Glory Boys. Harry Bingham

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СКАЧАТЬ sank into a deep chair and sat slumped, hardly moving.

      Willard felt lousy, when all the time he knew he should be happy. After all, he was a lucky man, born into a lucky family.

      His great-grandfather had begun it all, manufacturing handguns and rifles for sale to the country’s wild frontier. The business had prospered. The Civil War had turned Thornton Ordnance into one of the country’s biggest profit-makers, one with international reach. The nineteenth century had been a good one for wars and the firm had benefited from every one. When the Great War had broken out in Europe in 1914, Thornton Ordnance entered its most profitable phase. Junius Thornton – Willard’s father – made money hand over fist. On America’s entry into the war, profits had doubled, then doubled again.

      But it wasn’t just Willard’s family which had been touched with magic. He had been too. Willard had been a student at Princeton when Germany, in a fit of lunacy, began unrestricted submarine warfare against American shipping, thus propelling America into the war. Willard’s studies hadn’t exactly been going badly, but they certainly hadn’t been going well. Willard happened to meet a British pilot and saw the way the man had used his war stories to pull any girl he wanted.

      And so, one sunny autumn’s day and with almost no prior consideration, Willard had taken the plunge. He’d joined up. He sought a pilot’s commission and got it. Within three months of that sunny October day, he was in France, a lieutenant in the US Army Flying Corps.

      He hadn’t been there a week before he regretted it.

      On his first flight over enemy lines, he was almost killed. On his second flight, he returned with bullet holes plugging his upper starboard wing and the tail mounting. Within three weeks, Willard could count four lucky escapes – and not one time when he’d even got a shot away at the enemy.

      That had to change and it did.

      By a fluke, Willard was transferred to the Ninety-First Squadron, under the command of Captain Abraham ‘Abe’ Rockwell.

      Before letting his newest recruit out on patrol, Rockwell ordered Thornton to take to the air, twenty-five miles behind the lines, to take part in a dummy patrol and dogfight. Willard thought he’d done OK, but Rockwell had torn Willard’s combat-flying to pieces. Over the next two weeks, he’d reassembled it, from the ground up.

      When Willard was allowed back into the air, he scored his first kill on his very first patrol. He wasn’t the best pilot in the sky, but he was no longer a dangerous novice. By October 1918, he’d brought down three German machines – just two short of the magical number, which would turn him from a fine pilot into an officially recognised flying ace.

      Rockwell had seen the younger man’s desire and, in the first week of November, assigned him to fly against the enemy Drachen – gas-filled observation balloons, that rose from fixed steel cables a mile back from the collapsing German front. The assignments were simple and dangerous. Simple, because there was nothing easier than shooting at a giant inflammable balloon. Dangerous, because the Germans curtained their precious balloons with intense and accurate anti-aircraft fire. Willard accepted his assignment gravely. Before each flight, he was so afraid, he vomited secretly in the hangar toilet. But he’d hit his targets and escaped being hit himself. On November 8, three days before Armistice was declared, Willard downed his second Drache. A Drache counted the same as an airplane. By the time peace broke out, Willard Thornton was a flying ace. He returned to America, a hero.

      He hadn’t been the bravest pilot, or the best. He hadn’t scored anywhere near as many kills as Rockwell or Rickenbacker. But none of that mattered. He was an ace – and he was stunningly good-looking. Up-close, far away, carefully staged or thrillingly informal: there just wasn’t an angle that made him look bad. Sandy-haired, blue-eyed, wide-chinned, strongly built. His smile was terrific, his eyes enticing, his mouth full and kissable. He was dazzling to look at and he knew it.

      Hollywood saw the potential and was quick to move. The studios fought to get his signature on a movie deal. One of the studios had a guy literally follow him round with a blank contract. Willard rose to the bait and signed.

      His first picture had billed him as ‘Willard T. Thornton, America’s favourite ace’. A movie-going public, still enchanted with its war-time heroes, flocked to see it. For a few brief weeks, Willard’s had been one of the most recognisable faces in America. The second picture had sold well. The next two movies had done OK. The last two had sagged, flopped, sunk from sight.

      But Willard had grown up a little. He knew enough to make a picture of his own – ‘Heaven’s Beloved, a picture of class’. He’d asked his father for finance. His father had put him in touch with Ted Powell, a Wall Street banker. Willard had made his pitch – and Powell had bought it. And although the picture was over-schedule, although Daphne O’Hara had just quit right in the middle of filming, although costs were out of control and his precious stunt plane had just crashed, Willard’s luck was staying the course.

      Ted Powell continued to believe, continued to come up with cash. The original sixty-thousand dollar loan had mushroomed. First to eighty, then to a hundred, then to one-twenty, then to an ‘open-ended loan facility’ – banker-speak for don’t-even-ask.

      Willard was a lucky man, born into a lucky family.

5

      The Lundmark kid showed up at seven o’clock sharp, with a pot of coffee and a couple of rolls.

      ‘Feeding me, huh?’

      Abe had been up at dawn, and found nobody yet awake at the hotel. Sooner than wake anyone, he’d come directly to the barn. He’d shaved in a can of hot water brewed over a primus stove, then stripped to the waist and washed under the yard pump. Right now, he was stretched out on a bale of straw, rubbing soft wax into his flying boots and mending a small tear on his jacket.

      ‘I just thought … if you don’t want it, I can…’

      ‘No, Brad, I want it. There are a couple of mugs in there,’ said Abe nodding at the rear cockpit of the broken plane. ‘Green canvas bag.’

      Lundmark approached the plane like it was holy, and came away with a single mug.

      ‘Don’t drink coffee? You’re missing out.’

      Abe sipped his coffee and took a bite of the bread roll.

      ‘We’ll get to work shall we? We’ll need to send away for a new blade,’ Abe indicated the busted propeller. ‘Aside from that, if we can find some timber and a forge, I haven’t seen anything we can’t fix.’

      ‘Really? Wow! You can get it going again, Captain?’

      ‘Careful, Brad. She’s a lady.’

      ‘Huh? Oh. I mean, her. Sorry.’

      ‘Reckon we can. First thing is to send a wire to my friends at Curtiss. Get a new blade out here. There a post office in town?’

      ‘Sure, Captain…’ Lundmark’s reply wasn’t exactly confident.

      Abe was silent for a minute. He’d flown over the town, searching the ground for landing sites. He brought the view to mind. There are an infinity of obstacles that can smash up an aircraft. A cow. A ditch. A rickety fence with a single strand of wire. A boulder. СКАЧАТЬ