Prologue

Okay, okay, okay ... so maybe it was more accidental than an accident.

Maybe.

A little introduction and some background: My name is David, I’m fifteen and the county/district springboard and platform diving reigning champion. I’m the second of four children; two boys, two girls. Pops is the District Attorney. It’s a small county and not all that busy so he has a general practice on the side. Mom is/was an elementary teacher. Daddy is an only child and mom is the oldest of nine siblings; seven sisters and Harry.

Daddy is insanely handsome; square jawed with a chin dimple, perfect teeth, hair so black it’s purple and blue eyes. Daddy works out ... they didn’t call it that in my hometown ... they called it lifting rocks so one could mow the yard.

The rocks come sprouting up all mowing-season long ... my town is built on glacial till left over from the last Ice Age. The rocks dropped by the melting and receding Ice Cap begin their upward migration through the dirt every thaw and don’t stop popping up until winter. We have a hell of a rock pile between the sauna and the observatory.

Mother is one hundred percent Finn ... if nothing else explains the sauna in the backyard ... a Finnish mother should. Mom is a tall, chestnut haired, green-eyed slightly overweight beauty; plush is the term. Daddy was engaged to someone else when he met mom ... six weeks later they were married. Mom wasn’t overweight then.

Mom was slightly spectacular. Mom was Nose Art.

That needs explaining.

Mom’s brother Harry learned to fly in high school at a little grass field outside Hibbing, Minnesota. The airfield was outside Hibbing; where the taconite mine was The airfield was there first; the taconite mine was a war expedient. The high school was IN Hibbing. He received his private pilots license immediately after high school graduation. Since he was a smart athlete, college life began in the fall. Admitted to Hibbing State Junior College, Uncle Harry, the only male of nine siblings, was inducted to the military right after Pearl Harbor.

In college since the fall of 1939 Harry had his private pilot license and managed to pass the tests for Army pilot training; not every pilot passed the military tests. They were hard ... and slightly stupid. After the war effort got wound up, getting to pilot training was a lot easier.

Two years of college and math credits qualified Harry for OCS in the United States Army Air Corps. As is typical of military service, the young Harry Bleeker, so acclimated to the cold blue skies and heavy snows of northeast Minnesota, was posted to California.

Shuffled between bases and stations while the Army and Navy squabbled over possession of said bases, Harry eventually found himself stationed at an airbase with no runways or airplanes; Sunnyvale California. There, he learned the ins and outs of Officering but none of the ways of military flying. Anything he learned about military flight he learned from books.

No matter ... he knew how to fly ... quite well. Possessing logbooks accounting for nearly five hundred hours of single engine solo time, he was SURE he would be assigned to fighters ... if he ever found an Army airplane.

While he was paying for private aircraft rental ... to keep his hand in ... the Army changed. Harry had started as Signal Corps ... then Air Corps ... and now he was in the Army Air Force.

One thing about it ... Stanford was just up the way and Berkeley was across the bay ... and that meant girls. In 1942, college women were willing to sacrifice their ALL for the nations military ... especially officers. Pilot officers were the cream of the crop. Harry had a lot of cream and shared it.

In late 1942, just before he did something stupid, the Army came through. Two weeks before he was scheduled to say “I do,” he was posted to Texas ... Randolph Field, for “flight training.”

His instructors were disconcerted to find he could fly better than most of them ... and he was extremely good looking. The better pilot they could handle. It was his movie-star appearance that got him shuffled off to England as fast as possible, Cutting a wide swath in narrow female slits, it was only a matter of time before colonels and generals were discovering their daughters were in interesting conditions.

England ... watch out.

Chapter 1 »