Chapter 17 #2
The same thing could happen in wet snow, so she switched tactics, giving her engine some power.
It was a gamble with her tail already off the ground and her front wheels still sticking and refusing to roll smoothly.
The front end of the plane lifted just enough to take weight off the tires but not so much that she was fully flying again.
She skimmed over the deepest dirt in the middle of the field and slowed the plane closer to the edge of the field, where fewer airplanes had chewed up the soil.
“Down!” she ordered the tail. The clay abruptly lost its grip on her front wheels, and her plane leaped forward like a bullfrog.
She sucked in a breath through gritted teeth and pulled the power all the way back once more.
The tail settled, bouncing a little when it hit the ground.
That was good news, at least. The small rear wheel hadn’t bogged down.
She added in a touch of power to keep her aircraft moving and taxied off the landing square and onto a blessedly much firmer taxiway.
People ran up alongside the plane, cheering at her. She held a slow, steady pace until she reached the marshaler, who directed her into a spot beside Louise Thaden’s Travel Air. Louise had gotten here ahead of her? How? Her plane was faster than Louise’s. Odd . . .
Unable to work it out, she shook her head to clear it and stood up in her seat to wave at the crowd of people closing in around her, now that her propeller had stopped spinning.
That’s when her knees started to buckle and threatened to fold completely.
She caught the edge of her windshield to steady herself.
She really shouldn’t have skipped breakfast that morning.
All the women had, though. They’d been too busy to eat as they went over their planes with fine-tooth combs to make sure no sabotage had gone unnoticed.
But hey, at least she hadn’t landed on her nose. Speaking of which, she looked over at the plane that was just now being pushed off the landing field by a dozen men. It was bright red. Had a number six on the tail. Amelia.
Hope she’s okay! Marvel searched the area near the Vega and breathed a sigh of relief when she spotted Amelia standing in front of her plane, her hands planted on her hips in what could only be disgust. That alone told her Amelia was unharmed, even if the Vega did appear to be sporting a broken propeller.
Marvel looked down the line of planes that had arrived ahead of her.
Pancho’s plane wasn’t here yet. They took off each day in reverse order of position.
Since she was ahead of Pancho in the race, Marvel had taken off behind Pancho, by several minutes in fact.
Pancho should definitely be here by now.
“Are you coming down?” a spectator demanded. “I want your autograph, and my girl wants a picture with you, miss.”
She had an obligation to make nice with the fans but remained standing in her cockpit and counted the planes. Fifteen. Four were missing. And her friend Pancho was one of them. Looking up, she scanned the sky, searching for any dark specks of planes coming in for a landing.
Nothing.
A chill raced down Marvel’s spine. It was possible the saboteur had succeeded after all.
Pancho decided to follow a set of railroad tracks through the desert for the first part of her journey to Yuma. But when the tracks ended just outside Calexico, she needed to find other landmarks. She searched the horizon for a water tower with a city name on it.
Nothing.
She looked at her compass, but in the heat thermals rising from the desert, her plane was bouncing around too much to get an accurate reading from it.
She checked her time. She should’ve flown over a couple of road intersections and a small town by now, but she hadn’t spotted any of them.
Which meant she was off course. She just didn’t know how much or in which direction.
Hopefully, she was still on the American side of the border.
She spied something in the distance ahead, interrupting the otherwise unbroken horizon.
Was that a dust trail? Airplanes made them when they landed. Maybe that was Yuma! She flew until she was approximately over the spot where she’d seen the dust trail, yet there was no town of Yuma, no crowd, and no airport. Hell’s bells. She was lost.
While she was known for her temper, she muzzled it tightly when she was flying.
A pilot had to concentrate and always stay ahead of her plane.
There was no room in the cockpit for losing her cool.
The first order of business was figuring out where she was, which was going to be nearly impossible from the air, given how few landmarks there were in this part of the world.
Landing was the best and fastest way to find out where she was, provided she could take off again.
She looked at her fuel gauge. She probably had enough to make a quick landing and continue on to Yuma.
She wasn’t carrying a full load of gas; rather, she had just enough to make it to Yuma with a bit to spare. The added weight of extra gasoline would have slowed her down and cost her precious time in the race.
Dipping her wingtip, she circled the little building she had spotted near the dust trail.
She made out some cattle lounging in the building’s shade.
Where there were domesticated critters, there were people.
On cue, two people came out of the structure and looked up at the sky.
They must have heard her plane. A decent-sized pasture stretched away from the building.
She circled around it, lining herself up into the wind, noting sagebrush and mesquite trees dotting the field.
She would need to steer around them . . .
and any cattle grazing out there in the scrub.
As Pancho descended, she suddenly realized her mistake.
Just as the dust trail she’d followed had been swept away by wind, as she got close to the ground, she was suddenly caught up in a dust devil so thick she couldn’t see anything more than a few yards beyond the nose of her plane.
Her engine coughed. It must be sucking in enough dust to foul the carburetor.
The thick, madly swirling dirt turned her windshield brown, making it impossible to see anything. Including the ground.
Sweet baby Moses going down the Thames River in a basket!
Marvel climbed down from her plane and signed enough autographs to make her hand ache. It was the only way she could make a path through the dense crowd. Every time she finished an autograph and the person stepped aside, she jumped forward into the momentary gap.
It was a frustratingly slow way to cut a path toward the other pilots clustered around Amelia and her Vega, but Marvel finally managed to join them.
At least here, the security was holding the crowd back.
She spied Agent Pullman standing with the women.
That explained why they finally had proper security. He must’ve arranged it.
“Where’s Pancho?” she wasted no time in demanding.
Her fellow aviators’ worried expressions weren’t reassuring.
“Only information we have is that there were three planes missing at the flyover in Calexico,” Pullman answered.
Marvel frowned. “I thought I saw her ahead of me at Calexico. Something must have gone wrong for her after that.”
Amelia nodded. “That would make her the fourth plane that hasn’t arrived.”
“She might be lost in the desert,” Marvel gasped.
“Or she flew too far south and is in Mexico,” Phoebe pointed out.
“If Pancho Barnes lands in Mexico, she’s going to need more than Lady Lindy to keep her out of jail,” Pullman said grimly. “A great deal more. She could be jailed and tried for being a smuggler, or even charged with espionage.”