On Glorious Wings

by Stephen Coonts

  “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 firewall, 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.

  Bandfield’s airplane had pulled just to the side of the little Cessna when Dickens rocked his ailerons and flicked a skidding turn out in front of him.

  Dompnier watched, clinically detached. “Merde, he’s bluffing, just as Turner said he would.”

  Bandfield saw the Cessna’s control movements, ignored them. It was win or die, a high school game of chicken such as he’d once played in Model Ts on the country roads around Salinas.

  Dickens flicked his controls again, saw the Rascal relentlessly boring in, the shimmering circle of its propeller aimed directly at his cockpit. Dickens wrenched his red racer down and outside as Bandfield slammed his plane over the top of the Cessna’s cockpit with inches to spare, then dropped down to take advantage of the clear air of the lead.

  Dompnier growled with delight. “He made it.” The old 1918 ace’s killer instinct stirred within him. Dickens’s faked maneuver had cost him time, and he’d fallen a length behind Bandfield, and now was only half a length ahead. First Dickens, then Bandfield, then the trophy.

  Dickens swore to himself, bending the throttle forward. He knew he didn’t have the speed to catch Bandfield. He had to hold the Caudron off somehow and take at least second
place. He needed the money, to live, to eat, to fly.

  Dickens looked in his mirror again, saw the Caudron’s prop between his wing and elevator. Dompnier was gaining—his engine must have cleared up. Dickens forgot about Bandfield, forgot about anything but the blue Caudron moving in to steal second place, steal his livelihood from him. He moved stick and rudder in short abrupt slamming movements, glancing back at Dompnier, who was gaining inch by inch. He had no choice; he had to fake this Frog out even if he hadn’t fooled that fucking Bandfield.

  Dickens viciously flicked his ailerons, kicked the rudder, jigged the Cessna right, then left.

  Dompnier’s face compressed to a tight smile. “No, my friend, not this time. You didn’t fool Bandfield, you won’t fool me.”

  Desperate, Dickens flicked his controls again, harder, jolting unseen molecules of air, scraping loose their grip on his tapered wings. The little Cessna shuddered in a high-speed stall, snapping directly into Dompnier’s path.

  The Cessna blotted out the sky before Dompnier, a bright red wall centered with the terrified white smear of Dickens’s face. In the split second before the collision his hands automatically moved to jettison the canopy and unbuckle the safety harness. The two airplanes merged, disappearing in a thudding explosion that rocked the field. The French racer bored through the Cessna, propeller chewing Dickens and cockpit before lofting the engine away in a high arc as the Caudron disintegrated around Dompnier.

  Thrown brutally from his shattered cockpit, Stephan was pain-gouged to a clear untrammeled consciousness by the midair splintering of his shredded body. Turning flat, arms and legs outstretched into a cross, he saw the ground spin beneath him. He did not scream. His last thought was that Patty would not bear his son after all, before he dropped to bounce like a skipped rock on the grassy stubble.

  It was a second before the stricken crowd could comprehend what had happened, before the low, dolorous moan concealing the shock of blood-bitten peasure rolled out.

  Coming around for the last lap, Bandy took the checkered flag wondering where Dompnier and Dickens had suddenly gone. He pulled up to five hundred feet and brought the power back, letting the Rascal coast down to 150 mph. His left hand was trembling from the grip he had on the throttle, his muscles sore from the strain and the G forces. But he had the $15,000. They had the factory.

  The other racers were spreading out to forge a landing pattern, Dompnier and Dickens not among them. He dropped down to take a slow victory lap, fifty feet above the course. The flame and smoke puzzled him until he saw Patty running toward the wreckage.

  WINGS OVER

  KHABAROVSK

  by LOUIS L’AMOUR

  Louis L’Amour began his writing career in the late 1930s, selling short stories to pulp fiction magazines, a medium that became extinct with the dawning of the television age. Volume was the key to making a living writing for the pulps—the magazines paid by the word and the rate was low: some pulp writers pounded out as many as 10,000 words a day, every day. They never rewrote. Those successful at the craft published under numerous pen names.

  Pulp fiction was unoriginal and trite; it was written so fast it couldn’t be anything else. The L’Amour story that follows contains this magnificent sentence: “He sat behind his table staring at Turk inscrutably.” Takes your breath away, doesn’t it?

  Before he went on to fame and fortune writing formula westerns filled with stock characters who were wide at the shoulder, lean at the hip, and fast with a gun, Louis L’Amour wrote Turk Madden and his loyal sidekick, the Manchu Shin Bao. These two soldiers of fortune knocked about the world in a Grumman Goose and starred in numerous L’Amour pulp tales during World War II.

  The plot of the following adventure is strikingly similar to the plots of many of the B-movie westerns Hollywood was cranking out about this time. Comrade Lutvin could have easily been a deputy sheriff shot in the back on the outskirts of town, Turk Madden, the hero, a ranch foreman who discovers the body and rides into town to tell the sheriff. One suspects this thought also occurred to Louis L’Amour.

  L’Amour hot-rodded Madden’s Goose for the pulps. The real Goose was a nice little amphibian transport from the 1930s with two 450-HP Pratt & Whitney Wasp Jr. radial engines. It carried six people or cargo, cruised at about 150 miles per hour, and was unarmed. Sporting eight fixed .50-caliber machine guns, the same as a P-51 Mustang, L’Amour’s Goose routinely engages and shoots down fighter planes, including Zeros. Any attacking fighter pilot who gets behind Madden’s Goose faces the fierce Shin Bao, who throws hot lead at the villain with a Thompson sub-machine gun. How Shin manages to shoot from a transport at trailing aircraft is never explained. L’Amour’s airplanes do a lot of “streaking” around, and . . . read it yourself. Here’s a pulp tale by a master of the genre.

  The drone of the two radial motors broke the still white silence. As far as the eye could reach the snow-covered ridges of the Sihote Alin Mountains showed no sign of life. Turk Madden banked the Grumman and studied the broken terrain below. It was remote and lonely, this range along the Siberian coast.

  He swung his ship in a slow circle. That was odd. A half dozen fir trees had no snow on their branches.

  He leveled off and looked around, then saw what he wanted, a little park, open and snow-covered, among the trees. It was just the right size, by the look of it. He’d chance the landing. He slid down over the treetops, setting the ship down with just barely enough room. Madden turned the ship before he cut the motor.

  Taking down a rifle, he kicked his feet into snowshoes and stepped out into the snow. It was almost spring in Siberia, but the air was crisp and cold. Far to the south, the roads were sodden with melting snow, and the rivers swollen with spring floods. War would be going full blast again soon.

  He was an hour getting to the spot. Even before he reached it, his eyes caught the bright gleam of metal. The plane had plunged into the fir trees, burying its nose in the mountainside. In passing, it had knocked the snow from the surrounding trees, and there had been no snow for several days now. That was sheer luck. Ordinarily it would have snowed, and the plane would have been lost beyond discovery in these lonely peaks.

  Not a dozen feet from the tangled wreckage of the ship he could see a dark bundle he knew instinctively was the flyer. Lutvin had been his friend. The boyish young Russian had been a great favorite at Khabarovsk Airport. Suddenly, Turk stopped.

  Erratic footprints led from the crashed plane to the fallen body. Lutvin had been alive after the crash!

  Madden rushed forward and turned the body over. His wild hope that the boy might still be alive died instantly. The snow under the body was stained with blood. Fyodor Lutvin had been machine-gunned as he ran from his fallen plane.

  Machine-gunned! But that meant—

  Turk Madden got up slowly, and his face was hard. He turned toward the wreckage of the plane, began a slow, painstaking examination. What he saw convinced him. Fyodor Lutvin had been shot down, then, after his plane had crashed, had been ruthlessly machine-gunned by his attacker.

  But why? And by whom? It was miles from any known front. The closest fighting was around Murmansk, far to the west. Only Japan, lying beyond the narrow strip of sea at Sakhalin and Hokkaido. And Japan and Russia were playing a game of mutual hands off. But Lutvin had been shot down and then killed. His killers had wanted him dead beyond question.

  There could be only one reason—because he knew something that must not be told. The fierce loyalty of the young flyer was too well known to be questioned, so he must have been slain by enemies of his country.

  Turk Madden began a systematic search, first of the body, then of the wreckage. He found nothing.

  Then he saw the camera. Something about it puzzled him. He studied it thoughtfully. It was smashed, yet—

  Then he saw. The camera was smashed, but it had been smashed after it had been taken apart—after the film had been removed. Where then, was the film?

  He found it a dozen feet away from th
e body, lying in the snow. The film was in a waterproof container. Studying the situation, Turk could picture the scene.

  Lutvin had photographed something. He had been pursued, shot down, but had lived through the crash. Scrambling from the wrecked ship with the film, he had run for shelter in the rocks. Then, as he tumbled under the hail of machine-gun fire, he had thrown the film from him.

  Turk Madden took the film and, picking up his rifle, started up the steep mountainside toward the park where he had left the Grumman. He was just stepping from a clump of fir when a shot rang out. The bullet smacked a tree trunk beside him and stung his face with bits of bark.

  Turk dropped to his hands and knees and slid back into the trees. Ahead of him, and above him, was a bunch of boulders. Even as he looked a puff of smoke showed from the boulders, and another shot rang out. The bullet clipped a twig over his head. Madden fired instantly, coolly pinking every crevice and crack in the boulders. He did not hurry.

  His final shot sounded, and instantly he was running through the soft snow. He made it to a huge fir a dozen feet away before the rifle above him spoke. He turned and fired again.

  Indian-fashion, he circled the clump of boulders. But when he was within sight of them, there was no one about. For a half hour he waited, then slid down. On the snow in the center of the rocks, he found two old cartridge cases. He studied them.

  “Well, I’ll be blowed!” A Berdianka!” he muttered. “I didn’t think there was one outside a museum!”

  The man’s trail was plain. He wore moccasins made of fur, called unty. One of them was wrapped in a bit of rawhide, apparently.

  His rifle was ready, Turk fell in behind. But after a few minutes it became obvious that his attacker wanted no more of it. Outgunned, the man was making a quick retreat. After a few miles, Madden gave up and made his way slowly back to his own ship. The chances were the man had been sent to burn the plane, to be sure a clean job had been made of the killing. But that he was wearing unty proved him no white man, and no Jap either, but one of the native Siberian tribes.