of paste, long-handled brushes, and stacks of freshly printed posters. On the front of every one was Miller’s smiling face, half again as big as life, and the slogan, HELP TR WIN THE WAR. VOTE MILLER-VOTE DEMOCRATIC.
Into the buckets went the brushes. Matter-of-factly, the work crew went about the business of smearing fresh paste over Flora’s posters that had gone up only the day before. She stared in mute outrage that did not stay mute long. “They can’t do that!” she snarled at the policeman.
“Oh, but they can, Miss Hamburger,” he answered, respectful enough but not giving an inch. “They will. It’s a free country, and we let you have your posters and your speech and all. But now it’s our turn.”
Up went Daniel Miller’s posters, one after another. “Free country?” Flora said bitterly. Some of the last of the crowd she’d drawn were hanging about, watching with anything but delight as her message was effaced. If she shouted to them, they’d resist these paperhangers. New York City had seen political brawls and to spare since the rise of the Socialists. But, after Remembrance Day the year before, could she contemplate another round of riots, another round of repression?
“Don’t even let it cross your mind,” the cop said. He had no trouble thinking along with her. “We’ll land on the lot of you like a ton of bricks, and hell will freeze over before you get yourself another peaceable rally, I promise you.”
“Do you mean we, the police, or we, the Democratic Party?” she demanded. The policeman just stared at her, as if the two were too closely entwined to be worth separating. In fact, that wasn’t
She glanced at Herman Bruck. If he was ready to raise hell to keep the Democrats from silencing her posters, neither his face nor his body showed it. Maybe he’d avoided the Army by the simple expedient of being afraid to fight. Or maybe, she admitted to herself, he’d simply done a good job of figuring out how likely-or how unlikely-they were to succeed here.
“Democrats are free,” she told the policeman. “Socialists and Republicans and other riffraff are as free as the Democrats let them be.” He stared steadily back at her, a big, stolid man doing his job and doing it well and not worrying about the consequences of it, maybe in honest truth not even seeing that those consequences were bad.
Inside half an hour’s time, Daniel Miller’s posters had covered every one of hers.
Flying was beginning to feel like work again. Jonathan Moss’ eyes went back and forth, up and down, flicking to the rearview mirror mounted on the side of the cockpit. He looked back over his shoulder, too, again and again. It was the one you didn’t see who’d get you, sure as hell.
He still felt out of place, flying to the right of Dud Dudley. That was Tom Innis’ slot in the flight, no one else’s. Or it had been. But Tom was pushing up a lily now, with a rookie pilot named Orville Thornley sleeping on the cot that had been his. Thornley got endless ribbing because of his first name, but he didn’t seem to be the worst flier who’d ever come down the pike.
“A good thing, too,” Moss said, his eyes still on the move. The limeys had managed to sneak a few Sopwith Pups across the Atlantic, and, if you were unlucky enough to run up against one of them in a Martin one-decker, odds were the War Department would be sending your next of kin a telegram in short order. A Pup was faster, more maneuverable, and climbed better than the bus he was riding, and the British had finally figured out how to do a proper job with an interrupter gear.
Just thinking about the Pup was plenty to make him grimace. “Good thing they don’t have very many of ’em here,” he said. “It’d be a damn sight better if they didn’t have any at all. Damn Navy, asleep at the switch again.”
That was not fair. He knew it wasn’t fair. He didn’t care. The Atlantic Fleet had been built to close the gate between Britain and Canada, and to help the High Seas Fleet open the gate between Germany and the USA. It hadn’t managed to do either of those things. Among them, the British, the French, and the Confederates made sure none of the Atlantic was safe for anyone at any time, and the Germans remained bottled up in the North Sea.
He looked down. The front over which he flew was quiet now, nobody doing much of anything. The Canucks and the limeys had run out of steam after pushing the U.S. line four or five miles farther from Toronto, and the Army hadn’t yet tried pushing back. It was as if the mere idea of having had to fall back so startled the brass, they hadn’t figured out what to try next.
Dud Dudley waggled his wings and pointed off toward the west.
No sooner had the thought crossed his mind than a single aeroplane dove at his flight from the rear, machine gun spitting flame through the prop disk. He threw the joystick hard over and got the hell out of there. The flight exploded in all directions, like a flock of chickens with a fox in among them.
Tracers stitched their way across Orville Thornley’s bus. It kept flying, he kept flying, and he was shooting back, too, but Jesus, Jesus, how could you keep your gun centered on the other guy’s aeroplane when he was thirty miles an hour faster than you were? The short answer was, you couldn’t. The longer-but only slightly longer-answer was, if you couldn’t, you were dead.
Moss maneuvered now to help his flightmate, trying to put enough lead in the air to distract the limey bastard in the Pup from his chosen prey. He couldn’t keep a bead on the enemy aeroplane. Everything they’d said about it looked to be true. If it wasn’t doing 110, he’d eat his goggles. You couldn’t make a Martin do 110 if you threw it off a cliff.
And climb-The enemy pilot came out of his dive and clawed his way up above the U.S. machines as if they’d been nailed into place. And here he came again. Yes, he still wanted Thornley. He’d probably picked him for easy meat: last man in a flight of four would be either the worst or the least experienced or both.
The kid was doing his best, but his best wasn’t good enough. The Pup got on his tail and clung, chewing at him. Moss fired at the limey, but he was a few hundred yards off, unable to close farther, and he didn’t think he scored any hits.
Thornley’s single-decker went into a flat spin and plummeted toward the ground below, smoke trailing from the engine cowling. Moss didn’t see Thornley doing anything to try, no matter how uselessly, to bring the aeroplane back under control.
No time to worry about that now anyway. The Pup was like a dragonfly, darting everywhere at once, spitting fire at the American aeroplanes from impossible angles. Bullets punched through the canvas of the fuselage. None of them punched through Moss. None of them started a fire, for which he would have got down on his knees and thanked God-but he had no time for that, either.
And then, as swiftly and unexpectedly as it had appeared, the terrible Pup was gone, darting back toward the enemy lines at a pace that would have made pursuit impossible, even had the shaken Americans dared to try. Maybe the bus had run low on fuel. That was the only thing Moss could think of that might have kept it from destroying the whole flight. What would have stopped it? It had the American aeroplanes outnumbered, one against four.
Landing was glum, as it always was after losing a flightmate. “What happened?” one of the mechanics asked.
“Pup,” Moss said laconically.
The fellow in the greasy overalls bit his lip. “They really as bad as that?”
“Worse.” One word at a time was hard enough. More would have been impossible.
Along with Dudley and Phil Eaker, Moss went into Shelby Pruitt’s office. The squadron leader looked up at them. He grimaced. As the mechanic had, he asked, “What happened to Thornley?”
Instead of answering directly, Dudley burst out, “God damn it to hell, when the devil are we going to be able to sit our asses down in an aeroplane that’ll give us half a chance to go up there and come back alive, not one of these flying cart horses that isn’t fast enough to go after the Canucks and isn’t fast enough to run away from ’em, either?” All of that came out in one long, impassioned breath. On the inhale, Dudley added, “Sir.”
Major Pruitt looked down at his desk. The flight leader had told him what he needed to know. “Pup,” he said. It was not a question.
