Trophy for Eagles by Walter J. Boyne Read Free Book Online Page B

its back landing earlier in the year."
    Bandfield couldn't tell whether they were just trying to pump each other up, rationalizing decisions they had already made, or whether they believed it.
    "Did you hear about poor old Noel Davis?"
    "No. He's the guy flying the converted Keystone bomber?"
    "Yeah. He and his copilot, Wooster, went in at Langley. Killed them both."
    "Jeez, maybe solo is better."
    Neither man said what he really thought, that while two men might be all right in the cockpit, two men were one too many when it came to sharing the glory.
    "Bandy, great talking to you. I've got to go fiddle with my prop pitch setting—I change it every day whether it needs it or not."
    "What are you going to do tonight, Slim?" It was Bandfield's first trip East, and he wanted to see New York.
    Lindbergh's face crinkled into a grin. "How about coming to town with Mother and me? We could have some fun. We're driving in at about six."
    Lindbergh saw Bandfield hesitate and thought that it was because he was short of money. Actually, Bandfield had met Lindbergh's mother, and had found her overpowering, too domineering to spend an evening with. Her arrival had spurred the attention of the reporters, and Lindbergh spent a great deal of time with her. Yet the field was boring and he might never get to New York again. Lindbergh pressed him.
    "Look, Jack Winter's invited us out to dinner. He's a stockbroker, a friend of my backers in St. Louis. He told me to bring along anybody I wanted, especially if he's crazy enough to fly. He buys airplanes like Heinz buys pickles, and I'm sure he'd like to find out about yours. How about it?"
    "You're on—is what I'm wearing okay?"
    It wasn't even close, but Lindbergh said, "Sure. I'll pick you up at eighteen hundred—six o'clock, to civilians like you."
    Even the tabloids could get only so much mileage out of Peaches Browning, gangland slayings, and mysterious women in black who claimed to be married to Rudolph Valentino, so the little band of airmen clustered on Long Island turned into a journalistic mother- lode. The newspapers seized upon aviation everywhere as grist for their mills; a safe arrival was noticed, but an accident got two-column headlines. If a really lucky reporter could find a wife who had witnessed her husband's fatal crash, there were lead stories for two days.
    As a result, Roosevelt and the adjacent Curtiss Field became magnets for tourists. Where before no one but pilots or mechanics could be found there now surged hundreds of onlookers during the week, thousands on the weekends. Security became a problem for the flyers as well as the crowd. One man, intently peering into his camera, unable to hear the warning yells of the crowd, had backed comically step by step into the idling propeller of an Eaglerock biplane. The shattered propeller sliced off the tail of his coat and his pants, sending his wallet in an arc to land on the wing of a Jenny. One more step and he'd have been a true half-ass for life, a candidate for the Keystone Komedy hall of fame.
    The crowds were generally well-mannered and benign, but their curiosity and their numbers caused damage. Fingers somehow poked their way into the fabric of the ordinary transient planes staked out on the flight line, and finally, to keep the strangers out, guards had to be posted around the hangars where the various race planes were housed.
    The guard at Bandfield's little hangar nodded as Murray Roehlk laid his enormous shoulder to ease the door open. Murray was shaped like a Packard radiator: square, sharp, and sloped-shouldered. He was five and a half feet tall, and almost that wide, his bulk emphasized by a suit cut to hide shoulder holsters and conceal his disproportionately long arms. They hung gorillalike yet ended in delicate tapered hands that could fix anything from car buretors to altimeters. Hafner was a demanding employer who kept most people at their distance, but had gradually gained an equally high regard for both