“I’ve never flown with either of you chaps before,” he explained patiently. “Before I ask you to do any fancy flying I want to make damned sure that we are all on the same wavelength.”
He was not about to take anybody’s word for it that a man knew what he was doing until he had seen as much for himself in the air! In the flying game the quickest way to get oneself and one’s friends killed was to take somebody’s word for something.
“That’s fair enough, old man,” Paul Hopkins, the dark-haired, rakishly moustachioed twenty-four-year old son of a Massachusetts banker grunted with ill-disguised angst.
Alex had been warned that the man had been thrown out of the CAF at the end of his first year at the Academy ‘despite his Boston connections’. The Hopkins were East Coast Brahmins, the nearest thing to a New England aristocracy – many of whom claimed direct ancestry, like the wastrel CAF-washout standing in front of him now – from old and great European lineages. The senior echelons of the Colonial Civil Service and the Colonial armed forces were stuffed full of ‘settler nobility’, which probably explained why the border wars in the South West had rumbled on for decades. Well, that and the unwillingness of the King’s government in England to risk a new general war with the Empire of New Spain.
“We’re just wasting time and fuel,” his companion complained.
Rufus McIntyre was a friend of Alex’s brother Bill. He was a strange man to find in flying circles, ‘churchy’, introverted and mistrustful of most of the people around him.
Alex assumed this was because, like his brother, he viewed all non-adherents to his particular form of Lutheranism, or who did not physically attend his Church as a godless waster. Unfortunately, there seemed to be an awful lot of people like Rufus and Bill around these days!
No matter what their other differences – and they had had a few of those over the years – Alex had never fallen out with his father like Bill had. Bill had turned on their mother shortly before her death; practically accusing her of ‘denying the Lord’ her eternal soul. Still, with four siblings in the family statistically speaking at least one of them was bound to be a complete shithole!
That was Bill all right and his friend Rufus had the makings of a man cast from a similar mould.
“Sorry, chum,” Alex declared, knowing arguing with the Rufus McIntyres of this world was God’s way of telling a man there were some folk it was just better to punch on the jaw the first time you had the chance. “You’re flying on a provisional licence issued by the Committee of the Albany Flying Club and if you want to fly over regulated territory south of Montgomery and Albany Counties, I’ve got to certify, personally, that you are ‘safe and responsible pilots’. So, what we’re going to do is take-off, fly over Indian Country, do some formation flying, a few rolls and turns, nothing very demanding and return to Shaker Field. Our aircraft will be checked out and then all being well, later this afternoon after I’ve sorted out the documentation, we’ll head down to Jamaica Bay. If you don’t like it, sorry.”
The rules were nothing if not inflexible.
If either of the other two men wanted to find somebody stupid enough to ‘certify’ them without seeing them in the air that was their funeral. Alex had no intention of putting his life or his job on the line for a couple of strangers.
“Bill said you’d…”
Alex cut off Rufus McIntyre.
“Yeah, well you can write what Bill knows about aeroplanes on the back of a very small postage stamp and,” he was losing his temper, “if you’re thinking, for a single minute, of trying to bribe me, forget it, chum!”
While Paul Hopkins had lost his sense of humour, McIntyre looked as if he was on the verge of physically attacking Alex.
Not for the first time the former CAF ace asked himself what he was doing ‘accommodating’ these men. He had planned to take his Bristol V down to Long Island that morning; press and movie photographers were always crying out for rides when something was going on in the Upper or Lower Bays. With all the ships assembling for the great Fleet Review tomorrow it was like Christmas had come early for the ‘gentlemen of the press’ and they all wanted a personal ringside seat.
A Bristol V was a perfect ride for a man with a camera, it was slow, steady, relatively safe in comparison to the higher performance Bulldogs and a lot cheaper to hire than the plusher, more comfortable modern aircraft, few of which had open cockpits these days. The real top-notch ‘snappers’ hated having to do their work from behind a tiny window in a pressurised cabin. The windblown splendour of a Bristol V’s front cockpit provided the best seat in the house.
“We’re paying you well, Fielding!” Hopkins reminded him.
“No, you’re paying me what I could have made, easily, already today flying snappers over the fleet moored in the Lower Bay. I only took your commission because my brother asked me to!”
Life was never this complicated in the Air Force!
All Alex wanted to do was check out that Hopkins and McIntyre were competent pilots, sign off their papers and make sure they did not get lost flying down to the field at Jamaica Bay. What they got up to after that was none of his business. As for their little detour up into the Mohawk River country he had threatened to buzz his little brother’s ‘love island’ and he meant to do it in style!
Alex was never going to be ecstatic about Abe and Kate – even though she was a really nice girl, and apart from being a pure-bred Iroquois, Mohawk or whatever, he would have had no beef about her tying Abe around her little finger. He was no bigot. He had nothing against the Iroquois Nation, as a kid he had had Indian playmates like the others – not Bill, of course, he had always been a first-rate prig – but that was when they were children and everybody had to grow up sooner or later. Heck, it was not even legal to marry a squaw in the twin-colony!
“If you want to fly ‘legal’ you’ve got five minutes to mount up and follow me into the air,” he decided, obviating further debate. He was doing them a favour. If they expected him to kiss their arses too, that was their problem not his!
This said he turned on his heel and marched purposefully towards his Bristol V. His two unhappy ‘wingmen’ were flying almost identical Bristol VIs, theoretically a few miles an hour faster in level flight. However, since both Paul Hopkins and Rufus McIntyre had loaded what looked like enough luggage for a six-month stay on Long Island into the front cockpits of their aircraft they were the ones who were going to have trouble keeping up with Alex.
The Mark V was an out and out scout, the later Mark VI was a strengthened, and therefore several hundred pounds heavier, variant designed for a bombing role. Equipped with a slightly more powerful – but again, heavier – engine the latter’s take-off and landing characteristics had never been as friendly as the earlier models.
He had suggested that they lighten their loads; leave anything they were not going to need overnight in Albany for safekeeping in the hangar. Bristols were good, sound machines unless you overburdened them; notoriously, the CAF had only ever recruited jockey-sized men as air observer-gunners on its Bristol IV, V and VI squadrons.
The two men had refused point blank to lighten their aircraft.
Alex had done his duty, warning them that once they filled up their fuel tank ahead of the flight down to Jamaica Bay their aircraft would fly like beasts, especially if the wind from the south west freshened that afternoon.
Leppe Island here we come!