Amerika (4 page)

Re-fueling would be the easy part. Taxiing the plane to the dock to do another story. Not because of the wind or water conditions, but because I would have to taxi in front of the
Yankee Clipper
moored to the dock. As I drew abreast, eight men in dark blue uniforms with gold buttons and starched white caps marched in perfect unison down the loading dock toward the plane. The familiar flight ritual I had performed a thousand times had begun once again for these lucky guys. Once the captain and crew were on board, a bell on the dock would chime twice and the well-heeled, privileged passengers would board as well.

I looked away - unfortunately straight into Orlando’s eyes.

‘Know any of the boys?’ he said.

‘Williamson the navigator and Heath, the co-pilot. We flew the Caribbean Division together.’

‘Why don’t you wish them
bon voyage?’

‘You don’t know when to stop, do you?’

‘Lancing a boil eases the pain, brother.’

‘I’m not hurting.’

Orlando shook his head, said nothing and turned away. I could never lie to him and get away with it, not when we were boys, not now either. I yanked back on the throttles; the S-38 wallowed forward and came to a bobbing stop. I popped open the side window, leaned out, cupped my hands and shouted,

‘Hey, Tommy, bring me back some single malt, will you?’

The flight team kept marching along, but Tommy Heath shot a glance my way. He checked his smile, rolled his eyes toward the captain, indicating he was a hard-ass, and then nodded slightly.

Dick Williamson’s face brightened in recognition too, but he kept in character as he followed the crew onto the wing sponson, and entered the aircraft the last in a line of tin soldiers, just like I had done countless times in the past.

But ‘tin generals’ is a better word for a Boeing clipper crew. These were hand-picked veterans who’d worked their way up Pan Am’s tortured chain of seniority to finally arrive at the very top, ready to serve the public by flying the largest plane in the world all over the world.

The
Yankee Clipper
still had her all-silver paint job. But my blood pressure went up by twenty points when I saw that
LUFTHANSA
had replaced the
Pan American Airways System
lettering along the upper fuselage.  And my pressure went up another ten points when I saw the red-banded swastikas painted on her triple-tail rudders. Even though a Pan Am crew was flying her, she belonged to Berlin.

‘Trippe doesn’t give a damn if he gets dollars or
Deutschemarks
, as long as money pours into his hot little hands and his deep pockets.’

‘That’s no way to talk about an old friend.’

‘Not anymore.’

The boarding bell gonged, and the knot of people waiting on shore slowly untangled and became a long stream of neatly-dressed passengers walking singly and in pairs along the well-maintained dock.

‘Easy to spot the Nazis, ain’t it?’ Orlando said.

Most of the passengers walked with the casual, relaxed gait of the privileged class who could afford this expensive airborne ocean crossing, but five or six of them, despite their civilian clothes, had a peculiar, almost clipped way of moving more associated with a parade ground than wooden planks.

‘Who do they think they’re fooling, dressed like that?’ I said.

Orlando chuckled. ‘Why don’t you shout
Sieg Heil
and see what happens.’

I almost did, but thought better of it. Still, the idea of was tempting, so I cupped my hands, leaned out and shouted, ‘
Wiedersehen Scheisskopf!’’

One of them looked up sharply, but just as he did, I firewalled the throttles and the engines roared in response, kicking up a rooster tail of spray as we shot forward, heading straight for the refueling dock. Infantile, I know, even dangerous to call him a ‘shit head.’ But when you’re powerless against the bad guys, sometimes the only way to preserve a shred of integrity is to do something stupid and then get the hell out of Dodge before they catch you.

I’m here to say we made it out of Dodge without getting arrested for insulting our ‘compliance partners.’ As we reached our cruising altitude of three thousand feet, Orlando said, ‘Do you think they’ll report us?’

‘They saw our tail number. Probably will.’

‘And?’

‘And by the time the paperwork makes its way up and down the Nazi chain of command, we’ll be long gone and happy in Key West, flying lobsters and passengers to our hearts content.’

‘Hope you’re right.’ He leaned forward and cupped both his ears. After a long, analytical moment he said, ‘Engines sound okay.’

‘What did you do to them when I was fueling?’

‘Laid hands over their sorry cylinders.’

After all the fuss the S-38 had given us at the start, she was now performing the way Sikorsky had designed her. With her engines humming in perfect synchrony and my hands in my lap, I didn’t need to touch the control wheel. Properly trimmed, she kept her heading and altitude perfectly. Some planes need hands-on attention every minute you’re in the air, while others just want to fly, and the less you interfere with your clunky wheel and rudder adjustments, the happier they are and the sweeter they behave.

I repeated Captain Fatt’s familiar phrase, ‘She’d just as soon you stay on the ground and she’ll go flying by herself.’

That’s what he had told me the day he finally let me take the wheel of the Pan Am Fokker T-1 Monoplane. When Juan Trippe hired me on as a radio operator, I lied about knowing Morse code. But I had also lied about my age too. Don’t get me wrong. Truth is always better than fiction. But I was young and desperate, and my lies were just my way of keeping my hopes alive until I could match them up with reality.

And the reality was that from the very beginning I wanted to fly, and the instant I could weasel my way into Fatt’s favor and get some lessons, I did just that. He loved good cigars, and my mother rolled the best at
Key West & Havana Cigar Company.
Thanks to her and Carlita, I made sure the good captain had an unlimited supply of their
Maestro
brand.

I patted my right shirt pocket and felt the familiar shape of the same cigar. I don’t smoke any more, but I still carry one as a good luck charm. Not that it had worked worth a damn over the past year, but I wasn’t about to give up the tradition. But unlike me, Orlando was puffing away on a cigar the size of a small baseball bat.

‘Where do you get those things?’ I said.

His lips rose into a sweet smile but he said nothing.

‘They sure as heck don’t come from Key West – Havana is it?’

He shook his head. ‘A secret.’

‘Tell me.’

‘If I did, it won’t be a secret.’

‘Then at least crack your window. You’re killing me with that smoke.’

The engine noise swelled to a roar when he slid up the window, and I took the opportunity to scan the instruments: oil pressure fine, manifold pressure in the green, altimeter at a rock-steady three thousand feet and airspeed locked in at one hundred-ten mph indicated. But according to my dead reckoning, we had a headwind that would bring us down to about one hundred knots true airspeed or less. I did the math and figured we would reach Key West a little after midnight. Not great for a night’s sleep, but plenty of time to get ready for the first paying flight of
Carter Aviation, Inc
. I liked how the name rolled off my tongue. It sounded impressive, even though our company was far from it.

Eight months ago I had been wearing the dark-blue uniform of a Pan American Airways captain and flying the prestigious Caribbean route. Today I was muscling a twin-engine amphibian piece of junk and praying it would stay in one piece. All because of what I saw approaching to my starboard. Without thinking I banked to a new heading that would take us closer.

Orlando realized what I was doing and jumped as if shocked. ‘Brother, you best bring us back on course right now.’

‘I just want to see.’

‘They almost nailed us in New York. Don’t push your luck.’

‘I’ll be careful.’

Orlando folded his thick arms across his chest; a sure sign he wasn’t getting through to me. And he was right. But he wasn’t giving up yet.

‘You’ve still got a little girl and your momma, too. They’re waiting for us in Key West.’

I ignored him and put the plane into a shallow bank to the right, and the green, tree-lined horizon obediently tilted to reveal a distant view of Washington D.C. According to zoning laws, no buildings could be taller than U.S. Capitol, except the Washington Monument.

Before the ‘war that wasn’t,’ whenever I’d fly into the city, the visual effect at altitude suggested that someone had applied a giant flatiron to a normal sized city and squashed everything flat. Except of course, for the slender-spired Washington Monument that resembled a giant index finger pointing to the sky as if to say, ‘Here is the Capital of the United States of America.’

But eight months ago that finger had snapped in two from the fury of an atomic blast. Today, the upper half of it lay crumpled on the ground in a tumbled heap of limestone blocks. The remaining stump stood in mute testimony to our broken nation. They had plans to re-build it. But so far nothing had happened.

‘Like a tombstone.’ I said.

Orlando folded his arms tighter.

‘Fifteen thousand people gone in less than a second.’

‘Sam, don’t do this. You’re just -’

‘One minute alive and breathing and the next, burned as crisp as a -’

‘You couldn’t have done anything.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Nobody could. The bomb went off and everybody died. That’s what happened and you know it.’

‘Estelle and Eddy were down there. I wasn’t.’

I eased up on the throttles and let the plane sink into a shallow glide. The distant blur of buildings grew more distinct. So did the vast bomb crater just south of the U.S. Capital. Southwest Washington had borne the brunt of the initial blast. That’s where my wife and son had been staying with her parents. They’d travelled up from Miami to celebrate the birth of her sister’s first baby. A family affair all around - except for me.

‘I should have been there.’

‘Can we discuss this outside their airspace?’

‘Screw them, they don’t own this country, we do.’

‘They damn well own this part of it and we’re inside it.’

‘I want to see their graves.’

The slanting summer sunlight created a deep shadow inside the bomb crater. Even though eight months had passed, the devastation looked like it happened yesterday. For a mile and a half in all directions from the epicenter, nothing remained but scraps of what used to be buildings. Partial sections of the more substantial stone structures like the National Archives and Department of Commerce were still standing, but their empty windows and mounds of rubble marked them as memories not realities.

Somewhere beneath the shattered wood, steel and stone of what used to be 1207 Perry Place, SW, Estelle and Eddie lay buried in her parents’ vaporized house. No bodies had been recovered that close to the epicenter.

‘Let us pray for the departed,’ Orlando said softly.

‘Let us pray for vengeance first.’

Orlando tossed his cigar stub out the window and slammed it shut. ‘To everything there is a season, Brother. Our time will come.’

I opened my mouth to say something hateful, just as a thundering blast of noise screamed overhead. A blur of white wings, a green Nazi cross, and our world turned upside down as the S-38 nearly flipped over in the prop wash from the compliance fighter.

‘Bastard!’

I applied full power, leveled my wings and lowered her nose to regain control. Just in time, thank God, before another roar and another blast from the fighter’s wingman doing the same thing, and ending with a triumphant Immelmann turn to the left that brought him high above us, heading in the opposite direction, whereupon he promptly turned again and took up station about five hundred feet above.

His wingman drew up alongside my port wing. Flight goggles, helmet and a white silk scarf obscured most of the pilot’s face. He pointed at me, and then to the ground. The universal meaning was all too clear but I refused to play along. I smiled and waved back.

Orlando grunted, ‘We’re in it now, brother, up to our ears.’

‘Not if I can play stupid we aren’t.’ I waved harder and tried to make my smile seem genuine.

The sound of his twenty millimeter nose cannon stopped my bright idea dead in its tracks. Golden-red tracers flashed across the afternoon sky like tiny comets, each round capable of blowing our engines to bits.

Orlando shouted, ‘I told you we-’

‘-shut up and pray.’

The Nazi’s wingman dropped down to join us just off our starboard wing like a Berlin bookend. When he lowered his landing gear the meaning was clear: ‘follow me to the ground or be shot down.’ To confirm this, our radio came alive with a crisp, female German-accented voice that said, ‘Unidentified aircraft, this is Washington Control. You have violated restricted airspace. We are vectoring patrol aircraft your vicinity. Hold position until they arrive.’