Trophy for Eagles (3 page)

Bandfield looked anxious. "How much will it be? I'd planned on
just tying the airplane down."

The tall pilot laughed. "No charge. Byrd is very hospitable."

Lindbergh knew from experience that all Bandfield could handle now was a cup of coffee and some sleep. He handed him a Thermos
as they drove in a borrowed Essex to a shack where a folding cot and
two Army blankets waited. "Not the Plaza, Bandy, but you'll need
to get some sleep before the briefing tomorrow. The latrine's around
the corner. Tomorrow, if you want, I'll get you a room where I'm staying. See you in the morning."

Bandfield awoke six hours later, champagne corks popping through his sinuses and muscles tightened like a sardine-tin lid,
head pounding from the engine fumes. He had two hours before the
meeting—plenty of time to check the airplane, get some breakfast, and do some thinking.

Back in Salinas, his old friend, partner, and mentor Hadley Roget would already by elbow-deep in another project, probably tinkering
with the racer, cracking his stream of tired jokes. As much as they
had argued building the airplane, Hadley would be as confident that
Bandy had made Long Island as he was that he would make Paris.

It seemed incredible that the two of them had rolled his airplane out of the hangar for the first time only four days earlier. Working around the clock with pick-up help, they had built it in just eight
weeks of calico cat/gingham dog fighting. It was a battle between
Bandfield's hard engineering practice and Roget's inventive genius. Clarice, Hadley's wife, would bring them coffee, wincing at their
swearing. They argued and yelled even as they built, but no matter how angry or frustrated they were, the hammering and the gluing
never stopped. As a result, Bandy had the sleekest airplane in the
world, powered by a 220-horsepower Wright Whirlwind engine and
fueled by an enormous note at the bank.

If he won, the Orteig Prize would pay off the bank, and there
would be a little left over to build some airplanes, improved versions of what he was flying. He loved Hadley Roget like a father, but next
time, he had said, the airplane would be built his way, according to
sound engineering practice, and with no cockamamie unproven ideas like Hadley's full-span flaps and single-strut landing gear.

The fuselage-building process that Bandfield had invented was
radical enough. They had made male and female molds out of
concrete, then used heat and a vacuum bag to mold plywood into
any shape desired. He had the vision, and Hadley was enough of a
master craftsman to make it work. The fuselage was a shell of
plywood strengthened with formers, and when the big tanks needed
for the ocean hop were removed, capable of carrying the pilot and four passengers in relative comfort.

Their biggest argument had come over the cowling and wheel
covers that Bandfield had insisted on. Roget swore that the engine would overheat and that mud would catch in the covers. Bandfield
had worked it all out on a little wind tunnel he had built out of a
packing crate and an old fan. His lungs still ached from sucking on
the big White Owl cigars to get smoke to blow through the tunnel. The flight confirmed the test results; he'd averaged 125 miles per hour coming out, the engine running cool all the way.

In the end, all the arguments had ended in a draw, for he'd been wrong about Hadley's flaps. They worked like a charm, cutting his
takeoff distance by about a third, and making the approaches easier.
But the single-strut gear still worried him—he still hadn't made a
takeoff with the full fuel load he'd need to get to Paris, and he had a
vision of the plane sitting in a Fatty Arbuckle pratfall, gear spread
wide.

Their final argument had been about the airplane's name. Roget
wanted to call it the
Bandfield Bullet;
Bandy insisted on the
Roget
Rocket,
and the older man graciously gave in.

It was too expensive to telegraph, let alone telephone, the coast to
confirm his arrival. He carried six $5 bills, three in his wallet, three
in his shoe, and they had to last all the way to Paris and back. The nest egg he'd built up so painfully during his years in school, repairing and souping up cars, had been wiped out by his mother's
final illness, an excruciating bout with failing kidneys that left her
wracked with pain and drenched with sweat day after day. Even after
selling the truck he and Hadley had converted into a mobile repair shop, he was still in debt for the funeral bills and the airplane. Anyhow, no news would be good news. Every paper in the world was reporting on the New York-Paris race and would be quick to pick up on a crash.

There had been time for only one short test flight before he headed for Long Island, the last of the contestants to arrive. The
premier pilots in the world were in competition for the Orteig Prize, and he felt lucky to be with them. Except for the fractured fuel line and the failure of the new artificial horizon just out of St. Louis, the
flight out had been uneventful. Bandfield had flown the rest of the
way on needle and ball, accepting as ordinary working conditions a
cabin so cramped that they'd had to build a recess in the firewall for
the rudder pedals. For twenty hours, the engine's heat had roasted his feet while the rest of his body froze.

He opened the small valise that he'd tucked between his seat and the big tank that filled most of the cabin area. A clean pungent odor
ghosted through the usual gas-and-grease aircraft smell. Nestled
among the clean shirt and two pairs of BVDs and socks was a bar of
Fels-Naphtha soap, so strong it made you feel clean just sniffing it.
Clarice must have slipped it in, knowing he'd be doing his laundry in the sink. He was content; between the valise and the thirty
dollars, he had all he needed. If he got to Paris, there'd be plenty of
money to buy anything he wanted. If he didn't, he wouldn't need what he had.

He sanded the back of his hand on his stubble and decided to risk
the cold water and shave. Lindbergh was going to be introducing him to some famous people, names he'd read about for years. He wondered how he'd be received, an unknown pilot in an unknown airplane.

The asphalt road to Roosevelt Field disappeared in the murky rain,
merging anonymously with the roadside bushes, the glaucous yellow reflection of the headlights running everything together like dried paint on a palette. They could have been traveling in any direction, any dimension. The long black car, high gear groaning at the twenty-mile-per-hour pace, entered a lane of trees, and the reflections seemed to shift their route of travel from horizontal to vertical, as if they were falling straight down a well shaft. His stomach protested the drop until the horizon was restored suddenly
by the subdued glimmer of light from the open doors of a hangar.

The gloomy, foreboding precipitation had the same granular texture he remembered from storms along the Baltic coast, where
sea and sand mixed with the gritty industrial effluvia to produce a textured rain. Bruno Hafner rolled the window down and thrust his
hand out, gathering moisture to cool his brow.

He was tired and bored. Flying in peacetime was so different from, and in many ways more difficult than, flying in war. Even late in 1918, when there were shortages of fuel, oil, tires, every
thing, there was still a mechanism to get things done. If an airplane
needed repair, crews worked all night to have it on the line, ready for its pilot in the morning. And the flights were short; one might
have to fly four or five times a day, but only an hour at a time. Now
he had to attend to things personally, not to win victories for King
and Kaiser, but to face the broad Atlantic in a flight that would last more than a day. He told himself that it was worth the work and the
risk—if only they could get on with it.

"We're here, boss." Murray Roehlk's gravelly voice seemed to
reach up in apology from his toes. In the back of the Marmon town
car, Hafner placed the cashmere lap rug tenderly around the portly dachshund asleep next to him. He got out to stretch. As he tried to untie his muscles and clear his brain, he suppressed his usual unreasoning anger with Murray, forcing a civil tone.

"What time is it, Murray?"

"Six. You can wash up and I'll go get us some breakfast."

Hafner's stomach barrel rolled at the word
breakfast.
Last night he'd been drinking Johnny Walker Black Label "straight off the boat" at the Club Vendome on 56th Street, confident that there wouldn't be any flying in the morning. The Vendome was "his"
speakeasy, where the owner was pleased to have a distinguished flyer as a guest. He was the club celebrity and rarely had to spend a dime.

His control slipped, and he glared at Murray, bellowing, "Scram." Then, the oversight dawning, he said, "Make sure you take Nellie for a walk. I've got something for her to eat when you come back."

Murray nodded, and slipped from behind the wheel with the
dog's leash. Hafner sober was no prize; hungover he was a man to
avoid.

The big German slipped back into the car and spread his bulk out
over the backseat, looping his legs over the Marmon's mohair upholstery, knowing he had to go through his ritual of self-hate to bottom out his mood, to get functioning again. He thought about
searching for a flask, but decided against it, swearing for the fourth
morning that week that he would stop drinking, cut out all the
habits that gave such intense transitory pleasure that the rest of life
was pallid.

Lately, it was taking so much longer to get drunk, and even longer to recover. He remembered the old days, back in France,
indiscriminately sampling the captured wines and cognacs, drinking
whatever was poured. A few glasses of Bordeaux at dinner, a drink or
two afterward, and he was out cold. But he'd be on the line before dawn, checking over his Fokker, joking with the other pilots, eager to get airborne. Now he had to drink all evening to feel it. His hangovers lasted till noon and were different, depressing. With the
Staffel,
a hangover was something to laugh about, a trophy like a victory. Now it clung like a stinking black octopus around his shoulders, reproaching him for all he did and didn't do.

Even at the end of the war, when his scoring string was brought to
a halt by the Armistice, he hadn't felt the same bone-devouring
depression. People were always saying that everything was relative. Nothing was. In 1918, he was being shot at every day, didn't have a
mark in the bank, no time for romance except for quick tumbles
with the local unwashed farm girls, and he was completely happy.
Less than ten years later, no one was shooting, he had become wealthy selling surplus arms around the world, and he enjoyed a
beautiful rich blond wife as well as a string of young girlfriends. But
he was totally miserable.

He walked himself painfully through his analysis, working to get to the pit of his self-reproach, to worry his secrets like a terrier, and then to bound up, ready for the day. The reasons for his self-pitying black moods were paralyzingly simple. The first was good, one he
could talk about to anyone. In 1918, he had lived in an ordered
world in a powerful Germany he believed in, and where he was
famous as the youngest ace to win the Pour le Merite. His squadron
mates liked him, he had dined with the crown prince, his face appeared on postcards, and he was courted by the airplane man
ufacturers when he flew in the fighter competitions. He had scored forty-five times in aerial combat. The official records credited him
with only twenty-seven, because he had given away eighteen victo
ries to grateful young pilots to build their confidence.

Giving away victories was unusual. The reason he had done it was tied to the puzzling, unsavory second cause of his depression, an evil appetite he could admit only to himself, an appetite for
killing even more than for victory. He remembered his first realiza
tion of his obsession precisely, on May 10, 1918, when he was
engaging a Royal Air Force Bristol fighter. He could see it now, its
drab brown colors overlaid by the blue-white-and-red cocardes, the curious lower wing slung on struts below the fuselage, a tiny red-
haired man in the backseat who played his twin Lewis guns like an
organ. They had fought for twenty endless minutes, and as Hafner's brand-new Fokker D VII picked up bullet hole after bullet hole, his
lust to kill grew. A snap shot, hanging on his prop, through the bottom of the Bristol's fuselage had killed the enemy rear gunner.
On his next attack he closed to within fifteen meters, the big Bristol filling not only his sights but the prop disk. He could see the gunner
hanging slackly in the Scarff ring turret, blood spraying in a mist
from a face wound, the pilot whipping quick glances back over his
shoulder, pounding on his jammed forward-firing Vickers machine gun. Hafner closed his eyes to picture the scene precisely, remembering how he had mashed the trigger lever, spraying the Bristol till his ammunition belts ran empty. The pilot fell forward and the flame-precursoring wisp of white vapor streamed out. He dropped back to watch the Bristol spin, gently at first, then more quickly and steeply until it disappeared in an exploding circle of smoke that sent small drifting bits of men and machine to litter no-man's-land below.