They tiptoed through the forest in pre-sunrise murk the next morning. A.E. wondered whether they should have headed for Bordeaux after all. They might still have found a ship. Then they were out of the trees and on damp grass again, the Potez 63s only fifty yards ahead.
“Halt! Who goes there?” a sentry barked. He held a rifle. Even before sunrise, the bayonet fixed to the end of the barrel glinted nastily.
“We are the American flyers. The American flyers who came to fly for the Republic.” A.E. was the only one with enough French to talk to him. She went through her spiel; she’d lost sleep rehearsing it in her head more times than she could count.
“Vive la République!” Andy Mamedoff added, as if on cue. That was a fair chunk of the French he’d learned. Of the clean French, anyway.
“Advance and be recognized,” the sentry said. A.E. waved her comrades up with her in case they didn’t follow. The sentry’s two chums also showed themselves. That relieved her; there’d been three soldiers here when she’d checked the day before. The fellow who was doing the talking went on, “Show me your orders, if you please.”
This was the tricky part. She took a deep breath before answering. “Mais certainement. I have a copy for each of you.” She handed each soldier a sheet of paper folded in thirds horizontally. Inside each folded sheet was a hundred-dollar bill.
The fellow who’d questioned her had bushy eyebrows. They jumped when he saw the American money. One of the other soldiers exclaimed softly. The Frenchmen put their heads together for a moment. When they drew apart, the one who did the talking waved the Americans forward with an oddly courtly gesture, like a headwaiter offering a fine table. “Carry out your orders, friends of the Republic!” he said.
Trying not to show how weak her knees had got, A.E. walked up the two Potez 63s. The other Americans followed. The French planes reminded her not only of Messerschmitt 110s but also of the Lockheed Electra 10 in which she’d flown around the world. They were a bit smaller and slimmer—they were built for combat, not to carry passengers—but had similar lines and those twin tailfins.
She and Andy, the medium-sized people, got into one plane. Red and Vernon Keough, the long and short of it, climbed into the other. “Remember, the throttle works backwards,” she said one more time before they closed the canopies. “Follow me if you can.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Red said, and gave her a wave that was half a salute. “See you in England.”
She strapped herself into the pilot’s seat. Mamedoff took the one behind it, which faced the other way and let him use the machine gun that defended the Potez against attacks from the rear. She hoped—she prayed, though not much given to praying—he wouldn’t have to.
At least he hadn’t tried to claim the pilot’s seat himself. She had more experience than he did, and the bit of French she knew let her make some sense of the instrument panel. Not all men would have cared about any of that, but he owned sense enough to know it mattered.
The spade grip on the end of the stick had a red button on it. That was for the plane’s forward-facing guns. Again, she hoped she wouldn’t need it. She’d done a lot of flying, but not in combat, not yet.
She checked the fuel gauge. If the Potez was dry, she had a whole new problem, and not enough C-notes to spread around to solve it. But the gauge showed the tanks were better than half full. Was that enough to fly 350-odd miles?
A.E. laughed mirthlessly. She’d find out. So would Shorty and Red. How much gas did their plane carry?
Where were the engine starters? She found them, or hoped she did. When she hit the one labeled G, the left engine roared to life. The one marked D fired up the engine and prop on the right. A moment later, the other Potez’s props began to spin. Red gave her a thumbs-up from its cockpit.
Gently, as if walking on eggs, she pushed the throttle in a little. That felt unnatural, but the plane began to roll. She hadn’t been so careful or so nervous since her first takeoff. She steered the Potez’s nose into the wind, not that there was much, and gave it more gas.
It bumped over the dirt and grass of the field. She was more used to that kind of takeoff than to the smooth sort that came on paved runways. Everything she did was by eye and by feel. When she pulled back on the stick, the Potez’s nose went up. As soon as she knew it would stay airborne, she let out an Indian war whoop.
From the rear-facing seat, Andy Mamedoff bawled, “Red got off the ground, too!”
When A.E. understood him, she whooped again. After gaining some altitude, she cranked the wheels up into their wells. There was probably a hydraulic system to do it the easy way, but she couldn’t find the control on the instrument panel. She didn’t care. This worked.
She flew north at what the airspeed indicator said was three hundred kilometers an hour. That was two hundred miles an hour, or a little less. The Potez was faster than her old Electra, but not a whole lot. Against a Messerschmitt or a Hurricane, it would be in deep.
She had a compass. She could see shadows on the ground. England was a big target. She figured she’d find it. Nothing to worry about on that score, not the way there had been when she and Fred Noonan found Howland Island, a tiny speck of sand sticking up a few feet out of the endless, endless miles of the Pacific. Even drunk, as he often was, Fred had by God known how to navigate.
The altimeter, of course, read in meters. A meter was a yard, close enough. She stayed between three hundred and six hundred meters—one to two thousand feet. That way, she didn’t have to worry about oxygen. And if she wasn’t up very high, fewer people on the ground would spot her. That could matter. By now, she had to be crossing territory the Germans had overrun.
This plane had a rearview mirror at the top of the windscreen. She’d never seen that in any civilian model. When you flew into combat, though, you needed to see what was coming up behind you before it shot you down. At the moment, the only thing behind her was Red’s Potez. They both buzzed along as serenely as if no one had ever heard of war.
But people had. There clogging a highway was a German column: tanks, halftracks, trucks, motorcycles, guns, horse-drawn wagons, countless foot soldiers in field gray. A.E.’s thumb slid toward the red button. If she put her nose down and shot them up … She knew it was a bad idea, but it tempted her just the same.
Some of the infantrymen waved up at her. Sure as hell, they thought her Potez and Red’s were Messerschmitt 110s. Instead of opening fire on them, she waggled her wings. If they thought her a friend, she needed to act like one.
She flew on. France was greener and more finely divided into fields than most parts of the United States. She eyed the fuel gauge. It had sunk under the halfway line, but she’d been going for more than an hour. She nodded to herself. She ought to have enough to get to England.
Did Red? He was still a few hundred yards behind her. He could make his own fuel calculations … couldn’t he? A.E. shrugged and kept going. If he ran out of gas, she couldn’t do anything about it.
After a while, she reached the Channel. She remembered the fuss people had made the first time an airplane crossed it. That was in 1909; she couldn’t recall whether Blériot’s flight came before or after her twelfth birthday. Now it was just a ten-minute hop, with England on the far side.
England … and the RAF. If a patrolling Hurricane or Spitfire spotted her plane, would the pilot take the Potez 63 for a Messerschmitt? Landing as soon as she could suddenly seemed like a real good idea. She cranked down the landing gear, hoping Red would notice.
The cold, choppy gray water down below gave way to land. A.E. saw no sign of the white cliffs of Dover—she had to be farther west. Well, that was all right. Everything down below looked green and lush, as it had on the other side of the Channel.
Find a meadow big enough to land in, she told herself. As soon as she did, she began circling and descending. She saw Red Tobin doing the same thing. She also saw, with some relief, that his plane’s wheels were down, too.
Here came the ground. It wouldn’t be as smooth as it looked. It never was. The plane touched, bounced, touched again. She slowed to a stop, remembering one more time to pull the throttle out instead of pushing it in. When they were just about stopped, she killed the engines, first the left, then the right. The props slowed to immobility. Silence seemed strange after the droning roar that had filled her since dawn.
“Good job, boss,” Andy Mamedoff said. “You can pilot me any old time.”
“Any landing you can walk away from is a good one,” A.E. said. Red Tobin brought his Potez down. He landed rougher than she had, but he didn’t do a noseover or a ground loop. After he shut down his engines, he waved to her. So did Shorty from the rear seat. She waved back.
When she opened the canopy, the air was fresh and cool, noticeably cooler than it had been down in Tours. And a farmer was stumping across a meadow toward the planes. He carried only a pitchfork, but he carried it with as much determination as if it were a Tommy gun.
“Don’t try to get away!” he shouted. “I’ve called the soldiers, I have!”
“Good.” A.E. unstrapped and climbed out of the cockpit. “They can take us to London. We’re friends.”
Her voice and her looks stopped the farmer in his tracks. “You’re—you’re … her,” he said. “I seen you in the newsreels, I did. Never thought you’d come down on my back pasture.”
Three cars pulled up to the edge of the meadow. Helmeted men with rifles spilled out of them and trotted across the grass. A.E. ran a hand through her short, red-gold curls. The gesture was calculated to make them notice her, and it did. Like the farmer, a couple of them recognized her, too. She could watch word of who she was spread through the Englishmen.
Still, one of the soldiers began to raise his rifle. An older man with three chevrons on his sleeve—upside-down chevrons, to A.E.’s way of thinking—knocked the muzzle to one side. “Them ain’t Germans,” he said, and then, to the Americans, “Just who are you, and what are you doing here?”
Backed by Andy Mamedoff, A.E. began to explain. Red and Shorty walked over from their Potez and chimed in now and then. The longer the soldiers listened, the bigger their eyes got.