Josh did as the colonel ordered. A grinning mechanic handed him two bags of flour and then showed him how to use the speaker tubes to communicate with the pilot, Mitchell, if he didn’t feel like screaming at the top of his lungs. Mitchell started the engine and the mechanic spun the propeller, and they started bouncing down the dirt field.
“Don’t worry about freezing to death, Lieutenant; you won’t be up all that long.” They cleared a stand of trees by a few inches and climbed only a little. “And we won’t be going so high that you won’t be able to breathe. That doesn’t happen until about ten thousand feet.”
Josh didn’t know whether to feel reassured or not. The plane banked and Josh had a marvelous view of the camp and what he presumed were targets. He’d quickly realized that the shapes were intended to be ships and the collections of poles and canvas mimicked warships’ superstructures. The size of the targets told him that German battleships were what they were going to go after.
“Lieutenant, what we are going to do is very simple. I’m going to fly over the target and you’re going to drop a flour bag and try to hit the damn thing anywhere you can. The bags weigh twenty-five pounds each and will be awkward to handle, so just do your best. I don’t expect accuracy from you, only an understanding of what we’re doing out here and what we’re up against.”
Mitchell banked the plane again and came straight in on the port side of a target ship. “Drop when you’re ready,” Mitchell said.
Good god, Josh thought, we’re only about twenty feet off the ground, or ocean, he corrected himself. The bag was heavy and awkward to handle, but he managed to hold it over the side.
“Some day soon would be nice,” Mitchell snapped.
Josh dropped the bag and twisted to see. The plane banked and he spotted a white blob and a puff of dust on the ground about a hundred feet short of the outline of the hull.
Mitchell laughed. “Actually, that wasn’t half bad for a first try by someone who’d never been on a plane. Grab another bag and we’ll do it again.”
They did and, this time, Josh dropped with more decisiveness and confidence. He still missed but was much closer. Mitchell landed the plane and they got out, which was just as well as Josh was starting to feel very cold. Now he understood why pilots were heavily bundled up even in warm weather.
“Not bad at all for a rookie,” Mitchell said. “A few more tries and you’d be hitting the target with monotonous regularity. Now you can tell Sims how easy it is. But tell me one thing, Lieutenant.”
“Sir?”
“Could you hit the target at night with fires burning all around you and with a score of assholes with machine guns trying to blow you out of the sky? And, oh yeah, your target might just be moving erratically at twenty knots an hour in an attempt to shake you off.”
Josh saw the point. “I hope I would give it a helluva try, Colonel.”
“Good answer. Now watch.”
A group of small planes lifted over the hill and descended in an attack pattern. The flour Josh had dropped had been washed away by the ground crew and the new pilots had a clean target. Twelve bags were dropped and seven of them hit.
“Good, but they can and will do better. Thank God we don’t have a shortage of gas or, for that matter, flour.”
Josh looked around at the number of other pilots who’d gathered near them. He was shocked to see that some were women. Mitchell commented that, yes, a dozen or so were women, but that all were civilians.
“And if Admiral Sims is concerned about the fair sex getting into combat, tell him not to worry. I have no intention of letting women fly when we do attack.”
Josh understood. Mitchell was covering his ass. When push came to shove, there would be little anyone could do to prevent a civilian woman from getting into her plane and doing whatever the hell she wished to help her country. Josh felt a surge of pride for the volunteers, male and female.
Sunlight was just starting to fade and Mitchell said that Josh would stay the night. When he protested that he really should get back to San Francisco, Mitchell laughed.
“Why I’ll bet you got a girl back there, don’t you? Well, I’ll just bet she’d like you alive and in one piece, now wouldn’t she? You saw how miserable that road was in the daytime, now think of your driver trying to navigate that dangerous trail in the dark. You crash and your body will be eaten by bears or cougars before you can say jack shit.”
Bears? Cougars? All of a sudden a night with a bunch of crazy civilian pilots didn’t seem like a bad idea after all.
A few dozen yards away and obscured by shadows, twenty-three-year-old Amelia Earhart watched the two men converse. She was surprised to see the lone junior officer gain access to the field. Mitchell was obsessive about security, so the young man must represent someone important. Sims, she concluded.
Amelia had managed to get fairly close to the visitor and concluded that he was fairly cute but not her type. Too bookish, she thought and laughed silently. She lived for the adventure of flying.
Amelia had been flying planes for more than a year. She’d fallen in love with the freedom of flight and had taken lessons. She’d proven an apt pupil. Her family lived in Long Beach; thus, she was able to join the strange force created by General Billy Mitchell and called the “Fireflies.”
She sometimes wondered if Mitchell was aware that she and several other pilots were women. The female pilots dressed like men and didn’t flaunt their femininity. Maybe Mitchell was kept ignorant of the gender of some of his pilots, or maybe he was just desperate for qualified pilots.
Either way, she had a plane, a Curtiss JN4 biplane. As a warplane in the 1916 campaign in Mexico, it had been a failure. It was now only used as a trainer. Some had even been sold to civilians which is how she got hers.
Fully loaded with five hundred pounds of cargo, its ninety horsepower in-line engine could barely get the plane off the ground. The plane was a two seater, but Amelia liked flying alone.
Amelia also thought she’d heard the colonel say something about women pilots not going into combat. The comment made her laugh. She would do what she bloody well wished.
Sometimes the prisoners would ignore Martina Flores when she walked by the compound, except, of course, to stare at her ripe femininity. The day before she’d signaled that she wanted a distraction. She said throw stones at her.
“Puta! Whore! Bitch!” yelled the men as she strolled by. She made an obscene gesture. The men behind the wire hurled rocks, being careful to make sure none hit her.
Martina screamed back at them and threw her own rock over the fence. None of the guards noticed that it wasn’t one that had been thrown at her, and none of them noticed it really wasn’t a rock.
Joe Sullivan picked it up and tucked it in his sleeve. It was a small package. When Martina ran away, the uproar ended. As instructed, he waited a few minutes and then delivered it to Captain Rice, who took it and walked away. When Rice was in the collection of rags he called his tent, he carefully opened the package. His eyes widened. Two keys lay snug in the box. One was labeled “Main Gate,” and the other said “Armory.”
Well, well, Rice thought and smiled. The captive Americans had been in their prison near Raleigh for a couple of months and, by now, all had sharp objects they could use as knives. But a key to the German’s armory? That meant rifles. Well, well indeed.
“General Marshall, I really think you should come and look at the river.”
Marshall stood and stretched. He’d been working on yet another response to Washington outlining the futility of it all. “Thank you, Sergeant,” he said grumpily and walked the hundred yards to the ice-filled torrent.