Chapter 19
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“Pleasure doing business with you,” Pancho said to the smuggler as casually as she could muster, and started toward her plane.
The faint sound of the approaching plane was getting louder. She climbed up to her cockpit quickly, intent on getting out of there before anyone else realized there was another plane inbound. “Could one of you guys turn the propeller for me?” she called.
The men on the ground looked at her in confusion. Pancho searched her limited Spanish for a word they would understand. “?Contacto!” she tried.
That did the trick. One of them moved around in front of her plane. The other plane was getting closer. She heard it clearly now. The guy gave her propeller a spin.
Come on, baby. Start up. She gradually fed the engine more fuel, struggling to control an urge to shove the throttle forward too fast and flood it. Come on. Come on. Mama is going to be a dead duck if we don’t get out of here, pronto.
Off to her right, one of the men on guard lifted his head. He’d noticed the approaching plane. Her belly flip-flopped nervously. The guard whistled and pointed toward the sky. Off to her left, she heard a shout. The leader brought his rifle down, leveling the muzzle at her.
Pancho released the brakes and gunned her engine. The plane leaped forward. She swung it to the right, toward the men, using her propeller as a weapon and sending them diving in all directions to avoid being mulched.
A crack of gunfire from behind made her flinch. She heard tearing noises behind her as bullets punched through her fuselage. “Don’t hit my wings. Don’t hit my wings,” she chanted as she picked up speed across the pasture.
She ought to turn left into the wind, but she didn’t want to give the smugglers a larger cross section of the airplane to shoot at. It would be dicey to control the plane through liftoff in a stiff crosswind, but she could handle it. She hoped.
Adding rudder into the wind, she shoved the throttle all the way forward. The plane accelerated but not fast enough to outrun the bullets flying at her thick and fast. Her urge to duck was strong, but cattle were scattered across the field, and she needed to be able to see to steer around them.
A vehicle started, its engine roaring. She took a quick look. The truck was chasing after her, with someone leaning out the passenger window to shoot at her. A bullet tore diagonally through the cockpit, burying itself in the wood next to her altimeter.
She cringed, silently begging the plane to accelerate faster, as sweat trickled down the sides of her face. At long last, the tail lifted off the ground. She had almost enough speed to fly. At least she could see over the engine to some degree now. She craned her neck up to check for cows ahead.
Clear.
She was close. So close.
The upwind wing started to tilt up, and she turned the stick into the wind, forcing the wing back down to level. The plane started to feel weightless beneath her, and a fusillade of gunfire exploded behind her. More bullets hit the back end of the plane, but then she lifted off.
The plane dipped and swerved as the flight controls she’d used to steer on the ground overcompensated for the crosswind up higher. It took a moment for the plane to stabilize, crabbing into the wind, its wings level.
She was airborne.
The tree line marking the end of the pasture zoomed beneath her, and she held the plane low, using the trees behind her for cover from the gunfire. Only when she was sure she was beyond the range of the smugglers’ rifles did she ease back on the stick and climb into the sky.
She’d made it. Alive and in one piece. She couldn’t say the same for her plane. But at least the gunmen didn’t seem to have hit the engine and, thankfully, had missed her fuel tanks.
Exultation at cheating death rushed through her.
She threw her head back and shouted at the top of her lungs, the wind tearing her whoop of joy out of her mouth.
Not that she was out of the woods yet. She was very low on gas and had to get back across the border and find Yuma as soon as possible.
Not to mention, she was now carrying several hundred pounds’ worth of tequila, which would eat up even more gas.
But hey, if she crashed in the desert, she would have a rip-roaring good time waiting for rescuers to find her while she drank her way through her unexpected cargo.
“Another plane’s coming in!” someone yelled.
Marvel jumped out from beneath her wings, where she’d been hiding from the blistering sun, and ran out to see who it was.
The local Boy Scouts had turned out to help control the crowd. They held a line between the planes and the milling people, and she ran up behind the youths to get a better look at the sky.
The Yuma airfield was big and open, free of trees because there wasn’t enough water for any to grow. Using her hand to shield her eyes, Marvel scanned the sky. Sure enough, a plane was coming in.
The pilot cut across the end of the field to pass by the office building where Joe Nikrent was positioned to mark the official time of each plane’s arrival.
Marvel squinted as she tried to assess the airplane make and model, but waves of heat shimmered in the air, obscuring the plane. She blinked rapidly and tried again. This time she made out a Travel Air with 02 painted on its tail.
It was Pancho! Relief flooded her. Marvel felt a bit guilty because other pilots were still missing, but Pancho was one of a kind.
Marvel loved her huge heart, passion for flying, and sense of humor.
Everything about Pancho was larger than life.
Marvel watched Pancho finish flying her timing pass, do a teardrop turn just past the end of the runway, and line herself up to land.
She heard Pancho’s engine cough. Yikes. That sounded like fuel starvation. Pancho was out of gas!
“Put it down fast!” she cried to her friend, even though there was no way Pancho could hear her.
The other women were crawling out from under their planes’ wings.
Pancho’s engine sputtered again.
Amelia said worriedly, “She’s running on empty.”
Marvel nodded, too tense to speak. Wherever Pancho had been, there obviously hadn’t been any gasoline. She hardly breathed as Pancho brought in her Travel Air, smooth as silk, and greased on the prettiest landing ever. Thank God. She reached up to touch her gold cross necklace in gratitude.
Instead of heading toward the parking area, Pancho taxied straight over to the fuel truck parked beside the airport’s hangar. Whether Pancho cut the engine or it quit of its own volition, Marvel couldn’t tell, but it cut out the moment it reached the fuel truck.
She took off running, heedless of the heat and the still-considerable crowd. She reached the plane about the same time Pancho jumped down from the cockpit. Marvel wrapped her up in a giant bear hug that nearly knocked them both off their feet.
“I sure am glad to see you!” Marvel exclaimed. The hug was hard and perfect until she looked past Pancho’s shoulder at something on the side of the plane. “Is that a bullet hole?”
Pancho grinned. “Wait till I tell you the whole story. Short version: I ended up in Mexico, met some bandits, got shot at, and now I’ve got a bunch of tequila in the back of my plane.”
Marvel’s jaw dropped. “All that in two hours? It could only happen to you.”
Pancho’s grin faded. “Here’s the thing. I have a feeling there was more to our Calexico flyover than just a mayor who wanted his crowd amused.”
“How so?” said Agent Pullman, who’d come over to see what had taken Pancho so long to arrive.
Pancho grimaced at him. “Promise you won’t put me in handcuffs again until you hear the whole story.”
Pitching her voice low for just the three of them to hear, Pancho said, “Didn’t it strike you as odd that Horace Aldridge took his phone off the hook while there was an air race running that he’s responsible for?”
Marvel caught Pullman’s frown as he touched one of the bullet holes in the plane. She glanced down the length of the fuselage and was horrified to see at least a dozen pencil-sized punctures in the plane’s skin.
Pancho continued, “Particularly since he knew Dr. Ayers wasn’t going to decide on the final course until that evening?” She opened her flight jacket just a bit to flash them a bottle of tequila.
Pullman’s eyes narrowed. “You willingly flew liquor into the US?”
She jerked her head toward her shot-up plane. “Does it look like I was dealing with fellas who would take kindly to learning that I wasn’t the pilot they were expecting?”
“Fair point,” Pullman conceded.
“I had to make a run for it when the real pickup plane showed up.”
Pullman reached forward, briefly touching the collar of Pancho’s flight jacket. When he withdrew his fingers, there was blood on them.
“Holy cow, Pancho!” Marvel exclaimed in a horrified whisper. “You’ve been hit!”
Pancho felt her neck just below the edge of her leather helmet. “Huh. Guess I got grazed.”
“Don’t move. I’ll go get a first aid kit,” Marvel declared.
As Marvel ran for the hangar, Pancho turned to Pullman. “When I landed, my plane got stuck in a farmer’s vegetable patch. I went to his house to ask for a shovel, but he said something strange to me.” She dropped her voice even more. “The farmer said I was late. The flyover was finished.”
“The flyover?” Pullman echoed. “You think he was talking about Calexico?”
“I don’t know of any other well-publicized flyovers taking place in this part of the world today, but how does some poor dirt farmer in Mexico know about a flyover on the other side of the border?”
Pullman rocked back on his heels. “So, the pickup of the booze was supposed to coincide with when the Calexico flyover was happening,” he mused.
“The smugglers must have scheduled their run while you gals were airborne, knowing that all eyes would be on you ladies and nobody would be watching for their plane. Not to mention all the law enforcement folks anywhere near Calexico probably got called in to control the spectators there.”