Trophy for Eagles (43 page)

On his right were five more airplanes—Roy Moore in a Keith Ryder Special, Bill Ong in Howard's Pete, and then a line of
nondescript mechanic's specials, put together with cutting torch and
spare parts.

Coveys of sweat-stained, grease-covered ground crews surrounded
each airplane, blinking through the grit thrown back by the propel
lers, tugging on the wingtips and holding down on the tails to ease the strain on the brakes. The power would be full on when the starter's flag went down, and then they'd let go.

Bandy had finished a Thermos of ice water and gone to the
bathroom twenty minutes before, but his throat was parched and he
needed to urinate badly.

Roget leaned down and yelled in his ear, "Dompnier's going to be
first off, Bandy. I got a look at his prop. They pump it up with compressed air to fine pitch. When he takes off, a bleed valve opens, and it moves the prop to coarse pitch for the race. It's a hell of a gadget. I wish we had one."

"What's second prize? Seventy-five hundred?"

"There ain't no second prize for us. You got to win the fifteen
grand or we'll lose the option on the plant. Don't go thinking second
place."

Bandy nodded agreement. He felt the nervous excitement building in his gut, a weird circular clawing that began in the pit of his stomach and forced bile up to his mouth like toothpaste squeezed from a tube. He spat into the slipstream, forgetting about the guys holding down the tail.

In the past, he'd trembled with the building tension until the starter's flag went down, and then everything was automatic. He hoped it would be the same today.

He tapped the clock. The second hand lurched toward start time,
a long strand of temporal molasses that seemed never to disconnect.
He brought the engine to full power just as the red-and-white-checkered flag came down. The outside world crystallized into silence as the rising pounding of his own engine totally deafened him. Bandy danced on the rudder to keep the Rascal straight in the wildly bouncing slipstream. One of the mechanic's specials veered
left to run its prop right through its neighbor before they'd moved
twenty feet.

Bandy saw the accident, knew no one was hurt. The goddam
Caudron was already off the ground, gear coming up. He tugged at
the stick and skidded toward the inside of the track behind Dickens,
who was leading somehow, and Dompnier.

The Rascal was running perfectly, accelerating to top speed just
before he reached the pylon marking the first turn. The racecourse
was tricky, with farmers' water tanks scattered around the perimeter looking just like pylons. It would be easy to make a mistake and fly
off the course. The straightaways went by in less than a minute,
then it was rudder, aileron, left wing down, pulling back on the stick
to bend the airplane around the turn. G forces squashed him down
in the seat, multiplying his weight to over six hundred pounds. Back to the straight with aileron, rudder, right wing down to level, release back pressure. It was brutal flying, a blacksmith's formula of pound,
bend, pound, bend.

The grandstand had been a riot of color before he took off. In his
turns he saw it as a variegated blur binding together two checker
boards that he knew were the parking lots. Rudder, aileron, wing down, back pressure. It became a horizontal dance, a ritual coer
cion of a gravity steamroller. Sweat sluiced down his face and arms.
Once his hand slipped off the throttle. Better the throttle than the stick.

The pilot animal took over, the element within him that tuned itself to the machine, to the concept of winning. The other personality, the human element, sat back and watched, dispassionate save for fear.

Dickens was in the lead, with Dompnier half a length behind,
twenty feet ahead of Bandfield. The rest of the pack were stretching
out, waiting to be lapped by the faster leading trio.

He looked down at the twenty strips of tape.

"Christ, what lap is this?" He had already lost track, and determined to fly till everybody stopped.

His engine was running strong, broiling the cockpit with solid hot
fumes untainted by telltale burned oil. The wind picked up.

Straight down the field on the first stretch, it blew inward on the second, outward on the third.

On the second turn, the wind forced him toward the pylon. The
outside world telescoped down to a narrow band of vision, his brain
barely recovering from the blood-draining pull of one high-G turn before he was in another. In his turns he caught sight of the ground from the corner of his eye, two or three people, a man holding a square board with a number on it, automobile tracks in the dying
grass, then it was level again with nothing in view but Dickens and
Dompnier. A pylon loomed too close and he pumped the stick forward in the vertical turn, bucking the G forces to jump outward and losing another hundred feet on Dompnier.

He had no awareness of the passage of time, no ordered sense of
motion. The racers became centrifugal extrusions of metal and
man, spun out at random distances. The ground fifty feet below was a peripheral green-brown ribbon. He stared only at the two racers
shimmering with speed ahead of him, no time to glance at his
instruments. The sound and the feel told him the airplane was okay.
When it wasn't he'd know it all too well.

Dickens knew he was flying perfectly, shaving the pylons, keeping
down low in the smooth air. He could see Dompnier's airplane in the little rearview mirror mounted on his windscreen.

In the Caudron, Stephan Dompnier moved the wings as extensions of his shoulders, the engine as part of his heart and lungs. He watched the red airplane ahead. The pig Dickens was flying beautifully, but his Cessna was slower than the Caudron, and he knew he could pass him on the next lap.

Behind him, Bandy wished he'd counted the laps. It had to be ten
at least. His arm muscles ached, the left from bending the throttle forward, trying to push it in the firewall, the right from controlling the maverick stick dancing in the turbulence of Dompnier's prop wash. He was flying automatically now, grazing the pylon on each turn, pulling another half G to wrench the Rascal around a little quicker. He didn't hear the engine screaming, the wind whistling around the canopy, didn't feel the heat searing his shoes. He only
saw Dompnier and Dickens, both now seeming to inch back, lap by
lap, like heavy weights drawn on a string.

A juddering vibration forced Dompnier's eyes to the instrument
panel. The tachometer was leaping in concert with the backfiring engine. Something was wrong, a valve going, a ring sticking. He saw the Cessna edge away, and then as he slowed, he watched Bandfield vault ahead of him.

Sweating, Dompnier played with the mixture control, easing it back and forth slightly to try to smooth his engine out. He racked
the stick to his belly, squeezing speed from safety, clinging close to Bandfield by force of will and tighter turns. He clung to Bandfield's
wing, matching gut-wrenching G for G.

A slight change in noise told Bandfield that he'd somehow picked
up a few rpm. The engine was smoother, and he was gaining on Dickens foot by foot. The Cessna and the Rascal rocketed around the pylons, dumping the pilots into their seats with the G forces,
airspeed reaching 250 mph on the straights with only a mile or two
speed difference between them. He riveted his eyes on Dickens's
airplane, watching the sharp movements of the controls as Dickens
entered a turn—aileron in, wing up, aileron out, wing down—and on into the stretch. He was duplicating the movements exactly, unaware of it, unaware of anything except the blur of ground flashing by below, the jackhammer vibration that matched the airframe's groaning in the turns, and Dickens's red airplane creeping slowly back to him.

His thin body shuddering under the G forces, Dompnier forced
his eyes down to the instrument panel. All the needles were off the scale, but the engine was running well again, no longer backfiring,
and he began to gain on the leaders. Dickens was falling back, and
he could see Bandfield ready to make his move, trying for the lead.

Bandfield's airplane had pulled just to the side of the little Cessna
when Dickens rocked his ailerons and flicked a skidding turn out in
front of him.

Dompnier watched, clinically detached.
"Merde,
he's bluffing, just as Turner said he would."

Bandfield saw the Cessna's control movements, ignored them. It
was win or die, a high school game of chicken such as he'd once played in Model Ts on the country roads around Salinas.

Dickens flicked his controls again, saw the Rascal relentlessly
boring in, the shimmering circle of its propeller aimed directly at his cockpit. Dickens wrenched his red racer down and outside as Band
field slammed his plane over the top of the Cessna's cockpit with
inches to spare, then dropped down to take advantage of the clear air
of the lead.

Dompnier growled with delight. "He made it." The old 1918 ace's killer instinct stirred within him. Dickens's faked maneuver had cost him time, and he'd fallen a length behind Bandfield, and now was only half a length ahead. First Dickens, then Bandfield, then the trophy.

Dickens swore to himself, bending the throttle forward. He knew
he didn't have the speed to catch Bandfield. He had to hold the
Caudron off somehow and take at least second place. He needed the
money, to live, to eat, to fly.

Dickens looked in his mirror again, saw the Caudron's prop
between his wing and elevator. Dompnier was gaining—his engine
must have cleared up. Dickens forgot about Bandfield, forgot about
anything but the blue Caudron moving in to steal second place, steal his livelihood from him. He moved stick and rudder in short
abrupt slamming movements, glancing back at Dompnier, who was gaining inch by inch. He had no choice; he had to fake this Frog out
even if he hadn't fooled that fucking Bandfield.

Dickens viciously flicked his ailerons, kicked the rudder, jigged the Cessna right, then left.

Dompnier's face compressed to a tight smile. "No, my friend, not
this time. You didn't fool Bandfield, you won't fool me."

Desperate, Dickens flicked his controls again, harder, jolting unseen molecules of air, scraping loose their grip on his tapered wings. The little Cessna shuddered in a high-speed stall, snapping directly into Dompnier's path.

The Cessna blotted out the sky before Dompnier, a bright red
wall centered with the terrified white smear of Dickens's face. In the
split second before the collision his hands automatically moved to jettison the canopy and unbuckle the safety harness. The two
airplanes merged, disappearing in a thudding explosion that rocked
the field. The French racer bored through the Cessna, propeller
chewing Dickens and cockpit before lofting the engine away in a high arc as the Caudron disintegrated around Dompnier.

Thrown brutally from his shattered cockpit, Stephan was pain-
gouged to a clear untrammeled consciousness by the midair splintering of his shredded body. Turning flat, arms and legs outstretched into a cross, he saw the ground spin beneath him. He did
not scream. His last thought was that Patty would not bear his son
after all, before he dropped to bounce like a skipped rock on the grassy stubble.

It was a second before the stricken crowd could comprehend what
had happened, before the low, dolorous moan concealing the shock
of blood-bitten pleasure rolled out.

Coming around for the last lap, Bandy took the checkered flag wondering where Dompnier and Dickens had suddenly gone. He pulled up to five hundred feet and brought the power back, letting the Rascal coast down to 150 mph. His left hand was trembling
from the grip he had on the throttle, his muscles sore from the strain
and the G forces. But he had the $15,000. They had the factory.

The other racers were spreading out to forge a landing pattern, Dompnier and Dickens not among them. He dropped down to take
a slow victory lap, fifty feet above the course. The flame and smoke
puzzled him until he saw Patty running toward the wreckage.

***

Chapter 7

Sayville, Long Island/April 21, 1933

The sudden arrival of spring threw color everywhere like rice at a
wedding, plucking blossoms from the sleeping branches and splash
ing reds and yellows in every patch of sunlight. Innocent flowering
shrubs burst forth, unaware they were sacrificial victims to the frost
that was sure to follow. It was wonderful to be alone—Charlotte was
at the plant, Bruno off on another of his tours of Germany and France—and Patty sat on the chaise placed near the open French doors so she could drink in the broad, sweeping grounds. For a moment Patty indulged herself in a flight of sympathy for the new
blooms, whose happiness was certain to be nipped off as early as her
own had been.