Authors: Walter J. Boyne
Bandfield thought about it. He and Hadley had stopped work on
their own racer when they ran out of cash. They had only done the basic airframe; it could be modified into something competitive, maybe, with a little money.
"What about the Granvilles? Do you know anybody there?"
The Granvilles had built the Gee Bee Model Z that had won the
Thompson Trophy last year. It had crashed on a world-record speed
run, but they would surely have some more airplanes to fly.
"Maybe, but not without a lot of practice. The Gee Bees are almost too hot, even for me."
Bandfield sighed with resignation. "Well, if you'll take a promis
sory note, we might borrow enough to fix up the racer. If not, I'll just rob a bank and get some dough."
The afternoon rain that presaged the fogs of April seemed to help; by
four o'clock Bandy's head had stopped pounding. Hughes had lowered him into the cockpit, then fashioned a steel-tube cage that
fastened his legs in, plaster casts from the knees down, to the rudder
pedals. He was literally a part of the airplane, bolted to it as firmly as
the wings or engine.
When they rolled the Rapier out, Hafner was obviously surprised
to find that Bandy was flying. He had been expecting a walk-on-
walk-off win.
Grinning, he came over with Colonel Santos to stand looking up into the Rapier's cockpit. "How are you feeling, Mr. Bandfield?"
"Wonderful, Captain Hafner. These Peruvian doctors are miracle men!"
Santos beamed at them. "You gentlemen understand the rules? You are to meet over the field at one thousand feet at ten minutes past four. Captain Hafner will come from the north, heading due south; Mr. Bandfield will do just the opposite. Then a regular
dogfight, over the sea, due west of the airfield. Keep in sight so I can
judge. Agreed?"
The dull-copper sun glittered low on the horizon, in Incan appreciation of the brilliant blue-green sea's contrast with the austere sands of the Peruvian coastline. To the east the Andes saw-
toothed to the sky. Bandy knew he had to win quickly, or his ankles would give out from the strain of booting the rudder back and forth.
Dogfighting was very different from aerobatics. In aerobatics you
had to be smooth and coordinated, so the control movements were
relatively easy, going through programmed maneuvers that flowed
readily from one to the next, with all the G forces on the airplane manageable and well defined. In dogfighting, all the maneuvers
were vicious, sharp, with stick and rudder used against each other as
much as together. The idea was to present a difficult target, and to force, rather than maneuver, the airplane to where you wanted it.
Neither airplane carried a military load or an observer. Today was
a dogfight, pure and simple, and Santos would be determining the winner of the one-on-one duel. It didn't make sense, because the rebels didn't have any fighters and the Peruvian bombers would probably never have to engage in air-to-air combat. But it fit the pattern of bonehead pursuit pilots buying the airplanes, and the
only thing that really registered with them—besides the silver that
crossed their palms—was winning the dogfight.
As Bandy leveled off, trimming the airplane and pushing the
mixture and propeller settings forward, he saw the bright red A-11
streaking south. It looked like a dropping hawk, its talons the huge
fairings over the landing gear, its beak the big round Mead &
Wilgoos 650-horsepower radial engine. Hafner had done a good job
of streamlining, with the engine cowled so tightly that there were bumps to accommodate the rocker arms.
Suddenly it was time. Hafner bored in, a thin blue-black stream
from the exhausts showing that he was using maximum power. Bandy pulled back in a climb, cutting the supercharger in early at
the risk of blowing the engine. Hafner followed, but Bandy let his
Rapier hammerhead to drop straight down on the A-11. Hafner
turned and climbed almost vertically, the two planes passing belly to
belly in opposite directions. Both went into steep turns, in which the A-11's speed permitted Hafner to gain the advantage slowly.
Bandfield quickly realized how good Hafner was, and that the
Rapier's better maneuverability was the only thing saving him. With
a fierce concentration, he was just able to flick out of Hafner's line of flight, to stay out of the putative path of mythical bullets. He realized escapes wouldn't win in Santos's scorebook.
They dueled for another twenty minutes in a spiraling series of corkscrew turns that left Hafner always slightly higher, but just out
of "shooting" position. In desperation, his ankles beginning to ache
under the strain, Bandfield rolled from a full vertical turn to the right into one to the left. As he rolled through a level attitude, a
shadow blocked out his view of the sun, and Hafner's A-11eased in
directly above him, canopy to canopy, the German grinning down
beneath his goggles, his big wings overlapping the Rapier's. Band
field could see only the long nose of the A-11, the three-bladed propeller spinning in an arc ahead of his own. He unconsciously pushed forward on his stick to avoid a collision, and Hafner followed, mirroring each control movement.
Bandfield twisted in the cockpit, sweating to find a way out from
the murderous embrace of the A-11. All the while, Hafner smiled,
at ease, enjoying the advantage of position his superior skill had
provided.
Keeping the pressure on, Hafner squeezed closer to the Rapier,
his fingers on the stick sensing the changes in airflow between them.
At a distance of three feet, the air tended to push them apart. At less
than that it tried to suck them together, and he rode the invisible knife-edge margin between.
It had been easier than Hafner had thought it would be; Band
field's legs were obviously bothering him. He looked down, enjoying the sweat pouring down Bandfield's face, relishing the obvious
desperation in his movements. He felt the old bloodlust stir within him, and mentally went through the ritual motions that would have
armed and cocked the empty machine guns. It would be so fulfilling
to just drop back, press the triggers, watch Bandfield spin endlessly
to the ground.
Bandfield could only keep pushing over, lowering his nose in the
hope that Hafner would elect to break off. The German pilot followed easily, the maneuver no more difficult than the last part of
a loop. A stream of oil crept back from under Bandy's cowling,
spreading over his windscreen.
Hafner shaved the distance between them just a hair, keeping the margin so tight that Bandfield couldn't begin a turn without causing
a collision. He drove Bandfield steadily toward the sea.
At the Ancon airbase, crowds of Peruvian officers and enlisted men stood in separate groups, watching the two airplanes stream toward the coast in their inverted embrace. Santos stood next to Hughes.
"Senor Bandfield is in trouble, my friend."
"No, Colonel, he's got Hafner just where he wants him."
Santos shot him a black-eyed glance and laughed.
The Rapier looked like a dump truck carrying a crashed airplane
on its back. Bandfield found himself caught a mile from the run
way, five hundred feet from the sea, his visibility cut to a small gap
that the oil had not covered.
Hafner maintained position, herding him toward the airfield,
pushing him down. At the edge of the field, there was no choice—if he went on, the rising hills at the end of the field would claim them
both. The sale was not worth dying for. Bandfield cut his throttle, surrendering with his touchdown, while Hafner pushed the nose
up, rolling the A-11 across the field and then giving a first-class
aerobatic show.
There was another big party in the Peruvian officers' mess that night. Bandfield didn't attend.
*
Issy-les-Moulineaux, France/March 16, 1932
She tried to concentrate on the beauty of the night, the Venetian-
blue sky reminiscent of the name of a perfume she had worn the first
time she and Stephan had made love—Guerlain's L'Heure Bleu.
There was still sufficient light to pick out the naked arms of obsidian
black chestnut trees growing on both sides of the narrow street, somehow surviving in the small round circles of ground picked out
of the cobblestones. Stephan was driving maniacally, sounding his
horn and flicking his lights, the yellow reflection bouncing off the stone walls of the houses built square with the twisting roads. Patty closed her eyes and gasped as an ancient Frenchman, clad in a blue cloak and beret, clutching two long loaves of bread, leaped aside to
flatten himself against the wall. She grasped the strap on the door of
their Bugatti 50 and looked at her husband closely: Stephan rarely
drank, and the champagne must have made him tipsy.
It had been quite a day. Stephan had left the air force in a glorious ceremony at Le Bourget, where the 1st Pursuit Squadron had honored him with a flyover, nine parasol-wing Dewoitine D-27s in tight formation.
At the officers' mess, the champagne-laden toasts had unsettled
Stephan to the point that she had been afraid he was going to back out of his decision to enter civilian life. The way he was driving now, he might never have a civilian life.
"Slow down, Stephan—you don't know who is coming!"
"That's why I flash my lights, darling Patty, so that they know I'm coming. I wish I'd known that Angelique was coming! I'd have kept
you home."
The good-natured courtier of the past was now the typical French
husband, demanding and with a temper as short as his height. And she was failing him badly on two accounts: she had failed to conceive and she had failed to please his family. Their most recent
visit to the country home near Saint-Jean-le-Thomas—she still considered it to be more the Dompniers' than her own house—had brought things to a head.
"Angelique shouldn't have been invited! I don't care if the two
families are old friends. She shouldn't have come with all her brats!"
Stephan had laboriously arranged a week with his family in one
more attempt to maintain the harmony the wedding had generated. After Orleans, his family had been enamored of Charlotte and
Bruno, but had never really come to like Patty. Their emotions were
mixed about Stephan's heirless state. On the one hand, they desperately wanted grandchildren from their only surviving son. On the other, they were not certain they wanted the Dompnier bloodline, impeccable for centuries, contaminated with Patty Morgan's.
The visit had started well. Their house was huge, with great
French doors opening onto walled gardens. There was a walkway
along the walls from which you could gaze on the tides racing to Mont-Saint-Michel. But inside there was an austere air of decay fostered by walls festooned with trophies of the hunt, ample evidence that the Dompniers had done their part in slaughtering fauna
all over France. Patty vaguely remembered the den of her grand
parents' house, where a friendly moose head, one antler slightly
lower than the other, with layers of dust converting the glassy eyes into a leering wink, had decorated one wall. At the Dompniers', the
trophies didn't stop with heads; hundreds of family photos, all in heavy frames that seemed to armor rather than present, competed for space with an army of tails and hides that showed the scars of
pests and bullets. Every wall and doorway was a pincushion of horns
and hooves of all sizes and descriptions, long, short, furry and cartilaginous, virtually every hard part of an animal that a hat could
be hung upon. An Indian fakir could have been uncomfortably
thrust against any wall and never missed his bed of nails. In dusty
counterpart, obviously discontented stuffed birds and beady-eyed
squirrels sat, forever immobile, on any flat area, while no chair or couch went without its fox-fur throw.
Madame Dompnier had another little hobby—tortoiseshell bas
kets. Her vivid description of how she did it—from trapping the poor
dumb beast to boiling the bones from the carcass to varnishing the
shells—almost made Patty a nonstarter for breakfast and began the
general declining trend of events.
After Sunday-morning mass, they had invited Angelique Giscard
and her family for the afternoon. The daughter of old friends of the family, whose own country home bordered the Dompniers', she had once been Stephan's intended. Then Stephan's infatuation with Patty had changed everyone's plans. Angelique had married a wealthy manufacturer in Amboise, producing for him with bovine regularity children of alternate sexes, a boy, a girl, a boy, a girl. It
was almost certain that her visit was a celebration of French family
fecundity, an example to Patty.