- PROLOGUE -

NOVEMBER 17, 1962; NEAR WASHINGTON, D.C.

I was feeling pretty good about myself, floating up in a crystal blue sky, the roar of the engine in the Dauntless loud but smooth, the vibration strong but familiar. We were five thousand feet above the rolling and pebbled green Virginia countryside, with the tranquil, herringbone-patterned blue ocean off to my left and no destination in particular on my mind. Orville had been good about loading the tank with fuel and we could probably fly a couple of hundred miles out and back with no problem.

If I wanted to I could have worried about Tony. It seemed that finally he was out of our lives; I could stop thinking that at any moment something might go wrong and Tony would be at the bottom of it. He had been a challenge, but I didn’t need any more challenges. It was time to get back to normal – if there was such a thing. I wanted to enjoyed the sparkling day and the Dauntless and freedom from all the problems on the ground.
What made it even better was Louise, beautiful, warmhearted Louise–all that tumbling black hair and quartz green eyes and flawless skin, her willowy figure and dazzling smile. Her love and loyalty. Louise fit in perfectly with the sparkling day and the exhilaration of flying. I was glad the thing with Judy was over, even as I recalled the mistakes I had almost made. Well, a couple I had made, and hadn’t completely corrected. I had gotten off easy because Lou had been forgiving, maybe too forgiving. Maybe I was being generous about letting myself off the hook. Probably. But that didn’t mean I had to think about it right then, when I had a classic World War II Navy airplane in mint condition under (and around) me, plenty of fuel and a glorious day.
Especially with Louise riding in the observer’s seat at the other hand of the long, glass and steel canopy. We were both in our pilot’s gear, leather jackets and helmets and goggles, looking quite professional. At a distance you wouldn’t have known we were both seventeen years old—particularly with our goggles down. At the moment, mine were up and the canopy was partly open so I could feel the fresh air.
"How’s it going back there?" I said into the microphone.
"Great," Louise said, her voice sounding rich and smooth, even over the crackling radio connection. "The weather and the view couldn’t be better."
"Keep your eyes open for enemy planes," I joked.
Louise laughed.
I saw the shadow before I heard the roar, and I almost ducked as it swept over us, the rush of air shuddering the Dauntless, while I squinted into the sun, trying to identify the intruder.
"Who was that?" Louise asked.
"I’m gonna find out."
Damn it, I was frowning, and this wasn’t a day for frowning. We were past all that—weren’t we?
I pulled the stick back and to the left, lifting the plane and following the trail of the intruder, but he was racing away from me and up into the sun where I was nearly blinded. I’d forgotten to pull down the glasses and when I did, he was gone.
What a jerk! I thought, figuring it was over and I could resume my peaceful afternoon.
The shadow and the roar again. This time closer; this time I did duck, but then the so-and-so throttled back and I was gaining on him. I could see it was a Bf 109—a World War II Messerschmitt fighter, black with white markings. And the pilot was grinning a nasty grin beneath his goggles and helmet, waving not a greeting but a vulgar gesture.
"Tony!" Both Louise and I said it together.
I made some unprintable comments, under my breath. Aloud, I said, "He’s supposed to be in French Algeria."
"Doesn’t he care that police on three continents are after him?" Louise said.
"How did he get hold of the plane?" I said.
I thought of radioing the field, and probably I should have. Instead, I tried to reach Tony by radio, but he didn’t answer—just sat on our wing, grinning that cold, mirthless grin. He gestured again, pointing one hand at us and another at his chest, indicating a challenge. I didn’t know what the challenge could possibly be.
At that he did a wing-over, and the 109 roared away. I gathered that I was supposed to follow. I knew I shouldn’t have, but I did—which was pretty dumb because his plane was much faster than our Dauntless.
"Willi!" Louise said.
"I know," I said, but I kept pulling back on the throttle. Tony allowed us to wing alongside, and then promptly pushed his stick forward into a sharp dive. Well, the Dauntless was a dive bomber, and in that maneuver I could match him pretty well. At the back of my mind was the thought that I was using up a lot of fuel in this game, but I didn’t want to cave in. Although Louise wasn’t complaining, I realized it wasn’t much fun sitting backwards in the rear cockpit, facing up to the sky.
Tony surprised me by keeping his plane in that steep dive. We were getting lower all the time. At close to three hundred miles per hour the ground was coming up fast, postage stamp fields were becoming the size of book covers and then suitcases and then—I chickened out and pulled up the nose of my plane. My ears were pulsing and I was breathing rapidly, and it seemed almost as if the bottom of my wings had scraped the live oaks edging the fields. Tony had pulled out safely, too.
"Louise?"
"If you’re asking my permission, the answer is ‘No!"
I could hear a smile in her voice. Louise was just as gutsy as I was.
"Here comes your pal!" Louise said.
There he was—climbing alongside me, still grinning, making exaggerated gestures as if I had crashed into the trees. Blowing a kiss to Louise.
"He’s lucky the weapons on this plane have been decommissioned," Louise said. Her voice sounded chillingly cold even over the radio. Louise had suffered through a nasty run-in with Tony; one she was not likely to forget.
He was gesturing again, describing a barrel loop with his hands. I wasn’t going to do that. But Louise surprised me by saying, "Take him!" And I did, following his every move, a little behind him, a little slower. This was dumb, but the guy really had me pumped up. I liked to think I was as good a pilot as he was, although I didn’t have as much flying time. I was well aware my equipment wouldn’t do fighter plane tricks, but somehow I kept being drawn into his games. Showing off. Turning the Dauntless into a P-51. No way. But there I was, looping all over the sky, and also beginning to wonder when someone was going to report our antics. Maybe, when I got back to the field I’d find an FAA guy waiting for me and that would be the end of my flying career. Steve would be angry, very angry. I was betraying his trust.
"Wake up!" Louise yelled.
ZOOOOM! Tony raced over us, shadowing us, shaking the plane. And then, in spite of myself, I was following him. Once again he throttled alongside. Once more with the gestures. Both hands making like planes, aiming at each other, then breaking off. The symbolism was clear. Dogfight. I laughed. Why? How?
"You doing okay?" I asked Louise.
"I’m glad I didn’t have lunch—I also wish I was the one flying this thing."
"You don’t like my style?"
"You’re the one who’s having all the fun. I’m just an observer."
Tony was still waving signals. Oh, well, it was just a game.
He peeled off and I knew he was going to try to get behind me—ride my tail like in a real dogfight. I pulled back on the stick, climbed a ways, then peeled off into a long, arching curve. Damn! He had outsmarted me and his 109 was above and behind us. In a real fight I’d have been mincemeat. I yanked up abruptly, at the same time cutting speed, so it looked almost as if I would back into him. That surprised him and he broke off.
For a moment I was behind him, but he was maneuvering the 109 in such a waggle of moves that even if I’d had real guns and bullets he would have been an extremely elusive target. Then he peeled off again and dove; I tried to follow, but he brought his plane into a tight turn and there he was, off to my right, about to aim at me, and if I’d had chalk to keep score with, I’d have put an "x" on my forehead. I tried to pull away and use the same kind of evasive moves he did, but the Dauntless was bigger and slower and he was gaining. Frustrated, I pushed forward on the stick.
"Hold on!!" I told Louise.
Diving, I’d move faster. And if I could pull up quickly enough, he might lose contact. I yanked the stick sharply; the Dauntless shuddered but responded, and I figured I’d fooled him.
Then I heard the clatter. What clatter? Something wrong with my ship? What was going on? I was still maneuvering, dipping and swaying, when I noticed the pattern on my right wing. A pattern of rips or tears—or bullet holes.
That was crazy. I had worked on the Messerchmitt myself. I knew the guns hadn’t been fired in almost twenty years. I couldn’t put it all together. My mind was racing, but I couldn’t accept the logic of the whole thing.
"I saw flames and tracers," Louise said, her voice rising. "Were those blanks?"
"We’re hit!" I yelled. "Ripped up the wing a little."
And then the clatter again. And another set of rips a foot from the first group on the wing. I couldn’t fool myself any longer. As incredible as it seemed, the facts were clear: the crazy bastard was firing at us. This was no game—this was calculated murder.
"Let’s get out of here!" I yelled.
"Roger!" Louise responded.
I jammed down on the stick, banked sharply to my left, then pulled back, shoved her into level flight and hit the gas. Nothing made sense. The guns on all of the planes in the International Squadron had been stripped down, rebuilt and spiked. There was no ammunition at the field. This had taken planning. Planning and stealth.
I glanced at my fuel gage. Less than a quarter tank. I realized that was part of Tony’s plan—get me involved in all kinds of maneuvers that would use up fuel. I knew the 109 had an extra tank—I’d seen Tony install it himself a few months ago. He must have learned a lot flying for the French Air Force in Algeria, but fitting the plane for extra range had nothing to do with engaging in a real battle with real bullets, a mile up over Crossroads, Virginia.
I’d have to radio the tower. I hit the button and spoke into the mike. But there wasn’t any sound, not even a crackle. The radio was dead. Couldn’t be; I’d spoken to the tower just before takeoff. I looked out the windshield at the antenna. No antenna; Tony had shot it away.
"Radio’s dead," I said to Louise, but of course she couldn’t hear me.
Was she okay? Involuntarily I turned around, but our seats were so high I couldn’t see her. I yelled her name, but there was no response.
Tony was gaining on us. I couldn’t outrun him, but if I got close enough to be visible from the field, I didn’t think he would keep firing his guns. Of course, how had he dared to do it in the first place? This was a man bent on revenge, whatever the cost.
I wheeled over into a steep dive, pulling more G’s than I cared to, but briefly able to widen the gap between us. I pulled out sharply, and the Dauntless almost stalled, then the faithful old GE 300 HP roared to full throttle. Just in time: I saw the smoke of tracers whiz by a fraction of an inch from my cockpit.
"Louise!" I called out again. "Can you hear me?"
I looked back and saw her hand touch the canopy and then fall back, as if she was trying to answer. I don’t think I had ever been as frightened as I was at that moment. I was sure Louise had been hit by Tony’s guns. How badly?
"I’ll get us out of this!" I yelled. I hoped I sounded more confident than I felt. But I had to concentrate on flying the Dauntless and getting us both to safety. If I could.
The sun was sinking lower in the sky, and I tried to maneuver so he would have trouble seeing us. I peeled off time and again, dipped and turned, making sure never to present an easy target. But the Dauntless was rapidly running out of fuel, and I was still many miles from the field. We both had parachutes, of course, and Louise had taken a couple of practice jumps, but I had never used one, and if Tony was willing to shoot at our plane, maybe he would fire at us floating helplessly below a canopy.
I wasn’t so scared I was immobilized, but the tension was growing, and I was hunching my shoulders so tightly they were beginning to ache. There was a sore spot in the middle of my forehead and my eyes were coming out of my head. Still, I kept doing one evasive maneuver after another, trying not to repeat myself, hoping to avoid creating a pattern that he could easily follow. But even as I swerved, the bullets chattered by or clattered against the plane. One of the good things about the Dauntless was that it had more armor than most military aircraft and self-sealing fuel tanks, and I was pretty sure some of Tony’s machine gun fire had hit the tank area. Sooner or later….
More than once, I had a flashing vision of Tony’s face racing past, lips pasted back in a hideous grin. He thought he had us, and maybe he did. I was desperate, not knowing what evasive action to take, tension and fear draining my energy, as my mind whirled about searching for a way out of this trap. Just then, the 109 locked on behind us, and the rattle of bullets became the shatter of glass, as the canopy exploded all around me, shards and shrapnel tearing at my jumpsuit and helmet, blood from somewhere blurring my goggles and a sharp pain piercing my right shoulder.
One chance. I shut down the throttle, jammed open the dive brake—the "Swiss Cheese" flaps—cutting speed abruptly, and with the wind tearing at my head, jerked the plane slightly up and sideways, into the path of the 109. Tony tried to avoid me, but my wing clipped his, almost slicing it in half, before the impact began crumpling the wing of the Dauntless. Control wires snapped, the ailerons failed.
"You gotta jump, Lou! You gotta jump now!"
Looking back, I saw that Louise’s section of the canopy was shattered, too, but her helmet began rising above the top of her tall seat. She half waved at me.
I pulled back on the stick, forcing what was left of the Dauntless into a stall, and while it hung for a moment in the sky, I slipped from my shoulder belts, and hurled myself out of the cockpit, barely clearing my own aircraft as it shuddered past.
I was in free fall, now, spinning head over heels in the biting cold air. I waited as long as I dared and pulled the ripcord, not knowing whether Tony’s fire had damaged the chute. The rustle of silk hurrying out, a yank and a jolt, and there I was, floating down over the Potomac, perhaps a thousand feet in the air.
I couldn’t see Louise. Where was Louise?
Tony. I turned in the rigging trying to catch a glimpse of him. At first I couldn’t find him in the sky. Then a black blur and a twisting shape, perhaps a bird—but no, not with wings like that, spinning downward, relentlessly, nose pointed at the earth.
Then I saw her parachute, drifting slowly downward. She had managed to escape the plane! But her figure was limp in the rigging, head slumped forward, arms hanging down. Tony’s plane was falling through the sky, aiming straight at her. There was nothing I could do.
A roaring sound told me the Dauntless was close, and the shadow told me it was spinning in a flat circle above me. I slipped the chute trying to dodge it. And then I realized I was going to drop into the Potomac River, and it was an open question whether the Dauntless would hit me first.