Amerika (41 page)

‘Three degrees flaps.’

Ava answered, ‘at three.’

I took a deep breath. ‘Ready flag out.’

She knelt up on her. By now the clipper was vibrating like a tuning fork from the combined forces of four radial engines whirling eleven-foot propellers at full RPM.

Now or never.

‘Flag out!’

Ava slid open the window and leaned out, waving and shouting but I couldn’t hear her over the din of the engines, doubly loud because of the open window, not to mention the rum runner’s engine soaring up into full power.

I shouted, ‘Pilot to waist gunner, release the line!’

‘Aye, aye.’

I can’t exactly say we were shot from a cannon. After all, forty tons is forty tons, but for the first time since I’d been flying seaplanes, I literally felt myself shoved back into my seat from the force of motion as the
Dixie Clipper
surged forward so hard her nose began burying itself in the water. But the powerful rum-runner yanked it up before I could counteract it.

Creeley’s boat was thirty yards ahead, pulling hard, the line connecting us as taut as a steel rod. Ziggy hunkered down in the mooring hatch, one hand on the line, the other clamped onto his intercom headphones.

We hadn’t gone a thousand feet when the airspeed indicator ticked into life and was showing twenty-five knots already. So far so good. But forty- five more to go before we had the slightest chance of lifting off, and that bend in the river was getting closer and closer.

I found myself straining against my chest straps, as if that would make her go faster. Ava was doing the same thing.

‘Thirty knots,’ she called.

‘C’mon old girl, you can do it.’

‘C’mon darling Dixie, make us proud,’

‘Thirty five.’

Her hull began slapping the water and I smiled. Creeley’s boat was doing a lot more than pulling us with its five hundred horses, its marine propeller was churning up a roiling wake that broke up the glassy-still water and reduced its suction on the
Dixie Clipper’s
hull, giving us a fighting chance.

‘Fifty knots.’

One-third of the takeoff run left before the turn in the river. Needed seventy, but would chance it with sixty if we hand to. Felt a slight stiffening in the controls, as if she were flexing and stretching after a long nap, but not enough yet to wake up and fly.

Ava’s hand moved up to the flaps control and hovered there, waiting for my call.

‘Not yet,’ I said.

‘Sometime today I hope,’ she said, and then, ‘Fifty-five!’

‘Ziggy, stand bye to release your line!’

‘Standing by,’ Ziggy’s voice a buzzing blur.

The line to the rum-runner slackened as our increasing airspeed began to overtake her top speed. Creeley seemed to read my mind and nervously glanced over his shoulder. He pumped his fist hard.

‘Pull the line!’

Ziggy tugged at it. Nothing. Again, this time more frantically. But the line held.

‘Sixty!’

Controls firm, her wings biting into the morning air, she wanted to fly. Ziggy now halfway out of the mooring hatch, yanking on the line with both hands.

Nothing doing.

If I tried lifting her off now, we’d take the rumrunner along with us, and its weight would pull us back down.

‘Ziggy!’ Ava screamed.

Ziggy’s arms flew up and he disappeared down through the hatch as though he were a puppet. A fraction of a second later Orlando popped up, grabbed the line, yanked it, and the double Carrick knot ‘exploded’ exactly the way it should have, and it slithered down and away like a manila snake.

‘Sixty five.’

‘Full flaps.’

I cranked in nose trim as fast as I could to counteract the wing flaps extending deeper and deeper into the slipstream, dramatically increasing lift. The approaching trees were a wall of green that filled the windscreen. Now or never.

I pulled back on the yoke.

The
Dixie Clipper
didn’t take off so much as she ballooned off the surface of the water in perfect obedience to the rule of flight that allows you to exchange altitude for airspeed. And that’s what we were doing as  the  airspeed  needle  dropped  and  the  altimeter  soared  and  we  were clawing for just enough height to clear the trees that were suddenly upon us in a blurring rush of green and brown and a sudden banging, clanging, explosion of sound that came and went, and just like that we were clear of the trees.

Clear!

I lowered her nose and said a prayer we’d recover our airspeed before stalling. After that boost of height, the controls were mush, the wings wanted to stop working, but God bless the Wright Engine Company for saving our lives in that moment by having made machines that could be pushed past their limits and still keep working hard enough to shove the airspeed needle past the stall speed and into safe territory again.

When we finally reached one hundred-ten knots, I said, ‘How we doing, Mason?’

He answered with forced casualness, ‘Any time you want to cut RPM’s would be fine by me.’

I did so carefully and put the plane into a gentle bank that would take us back over Creeley’s Landing. Our last sight of him as we flew over at five hundred feet was a waving, dancing old man in a speedboat that had just helped us pull off a miracle. How many more we needed before this long, impossible day was over was anybody’s guess.

The rising sun cast long shadows across the Louisiana bayou as we slowly climbed to our cruising altitude of six thousand feet. No way of knowing how strong the winds aloft would be until we got up there and I did some estimations. If they were not too strong, we could make it all the way to the target and then back to our refueling base in Nevada without additional fuel. Nineteen hours by Fatt’s original flight plan, but no way of knowing how long now. Both he and the grand plan were out the window, flying among the stars.

Part of me understood my old friend was dead, but most of me felt he was still alive. The sheer momentum of his personality kept him talking and laughing inside me and I needed that, especially now.

One of the first lessons I learned from him was that it’s easy to lift an airplane off the runway. A five year-old can do it. Airplanes are designed to fly. All they need is enough airspeed for the wings to counteract weight forces by lift forces and up you go. But landing an airplane is another story entirely; you must orchestrate the just the opposite: achieve that perfect meeting between your wheels and the ground by reducing power and airspeed enough to lose altitude, but not so much that you fall out of the sky like a stone.

I turned to Ava. ‘Keep an eye on the store.’

‘Where you going?’

‘Try to raise Couba Island. See what’s going on.’

I unbuckled my seat belt and made my way back to the empty radio operator station directly behind her.   It would have been nice to have a

‘Sparks’ on board, but I had to play with the cards the
Kampfschwimmers
had dealt us.

I stared at the transmitters and receivers but nothing made sense at first. It had been years since I sweated through a flight as the radio operator trying to locate distant radio stations on the RDF locator, or tapping out position reports to Pan Am ground control. Much had changed since I had done this kind of thing.

But then, like a picture coming into perfect focus, everything came back to me in a rush. I turned on all of the equipment, dialed in the correct frequency, grabbed the microphone and said,

‘
Dixie Clipper
calling Couba Island. Come in Couba Island.’

Nothing but the rush of static in my headphones. I tried again but got the same thing.

‘Any luck?’ Ava called out over her shoulder.

‘Either they’re shot up or they’re out of range.’

‘Any other way to reach them?’

I stared at the Morse Key. Its well-thumbed black key brought back many memories of my first days with Pan Am. I slid it closer and began tapping away, slowly at first, and then faster as the familiar code came back to me.

DIXIE CLIPPER CALLING COUBA ISLAND

To my surprise, rapid DIT-DAH’s instantly replied:

COUBA ISLAND, GO AHEAD.

‘We got them!’ My fingers flew, or at least I thought they did as I quickly tapped:

DIXIE CLIPPER ALOFT SIX THOUSAND FEET / SOULS ON BOARD AVA, MASON, FRIEDMAN, ZIEGLER, DIAZ AND SELF/ ENROUTE TO TARGET /ADVISE / CARTER

Another long wait. Then a terse,

RETURN TO BASE IMMEDIATELY /PATTON.

I started to reply but something made me stop. Why the hell would Patton want us to come back? Wasn’t this mission the very thing the Sons of Liberty wanted?

Ava said, ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Not sure. They may have been overrun.’

Ava twisted around in her seat. ‘I don’t believe it. We outnumbered them.’

‘
Kampfschwimmers
are trained commandos. A big difference. Could have happened.’

‘Never.’

‘Say what you want but General Patton -- or somebody claiming to be him - just ordered us to return to base and I don’t like it.’

I hit the key again:

AUTHENTICATE MESSAGE / AVA’S PET NAME FOR YOU

The long silence that followed was answer enough. I knew what Ava was thinking, so I said quickly, ‘Look, he and your mother and the others most likely skedaddled into the bayou to regroup, and they’re in hiding until they can make a counterattack.’

The Morse code began DIT-DAH’ing at me but I ignored it. Ava and I held each other’s eyes until hers tightened slightly and we both came to a silent agreement. I switched off the transmitter.

Just then the wing inspection door behind Mason’s engineering console banged opened and Orlando squeezed his way out. A frown on his face.

‘What’s wrong?’ I said.

He exchanged a quick glance with Mason and then shrugged. ‘Number four engine’s running a little hotter than it should. Can’t figure out why just yet.’

‘Still in the green?’

‘Yes, but I wanted to open the hood, just to be on the safe side.’

In order to make minor engine repairs in flight, Boeing engineers had designed a small passageway inside the massive wings and equipped the rear of each engine with clamshell-like firewall doors that opened onto the back of the engine’s mysterious tangle of hydraulic, oil, and fuel lines available for inspection and possible repair. How Orlando had managed to get out onto the narrow inspection catwalk was a mystery. Especially the outboard engines that were furthest away and where the wing began to narrow.

‘Couldn’t find anything obvious,’ he continued. ‘But most likely we took a round or two.’

I  held  up  the  piece of  paper  with  my  scribbled  words.  ‘They just ordered us to return to base.’

Orlando said, ‘Who’s ‘they?’’

‘My point exactly. The Nazis are running the show - at least the radio shack part of it.’

Professor Friedman roused himself from the Master’s conference chair, as if coming out of a deep sleep. ‘What do you propose we do, captain?’

I glanced at my crew - minus Ziggy who was below decks - and realized that I was pilot-in-command of this harebrained flight and up to me to make the decision to obey or disobey orders. Not Fatt, not Patton, not Trippe. Me. A man in command of people whose frightened faces matched mine if I could only look into a mirror.

I finally said to Mason, ‘Let’s check out the bombsight, shall we?’ He grinned and flexed his fingers. ‘Thought you’d never ask.’

‘Orlando, keep an eye on those engines.’

‘Roger.’

‘Ava, you have the aircraft. Got your bearing okay?’

She nodded silently, the perfect first officer. Even if it was just an act, a good one.

I opened the deck hatch and followed Mason down the crew staircase to the lower deck. We turned left and made our way forward past the galley where Ziggy was clattering and banging pans. He called out breezily as we passed by.

‘Anybody else hungry but me? I missed breakfast by a country mile, what with all the bullets flying.’

I admired his coolness under fire, considering our harebrained takeoff.

‘What you got?’ I said.

He opened and closed a few stainless steel compartments, humming as he did so. ‘Looks like Nawrocki stocked up pretty well. Eggs...bread...fruit...bacon -- if you’re not kosher, that is.’

‘Are you?’

He looked pained. ‘Of course I am.’

‘You don’t look it.’

He raised his eyebrows. ‘Jews are very good at keeping secrets.’

I left him humming with his happy work and made my way forward into the mooring compartment in the nose of the plane, where by now Mason had already uncovered the bombsight stowed near the mooring anchor. Painted olive drab, about two feet high, the bombsight had a series of knobs and flat panels and a sighting eyepiece on top. Never having seen one before, and only having vaguely heard about it, I barely understood its function. Too many things had been happening too fast and I was bound to miss a few. This complicated device was one of them.

Mason grunted in pain and touched his bandaged side.