Here’s a powerful look at a part of World War II history that’s still almost unknown by most people even here in the twenty-first century: the vital role played by the pilots of the Women Airforce service pilots or WASP. Who couldn’t fight in combat, but who could—and did—die.
Bestseller Carrie Vaughn is the author of a wildly popular series of novels detailing the adventures of Kitty Norville, a radio personality who also happens to be a werewolf, and who runs a late-night call-in radio advice show for supernatural creatures. The Kitty books include Kitty and the Midnight Hour, Kitty Goes to Washington, Kitty Takes a Holiday, and Kitty and the Silver Bullet. Vaughn’s short work has appeared in Jim Baen’s Universe, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Inside Straight, Realms of Fantasy, Paradox, Strange Horizons, Weird Tales, All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories, and elsewhere. Kitty and the Dead Man’s Hand and Kitty Raises Hell are the newest Kitty novels, published in 2009. Vaughn lives in Colorado.
JUNE 1943
The sun was setting over Avenger Field when Em and a dozen others threw Mary into the so-called Wishing Well, the wide round fountain in front of the trainee barracks. A couple of the girls grabbed her arms; a couple more grabbed her feet and hauled her off the ground. Mary screamed in surprise, and Em laughed—she should have known this was coming, it happened to everyone after they soloed. But she remembered from her own dunking the week before, it was hard not to scream out of sheer high spirits.
Em halted the mob of cheering women just long enough to pull off Mary’s leather flight jacket—then she was right there at Mary’s shoulders, lifting her over the stone lip of the pool of water. Mary screamed again—half screamed, half laughed, rather—and splashed in, sending a wave over the edge. On her knees now, her sodden jumpsuit hanging off her like a sack, she splashed them all back. Em scrambled out of the way.
Applause and laughter died down, and Mary started climbing over the edge.
“Don’t forget to grab your coins,” Em told her.
“Oh!” She dived back under the water, reached around for a moment, then showed Em her prize—a couple of pennies in her open palm. Mary was young, twenty-two, and her wide, clear eyes showed it. Her brown hair was dripping over her face and she looked bedraggled, grinning. “I’m the luckiest girl in the world!”
Whenever one of the trainees at the Women’s Flight Training Detachment at Avenger Field had a test or a check-out flight, she tossed a coin into the fountain for good luck. When she soloed for the first time, she could take two out, for luck. Em’s coins were still in her pocket.
Em reached out, and Mary grabbed her hand. “Come on, get out of there. I think Suze has a fifth of whiskey with your name on it hidden under her mattress.”
Mary whooped and scrambled out. She shook out her jumpsuit; sheets of water came off it, and she laughed all over again.
Arm in arm, they trooped to the barracks, where someone had a radio playing and a party had already started.
DECEMBER 1943
In an outfit like the WASP, everyone knew everyone and news traveled fast.
Em heard about it as soon as she walked into the barracks at New Castle. Didn’t have time to even put her bag down or slide her jacket off before three of the others ran in from the hall, surrounded her, and started talking. Janey gripped her arm tight like she was drowning, and Em let her bag drop to the floor.
“Did you hear?” Janey said. Her eyes were red from crying, Tess looked like she was about to start, and Patty’s face was white. Em’s stomach turned, because she already knew what they were going to say.
“Hear what?” she asked. Delaying the inevitable, like if she could draw this moment out long enough, the news wouldn’t be true.
“A crash, out at Romulus,” Patty said.
Em asked what was always the first question: “Who?”
“Mary Keene.”
The world flipped, her heart jumped, and all the blood left her head. No, there was a mistake, not Mary. Rumors flew faster than anything. She realized Patty didn’t look so worried because of the crash; she was worried about Em.
“What happened?” Always the second question.
“I don’t know, just that there was a crash.”
“Mary, is she—?”
Janey’s tears fell and her voice was tight. She squeezed Em harder. “Oh, Em! I’m so sorry. I know you were friends—I’m so sorry.”
If Em didn’t get out of here now, she’d have to hug them all and start crying with them. She’d have to think about how to act and what to say and what to do next. She’d have to listen to the rumors and try to sort out what had really happened.
She pushed by them, got past their circle, ignored it when Patty touched her arm, trying to hold her back. Left her bag behind, thought that she ought to drag it with her because it had dirty clothing in it. Maybe somebody called to her, but she just wanted to be alone.
She found her room, sat on her cot, and stared at the empty cot against the other wall. She bunked with Mary, right here in this room, just as they had at Avenger. Doubled over, face to her lap, she hugged herself and wondered what to do next.
This didn’t happen often enough to think it could happen to you, or even someone you knew. A year of women flying Army planes, and it had happened less than a dozen times. There were few enough of them all together that Em had known some of them, even if they hadn’t been friends. Seen them at training or waved on the way to one job or another.
It had happened often enough that they had a system.
Em knocked on the last door of the barracks and collected money from Ruth and Liz. She didn’t have to explain what it was for when she held the cup out. It had been like that with everyone, the whole dozen of them on base at the moment. Em would take this hundred and twenty dollars, combine it with the hundred or so sent in from the women at Sweetwater and Houston, and she’d use it to take Mary back to Dayton. None of them were officially Army, so Uncle Sam didn’t pay for funerals. It seemed like a little thing to complain about, especially when so many of the boys overseas were dying. But Mary had done her part, too. Didn’t that count for something?
“Have you found out what happened yet?” Liz asked. Everyone had asked that, too.
Em shook her head. “Not a thing. I called Nancy, but they’re not telling her anything either.”
“You think it was bad?” Liz said. “You think that’s why they’re hushing it up?”
“They’re hushing it up because they don’t like to think about women dying in airplanes,” she said. Earlier in the year, she’d been told point blank by a couple of male pilots that the only women who belonged on planes were the ones painted on the noses. That was supposed to be clever. She was supposed to laugh and flirt. She’d just walked away.
Running footsteps sounded on the wood floor and they looked up to see Janey racing in. The panic in her eyes made Em think that maybe it had happened again, that someone else had gone and crashed and that they’d have to pass the cup around again, so soon.
Janey stopped herself by grabbing Em’s arm and said, “There’s a bird in from Romulus, a couple of guys in a B-26. You think maybe they know what happened?”
They’d have a better idea than anyone. They might even have seen something. “Anyone talk to them yet?” Em said. Janey shook her head.
A line on the rumor mill. Em gave her colleagues a grim smile and headed out.
She couldn’t walk by the flight line without stopping and looking, seeing what was parked and what was roaring overhead. The place was swarming, and it always made her heart race. It was ripe with potential—something big was happening here. We’re fighting a war here, we really are. She took a deep breath of air thick with the smell of fuel and tarmac. Dozens of planes lined up, all shapes and sizes, a dozen more were taking off and landing. Hangar doors stood open revealing even more, and a hundred people moved between them all, working to keep the sound of engines loud and sweet.
This time, she wasn’t the only one stopping to look, because a new sound was rocketing overhead, a subtly different rumble than the ones she normally heard out here. Sure enough, she heard the engine, followed the sound, and looked up to see a bulldog of a fighter buzz the field, faster than sin. She shaded her eyes against a bright winter sun and saw the P-51 Mustang—so much more graceful and agile than anything else in the sky. The nose tapered to a sleek point, streamlined and fast, like a rocket. Not like the clunky, snub-nosed trainers. Granted, clunky trainers served a purpose—it was easier for a pilot in training to correct a mistake at a hundred miles an hour than it was at three hundred. But Em had to wonder what it felt like to really fly. Some way, somehow, she was going to get up in one of those birds someday. She was going to find out what it was like to have 1,500 horse power at her command.
If she were male, her training wouldn’t stop with the little single-engine trainers the WASP ferried back and forth from training base to training base, where they were flown by the men who would move on to pursuits and bombers, and from there to combat. If she were male, she’d be flying bigger, faster, meaner planes already. Then she’d go overseas to fly them for real.
As Janey had said, a B-26 Marauder—a fast, compact two-engine bomber—crouched out on the tarmac, a couple of mechanics putting fuel into her. She was probably stopped for a refuel on her way to somewhere else. That meant Em probably had only one chance to talk to the pilots. She continued on to the ops center. The door to the briefing room was closed, but she heard voices inside, muffled. Against her better judgment, she put her ear to the door and listened, but the talk was all routine. The bomber was on its way to Newark for transport overseas, and the pilot was a combat instructor, just off the front.
Em sat in a chair across the hall and waited. Half an hour later, the door opened. The two guys who emerged were typical flyboys, leather jackets, sunglasses tucked in the pockets, khaki uniforms, short cropped hair, and Hollywood faces. Lieutenant bars on the shoulders.
When Em stood at attention, smoothing her trousers and trying not to worry if her collar was straight, the men looked startled. She didn’t give them time to try to figure out what to do with her. “I’m sorry to bother you. My name’s Emily Anderson, and I’m with the WASP squadron here. I got word that you just flew in from Romulus this morning. I was wondering if I could ask you something.”
The taller of the two edged toward the door. “I have to go check on . . . on something. Sorry.” His apology was quick and not very sincere.
The remaining pilot looked even more stricken and seemed ready to follow his buddy.
“Please, just a quick question,” she said, hating to sound like she was begging. She ought to be charming him.
His wary look deepened, a defensive, thin-lipped frown that made her despair of his taking her seriously. He hesitated, seeming to debate with himself before relenting. “What can I help you with, Miss Anderson?”
She took a deep breath. “I’m trying to find out about a crash that happened near Romulus Field three days ago. A WASP was the pilot. Mary Keene. Sir, she was a friend of mine, and we—the other WASP and I—we just want to know what happened. No one will tell us anything.”
He could have denied knowing anything, shaken his head, and walked out, and she wouldn’t have been able to do anything, and she wouldn’t have been more worried than she already was. But he hesitated. His hands fidgeted with the edge of his jacket, and he glanced at the door, nervous. He knew. Not just that, it was something he didn’t want to talk about, something awful.
She pressed. “You know what it’s like when something like this happens and they won’t tell you anything.”
He shook his head and wouldn’t meet her gaze. “I shouldn’t tell you this.”
“Why not? Because it’s classified? Or because I’m female and you think I can’t handle it?”
The lieutenant pursed his lips. He’d been in combat, might even have faced down enemy fighters, but he didn’t seem to want to stand up to her.
“It was a collision,” he said finally.
Em had worked out a dozen scenarios, everything from weather to mechanical failure. She was even braced to hear that Mary had made a mistake. A million things could go wrong in the air. But a collision?
“That doesn’t make sense, Mary had almost seven hundred hours in the air, she was too experienced for that.”
He got that patronizing look a lot of male pilots had when dealing with WASP, like she couldn’t possibly know what she was talking about. “I told you I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“A collision with whom? Did the other pilot make it? What were they doing that they ran into each other? Did you see it?”
“I don’t know the details, I’m sorry.”
“The Army won’t even tell me what she was flying when she went down,” she said.
He stepped closer, conspiratorially, as if afraid that someone was listening in. Like this really was classified.
“Look, Miss Anderson, you seem like a nice girl. Why are you doing this? Why are any of you risking your lives like this? Why not stay home, stay safe—?”
“And plant a Victory Garden like a good girl? Sit by the radio and wait for someone to tell me it’s going to be all right, and that my husband’ll come home safe? I couldn’t do that, Lieutenant. I had to do something.”
The arguments against women flyers tended to stall out at this point, into vague statements about what was ladylike, what well-bred girls ought to be doing, how women weren’t strong enough to handle the big planes even though they’d proved themselves over and over again. A year of women flying should have shut the naysayers up by now. It hadn’t.
The lieutenant didn’t say anything.
She said, “Is there someone else I can talk to?”
“Look, I don’t know, I’m working off rumors like everyone else. I can’t help you. I’m sorry.” He fled, backing to the door and abandoning Em to the empty corridor.
The WASP all liked Colonel Roper, who commanded the Second Ferry Group at New Castle. At some of the other bases, commanders had given WASP the cold shoulder, but here, he’d treated them with respect and made it policy that the rest of the group do likewise. He didn’t constantly ask them if they could do the job—he just gave them the job.
She went to him with the lieutenant’s story.
His office door was open and he saw her coming. As he was glancing up, a frown drew lines around his mouth. He was young for a Colonel, maybe a little rounder than most guys in the Army, but high-spirited. His uniform jacket was slung over the back of his chair.
“I’m sorry, Anderson, I don’t have any news for you,” he told her before she’d said a word.
She ducked her gaze and blushed. She’d been in here every day looking for news about Mary’s death.
“Sorry, sir,” she said, standing at the best attention she knew, back straight and hands at her sides. “But I just talked to the pilots of that B-26 that came in from Romulus. Sir, they told me Mary crashed in a collision. They wouldn’t tell me anything else.”
Roper’s lips thinned, his brow creased. “A collision—Mary wouldn’t get herself in that kind of mess.”
“I know. Sir, something’s not right. If there’s anything you can do, anything you can find out—”
He scratched out a note on a pad of paper. “The crash report ought to be filed by now. I’ll get a copy sent over.”
That meant a few more days of waiting, but it was progress. They’d get the report, and that would be that. But she still wanted to talk to someone. Someone who’d seen it, someone who knew her. If there was a collision, another pilot was involved. If she could just find out who.
“You’re welcome. Anderson—try to get some sleep. You look beat.”
She hadn’t even been thinking about being tired. She’d been running on fumes. “Yes, sir.”
Mary Keene came from the kind of family that did everything just so, with all the right etiquette. A car from the funeral home was waiting at the train station, along with Mary’s father. Em recognized him from the family picture Mary kept in their room.
Em, dressed in her blue uniform—skirt straight, collar pressed, lapels smooth, insignia pins and wings polished—jumped to the platform before the train slowed to a complete stop and made her way to the luggage car. She waited again. It should have been raining; instead, a crisp winter sun shone in a blue sky. Perfect flying weather. She was thankful for the wool uniform, because a cold wind blew in over a flat countryside.
Men from the funeral home retrieved the casket while Mr. Keene thanked her for coming, shaking her hand with both of his and frowning hard so he wouldn’t cry.
“I thought I’d be meeting one of my boys here like this. Not Mary.”
Em bowed her head. No one ever knew quite what to say about a woman coming home from war in a casket. If one of Mr. Keene’s sons had been killed, the family would put a gold star in the window to replace the blue one showing loved ones serving in combat. They’d be able to celebrate their war hero. Mary wouldn’t get any of that, not even a flag on her casket.
Mr. Keene left in his own car. Em would go with Mary to the funeral home, then call a cab and find a hotel to stay at until the funeral tomorrow. One of the men from the mortuary took Em aside before they left.
“I’m given to understand Miss Keene passed on in an airplane crash.”
“That’s right.”
He was nervous, not looking at her, clasping his hands. Em thought these guys knew how to deal with anything.
“I’m afraid I have to ask—I wasn’t given any information,” he said. “The family has traditionally held open-casket services—will this be possible?”
Or had she burned, had she been smashed beyond recognition, was there anything left?. . . Em’s lips tightened. Stay numb, stay focused, just like navigating a fogbank.
“No, I don’t think it will,” she said.
The man lowered his gaze, bowing a little, and returned to his car.
Em logged thirty hours the next week in trainers, two AT-6s and a BT-13, flying from one end of the country to the other. One morning, she’d woken up in the barracks and had to look outside the window to remember where she was. She kept an eye on other logs and flight plans coming in and out of each base, and kept looking for people who’d been at Romulus last week. Everyone knew about the crash, but other than the fact that a WASP had been killed, nobody treated it like anything unusual. This was wartime, after all.
Arriving back at New Castle on the train after ferrying another round of BT-13s to Houston, she dropped her bag off at the barracks and went to see Colonel Roper. She still had her jumpsuit and flight jacket on, and she really needed a shower. And a meal. And sleep. But maybe this time he had news.
“Sir?” she said at his doorway.
He looked hard at her, didn’t say a word. Self-consciously, she pushed her hair back behind her ears. Maybe she should have washed up first. She tried again. “Sir?”
“You’re right, Anderson,” he said finally. “Something’s not right. The crash report’s been classified.”
She stared. “But that doesn’t make any sense.”
“I have something for you.”
He handed her a folded paper that looked suspiciously like orders. She’d been in the air for three days. She hadn’t been back in her own room for a week. She didn’t want another mission; she didn’t want orders. But you never said no; you never complained.
Her despair must have shown, because Roper gave a thin smile. “I saved this one just for you. I have an AT-11 needs to go to Romulus and I thought you’re just the pilot to do it.”
Exhaustion vanished. She could fly a month straight if she had to.
He continued, “In fact, you look a little tired. Why don’t you spend a few days out there while you’re at it? Take a break, meet the locals.”
Do some digging, in other words.
“Thank you, sir,” she said, a little breathlessly.
“Bring me back some facts, Anderson.”
Last June, right after graduation and before transferring to New Castle, Em and Mary flew together on a cross-country training hop from Sweetwater to Dallas. It was the kind of easy trip where Em could sit back and actually enjoy flying. The kind of trip that reminded her why she was even doing this. She could lean back against the narrow seat, look up and all around through the narrow, boxy canopy at nothing but blue sky. Free as air.
“Hey Em, take the stick for a minute,” Mary said, shouting over the rumble of the engine, when they’d almost reached Love Field at Dallas.
From the back seat of their BT-13 Valiant, craning her neck to peer over Mary’s shoulder, Em saw her drop the stick and start digging in one of the pockets of her jacket. Em hadn’t yet taken over on the dual controls. The Valiant was a trainer and could be flown from either the front or back seat, and every trainee sitting in front had had the controls yanked away from them by the instructor in back at least once. The plane was flying trim so Em didn’t panic too much; she had a little time to put a steadying hand on the stick.
“What are you doing up there?” Em asked. Mary turned just enough so Em could see her putting on lipstick, studying her work in a compact mirror. She’d had enough practice putting on lipstick in airplanes that the teeth-rattling vibrations of the engine didn’t affect her at all. Em laughed. “No one up here cares about your lipstick.”
Mary looked a little ridiculous, leather cap mashing down her hair, goggles up on her forehead, painting her lips. So this was why she wanted to fly with the canopy closed on such a warm, beautiful day, making the cockpit hot and stuffy. She didn’t want to be all ruffled when they landed.
“I have to be ready. There might be some handsome young officer just waiting for me to catch his eye. Oh, I hope we get there in time for dinner. This bucket’s so slow. You think they’ll ever give us anything faster to fly?”
“A real plane, you mean?” Em said. It was an old joke.
“I wouldn’t say that. This bird’s real enough. If you don’t mind going slow.”
Em looked out the canopy stuck up top in the middle of the fuselage. “We have to get there and land before you can catch your handsome young officer’s eye. Do you know where we are?” They were flying lowlevel and cross-country; Em searched for landmarks, which was quite a trick in the middle of Texas.
“Don’t fret, we’re right on course. Bank left—there’s the main road, see?”
Em nudged the stick and the plane tipped, giving her a wide view past the wing and its Army star to the earth below, and the long straight line of paved road leading to Dallas. Mary seemed to have an instinct for these sorts of things.
“You really do have this all planned out,” Em said. “You’ll be heading straight from the flight line to the Officer’s Club, won’t you?”
Mary had a pout in her voice. “I might stop to brush my hair first.” Em laughed, and Mary looked over her shoulder. “Don’t give me a hard time just because I’m not already married off to a wonderful man like you are.”
Em sighed. She hadn’t seen her husband in almost a year. The last letter she’d had from him was postmarked Honolulu, three weeks ago. He hadn’t said where he was sailing to—couldn’t, really. All she knew was that he was somewhere in the middle of a big wide ocean, flying Navy dive-bombers off a carrier. Sometimes she wished she weren’t a pilot, because she knew exactly what could go wrong for Michael. Then again, maybe he was flying right now—it was mid-morning in the Pacific—cruising along for practice on a beautiful day and thinking of her, the way she was thinking of him.
“Em?” Mary said, still craned over to look at Em the best she could over the back of her seat.
“Sorry. You just got me thinking about Michael.”
Em could just see Mary’s wide red smile, her excitable eyes. “You really miss him, don’t you?”
“Of course I do.”
Mary sighed. “That’s so romantic.”
Em almost laughed again. “Would you listen to you? There’s nothing romantic about waking up every day wondering if he’s alive or dead.” She was only twenty-four, too young to be a widow, surely. She had to stop this or she’d start crying and have to let Mary land the plane. Shaking her head, she looked away, back to the blue sky outside the canopy, scattered clouds passing by.
“It’s just that being in love like that? I’ve never been in love like that. Except maybe with Clark Gable.” She grinned.
Em gratefully kept the joke going. “Don’t think for a minute Clark Gable’s going to be on the ground when we get there.”
“You never know. These are strange times. He enlisted, did you know that? I read about it. Him and Jimmy Stewart both—and Jimmy Stewart’s a pilot!”
“And maybe they’ll both be at Dallas, just for you.”
“Hope springs eternal,” Mary said smugly. “I’ve got my lucky pennies, you know.”
“All right, but if they’re there, you have to ask them to dance.”
“It’s a deal,” Mary said brightly, knowing she’d never have to make good on it. Because Clark Gable and Jimmy Stewart were not at Dallas. But if something like that was going to happen to anyone, it would happen to Mary.
A few minutes later, Em leaned forward to listen. Sure enough, Mary was singing. “Don’t sit under the apple tree, with anyone else but me, anyone else but me . . .”
Em joined in, and they sang until they were circling over the field to land.
After shutting down the engine, she sat in her cockpit and took a look down the flight line at Romulus, in freezing Michigan. The sight never failed to amaze her—a hundred silver birds perched on the tarmac, all that power, ready and waiting. The buzzing of engines was constant; she could feel the noise in her bones.
This was the last runway Mary took off from.
Sighing, she filled out the plane’s 1-A, collected her bag and her logbook, and hoisted herself out of the cockpit and onto the tarmac. Asked the first guy she saw, a mechanic, where the WASP barracks were. The wary look on his face told her all she needed to know about what the men on this base thought of WASP. She’d heard the rumors—they traded stories about which bases welcomed them and which wanted nothing to do with women pilots. She wasn’t sure she believed the stories about someone putting sugar in the fuel tank of a WASP’s plane at Camp Davis, causing it to crash—mostly because she didn’t think anyone would do that to a plane. But those were the sorts of stories people told.
She made her way to the barracks. After a shower, she’d be able to face the day a little easier.
After the shower, Em, dressed in shirt and trousers, was still drying her hair when a group of women came into the barracks—three of them, laughing and windblown, peeling off flight jackets and scrubbing fingers through mussed hair. They quieted when they saw her, and she set her towel aside.
“Hi.”
One of them, a slim blonde with mischief in her eyes, the kind of woman the brass liked to use in press photos, stepped forward, hand outstretched.
“Hi. You must be the new kid they were talking about back in ops. I’m Lillian Greshing.”
“Em Anderson,” she said, shaking her hand. “I’m just passing through. I hope you don’t mind, I used one of the towels on the shelf. There weren’t any names or labels—”
“Of course not, that’s what they’re there for. Hey—we were going to grab supper in town after we get cleaned up. Want to come along? You can catch us up on all the gossip.”
Em’s smile went from polite to warm, as she felt herself among friends again. “That sounds perfect.”
The four women found a table in the corner of a little bar just off base. The Runway wasn’t fancy; it had a Christmas tree decorated with spots of tinsel and glass bulbs in a corner, a pretty good bar, and a jukebox playing swing. The dinner special was roast chicken, mashed potatoes, and a bottle of beer to wash it down.
“What’re they transferring WASP to Camp Davis for?” Betsy, a tall woman with a narrow face and a nervous smile, asked when Em passed on the rumor.
“Don’t know,” Em said. “Nobody’ll say. But Davis is a gunnery school.” More speculative murmurs ran around the table.
“Target towing. Wanna bet?” Lillian said.
“I’ll stick to the job I have, thank you very much,” Betsy said, shivering. Em felt her smile grow thin and sly. “Not me. Nursing along slowpoke trainers? We can do better than that.”
“You want to fly planes while some cross-eyed greenhorn shoots at you?”
“Nope,” Em said. “I want to transition to pursuits.”
“It’ll never happen,” Lillian said, shaking her head, like she needed the emphasis. “The old cronies like Burnett will never let it happen.”
“Burnett?”
“Colonel. Runs this lovely little operation.” She gestured in the direction of the airfield. Smoke trailed behind her hand to join the rest of the haze in the air.
“What’s he like?” Em asked.
That no one answered with anything more than sidelong glances and rolled eyes told her enough. Romulus was a cold-shoulder base.
Em pressed on. “We’ll get there. Nancy Love has five girls in transition out at Palm Springs already. The factories are all working overtime building bombers and fighters, and ATC doesn’t have enough pilots to ferry them to port. They’re going to have to let us fly ’em, whether they like it or not.”
Betsy was still shaking her head. “Those birds are too dangerous.”
Mary got killed in a trainer, Em wanted to say. “We can do it. We’re capable of it.”
Lillian said with a sarcastic lilt, “Burnett would say we’re not strong enough. That we wouldn’t be able to even get something like a Mustang off the ground.”
“He’s full of it,” Em said. “I can’t wait to get my hands on one of those.”
Betsy, smiling vaguely, looked into her beer. “I don’t know how I’d explain flying fighters to my husband. He’s barely all right with my flying at all.”
“So don’t tell him,” Lillian said. Shocked giggles met the proclamation.
Round-eyed Molly, blond hair in a ponytail, leaned in. “Don’t listen to her, she’s got three boyfriends at three different fields. She doesn’t understand about husbands.” More giggling.
Em smiled. “Betsy, is he overseas?”
“England,” she said. “He’s a doctor.” Her pride was plain.
“You’ve got a ring there, Em,” Molly said to the band on Em’s finger. “You married or is that to keep the flyboys off you?”
“He’s Navy,” Em said. “He’s on a carrier in the Pacific.”
After a sympathetic hesitation, Lillian continued. “What does he think about you flying?”
Em donned a grin. “I met him when we were both taking flying lessons before the war. He can’t argue about me flying. Besides, I have to do something to keep my mind off things.”
Lillian raised her bottle. “Here’s to the end of the war.”
They raised their glasses and the toasts were heartfelt.
The quiet moment gave Em her opening—time to start in on the difficult gossip, what she’d come here to learn. “What do you all know about Mary Keene’s crash last week?”
No one would look at her. Betsy bit a trembling lip and teared up, and Molly fidgeted with her glass. Lillian’s jaw went taut with a scowl. She ground her cigarette into the ashtray with enough force to destroy what was left of it.
“It happened fifty miles out,” Lillian said, her voice quiet. “Nobody saw anything, we just heard it when the fire truck left. All we know is a group of seven planes went out—BT-13s, all of ’em—and an hour later six came back and nobody would tell us a thing. Just that Mary’d been killed. You knew her, I take it?”
“We were in the same class at Avenger,” Em said. “We were friends.”
“I’m sorry,” Lillian said. “She was only here a couple of days but we all liked her a lot.”
Molly handed Betsy a handkerchief; she dabbed her eyes with it.
“I was told the accident report was classified, and that doesn’t make any sense. Some guys who were here last week told me there was a collision.”
Lillian leaned close and spoke softly, like this was some kind of conspiracy. “That’s what we heard, and one of the planes came back with a wheel all busted up, but Burnett clamped down on talk so fast, our heads spun. Filed away all the paperwork and wouldn’t answer any questions. We don’t even know who else was flying that day.”
“He can’t do that,” Em said. “Couldn’t you go after him? Just keep pushing—”
“It’s Burnett,” Lillian said. “Guy’s a brick wall.”
“Then go over his head.”
“And get grounded? Get kicked out? That’s what he’s threatened us with, for going over his head,” Lillian said, and Em couldn’t argue. But technically, she wasn’t part of his squadron, and he couldn’t do anything to her. She could ask her questions.
Another group from the field came in then, flyboys by their leather jackets with silver wings pinned to the chest. Ferry Division, by the insignia. Not so different from the girls, who were wearing trousers and blouses, their jackets hanging off their chairs—a group gathered around a table, calling for beers and talking about the gossip, flying, and the war.
Pretty soon after their arrival, a couple of them went over to the jukebox and put in a few coins. A dance tune came up, something just fast enough to make you want to get out of your seat—Glenn Miller, “Little Brown Jug.” Lillian rolled her eyes and Molly hid a smile with her hand; they all knew what was coming next.
Sure enough, the guys sauntered over to their table. Em made sure the hand with her wedding band was out and visible. Not that that stopped some men. Just a dance, they’d say. But she didn’t want to, because it would make her think about Michael.
Lillian leaned back in her chair, chin up and shoulders squared, and met their gazes straight on. The others looked on like they were watching a show.
They weren’t bad looking, early thirties maybe. Slightly rumpled uniforms and nice smiles. “Would any of you ladies like a dance?”
The women glanced at each other—would any of them say yes?
Lillian, brow raised, blond curls falling over her ears so artfully she might have pinned them there, said, “What makes you boys think you could keep up with any of us?”
The guys glanced at each other, then smiled back at Lillian. Gauntlet accepted. “We’d sure like to give it a try.”
Nobody was making a move to stand, and Lillian again took the lead—breaking the boys’ hearts for fun. “Sorry to disappoint you, but the girls and I spent all day putting repaired AT-6s through their paces and we’re beat. We were looking forward to a nice, quiet evening.”
The guy standing at the first one’s shoulder huffed a little. “Lady pilots,” he might have muttered.
The first guy seemed a little daunted. “Well, maybe you’ll let us pull over a couple of chairs and buy you a round?”
Magic words, right there. Lillian sat up and made a space at the table. “That’ll be all right.”
Another round of beers arrived a moment later.
The men were nice enough, Ferry Division boys flying pursuits and bombers from the factories. Em asked questions—how many, what kind, where were they going, what was it like?—and ate up the answers. They seemed happy enough to humor her, even if they did come off on the condescending side—isn’t that cute, a girl who wants to fly fast planes.
The attitude was easy enough to ignore. Every WASP had a story about being chatted up by some flyboy at a bar, him bragging about piloting hotshot planes and ending with the “I ship out to Europe tomorrow, honey,” line; then seeing the look of shock on the guy’s face the next day when he spotted her on the flight line climbing into her own cockpit. That was funny every damn time.
Lillian leaned over to Jim, the guy who’d talked to them first, and said, “Do your friends want to come on over and join us? We could make a real party of it.”
A couple of the guys already had, but a few remained at the other table, talking quietly and nursing beers. They didn’t pay much attention to the other group, except for one guy, with a round face and slicked-back hair, who kept his jacket on even though the room had grown warm.
Grinning, Jim leaned forward and lowered his voice. “I think you all make some of the boys nervous.”
Em smiled and ducked her gaze while the other women giggled.
Lillian almost purred. “We’re not flying now, I don’t see why they should be nervous. We’re not going to crash into them.” Em looked away at that. It was just a joke, she told herself.
Jim tilted his head to the sullen-looking pilot. “Frank there almost walked back out again when he saw you girls sitting here.”
“What, afraid of little old us?” Lillian said, and the others laughed. The sullen-looking pilot at the other table, Frank, seemed to sink into his jacket a little further.
Jim shrugged. “His loss, right?”
Em agreed. Anyone had an issue with women pilots, it was their problem, not hers.
Em had to go at the mystery backwards. The accident report wasn’t available, so she dug through the flight logs to see who else was flying that day. Who else was in the air with Mary.
She made her way to ops, a big square prefab office building off the airstrip, around lunchtime the next day, when she was less likely to run into people. The move paid off—only a secretary, a woman in civilian clothes, was on duty. Em carried her logbook in hand, making her look more official than not, and made up some excuse about being new to the base and needing to log her next flight and where should she go? The secretary directed her to an adjoining room. There, Em found the setup familiar: maps pinned to the wall, chalkboards with instructions written on them, charts showing planes and schedules, and a wall of filing cabinets.
Every pilot taking off from the field was supposed to file a flight plan, which were kept in ops. Mary’s plan—and the plans of anyone else who was flying that day and might have collided with her—should be here. She rubbed her lucky pennies together and got to work.
The luck held: the files were marked by day and in order. Flipping through, Em found the pressboard folder containing the forms from that day. Taking the folder to an empty desk by the wall, she began studying, reconstructing in her mind what the flight line had looked like that day.
Mary had been part of a group ferrying seven BT-13 Valiants from Romulus to Dallas. She wasn’t originally part of the group; she’d been at Romulus overnight after ferrying a different BT-13. But they had an extra plane, and like just about any WASP, she would fly anything she was checked out on, anything a commander asked her to fly. Those were the bare facts. That was the starting point. Less than an hour after takeoff, Mary had crashed. A collision—which meant it must have been one of the other planes in the group.
WASP weren’t authorized for close-formation flying. When they did fly in groups, they flew loose, with enough distance between to prevent accidents—at least five hundred feet. Mary was the only WASP in the group, but the men should have followed the same procedure and maintained a safe distance. Just saying “collision” didn’t tell the story, because only one plane hit the ground, and only one pilot died.
The accident had eyewitnesses: the other six pilots in the group, who were flying with Mary when she crashed. She started jotting down names and the ID numbers of the planes they’d been flying.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
Startled, Em flinched and looked up to find a lanky man just past forty or so, his uniform starched and perfect, standing in the doorway, hands clenched, glaring. Silver eagles on his shoulders—this must be Colonel Burnett. Reflexively, she crumpled her page of notes and stuffed it in her pocket. The move was too obvious to hide. Gathering her thoughts, she stood with as much attention as she could muster—part of her mind was still on those six pilots.
She’d spent enough time in the Army Air Force to know how men like Burnett operated: they intimidated, they browbeat. They had their opinions and didn’t want to hear arguments. She just had to keep from letting herself get cowed.
“Filing a flight plan, sir.” She kept the lie short and simple, so he wouldn’t have anything to hold against her.
“I don’t think so,” he said, looking at the pages spread out on the desk.
They were in a standoff. She hadn’t finished, and wanted to get those last couple of names. Burnett didn’t look like he was going to leave.
“It’s true,” she bluffed. “BT-13 to Dallas.” Mary’s last flight plan; that might have been pushing it.
“You going to show me what’s in your pocket there?”
“Grocery list,” she said, deadpan.
He stepped closer, and Em had to work not to flinch away from the man.
“Those are papers from last week,” he said, pointing at the plans she’d been looking at.
“Yes, sir.”
His face reddened, and she thought he might start screaming at her, drill-sergeant style. “Who authorized you to look at these?”
Somebody had to speak up. Somebody had to find the truth. That allowed her to face him, chin up. “Sir, I believe the investigation into that crash ended prematurely, that all the information hasn’t been brought to light.”
“That report was filed. There’s nothing left to say. You need to get out of here, missy.”
Now he was just making her angry. He probably expected her to wilt—he probably yelled at all the women because he expected them to wilt. She stepped forward, feeling her own flush starting, her own temper rising. “Why was the report buried? I just want to know what really happened.”
“I don’t have to explain anything to you. You’re a civilian. You’re just a civilian.”
“What is there to explain, sir?”
“Unless you march out of here right now, I’ll have you arrested for spying. Don’t think the Army won’t shoot a woman for treason!”
Em expected a lot of threats—being grounded, getting kicked out of the WASP, just like Lillian said. But being shot for treason? What the hell was Burnett trying to hide?
Em was speechless, and didn’t have any fight left in her after that. She marched out with her logbook, just as Burnett told her to, head bowed, unable to look at him. Even though she really wanted to spit at him. In the corner of her gaze, she thought she saw him smile, like he thought he’d won some kind of victory over her. Bullying a woman, and he thought that made him tough. By the time she left the building, her eyes were watering. Angrily, she wiped the tears away.
Well away from the building, she stopped to catch her breath. Crossed her arms, waited for her blood to cool. Looked up into the sky, turning her face to the clouds. The day was overcast, the ceiling low, a biting wind smelling of snow. Terrible weather for flying. But she’d go up in a heartbeat, in Whatever piece-of-junk trainer was available, just to get away from here.
One of the lessons you learned early on: Make friends with the ground crew. When some of the trainers they flew had seen better days and took a lot of attention to keep running, sweet-talking a mechanic about what was wrong went further than complaining. Even if the wreckage from Mary’s plane was still around—it would have already been picked over for aluminum and parts—Em wouldn’t have been able to tell what had happened without seeing the crash site. She needed to talk to the recovery team.
Lillian told her that a Sergeant Bill Jacobs’s crew had been the one to recover Mary’s Valiant. He’d know a lot that hadn’t made it into the records, maybe even be able to tell her what happened. If she could sweet-talk him. She touched up her lipstick, repinned her hair, and tapped her lucky pennies.
On the walk to the hangar, she tried to pound out her bad mood, to work out her anger and put herself in a sweet-talking frame of mind. Hey there, mind telling me about a little ol’ plane crash that happened last week? She wasn’t so good at sweet-talking, not like Lillian was. Not like Mary had been.
The main door of the hangar was wide open to let in the afternoon light. In the doorway, she waited a moment to let her eyes adjust to the shadows. A B-24 was parked inside, two of its four engines open and half-dismantled. The couple of guys working on each one called a word to the other now and then, asking for a part or advice. A radio played Duke Ellington.
The hangar had a strangely homey feel to it, with its atmosphere of grease and hard work, the cheerful music playing and the friendly banter between the mechanics. This might have been any airport repair shop, if it weren’t for the fact they were working on a military bomber.
Em looked around for someone who might be in charge, someone who might be Jacobs. In the back corner, she saw the door to an office and headed there. Inside, she found what she was probably looking for: a wide desk stacked with papers and clipboards. Requisitions, repair records, inventories, and the like, she’d bet. Maybe a repair order for a BT-13 wounded in a collision last week?
She was about to start hunting when a man said, “Can I help you, miss?”
A man in Army coveralls and a cap stood at the doorway. Scraping together all the charm she could manage, she straightened and smiled. She must have made quite a silhouette in her trousers and jacket because he looked a bit stricken. He glanced at the insignia on her collar, the patches on her jacket, and knew what, if not who, she was.
“Sergeant Jacobs?” she said, smiling.
“Yes, ma’am.”
Her smile widened. “Hi, I’m Emily Anderson, in from New Castle.” She gestured vaguely over her shoulder. “They told me you might be able to help me out.”
He relaxed, maybe thinking she was only going to ask for a little grease on a squeaky canopy.
She said, “The crash last week. The one the WASP died in. Can you tell me what happened?” Her smile had stiffened; her politeness was a mask.
Jacobs sidled past her in an effort to put himself between her and the desk—the vital paperwork. He began sorting through the mess on the desk, but his movements were random. “I don’t know anything about that.”
“You recovered the plane. You saw the crash site.”
“It was a mess. I can’t tell you what happened.”
“What about the other plane? How badly was it damaged?”
He looked at her. “How do you know there was another plane?”
“I heard there was a collision. Who was flying that other plane? Can you at least tell me that much?”
“I can’t help you, I’m sorry.” He shook his head, like he was shaking off an annoying fly.
“Sergeant Jacobs, Mary Keene was my friend.”
When he looked at her, his gaze was tired, pitying. “Ma’am, please. Let it go. Digging this up isn’t going to fix anything.”
“I need to know what really happened.”
“The plane crashed, okay? It just crashed. Happens all the time, I hate to say it, but it’s so.”
Em shook her head. “Mary was a good pilot. Something had to have happened.”
Jacobs looked away. “She switched off the engine.”
“What?”
“She’d lost part of a wing—there was no way she could pull out of it. But before she hit the ground, she had time to turn off the engine so it wouldn’t catch fire. So the plane wouldn’t burn. She knew what was going to happen and she switched it off.”
Mary, sitting in her cockpit, out of control after Whatever had hit her, calmly reaching over to turn off the ignition, knowing the whole time she maybe wasn’t going to make it—
“Is that supposed to make me feel better?” Em said.
“No. I’m sorry, ma’am. It’s just you’re right. She was a good pilot.”
“Then why won’t you—?”
A panicked shouting from the hangar caught their attention—”Whoa whoa, hold that thing, it’s gonna drop”—followed by the ominous sound of metal crashing to concrete. Jacobs dashed out of the office to check on his crew.
Em wasn’t proud; she went through the stack of papers while he was occupied.
The fact that Mary had crashed and died was becoming less significant to Em than the way everyone was acting about it. Twitchy. Defensive. Like a pilot towing targets for gunnery training, wondering if the wet-behind-the-ears gunners were going to hit you instead. These guys, everyone who knew what had happened, didn’t want to talk about it, didn’t want her to ask about it, and were doing their damnedest to cover this up. What were all these people hiding? Or, what were they protecting?
It wasn’t a hard answer, when she put it like that: the other pilot. They were protecting the pilot who survived the collision.
She dug through repair orders. Mary’s plane had crashed—but the other plane hadn’t. It still would have been damaged, and there’d be paperwork for that. She looked at the dates, searching for that date. Found it, found the work order for a damaged BT-13. Quickly, she retrieved the list of names she’d taken from the flight plans. She’d copied only half of them before Burnett interrupted her. She had a fifty-fifty chance of matching the name on the work order. Heads or tails?
And there it was. When she compared ID numbers with the ones on the work order, she found the match she was looking for: Frank Milliken. The other pilot’s name was Frank Milliken.
She marched out of the office and into hangar. Jacobs was near the B-24 wing, yelling at the guys who had apparently unbolted and dropped a propeller. He might have followed her with a suspicious gaze as she left, but he couldn’t do anything about it now, could he?
She kept her eyes straight ahead and didn’t give him a chance to stop her.
“You know Frank Milliken?” she asked Lillian when she got back to the barracks.
“By name. He’s one of the Third Ferry Group guys—he was part of Jim’s bunch of clowns last night,” she said.
Em tried to remember the names she’d heard, to match them up with the faces, the guys who talked to them. “I don’t remember a Frank,” she said.
“He’s the sulky guy who stayed at the table.”
Ah . . . “You know anything about him?”
“Not really. They kind of run together when they’re all flirting with you at once.” She grinned. “What about him?”
“I think he was in the plane that collided with Mary’s last week.”
“What?” she said with a wince and tilted head, like she hadn’t heard right.
“I’ve got a flight plan and a plane ID number on a repair order that says it was him.”
Clench-jawed anger and an anxious gaze vied with each other and ended up making Lillian look young and confused. “What do we do?”
“I just want to find out what happened,” Em said. She just wanted to sit down with the guy, make him walk her through it, explain who had flown too close to whom, whether it was accident, weather, a gust of wind, pilot error—anything. She just wanted to know.
“You sure?” Lillian said. “This is being hushed up for a reason. It can’t be anything good. Not that anything is going to make this better, but—well, you know what I mean. Em, what if—what if it was Mary’s fault? Are you ready to hear that? Are you ready to hear that this was a stupid accident and Burnett’s covering it up to make his own record a little less dusty?”
Em understood what Lillian was saying—it didn’t matter how many stories you made up for yourself; the truth could always be worse. If something—God forbid—ever happened to Michael, would she really want to know what killed him? Did she really want to picture that?
Shouldn’t she just let Mary go?
Em’s smile felt thin and pained. “We have to look out for each other, Lillian. No one else is doing it for us, and no one else is going to tell our stories for us. I have to know.”
Lillian straightened, and the woman’s attitude won out over her confusion. “Right, then. Let’s go find ourselves a party.”
Em and Lillian parked at the same table at the Runway, but didn’t order dinner tonight. Em’s stomach was churning; she couldn’t think of eating. She and Lillian drank sodas and waited.
“What if they don’t come?” Em said.
“They’ll be here,” Lillian said. “They’re here every night they’re on base. Don’t worry.”
As they waited, a few of the other girls came in and joined them, and they all had a somber look, frowning, quiet. Em didn’t know how, but the rumor must have traveled.
“Is it true?” Betsy asked, sliding in across from Em. “You found out what happened to Mary?”
“That’s what we need to see,” she said, watching the front door, waiting.
The men knew something was up as soon as they came in and found the women watching them. The mood was tense, uncomfortable. None of them were smiling. And there he was, with his slicked-back hair, hunched up in his jacket like he was trying to hide. He hesitated inside the doorway along with the rest of the guys—if he turned around to leave this time, Em didn’t think Jim or the others would try to stop him.
Em stood and approached them. “Frank Milliken?”
He glanced up, startled, though he had to have seen her coming. The other guys stepped away and left him alone in a space.
Taking a breath, she closed her eyes a moment to steel herself. Didn’t matter how much she’d practiced this speech in her mind, it wasn’t going to come out right. She didn’t know what to say.
“Last week, you were flying with a group of BT-13s. There was a collision. A WASP named Mary Keene crashed. I’m trying to find out what happened. Can you tell me?”
He was looking around, glancing side to side as if searching for an escape route. He wasn’t saying anything, so Em kept on. “Your plane was damaged—I saw the work order. So I’m thinking your plane was involved and you know exactly what happened. Please, I just want to know how a good pilot like Mary crashed.”
He was shaking his head. “No. I don’t have to talk to you. I don’t have to tell you anything.”
“What’s wrong?” Em pleaded. “What’s everyone trying to hide?”
“Let it go. Why can’t you just let it go?” he said, refusing to look at her, shaking his head like he could ward her away. Lillian was at Em’s shoulder now, and a couple of the other WASP had joined them, standing in a group, staring down Milliken.
If Em had been male, she could have gotten away with grabbing his collar and shoving him to the wall, roughing him up a little to get him to talk. She was on the verge of doing it anyway; then wouldn’t he be surprised?
“It was your fault, wasn’t it?” She had the sudden epiphany. It was why he couldn’t look at her, why he didn’t even want to be here with WASP sitting at the next table. “What happened? Did you just lose control? Was something wrong with your plane?”
“It was an accident,” he said softly.
“But what happened?” Em said, getting tired of asking, not knowing what else to do. He had six women staring him down now, and a handful of men looking back and forth between them and him. Probably wondering who was going to start crying first.
“Why don’t you just tell her, Milliken,” Jim said, frowning.
“Please, no one will tell me—”
“It was an accident!” His face was flush; he ran a shaking hand over his hair. “It was just a game, you know? I only buzzed her a couple of times. I thought it’d be funny—it was supposed to be funny. You know, get close, scare her a little. But—it was an accident.”
He probably repeated it to himself so often, he believed it. But when he spoke it out loud, he couldn’t gloss the crime of it: he’d broken regs, buzzed Mary in the air, got closer than the regulation five hundred feet, thought he could handle the stunt—and he couldn’t. He’d hit her instead, crunched her wing. She’d lost control, plowed into the earth. Em could suddenly picture it so clearly. The lurch as the other plane hit Mary, the dive as she went out of control. She’d have looked out the canopy to see the gash in her wing, looked the other way to see the ground coming up fast. She’d have hauled on the stick, trying to land nose up, knowing it wasn’t going to work because she was going too fast, so she turned off the engine, just in case, and hadn’t she always wanted to go faster—
You tried to be respectful, to be a good girl. You bought war bonds and listened to the latest news on the radio. You prayed for the boys overseas, and most of all you didn’t rock the boat, because there were so many other things to worry about, from getting a gallon of rationed gas for your car to whether your husband was going to come home in one piece.
They were a bunch of Americans doing their part. She tried to let it go. Let the anger drain away. Didn’t work. The war had receded in Em’s mind to a small noise in the background. She had this one battle to face.
With Burnett in charge, nothing would happen to Milliken. The colonel had hushed it up good and tight because he didn’t want a more involved investigation, he didn’t want the lack of discipline among his male flyers to come out. Milliken wouldn’t be court-martialed and grounded, because trained pilots were too valuable. Em couldn’t do anything more than stand here and stare him down. How could she make that be enough?
“Mary Keene was my friend,” she said softly.
Milliken said, his voice a breath, “It was an accident. I didn’t mean to hit her. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, all right?”
Silence cut like a blade. None of the guys would look at her.
Em turned and walked out, flanked by the other WASP.
Outside, the sun had set, but she could still hear airplane engines soaring over the airfield, taking off and landing, changing pitch as they roared overhead. The air smelled of fuel, and the field was lit up like stars fallen to earth. The sun would shine again tomorrow no matter what happened, and nothing had changed. She couldn’t tell if she’d won. She slumped against the wall, slid to the ground, put her face to her knees and her arms over her head, and cried. The others gathered around her, rested hands on her shoulders, her arms. Didn’t say a word, didn’t make a big production. Just waited until she’d cried herself out. Then Lillian and Betsy hooked their arms in hers and pulled her back to the barracks, where one of the girls had stashed a bottle of whiskey.
The last time Em saw Mary was four days before she died.
Em reached the barracks after coming off the flight line to see Mary sitting on the front steps with her legs stretched out in front of her, smoking a cigarette and staring into space. Em approached slowly and sat beside her. “What’s gotten into you?”
Mary donned a slow, sly smile. “It didn’t happen the way I thought it would, the way I planned it.”
“What didn’t?”
She tipped her head back so her honey brown curls fell behind her and her tanned face looked into the sky. “I was supposed to step out of my airplane, chin up and beautiful, shaking my hair out after I took off my cap, and my handsome young officer would be standing there, stunned out of his wits. That didn’t happen.”
Em was grinning. This ought to be good. “So what did happen?”
“I’d just climbed out of my Valiant and I wanted to check the landing gear because it was feeling kind of wobbly when I landed. So there I was, bent over when I heard some guy say, ‘Hey, buddy, can you tell me where to find ops?’ I just about shot out of my boots. I stood up and look at him, and his eyes popped. And I swear to you he looked like Clark Gable. Not just like, but close. And I blushed red because the first thing he saw of me was my . . . my fanny stuck up in the air! We must have stood there staring at each other in shock for five minutes. Then we laughed.”
Now Em was laughing, and Mary joined in, until they were leaning together, shoulder to shoulder.
“So, what,” Em said. “It’s true love?”
“I don’t know. He’s nice. He’s a captain in from Long Beach. He’s taking me out for drinks later.”
“You are going to have the best stories when this is all over,” Em said.
Mary turned quiet, thoughtful. “Can I tell you a secret? Part of me doesn’t want the war to end. I don’t want this to end. I just want to keep flying and carrying on like this forever. They won’t let us keep flying when the boys come home. Then I’ll have to go back home, put on white gloves and a string of pearls and start acting respectable.” She shook her head. “I don’t really mean that, about the war. It’s got to end sometime, right?”
“I hope so,” Em said softly. Pearl Harbor had been almost exactly two years ago, and it was hard to see an end to it all.
“Sometimes I wish my crazy barnstormer uncle hadn’t ever taken me flying, then I wouldn’t feel like this. Oh, my dad was so mad, you should have seen it. But once I’d flown I wasn’t ever going to go back. I’m not ever going to quit, Em.”
“I know.” They sat on the stoop, watching and listening to planes come in over the field, until Mary went to get cleaned up for her date.
Em sat across from Colonel Roper’s desk and waited while he read her carefully typed report. He read it twice, straightened the pages, and set it aside. He folded his hands together and studied her.
“How are you doing?”
She paused a moment, thinking about it rather than giving the pat “just fine” response. Because it wasn’t true, and he wouldn’t believe her.
“Is it worth it, sir?” He tilted his head, questioning, and she tried to explain. “Are we really doing anything for the war? Are we going to look back and think she died for nothing?”
His gaze dropped to the desk while he gathered words. She waited for the expected platitudes, the gushing reassurances. They didn’t come.
“You want me to tell you Mary’s death meant something, that what she was doing was essential for the war, that her dying is going to help us win. I can’t do that.” He shook his head. Em almost wished he would sugarcoat it. She didn’t want to hear this. But she was also relieved that he was telling the truth. Maybe the bad-attitude flyboys were right, and the WASP were just a gimmick.
He continued. “You don’t build a war machine so that taking out one cog makes the whole thing fall apart. Maybe we’ll look back on this and decide we could have done it all without you. But, Emily—it would be a hell of a lot harder. We wouldn’t have the pilots we need, and we wouldn’t have the planes where we need them. And there’s a hell of a lot of war left to fight.”
She didn’t want to think about it. You could take all the numbers, all the people who’d died over the last few years and everything they’d died for, and the numbers on paper might add up, but you start putting names and stories to the list and it would never add up, never be worth it. She just wanted it to be over; she wanted Michael home.
Roper sorted through a stack of papers on the corner of his desk and found a page he was looking for. He made a show of studying it for a long moment, giving her time to draw her attention from the wall where she’d been staring blankly. Finally, she met his gaze across the desk.
“I have transfer orders here for you. If you want them.”
She shook her head, confused, wondering what she’d done wrong. Wondering if Burnett was having his revenge on her anyway, after all that had happened.
“Sir,” she said, confused. “But . . . where? Why?”
“Palm Springs,” he said, and her eyes grew wide, a spark in her heart lit, knowing what was at Palm Springs. “Pursuit School. If you’re interested.”
MARCH 1944
Em settled in her seat and reached up to close the canopy overhead. This was a one-seater, compact, nestled into a narrow, streamlined fuselage. The old trainers were roomy by comparison. She felt cocooned in the seat, all her controls and instruments at hand.
She started the engine; it roared. She could barely hear herself call the tower. “This is P-51 21054 requesting clearance for takeoff.”
Her hands on the stick could feel this thing’s power running into her bones. She wasn’t going to have to push this plane off the ground. All she’d have to do was give it its head and let it go.
A voice buzzed in her ear. “P-51 21054, this is Tower, you are cleared for takeoff.”
This was a crouched tiger preparing to leap. A rocket ready to explode. The nose was higher than the tail; she couldn’t even see straight ahead—just straight up, past sleek silver into blue sky.
She eased the throttle forward, and the plane started moving. Then it really started moving. The tail lifted—she could see ahead of her now, to the end of the runaway. Her speed increased, and she watched the dials in front of her. At a hundred miles per hour, she pulled back on the stick, lifted, and left earth behind. Climbed fast, into clear blue sky, like a bullet, like a hawk. She glanced over her shoulder; the airstrip was already tiny. Nothing but open sky ahead, and all the speed she could push out of this thing.
This was heaven.
“Luckiest girl in the world,” she murmured, thinking that Mary would have loved this.