Her Last Flight(45)

I replace the photograph on the line and climb back into bed. On the nightstand is the leather diary, and tucked inside are a few photographs dear to me. The blurred, sepia snap of my father is one of them. There are a couple of others. But the one I remove from the pages is the photo I took of Velázquez, just before he was reassigned back to his squadron in some RAF forward air base in The Netherlands at the end of October. Unlike Leo, he’s awake. He stares at the camera, naked and exasperated, because he wants to get back to what we were doing before, which you can imagine. His plain, wide face bears some shadow of stubble along the jaw and above his thin upper lip; his chest is dark and furry and shaped like a barrel of wine. One arm stretches toward me, as if to take the camera from my hand. His mouth is open a little, because he’s telling me that he hates having his photograph taken.





Aviatrix by Eugenia Everett (excerpt)





August 1928: Pacific Ocean



They were about nine hundred miles north of Samoa when Irene, who was piloting the Centauri at the time, noticed the fuel level was a lot lower than it should be. A minute or two later, while she was troubleshooting the problem, the right engine stopped. She swore and turned her head.

“Sam! Engine’s out!”

He bolted up from the makeshift cot, a couple of yards away. Sandy, curled up against his ribs, leapt away and scurried underneath to hide between the kit bags. “What?”

“I think something’s wrong with the fuel line! Right engine!”

Of course he couldn’t hear what she was saying. He staggered up and looked over her shoulder at the cockpit dials. Then he staggered over to the window on the right-hand side and peered at the engine, which was illuminated by moonlight. Irene wasn’t sure, but she thought he swore. Then he went to the navigator’s table. A moment later, while Irene struggled with the sagging airplane, a note came through on the clothesline: Baker Island, 102 miles bearing WSW.

She nodded and started to bank for the turn.

Behind her, the radio crackled over the noise of the remaining engine. The longwave frequency, as Sam tried to raise Samoa and the men assembled there to assist their arrival. George Morrow had arranged it all. He had negotiated the itinerary and the logistics with the navy, had confirmed the frequencies over which the Centauri and the vessels lined up along her route would communicate with each other. Had also sat for hours with Sam and Irene and a naval officer at a table covered by charts of the South Pacific Ocean. They’d dickered over islands and currents and prevailing winds and weather patterns. They had settled on the official landfalls—Honolulu, Samoa, Sydney—and also alternatives, should some mechanical fault occur, should some storm arise along their path. So Irene already knew about Baker Island. She could picture it on the map, nineteen hundred miles southwest of Honolulu, a thousand miles north-northwest of Samoa, an expired volcano colonized by coral and shaped like a potato chip. There wasn’t much in the way of vegetation, just sand and grass, which was why it made a likely spot to land an airplane in a pinch.

Irene glanced again at the fuel gauge. This was certainly a pinch.

Sam had made no move to replace her at the controls. She looked over her shoulder and saw he was busy at the navigation table, radio headset covering his ears, fingers busy at the dials. Though the engine noise was now diminished by half, she still couldn’t hear the pings of Morse code, or whether he’d been successful in contacting the navy. Sam had nearly reached the end of his scheduled two-hour nap; he’d been due to replace her within minutes. A quarter of an hour, and Sam would have sat at these controls, Sam would have possibly noticed the anomaly sooner; Sam with his experience and expertise might have been able to do something about it. Now it was too late. The sun wasn’t due to rise for another couple of hours. How were they supposed to find a few hundred acres of sand in the dark of night? How were they supposed to land on it? They had the cold, clear moon; that was all.

All of these thoughts shot across Irene’s mind one by one, without stopping for consideration. She didn’t have time to think. She had an airplane to contend with, an airplane that could putter along with one engine, as long as the pilot made the constant, necessary adjustments. Still Sam didn’t tap her shoulder, didn’t make her rise and return to her old seat. Irene kept flying. She got the knack of it. She glanced at the compass every ten or fifteen seconds, glanced at the altimeter (six thousand two hundred feet) and the speedometer (ninety-six miles an hour, much slower now) and the fuel gauge (eleven gallons remaining, dear God) in a continuous rotation. Each piece of information fed her brain. She felt preternaturally alert, as alive as an electrical wire, aware simultaneously of a dozen different things. A moment ago she had had to pinch herself to keep from dozing.

A note dragged into view on the clothesline: Maintain heading. Superb flying.

Irene was too busy to be shocked, but she felt the shock nonetheless, erupting down below somewhere, her stomach maybe. Sam wasn’t taking over. Irene was going to fly them to Baker Island on a single engine. She was going to land the airplane by moonlight on a coral island in the middle of the South Pacific, no airstrip or anything, no beacon, nothing but moon and stars.

Thank God for the full moon. Thank God for the clear air.

Irene kept one hand on the stick and scribbled on the paper with her other hand: Miles?

He replied, 86.

But that was just dead reckoning, she thought. They couldn’t know for certain. She hadn’t taken a celestial observation in two hours, and while the radio beacon in Samoa had insisted they were on course, it couldn’t tell them how far away they were, where precisely they existed on that curve drawn on the globe between Honolulu and the landing strip on Samoa. So these eighty-six miles were a guess. An answer worked out on pencil and paper. And on that estimate of distance depending the accuracy of their compass heading, and on the accuracy of that compass heading depending their ability to find Baker Island at all.