Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 10 (15 page)

“I don’t want to hear that kind of talk.”

“Nathan…”

“It’s fatalistic bullshit.” I held the little flag out to her.

“I don’t want it. Take it with you.”

She took and refolded it, placed it back in her pocket and was clearly hurt. Which was fine with me.

“What’s got you thinking like this?” I asked her.

“Nothing.” She had her arms folded now, and was still next to me, but not nestled, her back to the sofa. “I don’t really have misgivings…except maybe for Fred.”

“Fred?”

“Fred Noonan.”

“Oh, yeah. He’s your navigator?”

“And co-pilot if necessary, though I’ll do all or most of the flying myself.”

“What about that other guy—Manning?”

“He dropped out after Honolulu. Scheduling conflict.”

I bet that conflict arose about the time the Electra went skidding on its belly trailing sparks and fuel down the runway at Luke Field.

“So what’s the story with Noonan?”

“Paul recommended him. He’s experienced, easy-going…I like him well enough.”

“So why do I still sense misgivings?”

Her response was unconvincingly chipper. “He has a background in ocean navigation, and a great reputation for putting that to use in air navigation.”

“You haven’t answered my question.”

“He’s really a remarkable man…a merchant marine as a kid, joined the British Royal Navy during the war; one of the first flying-boat pilots for Pan Am, navigator on the
China Clipper,
its first year.”

I said, “Answer my question.”

“What was your question?”

“Don’t play dumb.”

The blue-gray eyes went hooded. “…He’s a drinker.”

“Ah.” Teetotaling Amy of the cups of cocoa, the little girl who’d been slapped by her drunken father, did not suffer drunken fools gladly. “Has it been a problem?”

Her smirk was humorless. “I think he got drunk the night before the Honolulu takeoff.”

Actually, it had been an attempted takeoff, but I thought not correcting her was the gentlemanly thing to do.

“Was he in some way responsible for the crackup?”

“No. No. Not at all. And he seemed quite clear-eyed and sober and lucid, that morning.”

“That’s all you can ask.”

“He and his wife…he got married recently, to a lovely girl, Mary’s her name…. Funny, ’cause that’s what he calls me, too. It’s my middle name…Mary. Anyway, driving back from their honeymoon, in Arizona someplace, they had this head-on collision with another auto.”

“Good God.”

“He wasn’t hurt, but his wife suffered some minor injuries, though not, thank goodness, the woman driving the other car…or her toddler. Fred was cited for driving in the wrong lane.”

“Was he drunk?”

She wouldn’t look at me. “Well, drinking, anyway.”

So I tried a conciliatory tone: “He just got married. Maybe he was celebrating.”

Now she looked at me. “Or maybe he was still upset about the Honolulu crackup. I know that upset him.”

“Why, if it wasn’t his fault?”

“Pan Am fired him for drinking. He apparently views this round-the-world flight as a last chance to vindicate himself…and make himself employable again. He says he has the backing to open a navigation school, if we pull off this flight.”

I put my hand on her shoulder. “Amy, can’t you find anybody else? Or is it that, you can’t bring yourself to fire somebody who needs this job so bad?”

“He’s really very good. Paul thinks the world of him.”

“Paul isn’t risking his life.”

“G. P. insists on Fred.”

“G. P. isn’t risking his life, either. Why does G. P. want Noonan?”

“…Because Fred’s…never mind.”

She looked away from me again.

I pressed: “What?”

“I think it’s because Fred’s an…economical choice.”

“Oh, Christ!”

She returned her eyes to mine and her gaze was almost pleading. “Nathan, most of the good navigators are military and they obviously can’t be accessed. Fred Noonan is the man who charted all of Pan Am’s Pacific routes—”

“Didn’t you say Pan Am fired him?”

“Please don’t be cross, Nathan. I didn’t look you up so I could spend the evening wallowing in my problems…”

This was one of those rare times when she seemed near tears.

I gathered her into my arms and kissed her on the forehead. “You mean, you were lookin’ for a good time? Did you find my name scribbled on a phone booth wall?…I’m sorry, Amy. We won’t talk anymore, about any of this.”

She kissed my nose and said, softly, “This is the last flight, Nathan. When I come back, I’m going to have a different life.”

Was she implying I’d be part of it? I was afraid to ask. I preferred to think she was. In my bed that night, city lights filtering through sheer curtains like neon stars, her slender white form had a ghostly beauty as she rode me, cowgirl-style. She seemed lost in the act of lovemaking, just as I was lost in her, and I like to think she found a joy with me, in our sexual flight, that rivaled whatever it was in the sky that drew her there.

When Amy began her around-the-world-at-the-Equator flight, she took steps to keep it from the press, telling reporters on May 21 that she was heading out on a shakedown cruise to Miami, to test the Electra’s special equipment. With Noonan, her mechanic “Bo” McKneely, and her husband, Amy flew to Tucson that afternoon, one of her engines catching fire shortly after landing. She requested an overnight checkup for her ailing plane, knowing that her Electra had a history of malfunction, having flown it in the 1936 Bendix race in which the oil seals leaked and the hatch blew off.

From Tucson she flew the repaired Electra to New Orleans, arriving at 6:00
P.M
. Saturday evening at Shushan Airport; checking in at the airport hotel, she and G. P. spent a quiet evening out with Amy’s old friend Toni Lake. All of these tidbits I picked up in the papers, following my friend’s flight long-distance, and even having to work at it somewhat, as the press didn’t seem to care all that much, this time around.

She was strictly an inside-pages phenomenon now, even when at Miami, the next morning, she brought her silver bird in with a shocking thud. She climbed from her cockpit after this “almost” crash landing to be quoted as saying, “I sure smacked it down hard that time!”

The Electra was misbehaving again: faulty shock absorbers, leaking fluid all the way from New Orleans, had caused the hard landing. The oil lines were also leaking, and McKneely led mechanics in an all-out assault on the problems.

On May 29 Amy told the press she would be taking off from Miami Airport, flying east to west on Pan Am’s route through the West Indies and then on down along South America’s east coast. Leaving G. P. and McKneely behind, Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan lifted off at 5:56
A.M
. on June 1 with five hundred fans in attendance, held back by a line of policemen, her loyal admirers waving and cheering their heroine of the skies.

The papers were less easily impressed. In Chicago the headlines of the next day’s papers belonged to the police riot on the South Side of Chicago in which ten striking Republic Steel workers were killed; and the next day, every front page seemed devoted to Edward of England marrying Baltimore’s Wallis Simpson.

Over the next six days, to modest press attention, the Electra glided over the east coast of Central and South America, with stops at San Juan, Puerto Rico; Caripito, Venezuela; and Paramaribo, Dutch Guiana; and—after a ten-hour flight, crossing 1,628 miles of jungle and ocean—touched down at Fortaleza, Brazil, with Natal her last stop before crossing the South Atlantic.

According to the papers, on her overnight stops, she was up at three or four in the morning after no more than five hours of sleep. But the flights themselves, in the noisy plane with its cramped cabin, were the real endurance test: she mostly communicated with navigator Noonan by sending him notes fastened to a pulley line with a clothespin. Otherwise one of them had to climb over the bulky auxiliary fuel tanks between her cockpit and Noonan’s navigation table.

The flight over the Atlantic went well, despite some headwinds and rainstorms, with the Electra’s performance finally on the beam and Noonan providing ace navigation. But when they neared the African coast on June 7, Amy ignored Noonan’s counsel to turn south for Dakar and instead headed north, flying fifty miles along the African coast. When she sighted St.-Louis, almost two hundred miles north of Dakar, she sent back a note to Noonan asking him what had put them north. His response: “You.” She later admitted as much.

They landed at St.-Louis, their revised destination, where barracks-like accommodations, complete with bedbugs and primitive toilet facilities, awaited them. But their first week had been successful: four thousand miles in forty hours.

After a short hop to Dakar, Amy met two days of bad weather; impatient, she switched her destination from Fort Niamey to Gao in French West Africa, finding a corridor between sandstorms to the north and a tornado to the south, and making the 1,140-mile flight in seven hours and change. The next morning she made the nearly one-thousand-mile trek from Gao over the Sahara Desert to Fort-Lamy in French Equatorial Africa. The heat was so punishing that the Electra could not be refueled until after sunset, as the gasoline might ignite upon touching the hot metal. Then it was on to El Fasher in Anglo-Egyptian Sudan and, on June 14, another twelve hundred miles to Assab on the shores of the Red Sea, stopping for lunch at Khartoum in the Sudan and taking tea at Massawa, Eritrea. She was, at the end of her second week and fifteen thousand miles from Miami, better than halfway to her objective.

The next day she crossed the Red Sea, then the Arabian Sea to Karachi, Pakistan. Here she stayed for two unpleasant days in the unremitting desert heat, taking two camel rides, and the time to stop at the post office to choose stamps and supervise the cancellation of the 7,500 first-day covers in her keeping. On June 17 she and Noonan headed for Calcutta, but even in the air, no relief from the blistering heat could be found: at fifty-five hundred feet, the temperature was a brutal ninety degrees. Finally the heat let up, and rainstorms took over, including air currents that sent the Electra up and down at a rate of one thousand feet in seconds.

When she took off from Calcutta’s Dum Dum Airport on June 18, the Electra struggled off a water-soaked runway, barely clearing the trees, and monsoon rains accompanied them over the Bay of Bengal on the way to Rangoon, Burma. She didn’t make it to Rangoon, settling on Akyab, but on June 19, they reached their destination, where they took in the Golden Pagoda, taking off the next day for Singapore. Word awaited her that mechanics would be on hand to overhaul her plane at Bandoeng, Java, which she made on the last day of her third week out. Her landing was an unsteady one, however, and she undoubtedly was suffering from what Paul Mantz later described as “extreme pilot fatigue.”

She had, after all, flown in 135 hours an amazing twenty thousand miles. She had slept in unfamiliar, sometimes primitive, even bizarre, surroundings; she had eaten little, slept less, and suffered from heat exhaustion, diarrhea, and nausea.

Three days of scheduled repairs for the Electra turned into six, and it wasn’t until June 27—suddenly behind schedule, playing hell with G. P. Putnam’s plans to have her back by the Fourth of July for some grand press attention—that she and Noonan landed at Koepang on Timor Island, having given up on reaching Port Darwin, Australia, before nightfall. High on a cliff, Amy and Noonan and some villagers staked down the Electra on the grass-covered field, bordered by a stone wall designed to keep out wild pigs. She rose at 4:00
A.M
., hoping to reach Lae, but was forced by headwinds to settle for Port Darwin, where she set down at 10:00
A.M
. Some minor repairs were made, and—after a seven-hour-and-forty-three-minute and twelve-hundred-mile journey—the Electra reached Lae, Papua New Guinea, on June 29.

Weather and instrument problems delayed takeoff till Friday, July 2, when at 10:22
A.M
., the Electra—carrying more than one thousand gallons of fuel, as well as Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan—wheeled lumberingly down a crude dirt runway a mere one thousand feet long. A 2,556-mile flight lay ahead, with navigator Noonan responsible for pinpointing tiny Howland Island somewhere in the mid-Pacific.

At the end of the runway was a cliff, a dropoff into Huon Gulf, and—providing spectators with a literal cliff-hanger—the Electra’s wheels stayed on the dirt runway until the final fifty yards, her propellers churning up puffs of red dust. No wind to help liftoff on this hot, clear morning. Spectators said it was as if the plane had jumped into the ocean, committing suicide; and indeed it did seem to fall off the runway, dropping behind the edge of the cliff.

When it reappeared, the Electra seemed to ride the gulf, no more than five or six feet above the surface, props throwing spray. It took a long time, the spectators said, for that plane to finally rise from the ocean’s surface into the sky, but at last it did. And on this clear morning, the Electra stayed visible for a long, long time.

Then, finally, it disappeared.

For the first seven hours of her flight, Amy stayed in contact with a radioman on Lae. On course, 750 miles out, still clearly heard, she was advised to maintain the same radio frequency until further notice. But that was the last she was heard on Lae.

The U.S.S. frigate
Ontario,
midway between Lae and Howland in the Pacific, waited to provide navigation and weather updates; the Electra should have passed over the ship where three sailors kept watch and a radio operator stood by. No sign of her. Of course, the good weather had turned bad after midnight, a nasty squall kicking in and holding on till dawn. This might have slowed Amy down and/or caused her to use up a considerable amount of fuel, outmaneuvering the storm, and unintentionally escaping the
Ontario’s
sight.

The Coast Guard cutter
Itasca
lay anchored just off Howland Island, assigned to help Amelia Earhart with radio direction signals, voice communication, and surface smoke. But starting at midnight,
Itasca’s
radio room had sent weather reports on the hour and half-hour, and Amy had not acknowledged any of them.