The Eleventh Man (7 page)

"I'll see you in Hell first, Maclaine." Cass took a dollar bill from her depleted stack and tossed it into the ante.

"Tsk, Cassie. That's one for Mother." Reaching across, Della plucked up another wrinkled bill from Cass's pile of ones and dropped it aside into the cuss pot, which they always divvied after the game.

"What's the program here," Cass said crossly, "to get rich off my vocabulary? That's chickenshit, Della."

The others eyed her. They knew Cass had the best cockpit nerves in the human race; when she was not at the controls, things could fray at the edges now and then. Beryl, ritual elder of the group, was about to say something but thought better of it. This time, Della only crept her fingers a little way toward Cass's pile, asking as if it was a matter of etiquette: "Another for Mother?"

Knowing that she needed to get a grip on the situation, Cass theatrically fanned at her mouth as if shooing off flies, then forked over another dollar for swearing during the game. As everyone laughed, she sneaked another glance at the nearest window port and still saw only fog; Seattle was socked in tighter than she could ever remember—that was saying a lot—and there were mountains out there. Even she, who had to have faith in instrumentation, was ready to divert to sunny Moses Lake. She caught the eye of Linda Cicotte, her B flight lead pilot, and pointed urgently toward the cockpit. Linda nodded, teetered to her feet, and felt her way forward to talk to the pilot. The rest of the dozen women, all in the baggy flying gear called zoot suits, slouched in sling seats along one side of the aircraft; the majority of the cabin was taken up with bulky crates. TARFU Airlines, these numbing transport trips in the equivalent of a boxcar with propellers were known as: Things Are Really Fucked Up. Circling in grade A fog this way was worse than usual, on these trips to the Coast, but there was nothing to do about it but go with the routine. Linda's team of fliers as usual were curled up as best they could, trying to catch some sleep. C flight, Ella Mannion's, did crossword puzzles and read books. Cass was not sure she wanted to know what it said that hers always sat on their parachute packs in the tail of the plane and played cutthroat poker.

Right now, Mary Catherine palmed the deck in cardsharp fashion, ready to keep dealing. "Cards, sisters in sin?"

"Honey"—Della was only from somewhere in southern Ohio, but when she poured it on, she sounded like Tallulah Bankhead on a bender—"I couldn't possibly stand one more good card."

Cass flinched inwardly.
What am I getting myself into here? A lot of that going around lately.
Saying "Hit me twice," she slid the deuce and trey to the discard pile. The new cards might as well have gone straight there, too.
Lucky in love doesn't seem to count in poker either, Ben.
Even so, when Della upped the ante, she stayed with her. Della raised her again, which mercifully was the limit. Cass met the bet and, fingers crossed, produced the jacks.

"Pair of ladies." Della laid down queens and scooped up cash. "Thank you for the money, y'all, it'll go for good causes, widows and orphans and the home for overmatched poker players."

Cass looked at Mary Catherine, and Mary Catherine at Beryl. Simultaneously they reached to their piles and each flung a dollar into the cuss pot. "Piss in the ocean, Della!" they chorused.

"My, my," Della drawled, cocking a delicate ear. "Do I hear a whine in one of the engines?" Cass had to hand it to her; shavetail latecomer or not, she was sharp as a porcupine on most things. The full lieutenants, Beryl Foster and Mary Catherine Cornelisen, had earned their wings in the very first contingent of WASPs, as Cass herself had. The three of them together had endured the bald old goat of a flight instructor at Sweetwater, Texas, who claimed women pilots would never amount to anything because they couldn't piss in the ocean—the Gulf of Mexico, actually—from ten thousand feet through the relief tube like the male pilots. If that had been deliberate motivation toward every other kind of flying skill, it worked in their case. Sometimes the aircraft they ferried from the plant were finished products and sometimes they weren't. Mary Catherine once had been going through a cockpit check on the factory floor when the engine of the shiny new fighter burst into flames; pure textbook but against all human inclination, she rammed the throttle open and blew out the fire. And Beryl knew what it was to land at East Base with nothing but fumes left in a leaky auxiliary tank. With scrapes enough of her own, Cass would not have traded their cool heads for reincarnations of Amelia Earhart. Della, though. Nearly a year behind them in flight school and immeasurably more than that in experience, Della still showed signs of thinking of herself as a hot pilot. Hot pilots tended to end up dead pilots. Cass knew she had her work cut out for her with Della.

Starting about now; Della was shuffling the cards in such a fashion that they purred expectantly, but she did have the smarts to check with Cass before dealing out another hand.

Cass shook her head. "That's it, officers. Time to ready up." She climbed to her feet, stiff from all the sitting. "M.C., where'd you put those newspapers?" They had grabbed up a pile of the
Great Falls Tribune
before takeoff; the article about them and the picture of the squadron proudly posed on the wings of an Airacobra had brought whoops of tribute to the inquisitive war correspondent in the fancy flight jacket.
And they're not even in the sack with him.
Cass tried to stifle that thought and keep a straight face as Mary Catherine uncovered the newspapers from under her gear and began passing them out. "Here you go, read all about our classy squadron commander and her Flying Women. How many does everybody want? Cass?"

"Oh, a couple."
One to send to Dan. What a case I am. Show the hubby the nice things the other man I love writes about me.
Dry-mouthed, Cass hoped she was better at a straight face than she was at stifling.

Linda Cicotte came weaving her way to the back of the plane. "We're in the hands of a hero, Cass." She jerked a thumb toward the cockpit. "He still says he's going to get us on the ground in Seattle."

"He didn't happen to say, 'Or die trying,' did he?" Cass asked in exasperation.

Linda simply rolled her eyes. "Are we going to fly out in this, do you think?"

"Too soupy for good health." Cass herself didn't mind instrument flying, bracketing the radio beam and the rest of the things you did to let the machine navigate itself through limited visibility. But she couldn't risk her fliers; Della in particular tended to trust her own instincts over the instruments, a good way to meet a mountain. "You know what a hard-ass this dispatching officer can be," Cass shared her thinking with Linda, who had flown the Seattle run nearly as many times as she had. "I'll work on him unmercifully. Tell your bunch and Ella's we're going to try to RON this one." Remaining overnight, when they were supposed to be picking up planes and heading back, would not be popular with the higher-ups at East Base. It also threw off tonight with Ben. Briefly she felt better about herself for not letting either of those get in the way of her decision.

Beryl looked up from the newspaper she was holding. "Cass? I didn't know that about the ring. Mine won't come off even if I wanted."

The line in there about the ringless hand, nothing between it and the controls of an Airacobra:
Damn it, Ben, you don't miss much, but I wish you'd been looking the other way that time.
They'd started off deadly stiff with one another when he showed up to interview her and the other WASPs, as was to be expected after that run-in in the hangar. The atmosphere started to thaw as soon as he discovered she gave a straight answer, no matter what the question, and she found out he knew his business about flying. He'd done his homework on P-39s, was familiar with the Cobra's reputation as a tricksome aircraft, with the engine mounted in back of the cockpit creating a center of gravity different from more stable fighter planes. And he had looked into the Lend-Lease lore that what was gained from the radical design was ideal room up front for a 30-millimeter cannon poking out of the propeller hub like a stinger; the Russians were said to adore P-39s for strafing, just point the nose of the plane at German tanks and convoys and blaze away. Cass drew a grin from him when she agreed it was a
flighty
aircraft, one you had to pilot every moment, but she confessed she didn't mind that about the Cobra; weren't you supposed to pay total attention when you were in the air? As to the funeral ticket always there in that big engine right behind the pilot's neck, she offhandedly said the answer was to not get in a situation where you had to make a belly landing. That drew somewhat less of a grin from him. The true tipping point came, though, when she climbed into a tethered P-39 to show him the cockpit routine, automatically slipping off her wedding band as she slid into the seat and he wanted to know what that was about. Somehow willpower—
won't power, too,
she ruefully corrected herself—went out of control from then on.

"My husband is too busy to mind about something like a ring, he's in New Guinea."

"With the Montaneers? So is one of my football buddies—I was there a little while back."

"You were? Is it as bad as they say?"

"I'll bring you the piece I wrote there, you can decide."

All that. Then before they knew it, nights at the roadhouse or his room at the Excelsior. She had done anything like this only once before, during the spree in Dallas after winning her wings, when that well-mannered tank officer as viewed through a celebratory haze of drinks looked too good to resist. That was strictly a one-nighter, and she had no illusions that Dan Standish refrained from similar flings when he was loose on leave in Brisbane and Rockhampton among the Sheilas of Australia. Supposedly it was different for men, their urges painted as almost medical, "the screw flu"; to hear them tell it, nature was to blame. But what about the strain of being a woman in singular command of a squadron of nerve-wracking planes and pilots both, and Ben Reinking happens into your life, nature's remedy for desolate nights if there ever was one? In the world of war, turn down such solace just because chance made you female? It had started off as only friendly drinks, Ben still asking her this and that as he worked over his piece about her squadron, the two of them sudden buddies over the topics of planes and New Guinea, until all at once he was revealing to her that he'd been wounded during his correspondent stint there. Every word that followed had stayed with Cass ever since:

"Where?"

"Place called Bitoi Ridge. Kind of a jungle hogback, in from the bay at Salamaua."

"Modest. I meant on you."

Ben paused. "I don't generally show it off."

She bolted the last of her drink, but there was a challenging dry tingle in her mouth as she spoke it: "Never make an exception?"

And ever since, the part she hated: if she wanted to hang on to her marriage and officer's rank, they didn't dare get caught at it. Tell no one. Show nothing. Staying casual as you hid a lover was a surprising amount of work, but now she managed to shrug at Beryl's remark. "I've just always done it, Bear. Dan and I knew a mechanic who slipped off a ladder, caught his ring on a bolt head. Pulled it right off."

"The ring?" Della was deep in admiration of the newspaper photo, where the flip of her blonde hair showed to advantage. "So what?"

"The finger, fool."

"Yipe. Guess I better stay single, keep on playing the field."

"Is that where you head out to with that warrant officer who has the jeep," Mary Catherine wondered, "the nearest field?"

"Nice talk, Mary Cat. I don't see you around the nunnery." Della tucked the newspaper into her ready-bag. "Maybe I ought to set my sights higher, a war correspondent. Anybody find out, is he up for grabs?"

"He's engaged," Cass made up on the spot. "Head over heels for the lucky girl, from the sound of it. Everybody, strap on those chutes in case this moron pilot isn't any better at reading a fuel gauge than the weather."

Mary Catherine couldn't resist a last dig on Della. "You're losing your touch, Delly. You might have known that dreamboat of a correspondent is taken." She spoke with the air of one who had been through enough men to know. "The good ones always are."

"Lieutenant Reinking, sir? I've been looking all over for you."

Not again. Doesn't that damn general have anything else to do, like run the base?
On edge anyway, Ben had intended to slip into his office only for a minute before heading to the communications section and then checking the flight board again. The last two times, the board showed NTO ZV—no takeoff, zero visibility—for Cass's WASP 1 squadron. It spooked him—possibly more than it should, but it spooked him nonetheless. Fog induced crashes. That 1,200-horsepower engine situated directly in back of the pilot seat, like a cocked catapult.
Seattle wrote the book on fog, surely to God they'll scrub the flight, won't they?

Along with fretting about Cass and trying to wind down from leave, he had spent the afternoon with his typewriter in a back room at the base library, wrapping up the piece on Vic. The war did not recognize Sunday, but somehow it was the slowest day of message traffic and his intention was to send in the piece while the sending was good. In the way of that stood a squat broken-nosed hard case in rumpled uniform, nervously fiddling with his cap. Ben eyed him distrustfully until he realized there was no armband of an orderly-room runner on this one.

"All over is the right place to look for me," Ben admitted. "What's on your mind, soldier?"