Warrior Women

by Paula Guran

  Just Yesterday & Perhaps

  Just Beyond Tomorrow

  Carrie Vaughn reminds us of some true heroes in this non-genre—well, it is a mystery—story. During World War II, 1,100 women pilots served in the Women Airforce Service Pilots, WASP—the first women to fly American military aircraft. Thirty-eight died while in the program. In 2010, the WASP were awarded the Congressional Gold Medal by the United States Congress. Over 250 surviving WASP were present to receive the honor.

  The Girls from Avenger

  Carrie Vaughn

  June 1943

  The sun was setting over Avenger Field when Em and a dozen others threw Mary into the so-called Wishing Well, the wide round fountain in front of the trainee barracks. A couple of the girls grabbed her arms; a couple more grabbed her feet and hauled her off the ground. Mary screamed in surprise, and Em laughed—she should have known this was coming, it happened to everyone after they soloed. But she remembered from her own dunking the week before, it was hard not to scream out of sheer high spirits.

  Em halted the mob of cheering women just long enough to pull off Mary’s leather flight jacket—then she was right there at Mary’s shoulders, lifting her over the stone lip of the pool of water. Mary screamed again—half screamed, half laughed, rather—and splashed in, sending a wave over the edge. On her knees now, her sodden jumpsuit hanging off her like a sack, she splashed them all back. Em scrambled out of the way.

  Applause and laughter died down, and Mary started climbing over the edge.

  “Don’t forget to grab your coins,” Em told her.

  “Oh!” She dived back under the water, reached around for a moment, then showed Em her prize—a couple of pennies in her open palm. Mary was young, twenty-two, and her wide, clear eyes showed it. Her brown hair was dripping over her face and she looked bedraggled, grinning. “I’m the luckiest girl in the world!”

  Whenever one of the trainees at the Women’s Flight Training Detachment at Avenger Field had a test or a check-out flight, she tossed a coin into the fountain for good luck. When she soloed for the first time, she could take two out, for luck. Em’s coins were still in her pocket.

  Em reached out, and Mary grabbed her hand. “Come on, get out of there. I think Suze has a fifth of whiskey with your name on it hidden under her mattress.”

  Mary whooped and scrambled out. She shook out her jumpsuit; sheets of water came off it, and she laughed all over again.

  Arm in arm, they trooped to the barracks, where someone had a radio playing and a party had already started.

  December 1943

  In an outfit like the WASP, everyone knew everyone and news traveled fast.

  Em heard about it as soon as she walked into the barracks at New Castle.

  Didn’t have time to even put her bag down or slide her jacket off before three of the others ran in from the hall, surrounded her, and started talking. Janey gripped her arm tight like she was drowning, and Em let her bag drop to the floor.

  “Did you hear?” Janey said. Her eyes were red from crying, Tess looked like she was about to start, and Patty’s face was white. Em’s stomach turned, because she already knew what they were going to say.

  “Hear what?” she asked. Delaying the inevitable, like if she could draw this moment out long enough, the news wouldn’t be true.

  “A crash, out at Romulus,” Patty said.

  Em asked what was always the first question: “Who?”

  “Mary Keene.”

  The world flipped, her heart jumped, and all the blood left her head.

  No, there was a mistake, not Mary. Rumors flew faster than anything. She realized Patty didn’t look so worried because of the crash; she was worried about Em.

  “What happened?” Always the second question.

  “I don’t know, just that there was a crash.”

  “Mary, is she—?”

  Janey’s tears fell and her voice was tight. She squeezed Em harder. “Oh, Em! I’m so sorry. I know you were friends—I’m so sorry.”

  If Em didn’t get out of here now, she’d have to hug them all and start crying with them. She’d have to think about how to act and what to say and what to do next. She’d have to listen to the rumors and try to sort out what had really happened.

  She pushed by them, got past their circle, ignored it when Patty touched her arm, trying to hold her back. Left her bag behind, thought that she ought to drag it with her because it had dirty clothing in it. Maybe somebody called to her, but she just wanted to be alone.

  She found her room, sat on her cot, and stared at the empty cot against the other wall. She bunked with Mary, right here in this room, just as they had at Avenger. Doubled over, face to her lap, she hugged herself and wondered what to do next.

  This didn’t happen often enough to think it could happen to you, or even someone you knew. A year of women flying Army planes, and it had happened less than a dozen times. There were few enough of them all together that Em had known some of them, even if they hadn’t been friends. Seen them at training or waved on the way to one job or another.

  It had happened often enough that they had a system.

  Em knocked on the last door of the barracks and collected money from Ruth and Liz. She didn’t have to explain what it was for when she held the cup out. It had been like that with everyone, the whole dozen of them on base at the moment. Em would take this hundred and twenty dollars, combine it with the hundred or so sent in from the women at Sweetwater and Houston, and she’d use it to take Mary back to Dayton. None of them were officially Army, so Uncle Sam didn’t pay for funerals. It seemed like a little thing to complain about, especially when so many of the boys overseas were dying. But Mary had done her part, too. Didn’t that count for something?

  “Have you found out what happened yet?” Liz asked. Everyone had asked that, too.

  Em shook her head. “Not a thing. I called Nancy, but they’re not telling her anything either.”

  “You think it was bad?” Liz said. “You think that’s why they’re hushing it up?”

  “They’re hushing it up because they don’t like to think about women dying in airplanes,” she said. Earlier in the year, she’d been told point blank by a couple of male pilots that the only women who belonged on planes were the ones painted on the noses. That was supposed to be clever.

  She was supposed to laugh and flirt. She’d just walked away.

  Running footsteps sounded on the wood floor and they looked up to see Janey racing in. The panic in her eyes made Em think that maybe it had happened again, that someone else had gone and crashed and that they’d have to pass the cup around again, so soon.

  Janey stopped herself by grabbing Em’s arm and said, “There’s a bird in from Romulus, a couple of guys in a B-26. You think maybe they know what happened?”

  They’d have a better idea than anyone. They might even have seen something. “Anyone talk to them yet?” Em said. Janey shook her head.

  A line on the rumor mill. Em gave her colleagues a grim smile and headed out.

  She couldn’t walk by the flight line without stopping and looking, seeing what was parked and what was roaring overhead. The place was swarming, and it always made her heart race. It was ripe with potential—something big was happening here. We’re fighting a war here, we really are. She took a deep breath of air thick with the smell of fuel and tarmac. Dozens of planes lined up, all shapes and sizes, a dozen more were taking off and landing.

  Hangar doors stood open revealing even more, and a hundred people moved between them all, working to keep the sound of engines loud and sweet.

  This time, she wasn’t the only one stopping to look, because a new sound was rocketing overhead, a subtly different rumble than the ones she normally heard out here. Sure enough, she heard the engine, followed the sound, and looked up to see a bulldog of a fighter buzz the field, faster than sin. She shaded her eyes against a bright winter sun and saw the P-51 Mustang—so much more graceful and agile than anything else in the
sky.

  The nose tapered to a sleek point, streamlined and fast, like a rocket. Not like the clunky, snub-nosed trainers. Granted, clunky trainers served a purpose—it was easier for a pilot in training to correct a mistake at a hundred miles an hour than it was at three hundred. But Em had to wonder what it felt like to really fly. Some way, somehow, she was going to get up in one of those birds someday. She was going to find out what it was like to have 1,500 horsepower at her command.

  If she were male, her training wouldn’t stop with the little single-engine trainers the WASP ferried back and forth from training base to training base, where they were flown by the men who would move on to pursuits and bombers, and from there to combat. If she were male, she’d be flying bigger, faster, meaner planes already. Then she’d go overseas to fly them for real.

  As Janey had said, a B-26 Marauder—a fast, compact two-engine bomber—crouched out on the tarmac, a couple of mechanics putting fuel into her. She was probably stopped for a refuel on her way to somewhere else. That meant Em probably had only one chance to talk to the pilots.

  She continued on to the ops center. The door to the briefing room was closed, but she heard voices inside, muffled. Against her better judgment, she put her ear to the door and listened, but the talk was all routine. The bomber was on its way to Newark for transport overseas, and the pilot was a combat instructor, just off the front.

  Em sat in a chair across the hall and waited. Half an hour later, the door opened. The two guys who emerged were typical flyboys, leather jackets, sunglasses tucked in the pockets, khaki uniforms, short cropped hair, and Hollywood faces. Lieutenant bars on the shoulders.

  When Em stood at attention, smoothing her trousers and trying not to worry if her collar was straight, the men looked startled. She didn’t give them time to try to figure out what to do with her. “I’m sorry to bother you. My name’s Emily Anderson, and I’m with the WASP squadron here. I got word that you just flew in from Romulus this morning. I was wondering if I could ask you something.”

  The taller of the two edged toward the door. “I have to go check on . . . on something. Sorry.” His apology was quick and not very sincere.

  The remaining pilot looked even more stricken and seemed ready to follow his buddy.

  “Please, just a quick question,” she said, hating to sound like she was begging. She ought to be charming him.

  His wary look deepened, a defensive, thin-lipped frown that made her despair of his taking her seriously. He hesitated, seeming to debate with himself before relenting. “What can I help you with, Miss Anderson?”

  She took a deep breath. “I’m trying to find out about a crash that happened near Romulus Field three days ago. A WASP was the pilot. Mary Keene. Sir, she was a friend of mine, and we—the other WASP and I—we just want to know what happened. No one will tell us anything.”

  He could have denied knowing anything, shaken his head, and walked out, and she wouldn’t have been able to do anything, and she wouldn’t have been more worried than she already was. But he hesitated. His hands fidgeted with the edge of his jacket, and he glanced at the door, nervous.

  He knew. Not just that, it was something he didn’t want to talk about, something awful.

  She pressed. “You know what it’s like when something like this happens and they won’t tell you anything.”

  He shook his head and wouldn’t meet her gaze. “I shouldn’t tell you this.”

  “Why not? Because it’s classified? Or because I’m female and you think I can’t handle it?”

  The lieutenant pursed his lips. He’d been in combat, might even have faced down enemy fighters, but he didn’t seem to want to stand up to her.

  “It was a collision,” he said finally.

  Em had worked out a dozen scenarios, everything from weather to mechanical failure. She was even braced to hear that Mary had made a mistake. A million things could go wrong in the air. But a collision?

  “That doesn’t make sense, Mary had almost seven hundred hours in the air, she was too experienced for that.”

  He got that patronizing look a lot of male pilots had when dealing with WASP, like she couldn’t possibly know what she was talking about. “I told you I shouldn’t have said anything.”

  “A collision with whom? Did the other pilot make it? What were they doing that they ran into each other? Did you see it?”

  “I don’t know the details, I’m sorry.”

  “The Army won’t even tell me what she was flying when she went down,” she said.

  He stepped closer, conspiratorially, as if afraid that someone was listening in. Like this really was classified.

  “Look, Miss Anderson, you seem like a nice girl. Why are you doing this? Why are any of you risking your lives like this? Why not stay home, stay safe—?”

  “And plant a Victory Garden like a good girl? Sit by the radio and wait for someone to tell me it’s going to be all right, and that my husband’ll come home safe? I couldn’t do that, Lieutenant. I had to do something.”

  The arguments against women flyers tended to stall out at this point, into vague statements about what was ladylike, what well-bred girls ought to be doing, how women weren’t strong enough to handle the big planes even though they’d proved themselves over and over again. A year of women flying should have shut the naysayers up by now. It hadn’t.

  The lieutenant didn’t say anything.

  She said, “Is there someone else I can talk to?”

  “Look, I don’t know, I’m working off rumors like everyone else. I can’t help you. I’m sorry.” He fled, backing to the door and abandoning Em to the empty corridor.

  The WASP all liked Colonel Roper, who commanded the Second Ferry Group at New Castle. At some of the other bases, commanders had given WASP the cold shoulder, but here, he’d treated them with respect and made it policy that the rest of the group do likewise. He didn’t constantly ask them if they could do the job—he just gave them the job.

  She went to him with the lieutenant’s story.

  His office door was open and he saw her coming. As he was glancing up, a frown drew lines around his mouth. He was young for a colonel, maybe a little rounder than most guys in the Army, but high-spirited. His uniform jacket was slung over the back of his chair.

  “I’m sorry, Anderson, I don’t have any news for you,” he told her before she’d said a word.

  She ducked her gaze and blushed. She’d been in here every day looking for news about Mary’s death.

  “Sorry, sir,” she said, standing at the best attention she knew, back straight and hands at her sides. “But I just talked to the pilots of that B-26 that came in from Romulus. Sir, they told me Mary crashed in a collision. They wouldn’t tell me anything else.”

  Roper’s lips thinned, his brow creased. “A collision—Mary wouldn’t get herself in that kind of mess.”

  “I know. Sir, something’s not right. If there’s anything you can do, anything you can find out—”

  He scratched out a note on a pad of paper. “The crash report ought to be filed by now. I’ll get a copy sent over.”

  That meant a few more days of waiting, but it was progress. They’d get the report, and that would be that. But she still wanted to talk to someone. Someone who’d seen it, someone who knew her. If there was a collision, another pilot was involved. If she could just find out who.

  “Thank you, sir,” she said.

  “You’re welcome. Anderson—try to get some sleep. You look beat.” She hadn’t even been thinking about being tired. She’d been running on fumes. “Yes, sir.”

  Mary Keene came from the kind of family that did everything just so, with all the right etiquette. A car from the funeral home was waiting at the train station, along with Mary’s father. Em recognized him from the family picture Mary kept in their room.

  Em, dressed in her blue uniform—skirt straight, collar pressed, lapels smooth, insignia pins and wings polished—jumped to the platform before the train slowed to a co
mplete stop and made her way to the luggage car.

  She waited again. It should have been raining; instead, a crisp winter sun shone in a blue sky. Perfect flying weather. She was thankful for the wool uniform, because a cold wind blew in over a flat countryside.

  Men from the funeral home retrieved the casket while Mr. Keene thanked her for coming, shaking her hand with both of his and frowning hard so he wouldn’t cry.

  “I thought I’d be meeting one of my boys here like this. Not Mary.”

  Em bowed her head. No one ever knew quite what to say about a woman coming home from war in a casket. If one of Mr. Keene’s sons had been killed, the family would put a gold star in the window to replace the blue one showing loved ones serving in combat. They’d be able to celebrate their war hero. Mary wouldn’t get any of that, not even a flag on her casket.

  Mr. Keene left in his own car. Em would go with Mary to the funeral home, then call a cab and find a hotel to stay at until the funeral tomorrow.

  One of the men from the mortuary took Em aside before they left.

  “I’m given to understand Miss Keene passed on in an airplane crash.”

  “That’s right.”

  He was nervous, not looking at her, clasping his hands. Em thought these guys knew how to deal with anything.

  “I’m afraid I have to ask—I wasn’t given any information,” he said. “The family has traditionally held open-casket services—will this be possible?”

  Or had she burned, had she been smashed beyond recognition, was there anything left? . . . Em’s lips tightened. Stay numb, stay focused, just like navigating a fogbank.

  “No, I don’t think it will,” she said.

  The man lowered his gaze, bowing a little, and returned to his car.

  Em logged thirty hours the next week in trainers, two AT-6s and a BT-13, flying from one end of the country to the other. One morning, she’d woken up in the barracks and had to look outside the window to remember where she was. She kept an eye on other logs and flight plans coming in and out of each base, and kept looking for people who’d been at Romulus last week. Everyone knew about the crash, but other than the fact that a WASP had been killed, nobody treated it like anything unusual. This was wartime, after all.