Glory Boys (56 page)
Authors: Harry Bingham
At the top of Tin Can Field, the first men appeared. Coats and ties flapping in the wind. A couple of the goons, ridiculously, had their hats on and were moving forward, a gun in one hand, their hats jammed down over their heads with the other. Down the edge of the field, there was a glitter of black and silver in the undergrowth. Cops, Pen guessed. Determined not to let their enemy escape again, the goons had taken their time, had planned an encircling movement with the cops on the flank, the goons at the head.
Pen and Abe watched – for two seconds, no more. Then Abe nodded and climbed into the cockpit. ‘Contact off! – Contact on! – Let’s go!’ The big propeller began to beat the air, at low throttle. Pen ran back from the propeller and jumped into the rear cockpit. Sarah Torrance’s discarded shoes lay on the ground below as though the girl wearing them had simply evaporated. Behind them, the goons began running. There were little white puffs from their guns, though in the strengthening wind no sound was audible.
Out to sea, there was a band of sunshine still glittering on the water, then a huge, dense band of blackness rushing towards them. Blackness and wind. Strong wind. A wind of more than gale force.
A wind that would either save or destroy them.
‘I’m sorry, Willard. This is the hardest thing. I hate being the one to break your heart.’
Willard still stood at his father’s desk in his Washington office. Rosalind, her voice tear-stained, was trying to wind things up.
‘To break my heart?’ he said woodenly.
He was feeling strange. He had never been dumped, let alone dumped only weeks before a very big, very public wedding. But he didn’t feel like a man with his heart broken. He didn’t even feel as though Rosalind imagined his heart might be broken. It was almost as though she was hoping to script their break-up in a way she’d never quite managed to script their relationship.
‘Oh, Willard, I know it must be terribly hard, but it will be for the best. You’ll see in time.’
‘Yes.’
She’d said that before.
He wondered at his own reactions. He loved her, didn’t he? Certainly more than any of his Hollywood girls, more than any of those he’d had in France or before the war. When he thought about how glamorous Rosalind had looked by his side, about what a dazzling couple the two of them made, he felt a kind of dark fury that she should be ruining it. But love? A broken heart? He couldn’t make sense of that.
‘Thank you for telling me. I’m rather shocked, I guess. I think I’ll get off the phone now.’
They said their goodbyes. Rosalind hung up first and the line went dead. Willard listened to the emptiness on the line, wondering if he should have protested more? He had the sudden feeling that if he’d kicked up a fuss, if he’d acted like a man whose heart
was
breaking, things might have turned out differently. Perhaps all Rosalind had needed was to be assured of the strength of her lover’s feelings. The actor in Willard felt annoyed at letting a fine scene run away from him. But it wasn’t too late. If that’s what he wanted to do, he only had to call her right back.
He stared down at the phone. The handset stared back. To call or not to call? The part of broken-hearted lover tempted him. Willard already knew how to speak the lines that formed in his head. He put his hand to the phone and asked the operator for a long-distance line.
‘Yes, what number please?’ The operator’s voice was high-pitched and acid, like something you could use to etch on copper.
‘A New York number. Manhattan. The party’s name is Hooper. Annabelle Hooper.’
The goons came running forwards. The cops, not wanting to miss the action, came running too. Abe saw a dozen men in the first wave, with more following after. Every man was armed and most were shooting. Most carried only handguns and were shooting at a range from which handguns were almost guaranteed to be ineffective. But there were a couple of men carrying rifles and still others who had the sense to run first and shoot later.
The wind increased.
It was strong enough now that the men on the ground were having difficulty running directly into its force. The two men with hats had given up the struggle and had let their hats blow off into the sky. Those who had begun the race with coats unbuttoned were having to run with a hand keeping their coats closed up. One man leaped to clear a fallen log, but misjudged how hard he needed to jump against the wind, and missed his footing as he tumbled comically in the blast.
Abe glanced around at Pen. Her eyes were in goggles now, but her mouth was visible. It wore a grin. Abe guessed he was grinning too. He had always wondered whether a plane could do what he was about to ask it to do. Well, he was about to find out. He felt very calm. The next few moments would determine whether he would find safety or find death, but the human implications of that choice had receded almost infinitely far in his mind. Even Pen, sitting in the cockpit behind him, didn’t disturb his focus. He knew, of course, that she was the love of his life; that if he killed himself in the coming manoeuvre, he would kill her too. But the significance of those facts, like all other normal human concerns, had shrunk away to a tiny point the size of a pinhead.
Instead, his awareness was entirely focused on the importance of gauging the wind right, handling the plane properly. Abe sank into a state which was both hyper-conscious and entirely intuitive. While his eye and mind measured the wind, calculated forces and angles, his fingertips simultaneously spoke to the controls, his body felt the aircraft, felt the ache in the wings, the tremble running down the tail. In this expanded state of awareness, he no longer felt like he was in control of the plane, he felt like he
was
the plane; its brain and nerves, its muscles and its will.
The wind screamed through the rigging. The cross wires that braced the wing-struts set up a howl, a hollow, whining, mournful sound that never ended. Abe had the plane’s elevators fully raised, so that the force of the wind kept the plane jammed against the ground, and he could feel the wood and fabric flaps groaning under the strain.
Another second or two passed. Abe could feel the wind increase. Reading from the storm-whipped pattern of the boiling ocean ahead of him, he felt he could even see the wind.
The attackers continued forwards. There was more shooting.
Abe saw a bullet hole open in the starboard wing a few feet in front of him. It was time to go: safety or death.
He hunched over the control stick. Infinitely relaxed, but with infinite authority, he raised the stick. The aircraft responded. It began to move.
Mostly the way planes take off is simple. They roll along a flat piece of ground, gathering speed. When the air is moving fast enough over the wings, the plane has enough lift to take off. At this point, the pilot pulls back on the stick and lets the plane fly.
But that’s the regular type of take-off. It’s not one you can use if your plane has its rear end dug into a hole and its front end stuck in a sand-filled trench.
Fortunately, however, that’s not the only type of takeoff possible. If the wind is running hard enough, then, even if the plane is stationary, there can be enough airspeed over the wings to make a take-off possible. Not a good takeoff, of course. Not a safe one. Not a controlled one. As a matter of fact, it can be the sort of take-off which sees the plane snatched into the air, only to be dashed to the ground a second later. All the same, given the circumstances, any kind of take-off would be welcome, any kind at all.
Keeping the tail held firmly down on the ground, Abe gave the engine maximum power. Angled as they were, the two pairs of wings were meeting the wind at a high angle of attack, exposing their undersurface to the buffeting force of the air.
And, in an instant, the big plane, all two tons of her, was snatched into the sky, exactly as if it had become a giant kite. There was no forward movement. There was almost no backwards or sideways movement. One second the plane was sitting on the ground, the next it was as if it had been jerked seventy feet into the air. The position, of course, was wildly unsustainable. Abe forced the nose of the aircraft down again. The wings bit into the wind at their normal angle. The big machine was no longer a giant kite; it was a plane once again.
Leaning out of the cockpit, Abe could see their recent attackers on the ground, looking up, astounded, completely beaten. A few of them had guns raised. Abe counted a few more shots, but what with the rapidly widening distance and the unpredictable ferocity of the wind, he knew they had little chance of causing damage.
But they were out of one danger and smack into another, possibly more serious, one. The storm was one of the most violent Abe had ever seen. It was possible that no pilot in history had ever flown in such weather and lived.
Still relaxed, still alert, Abe coaxed the plane into climbing. He kept her at full throttle, keeping her nose pointed into the wind, and giving her all the lift he could find.
It wasn’t a predictable ascent. The wind was still gusty, and when it dropped, it dropped suddenly and hard. As soon as it dropped, the lift on the wings died away and the big plane lurched downwards. Abe did what he could to keep her steady, but it was an unnerving journey. They’d gain two hundred feet in a few seconds, then lose half of their gain in the blink of an eye. It was like being trapped in some giant elevator, with somebody else at the controls.
Abe coaxed the plane upwards. As the seconds ticked by, he fought the plane higher and higher. Two hundred feet, four hundred, six hundred, a thousand. At present, they were still on the outskirts of the storm. They hadn’t yet reached the mountainous cloud wall that threatened to overwhelm them.
Abe was tempted to turn the aircraft and fly full-speed away, but he didn’t dare. In those tumultuous conditions, turning the plane through one hundred and eighty degrees would expose the wings to violent and uneven forces. A couple of times, he tried nudging the plane around just a few degrees, but both times, the wings told him they couldn’t stand the stress. He straightened up.
He had fifteen hundred feet beneath him now, but he needed more before attempting the manoeuvre. He wanted at least two thousand feet before risking it. He almost made it. At nineteen hundred feet, he began to relax. He adjusted position on the controls, ready to turn the aircraft, when a violent jolt of wind, the most violent yet, sprang them up three hundred feet, then threw them back almost a thousand.
Abe steadied the aircraft. There was no turning now. They were already into the grey outposts of the storm. Then, in a flash, they were inside the storm itself.
Henry Geddes, driving his own car, met Roeder off the train from New York. The two men knew each other, disliked each other, and used their acquaintance as an excuse to avoid courtesy.
‘News?’ asked Roeder.
‘They didn’t get her. Neither her nor the pilot nor the mechanic.’
‘And the documents?’
‘She has them. They’re missing from the bank anyway. The only good part of it is the weather. They took off in the worst storm this year. For all we know, they’ve already smashed up.’
Roeder said nothing, just watched the road ahead. Geddes drove a big-engined Studebaker and he drove it fast, but somehow effetely. His hands were dressed in tan leather driving gloves and they slid around the rim of the steering wheel instead of gripping it and releasing it like a man.
Roeder half-closed his eyes. His attitude of relaxation wasn’t a pose, it was for real. And why wouldn’t it be? Despite the setbacks, the situation was under control. Rockwell and the Hamilton girl didn’t know it, but their escape from Florida was meaningless. The stolen ledgers were already worthless, the two runaway pilots already dead.
The Firm would win, as the Firm would always win.
To
most people, there are only two things about airplanes that scare them: height and speed. To pilots, however, there are only two things that make a plane safe enough to get into: height and speed.
Speed means air moving fast over the airplane’s wings. Speed means lift. It means no risk of falling from the sky. It means the pilot has plenty to play with. It means the pilot can climb, dive, turn, manoeuvre, all without risk.
And height.
Just suppose the worst happens. Suppose the engine cuts out or a control wire snaps, the fuel pump jams. Where’s the safest place to be when that happens? The answer’s obvious. High up is the only safe place to be. At two, three, even five thousand feet, the world is a blanket spread out beneath the sky. The pilot can begin to glide, nose angled a little down, slowly circling as alternative landing sites offer themselves. To land safely, a biplane only needs a largish field. All a pilot needs to do is to pick a site, then wait. Why hurry? The view’s great, there’s no need to rush. When the field finally rises close enough to land on, the pilot simply glides in to land. Fields can be a little bumpier than a regular airfield, but who cares about bumps?
Of course, things don’t always go so well.
Sod’s law says that problems never happen when you’re ready for them. Problems happen when you’re flying low, close to the ground, when the engine’s stuttering, when your airspeed’s low.
Not enough speed. Not enough height. No room to manoeuvre and a loss of power. The pilot’s nightmare. A recipe for death.
The intensity of the storm was literally stunning. Light left them. It wasn’t pitch black, but the suddenness of the darkness was terrifying all the same. The ground below disappeared. The cloud was so thick that Pen couldn’t see clear to the ends of the wingtips. Ahead of her, the flashing disc of the propeller was only barely visible in the tearing fog.
And the rain! The rain struck with the force of hailstones. Pen had found her flying clothes in the cockpit and struggled into them as soon as she could. But even so, her flying suit left the bottom half of her face unprotected and the exposed skin was instantly stinging and sore. Aircraft were designed for clear weather. They could take a little rain, but weren’t designed to take much. Over the sound of the storm and engine combined, Pen could hear the wings sounding a new note under the driving rain.