Authors: Walter J. Boyne
In the south he had grown familiar with the Russian Polikarpov I-15, a sturdy biplane that had surprised the Germans and the Spanish with its speed and agility. For the trip to the north—a suicide mission, the Spaniard had called it—the government had given them two of the scarce I-16s, the best and fastest Russian fighter in Spain. A stubby, fat-winged monoplane, affectionately called the Mosca—"fly"—it was as difficult to maneuver as the I-15 had been easy. Yet it had to serve in this last attack.
In isolated unison, the two pilots pulled their goggles down, tightened their harnesses, set the arming switches, automatically performing a precise precombat ritual. The American felt his energy surge, and he was eager to attack, indifferent to the usual twelve-to-one odds. The Spaniard's customary stoic calm was replaced with a fierce burning indignation. He was fighting for more than his homeland; he had been born on a farm outside Bilboa and spent many a market day in the little town square now consumed by flames and smoke. His orders were to ignore the fighters and get the bombers. It suited him. With full tanks, they could make at least three passes before disengaging. Three passes could mean six bombers and many lives saved on the ground.
The German fighter squadron commander in the red Messerschmitt saw the blunt fleeting shapes of the two enemy fighters and shook his head. Where had they sprung from? The last Loyalist fighters in the north were supposed to have been shot down the day before. He waggled his wings and pointed, and the Heinkel biplanes shimmered into little buzzing packets, flying in the newly adopted finger-four formation, each pilot performing his own precombat litany. The two Russian planes were fifty miles per hour faster than the Heinkels, fifty miles per hour slower than the red Messerschmitt. The Heinkels could only meet the Russian I-16s head on, then dive to catch them after the attack.
The priest, standing now at the edge of the square, cheered the flaring sweep of the Moscas' attack. The two green fighters dropped
in a knife-edged dive, turning through the Heinkels, and he could hear the clatter of their guns as they attacked the Junkers. Flames immediately broke out from one bomber as the lead Mosca fixed it in a spray of fire before disappearing into the center of a midgelike swirl of fighters.
The American swept up in a wide, twisting arc. He glanced down at his comrade, admiring the finesse with which the Spaniard slammed his fighter through hard uncoordinated maneuvers, forcing his Mosca into attitudes for which it was not built, using the brute forces of acceleration and gravity to slide out from under the guns of one Heinkel and then send his own bullets hammering through another. The American wished he could have this on film to show students how a master worked against the odds.
A check of his instruments and he peeled off in a headlong diving attack. He brushed past the uplifted noses of the Heinkel fighters, their tiny 7.9mm MG 17 machine guns winking on their cowls, to fasten his sights on the rough corrugated skin of a trimotor. The target, camouflaged in the surreal antic angles of a World War destroyer, blossomed in his sights like an onrushing freight train. He knew that inside the pilot would be grimly holding formation, watching for the signals from the bombardier, humped over the bombsight. The rear gunner could see the Mosca coming, and fired a long burst in vain before watching Russian bullets stitch through the cockpit into the wing. The Junkers blew up above the American as he pulled out of his dive into another soaring climb, trying to see where the Spaniard was.
He shrugged as half the remaining Heinkels raced to the north to cut the two Loyalists off from their base. It was a textbook move, designed to ensure that they could not break away, but it probably didn't matter, for the battle would be decided here and now, in the columns of smoke roiling up from battered Guernica below.
The American, his mouth dry and neck tired from swiveling, glanced for an unbelieving instant as the Messerschmitt opened fire from behind and below at his comrade. The Spaniard jinked, trying to turn away from the stream of lead being poured from the two cowl guns. The Russian plane staggered, then spun away, belching
black smoke, the Heinkel fighters jabbing at it like magpies attacking a crow.
The American cursed. It could not be, not after so many battles. He prayed that the Spaniard was faking, that his spin was an escape maneuver. Anguished, he dove headlong, firing at the whirling Heinkels, knowing he was too far away to be effective. He pressed the trigger button until the clatter of the gun blocks moaned that he was out of ammunition. Almost out of sight, his friend's plane, tumbling erratically like a drop of water running down a window, stopped in midair, exploding in a crimson splash.
For a moment he was lost, drowned in the thought that one more friend had died flying. There had been so many, in peace and in war. He banked vertically, pulling back on the stick so that the G forces buried him in his seat as the Mosca turned on its wing, white vapor trails flaring from its tips. He strained to see if there was someone on his tail, waiting to touch a button that would end him.
A thin line of bile surged in his upper throat, a sour mixture of fear and melancholy that suddenly disappeared in the thought that this was his last battle too. A strange exalted sense of deliverance coursed through him, a knowledge that he would fight no more, lose no more friends, kill no more.
Expectant, he turned again: there was no one behind him. The fevered happiness grew. He wondered if anyone was looking down, anyone of all those men and women he had known so well and whose love of flying had taken them early to their deaths. Now he was ready, eager. If the Spaniard had to go, so would he, but he'd take someone with him.
Bullets came from behind, punching whistling holes in his windscreen, smashing instruments. His engine shuddered and oil spurted from his cowling to smear back over the windscreen in a greasy black blanket. He forced his head outside the open cockpit against the wind, wiping his goggles with his scarf. Blood from a ragged wound on his hand ran down his sleeve.
His exaltation ebbed with the blood's flow, and the old dual response to grasping fear raged back. He felt his guts and knees turn to the usual uniform vat of shivering clotted jelly, even as his brain
be
came alert, detached, and observant. The mind fought on, telling his hands and feet what to do to survive, ignoring the whimpering cry of his body to lose all control, to curl into a corner of the cockpit and fall to the ground. As distinctly as he had seen the Spaniard fighting his last battle, he saw himself jerk the stick against the side and pull back, turning vertically to head due north, in an attempt to disengage before the shuddering engine jerked out of its mounts.
Ahead, he saw the Nationalist formation of Heinkels in two layers, one at three thousand feet, one at five thousand feet above him. Like a trapeze artist swinging down from his loft, the lone red Messerschmitt, already once a victor in this battle, curved south to attack him.
He knew only too well how fast and how deadly the Messerschmitt was. There was time still to admire its angular nose, blunt-tipped wings, and even the St. Andrew's cross insignia. The thin black streamers from the low-slung exhausts showed that the airplane was pulling maximum power. As it closed in the curving dive that would place it at his rear, the American saw it also bore a personal marking, one he had seen long ago.
He had no doubt in his mind who was flying that slanting red killing machine, and the knowledge washed him in a fierce warrior's joy. He would revenge the Spaniard or join him.
***
PART I
GAMBLING FOR GLORY
***
Chapter 1
Roosevelt Field, Long Island/May 15, 1927
New York's nightlife saved Frank Bandfield. Broadway-baby lights
down below turned the gray meringue covering Manhattan into a luminescent signpost to Roosevelt Field. Sandbagged by fatigue,
he'd drifted far off course, rousing to find himself hurtling westward
back into the same storm that had battered him for the last three hours. He flew directly over the city's center at two thousand feet,
above the jagged points of skyline floating like islands in the fog. A
nudge of the rudder set a descending course for Long Island, the slowly turning propeller cutting phosphorescent slices from the clouds.
Earlier he had flown with his customary tenderness, fingers
sensitive to the stick, the plane responding like a bride passionate to
please. Lashed by hours of wind and rain, the compliant bride had
turned shrewish, fighting his control and bounding off in directions
of her own. From Columbus on, sleep had dimmed his senses as implacably as the cold turned his gasoline-soaked fingers into ice. A copper fuel line, routed through the cabin in the frenzied improvisation at the factory in Salinas, had developed a long crack
that sent a fan-shaped film of fuel spraying into the cockpit.
He'd spent the last hour with his hand clamped over the line, gloves wet through, damping the vibration to prevent a complete break that
would cut off fuel flow to the engine. Clamping the stick between his knees, he blew futilely on his hands, one at a time, to summon feeling.
Six hours into the flight, he'd begun to bite his lips to stay awake.
Now they were raw and swollen, but sleep still assailed him. He was
hungry and thirsty, his guts rumbling in protest against the unaccustomed neglect. Waiting for the prelanding adrenaline to course through him, Frank Bandfield rocked back and forth in his seat, trying to ease the cramps, letting the sharp handles of the fuel cocks at his side prod him awake. He was alone in the sky; he needed a little help from the ground.
He prayed someone was there. He might have flown across the country to a field empty of his competitors! What if Byrd or Lind
bergh had already taken off, was halfway across the Atlantic? The
Orteig Prize was $25,000 for the first airplane across—nothing for
second place. Yet the prize was the least of it: the headlines and the
future would belong to the first pilot to land his plane in Paris. Whatever came after would be an anticlimax.
His usual optimistic manner came back with the rush of the wind. Christ, if they were gone, he'd turn around and head west to
California, maybe make the first flight to Hawaii or even Australia,
if there were enough islands in between. He'd do what had to be done, whatever it was.
Twenty minutes later, his wingtips trimming gray shreds from the clouds like whiskers from a beard, he ducked below the last layer to
see a long L of lights flicker on at Roosevelt Field. They'd believed
his estimate, and were waiting for him. Elated, he thought, Goddam, Slim must have turned out the whole National Guard.
He dropped, curving through the patchy mist to meet the field's
east-west layout, sideslipping to bleed off altitude. Tired eyes sought
to pick out Lindbergh against the cars parked a hundred yards apart along the field's boundary. The sleek little monoplane's tail skid cut
through the soaked grass, sluicing a rooster tail of moisture to glisten
in the yellow headlight halos. Bandfield turned off at midfield, the
field's potholes bobbing the wings up and down in a Swedish
exercise rhythm. He taxied toward the tall, lanky figure who was
waving a flashlight and shouting at him.
"Bandy, great to see you! But, you rat, you beat my record!"
The pilot climbed out of the cockpit, his legs stiff and his back
aching.
"Good to see you, Slim! The record's not official. I didn't log off
from St. Louis. And thanks for the lights. I really needed them."
"I was afraid you wouldn't see the dinky little string of boundary lights in the fog. Too bad it's too early for the reporters—you made
one hell of a landing."
He helped Bandfield walk to get the circulation going. As they
circled, the airplane steamed and gurgled like a winded horse, the hot engine and exhaust manifolds crackling in the misting rain. Lindbergh's bird-quick eyes took in the smooth finish of the ply
wood fuselage, the cantilever wing. His old flying-school roommate
had a first-rate airplane.
Bandfield saw the glance and laughed.
"It's a duesy! And it flies as good as it looks, Slim."
"It must if you got across the Alleghenies in this weather." He
switched subjects. "Do you have anybody here to help you?"
Bandy looked at him blankly. It had taken every dime he and his
partner had to get him here. There was nothing left over for a support crew. If there was work to do, he'd do it.
"No, I'm on my own. I'll be okay."
"I'll give you a hand when I can. We'll talk about it in the morning."
Bandfield thanked the mechanics who had parked the cars to
illuminate the field and were now pushing the airplane into a
battered hangar, little more than a garage, three hundred yards from the main buildings. Lindbergh yawned and said, "When Dick Byrd
heard you were inbound, he said you could use this."