Amerika Page 29

  With Creeley’s help we concocted a hybrid blend of bamboo plugs wrapped with oakum and hammered them into the holes. True, we had only half-solved the problem; the inner hull was still holed and held hundreds of gallons of water, but in theory the sump pumps could get rid of that water before we took off.

  IF we took off.

  I had been nervously kicking that can down the road the whole time we were working on the hull because I didn’t want to do the math, which was this: a gallon of gasoline weighs five-point-eight pounds. Each of our topped-off sponson tanks now held two thousand gallons, which means we had taken on an additional twenty-three thousand pounds.

  Not a problem when the Boeing 314 had nice long run to lug that kind of weight into the air. But in our case, Creeley’s Landing was located on a narrow inlet with a decided hard left turn to the water’s course about two miles downwind - make that no wind. The morning sun was well established, but it had brought no wind along with it. The water surface was like polished aluminum. When it came to the Dixie Clipper trying to break free of its tenacious surface tension, it might as well be glue.

  My idea was a simple. Making it a reality would be the challenge. I explained it to Creeley and finished by saying, ‘You got a boat with some muscle to it?’

  ‘I might.’

  ‘How much?’

  He departed in his little green dinghy without saying another word. Minutes later the thundering roar of a diesel marine engine shattered the morning stillness as a massive, forty-foot long, low-slung symphony of polished mahogany and chrome burst from behind the landing and split the waters like a scalpel as it raced toward us. It slowed to a stop in a slew of spray that sparkled in the sunshine.

  Over the contented burble of the massive engine, Creeley said, ‘Will this do?’

  I took in the immense size of the craft. ‘What the hell is it?’

  He patted the steering wheel and said slyly, ‘I wasn’t always in the aviation business.’

  Ava said, ‘Lester was a rum-runner. Made a fortune. Lost it, too, didn’t you?’

  Creeley bristled. ‘Didn’t lose the boat though.’

  ‘Good thing, since Mother was one of your investors.’

  ‘Your mother?’ I said.

  ‘She likes her bourbon, and didn’t appreciate it when Prohibition came along. So she and some of her cronies ponied up a grubstake for Lester, who kept them in their cups, at least for a while.’

  I said to Creeley, ‘What you got for power?’

  ‘Liberty Vee-twelve. Five hundred-twenty-five horses.’ He revved it briefly as if to prove his claim and the birds screeched in complaint.

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Let’s you and me go for a ride.’

  I hopped into the rum-runner and Creeley took us down to the bend in the river. Once there, I measured the tree height and did some rough calculations. Didn’t like the answers I came up with, but stayed with it until I finally found a set of numbers that didn’t make my stomach sink with fear, just thrash around on the surface instead.

  Creeley observed me in silence, and then said, ‘Think we can make it, captain?’

  ‘Got no choice.’

  ‘My kind of odds. Count me in.’

  Forty tons of airplane is a lot. If I had done my takeoff calculations right, and I knew I had because Fatt had been a good teacher, then I had roughly ten thousand feet of water ‘runway’ to lift eighty thousand pounds of aluminum and people into the air and clear a stand of cypress trees fifty- feet high. I had four radial engines putting out a total of six thousand eight hundred horsepower to do the job, which would have been child’s play in open water where a flying boat’s takeoff run is endless and her engines have plenty of time to develop full output.

  On land I could have solved the problem a different way: stand on the brakes and bring the engines up to full power before starting my takeoff roll. I had done it hundreds of times in the past. But that was land, this was water, and while the laws of physics can’t be beaten, they can be bent a bit.

  With everybody strapped in and ready to go, we were going to try.

  Think of a slingshot. I know it sounds preposterous, but I had no choice. Loaded with over twenty thousand additional pounds of avgas, no way in hell we were going anywhere but back and forth on this windless, calm water without a creative plan of action.

  I keyed my intercom. ‘All set, Ziggy?’

  Back in his familiar station in the open nose hatch, he turned and saluted impressively. ‘Standing by SIR!’

  ‘You ever get sick of Hollywood, I’ll get you a job with Pan Am.’

  ‘No thank you, SIR!’

  ‘Got your line release all figured out?’

  He held up the end of a rope that led to a strange-looking knot tied across both bollards. I had originally planned on rigging a simple ‘exploding knot’ like a clove hitch, that would allow quick release when pulled, but Creeley had come up with something called a ‘Double Carrick Bend’ which was a ten times stronger knot. And considering what we were going to do, we would need it - at both ends of the plane.

  ‘Pilot to waist gunner.’

  Orlando’s deep voice answered with a chuckle. ‘That would be me, sir.’

  ‘Your line all set?’

  ‘In my hands waiting for your command.’

  I leaned out the window and waved at Creeley, down and to the left of us, crouched over the wheel of his rum runner. He waved back, advanced the throttle and centered up on the plane. His maneuver took up the slack from the line that ran from our nose bollard to the rum-runner’s stern cleats. He had wound the line around his gunwale cleats too, for good measure.

  A haze of diesel smoke drifted across the still waters from his burbling engine. Those damn still waters. Why wasn’t there any wind?

  I ducked back inside. ‘Stand by your flag.’

  Ava unrolled the small American flag Pan Am co-pilots place outside on a stanchion after landing, after the tradition of a ship arriving in port. Only this time we weren’t arriving, we were departing, and the flag would be Creeley’s signal to hit full throttle.

  I said to her, ‘Things are going to get noisy real soon, so here’s the deal, when-’

  ‘When you call for flaps I keep my finger on the solenoid so they’ll keep deploying without stopping, got it, got it, GOT IT. You told me that hundred times already.’

  ‘Just want to be sure.’

  She tapped the flag against her palm and then looked over at me.

  ‘Didn’t mean to yell at you like that.’

  ‘That’s okay, you’re fired.’ She grinned. ‘Just like that?’

  ‘It’s the Pan Am way. No second chance with insubordination.’

  ‘All along I thought Hollywood was bad.’

  ‘Juan Trippe makes Jack Warner look like Mother Goose.’ I said.

  ‘That I’d like to see.’

  ‘If we get through this in one piece, we will.’

  Don’t ask me why I said that, I just imagined the two of us doing something other than running for our lives, and I liked the thought. But it lasted about as long as a firefly’s flash as the task at hand came rushing back.

  ‘Pilot to crew, prepare for takeoff.’

  Mason, Ziggy, Orlando and Ava dutifully answered in turn, and I almost laughed at my idea of a ‘crew,’ but it wasn’t funny, it was scary.

  Ava and I went through the engine sequence start, and two minutes later, with magneto checks accomplished, all four engines were turning over sweetly, sending a vibration through the plane much the same as a heartbeat does in a human being. Instruments in the green, pre-flight check done, I flexed my fingers for a brief second before closing them over the throttles.

  ‘Stand by,’ I said.

  Ava sat up straight. ‘Standing by.’

  I slowly advanced the throttles. But instead of moving gracefully away from the dock, the clipper sat there, tied to it with the strong manila line leading back from Orlando’s gun station to the dock.

 
‘Waist gunner, line status,’ I said over the increasing engine roar.

  ‘Holding steady,’ Orlando said.

  ‘Ready close cowl flaps fifty.’ Mason said. ‘Standing by.’

  The cylinder head temperatures were rising fast. The plane wasn’t designed to be held back on a leash like a straining greyhound and her engines were showing the strain. The small flaps encircling the streamlined engine cowls were doing their best to let air in to cool down the cylinders. But once we started our takeoff run, they would add drag unless we closed them partway.

  ‘Three degrees flaps.’

  Ava answered, ‘at three.’

  I took a deep breath. ‘Ready flag out.’

  She knelt up on her. By now the clipper was vibrating like a tuning fork from the combined forces of four radial engines whirling eleven-foot propellers at full RPM.

  Now or never.

  ‘Flag out!’

  Ava slid open the window and leaned out, waving and shouting but I couldn’t hear her over the din of the engines, doubly loud because of the open window, not to mention the rum runner’s engine soaring up into full power.

  I shouted, ‘Pilot to waist gunner, release the line!’

  ‘Aye, aye.’

  I can’t exactly say we were shot from a cannon. After all, forty tons is forty tons, but for the first time since I’d been flying seaplanes, I literally felt myself shoved back into my seat from the force of motion as the Dixie Clipper surged forward so hard her nose began burying itself in the water. But the powerful rum-runner yanked it up before I could counteract it.

  Creeley’s boat was thirty yards ahead, pulling hard, the line connecting us as taut as a steel rod. Ziggy hunkered down in the mooring hatch, one hand on the line, the other clamped onto his intercom headphones.

  We hadn’t gone a thousand feet when the airspeed indicator ticked into life and was showing twenty-five knots already. So far so good. But forty- five more to go before we had the slightest chance of lifting off, and that bend in the river was getting closer and closer.

  I found myself straining against my chest straps, as if that would make her go faster. Ava was doing the same thing.

  ‘Thirty knots,’ she called.

  ‘C’mon old girl, you can do it.’

  ‘C’mon darling Dixie, make us proud,’

  ‘Thirty five.’

  Her hull began slapping the water and I smiled. Creeley’s boat was doing a lot more than pulling us with its five hundred horses, its marine propeller was churning up a roiling wake that broke up the glassy-still water and reduced its suction on the Dixie Clipper’s hull, giving us a fighting chance.

  ‘Fifty knots.’

  One-third of the takeoff run left before the turn in the river. Needed seventy, but would chance it with sixty if we hand to. Felt a slight stiffening in the controls, as if she were flexing and stretching after a long nap, but not enough yet to wake up and fly.

  Ava’s hand moved up to the flaps control and hovered there, waiting for my call.

  ‘Not yet,’ I said.

  ‘Sometime today I hope,’ she said, and then, ‘Fifty-five!’

  ‘Ziggy, stand bye to release your line!’

  ‘Standing by,’ Ziggy’s voice a buzzing blur.

  The line to the rum-runner slackened as our increasing airspeed began to overtake her top speed. Creeley seemed to read my mind and nervously glanced over his shoulder. He pumped his fist hard.

  ‘Pull the line!’

  Ziggy tugged at it. Nothing. Again, this time more frantically. But the line held.

  ‘Sixty!’

  Controls firm, her wings biting into the morning air, she wanted to fly. Ziggy now halfway out of the mooring hatch, yanking on the line with both hands.

  Nothing doing.

  If I tried lifting her off now, we’d take the rumrunner along with us, and its weight would pull us back down.

  ‘Ziggy!’ Ava screamed.

  Ziggy’s arms flew up and he disappeared down through the hatch as though he were a puppet. A fraction of a second later Orlando popped up, grabbed the line, yanked it, and the double Carrick knot ‘exploded’ exactly the way it should have, and it slithered down and away like a manila snake.

  ‘Sixty five.’

  ‘Full flaps.’

  I cranked in nose trim as fast as I could to counteract the wing flaps extending deeper and deeper into the slipstream, dramatically increasing lift. The approaching trees were a wall of green that filled the windscreen. Now or never.

  I pulled back on the yoke.

  The Dixie Clipper didn’t take off so much as she ballooned off the surface of the water in perfect obedience to the rule of flight that allows you to exchange altitude for airspeed. And that’s what we were doing as the airspeed needle dropped and the altimeter soared and we were clawing for just enough height to clear the trees that were suddenly upon us in a blurring rush of green and brown and a sudden banging, clanging, explosion of sound that came and went, and just like that we were clear of the trees.

  Clear!

  I lowered her nose and said a prayer we’d recover our airspeed before stalling. After that boost of height, the controls were mush, the wings wanted to stop working, but God bless the Wright Engine Company for saving our lives in that moment by having made machines that could be pushed past their limits and still keep working hard enough to shove the airspeed needle past the stall speed and into safe territory again.

  When we finally reached one hundred-ten knots, I said, ‘How we doing, Mason?’

  He answered with forced casualness, ‘Any time you want to cut RPM’s would be fine by me.’

  I did so carefully and put the plane into a gentle bank that would take us back over Creeley’s Landing. Our last sight of him as we flew over at five hundred feet was a waving, dancing old man in a speedboat that had just helped us pull off a miracle. How many more we needed before this long, impossible day was over was anybody’s guess.

  The rising sun cast long shadows across the Louisiana bayou as we slowly climbed to our cruising altitude of six thousand feet. No way of knowing how strong the winds aloft would be until we got up there and I did some estimations. If they were not too strong, we could make it all the way to the target and then back to our refueling base in Nevada without additional fuel. Nineteen hours by Fatt’s original flight plan, but no way of knowing how long now. Both he and the grand plan were out the window, flying among the stars.

  Part of me understood my old friend was dead, but most of me felt he was still alive. The sheer momentum of his personality kept him talking and laughing inside me and I needed that, especially now.

  One of the first lessons I learned from him was that it’s easy to lift an airplane off the runway. A five year-old can do it. Airplanes are designed to fly. All they need is enough airspeed for the wings to counteract weight forces by lift forces and up you go. But landing an airplane is another story entirely; you must orchestrate the just the opposite: achieve that perfect meeting between your wheels and the ground by reducing power and airspeed enough to lose altitude, but not so much that you fall out of the sky like a stone.

  I turned to Ava. ‘Keep an eye on the store.’

  ‘Where you going?’

  ‘Try to raise Couba Island. See what’s going on.’

  I unbuckled my seat belt and made my way back to the empty radio operator station directly behind her. It would have been nice to have a

  ‘Sparks’ on board, but I had to play with the cards the Kampfschwimmers had dealt us.

  I stared at the transmitters and receivers but nothing made sense at first. It had been years since I sweated through a flight as the radio operator trying to locate distant radio stations on the RDF locator, or tapping out position reports to Pan Am ground control. Much had changed since I had done this kind of thing.

  But then, like a picture coming into perfect focus, everything came back to me in a rush. I turned on all of the equipment, dialed in the correct frequency, grabbed
the microphone and said,

  ‘Dixie Clipper calling Couba Island. Come in Couba Island.’

  Nothing but the rush of static in my headphones. I tried again but got the same thing.

  ‘Any luck?’ Ava called out over her shoulder.

  ‘Either they’re shot up or they’re out of range.’

  ‘Any other way to reach them?’

  I stared at the Morse Key. Its well-thumbed black key brought back many memories of my first days with Pan Am. I slid it closer and began tapping away, slowly at first, and then faster as the familiar code came back to me.

  DIXIE CLIPPER CALLING COUBA ISLAND

  To my surprise, rapid DIT-DAH’s instantly replied:

  COUBA ISLAND, GO AHEAD.

  ‘We got them!’ My fingers flew, or at least I thought they did as I quickly tapped:

  DIXIE CLIPPER ALOFT SIX THOUSAND FEET / SOULS ON BOARD AVA, MASON, FRIEDMAN, ZIEGLER, DIAZ AND SELF/ ENROUTE TO TARGET /ADVISE / CARTER

  Another long wait. Then a terse,

  RETURN TO BASE IMMEDIATELY /PATTON.

  I started to reply but something made me stop. Why the hell would Patton want us to come back? Wasn’t this mission the very thing the Sons of Liberty wanted?

  Ava said, ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Not sure. They may have been overrun.’

  Ava twisted around in her seat. ‘I don’t believe it. We outnumbered them.’

  ‘Kampfschwimmers are trained commandos. A big difference. Could have happened.’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘Say what you want but General Patton -- or somebody claiming to be him - just ordered us to return to base and I don’t like it.’

  I hit the key again: