Amerika (40 page)

‘No kidding. How is he?’

‘Short, now shut up.’

She  advanced  the  port  engine  and  the 
Dixie  Clipper
  slowly  swung around to line up with the orange and white mooring buoy. Ziggy’s head poked out of the bow hatch, he turned, grinned and saluted, just as a small green dinghy pushed off from the dock and putt-putted straight for us. A bent over figure sat crouched in the back, his hand on the tiller and his jaw set.

‘That would be Mr. Creeley?’ I said.

‘One and the same.’

Minutes later, Ziggy leaned out of the hatch, hands outstretched to snag the buoy line. He snagged it expertly and tied it off onto one of the bow bollards.

‘Cut engines?’ Ava asked.

‘Affirmative.’

The Wright radials clattered into silence. A long beat before the surrounding trees and bushes came alive with the excited cries of birds and beasts staring astonished at a forty-ton flying boat floating in the midst of their quiet little world.

Ava said, ‘Excuse me.’

Before  I  could  react  she  plopped  into  my  lap,  slid  open  my  side window, leaned out and shouted, ‘Lester, you old buzzard, we need some gas and we need it fast.’

‘Child, is that you?’

‘Who’d you think it was? Some high falutin’ movie star or something?’

‘Hey, girl, that’s what you is now, ain’t you?’

‘Sure am, and I’ll give you an autograph to prove it, providing you gas up this big bird.’

Creeley took in the immense size of the clipper looming over him like an aluminum skyscraper. ‘What in the God’s green earth is this thing doing here?’

‘Gas.’

He shook his head as if trying to wake up. ‘Uh... how much you figure you need?’

‘Fill ‘er up.’

‘You’re joking.’

‘C’mon Lester, don’t be a pain.’

He gulped. ‘Cash on the barrel then.’

‘My credit’s good here and you know it.’

‘Not that good.’ He folded his arms and stood there balancing easily in the bobbing dinghy.

I tapped Ava on the shoulder. ‘My turn.’

She slid off my lap and I leaned out the window. ‘Good morning, sir. Captain Samuel Carter, Pan American Airways at your service. Do you have any diving gear? Face masks, anything like that?’

‘What the hell for?’

‘Seems we got shot up by some Nazis an hour ago, and I want to check the damage.’

A  slow  smile  spread  across  his  leathery  face  like  a  hungry  catfish spotting dinner. ‘You don’t say now.’

I thumbed in the direction of the tail where she’d been stitched with bullet holes. ‘See for yourself.’

He examined the damage. ‘One of them compliance fighters pounced you, huh?’

‘Ground fire.’

‘You don’t say!’

He considered this new bit of information, adding it up like a miser stacking coins. He frowned and leaned forward for another look at the fuselage. ‘Thought Looft-HAN-see was flying these big birds now.’

‘They are.’

‘Where’s your swastikas?’

‘What do you mean?’

He pointed to the side of the
Dixie Clipper’s
fuselage. ‘All I see is stars and bars.’

In the chaos of trying to escape, I never noticed what the Couba Island flight crew had done. Overnight they had painted over the loathsome triple- tail swastikas, and then scraped off the LUFTHANSA lettering to reveal the American flag that Trippe had painted on the sides of all the Pan Am planes in 1939, when war broke out in Europe to proclaim their American nationality.

Creeley said, ‘Looks mighty pretty.’

‘Be nice to see it flying over Berlin one of these days, don’t you think?’

He considered this for a long minute. His jaw worked his tobacco like a cow’s cud. Then he spat. ‘This plane got something to do with that?’

‘It might.’

‘Secret mission?’

‘Didn’t say that.’

He nodded. ‘No, sir, you didn’t. But it could be, right?’

A long pause.

‘About that gas,’ I said.

He spat again. ‘I’ll damn well pump it for you myself.’

I left Mason to supervise the re-fueling while Orlando and I took turns diving under the clipper with Creeley’s ancient gear, which was sketchy at best. But the sputtering air compressor and hose worked well enough to keep air flowing through the diving mask.

The water was clear enough for me to determine that the hull was basically sound, except for two rows of bullet holes near the nose that needed plugging. The clipper was built with a double hull for collision emergencies, but machine gun bullets weren’t like floating logs. The slugs had torn through both the outer and inner hulls like a screwdriver jammed through a melon. Our bilge pumps couldn’t keep up with that much water, so Orlando and I needed to fashion some kind of plugs of that would tide us over until the clipper could be properly repaired.

With Creeley’s help we concocted a hybrid blend of bamboo plugs wrapped with oakum and hammered them into the holes. True, we had only  half-solved  the  problem;  the  inner  hull  was  still  holed  and  held hundreds of gallons of water, but in theory the sump pumps could get rid of that water before we took off.

IF we took off.

I had been nervously kicking that can down the road the whole time we were working on the hull because I didn’t want to do the math, which was this: a gallon of gasoline weighs five-point-eight pounds. Each of our topped-off sponson tanks now held two thousand gallons, which means we had taken on an additional twenty-three thousand pounds.

Not a problem when the Boeing 314 had nice long run to lug that kind of weight into the air. But in our case, Creeley’s Landing was located on a narrow inlet with a decided hard left turn to the water’s course about two miles  downwind  -  make  that  no  wind.  The morning sun was well established, but it had brought no wind along with it. The water surface was like polished aluminum. When it came to the
Dixie Clipper
trying to break free of its tenacious surface tension, it might as well be glue.

My idea was a simple. Making it a reality would be the challenge. I explained it to Creeley and finished by saying, ‘You got a boat with some muscle to it?’

‘I might.’

‘How much?’

He departed in his little green dinghy without saying another word. Minutes later the thundering roar of a diesel marine engine shattered the morning stillness as a massive, forty-foot long, low-slung symphony of polished mahogany and chrome burst from behind the landing and split the waters like a scalpel as it raced toward us. It slowed to a stop in a slew of spray that sparkled in the sunshine.

Over the contented burble of the massive engine, Creeley said, ‘Will this do?’

I took in the immense size of the craft. ‘What the hell is it?’

He patted the steering wheel and said slyly, ‘I wasn’t always in the aviation business.’

Ava said, ‘Lester was a rum-runner. Made a fortune. Lost it, too, didn’t you?’

Creeley bristled. ‘Didn’t lose the boat though.’

‘Good thing, since Mother was one of your investors.’

‘Your mother?’ I said.

‘She likes her bourbon, and didn’t appreciate it when Prohibition came along. So she and some of her cronies ponied up a grubstake for Lester, who kept them in their cups, at least for a while.’

I said to Creeley, ‘What you got for power?’

‘Liberty Vee-twelve. Five hundred-twenty-five horses.’ He revved it briefly as if to prove his claim and the birds screeched in complaint.

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Let’s you and me go for a ride.’

I hopped into the rum-runner and Creeley took us down to the bend in the river. Once there, I measured the tree height and did some rough calculations. Didn’t like the answers I came up with, but stayed with it until I finally found a set of numbers that didn’t make my stomach sink with fear, just thrash around on the surface instead.

Creeley observed me in silence, and then said, ‘Think we can make it, captain?’

‘Got no choice.’

‘My kind of odds. Count me in.’

Forty tons of airplane is a lot. If I had done my takeoff calculations right, and I knew I had because Fatt had been a good teacher, then I had roughly ten thousand feet of water ‘runway’ to lift eighty thousand pounds of aluminum and people into the air and clear a stand of cypress trees fifty- feet high. I had four radial engines putting out a total of six thousand eight hundred horsepower to do the job, which would have been child’s play in open water where a flying boat’s takeoff run is endless and her engines have plenty of time to develop full output.

On land I could have solved the problem a different way: stand on the brakes and bring the engines up to full power before starting my takeoff roll. I had done it hundreds of times in the past. But that was land, this was water, and while the laws of physics can’t be beaten, they can be bent a bit.

With everybody strapped in and ready to go, we were going to try.

Think of a slingshot. I know it sounds preposterous, but I had no choice. Loaded with over twenty thousand additional pounds of avgas, no way in hell we were going anywhere but back and forth on this windless, calm water without a creative plan of action.

I keyed my intercom. ‘All set, Ziggy?’

Back in his familiar station in the open nose hatch, he turned and saluted impressively. ‘Standing by SIR!’

‘You ever get sick of Hollywood, I’ll get you a job with Pan Am.’

‘No thank you, SIR!’

‘Got your line release all figured out?’

He held up the end of a rope that led to a strange-looking knot tied across both bollards. I had originally planned on rigging a simple ‘exploding knot’ like a clove hitch, that would allow quick release when pulled, but Creeley had come up with something called a ‘Double Carrick Bend’ which was a ten times stronger knot. And considering what we were going to do, we would need it - at both ends of the plane.

‘Pilot to waist gunner.’

Orlando’s deep voice answered with a chuckle. ‘That would be me, sir.’

‘Your line all set?’

‘In my hands waiting for your command.’

I leaned out the window and waved at Creeley, down and to the left of us, crouched over the wheel of his rum runner. He waved back, advanced the throttle and centered up on the plane. His maneuver took up the slack from the line that ran from our nose bollard to the rum-runner’s stern cleats. He had wound the line around his gunwale cleats too, for good measure.

A haze of diesel smoke drifted across the still waters from his burbling engine. Those damn still waters. Why wasn’t there any wind?

I ducked back inside. ‘Stand by your flag.’

Ava unrolled the small American flag Pan Am co-pilots place outside on a stanchion after landing, after the tradition of a ship arriving in port. Only this time we weren’t arriving, we were departing, and the flag would be Creeley’s signal to hit full throttle.

I said to her, ‘Things are going to get noisy real soon, so here’s the deal, when-’

‘When you call for flaps I keep my finger on the solenoid so they’ll keep deploying without stopping, got it, got it, GOT IT. You told me that hundred times already.’

‘Just want to be sure.’

She tapped the flag against her palm and then looked over at me.

‘Didn’t mean to yell at you like that.’

‘That’s okay, you’re fired.’ She grinned. ‘Just like that?’

‘It’s the Pan Am way. No second chance with insubordination.’

‘All along I thought Hollywood was bad.’

‘Juan Trippe makes Jack Warner look like Mother Goose.’ I said.

‘That I’d like to see.’

‘If we get through this in one piece, we will.’

Don’t ask me why I said that, I just imagined the two of us doing something other than running for our lives, and I liked the thought. But it lasted about as long as a firefly’s flash as the task at hand came rushing back.

‘Pilot to crew, prepare for takeoff.’

Mason,  Ziggy,  Orlando  and  Ava  dutifully  answered  in  turn,  and  I almost laughed at my idea of a ‘crew,’ but it wasn’t funny, it was scary.

Ava and I went through the engine sequence start, and two minutes later, with magneto checks accomplished, all four engines were turning over sweetly, sending a vibration through the plane much the same as a heartbeat does in a human being. Instruments in the green, pre-flight check done, I flexed my fingers for a brief second before closing them over the throttles.

‘Stand by,’ I said.

Ava sat up straight. ‘Standing by.’

I slowly advanced the throttles. But instead of moving gracefully away from the dock, the clipper sat there, tied to it with the strong manila line leading back from Orlando’s gun station to the dock.

‘Waist gunner, line status,’ I said over the increasing engine roar.

‘Holding steady,’ Orlando said.

‘Ready close cowl flaps fifty.’ Mason said. ‘Standing by.’

The cylinder head temperatures were rising fast.  The plane wasn’t designed to be held back on a leash like a straining greyhound and her engines were showing the strain. The small flaps encircling the streamlined engine cowls were doing their best to let air in to cool down the cylinders. But once we started our takeoff run, they would add drag unless we closed them partway.