Trophy for Eagles (18 page)

The press treated Jack Winter well, but Millie was the real celebrity. And even worse than Bandy admitting his jealousy to
himself was that she knew it, and kidded him unmercifully about it.

California was like old home week for Bruno. Women with whom
he'd slept in his early-twenties barnstorming tours but whose names
he'd forgotten began descending on Oakland as soon they saw the headline "Famous German Ace Arrives." Hafner smiled as he
wondered if Nungesser was looking down from some pilot's heaven,
checking to see if any of
his
old girlfriends showed up.

Bruno's bulk filled a chair to overflowing in the little office overlooking the field. He scratched Nellie's head as he read Cy Bidwell's column in
Aviation Age,
for once agreeing with him.
Bidwell argued that the Pineapple Derby was twice as important as
the Lindbergh flight, because it was more than twice as difficult. The route was shorter, but Hawaii was just a dot in the middle of a
vast ocean. A minor navigation error would send a plane off into a
vast, empty Pacific.

Hafner put down the magazine and assessed the problem. If he
had agreed to bring Dusty along, one man could have used the sextant while the other flew. But the furor over Lindbergh clearly
showed that the press was for the solo pilot, and he was still glad that
he had left Dusty on Long Island. Navigation wasn't his long suit, even though he had practiced in New York, while preparing for the
Atlantic race. The problem was that he hadn't really been serious, for he hadn't worried about it, knowing that if he missed France he had an entire continent to aim for. The fact that two planes had already flown the route didn't change anything. The Army plane,
Bird of Paradise,
had special radio equipment and three engines. Then some dumb civilians, indifferent to the prize money, had taken off in mid-July in a Travelair monoplane and wound up in a
treetop on some little island next to Oahu. It proved his point about flying solo. The press commented briefly on the flights, then turned its attention back to Lindbergh. The two flights didn't seem to affect
interest in the Pineapple Derby, either.

Right now, though, he had other things on his mind. Winning
didn't mean much in the way of dollars to him, but the prestige was
critical for building airplanes and selling them. The option he had
on a factory at Roosevelt Field had fallen through; the company was
tied up in litigation, and he couldn't take possession. Charlotte was
working on another deal; maybe she could pull it off.

God, they had a strange relationship. He wondered what his
mother and father, both stiffly formal, would have made of it. If
Germany had won the war, where would he be? Commanding a
squadron in an African colony somewhere, with a proper wife back
home in Germany and a sleep-in native girl. He laughed—Charlotte
was
his sleep-in native.

But she was good. They generated a magic that was hard to
duplicate. Other women were fun, but none provided the obsessive
intensity of Charlotte's lovemaking. And he needed her. She not only carried the business in her head, she knew where to go for money when they needed it, and brought the right people into the
factory. Charlotte had made friends with Igor Sikorsky out on Long
Island—he wondered just how good their friendship really was—and Sikorsky had provided leads on some magnificent engineers.

And when Sikorsky's business fell off, as it did after the Fonck crash,
Charlotte had even leased the ramshackle facility they were using and hired many of his junior engineers and mechanics, just so they'd have paychecks.

He rolled an ashtray shaped like an automobile tire back and forth
on the desk, feeling edgy. The business with Bandfield had been
unsettling. He was glad it was behind him. It was curious, but Charlotte had never inquired about the fire, never asked what he thought about it.

The magazines and newspapers were filled with talk about the
"modern woman." Hell, he'd married one. It was a good arrangement, one that suited them both. But he didn't know how long it would last. One or the other would tire of it, unless the business
expanded and served as a safety valve. They could stay together for
as long as they were wealthy, busy—and frequently apart.

He knew that one of the saving graces would be her enjoyment of
being a businesswoman, of having a say in matters normally re
served for men. Charlotte was as totally dependable as a business
partner as she was unreliable as a spouse. He needed her for the
day-to-day work; he could do the long-range planning. More impor
tant, their tumultuous relationship embraced a particular level in which he valued her respect, and she in turn demanded his. As earthy as their partnership was, he could never comprehend it in
any but the most abstract engineering terms. If it was as if they were
two essential gears in the clockwork of life, each gear fitted with
teeth of totally different sizes and shapes, yet somehow still meshing
at certain speeds and certain times.

It was strange, after all their intimacies—and they had been intense beyond telling—and all their fights, he had never told her how he felt. It was something he would like to have done, if he could have known the response in advance, if he could be assured that she would not ridicule him.

The nasal-toned Oakland operator had been promising to put the call through all afternoon, but he still jumped when the phone rang.

"Hello, Charlotte? How are things in Long Island? What time is it there?"

Charlotte cradled the French-style phone between her head and neck.

"Don't yell, Bruno, I can hear you fine. It's seven here. I'm calling from the New Jersey office."

She reached down and ruffled Dusty's reddish hair. He kissed her
bellybutton with sucking sounds that caused her to clasp her hand over the mouthpiece.

"What's going on at the plant?"

"Plenty. That's why I called. I need a decision from you right
now. A special situation has developed with the Aircraft Corpora
tion. I can get controlling interest for us for almost nothing. Curtiss is trying to buy it and Ned Dorfman doesn't want to sell it to them. You remember how Curtiss cheated him on that bomber contract. He hates them."

Rhoades looked up at her and grinned, mouthing the words "Say
hi to him for me."

Hafner snorted. "Who doesn't hate Curtiss? They've screwed everybody in the business. What does Dorfman want for it?"

"He'll swap stock with Hafner Aircraft on a one-for-one basis, and
one million cash on the side. He really just wants out. Says he's
going down to Florida to waterfront property. We can swing it, but we'll be short of cash for a while." Rhoades ran his tongue up and
down her thigh.

Bruno was enthused, shouting into the mouthpiece, "Wonderful! We won't have to build a new building. And he's got some great
engineers there, more of the Russians Sikorsky brought over and
couldn't find work for. We need the factory space." Hafner gazed out at the flight line, his mind racing ahead. "And we can use most of his working people. They're the best in the business with aluminum construction. We'd have to let most of the management go, all except the guy running contracts—his name is Ferguson, I think. He knows how to soft-talk the brass at Wright Field."

Charlotte fluttered her eyes at Rhoades, put her finger to her lips.
"So you think it's okay to go ahead?"

"Ja,
go ahead. I'll be back as soon as I can to help work out the
details."

Rhoades moved between her legs, slid up to her.

"What's that? I can't hear you, Charlotte. Speak up—this is a bad connection."

Charlotte shifted to ease Rhoade's access. "It must be the line, Bruno. I don't hear anything."

Her hips began to move. Rhoades moaned. Charlotte put her hand over the mouthpiece.

"Hang up, dammit," he gasped.

"Just keep moving," she whispered back.

"Charlotte, are you there? I can barely hear you."

"I can hear you fine. The real beauty of acquiring them is that they control both the Mead & Wilgoos Engine and the Premium Propeller companies, and have a big chunk of Federated Airlines. We can build a plane, put our own engines and props on it, and fly it on our own airline."

"Go ahead and give him a handshake, Charlotte. Have the lawyers draw up some papers and we'll settle it when I get back."

He carefully replaced the earpiece into the hook, pleased once again at how well Charlotte served him.

The same was true for Dusty. As the line went dead, Charlotte wrapped her legs tightly around him, ratcheting him to her with convulsive undulations.

"I'm sorry about that, but it took him a long time to get a call through, and I had to talk to him."

Rhoades laid his head by her cheek, moving, oblivious to everything. She stared at the ceiling. The airplane business was so risky;
you went from one design to the next, with everything riding on
how well it did. You could never be safe, never take it easy. Maybe
that was why she liked it.

Elated by the conversation, sexually stirred by Charlotte's voice,
compressed and distorted as it was by the phone, Bruno Hafner
flexed his arms, trying to work out the recurring ache laid across his
shoulders ten years before by a British bullet. He'd spent only four days in the hospital before going back to his unit. Now, after long flights, the pain returned.

He glanced out the window to where Murray was fussing around
the
Miss Charlotte,
supervising the installation of the radio. The
question of radios had come up on Long Island; he'd decided against
it because of the weight involved. There was no question about making landfall across the Atlantic. In the Pacific he'd need all the help he could get to reach Oahu. He glanced down at the U.S. Hydrographic chart spread out on his desk. There was nothing
between San Francisco and the little arc of islands that was Hawaii,
and damn little beyond. Except for a lot of water.

Murray had really done a good job investigating what Hegenber-
ger and Maitland, the two Army pilots of the
Bird of Paradise,
had
done, and scouted the market, finally coming to him as eager as a
puppy with diagrams for both a transmitter/receiver set and a direc
tion finder. He had agreed to the direction finder, but said no to the
transmitter/receiver. He wasn't very good at Morse code—taking it
in English rather than German somehow intensified the difficulty—and would be busy enough with the sextant. Murray tried to tell him
that it was the wrong choice, that the Army plane hadn't been able to use the direction finder very much, but Bruno was adamant. There was no sense carrying something he couldn't use.

It was, after all, only a matter of risk, something he'd grown used
to flying on the Western Front. There the degree of risk had been
constant, even though the kinds of risk had changed. At first, flying
against the French in a quiet sector, the danger was mostly the risk of crashing from inexperience. Then as he gained flying skill, that
risk declined, but his unit was transferred to where the British were
operating, and combat risk went up.

Even as he gained experience and victories, the risk stayed very
small. He would go into battle eagerly, pursuing his lust for killing
with confidence in himself, but concerned about the quality of his airplanes. Late in the war, even the good designs like the Fokker
were flawed by bad materials and sloppy workmanship. He remem
bered when they finally got the D VII fighters. Wonderful machines, barely fast enough, but very strong and able to hang on their props and fire straight up. Things still would happen. He
closed his eyes and it was like yesterday, flying with Fritz Frederichs
on a test hop. They had played around in mock combat, and were coming back to land when the ammunition cans in Fritz's Fokker exploded, turning him into a burning cinder in seconds. A stupid
design error had placed the ammunition boxes where the heat of the
engine had ignited them and blown up the fuel tank, snuffing out the life of his best friend.

The risks were different here. He knew his plane and engine could make the flight; the only imponderable was his navigation skills. He thought they were sufficient; if they weren't, so be it.

He yawned and stretched pleasurably. That's what the weaklings
couldn't understand, the necessity of having your senses height
ened, to take valid risks to make life worth living. He didn't mean stupid things like racing a car across a train crossing, but something
worth doing. He could have let Murray put the little time bomb in Bandfield's plane back in Long Island, but he'd done it himself, partly because he wanted to be sure it was done right, and partly because he enjoyed the danger involved.