by Janet Dailey
The sarcasm made her bristle on her cushion of pillows. “Yes, sir, and I heard the cone of silence.” Very sweetly, “Didn’t you?”
His failure to respond immediately was immensely satisfying. Marty had told her some of the instructors had only a few more hours in the BT-13S than they themselves had. “The blind leading the blind,” she had joked. Mary Lynn had suspected Marty of exaggerating but it was beginning to ring true. On two other flights, she’d followed his directions and they’d wound up lost.
Finally, her instructor came back to claim defensively, “I was just testing you.”
With a warm feeling of satisfaction, Mary Lynn headed the BT into the star-studded blackness. Minutes later, a sense of unease stole over her. The engine wasn’t running right; it was a feeling rather than an actual change in its rhythm. She began checking the gauges.
The roughness began as a vibration. Her instructor started yelling at her. Then a tongue of flame leaped out from the whirling propeller, dancing, darting, and disappearing. Then it came again. Fire. The engine was on fire! The instructor screamed obscenities and yanked the controls from Mary Lynn; the stick banged against her knee. Mary Lynn was fighting her own waves of panic at the sight of that deadly yellow fire spilling backwards from the nose of the plane toward the front cockpit where she sat.
It was after 2 A.M. when Marty and Chicago staggered into their bay, physically exhausted, their heads whirling, still seeing the streamers of light from the flare pots in their side vision. Cappy was just climbing into bed, and Eden was already stretched out on her cot, the satin sleep mask over her eyes.
“I could sleep for a week,” Marty complained. She flopped onto her cot, letting her tired head sink into her hands.
“Couldn’t we all.” Cappy pulled the covers up around her shoulders and turned onto her side, snuggling into the pillow.
With an effort, Marty raised her head. The cot next to hers was empty, the blanket stretched tautly across it. “Where’s Mary Lynn?” She frowned.
“I guess she isn’t back yet,” Cappy said without bothering to open her eyes.
Chicago had wasted no time shedding her flight suit and climbing into her pajamas. Late-night conversation was the last thing she was interested in.
“Good night.” She hauled her tired body onto the cot and slipped under the covers.
Marty was now the only one still up. She eyed the empty cot for another several seconds, nagged by Mary Lynn’s absence. Then she shrugged her shoulders and announced to no one in particular, “That stupid instructor probably got her lost again.” She reached for the zipper of her flight suit. “You know, I don’t know why we should bother to undress. We’ll be getting up again in four hours.”
Eden, who had given every semblance of being sound asleep, finally said, “Shut up, Rogers.”
The next morning the cot was still empty. Mary Lynn’s absence could no longer be shrugged aside. Worry was a knife in each one of them.
“What do you suppose happened?” Marty probed each of their faces with her hard glance, afraid but unwilling to show it.
“I don’t know.” Cappy shared the anxiety written in the expressions of her baymates, although it glimmered only in the blue confusion of her eyes. “Like you said last night, Marty, they might have gotten lost. They probably landed at another field and decided to wait until daylight to fly back,” she reasoned. Until they were told differently, she felt it was wisest to maintain a positive outlook. She smiled to encourage optimism. “We’re all probably worrying for nothing.”
“Yeah.” But Marty wasn’t convinced.
After reporting for morning formation, they skipped breakfast and went directly to operations. Marty shouldered her way to the front of the quartet and demanded to know what had happened to Mary Lynn Palmer.
“Please. We’re her baymates,” Cappy said, attempting to temper Marty’s belligerence.
There was a telling hesitation on the part of the establishment officer. “I’m sorry, but the wreckage of her BT-13 was found this morning on a ranch north of here. The plane appears to have exploded on impact. A search is under way for the bodies now.”
“No.” The small negative came from Marty, who went numb with shock. It wasn’t possible. They had made some mistake, her mind kept insisting. Mary Lynn couldn’t be dead. Not her. Marty met the news with a raw and wild disbelief.
While the others reeled from the news, Cappy retained her presence of mind. “Thank you,” she murmured to the solemnfaced woman. They walked out in a close bunch, shoulders rubbing, arms supporting waists, all of them needing the physical contact with one another. Chicago was the only one crying, sobbing softly while tears slid down her cheeks.
Outside, the sun shone down out of an incomparable Texas sky. Spring was bursting around them, birds trilling. It was a perfect day for flying, a gentle wind blowing, but the four were too stunned by the news to notice.
“I don’t believe it,” Marty repeated.
Her expression was stark with the shock of it, her face drained and pale. Marty was taking it the hardest of all of them; she had been the closest to Mary Lynn.
They stood huddled together, grieving in silence. Beyond the loss of a baymate, there was the shock of coming face to face with their own mortality. Regardless of the cause—instrument malfunction, engine failure, pilot error, it could have happened to any of them. Chicago started crying again, smothering the sobs with a hand clamped over her mouth.
If they stood around much longer, Cappy feared they’d become paralyzed. “Come on,” she urged quietly. “We have to report to the flight line.” Her reminder seemed to fall on deaf ears, so she added, “Have you forgotten? There’s a war on.”
The stony look left Marty’s eyes as she glared at Cappy. “Hayward, you make me sick! You can take your stiff upper lip and shove it!” She stalked away, rigid and hurting, unable to find a release for the pain that clutched her throat.
Later, Marty cut off her instructor Bud Hanson’s expression of sympathy as she walked with him to the airplane parked on the ramp. She didn’t want to hear the words, more confirmation of Mary Lynn’s death.
“I don’t want to talk about it, Bud,” she informed him in a hard, cold voice.
His glance skidded over her. “Sure.”
Climbing into the cockpit of the trainer and buckling in was a strange sensation. She caught herself wondering what Mary Lynn had felt when the plane was going down. Had there been time for fear … or pain?
“FF eighty-one.” She depressed the microphone button to call the tower. “This is sixty-two on the ramp requesting taxi instructions. Over.”
A tear slid down her cheek, followed by a second, and a third. Marty heard the reply, but she just couldn’t seem to act. The tears turned into a steady stream, washing down her face and into the corners of her mouth.
“Marty?” Bud Hanson’s voice came over the earphones. “The tower gave you clearance to runway seventeen. Didn’t you hear it?”
“Yes.” She sniffed loudly. “I’m going.” With a check on either side for other aircraft, Marty pushed the throttle forward and stepped her foot down on the right rudder.
It was the poorest job of flying she’d ever done. She almost resented the patience Bud exhibited with mistakes usually made by beginners. Inside, Marty felt sick and dulled. On the ground, she paused to look at the chubby-cheeked man without quite meeting his eyes.
“I’m sorry, Bud,” she said.
“We’re all entitled to our bad days.”
Her legs seemed to be made of lead as she headed across the concrete apron to the hangar. She spotted Chicago standing by a jeep parked near the hangar and immediately bent her head, not wanting to give any sign that she had noticed her baymate. The pain and grief were too fresh and too new. She didn’t want to face any of them and listen to them talk about Mary Lynn. It hurt too much.
“Hey! Marty!”
It was too late. Chicago had seen her. Marty considered ignoring the shout
ed call, then grudgingly turned her gaze toward the girl and altered her direction when Chicago waved her over to the jeep. The knot in her throat got thicker as Marty guessed Chicago probably wanted to tell her the bodies had been recovered. Doll-sized Mary Lynn, all broken up and battered.
“Marty!” A familiar voice called her name.
All at the same time, Marty observed the short, baggy-suited girl waving at her, the crumpled parachute in the back of the jeep and the wide smile on Chicago’s face.
It was Mary Lynn—very much alive despite the scratches from being dragged by the parachute when she had landed. Laughing and crying, Marty broke into a run. When the hugs and the laughter subsided, Mary Lynn explained how she and her instructor had both bailed out of the burning plane before it crashed. The wind had carried her slight weight farther, separating her from the instructor, who had broken his leg in the fall. After shivering through the night’s cold, Mary Lynn had set out walking at dawn and met up with a cowboy.
“When he hauled me onto the back of that horse and it started bucking, I thought I was really doomed.” Mary Lynn laughed in retrospect. But the laugh faded as she glanced at the handle to the parachute ripcord, a souvenir she still gripped in her hand. “I guess this makes me an official member of the Caterpillar Club, doesn’t it?” This was an exclusive club whose membership was limited to pilots who had bailed out of an airplane and had the parachute handle as proof.
“It makes you the luckiest devil on earth,” Marty retorted.
“I know.” It would be a long time before she’d forget the sensation of that night—cracking the canopy and shoving it back, the rushing push of the wind and fiery heat from the flames blowing on her, hurtling into that black void and feeling that abject terror, pulling on the ripcord and waiting those agonizing seconds for the chute to open, the crack of the billowing silk and the sight of the burning plane spinning in its death throes. A long time.
“Hot damn! This calls for a party!” Marty declared, unable to blink back the tears in her eyes. “Let’s round up Cappy and Eden and go to the canteen. The Cokes are on me!”
“Yeah, we need to celebrate,” Chicago agreed. “The Inseparables are all together again!”
Chapter VII
HER NECK AND shoulder muscles ached with tension, but Cappy couldn’t spare the few seconds it would take to relax them and ease some of the painful stiffness. All her concentration was focused on the instrument panel in front of her. Her hands gripped the stick between her legs and her feet operated the rudder pedals as she performed the maneuvers instructed by the voice on the headphones. The air inside the closed cockpit was becoming suffocatingly close. It seemed to add to the dull throb in her head.
“Okay, that’s enough for today,” the voice said, then added, as an afterthought, “Good job.”
All the instruments went dead, but Cappy was slow to loosen her grip on the stick. It seemed a permanent part of her. Sighing, she arched her shoulders and back, turning her neck into them in a flexing maneuver, then reached up to unfasten the hatch.
Whenever she first stuck her head out of the cockpit she always experienced that disoriented pause. She felt she’d been flying a plane this last hour, but she was climbing out into a classroom. Cappy swung over the side of the Link trainer and stepped down to the floor. The “voice” was sitting at a table. He could communicate by phone with the “pilot” and observe the pilot’s performance as it was recorded by the automatic stylus.
With her feet on the floor, Cappy looked at the flight simulator that had tricked her once again into believing it was real.
The Link trainer was such an absurd sight—a boxlike structure with stubby mock wings and a ridiculous tail. It always reminded Cappy of a cartoon caricature of an airplane, something that belonged in a carnival. All it lacked was a fake propeller. But she supposed for all its comical appearance it accomplished its purpose, which was to give the trainees plenty of practice in instrument flying.
At the end of a Link class, Cappy always felt frazzled and worn out, as if her brains had been fried and scrambled. This time wasn’t any different. It had been raining steadily since morning, so there would be no flying. With the day’s classes over, the trainees were at loose ends.
Like herd animals, the five from Cappy’s bay naturally coalesced into a group as they headed for the door. They all wore that same sense-dulled expression and that blank look in their eyes.
“Hell has to be a Link trainer,” Marty declared. “It got so stuffy in there today I thought I was going to suffocate. Can you imagine what it’s going to be like in the summer when the temperature hits a hundred in the shade … and us trapped in that sweatbox for hours on end? There isn’t a muscle in my body that doesn’t ache. And my head—the damned thing is pounding so, I’d just as soon cut it off.”
“Please do.” Eden’s smile was thin with sarcasm. “Then the rest of us wouldn’t have to listen to you bitch all the time.”
Marty curled a lip at her but didn’t respond as they filed through the door. The rain was coming straight down in obscuring sheets. They huddled under the overhang of the building with the steady drum of the falling rain above them and the runoff from the roof creating a water screen in front of them. An incongruous evergreen, short and squat, stood beside the post, one of a scattered row that dotted the front of the classroom building. Evergreens seemed out of place in this red Texas landscape.
“Hell, I need a cigarette. Let’s go over to the canteen for Cokes and smokes,” Marty suggested and looked to Cappy for agreement.
“Okay, but somebody has to go back to the bay and empty the pans.” Their barracks was not only notoriously drafty, but the roof also leaked. They had scrounged up a half-dozen containers and strategically positioned them to catch all the drips. Cappy had organized a system where they each set their alarm clocks for a different hour of the night so the pans would be emptied at regular intervals.
“I did it last,” Marty asserted. “It’s Chicago’s turn.”
With a grimace, Chicago accepted her fate. “I’ll see you all later.”
“Aren’t you going to join us at the canteen?” Cappy asked.
“Nawh. I got some washing I need to do.” There was a troubled and sad look in Chicago’s eyes before she turned away and raised the collar of her battle jacket up around her head. “See you later.” With her head down, she dashed into the rain. Cappy felt a twinge of pity for the girl as she watched her leave.
“What’s the matter with her?” Marty frowned.
“I think this instrument flying is giving her problems.” Cappy shrugged to indicate it wasn’t really any of their business.
“Some days it gets to all of us.” Mary Lynn hunched her shoulders and looked out into the downpour. Water was already pooling on the ground, the pelting drops splattering when they hit. “A gloomy day like this naturally makes you moody.”
“It’s definitely ruining my hair.” Eden hooked her finger around a limp strand and let it fall. “Look at the way it’s drooping. Do you know what I keep fantasizing about? Getting a hot oil treatment for my hair, and a facial, then stretching out on a massage table and sipping twelve-year-old Scotch while trained hands rub away all the muscle aches and tension.”
“It sounds wonderful,” Cappy murmured.
“Especially the Scotch,” Marty agreed in her raspy, amused voice.
“This rain isn’t letting up a bit. Why are we standing here?” Mary Lynn wanted to know.
“She’s right. Come on.” Marty loosened her jacket and pulled it up over her head.
In follow-the-leader style, they all ducked their heads under their raised jackets and splashed across the compound toward the canteen. The rain drenched them.
“Hey, look!” Marty pointed to the administration building while water dribbled down her face. The local taxi was parked in front while its well-dressed, umbrellaed passengers waited to claim their luggage from the trunk, their heads turning in every direction as they gawked
at everything they saw. The women looked bewildered, decidedly out of place, but eager to belong. “It’s the new class of trainees. Do you suppose we looked that green?”
“Probably,” Cappy replied, smiling faintly. That gray day almost a month and a half ago when they arrived at Avenger Field seemed years away.
“I think we need to show them the ropes.” There was a devilish glint in Marty’s eyes.
“What does she mean?” Mary Lynn turned her head to look up to the taller Cappy, and got a faceful of rain in the process. Cappy tried to hide her smile at Mary Lynn’s inexperience.
Come sundown, the clouds rolled away and a rainbow came out to compete with the fresh-washed brilliance of a scarlet sunset. The containers were emptied for the last time and stored away for a future rainy day. Then the Inseparables waited until Marty decreed the time was ripe.
Outside they joined other trainees of the first Sweetwater class and sloshed through the red mud to the barracks of the new recruits. Mary Lynn was swept along with the pack as they burst into the first bay. Marty was at the front of the assault, barking out orders and acting tough.
“Attention!” she shouted to the startled trainees, who were lounging on their new beds, writing their first letters home. After they scrambled off their cots, the giggling started as they realized they were being hazed by their “upper classmen.” “What’s so funny?” Marty demanded without cracking a smile, but her light-colored eyes were gleaming with wicked humor. “Stand up straight. Shoulders back, chest out, stomach in!”
The raucous spirit of the initiation went against everything Mary Lynn had been taught about kindness and courtesy, all the mannerly things that should be done to make a new person feel welcome. But the new trainees seemed to take the harassing and the sometimes cruel ridicule all in good fun. Obediently they marched to the confusing set of orders and attempted to sit in chairs they knew would be pulled away at the last second. When a few of them were selected to be thrown in the showers, they squealed with a kind of laughter.