Or Even Eagle Flew Read online

  After that, the ocean got milder or she got used to it. She could visit the galley without rushing to the head or the rail as soon as she finished eating. They had a phonograph. Red played American records. The platters the French sailors spun were all about the war.

  “You can tell why they fight, that’s for sure,” Tobin said, and he didn’t speak a word of French.

  A.E. nodded. “You can,” she agreed. “If only they were doing better.” The little news they got at sea came from the shortwave radio. Her French was improving with practice, but still wasn’t good. Neither was any of the news.

  Chapter Three

  German U-boats were on everyone’s mind. A British destroyer escorting the convoy depth-charged what it thought was one. Every sailor on the Pierre L.D. stayed at action stations for hours afterwards. No torpedoes tore into the freighters, though. Two weeks after leaving Halifax, the convoy steamed into St. Nazaire. A.E. and Red met up with Shorty and Mamedoff on the pier. The other Americans’ travel had been every bit as delightful as theirs.

  They’d hardly got off the docks before they realized everything in France had gone to hell while they crawled across the Atlantic. This wasn’t just a country fighting a war—it was a country losing a war, and losing badly. No one in St. Nazaire had time for four Americans washed up on the lee shore of disaster.

  At last, they found a harried official who grudged them half an hour he clearly resented. “I can give you train tickets to Paris, but the train does not depart until Monday,” he said. “Until then, I can put you up here.” He sighed. “I suppose I can put you up here.”

  Only they didn’t leave Monday. The French bureaucrats gave them three more days of grief. “Why should we help you?” the last one said. “According to your documents, your nationality is indeterminate. What are you?”

  “We’re Americans. You know damn well we’re Americans,” Red Tobin snapped. His patience had worn very thin. So had A.E.’s.

  “You have no passports,” the Frenchman said.

  “Our government won’t let us travel to a war zone on ’em,” Shorty Keough said.

  “I do. They didn’t worry about me.” A.E. produced hers.

  The functionary gave it a fishy stare. “What are you doing with these men, Madame Poot-nahm?” What his accent did to her married name was a caution. “Are you their mother?”

  “I’m a pilot, same as they are,” she answered, as evenly as she could. “Putnam is my ex-husband’s last name. Mine is Earhart.”

  He needed a couple of seconds before that sank in. “Nom d’un nom!” he muttered, and then, “You are the famous Amelia Earhart?”

  “That’s me.” A.E. didn’t like to trade on her fame, but it came in handy every so often. “So how about you let us have those tickets for Paris we’re supposed to get?”

  She didn’t know whether the ploy would work, but they were on the next train to the French capital. “Gotta hand it to you, ma’am,” Andy Mamedoff said as they squeezed into a crowded car. “That was terrific.”

  “Thanks,” A.E. said. “And for God’s sake call me Amelia. Otherwise I’ll think we’ve got that damned French pencil pusher along with us.”

  He grinned at her. “You’re okay, you know that?”

  “Well, I try,” she said, just as the train began to move.

  From St. Nazaire to Paris was about two hundred miles. The train seemed to stop every half hour or so. One of the stops, at Le Mans, was very bad. A westbound train had also stopped, on the track next to theirs. Half the cars had been shot up from the air. They were pocked with bullet and shell holes; only a few windows still had glass in them. And half the French soldiers in the cars looked to have been shot up, too. They were bloody; they were bandaged; their faces were pale and full of pain. A fellow with a Red Cross armband tenderly helped a wounded man smoke a cigarette.

  “Nazi bastards,” Mamedoff ground out.

  “If we spotted a German troop train, or a column of trucks …” Red Tobin said slowly. “It’s war. This is what we signed up for.”

  A.E. had thought about shooting down enemy pilots in 109s or 110s or bombers. She hadn’t thought about shooting up luckless foot soldiers who might not even be able to shoot back. But Red was right. That also came with the job.

  After a mournful toot from the whistle, the train rolled on toward Paris.

  The hotel in the City of Light was, not to put too fine a point on it, a fleabag. Tobin, Keough, and Mamedoff shared a room. It had one narrow bed. How they decided who got to use it, A.E. didn’t know. She had a room to herself. It was bigger than her cabin on the Pierre L.D., but not much. An almost equally tiny bathroom lurked down at the end of the hall.

  No one slept the night after they got in. German planes bombed Paris. What sounded like every antiaircraft gun in the world tried to shoot them down. A bomb hit no more than 150 yards from the hotel. The noise was like the end of the world. The building jumped as if someone had kicked it in the behind. A.E.’s window rattled, but didn’t blow in.

  Next morning, over croissants and strong coffee at a café around the corner, Red managed a crooked grin. “Boy, that was fun,” he said.

  “Merde!” Andy Mamedoff had started picking up French.

  That word, and others like it, came in handy when the Americans tried to get any Armée de l’Air officials to pay attention to them. They didn’t have much luck. In a way, A.E. understood it. The Germans were surging forward everywhere. Paris itself looked like falling soon. The British and French troops who hadn’t made it across the Channel to England had surrendered to the Nazis. In the face of catastrophe, who could get excited about a few possible pilots? All the same …

  “Least they can do is give us a medical exam and put us in planes,” Shorty Keough groused. “How can we do worse than they’re doing already?”

  “They haven’t got time for us,” A.E. said. “We’re uninvited guests in a house where someone’s dying.”

  “Where everybody’s dying,” Red Tobin amended, and she didn’t try to tell him he was wrong.

  She did say, “Something I’ve seen in French planes, you guys need to remember. You pull the throttle out for more power and push it in for less, right?”

  “Sure,” Andy Mamedoff said. Shorty and Red nodded.

  “Sure if it’s an American plane or an English one or even one from Germany,” A.E. said. “France and Italy do it backwards. With their planes, you push the throttle in for more juice and pull it out to ease back. You can kill yourself if you forget. I almost did once.”

  “Thanks,” Red said. “That’s worth knowing, all right.”

  “If we ever get into a French plane it will be, anyhow,” Shorty said.

  “This country is going down the drain,” Mamedoff said, and nobody tried to contradict him, either. He went on, “I came over here to fight the goddamn Nazis, not to surrender to them.”

  “None of us has proper papers. Except Amelia, I mean,” Red said.

  Mamedoff exhaled through his nose. “Papers are the least of my worries if the Germans catch us.” He was Jewish. He didn’t make a big deal out of it, but the Gestapo wouldn’t care about that.

  A couple of days later, they finally did get called in for medicals. The doc who examined A.E. was short and dumpy and bald with a fringe of gray. He spoke some English. Along with her bits of French, they managed to understand each other. Before long, she wasn’t sure she wanted to. “You are something out of the ordinary,” he remarked.

  “I’m a pilot. I’m a good pilot. If I ever get the chance, I can help France,” she said.

  “France?” He waved that aside. “France, c’est morte.” France is dead. It wasn’t a thought A.E. hadn’t had herself, but she hated hearing it from a Frenchman. She also hated the way the guy’s hands wandered. It wasn’t the first time that kind of thing had happened, but it was the first time in quite a while.

  “Watch yourself, Charlie,” she snapped.

  “If you are friendly, I promise you
will pass the medical,” he said.

  “Friendly, huh? I’m going to pass the medical or I’m gonna beat the living crap out of you. Your choice. How about that?” At five eight, she was at least three inches taller than he was. She was also in much better shape. She figured she could do exactly what she threatened.

  By the way he licked his lips, by the way his eyes widened behind his steel-framed spectacles, so did he. “You don’t have to be so, so masculine about it,” he said.

  “Just make sure my papers look the way they’re supposed to. I know enough français to catch you if you try to pull a fast one, too.” A.E. hoped she was right. That masculine made her want to laugh more than it made her mad. It wasn’t the first time she’d got called a dyke. Nowhere close. Way too much of the world thought any woman who tried to get ahead in a man’s profession had to be butch.

  Despite passing their medicals, the Americans kept not getting sent anywhere that had airplanes. Andy and Shorty and Red went out and got magnificently smashed; their piteous state the next morning showed what a big one they’d tied on. Some of the things they stifled, not quite soon enough, when they noticed A.E. was in earshot made her sure they’d done some serious screwing to go with their serious drinking. That didn’t embarrass her—it amused her. Boys would be boys.

  They’d surely long since run through the 2,500 francs they’d got in Halifax. One way or another, they kept themselves in funds without putting the bite on her. She liked them better for that.

  Chapter Four

  On the tenth of June, A.E. woke to see the sun rise red through man-made, foul-smelling fog. The French were sending up smokescreens and burning crude oil to shield Paris from German bombers. She’d understood for a while that the City of Light would fall soon. Realizing the French understood it, too, was like a punch in the gut.

  Over the usual meager breakfast—what was wrong with bacon and eggs or something like that, for crying out loud?—Andy Mamedoff said, “We’ve gotta get out of here while we still can.”

  “How do you aim to pay the hotel bill?” Shorty asked, so maybe the men weren’t keeping themselves in funds after all.

  “I don’t,” Mamedoff said calmly. “I aim to skip.”

  A.E. could have paid their bill along with hers. Instead, she skipped with them. It distressed her much less than she’d imagined it could. Everything was breaking down. With the Nazis bound to march into Paris soon, the people who ran the hotel had more to worry about than foreigners who didn’t pay what they owed.

  The Gar de l’Est was chaos compounded. Everyone was trying to make it aboard a train heading away from the oncoming Germans. The Americans literally fought their way onto one bound for Tours in the southwest. What was left of the French government was on its way there, too. There was an airstrip not far from town. Maybe the fight could go on after the swastika flew over Paris. Maybe.

  It was standing room only in the car. A lot of the standees were soldiers. A poilu breathed garlic and sour wine into A.E.’s face as he said, “I don’t want to give in. My leaders are spineless cochons, but not me.”

  “Good,” she answered.

  They reached Tours early in the afternoon, just in time to dive into a ditch as the Luftwaffe bombed the town. Then they tried to get a car to take them to the air base. They had no luck, and hoofed it instead. A.E. wore comfortable shoes, but what was comfortable in town wasn’t so much for what turned out to be a five-mile hike. She wasn’t the only one with barking dogs by the time they got there, either.

  At least the Armée de l’Air officers at the base seemed to know who they were and why they’d come to France. One of them pointed to a two-seat Potez 63 heavy fighter or light bomber at the edge of a dirt runway. “We will train you up on this avion,” he said in a mixture of English and French.

  “For God’s sake remember the backwards throttle,” A.E. warned her comrades. “You really will kill yourselves if you don’t.”

  “Gotcha,” Red said, and sketched a salute.

  “Our own side is liable to shoot us down if we go up in one of those. It looks a lot like a Messerschmitt 110,” Andy Mamedoff added.

  The same thing had occurred to A.E. “Maybe the Nazis won’t shoot at us so much,” she said.

  “Here’s hoping,” Shorty agreed.

  They did not get trained on that Potez 63. Less than half an hour after the French officer pointed it out to them, a Stuka screamed down out of the sky and strafed it, leaving it a burning wreck. Another French fighter, this one actually airworthy, downed the German dive bomber as it tried to climb away. It smashed to earth only a couple of hundred yards from the plane it had killed.

  Quietly, A.E. said, “You hope the crash killed them before the fire started.” The other three Americans all nodded. Like her, they’d seen mishaps before. Only this was no mishap. The French pilot had meant to do just what he did. If they went up there in fighter planes, German pilots would try their damnedest to do that to them. The thought was sobering.

  They ate well that night, washing down roast pork with pretty good red wine. The French seemed to believe A.E. could fly fighters. They ran up a tent for her by the ones the men slept in, and gave her a cot with a skinny mattress and a rough wool blanket. She slept like a rock.

  News came from the north, by radio and by fleeing soldiers and civilians. Paris was declared an open city to keep the Germans from bombing it flat. The Wehrmacht wouldn’t just march in; it would parade in. The Americans wouldn’t have much chance to fly in France after all. Surrender couldn’t be more than days away.

  Word that France had asked Germany for an armistice came over the radio on June 17. “Well, now it’s official,” Red Tobin said glumly. “We aren’t gonna be aces in the Armée de l’Air.”

  “What will the Nazis do with us if they catch us?” Andy wondered. “Not like we’ve got passports or anything.” A.E. did, of course, but felt oddly happier because he didn’t remind her of it.

  Shorty sliced a thumb across his throat. “What do the Nazis do to us, is what you mean.”

  “Maybe we can get to Bordeaux. Maybe we can squeeze onto a ship bound for England from there,” Red said. “If I can’t fight the Luftwaffe in the Armée de l’Air, I’ll do it in the RAF.”

  “What do you think our chances are?” Shorty asked. Tobin didn’t answer. Anyone could see the odds weren’t good.

  “I have another idea.” A.E. spoke for the first time. The three men all looked at her. They did her the courtesy of taking her seriously. She’d earned that by not trading on her fame with them and by not looking for any special treatment because she was a woman. She went on, “There are a couple of more of those Potez two-seaters out past the woods.” She gestured. “If we get into them, we’re only two hours from England—as long as we remember which way the throttle goes, anyhow.”

  “They’ll be guarded,” Mamedoff said gloomily. “How do you aim to get past the sentries?”

  “The government isn’t here any more. The Germans were getting too close. They’ve all gone to Bordeaux themselves. We can say we’ve been ordered to take the planes there,” A.E. said. “The soldiers will believe us. They’ll think the big shots will want to run away to England themselves.”

  “Maybe. Or maybe not,” Andy said. “Suppose they ask to see our orders. What happens then?”

  “Leave that to me.” A.E. sounded more confident than she felt. She knew the kind of chance she’d be taking. Even next to the risk of getting shot down in flames, the danger wasn’t small. But she saw no safe way out of a country about to surrender to its worst enemy.

  Chapter Five

  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.