Glory Boys (37 page)

Ten days later, they hadn’t bottomed out the mystery of the sudden acceleration in security. Brad Lundmark heard from someone that there had been a visitor in town that night, an out-of-towner but not a gambler, an important person, apparently. But Mason had visitors often enough. Whoever the vistor had been, he’d gone again almost straight away and the heightened security remained. Brad had made a couple more visits to Mamie and Suky, begging iced tea and cake off them and allowing them, in exchange, to treat him as some kind of exotic pet. Brad said he was sure the two girls looked after all Marion’s key paperwork. He said if the accounts and the payroll existed anywhere, they’d be in that office. Brad himself had offered more than once to investigate further, but Abe, Pen and Hennessey were all unanimous about refusing to let the kid place himself in any further danger. The boy still did odd jobs for Mason, but most of the time now he was back in Brunswick, looking after the tin Lizzies and battered De Sotos that crept through the door of the garage with steaming radiators or tattered brake pads.

But meantime, a piece of much brighter news.

That night in the tool shed had changed something for Abe. When before he had been reluctant to share, he now seemed, not eager exactly, but willing to try. He and Arnie had some big demonstration planned. It involved Abe’s collection of castings, and, though Pen knew Arnie knew more than she did, they both knew that Abe had kept the biggest secret from them both.

They stood now in the cool green shade of the water tank.

Arnie had rigged up some complex arrangement of hoses, tanks and pumps which Pen didn’t understand. At the bottom of the big tank, there was a chute leading down to a secondary tank beneath. A dozen of Abe’s precious models sat on the grass, like a combat squadron in miniature. Arnie smacked a thick coil of rubber hose into an outlet valve then stood back.

Abe looked at Pen. ‘Ready?’

‘Ready.’

‘OK, now this is a water tunnel. A poor man’s wind tunnel. See this?’ He picked up one of his castings and handed it to Pen. ‘Recognise it?’

After a hard day battling headwinds the day before, Pen’s arms were tired and the little model felt heavy. But the shape of the plane was unmistakable.

‘Of course. This is my Curtiss racer.’

‘Right. And what you’ve got there is a scale model, exact to one part in twenty. Now watch.’

Abe took the model and fixed it on two steel pins in the empty water chute. The plane’s nose faced uphill as though attempting to fly up the chute. Then Arnie released the sluice gate. Water ran down the chute in an even, unbroken stream, completely submerging the little model plane. Abe produced a surgical needle filled with red ink.

‘Watch.’

As he spoke he held the tip of the needle down into the water and injected a stream of ink into the water flowing around the nose. The line of ink flowed completely straight and unbroken, then caught just a little around the nose, before evening out and moving on down the airplane fuselage.

‘That’s probably the nicest nose shape out of the planes we’ve been looking at. No turbulence. Minimal drag. Glenn Curtiss always was a genius. But now look at this. The wing-struts.’

He moved the needle and now injected the ink so that it flowed down towards one of the struts connecting the upper wing to the lower one. Once again, the ink moved in a dead straight line until it hit the plane. And then something strange happened. The ink fluttered, eddied and swirled around the wing-strut. Twists and curls became visible in the water. Behind the little airplane, the water became filled with murky pink.

‘Ain’t that horrible?’ said Hueffer, who was crouching over the chute like an anxious hen. ‘The poor old engine’s gotta fight all that turbulence. It’s the same with every strut. And this plane’s a good ’un, mind you. The best biplane we’ve looked at.’

‘Yes. You can feel that,’ said Pen slowly. ‘Flying her for real, I mean. There’s a…’ she didn’t know how to phrase it. The knowledge was in the tips of her fingers, the tremble of the fuselage as the plane banked into a curve. ‘I don’t know how to say it, but that turbulence there, that drag, you can feel it when you fly her. Probably just as well. It’s the only thing that slows her down.’

‘Right,’ said Abe, ‘only what if you wanted to build for distance?’

‘Distance? She’s not really that type of plane. She’s…’

She stopped. Of course her little racer wasn’t built for range. In order to get range you needed big fuel tanks. But big fuel tanks needed big wings. Big wings needed big engines. And big engines meant the whole plane had to be scaled up. Her clean lines would be lost. And half the extra fuel capacity would be wasted in battling the drag which the need for greater fuel capacity had itself created.

‘I don’t get it.’ Then, pointing to the water chute, which was now closed off with the little model airplane already steaming dry, she added, ‘Now this I get. Water tunnels, wind tunnels. They’re telling you something which in a way you already know from flying it. I mean, it tells you in a more useful way. But where it takes you, what the purpose is…’

She shook her head a second time. Abe lifted the little racer off its stand and cradled it, stroked it, running his hand always in the direction of air flow, nose to tail, leading edge to trailing edge. She realised that whenever he handled his models, he always touched them like that, feeling their shape the way the wind felt it.

‘You want to know where it takes us?’

‘Uh-huh.’

Arnie stopped and stared too. He, after all, had known the mechanical point of Abe’s castings, but not the real point: not the point that had absorbed Abe’s energies for so long.

‘Orteig,’ said Abe. ‘Orteig is where it takes us.’

Pen stared. She stared at Abe, at Arnie, at the model plane, at the water chute. And then she got it. She really got it.

73

On 14 June 1919, two British aviators, Captain John Alcock and Lieutenant Arthur Whitten Brown, climbed into the cockpit of their modified Vickers Vimy biplane. The Vickers was a monster. It was a monster in terms of size, but also in terms of ugliness. The giant fuel load required a huge two-tier wingspan supported by a whole cat’s cradle of struts and wires. The big ugly beast was powered by a pair of 360 horsepower Rolls Royce Eagle VIII engines.

The two men took off.

Flying east from Newfoundland, over the Atlantic, bound for the Irish coast.

In good conditions, the venture would have been crazy. Little more than a fortnight earlier, a trio of US navy airplanes, backed by radio, air-sea rescue, refuelling stops, and more than a hundred ships, had attempted to fly from Newfoundland to Portugal. Of the three planes, only one had made it. Alcock and Brown would attempt the flight, non-stop, without radio, without air-sea rescue, without naval support.

And the conditions weren’t good, they were awful.

The majority of the flight was spent flying blind, in a murderous combination of darkness, foul weather and fog. At one point, a build-up of ice on the wings was so bad that one of the two men had to climb out onto the wing in the full rip of a hundred-mile-an-hour gale and hack the potentially lethal ice away from the plane. To add to everything else, halfway across the ocean, the airspeed indicator failed, seriously increasing the risk of a dangerous stall.

After nineteen hours of appalling flying, the two men found the Irish coast beneath them. They found a broad and level field and brought their aircraft in to land.

Only the field wasn’t a field. It was a swamp. The first genuine transatlantic flight wound up axle deep in sucking Irish mud.

And that’s where Orteig came into it.

The date was now 17 December 1926. Seven and a half years had passed since Alcock and Brown had led the way. In the history of a technology just twenty-three years old, those seven years were a lifetime. And still the Atlantic hadn’t been properly crossed, except by zeppelins, those over-stuffed overflammable bags of gas.

And so, aware of all this, a French millionaire, Raymond Orteig, had offered a $25,000 prize to the first aviator to cross the Atlantic non-stop from New York to Paris, or vice versa. The prize would require a new distance record to be set. It would require an unprecedented degree of confidence in pilot, engine and machine. And it defined, in advance, the points to be connected. The prize – and the ambition which lay behind it – was unquestionably the most important goal in world aviation.

And Abe had a plan. The problem, as he saw it, was that airplane designers had concentrated for too long on engine strength over drag reduction. The plane which won the Orteig Prize would be big enough to carry plenty of fuel, of course, but it would be built slim and light. It would meet the wind, not with a shrieking mass of piano wire and wing supports, but gracefully, cleanly, like a dolphin meeting waves or a hawk angling into its dive.

‘We’ll use this water chute here to explore anything and everything,’ he explained. ‘Like how should a wing join onto the fuselage? Not too square, of course. Rounded, presumably. But how? Rounded in a pointy way or rounded in a more curvy way? And what about the nose shape? What about the tail fin? Now, of course, our water chute isn’t going to give us exact results. Water isn’t air. Small scale isn’t full scale. But we can sort out the shapes which definitely don’t work from ones which maybe do. We’ll try to work out the shape of the plane approximately, then hand over to some real engineers to sort out the detail.’

‘And then?’

‘And then, I’ll commission a plane, with Mason’s money…’

‘And then … do you …? Will it…?’

‘Huh?’

Pen got a grip. ‘Nothing, really. Nothing. Only, you’ll have a copilot, I assume. I was wondering if you’d already thought of who…’

Abe’s voice gentled suddenly, and his eyes looked away. ‘A tank of fuel. For something like this, the best safety isn’t a second flier, it’s plenty of fuel.’

‘You’ll fly solo?’ Pen found herself absurdly disappointed, as though she’d already booked the seat next to his.

‘It’s the only way to do it,’ said Abe. ‘I’m sorry.’

74

Captain Rockwell!

Willard couldn’t get over it. America had come home from war with plenty of heroes, but Captain Rockwell belonged to the very highest rank. It hadn’t just been his individual record – more victories than anyone except Rickenbacker. It hadn’t just been his collective record – his squadron narrowly beating Rickenbacker’s for total victories. The point was, it hadn’t just been his war record. Rockwell remained unsullied by peace. No newspaper man ever succeeded in digging out anything to tarnish him. No seedy affairs. No greedy desire to turn fame into banknotes. No grasping after honours. No grubby self-promotion.

And America had understood. Amidst all the ballyhoo of victory and demobilisation and red scares, America had somehow managed to separate its enduring heroes from its temporary ones. Rockwell hadn’t just been awarded the ticker-tape parades, the civic receptions, the Presidential photo sessions. He’d been awarded the Congressional Medal of Honour, one of the few men in history to have been so honoured.

And now this.

Captain Rockwell was flying observation for a bunch of booze-smugglers. Willard didn’t know what to think. Logically, only two things were possible. First, Rockwell was behaving like everyone else in America had behaved. War had been a time for commitment and sacrifice. But peace was peace. Perhaps Rockwell had figured the angles the way everyone else had. Being a hero bought him nothing. Not much fame, certainly no money. So he’d quit. He’d resigned the position, handed in his notice, packed up and gone. Instead, he’d entered a more lucrative line of work. And why not? He was only human. A human doing what humans do.

But there was a second explanation. Rockwell hadn’t resigned. Others had. He hadn’t. He was still the man that Willard had once admired more than any other on earth. And if Captain Rockwell, hero, was flying observation for Bob Mason, then something didn’t add up. He had some agenda of his own. Willard couldn’t guess what it was. But whatever Rockwell’s precise motivation, if he had come to Marion as the war hero he’d once been, his presence there spelled red danger to the Firm.

That was the logical way to think about it, but Willard was hardly able to stay logical.
Captain Rockwell
! The man, almost literally, had brought Willard from boyhood into manhood. He had, quite literally, saved Willard’s life. During those intense and terrifying months of war, Rockwell had been a second father to him. A first father, even, because a distant parent on the far side of the Atlantic scarcely counted for much.

And Willard could hardly fail to be aware of something else.
If Rockwell were attempting to engineer the downfall of Marion, then Powell Lambert would have to take action.
If the insurance department became involved, that action would result in Rockwell’s sudden and violent death. If Willard could manage it so that he dealt with the issue himself, then maybe he could write a different ending to that story. Maybe. Rockwell had been a persistent and dangerous pursuit pilot. He would be a persistent and dangerous adversary in any other form of warfare too. Willard was unable to imagine how he could neutralise Rockwell without murdering him. He was equally unable to imagine giving the instructions which would end up with Rockwell dead.

But if Rockwell had been the man he had once been, then one of those two things needed to happen.

For the two weeks of his sun-drenched holiday with Rosalind, Willard thought things over. Rosalind, seeing him distracted, silently assumed that his adventures in Canada had taken more out of him than he’d ever let on. She saw his behaviour as confirming his curious but genuine bravery. He was a vain man, a spoiled one, sometimes a boastful and petulant one – she knew all that. But more and more, she was coming to see his better side: courageous, committed, resourceful, solid. In the baking Florida sun, Willard was at his charming, delightful best. Little by little, Rosalind felt herself slipping further into love with him. In bed, she gave herself to him. Awake, she gave him the adoration she knew he craved.