The Long Flight Home

by Alan Hlad

Genres: Thrillers

Synopsis

Hope flies behind enemy lines ... It is September 1940, and as German bombs fall on Britain, fears grow of an impending invasion. Enemy fighter planes blacken the sky around Epping Forest, the home of Susan Shepherd and her grandfather, Bertie. After losing her parents as a child, Susan found comfort in raising homing pigeons. Duchess has proven to be the most extraordinary of all Susan's birds, as the two share a special bond and an unusual curiosity about the world. Thousands of miles away in Buxton, Maine, a young crop-duster pilot named Ollie Evans has decided to travel to Britain to join the Royal Air Force. His quest brings him to the National Pigeon Service, where Susan is involved in a new, covert assignment. The mission aims to air-drop hundreds of homing pigeons in German-occupied France, where many will not survive. As the mission date draws near, the friendship between Ollie and Susan deepens. When Ollie's plane is downed behind enemy lines, both know that the chances of a reunion are very remote. Will Duchess's devotion and sense of duty become an unexpected lifeline, and prove that hope is never truly lost?

Release date: June 25, 2019

Publisher: A John Scognamiglio Book

Print pages: 387

Sample

On the day of the atrocity, Susan Shepherd was working in a pigeon loft, sprinkling feed—a mixture of sorghum, wheat, and field peas—into a long metal tray. A few sleepy squabs lifted their heads from under their wings but made no effort to leave their nests. Most of the pigeons were outside, circling the rolling green sheep pasture or decorating the bending birches of Epping Forest.

“You’re going to help us save Britain,” she whispered.

The loft was a twelve-foot-by-twelve-foot wooden shed lined with cubbyholes like a primary-school classroom. But instead of holding rain boots, hats, or wet gloves, the tiny compartments were the homes for more than sixty pigeons. This was the original loft, constructed by her grandfather, Bertie, before she had been born. And over the past year, a dozen new lofts had been hastily built. Except for more pigeons, her grandfather’s farm hadn’t changed since she’d left to study zoology at the University of London. Same musty smell: a mixture of down feathers, droppings, and grain. She hadn’t expected to return home so soon, but her volunteer work for the National Pigeon Service had postponed her studies in lieu of a more important endeavor—raising war pigeons.

As Susan brushed away specks of feed from her well-worn skirt—repaired with darn and patch—her eyes were drawn to the faded pencil marks on a wall Bertie had made to record her growth as a wee child. She had pressed her back against the wall and stretched her neck like a giraffe. Desperate to grow, she had even resorted to stuffing her shoes with tissue. And six months later, Bertie only laughed when his granddaughter, who failed to remember her tissue, had shrunk an inch. During her childhood, she had grown quite fond of the pencil gracing the top of her head, the sound of scratching lead, and turning in anticipation to check her height as an audience of pigeons cooed in amusement. Susan kneeled and touched her first marking as a toddler, a date shortly after she had come to live with Bertie.

I had a little bird, its name was Enza. I opened the window, and in flew Enza.

Susan shook the childhood jump-rope rhyme from her mind, then picked up a wooden spoon and rapped the side of a can, once used to hold the paint that now peeled from the siding of her grandfather’s cottage.

Pigeons flocked through a hole cut near the ceiling. One by one, they entered the loft and fluttered to the ground. The pigeons scuttled along the floor, jutting their heads and flicking their feet, while their bodies remained eloquent and steady, as if they could balance acorns on their tails. The last bird entered, stood on the grain barrel, and tilted its head.

“Hello, Duchess,” Susan said.

The bird—unique with its glowing, purplish-green neck plume, more appropriate for a peacock than a pigeon—fluttered to the floor and waddled to Susan’s feet.

“I’m afraid I’ve spoiled you.” Susan poured feed into her hand and kneeled.

Duchess pecked at the grains.

The touch of the beak tickled Susan’s palm. She knew she shouldn’t be hand-feeding a pigeon—it wasn’t the Pigeon Service’s protocol, or her grandfather’s—and would no doubt cause problems if Duchess were put into service. But this bird was different. All because a feral cat had managed to scratch its way under the door and take the lives of Bertie’s prized racing pigeons, Skye and Islay.

Three years earlier, Susan and Bertie had found what was left of Skye behind the grain barrel. They had found Islay in her nest with a severely injured wing, sitting on an egg she had laid before her attack. They had tried to repair Islay’s wing with tape and splinters of wood, but she was too weak to eat, and she sat feebly on her egg for five days before she passed. They had buried her in one of Bertie’s tobacco boxes, next to Skye near the edge of Epping Forest.

When none of the other pigeons would sit on the egg, tainted from the feline tragedy, Susan insisted on incubating it, despite her grandfather’s belief that the chances of the egg hatching were extraordinarily slim, especially without a calibrated incubator that they could not afford. Stubborn like her grandfather, Susan retrieved a blue ceramic bowl, once used by her grandmother to eat oatmeal. She warmed the bowl with water from the teakettle to establish a good base temperature, then delicately wrapped the egg in a lightly moistened towel and placed it inside. Setting the bowl under Bertie’s desk lamp, she adjusted the distance to reach the ideal temperature by using a medical thermometer, which she had tested by sticking it under a nesting pigeon.

For two weeks and two days, Susan rotated the egg every eight hours and sprinkled drops of water onto the towel to keep the proper humidity. And despite the odds of having to bury the egg next to its parents, the egg quivered early on a Sunday morning. Susan and her grandfather skipped church, pulled up chairs, and watched for three hours as the egg slowly cracked open. As church bells rang over Epping to release their congregations, a shriveled hatchling poked its way into the world.

“Your parents and your granny would be proud of you,” Bertie had said.

Susan, a heaviness in her chest, had smiled and gently caressed the hatchling.

It had been a miracle, but Susan knew that this hatchling still had a slim chance of survival without the aid of her parents’ pigeon milk. Undeterred, she took to grinding seed into paste and feeding the hatchling by hand. Within a few days, the hatchling was able to stand, unfurl its wings, and peck. One week later, it was eating feed with the others in the loft. And Susan named her Duchess, despite her grandfather’s fondness for naming his racing pigeons after remote Scottish land masses, none of which they had ever visited.

Duchess had grown into something extraordinary. And it wasn’t just her looks, even though her neck plume shimmered like mother of pearl. It was the bird’s intelligence—or odd behavior, as her grandfather believed—that made her stand out among the flock. While homing pigeons were trained by the reward of food, Duchess seemed to be driven by the need to understand the world around her, a strange sense of curiosity hidden behind her golden eyes. Instead of joining the group, Duchess was content to watch her companions eat as she stood on Susan’s shoulder, cooing in response to Susan’s words, as if the bird enjoyed the art of conversation. And even more impressive was Duchess’s athletic ability; she was typically the first to arrive home after the pigeons were released at a distant training location. Bertie had commented that Duchess was the fastest to return only because of her desire to get a few minutes of Susan’s undivided attention. Susan laughed but knew there was some truth to what he said.

As Susan stroked Duchess’s back with a finger, a siren sounded. She stopped. The horn began as a low growl, then grew to an ear-piercing roar, tapering off, then repeating. Goose bumps cropped up on her arms. Pigeons fluttered. Walls vibrated. Seed in the feeding tray quivered.

The door flew open. Her grandfather, a bowlegged man wearing a tarnished tin helmet, shouted, “Luftwaffe!” He grabbed Susan’s hand and pulled.

Susan saw the spring door closing behind her, Duchess standing calmly on the ground as the other pigeons scattered. “Duchess!” She broke her grandfather’s grip, threw open the door, and scooped up the bird.

Susan, with Duchess tucked into the crook of her arm, ran with Bertie toward the bomb shelter, just like they had rehearsed, praying each time that this day would never come. But they knew it was merely a matter of time. As they ran across the field and past several other pigeon lofts, the siren wailed from nearby North Weald Airfield.

Bertie paused as he struggled to catch his breath. He pushed up his old military helmet that kept falling over his eyes. “Hurry!” he shouted.

Before they reached the shelter, the siren died, replaced by the buzz of mechanical bees. Susan looked up, swallowed, and pushed up the brim of Bertie’s helmet. Hundreds of enemy bombers, and nearly twice as many fighters, darkened the late-afternoon sky like a swarm of black flies. Antiaircraft fire boomed. Black bursts exploded below the aerial armada.

The shelter was a broad earthen mound under the canopy of a large beech tree. Green grass now covered the embankment, blending the refuge into the rolling pasture. Except for the front door, which made it look like a home for a hobbit, the sanctuary was camouflaged. Susan had helped her grandfather build the shelter, piling up wheelbarrows of dirt and mixing concrete in buckets to line the inner walls reinforced with remnant bricks and scrap steel from a demolished cannery. And for the entrance, they used a door from an old outhouse.

As they reached the shelter, the bellies of the bombers cracked open. Instead of hunkering into the pit, they were compelled—despite their own safety—to watch scrambling Royal Air Force Hurricane fighters soar over the trees and pitch sharply to the sky. The fighter squadron was sorely outnumbered as enemy escort fighters bearing the Iron Cross swooped down to surround them. The RAF put up a short but valiant effort. One Hurricane exploded after rounds of enemy gunfire pierced its fuel tank, sending shrapnel over Epping Forest. Another had its tail shot off, sending the Hurricane into a spinning dive and crashing into a field with no sign of the pilot bailing out. One by one, the RAF Hurricanes were shot down, and the few planes lucky enough to suffer only minor damages retreated with smoke pouring from their engines.

Susan and Bertie watched the invaders fly toward London, a mere twenty miles away, contested only by inaccurate antiaircraft fire. Seeds of destruction dropped from the bellies of the bombers and whistled to the ground.

“My God.” Tears flowed down Susan’s cheeks as the first bombs exploded.

As night set in, the horizon of London glowed with scores, perhaps hundreds, of great fires. And with the darkness came a second wave of bombers dropping their payloads throughout the night, using the burning fires to identify their targets. White-hot incendiary bombs flared. Echoes of explosions filled the air.

At 4:30 AM, the bombing stopped. Susan stepped to Bertie, sitting on the ground, and helped him to his feet. With weak legs, he shuffled into the shelter, then curled onto a cot with his tin helmet covering his face. Unable to rest, Susan stood outside with Duchess cradled in her arms and watched the glow on the horizon. The grinding continued as the German planes flew overhead, masking the stars and crescent moon. She closed her eyes and prayed that they would not return. But the following evening they came back. And again the night after that.

Ollie Evans, lured by a squeaky porch swing and the roasted-nut aroma of chicory coffee, opened the screen door. He found his parents gently rocking, sharing a wool blanket and a cup of coffee, as an orange sun rose above the dew-glistened potato fields.

The cup in his mother’s hand, Ollie noticed, was a misshapen toad-green mug he had made in industrial arts class in the seventh grade. He chuckled. “Where did you find it?”

His mother shrugged, wisps of faded brown hair resting on her shoulders. She sipped. Steam swirled in the cool air.

Ollie was no longer a little boy. He was six feet tall, give or take an inch, with wavy brown hair and caramel eyes, a gift from his mother. The dimple on his chin mirrored the one on his father. As Ollie took a seat on the porch steps, an unsettling feeling that he should be somewhere else filled his belly. It wasn’t unusual to be home in the fall. After all, most of the schools would soon be on potato recess. Unfortunately, his harvest break was more permanent.

“I’m proud of you,” his father said.

“For what?” Ollie asked.

“For putting family first.” He accepted the mug from his wife and drank. “I’m sorry you’re still home.” He nudged the cane hanging from the side of the swing. “It wasn’t fair that you had to stay.”

“That’s okay. The farm’s important. And so are you.”

Three years ago, his father’s muddy boot slipped off the tractor’s clutch while attempting to pull out a stump. The machine flipped backward, pinning his father’s right leg, shattering his hip, and snapping a femur in two places. Ollie, unable to lift the tractor, dug him out with a hand trowel from the garden shed. His mother had called for an ambulance and helped by scraping earth with her bare hands, ripping off three of her fingernails. It had been a painful recovery, including two surgeries and agonizing rounds of physical therapy. And now his father, held together with screws and wire, was able to perform some of the farm duties, except for plowing and crop-dusting. He was no longer able to work the pedals, the strain too much for his brittle leg. His father didn’t seem to mind moving as slowly as a tortoise, the constant ache in his joints, or the pronounced limp in his walk. It was the inability to fly that had stolen his spirit, his once-dark hair turning gray with the passing of days spent grounded, as if the lower altitude accelerated the aging process.

His mother adjusted the blanket covering their laps, took the mug from her husband, and handed him the newspaper.

Ollie’s father slid the rubber band from the paper, wrapped it around his forefinger, and shot it at Ollie.

Ollie ducked, even though it whizzed two feet over his head.

The smile fell from his father’s face as he unfolded the paper. “Good God.”

Mother’s eyes widened.

“They’ve bombed London,” Ollie’s father said, showing her the paper.

“Those poor people,” Mother said.

Ollie stepped to his parents and stared at the newspaper headline: Nazis Strike! German Planes Raid London! He took a deep breath and exhaled.

“The Nazis took France in just over a month,” Ollie’s father said. “Without our help, they’ll take Britain in a year. And before we know it, we’ll have a regatta of U-boats in Casco Bay.”

Ollie crossed his arms as another debate about the war began to dominate their conversation. It usually started with the newspaper but always ended with his father’s proclamation of their British heritage.

“FDR says we’re going to stay neutral,” Mother said.

“We’ll be in this war eventually.” Ollie’s father tapped his thigh. “If I didn’t have a bum leg, I’d have a mind to walk to Montreal and join the Merchant Navy. At least the Canadians have the guts to stand by Britain.” He lowered the paper. “Our family may have lost our accent . . .”

“But our blood is, and always will be, British,” Ollie said, cutting off his father. “We know.”

The porch turned silent, except for the creek of the swing and the caw of a crow in the potato field.

“I suggest that you never forget it.” Ollie’s father dropped the paper, retrieved his cane, and stood.

“Dad, I didn’t mean to . . .”

Father raised his hand. “Your mother and I have errands to run.” He turned and went inside, the screen door banging against the frame.

Mother sighed and looked at Ollie. “Have you forgotten how your father lost his brother?”

“I’m sorry,” Ollie said, recalling the uncle he had never met. Uncle Henry was killed in the Great War, two years before Ollie was born. Each year on Henry’s birthday, Ollie’s father honored his brother’s memory by going salmon fishing, their favorite childhood sport in northern England. Ollie often joined his father for the day, fly-fishing in the solitude of the Saco River’s rippling waters. Although his father spoke little of the details, Ollie had managed to piece together that a cloud of chlorine gas had forced Henry to abandon his trench in exchange for machine-gun fire. Henry died, and so did a piece of his father, in a French field on the Western Front.

“You should be more respectful of your father’s feelings about the war. And mine.” Mother paused. “Want something to eat?”

Ollie shook his head, feeling as if his stomach was filled with clay.

“You and your father can continue this discussion when we get back from town.” Mother stood. “And I expect you to apologize.”

“I will.”

She placed her hands on her hips.

“I promise.” Ollie retrieved the rubber band and slid it onto his wrist. “I better get going. Lots of dusting to do.”

“Be careful,” his mother said, going inside.

Behind the barn, Ollie saw the weathered canary-yellow biplane, looking like a prehistoric bird warming its old bones in the morning sun. The plane was fully fueled and loaded with insecticide, or what his father aptly called pixie dust. He checked the tension wires strung between the upper and lower wings, stepped into the cockpit, and put on his leather cap. As he flipped the ignition, the engine coughed and the propeller turned over, sending a vibrating buzz through his body. He advanced the power, moving the plane down a bumpy earthen runway that split the potato field. The plane accelerated, and the tail began to rise. Sensing the proper speed, considering the instrument panel didn’t work, he pulled back on the stick, and the plane lifted into the air. He circled their house, wondering how he would smooth things over with his father. Flying west to the farmlands, he replaced thoughts of war with his longing of someday going away to college.

The Maine potato harvest would soon be over, bringing an end to another crop-dusting season and his third year of staying home to run the family potato farm. Assuming the fall crop had a good yield and the price for potatoes didn’t plummet, perhaps they’d have enough money for him to leave for college next year. He’d already been accepted at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. But before he would allow himself to leave, his father’s health would need to improve. If everything went perfectly, five or six years from now, he’d have his aeronautical engineering degree, his ticket out of Buxton.

There was nothing wrong with Buxton. In many respects, a farm was a great place to grow up, and he had no regrets about staying to help his father. But most of his friends had left home years ago; many were now cutting logs for a paper mill or hoisting crustaceans from the back of a lobster boat. And the lucky ones had gone off to college, including his girlfriend, Caroline, who went to Bates, where her letters had dwindled and eventually stopped. Even his high school buddies, Stan and James, had gone to the University of Maine and seldom came home on breaks. They were reveling in their life of academia and social parties, while Ollie was still living with his parents. They had taken different paths, and Ollie couldn’t blame them for falling out of touch.

Caroline had been Ollie’s first girlfriend. They’d dated during their senior year of high school. Caroline had been cute and popular, and her family owned one of the largest lumber mills in York County; they were wealthy by Buxton standards. And she’d been charmed, Ollie believed, by his ability to fly a plane, an attractive trait when compared to boys who were driving their parents’ car. Initially, he thought Caroline might be the girl he was going to spend his life with. But things changed when Ollie’s dad was injured. Caroline, who claimed that she didn’t do well with hospitals, had reluctantly joined Ollie and his mother to visit Ollie’s dad in the recovery ward. And Caroline had turned reticent when Ollie brought up the subject of having to defer college to take care of the family farm. In the end, Ollie had stayed home, and Caroline had gone to college, where she distanced herself from Ollie, even making excuses on holidays for why she was too busy to see him. He’d been dejected. She doesn’t want to risk being stuck with me on a farm. But as time passed, Ollie realized that it was best that he and Caroline had gone their separate ways. More importantly, he now knew that he wanted what his parents had in a relationship. They would always be there for each other, regardless of life’s unexpected circumstances. Someday, I’ll love a woman as much as Dad loves Mom.

Despite spending his entire life in a town where he knew everyone by their first name, he now felt out of place. In Buxton, one either farmed or fished, not a good fit for someone who preferred the speed of a plane to the crawl of a tractor. And besides, he had always been allergic to shellfish, unable to have even a nibble of lobster without breaking into hives and running for the bathroom.

With a college degree, he would certainly have options to design or build planes, taking him to new parts of the country, perhaps as far as California. But what he really wanted to do was fly. Since the first time his father had taken him crop-dusting, he was hooked. Ollie’s father had placed Ollie on his lap, slid a leather flight cap on him that was several sizes too big on his son’s head, and took to the sky. Ollie, a grin carved into his face, loved the way the plane angled upward to the clouds as he pulled the stick to his chest. He felt his father laugh, his back bouncing against his father’s tummy. Then his father eased his hands forward to keep from pulling a loop, a dangerous maneuver considering the biplane was missing safety harnesses. By the time he was fourteen, when he had grown big enough to reach the pedals, his father acted as a copilot, gradually weaning him from instructions. Within a year, he was flying on his own, much to the chagrin of his mother, who still worried about him getting hurt playing football. To help put his mother’s mind at ease, his father installed new safety harnesses, but considering Ollie’s fearless acrobatics, that was about as useful as giving a tightrope walker an umbrella.

As he approached a large farm, Ollie pushed the stick forward and felt his body rise, and the nose of the biplane tipped down. The engine roared. Wind pressed against his face. Approaching the ground, he adjusted the stick, feeling the pull of gravity sink him into his seat. The plane leveled off. Five feet above a potato field, he pulled the lever. A spray of dust streamed behind the tail and fell like snow. At the end of the field, he pulled back hard on the stick, shooting the plane over a row of towering pines. He arced to the left and came around for another pass.

Ollie spent the morning dusting fields. Finishing his last farm, he checked the fuel gauge—the only instrument that seemed to work—and tipped the wings to the north. The scattered fields disappeared, and in the distance, he saw his favorite spot, Sebago Lake. There were few farmers in this area, at least none who were clients of his father’s business, making it unlikely that word about Ollie’s stunts would get back to his mother. Otherwise, he’d be skinned alive.

Above the lake, he did a snap roll, as if the fuselage spun on a skewer. He pulled the nose straight to the sky, flying toward the clouds until the propeller lost its battle against the pull of gravity and tipped the plane over, just before the engine stalled, into a hammerhead dive. As he fell to the lake, he pulled up and glided over the still water, feeling the urge to dip the landing gear.

A young girl in pigtails ran out of a cottage—the only home on the north side of the lake—and stood on a dock. She waved and jumped. Ollie tipped the wings, buzzed the shoreline, and performed his usual show for an audience of one. The girl, whom Ollie only knew from the air, was probably in grade school. Attracted by the roar of the plane’s engine, she often came outside to watch. As the girl took a seat on the dock, Ollie swooped the plane high into the sky, pulling a barrel-roll maneuver, then leveled off. He performed a split-S, an inside loop, and a series of spins.

For the finale, he decided to perform a less practiced and more challenging maneuver, the tailslide. He did a quarter loop that sent the plane straight vertical, with full power. Wind whistled. His adrenaline rushed. The aircraft continued to climb until it lost momentum, then hung for a second before falling backward. As the nose dropped through the horizon, he pushed the stick forward and sent the plane into a dive. He pulled hard on the stick and leveled off a few feet above the lake, much too close for comfort. His pulse pounded in his ears. He saw the girl standing on the shoreline clapping her hands.

As he swooped by the cottage, he reached into his jacket and pulled out a note that was tied to a small piece of wood. He released the package. It fell gently to a grass clearing several yards from the shoreline.

The girl ran to the package, untied the string, and read the note.

Thanks for being a great audience. Ollie.

The girl waved her arms. And he flew away.

Ollie eased back the throttle and zigzagged on his way home, maximizing his time in the air before he’d have to begin his farm chores. As he neared Buxton, the thick forest of pines turned to rolling plots of corn, potatoes, and hay. As the family farm came into view, he noticed his father’s truck was gone, replaced with a shiny new-model car. He swooped over and saw a man in dark clothing standing on the porch. He banked around to the runway and landed. Ollie cut the engine, got out of the cockpit, and walked to the house. As he approached, he glanced at the ’39 Plymouth with an unmistakable white top and green sides. The Portland police officer stepped from the porch and removed his cap, exposing a bald head with stubbly gray sideburns.

“Oliver Evans?” the officer asked.

A knot formed in Ollie’s gut. “Yes.”

“There’s been an accident.”

Ollie opened his mouth, but nothing came out.

“It’s your parents.”

“Are they okay?”

The officer wiped his face with a handkerchief from his pocket. “I’m sorry.”

A shock jolted Ollie. He bent over like he’d been punched in the gut. “No,” he whimpered in disbelief. A bombardment of thoughts and emotions made him feel as though the ground was spinning. Numb and having difficulty walking, he was helped into the police car by the officer. As they drove away, the smell of cigar smoke embedded into the interior made Ollie’s stomach churn.

“The driver had been drinking,” the officer said, gripping the steering wheel. “He ran a red light, veered onto a sidewalk, and struck your parents as they were leaving Casco Hardware.”

“There must be some mistake.” Ollie’s head throbbed, and his heart was ravaged by a mixture of anger and despair.

The officer cleared his throat. “I wish there was, son.”

Ollie slumped in his seat like a marionette with its strings severed. This can’t be happening! He had an impulse to pull the door handle and jump out, anything to escape this nightmare. Ollie, his eyes welled with tears, buried his head into his hands. He bit his lip and tasted copper.

Twenty minutes later, Ollie arrived at the Cumberland County Morgue. A scent of rubbing alcohol hung in the air. The coroner, a thin, stoic man who was washing his hands over a sink, turned off the water and then led Ollie to a wall of nickel-plated cooler drawers. The coroner wiped his hands on his lab coat, pulled two latches, and slid the bodies out.

Ollie’s heart sank. His eyes watered. A flash of his father picking oxeye daisies, his mother’s favorite flower. An image of Mom placing a handwritten note into Dad’s lunch box. Simple gifts were symbols of their affection for each other. But there would be no more flowers for Mom to place on the kitchen table. And no more sweet notes for Dad to add to the stack that he kept in a bedside drawer.

The officer, standing in the doorway, turned his head.

The coroner finished drying his hands, using the tail of his lab coat. “Are these your parents?”

Mother was missing a shoe, her toes a pasty blue. Father’s chest was sunken, and his left arm was badly broken. Unable to bring his eyes to look at their faces, Ollie touched their hands, cold and stiff. He began to weep, then nodded to the coroner. Steel casters rolled. And his parents . . .