Her Last Flight(96)

Before she left, the commandant sat her down with the map and went over the terrain, the geography of Spain. He remonstrated with her. The news from Guernica is terrible, he said. There will be frightful wounds, children maimed, the entire town destroyed.

“That’s why I’m going,” she said. “I want to help. I want to make sure Se?or Mallory is safe.”

“Do you love him very much?” the commandant said earnestly, as if the immorality of loving a man other than your husband meant nothing to him, or that a woman so great as Miss Foster could naturally love whom she pleased.

“Yes, I love him very much,” Irene said, in Spanish, and the commandant nodded, as if the matter were closed.

So she took off at dawn, after a hasty breakfast and more strong coffee, and the last thing Irene said to the commandant was that he must not, above all, tell anybody where she was, or that she’d visited the air base at all. Even your husband? asked the commandant, and Irene replied, Especially my husband.

This disturbed him, but he wished her Godspeed anyway. As she made her turn at the end of the runway and began to spin her engines, preparing to depart, she saw the fleck of him through the cockpit window, standing by himself to watch Irene Foster take off in her famous airplane from his own air base, what an honor.



The commandant warned her that as she headed north, closer to the territory held by the Nationalists, she might encounter enemy aircraft, mostly German. They did not, as a rule, go out on regular patrols, but there was still some danger that she might blunder into a bombing group. Nobody had been expecting the Guernica attack; it had occurred in the middle of the afternoon, on a market day, sunshine and stalls and fresh food brought in from the country farms, then out of the clear blue sky came the grind of propeller engines, bombs whining through the air and exploding everywhere. So keep your eyeballs peeled, Se?orita Foster, the commandant said, proud of his command of American idiom. As Irene flew northward over the deserts and plains of central Spain, she wondered if he’d learned that phrase from Sam.

Because there was no airstrip at Guernica—or if there was, it was destroyed—Irene flew to Bilbao, which was about ten miles to the west. Four hundred miles separated Bilbao on the northern coast of Spain from the air base at El Carmoli on the southwestern coast, a flight of less than three hours for such a powerful airplane as the Sirius, but Irene would be crossing the frontiers of this war twice, from Republican to Nationalist territory and back again. Later, Irene remembered thinking how remote you were, flying two and a half miles above the earth. You would never have known this country was at war: it just looked like any old landscape. First she flew over the deserts of Valencia, then the hills and valleys of Aragon that grew into the deserts and mountains of Navarre. As she hurried north, the arid blue sky took on clouds. The ground became green and fertile. She passed from Republican territory into Nationalist territory, and there was no change at all. She would not have known the difference. She crossed into the ancient country of the Basques, where the Republicans still held control of a strip of land bordering the sea. Somewhere ahead lay the Bay of Biscay, that graveyard of ships, that cauldron of notorious weather. Five miles from the coast, along a river estuary, grew the town called Guernica, of which Irene had never heard until now: a town of only seven thousand souls, but vast significance to the Basque people. As Irene began descending into Bilbao, she looked east, in the direction of Guernica. She saw only fields, some woods, wisps of smoke, roads crawling with tiny vehicles. There was something there, but you couldn’t tell what it was.



Before Irene left El Carmoli, the commandant had promised to send a radio message to Bilbao and alert them that an American airplane was on its way to provide humanitarian aid to the beleaguered Basques. Whether or not this transmission was successful, she met no resistance at all during her flight or landing, from either the Condor Legion—that was the German air force operating for the rebel side—or the loyalist aircraft doing their best to defend the region. When she put on her headset and radioed the Bilbao tower on the frequency the commandant had given her, she was given clearance to land, but there was no one to greet her, no sign at all that she was expected. She jumped down from the airplane. A few men ran past, toward the control tower. She didn’t recognize the scattered airplanes on the ground, but she saw at a glance that they were ancient and dilapidated, no match at all for the airplanes of the Luftwaffe, which she had inspected on an overseas lecture tour two years ago. Some kind of hasty grass netting covered each of them, to disguise them from above. Irene felt the sun on her neck and took off her leather jacket, but not her flight suit. She followed the men toward the tower, and just as she reached it, the faint thud of a propeller engine began to grow in the distance, from the southwest.

Irene turned and looked up at the sky. Two airplanes approached like a pair of birds, too fast and too high to land. She put up her hand to shade her eyes. What the hell are they doing? she thought, not comprehending at all for some reason. Irene had never in her life encountered an airplane that was not a friend to her. Of course she knew that this was war, that airplanes were now divided into ally and enemy, but it didn’t seem real. War was not real. Not until she heard the quick thuds of bullets, not until she saw the dirt spray up in neat, evenly spaced spouts, like a stone skipping over the water, did she realize what was happening.

Somebody shouted in Spanish. An arm fell over her shoulder and dragged her backward, into the shelter of the tower. The bullets thwacked past, the noise of the German engines ground the air. Irene was pinned up against the concrete wall of the control tower, half covered by the body of some thick-chested stranger who stank of sweat and cigarettes. He was shouting Spanish in her ear, curses or warnings, and the sound of his voice grew louder and louder until she realized that was because the engines were drawing away, that the bullets had stopped. Then the grip loosened, and Irene stepped away and turned to thank this fellow who had saved her from her own ignorance. He was a couple of inches shorter, stocky, unshaven. He looked as amazed as she was.