Trophy for Eagles (67 page)

He turned and stood at attention, thumbs placed precisely on his
trouser seams, eyes riveted just beyond Sperrle's bulbous head. "Herr General, what comes after the Messerschmitt?" he asked.

Sperrle shot a look of warning to von Richthofen. Enough was enough! Von Richthofen smoothly intervened, "Thank you,
Bruno, for your customary frankness. You may be sure that what is coming after the Messerschmitt will be quite adequate. You may
go."

Hafner saluted and did an about-face. On his way out he raised his eyebrows to the aide holding the door, as if to say, "Court-martial or promotion—who cares?"

"The remark about what comes after the Messerschmitt, von Richthofen! What did he mean by that? The 109 is brand-new, not even in squadron service yet, and he's talking about what comes after?"

"Ja.
It's a problem that Udet has as well. He's quite right—
something should already be on the drawing boards. The problem is
that Hafner has an interest in a certain airplane, one he's shown Focke-Wulf. He is a somewhat entrepreneurial lieutenant colonel!"

Sperrle shrugged and told his adjutant to arrange for him to speak to Kurt Tank at Focke-Wulf. Tank was as much of a genius as Willy
Messerschmitt; he'd tell him what to make of this Hafner fellow.

*

Over New Mexico/January 3, 1937

She was a fury, wrapped in passion concealed in rage, and hidden
by hubris. Patty Morgan Dompnier Bandfield leaned forward in the
cockpit of her Beech racer, trying to will the recalcitrant instruments
into proper order.

Bandy had broken his word, leaving the morning after the night they first had the violent argument, then made violent love. He had
said he had to go to some secret briefings at Wright Field. Now she knew that he was somewhere in New York. She didn't know where,
but she would wring the truth from Caldwell and find him. He was going to Spain, after he had promised—sworn!—not to, and after she had promised to remove herself from the Earhart trip.

She would have killed him easily, if she could have loved him to
death. In her heart was an ominous fear that he would not return, that he would cross the ocean to die in Spain, to be left a burned
and jumbled mass, crumpled in the wreckage of an airplane, just as
Stephan had crossed an ocean to die in the race.

TROPHY FOR EAGLES 411

And to ice the cake, the flight was going sour. She had been
averaging 240 mph. Now she was at sixteen thousand feet over New
Mexico, between cloud layers, deliberately slowed down to 150 mph. A sinister quiver running through the yellow Beechcraft
exactly matched the oscillation of the tachometer, now nervously
buzzing from 2,000 to 2,300 rpm every thirty seconds.

She'd left Los Angeles, intending to confront Bandy and set a
transcontinental record in the process. Until twenty minutes ago,
the flight had been perfect. Patty corrected course angrily, unhappy
that she'd allowed her preoccupation with the tachometer to let her
drift twenty degrees off. She reduced power a little more to bleed the
airspeed back to 140 mph. The record was out of the question, but
she still had to be in New York by the 5th, if she was to see Bandy
before he left. She would stop him if she could; if she could not, he
would go warm with her love. As much as she needed to see him, she now needed a hole in the undercast even more, a brief blessed spot of light where she could let down if she had to.

There was a faster surge, and the tachometer picked up to 2,400 rpm, before subsiding to 1,900. Patty reached up and pulled the propeller lever back. She hated to touch it, afraid that any change would make things worse.

Nothing happened until she reduced power again. The engine sagged, then surged, the rpm bobbing back and forth, until the pointer pegged itself at 2,600, the sound of the freewheeling propeller singing back through the windscreen. She glanced down at
the map, then back out the windscreen, desperately trying to spot a
hole in the clouds.

The propeller whine went up an octave and culminated in a
shuddering jolt that jerked the airplane almost sideways and sent her head clattering against the cockpit wall. Half the prop sailed into the
New Mexico skies. Unbalanced, the massive engine lunged con
vulsively, wrenching away from the mounts Bandy had welded with
such care. The big Pratt & Whitney's lurch to the right sent the
cowling whipping back over the wing, tearing the yellow fabric into
shreds. The now useless engine dangled halfway to one side, a massive derelict forward rudder.

Don't let me die! Let me get to him! she thought, instinctively
pulling the throttle back and switching the magneto off, pointless reactions since her horsepower had just been transformed to junk
metal. The Beechcraft, normally so stable, began an aimless yawing
descent, instrument readings on the panel spinning wildly.

"Mother," she said, the image of Charlotte fighting the controls of the bomber adding to the choking fear gripping her throat. She
forced herself to try to save herself as her fear turned into an insistent
anger that the full force of her left leg was not enough to halt the biplane's relentless skid to the right. The agonized airplane wanted
to plunge straight down, despite her full back pressure on the stick.
She had already run in all the available trim, and there was nothing she could do that would bring the disfigured nose up. The airspeed increased to 160, then 170. At the higher airspeeds she regained some control authority, and the rate of descent stabilized at seven hundred feet per minute.

Her arms were aching and her left leg quivered from the strain so
badly that she brought her right leg into play, standing with both feet on the left rudder pedal. The corkscrew spiral moderated to a wide, skidding turn to the right.

Patty reached over and pulled her chute toward her. She was wearing the harness, and forced the connecting rings of the pack into place. She swung over in her seat, forcing the door open. The Beech swung downward with a dreamlike intensity, a maddened runaway creature determined to scrub her off against a mountain as a horse rubs a rider off against a tree. The hands on the altimeter rushed through ten thousand feet. She knew the ground below was at least five thousand feet high, and the mountains might reach to nine. Her legs still held full left rudder, slowing the turn to about two degrees per second. The cloud layer engulfed her momentarily
in mist, then dissolved. She sobbed in relief when the snow-dusted
mountain peaks appeared below. They seemed to reach up beseechingly even as they spun in a flat circle around her.

Patty slacked off pressure on the rudder, and the airplane whipped
to the right. She let it turn a full circle, then led in with full two-leg pressure on the left rudder pedal. It straightened momentarily and
she forced herself out the door into the slipstream, which pulled her
away and free.

Don't know how high I am, she-thought, pulling the ripcord, and
accepted gladly the wrenching pain of the opening shock. Moments later, she saw the bright glow of the Beechcraft exploding as it struck
the ground. Her legs hit pine branches and she hurtled through,
hands crossed over her face, wondering where she was, if she would
survive.

The grasping hand of the parachute canopy enfolded the top of a
pine tree. She sensed the tree's indignation as it bent almost double,
then jerked her upright like a broken marionette. She bounced up and down, not certain if she was alive, where she was, or if she would spend the rest of her life tucked in some New Mexico pine tree like a forgotten Christmas ornament. None of it mattered.
Bandy would be gone to Spain and never know that she had sought him, that she had tried to stop him, that she had forgiven his going.

She looked around in the darkness. There was a glow not far away, a farmhouse. Then she saw headlights coming, someone
probably looking for the airplane. The lights grew larger, and a truck
came around the curve, skidding to a halt as its headlights illuminated her.

An Indian got out.

"Are you alive?"

"Yes. Thank you for coming."

"I'll get a ladder. Are you hurt?"

"I don't know. Thank you for coming."

He went back to the truck, and then stopped and yelled, "Don't go away. I'll be right back."

She laughed until it hurt to do so.

***

Chapter 11

Valencia, Spain/January 11,1937

The braying of donkeys awakened him from a troubling dream; he thought for a moment that he was back on the farm in Salinas. He
lay quietly, trying to figure out what was different. Then he realized that he'd slept the night through for the first time since his arrival in Spain, not kept awake by a solid lump of beans and
chorizo,
the
inevitable main dish served to flyers at the Loyalist training station.
The dream had been a puzzle—Patty and Millie had been with him
in a New York restaurant. Then it clicked into place. The incredibly
inedible soup last night, made of equal parts of oil and garlic, had reminded him of the onion soup at Orteig's restaurant.

The news of Patty's crash had just reached him. Thank God she was safe. He thought wryly of the Great War term "blighty"—a minor wound just serious enough to get you out of the trenches and back to England. Her injuries—burns and bruises—sounded like a
blighty that would keep her from flying with Earhart. He hoped so.

And he hoped she would have time and charity to forgive him for
leaving without telling her. There was no way to explain to her, as
Caldwell had "explained" to him, that failing to go would result in a
court-martial. Caldwell was a friend, but a soldier, and he expected Bandy to honor his bargain. Bandfield had filled Roget in, and he
hoped he would have time to talk to Patty, and perhaps convince her that his going was necessary.

So far, he had been safer entering combat than she had been at home. The great Spanish adventure had been one anticlimax after another. He had waited in the Waldorf as Caldwell had directed him to do, expecting someone like Erich von Stroheim or Peter Lorre to contact him. Instead, an attorney sought him out. Dan Schecter was a mousy little man, more clerk than spy, and he
quietly gave Bandfield his passport, tickets, and a contract that said
that he would be paid $1,500 a month, plus $1,000 for each enemy plane shot down. One paragraph specified that he had to take a check flight in Spain to prove his flying abilities.

He had been the only Loyalist volunteer on the ocean liner that carried him to France. A Spanish captain, Augustin Sanz Sainz, who insisted that Bandy call him Augusto, met the boat and took the American by train on a long circuitous journey to Valencia. Before leaving, the captain brought in an old friend from the Roosevelt Field days, Bert Acosta. Acosta was returning to the United States, disgruntled with the Spanish and incensed that Bandy was going to be checked out in fighters.

"Fred Lord and I were sent to Bilboa to fly Breguets on coastal patrol! We're probably the two best pilots in Europe, and they made
us fly something that should have been scrapped ten years ago!"

Bandy didn't say anything, figuring that Acosta's age and drinking
had worked against him. He didn't know Lord.

"Frank Tinker got fighters, too. How are you supposed to get a
bonus for shooting down people when you're flying Breguets?"

Augusto later indicated that the Loyalists were less than pleased
with the work Acosta and Lord had done, intimating that they
expected rather more from Bandy. They lived on sour red wine and bread on the train, a trip that would have been interminable if it had
not been for the ever-changing panorama of beauty and pestilence
that rolled by. It was as if Peru had been superimposed on Califor
nia, arid browns pressed against sudden verdant foliage. Bandfield
loved the closely built homes, the shrouded women walking to get a
loaf of bread as secretly as if they were sneaking from a seraglio, and
everywhere kids playing soldier with sticks for swords and rifles.

Augusto took him to the Air Ministry in Valencia. The process
ing was simple, and the next morning Bandy left for the Escuela de
Caza, the fighter school at San Javier airfield.

Bordered by straight rows of stunted, moisture-starved trees, the
rough flat field stretched like boring company endlessly to the horizons. The broken remains of landing crashes, sad airplanes angled into bloody junk, were strewn haphazardly around the for
mer military parade ground. His initial check ride was in a well-
maintained Caudron Aiglon. The check pilot, a dour lieutenant named Jose Torres, said nothing from start to finish. While they
were walking back to the long low frame building that served as an
operations shack, Torres grunted and said in English, "Report for Chato training at six in the morning."