Authors: Walter J. Boyne
Millie reached over and pulled on the canvas curtain Jack had rigged for her privacy until it closed. It was dark and the engine drowned out any noise, but she still felt uncomfortable using the little hospital bedpan that she had brought on board to relieve herself. She struggled out of her clothes, wondering how she was going to write about this part of the flight in her book.
*
Aboard the
Salinas Made
10:03
p.m.
PST, August 16, 1927
Bandfield roused himself with a shudder; he'd drifted off to sleep, and wakened to a searing sense of desperation and fear. He moved his flashlight around the cockpit, checking the instruments. Ahead, the exhaust-collector ring glowed cherry red, the staccato flash of the exhaust stacks winking continuously around like a demented sign in Times Square, the mellow blue-and-yellow flames telling him that the engine's fuel/air mixture was correct.
He had drifted up to about 5,500 feet; now he let the airplane glide down toward 5,000, where he leveled off and allowed the airspeed to build to 120 before throttling back. The
Salinas Made
settled down to cruise at 5,000 feet and 108 mph. The airplane was on "the step," flying at an attitude where drag was minimized. He brought the mixture lever back, slowly, listening to the beat of the engine. There was a sudden pop, and he pushed the mixture lever forward slightly until the engine smoothed out.
He was wide-awake and totally depressed. He glanced back to see
Hafner's plane still in position above and behind him. He ran
another check on the radios, tapping out a request for a position. In quick succession, he got replies from the USS
McDonough
and the
S.S.
Manulani.
His Morse-taking capability was rusty, and the
Manulani
had to transmit three times. The last time the radio
operator, either careful or sarcastic, transmitted so slowly that it was
almost a dot or a dash at a time. Then a third call came from the S.S. W. S.
Miller,
giving him a line that intersected the other two in a tiny triangle, right on course. With a sigh of relief, he put the sextant back in its case; no sense in even bothering with it.
The leaden weight of depression tugged at his eyelids. He yawned
constantly, as his psychology went through a demanding game with
his physiology. When he grew irrepressibly sleepy, he would take his hands off the controls. The plane would drift off course and a
jolt of adrenaline would trigger him awake. But it was a process of
diminishing returns. He had no idea what his adrenaline reserves were, but they were much reduced, and the flight was only half finished. He toyed with the idea of dropping down below the cloud
deck to fly along the surface of the sea, to try to get some exhilara
tion from chasing waves. He didn't know the height of the cloud base, and decided against it.
The hours passed into an opaque tunnel of boredom. The instrument panel did tricks, growing larger and larger in his vision until
his eyes seemed to be resting on the altimeter, then growing smaller
and smaller until he felt he needed a telescope to see it. Pain didn't
help. He slapped his face and bit his lips, chewed the inside of his
mouth. The pain registered at a very low level, not intruding on the overpowering desire to sleep.
He made hourly course corrections, tracing that invisible great-circle line over the globe that was the shortest distance to Hawaii. He was only five thousand feet up in the ocean of air; beneath, the ocean of water went down what—ten thousand feet, twenty thousand? He wished Millie were with him; she'd know. He'd ask her when they got to Hawaii.
He ran a routine fuel check and snapped fully awake, terror
gouging his adrenal glands. He had not yet transferred any from the
rear main tank, but the gauge read half-empty. The gear must have punched a hole in it when it pulled free. The big question was
where the hole was. If it was in the bottom of the tank, he was lost.
He'd never make it to Hawaii or back to California. Even if the leak
was halfway up and he didn't lose any more, all his reserves were gone. He picked up the charts and rechecked his navigation. There was no margin to spare.
In the past, he had always grown more awake flying when night
fell, the sense of quiet beauty summoning concentration for the task. Now, with the fuel worries, the old habit was reinforced, and he felt as if he'd never sleep again. Yet there was nothing to do except plod ahead, and as usual with long flights, he drifted into erotic daydreams, aroused by his thoughts of Millie. He was glad
they were waiting until they were married to make love. It was old-fashioned, but proper, and his love for her was truly proper. He
wondered what kind of a guy the navigator, Gordon, was, if he
would try to flirt with her. It wouldn't do him any good, and Millie would never tell even if he did, because she wouldn't want to create
a problem. He'd already gotten a reputation as a hothead by hitting
Hafner.
Bandfield's chemistry stabilized, and he began to analyze his fuel
situation. He drank some of the tepid water in the other flask. It
tasted brackishly of coffee. Hadley must not have rinsed it well when
he filled it. He took out one of the drying ham-and-cheese sandwiches. When he'd finished, he reached into his pocket for a Hershey bar.
The chocolate reinforced his irrational contentment. Alone, over a truly trackless ocean, with fuel and position indeterminate, he
nonetheless felt like a king, for he was flying, and that itself was enough. The higher, the farther, the faster you went always made it
better, for there was the supreme sense that you were alone in a
place no other man could be. He checked the rear tank fuel again; it seemed to have stabilized. Maybe things were going to be all right.
Even Hafner's tailing along behind him was no longer an affront.
Bandy was surprised at the charity of his thoughts, guessing it was
the intoxicating euphoria of flight, the relief that the leak was
apparently stopped. The layer of clouds below now seemed higher.
An idea began to form. He'd just play a little joke on Hafner, to see
how he liked it.
He reached down and felt along the instrument panel till he
found the switch for the navigation lights. He turned them off, then
pulled the throttle back, letting the Breese nose down toward the clouds. He'd drop through to five hundred feet; if he wasn't in the clear, he'd climb back up. If he was, he'd scoot along beneath the
clouds, leaving Hafner on his own. It would do him good, make a
navigator of him.
The clouds enveloped him like a wet gray sweatsock. He wondered what the base was and whether he'd break out at all. Hadley
had told him a long shaggy-dog story about a girl whose legs had run
all the way to the ground—maybe the clouds were like that, running
all the way to the water.
*
Aboard the
Miss Charlotte
2:30
a.m.
PST, August 17, 1927
Hafner checked his watch again, and scanned the horizon ahead. When he glanced down, the Breese was gone.
Anxiety clutched him, and he rocked the Bellanca into a 360-degree turn, thinking he might have overflown Bandfield. There was nothing, just the pale yellow moonlit surfaces of the clouds.
He resumed his course of 240 degrees magnetic, fiddled with the
direction finder. It was dead.
Ach, well, he thought. I've done dead reckoning before. I'll just fly out the time and the distance and let down. If I can't find the islands, I'll find a ship. If I can't find a ship, I'll land this bloody bastard and sail it to Hawaii.
Hafner knew that he had courage to spare when it came to things
he could control. The problem was that he wasn't sure he could
control the navigation problem, and a faint rinse of sour-tasting fear
touched the back of his throat. Now he wished he hadn't brought Nellie along.
*
Aboard the
Salinas Made
4:30
a.m.
PST, August 17, 1927
The cloud cover combined with the night to turn the five hundred
feet of clear air over the sea into a gelid black mass, a palpable solid
through which he passed without disturbance. Bandfield had tried to let down to wave-chase the surface of the sea, but there was no light at all, no way to avoid simply flying into the ocean. He climbed to four hundred feet, flying on instruments.
It was enjoyable at first, the challenge of glancing quickly from the altimeter to the airspeed indicator to the compass to the turn-
and-bank needle and then back again, keeping him awake. He soon
tired of it, and climbed back up to two thousand feet, well within the clouds. Without any turbulence, without any icing, it was as easy to fly in the clouds as below them; he wanted to wait a bit, to get a little farther from Hafner before he popped up again.
Sleep nibbled again at his consciousness the way coffee spreads
through a sugar cube, seeping up by capillary action, soaking, softening, until the entire cube crumbles. He began to doze, fight
ing it by closing first one eye then the other, then closing them both
and counting to ten, before opening them wide. Once, at the count of eight, the cube crumbled and he fell asleep.
The whistle awakened him. He started, shedding sleep like confetti. The plane was spinning nose-down into the clouds. The instruments were in wild disarray, the turn needle tucked to the
right, the ball skidding to the left. Desperately off balance, the bitter
coffee bile rising in his mouth, he tried to make sense of the
maverick instrument pointers. The airspeed was constant at seventy
miles per hour, the unwinding altimeter screaming his spin toward the sea.
His throat muscles contracted in fear; altimeters lagged, so he didn't know how high he was above the beckoning Pacific. In a single motion, he brought the throttle back to idle, booted left rudder, and pushed the stick forward slightly. The ball and needle came together and he felt the controls bite the air. He shoved the throttle forward, hoping that the carburetor had not iced up, and pulled back strongly on the stick.
The murky gray parted and he was peering down into a polished
black saucer that reached up to merge on all sides with the clouds.
He tugged harder on the stick, the G forces pushing him to his seat;
he could feel the seat braces bend, hoped that he had welded them of strong enough material. He knew he couldn't believe his senses, but the black mass seemed to be shifting bit by bit from straight below to straight ahead and the
Salinas Made
bottomed out, its
belly just above the slashing waves, the priceless Whirlwind engine
surging with power as if nothing had happened.
A black web of fear set him shivering, teeth chattering uncontrol
lably, hands thrumming on the controls. The airplane quivered in concert as the instruments came back into range and the sloshing fuel began to quiet.
He settled down, checking the airplane over very carefully, then began a long instrument climb back to altitude. He tried to compute
how far he'd been from death. One hundredth of a second, no
more. If he hadn't dropped the gear early in the flight, it would have
caught the wave tops and slammed him into the sea. As it was, a single instant more and there would have been nothing left but debris and an oil slick on the surface of the Pacific.
He climbed slowly until he broke through the cloud layer, now down to five thousand feet. The moon beamed like a Hollywood searchlight, and he flipped on his navigation lights, searching the
sky for Hafner's Bellanca. Having even an enemy in view would be
comforting after the sickening spin. Hafner was nowhere in sight.
As his nerves steadied, Bandfield tried the radio again for another
position fix, squinting to get the tiny white lines and numbers of the
frequency dials properly aligned. It was dead, probably displaced and wires disconnected during the wild spin. He wondered if the
compass was still working right. It had been spinning like a top, and
had just settled down when he'd turned to a 235-degree heading.
He'd have to go the rest of the way on dead reckoning, a term too
appropriate for the task, given that he was lost, short on fuel, and totally without communications.
The blessed sun rose right on time, 6:34
a.m.,
spreading the clouds first with a shimmering pink, then orange, then bursting through to turn the sky bright blue. He ate another sandwich and drank some water, waiting for the clock to run out, for Mauna Loa to poke its sweet smoking head up through the clouds.