Amerika

by Paul Lally

  ‘That’ll help.’

  ‘The good news isn’t finished. I’ve got a tour scheduled for tonight. Charlie Macomb, he manages the dam, always lights up the place like a Christmas tree as a favor to me. ‘Course I grease his palm a bit too, to do it. No sir, there’s nothing more beautiful than Boulder Dam at night.’

  Ava said, ‘Except for the Dixie Clipper flying over it.’

  McGraw smiled. ‘If we time it right, we can give our passengers an unexpected treat.’

  ‘Heart attacks, you mean,’ I said. ‘We’ll be blasting down the river like there’s no tomorrow.’

  He clapped his hands. ‘You’ll do it then?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The leaking avgas from our ruptured sponson tank cast a rainbow-like sheen on the lake waters as I taxied the Dixie Clipper away from her mooring. It felt like she was bleeding to death. But nothing we could do about it now. While we were on our scouting mission at the dam, the Sentinel Island crew, under Orlando’s supervision, had managed to find bullet holes in the right sponson that we had missed. But like our battle damage to the hull, not just the outer duralumin skin the Nazi bullets punctured, but the fuel tanks themselves had been hit.

  If only we had the self-sealing tanks like the fighter planes we had been building before the Neutrality Act. I remembered movie newsreels showing row after row of twin-engine, supercharged Lockheed P-38 Lightning fighter planes moving down assembly lines, out onto the tarmac and then zooming into the air, guns blazing, on their way to Britain and France. But now those same assembly lines were gearing up to make refrigerators instead, while we were stuck with a bleeding seaplane.

  The crew briefing had been surprisingly quick and issue-free. When I announced our intentions I had expected objections, but to a person they agreed that we had come this far together, and if we had a chance to continue, we should take it, no matter how risky, no matter how farfetched.

  When they finished I said, ‘Fair enough. But let me say one more time, if you want out, that’s fine too. There’s no guarantee we’re going to make it out of here in one piece, let alone get to the target.’

  I paused. For sure I thought Ziggy would want to bail and I couldn’t blame him. Of all the crew, his was the least important position. We could easily do this without him. But from his stony silence and stern features, it became clear to me that he felt just the opposite.

  Captain McGraw was right about the moon, just as he was right about a lot of other things; it rose bright and clear in the night sky. The barrenness of the surrounding rock outcroppings, empty of vegetation, reflected the light and became a silvery, craggy landscape almost as barren the moon and just as unforgiving. How anything managed to survive in these dry, dusty conditions was a mystery to me. But that was a thought to consider only while calmly cruising at eight thousand feet on autopilot on a starry night. We had to get up there first.

  ‘Flaps five,’ I said.

  ‘Flaps five.’

  I slid back the cockpit window and leaned out to catch a glimpse of the slowly receding dock. The tall figure of Esau McGraw stood silently watching. I waved at him. He took off his Stetson and waved it in return. The moonlight made it look white as snow.

  I said to Ava, ‘What an odd pair those two are.’

  ‘I’m sure they feel the same about our crew.’

  All of whom were now at their assigned stations. But since we weren’t anticipating armed resistance at this point, Orlando had exchanged his waist gun position for the radio operator’s station. He sat facing the engineering panel, watching Mason’s every move.

  The noise on the flight deck was slightly less because we only had three engines. A mixed blessing to be sure. I would gladly have traded quiet for power. Even so, we still needed our intercoms to communicate normally.

  ‘Captain to crew, station report.’

  ‘Engineering, check.’

  ‘Co-pilot check.’

  ‘Ziggy? Professor?’ The two were strapped in at the captain’s station next to the navigator’s table.

  ‘Doing fine back here,’ Ziggy said, his voice pitched higher than I’d ever heard. ‘Telling each other Bar Mitzvah jokes.’

  And that was it for my ‘crew.’ I wanted to laugh but it wasn’t funny.

  ‘Channel buoy,’ Ava called out.

  The red beacon marking Black Canyon’s channel shone brightly in the darkness. I throttled up our port engines for a differential turn to starboard. The buoy dutifully slid away in the opposite direction as I came into the wind. Sure enough, the starboard wing dipped slightly as the force of the air struck it. But our taxi speed was just below ten knots, so we were spared the embarrassment of weathercocking. Instead of the wind hitting us sideways as it had been all the way from the dock, we now faced it head on, making it much easier to taxi.

  ‘So far so good,’ Ava said.

  ‘...said the man falling off the cliff.’

  ‘Funny.’

  ‘But true, in about five minutes.’

  A mixture of fear, anger and excitement, all rolled up into one, flickered across her dimly-lit face.

  ‘Fasten your seatbelt,’ I said. ‘And keep your eye on the head temps.’

  She flicked her eyes to the gauges. ‘That’s not the only temperature rising. I’m sweating bullets.’

  Dead ahead of us the night sky was getting brighter. I could only assume the lights coming from Boulder Dam. No time like the present. I flexed my fingers over the throttle quadrant, gripped three of the four rounded knobs and shoved them forward. The engines responded smoothly and we began accelerating. To them, just one more flight. To me it might damn well be their last. The airspeed needle quivered past twenty, then thirty knots. The nose felt heavier than usual. I cranked in more elevator trim and that seemed to help.

  ‘Forty,’ Ava called.

  ‘Flaps ten.’

  The first faraway slap of water against the hull as she started skipping along. A slender string of stars appeared on the horizon, then grew larger and larger until they became lights, hundreds of them it seemed, ringing the upstream edge of Boulder Dam. Off to starboard, the Desert Queen, lit up like a Christmas tree, sailed full speed for the dam.

  ‘Sixty knots,’ she called.

  Too slow, way too slow. Rudder stiffening, adding more trim to keep her from pulling toward the dead engine.

  ‘Ready flaps forty.’

  ‘Standing by.’

  I could read the engine instruments, but wanted confirmation.

  ‘Engineering, how we doing?’

  ‘In the red, but go, go, GO!’ Orlando shouted.

  I risked some back pressure on the yoke and felt her rise up onto the step momentarily, fall off, then rise again and stay there. The wallowing motion instantly disappeared as the hull rode higher and higher and the thrumming sound increased as the wavelets began spanking her bottom. How much room left before the dam? Half mile? Less? Hard to tell. Never tried taking off into a concrete wall that rose higher and higher the closer we got. All we needed was thirty-five feet to clear it.

  Ava stroked the instrument panel, ‘C’mon, darling, you can do it.’

  I wasn’t so sure, but I liked her confidence. Sometimes it adds lift to your wings when you need it most.

  And then suddenly I was flying down a tunnel; that familiar place where nothing exists but the task at hand, and knew the time had come. Nothing on either side of me, just the dam ahead. No engine sound, no outside noise, just my own breathing and my hands feeling the warmth of the yoke and my feet on the stiffening rudder pedals as the Dixie Clipper merged with me into one creature with metal wings and engines and a human heart and mind rushing across the water faster and faster, and slowly lifting off the water surface, getting her nose down, gaining airspeed.

  Needle touching seventy, intake towers skyscraper-tall flashing past on both sides.

  ‘Full flaps!’

  The wings broadened with added lift just as the Desert Queen flashed past to starboard, a gush
of steam coming from her whistle, but I didn’t hear it, and I pulled back on the yoke and up we rose, higher and higher and cleared the top of the dam with nothing but stars above and clear sky. But the stall horn was sounding, control yoke softening, and I shoved it forward and we nosed down, losing the sky, and the dark canyon walls rushed in on both sides, reaching out to rip off our wings.

  Gone was the wide expanse of water behind us. Now just the narrow, winding river below that curved to the left and I kept the throttles at full power as we dropped further and further, gaining airspeed but losing altitude. Ava shouted something but I couldn’t make it out.

  All I could think about was the airspeed building fast enough to let me pull back on the yoke and level us out from the seven hundred-foot circus dive we made off the edge of a cliff, and that damned canyon wall was straight ahead, velvet black, unyielding and coming fast.

  ‘Landing lights!’

  Twin cones of white split the darkness, turning the black canyon walls brown and dark red. They slid to starboard as I banked into a tight turn that instantly stole the precious airspeed we had gained from the drop, only to lose it as I tried to escape the stone walls. By how much I don’t know. All I know is that we were still here, not a tangled wreck, and Black Canyon opened out ahead of us, its river sparkling in the moonlight as we flew below the ridge like some gigantic, prehistoric bird in search of its prey.

  The iron band around my head slowly began to ease and my tunnel

  vision melted outward until I could see more to my left and right and the cockpit noise rushed back like a rising tide and I heard Ava’s voice, ‘We’re losing number two if you don’t throttle back.’

  I gently eased back on the power, even though my instincts told me to push her even more. We still needed to climb out of the canyon, but we were too heavy to do it unless we had at least one hundred-ten knots indicated, which we did not. And so instead, I continued flying a weaving, sinuous path that followed the river as it coursed down the canyon toward God knows where.

  Slowly, ever so slowly, the canyon walls grew wider, maybe three or four hundred feet, which greatly reduced the chances of losing a wingtip or worse. But it couldn’t last forever. Sooner or later the walls would start narrowing again and this time it would be too tight a fit.

  ‘Sure would love to see some sky,’ Ava said.

  ‘Ten more knots and we will. Keep your eyes peeled on these walls. If they start squeezing in, holler.’

  ‘I’ll scream my head off.’

  I had been slowly milking up the flaps the whole time, and by now they were fully retracted. The lessened drag would give us a few more much- needed knots. What else could help? Then I remembered.

  ‘Cowl flaps closed?’ I said.

  Orlando said, ‘Been closed.’

  ‘Damn, so much for that idea - where’s Mason?’

  ‘Beside me.’

  ‘How’s our fuel?’

  Mason chimed in. ‘Too soon to tell. Give me an hour into the flight and I’ll have a chart ready for you.’

  ‘Let Orlando do it. You’ve got a bomb to drop, remember.’

  A chuckle. ‘Forgot that little detail.’

  Ava shouted, ‘We’ve got positive rate of climb!’

  I started pulling back the yoke before she even finished her sentence, so anxious was I to escape the brooding depths of the dark canyon. The clipper climbed slowly, an aluminum whale in search of the surface to take a breath of air. The night sky slid into place, complete with countless, comforting star while the altimeter continued its clockwise journey, five hundred feet...seven-fifty... one thousand…

  When we reached cruising altitude, we flew in silence for a long minute, while I tried to loosen the iron grip I had on the yoke, as if somebody had welded my fingers to its Bakelite surface. But finger by finger, I finally succeeded.

  Ava voice was shaky but calm. ‘That was a first.’

  ‘And a last.’

  ‘Had to close my eyes toward the end.’

  ‘Don’t blame you.’

  ‘Glad you didn’t.’

  I wiggled the control wheel. ‘Need to dial up an RDF station.’

  Ava took over. ‘Find something good to listen to. No preachers, okay?’ I saluted her and made for the radio operator’s table. From long habit I was flicking power switches on the transmitter and receiver before I even sat down. I started tuning the radio direction finder, but then noticed its big round dial wasn’t lit. Neither were the frequency dials and indicator lights on the transmitter and receiver. Tried again.

  Nothing.

  To Orlando and Mason, ‘Check your radio breakers.’

  They flicked them on and off. Nothing. Without power the transmitter and receiver were useless boxes. Ditto the RDF. And without RDF we couldn’t fly the frequency to our target. Futile, I know, but just to be sure I checked the cable connections by pulling on them one by one, especially those leading to the power supplies. I almost overlooked the one curled around a lower stanchion then disappeared into the fuselage wall.

  I got down on my hands and knees and squirmed underneath the table to reach it. I gave it a quick tug, expecting the same resistance, but it came free from its socket like a rotten tooth.

  One look at the tangled mass of torn and stripped wires and I felt like somebody had punched me in the head with a brick. What should have been a tightly-bound bundle of color-coded wiring carefully soldered into a large multi-pin, screw-on connector, was nothing but a tangled mess. The connector was still screwed into place, minus the cable that somebody had intentionally yanked out and then stuffed back to make them look okay.

  After Orlando examined it he said, ‘No way can we fix it.’

  ‘What if we had the wiring diagram?’

  ‘Something like is a division-level repair item. They’d just swap it out.’

  ‘Can we guess where the wires go?’

  His silent stare made me regret my stupid comment. Then he said,

  ‘Look, even if we did have the diagram, we’ve got no soldering tools.’

  ‘Can’t we just wedge them in somehow?’

  ‘Sam, stop it.’ He shook his head. ‘The radios are dead. Either move on to a Plan B or turn this girl around.’

  I couldn’t let go just yet. ‘Were the radios okay when you stood watch last night?’

  He shrugged. ‘They were turned off, but they looked okay to me.’

  ‘And they were working when I was there. And when Ziggy was there too.’ I dropped my voice to a whisper. ‘Who the hell did this?’ He shrugged. ‘Bad guys for sure.’

  ‘But who?’

  ‘You’re asking the wrong person.’

  Before I could stop, my mind took off like a bloodhound, sniffing with suspicion at everything; the Sentinel Island crew working around the clipper, the old-timer guard I’d talked to before I came on board last night, any one of them could have ripped the wires out and disabled the radios.

  But whoever it was, he’d done a good job. Gone was simply finding a radio station’s frequency and homing in on it. Had we been flying with a full crew and lost our radios, this would not have been the end of the world. Our navigator could have plotted our position with a combination of dead reckoning and celestial navigation.

  Orlando nudged me. ‘Got that plan yet?’

  ‘Getting there.’

  I unwound myself from underneath the radio operator’s table. Ziggy stood there with his hands on his hips like a sidewalk superintendent.

  ‘Problems?’ he said.

  I decided not to feed the flames. ‘Radio’s not working.’

  ‘But we need it to find the target, right?’

  ‘Not anymore.’

  He looked pained. ‘You mean the mission’s off?’

  I didn’t answer him because I didn’t have an answer… yet.

  Seconds later, with a prayer running thorough my head, I rummaged around the drawers beneath the navigator’s plotting table. Had this been anything but a Pan Am plane I woul
dn’t have bothered doing this, but Dutchman Preister was good at training his crews to be prepared for any and all contingencies.

  Since Pan Am flew over empty oceans and seas, this included a fat- barreled flare pistol and eighteen flares clipped to the wall for firing downwards towards the water to determine wind drift. Was it in there?

  Check.

  Add to this, the more prosaic navigator’s tools: parallel rulers, sight reduction tables, plotting sheets, dividers, sharpened pencils and a stopwatch. Were they there?

  Check.

  And in the third drawer beneath the long chart table, a thick blue book lettered in gold: 1942 Air Almanac. I breathed a sigh of relief. Fine to have a church, but this was the bible. Even so, we needed the ‘preacher’ or we were sunk. I took a deep breath, opened the next drawer, and for a moment saw nothing and my heart sank.

  Then I reached further back and my fingers brushed against a wooden box with a hinged lid. I pulled it out, held my breath, and opened the lid. The Spencer, Browning and Rust Company bubble octant rested peacefully in its blue-velvet home. The polished brass instrument felt cool in my hands as I carefully lifted it out of its resting place. It would warm up when I put it to use.

  Ziggy said, ‘What the heck is that?’

  I turned it over in my hands and silently thanked our navigator Stone, back on Couba Island, either dead or alive, for following Preister’s rules to the letter.

  ‘Something we need.’

  I left him and went forward to bring Ava up to speed. I had her make a timed turn over a fixed point on the ground so that I could get to work.

  ‘Can you plot our course with dead reckoning?’ she said.

  ‘Not as accurate by itself. Washington’s too far a reach and besides, the weather’s never going to hold long enough. Look out there.’

  The moonlight lit up a faraway, soft silver wall of clouds to the northwest.

  ‘Maybe we can climb above it.’

  ‘Doubt it. That’s why I want a star fix right now.’

  I fished around inside my pocket and pulled out a slip of paper upon which I had scribbled something I always automatically did as a captain:

  33°03'23.00’ N 114°44’44.09’ W