forty hours without fighting all the way."

"I agree. Besides, all the big planes are crashing. Fonck smashed
up, and Fokker turned the
America
over on its back landing earlier in the year."

Bandfield couldn't tell whether they were just trying to pump each other up, rationalizing decisions they had already made, or whether they believed it.

"Did you hear about poor old Noel Davis?"