Conquerors of the Sky by Thomas Fleming Page B

with loathing.
    The dreamer-designer Frank Buchanan shuddered under these blows. He wandered the streets of London consoling himself with streetwalkers while Craig
whispered in his soul. They’re only good for one thing, kid. When you listen to their yak-yak they drive you nuts.
    One night, after a particularly unsatisfying encounter with a prostitute, Frank found himself on Brompton Road, standing before a building with a small sign crudely lettered over the doorway: Church of the Questing Spirit. Inside about two dozen people listened to a gray-haired minister talk about a world beyond their tormented visible one. The rectangular room, with a dome of stars painted on the ceiling, was the London headquarters of the sect Althea Buchanan had joined in California.
    At the end of the sermon, the minister gestured to Frank, in the first row, and said: “Young man, are you as troubled as you look?”
    Frank poured out his growing despair and confusion over the war. The woman he loved called him a coward for defending his own and his country’s refusal to fight. What should he do?
    The minister stepped into an anteroom and emerged with a shirt that had somehow been ripped almost to shreds. “Put this on,” he said.
    Frank shrugged off his jacket and thrust his arms into the shirt. Instantly he felt an incredible lash of pain across his back. Again again again, a fiery agony unlike anything he had ever experienced seared his flesh. He ripped off the shirt and flung it at the minister.
    â€œWhat is it? What are you trying to do?” Frank gasped.
    â€œThat shirt belonged to a seaman in Nelson’s navy who was lashed to death,” the minister said. “You’re one of us. Everyone in this room has felt that pain when they wore this shirt. Most people feel nothing.”
    â€œWhat does it mean?”
    â€œEach of us has to find his own interpretation of that pain.”
    Outside the church, Frank found the night sky full of searchlights and flares. The Gothas were raiding London again. Huge explosions made the sidewalk tremble. The bombs were falling only a few blocks away, around Marble Arch. A man grabbed his arm. “Where’s the nearest subway station, pal?” he asked. His accent was as American as his vocabulary. People were using London’s underground for air-raid shelters.
    â€œI don’t know this neighborhood.”
    â€œAh, what the hell. Let’s have a drink.”
    They pounded on the door of a nearby pub. Behind the blacked-out windows a dozen fatalists were savoring what could be their last pints. The American ordered double Scotches for himself and Frank and held out his hand.
    â€œBuzz McCall’s the name, flying’s my game.”
    â€œLikewise,” Frank said.
    Buzz was a chunk of a man, with black hair and a complexion as swarthy as an Italian’s. He had a square fighter’s jaw and a swagger to his walk and talk. Except for his stockier physique, the resemblance to Craig was uncanny.
    Buzz began telling Frank he was on his way to France. A group of Americans had volunteered to form a squadron in the French air force. They were going to call it the Lafayette Escadrille. “We’re gonna teach these German fuckers a
couple of lessons for bombin’ women and children,” he said.
    â€œHave you got room for another pilot?” Frank said.
    Death machine, his mother whispered. But Frank dismissed her once and for all. Buzz and Craig and this war-maddened world were suddenly connected to the fiery shirt he had just torn from his back in the Church of the Questing Spirit. If he hoped to live as a man and not a momma’s boy, he would have to wear that ancient shirt, no matter how much pain it cost him. He would have to endure history’s lash.

THE GIRL FROM THE GLORIOUS WEST
    â€œAmerica stands for peace and nothing but peace!”
    Auburn hair streaming to her waist, Amanda Cadwallader trembled in the icy January