Air Force Eagles Read Online Free PDF

teeth.
    Immune to the grin, she asked, "When are you going to stand up for your rights?"
    "Look, pussycat, your dad's already helped me, just getting me assigned at Muroc. I can't just go in and demand to fly a secret test aircraft."
    "Some secret! Everybody knows about it. The real secret is that the test pilot is a jigaboo. And a civilian at that!"
    "Don't talk like that, honey. Marshall got two kills in Italy, and he's one hell of a pilot." He put his hand out to her shoulder and she shrugged it away.
    "If the Air Force can let a West Virginia hillbilly like Yeager fly Bell's airplane, I don't know why they can't let you fly the McNaughton. You know what they're saying out at Pancho's—the first man to break the sound barrier will be able to write his own ticket."
    The reference to Pancho Barnes's ramshackle watering hole, which served as an informal club for the top test pilots, made him uncomfortable. A light drinker—there were only so many coming to him—he felt completely out of place at the boozing contests that went on there every night. Ginny loved it, drinking hard and then often going off to ride horseback with the other pilots at night. At least he hoped she was riding horseback.
    "Yeah, sure, if he doesn't bust his ass! Nobody knows what will happen. The airplane could break up or go out of control."
    "Yeager wouldn't be so hot to trot if he thought he was going to kill himself. I can't believe it's any more dangerous than what you're doing."
    He hated it when she tried to sound knowledgeable. She couldn't tell a brick from a biplane, but that didn't keep her from speaking with authority. It came with the rich-father territory.
    "Honey, I don't want you to do anything dangerous, I just want you to get ahead. If I don't push you, you'll just hang around flying airplanes for the rest of your life. There's no money in that, and no rank, either."
    She was right. He liked to fly airplanes—and that wasn't enough to get ahead, not in peacetime, not with the Air Force melting like a lump of ice cream on a hot sidewalk. Promotions had been assured during the war, as the military expanded and the leaders were killed off. As soon as Japan surrendered, the services had collapsed in a frenzy of demobilization.
    Ginny bored in. "Tell me this. How could a die-hard Southerner like Troy McNaughton ever let a colored pilot fly his airplanes anyway?"
    He tossed a towel on the molding heap in the corner of the bathroom. "Hell, he probably never met the guy. From what 1 hear, McNaughton's all wrapped up in their secret programs in San Diego. I've never seen him at Muroc."
    They were quiet for a while, then she said in the low, slow voice she used when her mind was made up, "You know, maybe I'll just talk this over with Daddy. He'll know how to handle McNaughton."
    *
    Muroc Army Air Base, California/October 7, 1947
    Trucks jammed with racks of communications and telemetry gear were parked around the hangar doors like jackals feeding on a carcass. As signals from the twin SCR-584 radars filled the green screens, the men inside moved like a surgical team, keeping conversation at a minimum, eyes constantly flicking from the instruments to the aerial ballet unfolding above them.
    A technician in a white jacket reached across the console to adjust a knob and the operator slapped his hand away.
    "Hands off, Jack, I got this baby tuned the way I want it."
    The team members' edginess was honed by the pervasive film of white grit intruding into instruments and lungs, as abrasive as the long-running competition between Bell Aircraft and McNaughton to build the first supersonic plane. Bell had gotten off to a faster start, but it had followed a more methodical test program; so far its bullet-shaped XS-1 had reached only .92 Mach. The McNaughton had been delayed in production, but its test program had rushed it ahead of the Bell entry. Last week, the swept-wing MS-447 had touched .95 Mach. Today it was going to try to go supersonic, to