Amerika (10 page)

‘Clear left.’ I shouted.

‘Clear left.’

I primed number one engine and pressed the starter. The polished metal propeller turned slowly at first, then faster and faster as the engine groaned, sputtered and coughed into life, sending out clouds of blue exhaust smoke.

Ava said from the co-pilot’s seat, ‘Lights...camera...action.’

She’d asked if I wanted company up front. I wasn’t about to turn down a movie star sitting in the right hand seat.

Ziggy’s muffled voice shouted from somewhere in the back, ‘Hey, what kind of theater is this? Where’s your popcorn?’

Number two engine shuddered as the pistons began firing in turn. As I brought it up to its assigned RPM, the clatter quickly smoothed into a steady roar.

‘Sounds sweet,’ Orlando shouted.

Did a quick instrument check; engines in the green, oil pressure steady, cylinder head temps fine; pre-flight finished, ready to taxi.

‘Key West tower, Carter Air four-five requesting permission to taxi active.’

I glanced at Ava, hands in her lap, feet flat on the floor, clear of the rudder pedals, just like I told her. She caught my eye and lifted her hands like she was handcuffed. ‘Don’t worry, won’t touch a thing.’

‘Carter Air, you’re cleared to taxi three-six.’

‘Three-six, Carter Air.’

I leaned out the window and nodded to Abby, who brought both her arms straight up, and then lowered her left one to direct me toward the taxiway. I blew her a kiss. She scowled, too intent on her job to acknowledge fatherly affection. I stuck my fingers in my mouth, stretched my cheeks into a rubbery grin and wiggled my tongue. That made her laugh and roll her eyes.

I mouthed over the engine roar, ‘See you soon.’

She nodded and smiled.

‘Nice kid,’ Ava said.

‘Thanks.’

‘Nice dad, too.’

‘Not really.’

‘A man who makes a face like that can’t be all bad.’

From three thousand feet the Florida Keys are just like the postcards say, ‘An emerald necklace floating on blue-green velvet.’ But even prettier in person.

Heading south from Key West you pass smaller islands; Crawfish Key, Man Key, and Ballast Key. Few folks live there, mostly snakes, lizards, turtles, and alligators, all of which would prefer you never set foot there, leaving them free to run wild and chase and catch and eat each other in an endless cycle of kill-or-be-killed.

When Orlando and I were kids, we’d go with my dad on fishing trips around these lesser keys.  Back then, we needed a strong male bearing down on our rambunctious lives and he was more than happy to oblige. Being fatherless, Orlando needed this even more than me.

But the minute pop left on his three-day trips for the railroad, it was an open invitation for Orlando and me to head out on ‘trips’ of our own. Most were innocent, like stealing candy from drug stores or lobsters from the fishermen’s traps. For us it wasn’t the deed that gave us pleasure, but the getting away with it that made it fun.

Nothing could beat running like the wind with an angry grownup chasing after you, except maybe vaulting over a high wooden fence you knew would stop that grownup cold. And the sheer, exhilarating feeling of laughing so hard you couldn’t breathe, when we would arrive home unscathed. Now O and I were off on another adventure. How it would turn out was anybody’s guess.

Ava tapped me on the shoulder just as we broke free of a line of clouds gathering into a thunderhead. ‘Is that what I think it is?’

‘U-boat.’

Three thousand feet down, the enemy submarine’s bow and stern waves made twin V-shapes on the glassy-smooth sea.

‘Wish to hell it were one of ours,’ I said.

‘One of these days it will be.’

‘Not any time soon. Florida’s going to secede from the Union. And they’re not the only ones. Georgia and North Carolina are voting for it faster than when they repealed Prohibition.’

I put the plane into a shallow left bank for a closer look at the submarine, but careful to stay near the clouds. My Nazi-issued charter certificate allowed me a lot of freedom as to when and where I could fly. But flying this far south of Key West could need some heavy explaining if we got caught.

Ava unbuckled her seatbelt and leaned over my shoulder to look out the window. Wisps of auburn hair tickled my face.

‘Sorry,’ she said.

‘That’s okay.’

‘Bastards. Just who do they think they are?’

‘The winners.’

‘Not if Russia stays in the fight.’

‘Don’t see how when Stalin’s on one side of a mountain scared to death and Hitler’s on the other with an atomic bomb.’

‘So, why hasn’t he dropped it yet?’

I didn’t have an answer. All I could think of was the
Unterseeboot
below, sweeping the Florida Straits of contraband shipping the same way the Yankees did during the Civil War to choke off French and British supplies to the Confederacy.

Ava said, ‘Why isn’t he submerged?’

‘Faster on the surface. Can see farther too.’

She went back and buckled in. ‘I still can’t believe it.’

‘That we gave up?’

‘Yes.’

‘The president got caught between a rock and a hard place.’

‘She should have told Hitler to go to hell.’

‘And where would Miami be today? And Chicago, and St. Louis? And the people who live there? I’m thinking hell.’

She didn’t say anything.

I was about to press my point even further, when suddenly the plane began vibrating like mad. My first instinct was to back off power, which reduced it somewhat, but not completely. Ava and I exchanged a long look, but to her credit she didn’t say a word. Orlando was beside me in an instant.

‘This bucket of bolts will not leave us alone,’ he said.

‘Any ideas?’

‘Prop maybe. Throttle up, one at a time.’

The vibration increased, so I backed off, which helped, but the hands of the altimeter kept slowly unwinding.

Orlando said, ‘Can you put her down?’

‘If I have to, but I don’t want to near that sub. They’ll toss us on board and send our plane to the bottom.’

I tested the controls, first ailerons then rudder. No problems. All gauges in the green. The only thing not working was the radio for some reason.

Puzzling.

‘It’s not the engines, it’s something else,’ I said. ‘Feels like something’s screwy in the tail assembly. Do me a favor, stick your head out the boarding hatch. Tell me what you see.’

Orlando turned to go as I began a slow descending turn to the left. If we had to land, I wanted it to be as far away from the sub as possible on the slimmest of hopes that their lookouts wouldn’t see us.

Ava read my mind. ‘Any way we can hide down there?’

‘Their lookouts probably spotted us a long time ago. Nazi sailors have sharp eyes.’

A sudden blast of noise as Orlando opened the rear boarding hatch. Seconds later, he came thumping up to the cockpit. ‘Center tail brace broke clean in two.’

‘That explains the radio gone. Did we lose the generator?’

‘Hanging on by a wire. But those side braces are shaking us to pieces.’

‘Can you break them off or bend them back?’

‘It can be done.’

I knew what that meant.  ‘Sit here and keep her wings level like we did before.’

I started getting up.

‘Don’t bother, captain,’ Ava said crisply, ‘I have the aircraft.’

‘Huh?’

Instead of answering, she deftly pulled the release pin from the control column, swung it over to her side and maintained a perfect heading.

‘You fly?’

‘Who do you think brought in that Beechcraft last night?’

‘You?’

‘Affirmative.’

‘Who flew it out? He almost killed me.’

‘The new owner - now get back there and fix this bucket of bolts. Orlando, hold his feet.’

No time for twenty questions. We were going down fast.

I cautioned, ‘Watch your elevator trim. She’ll go tail heavy on you when I start climbing around out there.’

‘No kidding.’

‘Keep her just above her stall speed of fifty knots. Otherwise the wind will blow me off, then where will you be?’

‘Don’t want that to happen.’

‘You sure you can fly this bird?’

She ignored me, her stiffened shoulders and firm grip on the controls answer enough.

As I scrambled past the camping gear, Ziggy pulled me to his ashen face. ‘Where you going?’

‘Out.’

‘You don’t have a parachute.’

‘Don’t need one. I’m coming back.’

He shut his eyes and shook his head. ‘I knew it was going to end like this.’

Orlando slid open the passenger boarding hatch and fastened the small step ladder in place.

I shouted to be heard over the roaring wind. ‘Once I’m up, hold onto my ankles and I’ll work my way down.’

He held up a pair of pliers.
I pocketed them, tightened my belt, buttoned my collar button and climbed into the howling wind stream.

The S-38 has a forest of struts and braces designed to hold her wings, engines, and tail together like a complicated ‘cats’ cradle,’ with intersecting wires and braces to keep everything in correct aerodynamic tension.

I could see at once what had happened: the big ‘V’ shaped strut that leads from the rear tip of the fuselage, up to each of the tail booms was still intact. But the horizontal braces halfway up had snapped in two. The broken pieces, each attached to its respective strut, fluttered and spun and moaned, making the entire tail vibrate in sympathy.

‘Let go my feet,’ I shouted.

Belly-down, I slid along the curved back of the fuselage until I reached the base of the V strut. I grabbed it and pulled myself up until I stood with the wind tearing at my back. The small, propeller-driven generator that powered our radio, normally attached to the center of the horizontal brace, spun around in the slipstream like a dervish. Without the radio we were sunk.

It took me three lunging tries, but I finally caught hold of the wire, reeled it in, snipped it free and stuffed it inside my shirt, wincing as the small propeller blades dug into my chest.

The plane nosed up slightly as Ava applied trim to balance my movement. She was doing okay, but with the engines throttled back we were still descending. I was afraid to look for the U-Boat.

It took me longer than I planned, but I finally managed to bend each brace back upon itself and then around each of the struts. They still rattled and moaned, but the vibration stopped. The V strut looked like it could hold fine on its own until we got back home, as long as I didn’t play fighter pilot.

I started making my way back to the hatch, my shoes slipping and scrabbling on the fuselage until I touched Orlando’s outstretched hand. He yanked me inside like a hooked fish. I headed for the cockpit and strapped in.

Moments later we were safely above the clouds, the U-Boat somewhere far behind, and the Dry Tortugas just coming into view on the horizon.

I said to Ava, ‘Why didn’t you tell me you knew how to fly?’

‘You didn’t ask.’

‘Multi-engines?’

‘Enough to get rated.’

‘Not bad.’

A tight smile. ‘Thanks.’ She wiggled the control wheel. ‘You want her back?’

‘Keep her for a while. Where’d you learn?’

‘You won’t believe me.’

‘Try.’

‘Amelia Earhart.’

‘You’re right, I don’t.’

‘It’s true. They hired her as a consultant for
Ceiling Zero
. We hit it off like sisters. Always wanted to fly, so she took me up one day.’

‘How was it?’

‘She’s good, Sam, very good.’ Ava hesitated. ‘That is, until she went down.’

‘Think she and Noonan are still alive?’

She shook her head. ‘It’s been over four years. Flying’s a dangerous job.’

‘So I’ve heard.’

Back in 1937, Amelia Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan had disappeared somewhere in the vast Pacific during their second attempt to fly around the world. The whole world had searched for them, or so it seemed. Navy ships, airplanes, ocean liners, tramp steamers, the works. It’s hard to lose dreams. Harder still when we lose the dreamers.

‘I knew Freddie Noonan,’ I said. ‘Taught me navigation when he was with Pan Am in the early 30s. He ran their school.’

‘How was he?’

‘The best, like Earhart.’

‘What went wrong, do you suppose?’

A thousand things can go wrong when you’re flying from A to B: Winds aloft, temperature change, unreported turbulence, lightning strikes, hail, icing, and all you’ve got is a lousy map, a pair of dividers, a bubble octant to shoot the stars - providing you can see them - and a lot of prayer, providing you believe in God. But I don’t know of any pilot, when the world’s turning upside down and he doesn’t know how to get it upright again, won’t pray to a power greater than his own to save his sorry hide.

Everybody in the world knew about Amelia Earhart’s fateful flight. I tried to imagine my own version of the story, where Freddie Noonan, a tall, dark-haired, brooding kind of guy, hunched over his map inside that tiny Lockheed
Electra
, maybe his hands shaking from having one too many-- although I never believed that about him - and he brushes back his lanky black hair that keeps falling across his forehead and blocks his view of the vast, blank, blue space of the Pacific Ocean, while he desperately searches for Howland Island; a dot that says it’s there, but it’s not.