A strong wind blew down the center of the runway at Avenger Field. “There’s only two places in all of America where the tower’s obliged to issue a ‘flying gravel’ advisory,” trainees were told. “El Paso’s one, and you’re hanging on to the other.” Sally knew that to be true. But this wind was different. The chill of death rode this wind: the death of her dreams, the death of her future.
She rested her hand on the wingtip of a parked AT-6. She had stopped crying. That had happened when her body ran out of tears. Dixie had comforted her for a while and then had gone off to phone Pierre Valois, the fashion photographer in New Orleans. Everyone, it seemed, had someone to call to help start the next part of their lives. The phones were jammed.
Sally finally had wandered outside to the flight line where there were no phones to remind her that she was utterly alone and therefore different. Even Beau wasn’t there to comfort her. She had desperately wanted to fall into his arms, but Skinner had sent him up earlier with a student. He didn’t even know yet that he was unemployed, and therefore draftable. The thought of him going into combat, perhaps never to see Rose or her again, was unbearable.
The one person she had seen plenty of was Waterman. The big Packard had cruised Avenger, sometimes lollygagging along its dusty streets and at other times parking, the figure in its back seat smoking, sitting perfectly still and erect like a conquering general overseeing the destruction of a defeated army. She had even wondered if he were stalking her. But with the end of the WASP, Waterman couldn’t possibly still have an interest in her. The warning from the FBI man rang hollow. The WASP were finished, and Waterman no longer had any reason to care about her destiny. That problem was hers and hers alone.
Nighttime was falling. She turned up the collar on her leather fight jacket. Texas got cold in the wintertime. The winter cold atop a Texas mesa could freeze a jackrabbit in full flight. The dark planes, parked wingtip-to-wingtip along the length of the flight line, rocked and groaned against their tie-downs. They would be dispersed to other bases, she supposed, never to be flown again by women.
The base was in chaos. Hysteria, disbelief, anger, vengefulness . . . every emotion had been on parade when she and the other Avenger students crowded into the old trailer and hurried back from Sweetwater. Avenger was a madhouse. Even Mrs. Teetle and the sergeant had looked shocked.
The decision to disband had been a tightly kept secret until the announcement came from Jackie Cochran’s office in Washington. The official explanation cited the great number of experienced pilots returning from combat, which made the WASP unnecessary, but a dozen other causes were also making the rounds. The most popular was that Waterman and Congress had gotten rid of the WASP simply because men couldn’t stand seeing women in cockpits. Another was that the army had been ready to militarize the WASP, but under the command of someone other than Jackie—something the headstrong leader violently opposed—and so she had shut down the outfit herself.
Whatever the truth, Avenger was finished. The last class would assemble a final time to march in formation and to hear a few speeches and to have their pictures taken, and then everyone would scatter to the winds. A new trickle of tears squeezed out of her eyes. The wind whipped the little streams away before she could even lift her fingers. She stiffened her grip on the AT-6’s wing.
The sound of an airplane drew her attention to the sky. A twin-engine C-47, the military version of the DC-3 flown by almost every airline in the world, had entered the pattern to land. The C-47 was no trainer, but a big cargo transport. What one would be doing landing at Avenger on a Saturday night, she couldn’t imagine.
The pilot had turned onto final approach. His landing gear was down and lights on. Because of the stiff headwind, the plane seemed to creep forward. In her mind’s eye, she saw exactly what the pilot saw. When one wing dipped, she corrected automatically as the real pilot would do. Finally the plane crossed the end of the runway and settled to earth with several chirps of rubber.
She looked around, expecting a Jeep or perhaps even a staff car to come out to meet the visitor, but no headlights approached. So far as she could tell, she was the only person at Avenger with the least bit of interest in this stranger who’d dropped from the night.
The C-47 had turned off the runway and was trundling toward where she was standing. She squinted against the glare of its landing lights. The pilot was having a hard time controlling the plane in the strong wind. He was working the brakes hard, making them heat up and squeal. The C-47 was a tail-dragger like the trainers at Avenger, which meant that when on the ground it rested on its two main wheels and a smaller one beneath the tail. Such an arrangement tested the skill of a taxiing pilot, for the unnaturally angled wings acted like a weathervane. A strong wind blowing in just the right direction would catch the underside of a wing and spin the plane around, an embarrassing situation for a pilot who was accomplished enough to be flying sophisticated machinery like a C-47.
The landing lights were blinding. Sally looked away, at the same time shifting uneasily. Common sense told her that the pilot would turn before he ran over her and a half-dozen parked AT-6’s. Still, the deadly arc of the approaching propeller tips, caught in the powerful beams, was too real to ignore.
The pilot suddenly stabbed hard on the right brake pedal and the C-47 swiveled safely around and came to a halt. A large clamshell cargo door in the side of the fuselage swung open, and she saw two figures standing in the dimly lit bare metal interior. One jumped to the ground, and the other tossed out a duffel bag and then quickly pulled the door closed. The figure on the ground barely managed to grab the bag and jump clear of the tail before the pilot gunned the engines and the plane started rolling again. The new arrival squinted against the blast of dirt and exhaust fumes, in an effort to see through the gloom, and hefted the bag wearily and walked in Sally’s direction.
“Hey! I need a ride!” the stranger yelled. “Has that bastard Waterman already gotten rid of everybody, or is there still somebody around here who can give me one?” She was loud and angry and sounded like she was spoiling for a fight and didn’t care with whom.
Sally hadn’t been able to tell at first whether the C-47’s passenger was a man or a woman, until she spoke. Now it was obvious the newcomer was older than herself by several years, and taller and more slender, and that she wore a regulation Army Air Corps leather jacket and flight suit. The woman stepped into the glare of the flight line lights. In addition to her face being hard with anger, she looked exhausted.
“I’m sure someone can take you to town,” Sally said, “if you have orders.”
The stranger dropped the duffel bag. “Screw orders! I’ll walk home before I’ll put up with any more orders!”
The C-47 had barely reached the runway and turned into the wind when the pilot opened the throttles. The tail rose immediately. After rolling for what seemed like only a few feet, the main wheels lifted from the ground, and the plane climbed into the night.
“He’s sure in a hurry.” Sally looked around uneasily. Except for the two of them, the flight line was deserted.
“Yeah, they’re in almost as big a hurry to get away from me, as I am to get as far away as I can from everything that has ‘army’ painted on the side of it.” The woman angrily zipped up her flight jacket. “There’s four feet of snow on top of Detroit right now, and enough ice to cover up Alaska. I had orders to deliver a P-51 to New York, even though there was a real chance of sliding off the runway and burning. That happened to a friend of mine; there was barely enough left of her to bury. I taxied that beast out and when I stood on the brakes to run up the engine, there was so much ice on the runway it was like having no brakes at all. I think I could have taken off with both wheels locked. That’s when they told me over the radio that I was out of a job. Just like that. All of us. Every WASP. I thought about that for a long time, sitting out there, and about the way that ’51 was scooting around on that ice, and finally I decided that if the army was through with me, then I was through risking my neck for the army. I turned that Mustang around and went back to the operations shack and handed in my paperwork.”
Sally examined her closely. She had a no-nonsense air that extended even to the way she stood: straight as a board, and, Sally suspected, she was just as tough. Like the rest of her, her face was long and lean, her chin and nose pointed. She wasn’t attractive. But there was an aura of solidness to her—of competence. Sally suspected this woman could tame even the most belligerent airplane.
“There were about forty army pilots sitting in that shack,” the stranger continued. “The army wasn’t gonna make any of them go up in that weather. I was the only one the army had ordered out to fly. Some major started giving me a lot of lip for not going. He chewed me out royally in front of everybody because I wouldn’t fly an airplane that doesn’t like ice, into an ice storm that no man was flying into, even though the army had just tossed me out like a bunch of dirty water. What’s more, I found out it was gonna be up to me to figure out how to get home once I got to New York—if I got to New York—and to pay for it myself; because once they had their airplane, the army wanted nothing more to do with me. I just turned around and walked away. There was nothing they could do to me.”
Her voice turned bitter as the first bite of a lemon. “I did my best. I did everything I was told to do. I flew airplanes that weren’t safe to fly—that no man would fly. We all did, every one of us; and we all got kicked in the ass like stray cats. And that’s why if I never have anything to do with the army again, it can’t happen too soon. The damn army didn’t even want to give me a lift out of Detroit. Some jerk in Operations said if I was in such a hurry to get to Texas, I should hitchhike.” She indicated the fast-disappearing plane. “I almost had to throw the crew off that C-47 and fly the damn thing here myself; and I would have, too, if they hadn’t finally seen things my way.”
“You flew the P-51?” The question was so childish and dripped with such envy, but Sally couldn’t stop herself. The barracks were teeming with stories similar to this woman’s, including some about WASP being marooned in the middle of nowhere, making desperate phone calls to relatives or friends for money to get home. With everything that had happened, she almost expected that of the army. But the Mustang fighter was the fastest plane in the world, the most beautiful and sexiest airplane in the world, and the most fun to fly. Men were said to stab each other through the heart for a chance at its controls. Sally couldn’t let this stranger get away without asking her what it was like to fly that airplane.
“Yeah.” The woman answered absently. She was busy gathering herself before either finding a ride home or striking out into the night on her own. But suddenly she looked at Sally with a new flash of understanding. “Oh, honey, you’re not a WASP, are you? You’re in the last class.” She softened like pudding. “You never even got the chance to know what it was like, did you?” She stepped forward and put out her arms. “Oh, honey.”
Sally didn’t know what to say. She wasn’t looking for sympathy. On the other hand, she was as angry and bitter as a person could be, as well as jealous of this woman. She awkwardly hugged her back and said lamely, “I guess you’re glad it’s over.”
The woman pulled back. Her face was as serious as death. “I’ve never been as sorry about anything in my life. I don’t know a single WASP who’s glad. Some of us—me included—are gonna write letters to Cochran offering to fly for free, not that it’ll do any good. I think everybody knows that, deep down. They don’t want us. They need us, but they don’t want us, even though the army’s still screaming for airplanes.”
“But you just said—”
“I know what I said, and every bit of it’s true. Still, I wouldn’t trade a moment for anything. To be part of the war, and to be around those wonderful planes. To fly ’em. And the adventure . . . and the wonderful people, both men and women. There’re an awful lot of men who’re sick to death over what’s happened to us.” Her voice grew thin. “I’m going to miss it all so.” She looked out into the night. “There’ll never be another time like it. We were so lucky. So lucky. Of all the women in America, only a little more than a thousand of us got to be WASP. My God, but we did fly the wings off those airplanes. We did it as well as any man!” She picked up the duffel bag. “You take care, honey.” She moved toward a clump of buildings and within moments became part of the shadows.
Sally slumped against the AT-6’s wing. She hadn’t thought it possible, but she felt even worse than she had before coming out to the flight line to be alone.
She stared into the pitch-blackness beyond the runway for a long time, her brain incapable of absorbing any more bad news, until the steadily dropping temperature finally pulled her out of her stupor and she realized she was freezing. She was about to turn back to the barracks when she sensed a presence.
Lighting on the flight line was sparse. The poles were spaced too far apart, which sent deep wedges of darkness creeping into the gaps. She looked up and down the line, but so far as she could tell, she was completely alone. Still, the feeling of being watched persisted, and she quickly stepped away from the AT-6, at the same time pulling her hands from her jacket pockets.
She tried to keep her head. A flight line at night was a spooky place. Airplanes had a way of making noises. Their odd shapes, designed to slip so smoothly through the air in flight, made strange sounds when parked on the ground in the wind. A good breeze could make a flight line whistle and bang and creak. A stiff wind blowing across the line on a dark night could start the imagination down roads better left traveled in the daylight. But she was used to all that, and to the dark, and to being out here alone. There was no reason in the world to be afraid. Yet she was, and becoming more so by the moment; a deep, unreasonable fear that dried her mouth and made her dread closing her eyes even for a moment, even against the blowing sand.
She realized suddenly that she had stupidly been edging toward the runway and the darkness beyond. She immediately turned back in the direction of the base proper, and instantly sensed something moving with her. She whirled and came face to face with Waterman.
“Mr. Waterman!” She struggled to catch her breath. She almost would have preferred any of the ordinary monsters that lurk in nightmares. “You scared me.”
The lights of the base suddenly seemed a million miles away. She backed up in their direction. He moved with her.
“What are you doing out here, Mr. Waterman?”
Something hit her in the back. She gasped and spun around and found that she had backed into a wing. She quickly navigated around it and continued in the direction of the lights. She desperately wanted to turn and run, as hard and as fast as she could, but some primordial instinct made her keep her eyes on him.
“I said, what are you doing out here, Mr. Waterman?” Perhaps he really did have ice water for blood, she thought. He wasn’t even wearing a real coat, but just the one that came with that white three-piece suit. The wind whipped and snapped the lapels, and lifted and blew his white hair in every direction, though he seemed not to notice.
“Waiting for you, Miss Ketchum.”
She shuddered. The uneven light played mean tricks on his face.
“Why?” She tripped and almost fell. The soft dirt and deep shadows made walking backward difficult.
“I have come to view my reward.”
“Reward?”
The wind had picked up. The sharp edges of airplanes whistled. A million tiny spaces between aluminum pieces howled.
He stepped toward her. “I assured you I would win. And I have.” He paused.
She wondered if he was waiting for her to rip out her entire bleeding soul and chuck it over for him to feast on. She promised herself that she’d burn at the stake first.
“But I’m not through yet, Miss Ketchum. I want you to know that I’ve set into motion steps to revoke your pilot’s license. You will never fly again. You will never earn so much as a penny doing the thing you love most.”
She tried to hide her surprise and her fear. Her failure nourished him.
“I’m sending you back to where you belong, Miss Ketchum. I’m tossing you back into the filth and squalor and stupidity from whence you came, never to rise again. You will spend the rest of your life pondering why, of all the women in the world, I chose you to destroy. That question will become torture. It will fester and eat at you. I have doomed you, and you will never know why. That is my reward.”
He was crazy. But he wasn’t so crazy that he’d picked her at random. She didn’t believe that for a moment. Nor did she believe that he would go to so much trouble just because she’d stood up to him. He was a lawyer. People stood up to him every day. Besides, why would he care what a poor farm girl from East Texas had to say?
Suddenly she had a thought. It was a crazy thought, hatched from a dozen seemingly unconnected events. But in a crazy way, it made perfect sense.
“This has nothing to do with Avenger, does it,” she asked, “or even the WASP? This has to do with Tex. You knew Tex, didn’t you?”
A flicker of emotion crossed his face. She almost missed it, but this time she was watching for it because she’d seen it before. After Emma Kelley’s death, standing outside the operations building, when he’d snatched Tex’s watch . . . he’d had the same reaction when she’d asked if he’d ever loved anyone. That’s why he’d been so interested in Tex’s watch. He had known Tex! She was sure now.
“Tell me how you knew him, Mr. Waterman. Please!”
He’d been waiting for that. He’d been waiting for her to beg. Pleasure spread across his face. He was feeding off her agony.
She no longer could control herself. She turned and she ran. She looked over her shoulder only once.
Waterman stood tall and straight, the frigid wind whipping his clothes and hair. He was watching her run. And he was smiling.