We accelerated, the force pressing us back in our seats. Faster and faster, the engines roared like thunder until we hit decision speed, and Evie pulled back on the yoke. We bounced, rumbling along the tarmac. Then stillness. The plane tipped back as it lifted off its nose gear. Then off the main gear. We climbed, with nothing but air all around us. Nothing but the bomber’s pulse, the drone of engines, and flight.
The engines revved to a higher pitch for a moment, and the plane jumped, leaping a dozen feet in altitude before settling into the ascent. Cook grabbed the back of my seat.
“Did you do that?” Evie said.
“No.” I shook my head and gripped the yoke, waiting for another jump. Every plane had its quirks; we’d just discovered this one’s.
“Ooh,” Evie said. “This baby has some kick!”
We soared. Half-moonlight turned the desert below an icy silver. Scrub made weird shadows. The Gulf of Mexico to the east shone like mercury. We climbed to 10,000 feet and cruised.
We glowed like an opalescent beacon.
My parents had been barnstormers. Mom was one of the original Ninety-Nines, Amelia Earhart’s association of women pilots. I had a blurry photo of Mom and Dad from the Twenties, my mother posing on the top wing of their biplane in a swimming costume, my father by the propeller, hands on his hips, looking like a fighter ace with his white silk scarf, leather flight cap, and handlebar moustache. These days they ran a charter service, flying rich tourists and thrill seekers up and down the California coast. They also headed up the local Civil Air Patrol.
The image I had of them, great pilots and adventurers, was a tough one to live up to, but I tried. I liked to say I was flying before I was born. I got my pilot’s license when I was sixteen. I worked for them as a pilot and mechanic while I was still in high school. This was after Lindbergh’s famous flight, long after the Great War, and flying had become routine, losing some of its romantic appeal. It was a job, something I’d done my whole life. I was practical about it. I took it for granted.
Evie, on the other hand—Evie’s voice got low and breathy when she talked about flying. She was from a good Pennsylvania family, a debutante, went to Smith. She rode in a plane for the first time on a charter—like my folks ran—while on vacation at Martha’s Vineyard. It hooked her. A lot of pilots had stories like that—one flight, and it was like they’d been called by God. Of course, piloting wasn’t something a well-bred girl from Philly aspired to. She talked an instructor at a local airfield into giving her lessons, she scraped the money for it together by selling her old clothes, and got her sister to lie for her and say she was spending all that time at the library. Somehow, she managed to learn, managed to solo, and got her license. For her, every hour of flight was stolen. Even now that she worked as a pilot, she treated flying like a treasure that might be taken away from her. In the cockpit, she was like a kid in a candy store, all eyes and smiles.
Three hours into the flight, Evie still smiled, a vague, dreamy look in her eyes. She w
as humming. “Though there’s one motor gone we can still carry on, comin’ in on a wing and a prayer . . .” I don’t think she realized just what she was humming.
Cook was not prone to conversation. He’d spent most of the flight writing in a little notebook with a pencil stub, looking around occasionally with a tight, anxious expression that I chose to attribute to his earnest youth, or possibly a fear of flying—or of flying with the current pilots.
“You fly much, Doctor?” I said at a moment when the pencil rested. Cook had made himself as comfortable as possible, sitting wedged behind the two seats, knees pulled up.
“Not really. I’m quite interested in flight, but the Army wouldn’t take me for pilot training. Bad eyes,” he said, pointing to the glasses. “So I’ve made the psychology of flight my specialty.”
“Psychology of flight?”
“Yes. What particular stresses do pilots experience, why do certain types of men seem drawn to becoming pilots more than others. Could the Army develop a profile for choosing the most psychologically fit pilots? Not something too many people have thought about. That just means the subject is long overdue for study. Don’t you think?”
At this point, with thousands of planes dropping bombs all over Europe and the war in the Pacific escalating, with factories turning out hundreds more planes every month, the Army couldn’t be too picky about who it chose to be its pilots. Evie and I wouldn’t have been here if it could.
“So what does psychology have to do with this plane?”
Cook pursed his lips. “That’s need to know.”
Smirking, I turned away and flipped through the bomber’s log. It only had a dozen flights logged since it was commissioned, one of the first batch of B-26’s to enter service earlier this year. I recognized the names of the two WASP who had delivered it from the factory. It had been designated for use in towing targets at the gunnery school at Harlingen. But right below that assignment was a mark, a star and the word “special,” that I’d never seen in a log before. I assumed that had something to do with Cook’s experiment.
On the last two flights, the pilots hadn’t checked out. They might have been under orders for security reasons, to cover up what they’d been doing. But then why log in? Or why not log false information? Avery hadn’t given us any instructions about altering the log. Nothing gave any clue as to why this bomber shone like a carnival midway.
“So what have you found out?” I asked. “Does flying attract a certain type of person? Are certain types more likely to become pilots than others?”
“Well, men who become pilots tend to be risk takers. They tend to have a greater sense of adventure. They also tend to be dreamers. Less practical than the average individual. They have a greater sense of, oh, I don’t know. Aesthetics. They’re more sublime, if you will. Army pilots write more poetry than officers in other branches.”
“I could have told you that without the Ph.D.” Just about every pilot I knew started out as a kid who looked skyward when the drone of an aircraft engine sounded overhead. “So how about women?”
He shrugged, wedging himself more firmly into his nook. “I haven’t studied the psychology of female pilots.”
“Figures.”
I didn’t think they’d ever be able to quantify the old dream of flight that had once sent people jumping off hillsides in paper wings. It wasn’t about numbers or types, but about becoming part of the sky, becoming free of gravity. Some people said an airplane was a crutch, substitute, not like being a bird at all because of the steel and engines and fuel. But there was something about the airplane, too—all that power, responsive to the touch of a finger. All that power at my command. I was in control of the height of modern technology, the pinnacle of what civilization had produced: a 35,000 pound machine that could fly.
It was about being part of the machine. Learning every nuance, reacting in the blink of an eye. The machine did the flying, yes, but it couldn’t fly without the pilot, without me or Evie or any of the guys in the logbook. So it wasn’t the plane flying at all, it was us.
According to the logbook, the previous pilot had been Captain Elliot Boyd.