Omnibus.The.Sea.Witch.2012 (11 page)

Hyde was searching for specks, little black specks in the bright sky that moved slowly this way and that. Those specks would be airplanes.

Finally he remembered to search the gloom in all the other directions. The Huns could be anywhere.

The altimeter recorded his upward progress. After about sixteen minutes of flight he passed fourteen thousand feet. Further progress upward would be much slower. Hyde wanted to be as high as possible, so he kept climbing.

Below he could occasionally catch a glimpse of the ground. Once he saw the ugly brown smear of trenches.

He was near Grommecourt, he thought, but nothing was certain. He couldn’t see enough of the earth to be sure. He must be careful this morning not to let the wind that must be at altitude push him too deep behind enemy lines.

He swung west, let the ship climb into the prevailing westerlies. There was enough light to easily see the altimeter now, which was moving very slowly upward. The temperature in the radiator was rising, so Hyde opened the radiator shutters to let more air through. Up, up, up
as the minutes ticked past and the engine hummed sweetly. He leaned the fuel/air mixture, tightened his collar against the cold.

He was breathing shallowly now, and rapidly. The air here was thin. He must make no sudden movements, make no serious demands upon his body or his body would rebel from the lack of oxygen.

At seventeen thousand feet he let the nose come down a degree or two. The plane was slow, sluggish on the controls, and he was a touch light-headed.

He let the left wing drop a few degrees, let the nose track slowly around the horizon until he was again flying east. The sun was up now, filling the eastern sky. All the clouds were below him.

God, it was cold up here! He checked his watch. He had been airborne for forty minutes.

He put his hand over the sun, looked left and right, above and below. Out to the left, the right, behind, below, even above. His eyes never stopped moving.

Another quarter hour passed. The day was fully here, the sun a brilliant orb climbing the sky.

There, a speck against a cloud. No, two. Two specks. To his left and down a thousand feet or so.

He turned in that direction.

Definitely two planes. Flying south. Hyde was approaching them from their right front quarter, so he turned almost north, let them go past at about a mile, hoping they didn’t see him. As the specks passed behind his right wing, he turned toward them and lowered the nose a tad.

Two. One alone would have been more than enough, but Hyde wasn’t going to let the Hun strut about unmolested just because he had brought a friend.

At least there were no enemy scouts above. He looked carefully and saw only empty sky.

He was going fast now, the wires keening, the motor thundering again at full cry, coming down in the right rear quarter of those two planes. The distance closed nicely.

He fingered the trigger levers inside the round stick handle.

The victims flew on straight, seemingly oblivious to his ambush.

At three hundred yards he realized what they were: S.E.5’s.

He turned to cross behind them. If the pilots had seen him, they gave no indication.

Perhaps he should have flown alongside, waved. But they would rag him in the mess, say that he thought they were Germans and had come to pot them. All of which would be true and hard to laugh off, so he turned behind them to sneak away.

He kept the turn in.

There! Just off the nose! A plane coming in almost head-on.

He was so surprised he forgot to do anything.

The enemy pilot shot across almost in front of him, a Fokker D-VII, with a yellow nose and a black Maltese cross on the fuselage behind the pilot.

Hyde slammed the right wing down, pulled the nose around, used the speed that he still had to come hard around in the high thin air. Unfortunately the S.E. turned slowest to the right—maybe he should have turned left.

When he got straightened out he was too far behind the Fokker to shoot.

The enemy pilot roared in after the pair of S.E.’s.

If only he had been more alert! He could have taken a shot as the enemy scout crossed his nose. Damnation!

Now the Hun swooped in on the left-most S.E. A slender feather of white smoke poured aft from the German’s nose—he was shooting.

The S.E.5 seemed to stagger, the wings waggled, then the left wing dropped in a hard turn.

The Fokker closed relentlessly, its gun going.

The S.E. went over on its back and the Fokker swerved just enough to miss it, then lowered its nose even more and dove away.

Paul Hyde kept his nose down, the engine full on.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw the S.E.’s nose drop until it was going almost straight down. It couldn’t do that long, he knew, or the wings would come off when the speed got too great.

He checked the Hun, going for a cloud.

Brass. The enemy pilot had brass.

But Hyde was overtaking.

He looked again for the stricken S.E., and couldn’t find it.

Only now did the possibility of another Hun following
the first occur to him. Guiltily he looked aft, cleared his tail. Nothing. The sky seemed empty.

He was two hundred yards behind the Fokker now, closing slowly, but closing.

The Fokker was going for a cloud.

Suddenly Paul Hyde knew how it was going to be. He was going to get a shot before the enemy pilot reached the safety of the cloud. He moved his thumb over the firing levers, looked through the post and ring sight mounted on the cowling in front of him. The enemy plane was getting larger and larger.

Without warning the nose of the enemy plane rose sharply, up, up, up.

Hyde automatically pulled hard on the stick. He was going too fast, knew he couldn’t follow the Fokker into the loop, so he pulled the nose up hard and jabbed the triggers. Both guns hammered out a burst and the Fokker climbed straight up through it.

Then Hyde was flashing past, going for the cloud. He jammed the nose down just as the cloud swallowed him.

He throttled back, raised the nose until the altimeter stopped unwinding.

The S.E.5A had no attitude instruments whatsoever. All Hyde could do was hold the stick and rudder frozen, wait until his plane flew through the cloud to the other side.

His airspeed was dropping. He could feel the controls growing sloppy. He eased the nose forward a tad. The altimeter began unwinding.

God, he was high, still above thirteen thousand feet. The altimeter was going down too fast, his speed building relentlessly.

He pulled back on the stick. To no avail. The altimeter continued to fall. He was in a graveyard spiral, but whether to the right or left he could not tell.

Panic seized Paul Hyde. He tightened the pressure on the stick, pulled it back farther and farther.

No. No! Too much of this and he would tear the wings off.

He had no way of knowing if he was turning left or right. He could guess, of course, and try to right the plane with the stick. If he guessed wrong he would put the S.E. over on its back, the nose would come down, and the plane would accelerate until it shed its wings. If he guessed right, he could indeed bring the plane upright, or nearly so, but it would do him no good unless he could keep it upright in balanced flight—and he had no means to accomplish that feat. All this Hyde knew, so he fought the temptation to move the stick sideways. What he did do was pull back even harder, tighten the turn, increase the G-load.

Oh, God! Help me! Help me, please!

Something gave. He felt it break with a jolt that reached him through the seat, heard a sharp sound audible even above the engine noise.

Eleven thousand feet.

He kept back pressure on the stick. Instinct required that he do
something
, and he sensed that if he relaxed back pressure, the plane would accelerate out of control.

Ten thousand.

Fabric flapping caught his eye. A strip of fabric was peeling from the underside of the left wing. He looked, and watched the wind peel the strip the width of the wing.

Nine thousand.

Before his eyes one of the wing bracing wires failed, broke cleanly in two.

Eight.

Another jolt through the seat. Wooden wing compression ribs or longerons or something was breaking under the stress. If a wing spar went, he was a dead man.

Seven.

Hyde was having trouble seeing. The G was graying him out. He shook his head, fought against the G-forces, screamed at the top of his lungs, although he wasn’t aware he was screaming.

Six …

Five …

Four …

And then in an eye-blink he was out of the cloud, spiraling tightly to the left. The ground was several thousand feet below. He raised the left wing, gently lifted the nose. He was so frightened he couldn’t think.

Below he saw farmland. Squares of green, trees, roads, carts, horses ….

Was he east or west of the trenches?
Think, man, think
.

He was so cold, so scared he wanted to vomit.

A sunbeam caught his eye. He turned to place the
sun on his tail, checked the compass. It was swimming round and round, useless.

At least two lift wires were broken, a wide strip of fabric flapped behind the upper wing, one of the struts was splintered, and the damn plane flew sideways. Not a lot, but noticeably so. Hyde used right rudder and left stick to keep it level and going west.

Up ahead, the trenches. Clouds of mud and smoke … artillery!

The artillery emplacements were impossible to avoid. The guns roared almost in his ear. If a shell hit him, he would never know it; he would be instantly launched into eternity.

He hunched his shoulders as if he were caught in a cloudburst, waited with nerves taut as steel for the inevitable.

Then, miraculously, he was past the artillery and out over the trenches, jagged tears in a muddy brown landscape. He saw infantrymen swing their rifles up, saw the flash of the muzzle blasts, felt the tiny jolts of bullets striking the plane. No-man’s-land lay beyond, torn by artillery shells which seemed to be landing randomly. The land was covered with men, British soldiers. Hyde weaved his way through the erupting fistulas of smoke and earth while he waited for a chance shell to smash him from the sky. After a lifetime he flew clear.

He recognized where he was. The airfield was just ten miles southwest.

He sweated every mile. Once he thought he felt another jolt of something breaking.

At least the fog had burned off a bit. Visibility was up to perhaps three miles.

When he saw the hangars and tents of the aerodrome, a wave of relief swept over him. With the sun shining over his shoulder onto the instrument panel, Paul Hyde eased the throttle and let the S.E. settle onto the ground. It bounced once. When it touched the second time he pulled the tail skid down into the dirt. When the plane slowed to taxi speed he used the rudder to turn the steerable tail skid, and taxied over in front of the maintenance hangar.

He was unstrapping, getting ready to climb from the cockpit, when three more bracing wires on the left side snapped and both the left wings sagged toward the ground.

A maintenance wallah came trotting up as Hyde pulled off his leather helmet and wiped the sweat from his face and hair.

From twenty feet away the damage was obvious: A strip of fabric was peeled from the lower right wing, too, one of the bracing wires for the tail was broken, at least one of the fuselage stringers behind the cockpit had snapped, the tip of the lower left wing hung only inches above the grass, the plane was peppered with several dozen bullet holes that he had picked up flying over the trenches.

The horrified M.O. didn’t say anything, merely stood and looked with a forlorn expression on his face.

Hyde didn’t care. He was still alive! That was something grand and exciting in a subtly glorious way.

He turned and walked across the field toward the mess. He desperately needed a drink of water.

“Rough go
, old chap,” the major said, eyeing the broken S.E. out the window as the mechanics towed it off the field with a lorry. “What happened?”

Hyde explained. “Went out of control in the cloud,” he finished lamely.

“Albert Ball died like that, or so I’ve heard,” the major said. He ran his fingers through his hair and looked at Hyde carefully. “Are you fit?”

“I suppose,” Hyde said, taking a deep breath and setting his jaw just so. He didn’t want the major to think he had the wind up.

“There’s a push on, I needn’t tell you. Going to have to send you up again. We’ve got to do our bit.”

“Where’s Mac?”

“He got off just a few minutes ago. If you hurry you can catch him in this sector here.” The major showed him on the wall chart.

“I got a short burst into a D-VII just west of the Hun trenches.”

“Plucky lad you are, Tex. If someone reports one going down, I’ll let you know. Now off with you.”

The next machine was older and had seen more rough service than the one he had just bent. The engine didn’t seem to have the vigor it should have.

Paul Hyde coaxed it into the air and turned south. He was passing through five thousand when the engine
popped a few times, then windmilled for a second or so before it resumed firing. He pulled the mixture lever full out and frantically worked the fuel pump handle.

Perhaps he should go back.

But no. The major would think …

The engine ran steadily enough now. Perhaps there was just a bit of dirt in the carb, maybe a slug of water in the petrol.

On he climbed, up into the morning.

He saw the German two-seater when he was still several thousand feet below it. He had been airborne about an hour and had seen a handful of British machines and several German kites, but they were too far away to stalk. This LVG was weaving around cloud towers at about twelve thousand feet. Hyde let it go over him, then turned to stalk it as he climbed.

Idly he wondered if that burst he had fired at the German scout earlier this morning had done any damage. Or if it had even struck the Fokker.

No way of knowing, of course.