Pop still owned a majority of his fleet, twenty-one of the thirty-seven planes. Regardless of ownership, they were all beautifuclass="underline" six one-man Piper L-4s, eight T-6 Texas trainers, five P-51 Mustangs and the same number of P-40 Warhawks; four Corsairs, three F8F Bearcats, and a pair each of Spitfires, Trojans, and German Messerschmitts. He pampered them like children, taking great pride in the fact that several had been lifted literally off the scrap heap and reconditioned with his own hands.
Pop drained the rest of his special and watched the mist starting to break outside. He didn’t have the spare parts anymore to make planes fly, and the men flying them were living out ancient fantasies in skies that didn’t scorn them. It was nice when you thought of it that way. Pop could see the bitterness and despair disappear every time they took to the air. They would have been much happier in a real battle.
Keysar Flats, he figured, might be the end. Having their site yanked right out was a crippler, a total loss on the money he’d spent getting his fleet there. Looking for another site had started as a pain in the ass and then the weather fucked him sideways, so it probably didn’t matter anyway.
Not surprisingly, then, Pop Keller could recognize a man in trouble because one looked back at him in the mirror every day. He knew he was seeing one in the nervous man swallowing coffee at the bar. They had the Lonesome Horn all to themselves, and Pop Keller didn’t feel like being alone.
He pushed his ragged, arthritic bones from his table and slid onto the stool next to the stranger’s.
“Mind if I join you?”
“Be my guest,” Christopher Locke told him.
Pop Keller ordered another special and looked the man over. His eyes were drawn and bloodshot, his hair matted down by the morning rain.
“You look like hell, friend.”
Locke almost smiled. “Believe it or not, that’s the nicest thing anybody’s said to me in quite a while.”
“Been up all night?”
“Yeah.”
“I figured as much. I knew I recognized that look…. Can I buy you a drink?”
“Just coffee.”
“Some food?”
“I’m not hungry.”
“Gotta eat, friend. I turned sixty-six last week and I ain’t lost my appetite yet.”
Locke stared down into his coffee, wishing the old man would go away. He was depressed and frustrated, and wanted very much to be alone with his misery. He had been up the entire night driving the roads of Keysar Flats, losing his way enough times to lose track of which roads he had been on and which ones he’d missed. It was no use. The airfield sheltering the cropdusters was too well hidden. It was over and he had lost. There wasn’t a single soul in the world he could turn to for help.
“Sometimes it helps to talk things out, friend,” the old man suggested.
“Not this time.”
“Friend, I’ve had a load of trouble in my life and finding a sympathetic ear always seems to ease it. Let me try and help you.”
Locke looked into the wizened, liver-spotted face beneath a sparse crop of white hair. “Unless you’ve got an army regiment or air force squadron waiting close by, there’s not a damn thing you can do.”
Pop Keller smiled.
Dogan was confused when the men who’d converged on his hotel room had not killed him. They roughed him up a bit, refused to respond to his questions, and then transported him handcuffed in the back of a van to what must have been a safe house over the border in Virginia. There he was locked in a small living room with steel-barred windows and plenty of guards beyond the door. Dogan spent the ensuing hours pacing anxiously. What was going on? What did the men have planned for him?
It must have been closing in on noontime when the door to the room finally opened and a small, balding man wearing a pair of steel-rimmed glasses entered.
“I’ll tell ya, son,” he said, addressing Dogan in a comfortable southern drawl, “somebody should dig up all the channels of this piss-ass government and plant new ones. Woulda been here sooner but word takes a damnable long time to travel.” The figure stepped closer and extended his hand. “The name’s Roy, son, Calvin Roy. Had your lunch yet? I don’t know ‘bout you, but I’m starved.”
They drove north along U.S. 83 in Pop Keller’s battered pickup.
“You sure they’ll be at that airfield?” Locke asked him. “What did you call it?”
“Stonewall Jackson Air Force Base. Been shut down for fifteen years now. But the runways are still kept in condition and there’s plenty of hangars, barracks, and large storage areas. I should know. I rented the fucking place four months back. Somebody canceled our show eight days ago. They didn’t give no reason.”
“You’re lucky they let you walk away alive.”
Pop’s fingers tightened around the steering wheel. “Let me tell you something, friend—”
“Call me Chris.”
“Yeah, Chris, I went through the big one: WW Two. I shot down lots of Jap planes and I walked away from every battle. I don’t intend to break that streak now.”
Locke searched for a clock in the pickup but found none. “How many planes do you have?”
“You’re talkin’ ’bout some pretty heavy flyin’ here, Chris. My fighters got lots of guts but not an awful lot holdin’ them together. Twenty’s a reasonable figure to get up, give or take a few.”
“I can’t ask you to go along with this. The risks involved would be—”
“I don’t give two shits about risk,” Pop snapped.
“But your men, they—”
“My men feel like I do. We’re all beaten old farts, Chris boy. We’ve all been dreamin’ about fighting one last battle for years now. ‘Sides, cropdusters ain’t exactly about to offer much of a contest in an air-to-air battle with my fleet. Hell, I still got planes that’ll go three bucks easy.”
“They’ll have taken other precautions.”
“No sweat. We’ll come in low and fast and the bastards’ll never know what hit ’em.”
Locke shook his head. “No, I can’t let you do this. Just get me to this air force base and I’ll take it from there.”
“Alone, friend? Now that wouldn’t be too smart, would it? Come on, you’re doin’ us a favor. Flyin’ on weekends like a bunch of circus clowns has beaten the life out of my men. They all left their best days behind, and anything that helps them get those days back is okay for sure. They joined up with the Devils and stayed ’cause at least they can still fly and maybe pretend. Well, they won’t have to pretend today.”
Locke hesitated. “You’re sure about Stonewall Jackson being the place?”
“I’m sure it’s the only site in the Flats capable of sustaining the kinda operation you described ’cause I spent plenty of time lately lookin’ for others. And what better reason can you think of to cancel my gig all of a sudden?”
Chris shrugged, knowing he had to give in to the old man for lack of any other alternative. “Just volunteers, Pop, we only take volunteers.”
Keller smiled at him. “Wouldn’t have it any other way, friend.”
The Flying Devils had set up camp not far from the North Wichita River, fifteen minutes flying time from Stonewall Jackson Air Force Base. Locke stepped down from Pop Keller’s pickup and felt as if he were stepping back in time. The trailers and storage trucks had been arranged in a circle surrounding a huge mass of green tarpaulins, which covered the fleet. It almost looked like the men of the traveling air show had arranged their vehicles to protect against Indian attack.
“Gus, get the boys together!” Pop shouted to a toothless, barrel-chested man hammering away at a stripped engine.
“What you say, Pop?”
“Hurry up’s what I say, asshole! We got us a war to fight today!”
“Huh?”
Minutes later Pop Keller was standing on the roof of a trailer with the Flying Devils logo fading from its side. Fifty or so men gazed up at him intently as he recited his own colorful version of Locke’s story. Chris scanned them, saw not hesitation and fear but determination and resolve in their faces.
“This here’s the front, boys,” Keller said, nearing his close, “and we’re the last thing that stands between these murderin’ bastards and America. Some of us knocked plenty of Nazis and Japs from the sky and others took out their share of Gooks a few years later. I say it’s time to hit the skies for real again!”
“Yeah!” came the resounding chorus.
“Who’s with me, boys?”
Every hand went up.
“Let’s get to it, then!”
With roars of enthusiastic delight, the men of the Flying Devils headed toward their positions, each knowing his proper place. For them the preparations were probably the same as those for a show, yet Chris could not help but be amazed at the precision of their motions. In less than a minute, the tarps were all ripped from the planes and left to flutter in the wind. Locke looked at the ancient fighters and felt his heart sink. Somehow he had expected fresh, glowing Warhawks and Cobras shining proudly in the sun. What he saw instead was a squadron of battered, broken airplanes that looked as fragile as the balsawood fliers boys toss around their backyards. The Devils had done their best to restore each fighter’s original paint job, but patchup work was so evident that not a single plane could boast a consistent shade.
Locke sat down against a trailer. For a while the sight of broken men readying broken airplanes for battle had an almost comic texture to it. Then suddenly Chris realized there was nothing even remotely comic about what he was watching. The Devils moved confidently, even as they spit tobacco and huffed for breath. Engines were checked, propellers oiled and greased, glass cockpit covers washed squeaky clean. Gun sights were set and huge ammunition belts for the front-mounted machine guns were snapped home. For those planes still capable of holding bombs, dark-green projectiles were loaded beneath the wings. Wooden blocks were yanked from under the fighters’ tires and mechanics rushed crazily from one to the next, tightening a lug or fastening a bolt. When they wiped the sweat from their brow, they left a trail of grease behind. Their white T-shirts grew filthy from the grime.
Chris found himself rising involuntarily to his feet. The fighters were all being spun around now to face the same direction — toward the highway. A few pilots gunned their engines and taxied forward on their own. The ancient fighters seemed brighter now, more alive, as if they understood the role they were being called on to perform and were responding to it.
“We’ll be off the ground in fifteen minutes, Chris,” Pop Keller told him, the pain of his arthritis vanquished along with thoughts of unpaid debts and bankruptcy.
“What are we gonna use for runways?” Locke asked.
Keller’s eyes gazed out at U.S. 83. “The highway, friend. We’ll place trailers across to block off a big enough stretch. Yup, it’ll do just fine.”
Four prairie dust specials were starting to make themselves felt in his stomach, and Pop moved off toward the water jugs to drown the damn booze. Locke looked back at the fighters and watched the pilots donning their flying gear. Other men were still prepping guns and passing out parachutes.
Keller returned, dragging his sleeve across his lips. “We’ll be able to get about twenty of them in the air like I said and about half are equipped with rockets.”
“How many men per plane?”
“Most are outfitted to take two but we’ll stay with one. Cropdusters ain’t the fastest planes on the market but we’ll still need to cut out as much excess weight as possible to be sure of catching them.”
While the plane engines idled, all the men gathered together, and Pop Keller moved toward them. The average age of the Flying Devils looked to be about fifty-five, with variations twenty years in both directions.
“Boys,” Pop Keller began, eyes plainly on his watch, “we ain’t got much time. I ain’t much good at speakin’ so I’m just gonna speak my mind. It’s gonna be dangerous for us on this raid. Our best bet is to strike fast and hard and take these bastards with their pants down. If it looks like none of the dusters have took off yet when we get to the base, both Red and Blue wings will go in blasting. If some dusters have made it up, and that’s my guess, we’ll use a different strategy.” Pop Keller searched the crowd. “Mickey O.,” he called out.
A burly, white-haired man wearing an oil-stained shirt stepped forward. “Right here.”
“You’ll lead Blue Wing on the air-to-ground assault while I take Red Wing air-to-air after any of the bastards that already took off. Let yours and the other Pipers head the attack ’cause you each got six rockets and the best aim by far. We all gotta be careful,” Pop went on, speaking to everyone, “’cause catchin’ them with their pants down don’t necessarily mean they’ll be holdin’ their dicks in their hands. They’ll be protected, boys. Make your ammo count and remember we gotta knock these dusters down before they can drop their stuff.”
The men of the Flying Devils glanced at each other.
“Boys, I’m not much of an expert on this scientific junk but it’s a plain fact that the scum we’re goin’ up against means to do a swift number on the old U.S. of A. Well, I fought the Nazis and the Japs to keep that from happening and I’ll do it again today, tomorrow, or any other day it’s called for.”
The Flying Devils started hooting and hollering. Some of the men whistled through their parched lips.
“Ready, boys?”
A triumphant scream rang out.
“Then let’s getto it!”
And with that, the Flying Devils scattered toward their fighters, or the trucks and trailers that would follow them to Stonewall Jackson on the ground. Members of the ground-based crew helped the leather-clad pilots into their cockpits and waited for the thumbs-up sign as engines were gunned and propeller blades spun to life. A chorus of sputtering followed, quickly drowned out by the sound of gunned engines revving again. The assault squadron was ready for take-off, with nineteen fighters, six of which were Piper L-4s carrying rocket-propelled warheads under their wings.
“Ain’t gonna miss your own show, are ya, friend?” a voice shouted at Locke over the roar of the engines.
Chris turned to Pop Keller. The old pilot adjusted his goggles and then zipped up his brown leather flight jacket.
“I saved you the rear seat in my personal sweetheart,” Pop said.
And together they trotted toward a red P-40 Warhawk with the gaping mouth of a shark painted on its nose.