The Parsifal Pursuit

by Michael McMenamin

  “You still haven‘t convinced me to climb into that thing as a passenger.”

  “Look, this is the only way to make up Mattie‘s head-start. I learned to fly an autogiro in a day and you can too. Each cockpit has its own set of controls. I‘ll start out as the pilot and I can retake control if necessary. You‘ll enter as a passenger and leave as a pilot.” He paused. “But I‘ll go without you if I have too. I‘m not letting Mattie die up there in the Alps.”

  Sullivan settled wordlessly into the two-passenger cockpit in the front, while Cockran climbed into the pilot cockpit in back. The controls in the Spanish C-19 were the same as his PCA-2 back home. He walked Sullivan through a lesson so that he knew where everything was—the altimeter, accelerometers, horizons—as well as what they all meant. Then Cockran fired up the Wright Whirlwind 420 HP radial engine and spun the nose propeller into life. Slowly, the rotor blades above his head started rotating as a small amount of power from the engine gave the rotary wing a boost to get it going. Unlike the propeller attached to the engine, however, the large rotor blades on top were not powered by an engine once it was in the air. They auto-rotated as the aircraft moved forward, providing lift like wings. Unlike its propeller, the rotor blades on top of the autogiro were clearly visible to the naked eye once aloft.

  Cockran opened the throttle and the propeller pulled them forward. “Look at the controls in front of you,” Cockran shouted into the speaking tube running from the pilot‘s cockpit to the passenger compartment. “They‘re connected to my controls and they move when I make them move. Don‘t touch the stick in front of you, but watch what happens when I pull it back.” The autogiro topped 15 miles per hour after about twenty-five feet when he pulled back on the stick and the aircraft began to rise. The autogiro continued to accelerate and gain altitude, climbing to 500 feet. “I‘ll bring the stick back to its neutral position and we‘ll fly level. You understand?”

  “Yes,” came Sullivan‘s shouted reply back through the speaking tube.

  “Good. Now watch the left pedal as I press it in,” which Cockran did and the plane turned in a gentle left bank. Then he did the same with the right rudder.

  “See, even a thick-headed mick like you can see that pulling the stick back takes you up, pushing it forward takes you down, left pedal turns you left, right pedal turns you right. No sudden movements. Easy does it. Everything you do with this plane, you do it nice and slow. Now you try. Take the stick and put your feet on the pedals. After that, follow my instructions but keep us steady. Most importantly, keep us level.”

  “Okay,” Sullivan shouted over the roar of the engine.

  “The controls are yours,” Cockran said.

  For the next two hours Cockran put Sullivan through his paces. Climbs and turns. Left, right, up and down––and always returning straight and level. Autogiros were definitely easier and safer for novices to fly than a fixed-wing aircraft. The greatest danger in flying an autogiro was tipping the nose so far down that you began to flip end over end, losing all control.

  Cockran was right. Sullivan‘s reflexes were remarkable. He worked the stick and the rudder pedals as deftly as the trigger and hammer of his beloved Colt .45 automatics. Some people were born natural athletes and Bobby Sullivan was one of them. He often wondered how Sullivan would have turned out if, as a teenager, he had gone to university like Cockran instead of being trained by Michael Collins to kill British agents on the streets of Dublin.

  “Okay, I can fly the bloody thing,” Sullivan‘s voice came back at him through the speaker. “I can probably even take off, but I‘d like some practice landing in one piece.”

  Cockran banked the autogiro to the right as they headed back to Milan‘s aerodrome where he brought the autogiro‘s altitude down to 100 feet.

  “Remember how I said a pilot‘s worst fear was a stall?”

  “Yes,” came the shouted reply.

  “That‘s when the airplane‘s speed becomes so low that the wings no longer provide lift until the pilot pushes the stick forward to regain airspeed and produce lift.”

  “Yeah, I know. What‘s your point?”

  “Well, if you lose the airplane‘s only engine, the stall comes quicker. Like now,” Cockran said, as he cut the engine.

  “Are you daft?” Sullivan shouted, his voice clear over the silence of the engine.

  Cockran laughed. “Trust me.”

  The rotors atop the plane continued to rotate automatically as Cockran kept the controls in neutral and the autogiro gently floated to earth, their speed declining until their descent was almost vertical rather than horizontal. The aircraft was down to twenty miles per hour as they approached the ground and bounced once as the main wheels touched the earth. Cockran gently raised the nose until the tail hit the ground, the plane rolling to a stop in about 15 to 20 feet.

  “Did you see what I did? How as soon as the wheels touched, I lifted the nose?”

  “Aye.”

  “That‘s about as slow as you want to land this thing, 20 miles per hour. Generally, anywhere between 20 to 30 miles per hour is ideal for landing and taking off in small spaces. We could even land almost straight down in an emergency, but that‘s not good for the plane.”

  For the rest of the afternoon, Cockran had Sullivan practice take offs and landings until Michael Collins‘ most feared assassin became as skilled at those as he was flying the autogiro. Cockran started him off landing at a 30 miles per hour air speed because it slowed down the vertical descent for the pilot and made for softer landings. Thirty miles per hour was slow enough to keep rookie pilots calm and confident. In truth, the worst possible landing—nearly straight down in an emergency—had the plane descending at a rate of seven miles per hour and moving forward at less than 15 miles per hour. The only problem was that jolting the plane too sharply in a vertical landing could damage the rotors, so a pilot didn‘t want to make a habit of landing straight down. Eventually, Cockran forced Sullivan to glide in closer to 20 miles per hour until he would have felt comfortable landing the plane on a rooftop in Hell‘s Kitchen.

  They finished their final landing, touching down on a stretch of ground no longer than 30 feet, just as the sky turned a fiery orange on the western horizon. A few moments later, Cockran saw the familiar silhouette of two more flying windmills approaching the aerodrome, outlined against the the setting sun. Two factory-fresh autogiros from the Cierva Works in Spain.

  The two men walked into the pilot‘s lounge, Cockran limping slightly as his hip had stiffened up in flight, and were cheered by the familiar figure of Sergeant Robert Rankin of Scotland Yard, red hair, red beard and six foot five inches tall. They both greeted him warmly.

  “And here I was thinking that, with Mussolini running things and keeping the trains on time, they were also keeping Scottish riff raff out of this country,” Sullivan said.

  The big Scot laughed. “Now, lads, we‘re all Celts here. Just us against the Krauts according to Mr. Churchill.”

  “You‘re early,” Cockran said

  “I took the night train. Winston said it was urgent and that our bonnie Mattie was in danger.” Rankin allowed a smile to emerge from his coarse red beard. “Just like old times.”

  43.

  Her Nightmares Stayed Away

  The Austrian Alps

  Tuesday, 9 June 1931

  MATTIE was disappointed that Kurt had not come to her tent the night before. She had needed to be held by someone who wanted her and would keep her nightmare away. Dancing in the clouds their first night together on the Graf Zeppelin, his kiss had proved that Kurt von Sturm most certainly had wanted her. Maybe he no longer did.

  The sky today was again high and blue as they left the valley floor and proceeded slowly up the incline to the first mountain pass, the only one passable in their Mercedes trucks. The guide assured them that the pack horses he had hired would be waiting for them at the far end of the next valley and the second mountain pass.

  Mattie was driving the second G-2 with G
regor, another porter and the cook, while Hoch, the guide, Professor Campbell and one of Sturm‘s men were in the first vehicle just ahead. Sturm was with three of his men in the six-wheeled G-1 behind her. The incline was steep. She had never been a fan of motorcars with their steering wheel on the left instead of the right where God and Great Britain had decided it should be. At least, she thought, it placed her further from the edge on the right of the road. The vehicles were creeping along when Mattie heard a sharp report. She looked up to their left and saw that a small landslide had started at the top of the ridge. Hoch‘s vehicle looked in the clear up ahead but not Mattie‘s truck. The jagged rocks and debris were gathering speed and mass, heading directly towards them. Mattie reacted instinctively and floored the pedal on the truck. To stay where they were was suicide and she thought their only chance was to outrun the landslide. Her G-2 bounced over the rocks as it picked up speed and the muscles on her forearms strained to maintain control of the vehicle. Beside her, Gregor was holding on tight to the door handle and mumbling prayers in German. Mattie kept her eyes fixed straight ahead, not wanting to think of the sharp drop-off to the right. She made it past the main thrust of the landslide but not all of it. Smaller rocks and clouds of dirt blew past, rattling against the side of her vehicle. A broken tree branch whipped past, leaves clawing at the windshield and then the noise of the landslide began to subside, echoing beyond the cliff edge to their right. She could once again hear the whine of the engine, grinding the truck forward up the hill, dragging them to safety.

  Just then, something slammed into the left rear of the truck, wrenching the steering wheel from Mattie‘s grasp and knocking the vehicle into a sideways skid. The G-2 tilted to the right, its left side tires in the air and she heard the doors on the right side fling open as gravity pulled at them while Mattie tried in vain to bring the vehicle back on all four tires. The truck landed on its right side amid the crunch of steel and shattered glass and came to a halt.

  In the silence which followed, Mattie was dazed but knew that at least they were still alive. She looked behind her and saw that the cook and porter in the back seat had been banged up also but were otherwise okay. She crawled back and helped them open the left rear door, now facing the open sky above. She helped each of them climb out and start to scramble back up the steep slope to the mountain road. She heard voices shouting down to them from the road. Her head was clearing as she started to climb out. Then, she stopped, remembering. Gregor! There had been four of them in the truck! She ducked back inside but her stomach sank when she saw no one. Then she remembered the passenger door flinging open and closed her eyes.

  The shouts from outside grew in intensity and Mattie knew what it was about. The noise had returned. The landslide wasn‘t finished. She could feel the vibrations building rapidly, and she stuck her head out of the window. She barely had time to duck her head before several rocks hit the undercarriage of the Mercedes squarely and tipped it over completely, dumping Mattie on the underside of the canvas roof. When the truck stopped moving, she slid out from under the seats above her and crawled back to the window. She looked out and gasped. All she saw was air and space. The vehicle was perched directly over the edge of the cliff and, as she looked down, she could see what had to be Gregor‘s broken body lying on the rocks hundreds of feet below her. She moved carefully back from the window and felt the truck shift slightly as she did so. This was not good.

  “Mattie!” Sturm shouted. “I‘m throwing a rope down. Tie it to the steering column.”

  Mattie looked up through the other window. Sturm was a good fifteen feet above her and the rope was in reach of the driver‘s side opening. She crawled along the underside of the roof until she was just below the steering wheel. Then she grabbed the rope and tied it securely to the steering column as Sturm had instructed. Above her, she could see that the other end of the rope was looped around a sturdy tree and held by one of Sturm‘s men, Willi Wirth, the young receptionist who had greeted them in Geneva. Mattie eased herself out of the vehicle, moving hand over hand along the rope. Above her, Sturm was inching his way down to the stranded vehicle with a second rope tied around his waist. The Mercedes groaned as it tilted further over the edge and Mattie could feel the increasing tension in the rope between her hands. She looked up and saw the tree at the end of her rope was slowly being pulled up by its roots with the weight of the truck.

  Sturm looked back and saw the same thing. He quickly covered the last few feet separating them until he was beside her. “Take my arm. Then release your grip on the rope.”

  Mattie reached out for his extended hand and he grasped her wrist tightly just as the tree finally broke free of its mooring in the mountain side. They flattened themselves against the side of the incline and the Mercedes disappeared over the edge, the high-pitched sound of rocks scraping metal followed quickly by the uprooted tree tearing past them, spraying clumps of hard mud and soil over their faces.

  Sturm pulled Mattie up with both his hands now until she was on his back, her arms firmly secure around his neck. “Willi will drop a second rope down. Loop it under your arms.”

  The loop came down and Mattie did as instructed, holding tight to the rope, her feet occasionally touching the side of the mountain as Willi pulled her up the last ten feet. Two minutes later he had done the same for Sturm. Mattie held her breath while Willi pulled Sturm up. When he too was standing on solid ground, she rushed to Sturm, her adrenalin racing, and clung to him, holding him tightly until he embraced her as well and she could feel his heart beat as though it were her own. They stood locked in an embrace until her pulse returned to normal.

  Mattie stepped back and grasped both of his hands and squeezed. “Thank you. You saved my life. Again.” Then she kissed him softly on his lips before she turned to Willi Wirth and hugged him also, much to the younger man‘s embarrassment.

  THEY made camp late that afternoon near a tall and slender mountain waterfall which emptied into a small lake. The remainder of their trek after the land slide had been uneventful if a trifle crowded in the remaining two Mercedes. It had taken awhile, but Sturm‘s six-wheeled vehicle had proved as agile as a mountain goat as it slowly climbed up and over the aftermath of the landslide left on the road. As they made camp, the group seemed more subdued although, to her surprise, the guide, the cook and the remaining Austrian porter proved more fatalistic than Mattie about Gregor‘s death.

  “The mountains are dangerous,” the guide explained. “And Gregor knew the risks. We all know the risks. Sometimes the mountains bite back.”

  That evening at dinner, Mattie could have sworn Hoch was flirting with her. He avoided all the repulsive subjects on which he had expressed his equally repulsive opinions the night before and focused only on music and the arts, solicitously asking her whether she wanted more of this dish or that and keeping her wine glass filled as if he were a waiter hoping for a good tip. Perhaps he was embarrassed by his behavior the evening before but she had her doubts.

  Mattie was civil during dinner, but barely and, his charm offensive having failed, Hoch retired for the evening shortly after Professor Campbell. The third bottle of wine was still half full at that point and Sturm poured the last two glasses out for Mattie and him. They drank them in companionable silence beneath a clear Alpine sky brilliantly lit by countless points of light.

  Sturm finished his glass and turned to Mattie. “Mattie, there is something we need to discuss. Privately. I know the others have retired but sound carries far in the mountains and I would prefer that we have canvas as a buffer.”

  The adrenalin from earlier in the day had not worn completely off and the alcohol had loosened her inhibitions enough to cause Mattie to wonder if Sturm was about to seduce her. She hoped so. She was still depressed by the thought of Cockran with another woman. A younger woman. She needed a diversion. Her body, tingling from the alcohol, seemed to agree.

  A stern lecture was not how Mattie imagined her seduction would begin. After sitting her down
on a canvas chair by a small campaign desk, Sturm poured her a brandy and then began his lecture, pacing in the small confines of his tent as he did so, avoiding her eyes.

  “Mattie, what you did today was both foolish and impulsive and a man died because of it. If you had backed your vehicle up as I did, none of this would have happened and Gregor might still be alive. You are a brave and beautiful woman, Mattie, and fearless. But also reckless. You remember your photographs we talked about last night?”

  Mattie silently nodded yes.

  “They prove my point. Half of them, maybe more, should never have been taken because you should never have endangered yourself. None of those photographs were worth losing your life. Maybe your Mr. Cockran is hypocritical and selfish when he voices concerns over your safety but he is right and you are wrong. Any man who loves you would say what I am saying.”

  Mattie was stung by his words. Sturm had risked his life to save hers earlier that day but she never thought for a moment that she had caused Gregor‘s death. She had seen the land slide start and she had acted instinctively and, she thought, responsibly. She wasn‘t going to be a sitting duck. But Sturm might be correct. The landslide missed his truck and if she had backed hers up too, Gregor might not have died. But damn it, wasn‘t that just second-guessing?

  “When I was an officer in the Navy, I was taught that seeing to the safety of my men was my paramount duty, save only for engaging the enemy. I‘ve not said anything until now, but I could not forgive myself if any more men die on this expedition, let alone a woman so beautiful and worthy of love as you. It was agreed that I would be in charge. So from now until the end of the expedition, you will obey my orders. Like everyone else. You will not be driving one of the trucks again. Anything you want to do, you clear it with me first. Is that understood?”

  “Just who the hell do you think you are?” Mattie said, heatedly. “Have you forgotten it‘s my organization who‘s paying for half of this expedition?”