Or Even Eagle Flew Read online

  Middle Wallop lay seventy-five miles west of London—fifteen minutes in a Spitfire. Long before she got there, A.E. saw pillars of smoke rising from the greatest city in the world. Somewhere over there, Shorty and Red were having their palaver with Charles Sweeny. She hoped they’d be all right. After a moment, she hoped Sweeny would, too.

  As she drew closer, she saw the sky over London filled with planes: bombers, some still in formation, others scattered, dropping their cargo of death; and fighters both German and British darting this way and that, some attacking the bombers, others trying to hold the attackers at bay. Every antiaircraft gun for miles around was firing for all it was worth. Puffs of black smoke with flame at their heart punctuated the chaos.

  When an antiaircraft shell burst near her plane, the Spitfire bounced in the air like a car with bad shocks hitting a pothole. She hadn’t thought her own side might shoot her down by mistake. She shrugged. She couldn’t do anything about it if they did.

  As soon as the bombers unloaded, they ran for France as fast as they could go. That often wasn’t fast enough. RAF doctrine was for Spitfires to engage the Luftwaffe escorts while Hurricanes went after the bombers. Hurricanes weren’t quite up to matching 109s: not hopeless against them, but at a disadvantage.

  A.E. quickly found doctrine flew out the window when you were up there trying to stay alive. She fired a short burst at a Do 17. The Flying Pencil kept flying, so either she missed or the Dornier was good at soaking up damage.

  Then tracers flew past her own plane. She swung the stick as hard to the left as she could. G-forces almost made her gray out for a moment. Unwisely, the German on her tail tried to turn with her. A 109 might outclimb or outdive a Spit, but the British fighter turned more tightly. All of a sudden, she was on the Jerry’s tail, not the other way around.

  She thumbed the red firing button. From this range, she could hardly miss—and she didn’t. Chunks of aluminum skin flew off the 109. Belching first smoke and then fire, it went into a long, spinning dive. She didn’t see the pilot hit the silk.

  When her fuel ran low, she headed back to Middle Wallop. “Gas me up quick as you can and give me more ammo,” she told the groundcrew men who ran over to her plane. “I’ve got to head back. They’re still giving London hell.”

  “How’d you do this time, ma’am?” a corporal asked.

  “Got one—a 109,” she said.

  “Good on you!” he said. One of his crewmates gave her a thumbs-up. Grinning, she returned it.

  She closed the cockpit, fired up the Spit’s Merlin, and bounced along the airstrip till she got airborne. As she pulled back the stick to gain altitude, she realized that what some of the older hands had said after her first victory was true.

  The second time you killed somebody, you didn’t feel a thing.

  Chapter Nine

  The next few days went by in a blur, exhaustion tempered by moments of raw terror. She lost track of how many sorties she flew. So did the men she flew with. They didn’t even have time to shave, and got scruffier by the day.

  “Where’s your beard, Pilot Officer Earhart?” the squadron CO demanded with mock ferocity when they both happened to be on the ground at the same time.

  “Sorry, sir. I forget where I left it,” A.E. answered. Flight Lieutenant Darley laughed more than the comeback deserved. If he was as worn as she was, he had no business being upright and functional.

  Other pilots in the squadron had made kills, too. And three of them had got shot down themselves. One bailed out and came back to Middle Wallop with no worse than a limp from an ankle he’d twisted on landing. The other two bought a plot when their Spits went down, dying either from German gunfire or in the crash.

  Victories and deaths were observed the same way: with frenzied drinking at Middle Wallop’s pubs and with equally frenzied screwing with whatever willing women the flyers could find. A.E. stayed in her tent after it got too dark to fly one more mission. Unlike Achilles, she wasn’t sulking there. She just didn’t want to cramp her friends’ style. If they’d found ways to unwind, to forget for a little while what they did, more power to them.

  For a solid week, the Germans poured everything they had into wrecking London and the RAF. The consensus in 609 Squadron was that they’d also gone a long way toward wrecking the Luftwaffe.

  “They can’t go on like this,” Red Tobin said as he bolted supper before heading out for whatever debaucheries Middle Wallop had on offer. “They’ll run out of planes and crews. They don’t buy anything cheap there, any more than anybody else does.”

  “Will we have anything left when they pack it in?” A.E. only wished the question were rhetorical.

  Red shrugged and ran a comb through his hair. Yes, he had other things on his mind than grand military strategy, things he could actually do something about. “Beats me,” he said cheerfully. “As long as we’ve got one Spit—or even a Hurricane—flying when fat old Göring runs dry, we win, right?”

  Like jesting Pilate, the jesting pilot didn’t wait for an answer. He hopped on a bicycle and pedaled off to the raucous nightlife of Middle Wallop.

  A.E. stood on the grass, watching him shrink in the distance. Twilight hadn’t left the sky. No sooner had she thought she wouldn’t care to fly so near darkness than she heard an airplane motor. Someone up there was trying it—a German far off course or somebody from the RAF looking for a place to set down.

  She turned her head, trying to spot the aircraft by the direction its sound came from. She still had pretty good ears. Sometimes that surprised her, given how much time she’d spent too close to roaring airplane engines. Surprise or not, it was true.

  And sure enough, she did pick up the plane before it came in and landed at the Middle Wallop airstrip. Not a lost Luftwaffe pilot—it was a Westland Lysander, a two-seater the RAF used for everything from trainer to ground attack. Very early in the war, one had shot down a Heinkel bomber, though Lysanders carried only a pair of forward-facing machine guns when they mounted any at all.

  One other thing Lysanders did a lot of was serve as glorified taxis. If an officer of suitably exalted rank needed to go somewhere far away in a hurry, he’d hop in a Lysander. Either he’d fly it himself or a pilot would whisk him to his destination.

  That seemed to be what was going on here. An RAF officer got out of the plane and made for the battered bungalow that was optimistically called the ops shack. A moment later, the pilot came down to the ground, too, and stepped away from the Lysander, wanting a stretch or maybe a cigarette.

  A.E. ambled over toward the pilot. “Your passenger won’t find whoever he’s looking for in there,” she said. “Everybody but me’s in town, trying to blot out everything they’ve done today.”

  Her American accent and, she realized a beat slower than she might have, her contralto made the pilot snap her head up sharply and ask, “Who the devil are you?” She was a woman, too.

  Automatically, A.E. answered, “Pilot Officer Earhart, 609 Squadron. Who are you?”

  The other pilot burst out laughing. She was several inches shorter than A.E., though several inches taller than Shorty Keough. “Oh, good Lord, this is too mad for words!” she said. As A.E. realized her voice sounded not just feminine but familiar, she went on, “That I should land at the airfield where you’re stationed when I stayed in your house in New York!”

  A.E.’s eyes widened. “My God, Amy Johnson!” She squeezed the English aviatrix. They’d met before that in London, when A.E. was the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic. Amy and her then-husband tried to duplicate the crossing going the other way, but crashed on landing; he was hurt worse than she was.

  And now both women were still flying, but neither was still married. They’d loved planes before they met their spouses, and kept loving them though their spouses were spouses no more.

  That was bound to mean something. Before A.E. could begin to work out what, Amy Johnson’s passenger came back toward the Lysander. “Where in damnation has Flight Lieu
tenant Darley got to?” he demanded, as if expecting A.E. to have the squadron CO in her back pocket.

  “Sir, he and just about all the other flyers have gone into town to take the edge off the day’s fighting,” she said.

  “Except for you? Who the devil are you?” the officer unwittingly echoed the woman who’d flown him here.

  “I’m Pilot Officer Earhart, sir,” A.E. said, as she had to Amy Johnson. She didn’t ask him who he was. Englishmen were touchier than Yanks about rank.

  “Oh,” the RAF man said. “I’ve heard of you, yes. Jolly good, what you’re doing—jolly good. But how do I get to Middle Wallop?”

  He could have walked; it was only a couple of miles from the airbase. He’d taken A.E.’s anomalous gender and rank in stride, though, or better than in stride. Because he had, she said, “You can borrow my bicycle if you like, sir. It’s a man’s bike—no one will laugh at you for riding a girl’s machine.”

  “That’s white of you! Much obliged, Pilot Officer. I promise I’ll bring it back in good shape,” the officer said. A.E. led him and Amy Johnson over to her tent. The man thanked her again and rode away. A.E. had no idea whether anyone could distract Darley from drinking and wenching. The newly come officer might have a headache or a drippy faucet tomorrow. That wasn’t A.E.’s worry, though.

  As soon as the fellow had gone a couple of hundred yards, Amy Johnson spoke in a low voice. “I’m so jealous of you I could spit, Amelia.”

  “Of me? What did I do?”

  “You shot down a couple of German planes, that’s what!” the Englishwoman said fiercely. “I’m stuck ferrying important people—important men, don’t you know?—from yon to hither, or taking planes where they need to go next. It stinks!” She kicked at the dirt in frustration.

  “Why aren’t you in the RAF instead of the WAAF?” A.E. asked. “God knows you’ve got more experience and more sense than some of the half-trained guys they’re sticking in Spitfires.”

  “They won’t let me. I’m not an American coming over here with a boatload of press cuttings and an appetite for more. I’m just … part of the scenery, is all I am.” Amy Johnson didn’t try to hide her bitterness.

  A.E. nodded toward her elegant accommodations. “C’mon in. Let’s talk. I’ve got most of a quart of scotch in there. Andy Mamedoff—he’s one of the fellas who came over with me—gave it to me in case I needed to unwind the way the guys do. I haven’t touched it till now, but this looks like a pretty good time.”

  “I should have flown back to Norwich,” Amy said doubtfully. But then she nodded. “Why not? They can’t be browned off at me—it was dark by the time I got here.”

  They ducked into the tent together. It was crowded for two, but not impossibly so. A.E. made sure the flap was secured before she lit the kerosene lamp—only it was a paraffin lamp over here—that sat on a camp stool. She fished out the scotch and perched awkwardly on the cot next to Amy; with the lamp on the stool, it was the only place she could sit.

  She poured some of the amber fluid into her tin cup, then handed Amy the bottle. “Mud in your eye,” she said, and clinked tin against glass.

  Amy coughed. She made as if to read the label: “‘Aged in oaken barrels for at least twenty minutes.’” Then she sipped again as A.E. laughed. She added, “It may not be good, but it’s strong.”

  “Genuine paint thinner,” A.E. agreed. Then she came back to what they’d talked about outside. “Seriously, if you want to fly fighters, you ought to go see Leigh-Mallory or Sholto Douglas or one of the other RAF big shots and raise a stink. Nothing ever happens if you don’t make a stink about it.”

  “The only thing that would happen is they’d throw me out of the WAAF on my ear,” Amy said. “This isn’t the USA. They don’t much fancy stinks over here.” She drank some more.

  “Hey, save some for me!” A.E. held out the cup. Amy poured more of the cheap scotch into it. A.E. went on, “Do you want me to go in to London with you? If the people who run the RAF don’t have a damn good reason for keeping a pilot like you out, we can tell the papers all about it.”

  “I’m game, but it won’t do any good,” Amy said glumly. “Men can be such bastards sometimes. A lot of the time, in fact.”

  “Ain’t that the truth!” A.E. said, remembering her tiff with Air Vice Marshal Leigh-Mallory. She remembered other things, too. “I heard you and Jim broke up.”

  The Englishwoman nodded. “Afraid so. We couldn’t make it go any more, so we finally quit trying. Better than cutting each other up all the bloody time. You and your George aren’t husband and wife any more, either, are you?”

  “Nope.” A.E. shook her head. “George always had a roving eye. He dumped somebody else to get together with me, and he married somebody new right after our divorce went final.” She chuckled. Was she feeling the scotch? Oh, maybe a little. “Of course, my eye roves, too, I guess. I wrote the agreement we signed before we tied the knot, and one of the things it said was we didn’t have to be faithful that way to each other.”

  Amy drank some more. Then she poured some more into A.E.’s cup. And then she let the bottle fall to the ground. Between them, they were going to kill it. Maybe it was just the dim light from the kerosene lamp, but her eyes looked enormous. She said, “You know, I’ve always admired you so much. From the very first moment we met, I have.”

  “Me? That’s just silly.” A.E. drained what was in the cup. She hardly even felt it going down. And she understood why the men in the squadron drank so hard after every run-in with the Jerries. Booze helped shield you from the slings and arrows and machine-gun bullets and 20mm shells of outrageous fortune. She tried to remember what she’d been talking about. With almost as much triumph as she’d felt shooting down her second German plane, she did. “I’m nobody special.”

  “Oh, but you are!” Amy sounded very sure of herself, which was also bound to be the rotgut talking. “You always seem to take everything in stride. And the university work you’ve done, the aeronautical research. And you started doing things for women long before you came over here and put on the uniform. Compared to you, I always thought I flew for myself.”

  “No better reason,” A.E. said. If oxygen and adrenaline didn’t kill her hangover tomorrow morning, she was going to feel like grim death. The tip of her nose had gone numb, a warning of how much she’d put away.

  “You’re sweet to say so.” Amy slid closer on the cot and put an arm around her.

  It seemed the most natural thing in the world for A.E. to kiss her on the cheek. Only her aim, thanks to the scotch, wasn’t all it might have been. The kiss, to her surprise, landed square on Amy’s mouth. The way Amy kissed her back was a surprise, too. So was how much she liked it.

  Not very much later, she blew out the lamp. Even while it was going on, she had the feeling that what happened there in the quiet darkness might not be quite real. If We were drunk wasn’t the oldest excuse in the world, she couldn’t imagine what would be.

  But it was pretty wonderful while it went on. Yes, the scotch helped. So did the jangle of nerves that had brushed too close to death’s black wing. When you were with someone else, you could forget about that for a little while. Again, she understood her comrades-in-arms better.

  Afterwards, she did. At the time, she just enjoyed it. “Well,” Amy said softly as their hearts slowed together, “I never looked for that to happen.”

  “Neither did I,” A.E. said, and then, “Officially, of course, it never did.”

  “Right.” Amy giggled, still in a tiny voice. “Bound to be against regulations, don’t you know?”

  A.E. laughed so hard, she had to hold her face to the rough, scratchy RAF blanket to muffle the noise. It wasn’t even that Amy was wrong. This was bound to be against a whole raft of regulations. That only made it funnier. “We’d better put ourselves back together.”

  When they were more or less decent again, she lit the lamp once more so they could get the details right. “What do we do now?” Amy asked.


  “Let’s go to bed,” A.E. said. The Englishwoman looked at her. “To sleep, I mean,” she amended. “We’ve both got to fly tomorrow, and we need what rest we can grab.”

  “I told you you were sensible,” Amy said. Her flying jacket, which she hadn’t bothered putting back on, lay on the yellowing grass by the cot. A.E. saw it had a grease stain and a tear. It belonged to a working pilot, and had seen hard use. Why didn’t the RAF understand that, dammit?

  The cot was narrow for one. It was very narrow for two, no matter how friendly they were. A.E. didn’t care. As soon as darkness returned, she fell asleep as if clubbed.

  Chapter Ten

  A.E. had lost the habit of waking up with someone else in bed with her. She’d never got into the habit of waking up with someone else in bed draped all over her. That her head pounded like her Spitfire’s machine guns added nothing to the experience.

  “Morning,” Amy Johnson said, her mouth maybe three inches from A.E.’s ear.

  “It is, isn’t it?” A.E. agreed sorrowfully. Amy seemed no more chipper than she was, which pleased her as much as anything was likely to just then.

  They untangled from each other. A.E. found a little tin of aspirins and took three. Amy held out her hand. A.E. gave her three, too.

  Some of the men were already tucking into breakfast when they walked in together. Eggs were in short supply in England these days, but not for RAF flyers. When A.E. introduced her companion, a considerable silence fell. Red Tobin broke it. “My God! Between the two of you, you’ve done about everything a pilot can do.”

  “We haven’t shot down enough Germans yet,” A.E. said, a remark that met general approval.

  Shorty eyed Amy Johnson. “How come you’re not in a Spitfire instead of playing shuttle pilot? Any damn fool can do that.”

  “Because the RAF brass are a bunch of dodoes,” A.E. said before Amy could reply.