Oath Bound - Book V of The Order of the Air Read Online Free PDF Page B

what the Versailles Treaty said.  It was a fighter as good as anything he’d seen in America, and he felt a chill at the base of his spine in spite of the mild weather.  They were all fighters here, pilots and aircraft; he’d felt the others sizing him up just the way he’d been watching them, assessing their skills. If war came — as always, the thought brought both worry and secret, shameful excitement. If it came to a war, the countries were frighteningly well matched.
    He shook the thought away and looked around for Henry to distract himself. The owner was nowhere in sight, however, and Lewis suppressed a sigh, tilting his head back to watch the sport plane sideslip toward the end of the runway. For a second, he thought the pilot had overdone it, but he caught it at the last possible moment, set it down neatly on the center line.  He let out breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding, and at the same moment a slim young man in a German uniform said something heartfelt in German. Probably something like “cutting it a little close,” Lewis thought, and gave him a wry smile.
    The boy returned the smile — God, he had to be twenty-one if he had earned the lieutenant’s single flash, but he looked about twelve, with that fine-boned face and big dark eyes — and said something more.
    Lewis shook his head in apology. “Sorry, I don’t speak German. Do you speak English?”
    “A very little,” the boy said, pinching two fingers together. “Parlez-vous français?”
    “Not so much,” Lewis answered.
    After a few more tries, they settled on Spanish, stumbling over the boy’s vocabulary and Lewis’s Mexican accent, but it and hand gestures were enough to make themselves mostly understood.  The lieutenant was part of the group flying the Heinkel biplane fighters, and, while he defended it loyally, he was clearly interested in both the Dart and the Hawk. In the background, the loudspeaker squawked, releasing a torrent of Italian, and another low-winged monoplane dropped out of the southern sky to line up for its pass along the runway.
    “Elly Beinhorn,” the lieutenant said. “That’s her Africa special.”
    The German aviatrix had circumnavigated the continent back in 1933. Lewis shaded his eyes, studying the plane as it passed overhead. It didn’t look much different from the other German planes in the show, and the articles praising her achievement had been regrettably short on technical details. Alma had been more than a bit annoyed. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw another pilot move up to see better. He recognized the Russian uniform first, and only then realized that the pilot was a woman, her dishwater blonde hair caught back in a fraying bun.
    The lieutenant saw where he was looking and made an expressive face.  “ Rote hexen ,” he said.  “Um, brujas rojas ?”
    Red witches, Lewis translated. It was something you’d call an all-female Soviet squadron, but he didn’t think the lieutenant’s Spanish was up to telling whether it was an official nickname or something the Germans had adopted. “They any good?”
    “They — not bad,” the lieutenant answered.  “Their planes, not so good.”
    That was pretty much what Lewis had been thinking about the Russian entry, and he nodded.
    The announcer spoke again, and the lieutenant stiffened. Lewis cocked his head, and this time picked words out of the flowing Italian:  Ernst Udet and Junkers.  This was the plane everyone had been waiting for, at least in the hangar, the new German dive-bomber that was supposed to be absolutely in a class of its own.  And Udet… Udet was one of the old aces, the men Lewis had fought over France in the last war, one of the greats. Lewis still remembered the motto painted on the tail of his plane: Du doch nicht , definitely not you. He’d come up against Udet exactly once, and, while he was still here to talk about it, it definitely hadn’t been him to bring the German down.
    The dive-bomber