Trophy for Eagles

by Boyne, Walter J.

  The comic crash had diverted his mind but not his body from the excitement of holding Patty Dompnier tightly. She had ceased to struggle, and he was now aware that he was pressing a giant erection against this lovely woman, the wife of a friend.

  She had noticed, at first annoyed, then amused.

  "Thank you for saving me." She looked back over her shoulder, hesitating for a moment. Then, Charlotte's daughter, she paraphrased Mae West's line from a New York play. "Is that a wrench in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me?"

  Blushing, he let her go as Dickens wandered back in a state of shock.

  Embarrassed by her own joke, but not wanting to leave, she asked, "How did you know it was going to happen?"

  "I didn't. If I'd been sure it was, I wouldn't have let Dickens go either, I'd have kicked a hole in the rudder or something. But I knew I didn't want you to take a chance."

  She nodded. "Thanks." Then, unable to resist, she added, "For everything."

  An hour later, he was still trying to think of something clever to say as he polished the last of the Simoniz compound off the Rascal's fuselage. The line about the wrench had been funny; she must have inherited her mother's bawdy sense of humor. He wondered if she'd inherited her free and easy ways.

  Cleveland and Patty inevitably reminded him of Oakland and Millie. Patty Dompnier was totally different in appearance and manner, but he felt the same stirrings of fundamental hunger for her. Might as well forget about it—she's married, he told himself.

  Bandy knew there was a point in preparing an airplane when it was better just to button everything up and wait for the race. He tossed his polishing rag down and stretched out in the warm Ohio sun to watch the women's unlimited. Charlotte was competing against some of the best women flyers in the country, with the single exception of Amelia Earhart, who didn't fly closed-course races.

  Most of the men pilots resented having women compete. The prizes were small enough without having to share them with women, many of whom were wealthy in their own right. Some rash talk about letting them race against the men had been buried in an avalanche of curses and catcalls.

  The women's unlimited race results would depend almost entirely upon the pilots' skills, since two of the women were flying Gee Bee Sportsters identical to Charlotte's except for color. He could see them lined up for the racehorse start, quivering under power, dust swirling behind them.

  All three bore the Granville Brothers trademark paint scheme of gleaming white fuselage and wings edged with a scallop of contrasting colors. Charlotte's plane was trimmed in red, with the racing number seventeen on the side and the wingtips. Gladys Traden was number nine, and her scallops were green. Gloria Engles bore a black eight-ball for a number, with matching black trim.

  The fourth airplane, flown by young Nancy Alderman, was a taper-wing Laird biplane, clearly outclassed.

  Roget joined him, leaning down to yell in his ear, "Hey, Bandy—do you know why women can't fly upside down?"

  It was the tenth time he'd heard the joke in the last four days. "No idea. Why not?"

  " 'Cause they would have a crack-up!"

  Hadley had gotten a laugh with this one from everybody but the French mechanics.

  The decibel level of the engines went up and the starter's flag went down. Gladys Traden got off first, forcing Charlotte to fly high and outside. All the airplanes disappeared momentarily around the far turn, then came back in a blur as they whipped in front of them, hungry hornets racing wide open.

  He wondered about Charlotte's mental set. A closed-course race was the most dangerous flying short of actual combat, and apparently she loved it.

  The three Gee Bees looked as if they were tied in formation as they bored around the course, never changing position as they whipped around the pylons. They lapped the Laird the fourth time around, and Nancy Alderman graciously pulled up high and wide, giving way. She continued to fly the course, waiting for someone to drop out.

  Gloria Engles had attached herself to Traden's wing, flying in the number-two position all the way around, the turbulence from their prop wash combining to keep Charlotte well back and out of position. On the next lap Engles abruptly pulled deeply into the course in a tight turn that increased the force of gravity on her body four times, pressing her into her seat. She kept the elliptical wings of her racer hanging vertically as she rerounded the pylon.

  Must have missed the turn, Bandfield thought.

  He glanced at Charlotte, now flying number two to Traden, then back to Engles. She was gone. A billowing black cloud of smoke summoned the crash trucks, roaring out with sirens blaring.

  "High-speed stall. I saw her snap. Goddam women shouldn't be racing anyway." Roget's expression was grim.

  An involuntary response to the tragedy gripped the throttles of the two remaining Gee Bees, and their lap speeds slowed slightly. The Laird drifted down to reenter the pattern, lonely, watchful, waiting to finish third.

  Charlotte had drifted a little farther back in her number-two spot, a thin stream of white smoke pouring from her exhausts staining the white fuselage sides with an oil smear. The two Gee Bees roared past on the final lap, dead level, thirty feet separating them. Traden's right wing's fabric suddenly bellowed out to burst like a balloon, sending her aircraft snap-rolling to the right before burying itself inverted in the ground.

  "Holy Christ, that's two down."

  Charlotte, in a nervous fog, blasted past the checkered flag, then pulled up and headed off the course, gaining altitude slowly, trying to compose herself. The Laird circled again, Alderman delighted to have an unexpected second place.

  Bandy had a box lunch from the airfield cafe, but he couldn't touch a bite. The vision of the two women going in wouldn't leave him.

  "You'd better eat, Bandy. Twenty laps is one hell of a race, especially around this itty-bitty course." Hughes pushed a waxed-paper-wrapped sandwich at him.

  "At least the legs are all the same length. But at two hundred and forty miles an hour, you'll be turning every fifty seconds or so, pulling lots of Gs. Lemme in there."

  Hughes had a roll of adhesive tape and a pair of scissors. He cut and pasted twenty small strips of tape along the bottom of the instrument panel.

  "It's easy to lose track of where you are. Pull one piece of tape off after each lap, so you know how far you have to go."

  A haunted-looking Stephan Dompnier limped by, glancing neither right nor left.

  Eight airplanes were manhandled to the starting line. Hadley stood towering beside the little airplane, polishing the windscreen with a chamois for the hundredth time, ready for any last-minute emergency. Bandy sat in the Rascal, shivering in spite of the sultry Cleveland weather and the heat roaring back from the 485-horsepower Curtiss engine. He glanced at the panel; the oil and cylinder head temperature gauges were up, the coolant temperature was up, the oil pressure was down. Goddam, another five minutes on the ground and the damn thing would cook itself to death. He eased the throttle forward to clear the engine, burning the plugs clean and keeping air flowing through the radiator, and Hadley turned his back to the blast, squinting to keep the dust out of his eyes.

  Bandfield's qualifying time had been good enough to get him the third position in the line. It was a good break, because of the hazards of the racehorse start. The planes were lined up wingtip to wingtip; when the flag came down, they would be off and heading for the first pylon like wasps flying down a funnel. Number-two spot had gone to Roy Dickens, sitting comfortably in the Cessna racer he had flown for years, an airplane as pretty as he was ugly. He stuck out of it like a witch on a broomstick. The Cessna looked nose-heavy because of the disproportionately large Wasp engine that powered it.

  A universe of people milled in close proximity, pressing down upon the racers in an inverted pyramid of flesh. A quarter of a million watched from the bleachers, and as many more were spread out around the field. Another three or four thousand—insiders, the cognoscenti—were in the pit area, past the wire that
restrained the crowds. A covey of ten or twelve people gathered around each airplane, and each racer had a senior mechanic stationed like Hadley just outside the cockpit.

  But as the minutes ground down toward the starting time, each solitary figure of a pilot became the tip of the inverted pyramid, carrying on his back the weight of the watchers as well as the job at hand. As the seconds ticked off, the pilots' vision narrowed to a tunnel which saw part of the cockpit and a little section of the windscreen. At the start he would become absolutely alone, launched like an arrow into a winding roar of confusion, a freewheeling gear in a Chaplinesque clock speeding to oblivion.

  Dickens reached down and bottomed out his seat, pulling his head within the confines of the windscreen and doubling his legs up so that they almost reached his face. He'd had to make special cutouts in the instrument panel just to be able to squeeze into the airplane. He glanced to his left at the little Frog in the blue airplane and shook his head. It wasn't fair. The French government subsidized their racing team, paid Caudron and Renault to do their best. He'd put the Cessna together with hard work and an engine salvaged from one of last year's crashes. The Frog was rich and didn't need the prize money. Every cent Dickens had and all he could borrow was invested in the Cessna. He wanted to win, needed to win.

  Looking to the right, he sneered at Bandfield's airplane, crude in comparison to his or the Frenchman's. All he had to do was get off first and take the first pylon, then let the rest of them catch up with him. If he got ahead of the Frenchman, he'd never let him pass.

  Dompnier had won the pole position, and his head was now twitching in the cockpit, glancing from his instruments to the starter's flag and back again. The racehorse start worried him; his retractable gear might not be strong enough to hold up on the rough field surface. But if he could get off first and be first around the pylon, the race was won.

  Bandy stared at the Caudron with admiration. It was the fastest plane on the field by ten miles an hour or so, capable of 260-mph laps when it was running right. It should be running right now, he thought, after all the care Roget had given it. God, after all their efforts, working double shifts to keep the bomber project going while they built the racer, they might have given the prize away to Stephan by rebuilding his engine. Maybe they'd given the factory away! It had been crazy to help Dompnier.

  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 propellers, 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 checkerboards that he knew were the parking lots. Rudder, aileron, wing down, back pressure. It became a horizontal dance, a ritual coercion 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 firewa
ll, 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.