Chapter 20
CHAPTER TWENTY
Pancho felt bad as she watched Amelia prop her hands on her hips and glare at the busted propeller on the front of her plane. But the truth was, Amelia crashed all her planes.
Amelia said wearily, “A mechanic’s already on his way to Phoenix to pick up a new propeller, but he won’t make it back here in time to get it installed before takeoff time this afternoon. I’m out of the derby.”
Pancho winced at the crushing disappointment in her friend’s voice. She responded, “We could wait to take off until it’s installed. We forced Ayers to change the route. I’m sure we can make him delay the start a few hours.”
“You all go on and race without me. This derby was never about winning for me. It was about proving I can fly long distances by myself.”
Amelia was making lemonade. Every last one of them knew that recipe. And how much it stung to squeeze those lemons.
Marvel piped up. “I’d be happy to wait a few hours to start if it meant you could keep flying with us.”
The other women who were gathered around Amelia’s busted plane agreed.
Amelia’s expression softened. “You gals would do that for me?”
“This is about women flying,” Pancho stated firmly.
“The trophy and prize money are nice, but I’m here to prove women are just as skilled pilots as men.
Call Phoenix. Have them tell the mechanic to grab the new propeller and get back here on the double.
Meanwhile, the rest of us will go sign autographs and make so nice with the crowd that the local race officials will want us to stay a little longer. ”
“I must say, I’m shocked in just the best way possible.” Amelia smiled at the cluster of women. “It’s truly my honor to be in your ranks.”
“Aw, shucks. Don’t make us cry in front of the fans,” Pancho replied drolly. “Go call Phoenix and find out if the mechanic’s there yet.”
Amelia hurried toward the hangar.
Pancho looked at the horizon. Ruth Elder, Bobbi Trout, and Claire Fahy were still missing. They might have made the same mistake she had and accidentally flown to Mexico . . . or might have suffered sabotage like Thea.
Agile like a bird in flight was how Claire Fahy thought about her Travel Air. It loved to fly as much as she did. She’d had this plane for almost two years and knew it like the back of her hand. Indeed, when she flew it, she and her plane felt like two parts of a whole.
The wind was nearly as loud as the engine, but a blissful silence came over her every time she left the ground and soared up in the realm of angels.
Pairs of crisscrossing metal wires ran between the upper and lower wings on each side of her plane, and when the wind vibrated them, they made a faint, harp-like sound.
The sound changed, depending on her speed, and right now they were singing the way they did when she was going very fast.
Before going to bed last night, she’d replotted her course to account for the Calexico flyover.
Her map was now crowded with contradictory marks because there’d been no time to get a new map.
It was irritating, to say the least, as she squinted at her map now.
She did, however, feel a certain satisfaction about how she and the other pilots had forced Ayers to back down.
Normally, she would fly cross-country at a higher altitude than this, but the trade-off of not landing at Calexico had been the women agreeing to line up close together and fly over the airfield low and slow so the spectators could get a good look at them.
She figured it would cost her more gas to climb to altitude again for the second part of the flight than it would just to continue on to Yuma at about five hundred feet.
Of course, that meant it was so blistering hot that not even the 150-mile-per-hour wind alleviated it.
The sun felt as if it were cooking her face and head, and her mouth was bone-dry.
Not only would she love a sip of water right about now, but she wouldn’t mind pouring some over the top of her head either.
Suddenly she heard a twanging sound. For a second, Claire thought she’d imagined the sound coming from her right. She scanned the right pair of wings. Both looked fine, but then she spotted something flickering behind each wing, a metallic shine of something fluttering off the trailing edges.
What on earth?
She stared more closely and identified what she was looking at. Horror ripped through her. Those were two ends of a wing wire dangling in the wind.
Alone, each of her wings was quite fragile. But when tied together with thin but strong steel wires, they became a structurally sound unit that could withstand turbulence and the various pressures and loads put upon them.
She powered back smoothly but quickly, slowing the plane as close to stall speed as she dared, taking as much wind pressure off her wings as she could.
The second wing wire was now taking the entire strain of keeping the two wings from pulling apart. It was all that stood between her and potential disaster.
She looked down at the ground in alarm. Her husband, a test pilot, had access to articles about how parachutes performed in testing, and he’d told her under no circumstances to bail out of her airplane under a thousand feet above the ground.
She was around five hundred feet in the air now, too low to use her parachute if the wings gave way.
Would the plane hold together as she flew to Yuma and came in to land?
She heard another twang . . . Her gaze snapped to the other side of the plane. Another set of dangling wires was whipping around in the wind.
Sabotage.
Not in a million years would a wing wire spontaneously fail on each side of a plane at almost the exact same moment. She didn’t know how the wires had been sabotaged, but she didn’t have the slightest doubt that was what had happened. Curse and rot whoever did this!
She considered making an emergency landing.
Contrary to popular belief, deserts were not composed of miles of flat, smooth sand.
The terrain below was ragged, dotted with rock outcroppings, and crisscrossed by countless small gullies and larger ravines, cut by rain and wind and time.
As far as she could look in any direction, she didn’t see any safe landing spots.
Not to mention she could be out here for a week without anyone finding her.
And she only had enough food—and more importantly, water—for three days.
How dare someone do this to her beloved plane!
Furious and determined to tell everyone exactly what had happened, she vowed silently to get this plane down on the ground safely and make sure every reporter in Yuma knew her plane had been intentionally sabotaged.
Waves of heat rose, buffeting her plane with increasing intensity.
Every bump made her heart skip a beat. She begged whatever deity looked over flying fools to hold her wings together just a little longer.
The flight was interminable. Slowing down not only doubled the time it took but also greatly decreased the wind and its cooling effect.
She wasn’t sure if her wings falling off or heatstroke would kill her first.
At long, long last, the Yuma airfield came into sight. She would’ve cried if she had any moisture to make tears. She still had to land, though, and not snap a wing off doing so.
She didn’t bother passing the timing station.
She was much more concerned with just getting safely on the ground.
She elected to put the plane down straight ahead.
The bit of tailwind she would pick up would lengthen her landing rollout some, but the landing field was spacious, and fortunately, the spectators were completely off it.
She gulped and sent up a quick prayer as the plane started its final descent. Then she lowered her chin and set her jaw. Here went nothing.
Pancho’s head whipped up as the Yuma announcer called excitedly over the speakers, “Folks, we’ve got a plane coming in! Looks like our aviator has been out in the sun too long . . . She’s coming in backwards!”
A ripple of laughter rose from the crowd.
Pancho didn’t join in. If a plane hadn’t bothered to fly over the timing station and was coming in with a tailwind, it had a problem.
“It’s a bi-wing,” Amelia asserted.
“That’s Claire, then,” Pancho responded. “Bobbi Trout’s in a high-wing Golden Eagle, and Ruth Elder’s flying a Swallow that’s also a monoplane.”
Pancho watched the way Claire’s Travel Air was flying and frowned. “Something’s wrong. Her wings are moving around too much. They’re . . . flapping. I’ve never seen my wings do that before.”
The other Travel Air pilots concurred worriedly.
“Hold her steady,” Pancho muttered.
A gust of wind whipped across the field. The bi-wing wobbled again, its wingtips bouncing up and down loosely.
Phoebe chanted directions to Claire under her breath. “More left rudder. Throttle back to idle.”
Marvel added, “Ease up on the nose. Not too much or the wind will make you drift sideways.”
Louise murmured, “Easy. Keep the wings and wheels level. Bring up the left wing!”
At the last possible second before touching down, Claire leveled out the wings and kicked out the rudder, lining up her fuselage with her direction of travel. Both tires touched down, sending up a plume of dust behind the plane.
“Well done!” Amelia declared.
A flashbulb exploded noisily, startling Pancho. She’d been so intent on Claire’s landing, she hadn’t noticed photographers and reporters converging on them.
“Tell us, Lady Lindy. Why do you think this airplane came in against the traffic flow?”
“Miss Marvel, did you think only God could help this pilot land safely?”
The pilots unanimously ignored the journalists and took off running toward Claire’s plane.
“It’s Claire Fahy!” the announcer called out. “Welcome to Yuma!”
There was a round of applause from the crowd.