Trophy for Eagles Read Online Free PDF Page B

popular Norwegian Bernt Balchen, quiet, handsome, and an excellent instrument pilot. A good combination, and hard to beat, given that they had an excellent airplane.
    An important member of Byrd's team hovered in the background. The Tony Fokker stood quietly by the coffeepot stoking himself with granulated sugar licked from a spoon. It was an addiction; the soft-featured Dutchman often ate a bowl of sugar for dessert, and nipped at it constantly during the day. In 1914 Fokker had sold his services to Germany, and by 1918 had created the war's best fighter, the coffin-nosed D VII. At the Armistice, the twenty-eight-year-old multimillionaire fled to Holland with trainloads of planes and engines. After a booming success in the Netherlands, he expanded his operations to the United States. Self-trained, willful, and as much a pilot as any man in the room, Fokker preferred others to make the record flights, as long as they made them in his planes.
    Bandfield couldn't understand why Byrd, with his superior airplane, had not yet departed for Paris. Nor, apparently, could Fokker, who didn't bother to conceal his disapproval of the famous explorer.
    The door burst open, a barking dachshund preceding a blond giant with a hundred-watt smile that seemed to light up every corner of the room. There was a chorus of "Bruno!" as he apologized for being late.
    "I was helping a young lady start her engine"—an obviously familiar line that set the other pilots hooting and rolling their eyes.
    "Come meet our newest entrant, Bruno." Byrd looked like Jeff steering a husky Mutt as he guided the huge German to Bandfield's side. "Mr. Bandfield, Captain Bruno Hafner, late of the Kaiser's air force, now a well-known junkman about town."
    Bandfield stuck out his hand. Hafner's precisely measured hesita tion in returning the grip was exactly long enough for a jagged electric charge of mutual dislike to streak between them. Bandfield had seen the look before in the eyes of the fraternity men at Berkeley whose cars he'd fixed, vapid John Held caricatures who tendered him the ignition keys as if their fingers were tongs. Hafner marked Bandfield down as the troublesome sort of enlisted man, the smart noncommissioned officer whose "sirs" were always a half beat away from courtesy and who always had to be reminded of his place.
    The big man nodded abruptly and turned away, leaving Band- field standing, once again a green freshman embarrassed by what he was wearing, how he looked, and where he was from. In a single glance Hafner had charted the difference between haves and have-nots, nobles and commoners, the adept and the maladept.
    If the chemistry had been different, Bandfield would have told Hafner that in flying school he had learned all about the German's wartime career, and had even seen him in person once before. The Germans had evolved a unique "star" system in which the most promising young aces gravitated to Jagdgeschwader I, a con glomerate of four Jastas —squadrons—that formed the great aerial flying circus of Baron von Richthofen. Hafner had been summoned after his first fifteen victories; he had quickly gained five more to earn the Pour le Merite.
    The guns on the Western Front had scarcely fallen silent when a Hollywood promoter had gone to Europe searching for "authenticity" in his war films. It hadn't taken much talking to bring Hafner back, along with the French ace Charles Nungesser, now missing over the Atlantic. They had made a few two-reelers in the early 1920s, then toured the West Coast, flying fake dogfights out of country pastures, drinking homemade wine, and screwing the local women. In the beginning they had used planes like those they'd flown on the Western Front, Nungesser in a Spad XIII and Hafner in a Fokker D VII. By 1923, when Bandy had leaned across the barbed-wire fence to see them in Salinas, both warplanes had crashed and the men were flying Jennies. Nungesser's white JN-4 was decorated with wartime French cocardes and