Straying From the Path (9 page)

Three hours into the flight, Evie still smiled, a vague, dreamy look in her eyes. She was humming. “
Though there’s one motor gone we can still carry on, comin’ in on a wing and a prayer . . .”
I don’t think she realized just
what
she was humming.

Cook was not prone to conversation. He’d spent most of the flight writing in a little notebook with a pencil stub, looking around occasionally with a tight, anxious expression that I chose to attribute to his earnest youth, or possibly a fear of flying—or of flying with the current pilots.

“You fly much, Doctor?” I said at a moment when the pencil rested. Cook had made himself as comfortable as possible, sitting wedged behind the two seats, knees pulled up.

“Not really. I’m quite interested in flight, but the Army wouldn’t take me for pilot training. Bad eyes,” he said, pointing to the glasses. “So I’ve made the psychology of flight my specialty.”

“Psychology of flight?”

“Yes. What particular stresses do pilots experience, why do certain types of men seem drawn to becoming pilots more than others. Could the Army develop a profile for choosing the most psychologically fit pilots? Not something too many people have thought about. That just means the subject is long overdue for study. Don’t you think?”

At this point, with thousands of planes dropping bombs all over Europe and the war in the Pacific escalating, with factories turning out hundreds more planes every month, the Army couldn’t be too picky about who it chose to be its pilots. Evie and I wouldn’t have been here if it could.

“So what does psychology have to do with
this
plane?”

Cook pursed his lips. “That’s need to know.”

Smirking, I turned away and flipped through the bomber’s log. It only had a dozen flights logged since it was commissioned, one of the first batch of B-26’s to enter service earlier this year. I recognized the names of the two WASP who had delivered it from the factory. It had been designated for use in towing targets at the gunnery school at Harlingen. But right below that assignment was a mark, a star and the word “special,” that I’d never seen in a log before. I assumed that had something to do with Cook’s experiment.

On the last two flights, the pilots hadn’t checked out. They might have been under orders for security reasons, to cover up what they’d been doing. But then why log in? Or why not log false information? Avery hadn’t given us any instructions about altering the log. Nothing gave any clue as to why this bomber shone like a carnival midway.

“So what have you found out?” I asked. “Does flying attract a certain type of person? Are certain types more likely to become pilots than others?”

“Well, men who become pilots tend to be risk takers. They tend to have a greater sense of adventure. They also tend to be dreamers. Less practical than the average individual. They have a greater sense of, oh, I don’t know. Aesthetics. They’re more sublime, if you will. Army pilots write more poetry than officers in other branches.”

“I could have told you that without the Ph.D.” Just about every pilot I knew started out as a kid who looked skyward when the drone of an aircraft engine sounded overhead. “So how about women?”

He shrugged, wedging himself more firmly into his nook. “I haven’t studied the psychology of female pilots.”

“Figures.”

I didn’t think they’d ever be able to quantify the old dream of flight that had once sent people jumping off hillsides in paper wings. It wasn’t about numbers or types, but about becoming part of the sky, becoming free of gravity. Some people said an airplane was a crutch, substitute, not like being a bird at all because of the steel and engines and fuel. But there was something about the airplane, too—all that power, responsive to the touch of a finger. All that power at my command. I was in control of the height of modern technology, the pinnacle of what civilization had produced: a 35,000 pound machine that could
fly
.

It was about being part of the machine. Learning every nuance, reacting in the blink of an eye. The machine did the flying, yes, but it couldn’t fly without the pilot, without me or Evie or any of the guys in the logbook. So it wasn’t the plane flying at all, it was us.

According to the logbook, the previous pilot had been Captain Elliot Boyd.

I asked Cook, “Do you know Captain Boyd? Was he part of your study?”

“Yes,” Cook said without looking up from his notepad.

“What’s he like?”

He took a long time to answer, like he was gathering words and trying them out before speaking. “He was a good pilot,” he said finally.

Was? “What happened to him?”

“That’s classified.”

I looked over the logbook again. “And Captain McGlade? Where is he? And their copilots. Olsen? Todd?”

Cook shifted uncomfortably, pulling his cap over his forehead and lifting it off again. He wouldn’t meet my gaze. That told me all I needed to know—the last two crews of this thing were dead.

I was about to lay into the good doctor when Evie spoke softly.

“This is the last plane they ever flew.”

“What?”

“I can hear them. Listen.” Her gaze was distant, not on the instruments at all.

I heard the engines, their power vibrating through the body of the plane. The drone was hypnotic, comforting. Surrounded by the colors dancing outside the canopy, I felt cocooned. Warm and safe, like I was falling asleep in front of a campfire, with the hum of crickets all around.

“Now that you’re here, things are perfect. I always take girls flying on the first date. They love it.”

I thought for a moment another plane’s radio signal was bleeding into our channel. But our radio was turned off, not even hissing static. Yet, I heard a voice.

“Nice night for flying, isn’t it? ‘Comin’ in on a wing and a prayer . . .’ ”

Someone grabbed my arm.

“Miss Harris! Miss Bateson! Snap out of it, for God’s sake!”

Cook, breathing hard, shook my arm in a panic.

I blinked and rubbed my face. I’d been dozing. I’d never fallen asleep in the cockpit before. Never. That was a fast way to turn yourself into a smoking pile of wreck on the ground. I took a quick scan of the instruments, looked out the canopy—spotted the Mississippi, a glowing ribbon in the moonlight, a distinctive landmark. Everything looked fine. Except for those damn colors, like light through a stained glass window. What did we look like to a kid on the ground? Like a comet? A space ship?

Evie had her head cocked, like she was concentrating, listening closely.

“How’d you get in here?” she said softly. She smiled suddenly, like someone had told her a joke. “Oh really?”

Cook gripped her arm, but she brushed him away. He sat back, stunned, his eyes wide.

“Do you hear anything?” I asked him.

“This shouldn’t be happening,” he muttered, shaking his head.

“Evie!”

She gave me a sideways glance. “Can’t you hear it? They’re talking.”

I heard—the engines. The wind. A whisper.

“Come on, Jane. Be a sport and join in.”
Male voices, like cocky pilots flirting and teasing. I couldn’t think of where they came from, except my own imagination.

“This is some plane, huh? Why don’t you see what it can really do?”

I didn’t hear anything, not a damn thing.

The lights glowing on the surface of the plane pulsed, throbbing red like a heartbeat. Nothing about the plane’s mechanics had changed—still running at the same speed, altitude, RPMs. Fuel still good, pressure gauges normal. Everything normal, as far as the dials were concerned. But this plane was haunted.

The skin glowed so brightly now, I couldn’t see anything outside the plane. The world was a circle of light. Beyond that, blackness, emptiness. We had to fly by compass readings.

“Evie,” I said, quelling the desperation that tinged my voice. “What is going on?”

She flashed me an achingly familiar look of annoyance. “This plane . . . it’s
different
. Look.” She wasn’t holding her yoke. I wasn’t holding mine. Yet we were aloft, maintaining speed and altitude. “What if it’s alive, Jane? I can hear it talking to me.”

Ray guns. Smart machines. Strange ideas, like Avery said.

“What did you do to this plane?” I said to Cook. “To those pilots?”

He shook his head continually, a fast, trembling gesture. “This shouldn’t be happening, it can’t be happening.”

“
What
can’t be happening?” I had to shout in his ear before he responded.

“
This
. The link-up,” he said weakly.

“Link-up?”

“She’s not really hearing anything. She’s talking to herself. It’s a hysterical response, women are unstable in stressful situations—”

“Does she
look
like she’s under stress?” Evie’s fingers hung loosely on the yoke, her smile was easy. “You’re the one who’s hysterical, Cook.” The psychologist cringed on the floor of the cockpit.

“Why, thank you,” Evie said—not to either of us, but straight ahead, to the canopy. “I always sing to my planes.”

A finger of luminescence seeped under the canopy. It had substance, mass, like a pool of honey pushing into the cockpit. Evie unbelted her harness, reached over the yoke and touched the pool of light. Her hand went
into
the light, through the light, and kept going into the instrument panel. She pushed her arm into the metal of the plane. Her face glowed, her eyes were half-lidded with a look of bliss. “Yes, I can feel it,” she murmured. “Flying, oh yes!”

I grabbed a fistful of her flight suit and pulled her back. “No, you don’t!” I didn’t know if I yelled at the plane for taking her, or at Evie for letting it take her.

She cried out. The light flashed to orange, angry as fire as her arm came free and she wrenched away from it. The engines revved—all on their own—like a growl. I grabbed her around the waist and held—she tried to lunge forward to the instrument panel, back to the light.

“Cook, help me hold her!”

Cook was pulling on the straps of his parachute. “We’ve got to either land this thing or get out of here. If this goes on, we’ll all die.”

“We won’t,” said Evie, struggling against my bear-hug. “The other pilots aren’t dead. You don’t understand, they
wanted
it to happen. They’re still here. They’re
flying
.” She pulled my fingers, desperate to wrench out of my grasp.

We fell off balance as the plane pitched into a dive. The lights on the hull were searing, hot like flames. All around the canopy seams, the glow pushed inside the cockpit, oozing like slime.

“See, Jane? You’re upsetting them.”

I grabbed the copilot’s yoke and pulled, leaning against the tension, trying to level us off before we plunged into a spin. Altitude dropped, speed increased.

Evie took the pilot’s yoke and helped. Together, we pulled the bomber back under control.

She whispered, “It’s okay, baby. You just scared her is all. She doesn’t really want to hurt you.” Tears glistened on her cheeks.

“Who the hell are you talking to?”

“Jane, if you’d just
listen
.”

“This is crazy,” I murmured.

A sputter rocked to starboard, followed by an ominous quiet as the usual background roar diminished by half. I looked out the window; the right prop fluttered, stalled.

“We just lost starboard engine,” I said, leaning back on the yoke and slamming the rudder hard to hold our position. “Evie, tell me what’s wrong? What happened to that engine?”

Evie scanned the gauges. “Fuel pressure is at zero. There’s nothing mechanically wrong. I think they’re trying to scare you.”

“
That’s right, don’t fight it and no one gets hurt. You want to fly, don’t you? I’ll show you real flying.”

Our altitude was dropping. We weren’t in a dive anymore, but we didn’t have the thrust to stay airborne. I firewalled the throttle, but I couldn’t get the power to climb. We were still fifty miles from Wright Field.

Damned fly boys, always think they know best. “We fly on my terms, buster.” Fly—or not. “We’re going to have to land now. We’re going to have to put down in a field somewhere.”

“There’s no way,” Cook said, a waver in his voice. “Not with this plane, not at this speed. The best pilot in the Army couldn’t do it, and, well, you’re just—”

“We’re just
what
?” I said, murder in my voice. He didn’t have to say it, I heard it every time I showed up on an air field in my flight suit. “Can
you
fly this thing?” I shoved a roll of charts at him. “Here, look at these and tell me there’s a field we can put down in.” He disappeared down the hatch.

I didn’t lower the landing gear; it would be better to belly in on soft earth. I prayed there was an open field with good, soft earth.

Desperately, Evie pleaded, “Just let me talk to them, it’ll be okay if you’ll just let me—”

“Evie, this plane is trying to kill us! Now help me land!”

“They’re
not
trying to kill us. They just want to fly and you don’t understand.”

She put one hand on the yoke and reached the other toward the pool of light. It stretched to meet her, engulfing her arm in its radiance. The light poured into one hand, through her whole body, then out the other hand and into the yoke, completing the circuit. Her face glowed rose. She closed her eyes, and the plane steadied. The intense pressure eased off the yoke.

Holding the plane level had taken all my strength. I’d been shaking with the effort. But Evie held it with the touch of one hand.

Cook was wrong, trying to quantify the characteristics of the typical pilot so the Army could make a checklist and screen its candidates more efficiently. Good eyesight and a sense of daring, that was all a person really
needed
to be a pilot. To be a
good
pilot? A lot of us did a good job just by following the rules and using common sense. But to be a
great
pilot? Some pilots knew their plane’s condition without looking at the instruments. They could sense a change in the weather the moment before it happened, they could react before the plane itself did. I’d heard of guys coaxing their fighters out of flat spins just by talking to them, treating the planes like the sexy ladies they painted on the noses. It was instinct, a sixth sense that let a pilot be a part of his plane. You either had it or you didn’t.