Oath Bound - Book V of The Order of the Air Read online

  “Lewis!” Henry waved at him from the hangar door, then hurried across the parking area to join him. “Shouldn’t you be resting?”

  Lewis refrained from asking how he thought anyone could sleep through the noise of the oompah band by the grandstand. “I had a good nap. I’m fine, Henry.”

  Henry took a breath, as though he was going to remind him exactly why it was important that he did a good job, but then stopped, shaking his head. “I know. You know what you’re doing.” He held out a slip of paper. “You’re up next-to-last, after the Yak. It’s just the German monoplane after you.”

  Lewis took the list, scanning the only slightly faded carbon. The German biplanes were first — gossip said the Henkel He-51 was good for its type, but the double-winged fighters were sadly outdated — and then two of the three Italian planes. After them came the Curtiss prototype that was Henry’s real rival, then another Italian plane — the Ba.65, another prototype, then the Russian, and then the Dart. It was a good position, let him see what the other pilots were throwing and tailor his own presentation to match them. He didn’t know anything about the Bf 108 “sport plane” that was supposed to follow him. Presumably it was another German attempt to get around the Versailles rules — it would be interesting to see what they’d managed to come up with.

  “There’s a flyover by that German long-distance woman after your category,” Henry said. “What’s her name, Beinhorn? And then the fighter-bombers.”

  “I’m very interested in them,” Lewis admitted. There’d been rumors about the German entry there, too, a brand-new Junkers prototype barely off the factory floor. It was to be flown by one of the surviving great aces, Ernst Udet, and that alone was going to be worth seeing.

  “So am I.” Henry broke off, tilting his head to the side as a new engine noise cut through the crackle of speeches.

  Lewis shaded his eyes to look, but there was no missing the cluster of shapes against the clouds. A good dozen of them, flying in tight "V" formation — those must be the Italian flying boats, he thought, just as the loud speaker spoke again. He recognized the title and name, Maresciallo dell’Aria Italo Balbo, and the roar of the crowd confirmed it.

  “Balbo?” he said anyway, and Henry nodded.

  “In a balbo.” The big, tight formations and the control to fly them was largely Balbo’s invention, he deserved the credit. “They’ll do a flyover, then they’ll drive him back to the field for the rest of the ceremony.”

  Lewis watched as the big planes dropped lower, still perfectly in formation, the ungainly double-hulled S 55s handled as neatly as though they were fighters. They leveled off barely two hundred feet above the runway, roaring past still in their perfect "V. The crowd was chanting “Balbo, Balbo,” the words becoming clear only as the planes pulled away again, and then the chant dissolved into cheers and clapping.

  The loudspeaker said something else, and Henry gave a sideways grin. “They’ve just pronounced us officially open. Let’s hope the rest goes as neatly.”

  Lewis nodded, watching the sky. A few minutes later, he saw a dot moving in from the southeast, and the loudspeaker crackled again.

  “The Dornier Do 16 Wal,” Henry translated. “Civilian airliner, or supposed to be. They’ve been building them in Italy, Signore Davio was telling me. This is one of the first ones built in Germany since the current government… adjusted things.”

  Since Hitler effectively repudiated the Versailles Treaty back in the spring and started rebuilding the German military, Lewis thought. He guessed that wasn’t exactly what the announcer had said, but refused to let it bother him. Instead, he shaded his eyes, watching as the bulky plane lined itself up on the runway, dropping down to a few hundred feet to give the crowd a good look at its lines. Like the Catalina, it had a single wing mounted high above the fuselage, but its two engines were in a single nacelle, pusher and propeller running in tandem. The hull was blockier, the heavy lines making it look bigger than it was. It swept past, engines roaring, and pulled up in a respectably steep climb while the announcer continued his monologue. It came around again, the turns neat and careful, made a second, slightly lower pass.

  “This is the plane Amundsen used back in ‘25, right?” he said, to Henry. That had been a fancy piece of flying, getting airborne off the Arctic ice when the plane was loaded with nearly double the weight it had been supposed to carry: you had to respect a workhorse like that.

  “Same basic design, though this one’s bigger,” Henry answered. He glanced over his shoulder to make sure no one was listening. “It’s supposed to do the transatlantic mail run, but it has to refuel at sea, and that’s not been going well. Floyd’s going to eat their lunch.”

  Lewis nodded, looking south again for the Catalina. Yes, there it was, a dark speck that rapidly grew to the familiar shape, high wing towering over the fuselage with its deep forward hull and sharply stepped tail. She was twin-engined, too, but instead of the Wal’s weird push-pull combination, she had two relatively conventional engines mounted on top of the wing, the fuselage balanced below and beneath them. They’d gone with Gilchrist’s most gaudy paint job for the show, the red hull with red and white checkerboard that Alma had used for racing back in the ‘20s, and he was pleased to see how well she showed up against the pale sky.

  The announcer was talking, had been talking for a while, he realized, and the Catalina made a last lazy bank, showing her red wings, then went into a shallow dive, leveling out low and tight at the end of the runway. That was Alma flying, he was sure of it — that was exactly her sort of risk, so carefully calculated that it was hardly a risk at all — and then the Cat was past, drawing cheers and applause, to make a much tighter turn north over the runway to line up for the return. The second pass was higher but a little slower, giving everyone a good view of the sleek hull, and then she was pulling up and away again, circling back toward the harbor.

  “That’s a nice plane,” Henry said, and shook himself. “Right. You’d better —”

  Lewis nodded. “Showtime.”

  Carson had the Dart fueled and ready, drawn out onto the tarmac. Lewis made his walk-around, then watched from beneath the Dart’s wing while the first of the fighter group took their turns. The He-51 was pretty much what he’d expected: if he’d had that in France, he’d have made himself king of the hill, but against the Italians that followed it, you could see it was outclassed. The Curtiss Hawk was up next, and he felt himself tense, looking from the windsock drooping at the end of the runway, to the southern approach where all the runs started. This was his rival, this was the man he had to beat. His breath hitched as the Hawk dropped down out of the white sky, screaming along the length of the runway to pull up sharply as soon as he crossed the runway’s end. That was a top-notch airplane, maybe every bit as good as the Dart; he’d have to be a better pilot if he was going to put Henry on top.

  By the second pass, he was sure he could do it. The Hawk’s pilot was good, but he was flying conservatively — maybe he wasn’t sure of the Hawk, or maybe it was less controllable than it had looked on the first few stunts, but he wasn’t pushing the machine to anything near its limits. He wasn’t even going for flash: his stunts were pretty enough, but nothing that would catch the crowd’s attention. Lewis ran down his mental list, comparing his program to the one the Hawk was flying. They weren’t all that different, and he wasn’t yet comfortable enough in the Dart to add elements on the fly, but he would be crisper and tighter and have just that bit of flare that the Hawk’s pilot lacked.

  God willing. He put that thought away, and climbed into the cockpit as the Hawk made its last low-level pass, one single barrel roll. He’d do that, too, only lower and faster, he thought, and at least two revolutions. A lot of reward for not much risk.

  Lewis ran through the checklists, shutting out the noise of the crowd and the Russian plane, now starting its run, and was almost surprised when a voice spoke in his headset.

  “Dart, this is Boccadifalco Tower. You are next up,
after Yakovlev AIR-8.”

  “Tower, this is Dart. Understood. I will be next up.”

  Lewis craned his neck to see out the canopy, saw the AIR-8 sweep by the stands on its third pass. It was billed as a military trainer, and Alma said that the Russian delegation had been talking up its virtues — something about some non-stop distance records? — but from the ground it looked pretty ordinary. Unless the engine was something special, it was going to be pretty thoroughly out-classed.

  And from the performance, he doubted the engine was all that good. Oh, he could believe it had set some endurance records, the way the little plane settled back into its groove after each pass spoke of easy stability, but none of the acrobatics were anything fancy. The Dart would look even better following it.

  The AIR-8 came in for its landing, and Lewis signaled Carson to start the engine. The big inverted-"V" roared to life, and he felt the controls tremble under his hands as the Dart came alive.

  “Dart, this is the Tower. You may enter the taxiway.”

  “Tower, this is Dart,” Lewis answered. “Entering the taxiway.”

  Carson pulled the chocks, and Lewis let the engine pull the Dart forward, testing the control surfaces as he made his way down the taxiway. Everything felt good, all the instruments were reading correctly, and he braked at the end of the taxiway, waiting for the tower’s word.

  “Dart, this is the Tower. You are cleared for takeoff.”

  “Roger, clear for takeoff.” Lewis swallowed the sudden fierce happiness and turned the Dart onto Boocadifalco’s ample runway.

  The Dart lifted easily, landing gear folding up and locking with a solid thunk, and he pulled up into a steep climb as he crossed the end of the runway. A wingover, and back to the deck, leveling off at a couple hundred feet to scream past the grandstand. He pulled up into another climb, steeper still, almost to stalling, and flicked the Dart over into a perfect Immelman to line him up for the second pass. He had good height, and he leveled out, picking a one of the distant hills as his reference point for the barrel rolls. He pulled back the control yoke, touched the ailerons, hands and feet moving in perfect synchrony as the horizon seemed to rotate around that distant peak. Once, twice — that was far enough, and he straightened, pulling the Dart up again to gain altitude for the loops.

  He put the Dart through its paces, each move neat and crisp — possibly he could have pushed it a little more on the loops, he thought, frowning, but the air was changing, the afternoon breeze now lifting the windsock, and there was no need to take unnecessary risk.

  “Dart, this is the Tower. Your time is up, please come in to land.”

  Lewis grimaced. He hadn’t kept track of the time the way he ought, and he still had a trick left — but there would be time for that tomorrow. Even without that last pass, he’d showed as well as anyone. He put the Dart into one last perfect split-S, lining up on the runway, and began the landing checklist.

  “Tower, this is Dart. Coming in to land.”

  Carson took charge of the Dart as soon as Lewis had landed, leading him into the hangar and setting the chocks while Lewis cut the engine and went through the last checklists. Satisfied, he levered himself out of the cockpit, sliding down the fuselage and ducking under the wing to join Carson, who already had the engine fairings open. It was still strange to have the engine behind him, and it was hard not to worry about what might happen in a crash — but then, if any of these fighters went down, the engine placement was unlikely to make a lot of difference.

  Carson lifted his head from the engine, his hands already filthy. “Anything I should know about, Mr. Segura?”

  Lewis shook his head. “She handled like a dream. Don’t change a thing.” Carson grinned, and Lewis looked over his shoulder. “Did I see they were going to let the audience tour the hangars after the show?”

  “Yeah.” Carson turned back to the engine. “We’re going to put up ropes — I hear everybody is — and Mr. Kershaw’s hired a couple of guys to help me watch.”

  “Good.” Not that he was really worried, but nobody liked the idea of strangers climbing all over the planes. Lewis lifted a hand in farewell, knowing that Carson’s attention was already on the engine, and wandered back out onto the tarmac.

  The German sport plane was doing its final passes, the pilot rolling the sleek monoplane into an elegant series of turns. There was no mistaking it for anything but a fighter, Lewis thought, no matter what the Germans called it or what the Versailles Treaty said. It was a fighter as good as anything he’d seen in America, and he felt a chill at the base of his spine in spite of the mild weather. They were all fighters here, pilots and aircraft; he’d felt the others sizing him up just the way he’d been watching them, assessing their skills. If war came — as always, the thought brought both worry and secret, shameful excitement. If it came to a war, the countries were frighteningly well matched.

  He shook the thought away and looked around for Henry to distract himself. The owner was nowhere in sight, however, and Lewis suppressed a sigh, tilting his head back to watch the sport plane sideslip toward the end of the runway. For a second, he thought the pilot had overdone it, but he caught it at the last possible moment, set it down neatly on the center line. He let out breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding, and at the same moment a slim young man in a German uniform said something heartfelt in German. Probably something like “cutting it a little close,” Lewis thought, and gave him a wry smile.

  The boy returned the smile — God, he had to be twenty-one if he had earned the lieutenant’s single flash, but he looked about twelve, with that fine-boned face and big dark eyes — and said something more.

  Lewis shook his head in apology. “Sorry, I don’t speak German. Do you speak English?”

  “A very little,” the boy said, pinching two fingers together. “Parlez-vous français?”

  “Not so much,” Lewis answered.

  After a few more tries, they settled on Spanish, stumbling over the boy’s vocabulary and Lewis’s Mexican accent, but it and hand gestures were enough to make themselves mostly understood. The lieutenant was part of the group flying the Heinkel biplane fighters, and, while he defended it loyally, he was clearly interested in both the Dart and the Hawk. In the background, the loudspeaker squawked, releasing a torrent of Italian, and another low-winged monoplane dropped out of the southern sky to line up for its pass along the runway.

  “Elly Beinhorn,” the lieutenant said. “That’s her Africa special.”

  The German aviatrix had circumnavigated the continent back in 1933. Lewis shaded his eyes, studying the plane as it passed overhead. It didn’t look much different from the other German planes in the show, and the articles praising her achievement had been regrettably short on technical details. Alma had been more than a bit annoyed. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw another pilot move up to see better. He recognized the Russian uniform first, and only then realized that the pilot was a woman, her dishwater blonde hair caught back in a fraying bun.

  The lieutenant saw where he was looking and made an expressive face. “Rote hexen,” he said. “Um, brujas rojas?”

  Red witches, Lewis translated. It was something you’d call an all-female Soviet squadron, but he didn’t think the lieutenant’s Spanish was up to telling whether it was an official nickname or something the Germans had adopted. “They any good?”

  “They — not bad,” the lieutenant answered. “Their planes, not so good.”

  That was pretty much what Lewis had been thinking about the Russian entry, and he nodded.

  The announcer spoke again, and the lieutenant stiffened. Lewis cocked his head, and this time picked words out of the flowing Italian: Ernst Udet and Junkers. This was the plane everyone had been waiting for, at least in the hangar, the new German dive-bomber that was supposed to be absolutely in a class of its own. And Udet… Udet was one of the old aces, the men Lewis had fought over France in the last war, one of the greats. Lewis still remembered the motto painted on the
tail of his plane: Du doch nicht, definitely not you. He’d come up against Udet exactly once, and, while he was still here to talk about it, it definitely hadn’t been him to bring the German down.

  The dive-bomber trundled onto the runway, lining up for takeoff, and Lewis craned his neck to see. All of a sudden, the hangar apron was crowded, as though every pilot who could get away had come out to see the performance.

  “Brand-new,” the lieutenant said, raising his voice to be heard over the engine noise and the crowd. “Sturtzkampfflugzeug. Stuka.”

  Lewis nodded, watching as the plane lifted gently into the air. It looked like a two-seater — well, you’d want that in a bomber — and the wings were unusual, an inverted gull-wing shape Lewis hadn’t seen before. It looked as though the landing gear was fixed, or at least Udet hadn’t retracted it as he made his first pass along the grandstand, and that was odd, too. He took a few steps forward, jockeying for a spot where he could see the full length of the runway, and saw Udet make a climbing turn to set himself up for his main run. The announcer was saying something, but Lewis ignored him, watching the Stuka turn back toward the runway. It came on and on, fast and straight, past the halfway point, and for a moment Lewis thought Udet had overshot, that he would have to go around again.

  Then the Stuka rolled 180 degrees, and tipped instantly into a steep dive. Lewis caught his breath, afraid for a second that something had gone wrong. The angle was much too steep, sixty degrees at least, and from the sound of the motor, all at full power — he’d never seen a plane under power at that angle. But then the angle eased, the Stuka pulling up and away, and Udet climbed away from the runway, still under perfect control.

  “Holy —”

  The little lieutenant was grinning from ear to ear. “Very nice, ja?”

  “Impressive,” Lewis agreed, and repeated the word in Spanish.