(Stage shot)
Markey: And that’s a wrap for your news team. Good night, Julie.
Hawkins: Good night, Ben. (Full face to camera) Good night, folks. We’ll see you tomorrow at ten. Late Edition is next.
The number of visitors swelled considerably the day after Lasker’s boat made Ben at Ten, which is to say there were seldom fewer than a half-dozen people and sometimes as many as twenty. The kids took to selling coffee and sweet rolls and turned a nice profit right from the beginning.
Hal Riordan, who owned the Fort Moxie lumberyard, showed up. He wandered through the cabins, where the Laskers had installed a battery-powered heater. He peered closely at the hull and at the masts, and he finally arrived at Lasker’s front door. “Something you got to see,” he said, leading the way back to the boat. Hal had been old when Lasker was in school; his hair, gray in those days, was now silver. He was tall and methodical, a man who would not go to the bathroom without careful consideration. “This is very odd, Tom,” he said.
“What’s the matter?” asked Lasker.
“Take a look where the mast is joined to the cabin roof.”
Lasker did. “What about it?”
“It’s all one piece. The mast should have been manufactured separately, I would think. And then bolted down. Everything here looks as if it came out of a single mold.”
Riordan was right: there were no fittings, no screws, nothing. Lasker grunted, not knowing what to say.
In the morning Lasker leased a trailer and brought in a contractor from Grand Forks to lift the yacht onto it and move it close to the barn.
The crowd was growing every day. “You ought to charge admission,” suggested Frank Moll, an ex-mayor and retired customs officer. “You got people coming in all the way from Fargo.” Moll was easygoing, bearded, short, strongly built. He was one of Lasker’s old drinking buddies.
“What do you make of it, Frank?” he asked. They were standing in the driveway, watching Ginny and Moll’s wife, Peg, try to direct traffic.
Moll looked at him, looked at the boat. “You really don’t know how this got here, Tom?” There was an accusation in his tone.
“No.” With exasperation. “I really don’t.”
Moll shook his head. “Anybody else, Tom,” he said, “I’d say it’s a hoax.”
“No hoax.”
“Okay. I don’t know where that leaves you. The boat looks to be in good shape. So it was buried recently. When could that have happened?”
“I don’t know. They couldn’t have done it without tearing up the area.” He was squinting at the ridge, shielding his eyes. “I don’t see how it could have happened.”
“Thing that baffles me,” said Moll, “is why. Why would anyone put a boat like this in the ground? That thing must be worth half a million dollars.” He folded his arms and let his gaze rest on the yacht. It was close to the house now, just off the driveway, mounted on the trailer. “It’s a homebuilt job, by the way.”
“How do you know?”
“Easy.” He pointed at the stern. “No hull identification number. It would be in raised lettering, like the VIN on your car.” He shrugged. “It’s not there.”
“Maybe this was built before hull numbers were required.”
“They’ve been mandatory for a long time.”
They hosed off the sails, which now hung just inside the barn door. They were white, the kind of white that hurts your eyes when the sun hits it. They did not look as if they’d ever been in the ground.
Lasker stood inside, out of the wind, hands in his pockets, looking at them. And it struck him for the first time that he had a serviceable boat. He’d assumed all along that someone was going to step forward and claim the thing. But on that quiet, bleak, cold Sunday, almost two weeks since they’d pulled it out of the ground, it seemed to be his. For better or worse.
Lasker had never done any sailing, except once or twice with someone else at the tiller. He squeezed his eyes shut and saw himself and Ginny gliding past the low hills of Winnipeg’s shoreline in summer, a dying sun streaking the sky.
But when he climbed the rise and looked down into the hole from which they’d taken it, peered into that open wound on the west side of his property and wondered who had put it there, a cold wind blew through his soul.
No use denying it. He was spooked.
The taffrail was supported by a series of stanchions. These also seemed not to be bolted or joined to the deck, but were rather an integral part of the whole. When, on the day before Halloween, a souvenir hunter decided to steal one, he had to saw it off. Nobody saw it happen, but Lasker responded by moving the boat into the main barn after dark each night and padlocking the door.
In mid-November Lasker was scheduled to fly the Avenger to Oklahoma City for an air show. Ginny usually went along on these occasions, riding in the gunner’s seat. But she’d had enough action for a while and announced her intention to stay home this time. Anyway, she knew the yacht was worth some money, and she didn’t like just leaving it in the barn. “Everybody in the world knows it’s here,” she told her husband.
Lasker laughed and pointed out that yachts were parked in driveways all the time and nobody ever stole one. “It’s not like a car, you know.”
She watched him fly overhead Friday afternoon. He dipped his wings, and she waved (although she knew he couldn’t see her) and went inside to tackle the laundry.
Six hours later she was relaxing in the den, watching an old Columbo, listening to the wind bleat around the house. Will was out, and Jerry was in his room playing with his computer. The occasional beeps and the rattling of the leaves were soothing, not unlike the sound of kids sleeping or the blender making milk shakes after school.
She got up during a commercial to get some popcorn. And looked out the window.
The night was moonless, but there was too much light in the curtains. She moved closer to the glass, which was permanently shut against the North Dakota climate and never opened, not even during the brief summer. The barn was slightly downhill from the house.
A soft green glow leaked through its weathered walls.
Someone was inside.
2
Oh, Hedy Lamarr is a beautiful gal,
And Madeleine Carroll is too.
But you’ll find, if you query,
A different theory
Amongst any bomber crew.
For the loveliest thing
Of which one could sing
This side of the heavenly gates,
Is no blonde or brunette
Of the Hollywood set,
But an escort of P—38’s.
—Author unknown, “Lightnings in the Sky”
The Lockheed Lightning gleamed in the late-afternoon sun. It was a living artifact, a part of the great effort against Hitler that could still take to the sky, that still looked deadly. The twin tail booms, the chiseled cockpit, the broad sleek wings all whispered of power. The machine guns and cannon concentrated in its nose had been abrupt and to the point. Its firepower was far more precise than the spread-wing guns of other aircraft of its time. You did not want to get caught in the sights of this aircraft.
“It’s not an easy plane to fly,” Max said. The P—38J had its own mind; it required a pilot willing to blend with its geometry. A pilot like Max, maybe. A pilot whose senses could flow into its struts and joints and cables and rudders.
“Doesn’t matter,” said Kerr. He took out his checkbook. “I don’t intend to fly it.” He threw the remark in Max’s general direction.
Kerr was tall and imposing, good-looking in a used-up sort of way, rather like Bronco Adams, the barnstorming pilot-hero of his books. The fictional Bronco flew his trademark Lockheed Lightning in and around WWII China through a series of high-octane, high-sex thrillers. Kerr wrote in a style that he liked to describe as the one-damned-thing-after-another school of literature. It was not surprising that he wanted to own one of the few P—38’s left in the world. “You’re not going to fly it?” Max a
sked, not sure he had heard correctly. “It’s in great condition.”
Kerr looked bored. “I don’t fly,” he said.
Max had read three of the novels, Yellow Storm, Night in Shanghai, and Burma Crossing. He’d enjoyed them, had not been able to put them down, and had been impressed with the author’s mastery of the details of flying.
“It’s true,” said Kerr. “I fake it. It’s easy.”
Max stared at him, outlined against the blue and white star on the nacelle. The plane wore a fresh coat of jungle-colored paint. Its K—9122 designation was stenciled in white on the fuselage, below the name White Lightning and the image of a whiskey jug. In 1943 it had operated from a field outside London, where it was part of a squadron cooperating with the RAF. Later it had escorted bombers on missions over Germany, a task for which its combination of range and firepower were ideally suited. In 1944 it had gone to the Pacific.
White Lightning had a lot of history. Max had tracked it down from Army Air Force records, had interviewed pilots and ground personnel, and now produced a computer disk. “Everything we could find is here. Pilots. Campaigns. Kills. Eight confirmed fighters, by the way. And two Hinkels. Bombers.”
“Good.” Kerr waved it away. “I won’t need it.” He uncapped a gold pen and glanced around for something to lean on. The port side tail boom. “You want this payable to you?”
“To Sundown Aviation.” Max’s company, which restored and traded in antique warbirds.
Kerr wrote the check. Four hundred thousand. The profit to the company would be a hundred and a quarter. Not bad.
The check was green, and the face contained a reproduction of Bronco’s P—38 in flight. Max folded the check and put it in his breast pocket. “Are you going to put it in a museum?” he asked.
The question seemed to surprise Kerr. “No,” he said. “No museum. I’m going to put it on my lawn.”
Max felt a twinge in his stomach. “Your lawn? Mr. Kerr, there are six of these left in the world. It’s fully functional. You can’t just put it on a lawn.”
Kerr looked genuinely amused. “I would think,” he said, “that I can do damn near whatever I want with it. Now, I wonder whether we can get on with this.” He glanced at the folder in Max’s hand, which contained the title documents.
Kerr’s pilot-hero was a congenial, witty, and very human protagonist. Millions of people loved him, and they agreed that his creator had raised the aviation thriller to a new level of sophistication. Yet it struck Max that that same creator was a jerk. How was that possible? “If you just leave it on the lawn,” Max said, “it will get rained on. It will rust.” What he really meant was that this kind of aircraft deserved something far better than being installed as an ornament on a rich man’s property.
“When it does,” said Kerr, “I’ll give you a call and you can come down and touch it up for me. Now, if you will, I have work to do.”
A Brasilia commuter plane was circling the field, getting ready to land. It was red and white against a cloudless sky.
“No,” said Max, retrieving the check. He held it out for Kerr. “I don’t think so.”
“Beg pardon?” Kerr frowned.
“I don’t think we have a deal.”
The two men looked at each other. Kerr shrugged. “Yeah, maybe you’re right, Collingwood,” he said. “Janie didn’t much like the idea, anyway.” He turned on his heel crossed the gravel walkway into the terminal, and never looked back. Max could only guess who Janie was.
Max came from a family of combat pilots. Collingwoods had flown over Baghdad and Hanoi. They’d been with the USS Hornet in the Pacific and with the RAF in the spring of 1940. The family name appears on the 1918 roster of the Ringed Hat squadron.
Max was the exception. He had no taste for military life or for the prospect of getting shot at. His father, Colonel Maxwell E. Collingwood, USAF (retired), to his credit, tried to hide his disappointment in his only son. But it was there nonetheless, and Max had, on more than one occasion, overheard him wondering aloud to Max’s mother whether there was anything at all to genetics.
The remark was prompted by the fact that young Max should have been loaded from both sides of the barrel, so to speak. His mother was Molly Gregory, a former Israeli helicopter pilot, who during the Six-Day War had earned her nickname, Molly Glory, by returning fire at shore batteries during the rescue of a crippled gunboat.
Molly had encouraged him to stay away from the military, and he could not help reading her satisfaction that her son would not deliberately put himself in harm’s way. Her approval under those circumstances, ironically, had hurt him. But Max enjoyed being alive. He enjoyed the play of the senses, he loved the companionship of attractive women, and he had learned to appreciate the simpler pleasures of snowstorms and sunsets. He expected to have only one clear shot at the assorted joys of living, and he had no intention of risking it to meet someone else’s misconceived expectations. Max would take care of Max.
If he’d had any doubts about his character, his suspicions had been confirmed by an incident at Fort Collins when he was twenty-two. He had taken a job flying cargo and passengers to Denver and Colorado Springs for Wildcat Airlines. On a cold mid-November afternoon he had been inspecting his twin-engine Arapaho, standing under one wing with a clipboard, when a commuter flight came in. He never knew what had drawn his attention to the flight, but he paused to watch the plane touch down. The sun was still well above the mountains, the plane a blue-and-white twin-engine Bolo. It rolled down the runway, and he saw the face of a little girl, brown curls, big smile, in the right-hand forward window. The plane slowed and was approaching the terminal when, with only a brief wisp of black smoke as a warning, the port engine burst into flames.
Horrified, Max had started forward. A fuel line must have burst, because the fire roared across the wing and engulfed the cockpit before the pilot had time to react. The little girl with the smile did not even seem to know what was happening.
Someone in a white shirt, with his tie loosened, burst from the terminal and charged the plane. But he was too far away. The fire roared over the fuel tanks. Max had taken only a few steps before he realized it was hopeless. He stopped, waiting for the explosion, knowing it was already too late, almost wishing the blast would come and end it.
The little girl had been watching him, and now she saw the fire. Her expression changed, and she looked back at Max.
Max never forgot those eyes. Then the man with the tie bolted past, his shoes making clacking sounds on the concrete, and Max called after him that he would get killed. He got to the plane, fought the door open, and went inside. Still the girl stared at Max. Then hands drew her away from the window.
And in that moment it went.
The aircraft erupted in a fireball. The blast of heat rolled over him as he fell face down on the apron.
Max had found out who he was.
People rarely recognize the significant moments of their lives without the assistance of hindsight. A trip downtown to buy a book results in a chance meeting that ends at the altar. A late taxi leaves one stranded with a fellow traveler who becomes a friend and who, two years later, offers a career move. You never know.
Max had experienced a turning point shortly after the incident at Fort Collins, when a weekend of planned seduction went wrong and he found himself with nothing to do on an otherwise pleasant spring Sunday. Friends persuaded him to attend a warbirds air show, and he met Tom Lasker and his Avenger torpedo bomber.
Lasker was a flying farmer with several thousand acres up on the border. He had just purchased the Avenger at an auction and was having second thoughts when Max, looking for a lunch partner, came upon him and saw first the plane and then the big weather-beaten man seated beside it, staring at it, his wooden chair turned backward, his rough features creased with concern.
The Avenger was battered; it sagged, and its paint was flaking off. But something about it touched Max. He was a romantic at heart, and the Avenger was pure history,
lethal and lovely and in trouble. It was his first intersection with an antique warplane. And it changed his life forever.
“It could use some work,” Max had told him.
Lasker spoke to the plane. “I think I got carried away,” he said.
Which is how Max got into the antique plane business. He cut a deal and spent the next few weeks restoring the Avenger. He subcontracted to replace the engine and tighten up the hydraulics. He installed state-of-the-art electronics, applied fresh gray paint to the aircraft, and gave it a new set of insignia. Battle stars gleamed on its fuselage and wings, and he drew a crowd when he flew it into Fort Moxie to turn it over to its owner.
That had been a reluctant transfer. Lasker was pleased with the results and handed Max a generous bonus. His wife, Ginny, came with him, and she was ecstatic when she saw what he had done. That earned Ginny a permanent place in Max’s affections. She posed in front of the plane and insisted on going for a ride. Lasker had taken her up and circled the town for a half-hour, buzzing the water tower, while Max waited in the office. When they came back, they all went out to the farm, and Ginny laid out a roast-beef dinner. They drank and talked long into the night, and Max slept in the guest room, as he would do many more times.
Max had been restoring antique warbirds ever since.
The colonel and Molly Glory had both approved.
Max cruised down through cloud decks in the early evening toward Chellis Field outside Fargo. The P—38 felt good, felt damn out of this world. But he had lost the high bid, and the company would have to begin the process of a sale all over again. It was unlikely he would do as well next time.
Still, Max thought of himself as more of an artist than a businessman. His art was incorporated with power and flight as well as with cockpit design and battle emblems. Sundown’s warbirds were not intended to rust on someone’s lawn. (He didn’t even like museums very much, but at least there people could admire the old aircraft for what they had been.)
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