Chapter 4
CHAPTER FOUR
I should be there by now.
I’m so late.
The deadline to arrive—with her airplane—in Santa Monica, California, for the first-ever cross-country air race for women pilots was in barely an hour. Would they disqualify her from Sunday’s race if she didn’t land by the deadline at Clover Field, the race’s starting point?
Where’s the blasted airfield?
She glanced at the fuel gauge, and the needle was bouncing off empty.
Refusing to acknowledge the rising fear vying for her attention, she made a shallow turn to search for the airport.
An occasional vague shape of a barn was black within the fog, but that was it.
Everything else—every landmark, every sign of her destination, even the ground—was obscured into invisibility.
Several Los Angeles skyscrapers poked out of the fogbank east of her, which told her she was in the general vicinity of Santa Monica. But below, there wasn’t even a hint of the long rows of landing lights that should mark a runway in poor weather like this.
She was rapidly running out of fuel and out of options.
Breathe. It’s not the first tight spot you’ve been in.
No need to start planning her funeral. Her plane was light and compact, and it glided like a dream. If she had to make a dead-stick landing with no engine, this was the plane to do it in.
Phoebe smiled to herself. It was also one of the fastest racing planes in the world.
Clayton Folkerts, the plane’s designer, had personally modified her souped-up Warner engine to coax every ounce of power out of it.
She was going to beat everyone in her engine class to Cleveland.
The race had two divisions—one for large engines and one for lighter engines. She would race in the second division.
If she didn’t crash-land out here in the middle of nowhere. And if she didn’t miss the check-in.
Had she miscalculated her distance flown?
Only one way to find out. Using the compass bouncing around in its liquid-filled ball on her instrument panel, she pointed her plane more or less due west. The ocean should be just ahead if she was close to Santa Monica. She flew no more than a minute before spotting what she was looking for.
The dark-blue expanse of the Pacific Ocean yawned in front of her, free of fog, its pale strip of beach sprinkled with houses.
Bingo.
Also . . . ouch. The sun blazed directly in her eyes. She couldn’t see a thing. Just red spots dancing in front of her. She turned back toward shore, pulling back on the stick so as not to lose altitude in the turn.
She headed as close to true east as she could with a bouncing compass. Clover Field was two miles inland from the coast, due west of Los Angeles.
She had to be close.
But her fuel tank was nearly dry. One way or another, she would be on the ground very shortly.
No way did she want to crash this brand-new racing plane that had been built especially for her. It even had its name painted on the side, Miss Moline, in honor of the city in which it was built. This would not be her final flight in the sporty little plane if she had anything to say about it.
The edges of her cockpit windows were starting to frost at the corners. Not good. Ice was deadly to airplanes, degrading lift from the wings and fouling engines until they quit. The tip of her own nose confirmed the temperature was dropping up here at altitude. Fast.
The fuel gauge needle now rested firmly against the empty peg, unmoving.
That’s it. Time to land, airfield or no airfield.
This could turn into her first dead-stick landing. But she could do it. A surge of determination filled her.
Just another first to collect.
She was the first female licensed transport pilot. First female aviator to race against male pilots. First woman to fly solo over the Continental Divide. Record holder for the highest female parachute jump and current world record holder for the highest altitude flown by a woman.
She could certainly land in some piddly field.
She hoped.
Jaw set, she guided her plane in a wide circle in search of a good spot to land.
She needed a field that was flat, open, and clear of fog.
No tall crops, and especially no trees or power lines at either end of it.
Ideally, unplowed. It was okay to land in a plowed field if one could see the furrows and land in the direction they ran.
But landing perpendicular to furrows was a recipe for tearing off a landing gear or flipping onto one’s nose and having a serious wreck.
The engine coughed.
Just a few more seconds, baby.
Spotting a thin patch in the fog with a dark smudge of ground faintly visible below it, she lined herself up with what she hoped was a field. She pointed the nose into the wind for her approach, just as if the hypothetical field were a real runway.
She descended into the fogbank, and everything went gray and featureless around her. She was flying completely blind here. Heck, she barely had any outside references to tell her which way was up and which way was down, let alone what was hidden under the fog . . .
No time to think about that. I’m out of gas and have to land, no matter what’s down there. Now.
She forced herself to go through her usual landing routine, peering out the side window to check for obstacles in the landing zone—not that it did any good today.
Lower and lower she flew, heading for the ground.
The air grew mistier around her as the fog thickened. She even lost sight of the brightness of the sky overhead. Grimly, she froze her hands on the controls, praying she’d been straight and level before she’d been fully blinded by the fog.
She peered ahead over the engine cowling, terrified of what was going to pop up in front of her.
Please be a field. Please be a field.
She spied ground beneath her and made a quick correction to level the wings. A brownish-green patch passed beneath her, and then, all of a sudden, a black field loomed in front of her.
Thank you, Lord.
There was too much fog to make out whether it was plowed. Not that she had any choice now. She didn’t have enough fuel to climb out and try to set down somewhere else.
She didn’t allow herself to jinx the landing by overthinking it. She just concentrated on keeping her wings level and speed steady. The tail drifted slightly to the right, and she added left rudder pedal to straighten it out. She held a steady, shallow descent down the final approach.
The engine sputtered.
“C’mon,” she urged her plane. “Just a few more seconds.”
The engine cut out, then caught again just as she lost sight of the ground over her nose. She prayed there were no furrows and held the plane steady as she cut the throttle and pulled back on the stick, flaring to land.
Dear Lord, please don’t let me crash again.
Tucked in her luggage compartment was a cane. She needed it to walk, thanks to breaking both her legs in a bad flying accident nine months ago. The controls had seized up, and she’d spun in at high speed. It had been a miracle she’d survived at all. But hey. She was still alive and kicking.
And she was still flying. Being first in this dangerous profession meant constantly dancing with risk . . . and nearly as constantly dancing with death.
Phoebe felt the twist in her belly she always got when she was getting close to the ground. She eased back harder on the stick, bleeding off airspeed, holding the nose off the ground until she ran out of airspeed completely, but making sure not to flare so sharply she’d hit her tail first.
Her front wheels hit the ground.
The plane bounced.
Took a big hop and hit again.
And then she was down, the field whizzing past, bumping across clumps of weeds and clods of dirt.
She fought the controls, keeping the wings level as best she could.
The rudder pedals rattled beneath her feet as she stood on their tops, engaging the brakes.
Her barely healed leg bones shouted in protest at getting knocked around so hard.
She moaned in pain but grimly continued to slow the plane.
Something huge and dark rushed at her out of the fog, right in front of her.
Oh, crud. A tree.
She released the right brake, and the plane swerved left. But not soon enough. She heard a crunch of wood splintering as the plane’s right wing hit the tree trunk. She cringed, sucking in a sharp breath.
The impact bled off much of her remaining speed, though, and she came to rest another fifty feet or so past the tree, tilting gently to the right on the uneven ground.
The engine gave one last cough and stopped.
Silence settled around her.
Oh, man. She had a race to fly in the day after tomorrow. She didn’t have time to get a whole new wing installed.
Be okay, baby.
Frantic to assess the damage, she slid back the left-side window and angled her torso out of the cockpit. It was awkward to climb out of in the best of circumstances, but with her bum legs and the plane tilted away from the ground on this side, it was doubly awkward.
She ended up catching her foot on the wing strut, which ran diagonally from just above the landing gear to the midpoint of the wing, and fell, landing ignominiously on her keister beside the plane.
Oompf. Not her best dismount ever.
Beneath the plane’s belly, she spied a farmhouse through the fog. If she wasn’t mistaken, a pale face peered out of one of the ground-floor windows in her direction. Great. A witness to her humiliation. But maybe the owner had a phone she could use to call for help.
She rolled over onto her hands and knees and used the wing strut to drag herself upright.
The worst bone break, still healing in her right leg, throbbed painfully.
She limped around to the far side of the plane to have a look at the wing.
The last foot or so of its tip was mangled, with pieces of the wood frame and shredded fabric dangling from it.