The Eleventh Man (19 page)

"Knock it off, will you?" Unearned favors did not go down well with Ben, never had, never would. "That prissy ops officer had it right, I
am
a paper-airplane pilot anymore, and nothing—hey, where're you going?"

"To take a leak in the jug, what does it look like?" Jake vacated the pilot's seat and turned sideways to edge past Ben, patting him on the head as he did so. "Better fly the plane, kiddo, somebody has to."

"You damn fool," Ben hurled over his shoulder, his hands clamping onto the controls. Maybe he was imagining, but the Widgeon seemed instantly restless as Jake's weight moving toward the rear of the cabin altered its center of gravity. His hands managing to tame that without any conscious help from the rest of him, Ben scanned the infinite banks of dials, switches, and gauges of an instrument panel that now seemed the size and complexity of a cathedral window. Flight school had never included this peculiar breed of aircraft in the first place. He could hear Jake back there humming loudly to himself while peeing, which did not help. Still inventorying the instrumentation, he kept coming up one short. Precisely now, of course, the Tanana River chose to turn cockeyed, twisting away in fresh directions, glinting like a silver snake. Alert in every corpuscle, Ben could see wirelike trees down there on its banks, he could see the carpet of yellow leaves on the ground, he could see the bald tops of hills regularly passing under the wingtips. What he could not spot, somewhere right under his nose, was the most basic aeronautical instrument.

While he was trying to navigate without it, the Widgeon gravitated below four thousand feet and he hurriedly dropped the flaps for some lift. Just then Jake returned to the cockpit, gyrating into the pilot's seat as the plane bounded upward. "Ride 'em, cowboy. I will say, you fighter jockeys fly livelier than us old bomber drivers."

"Funny as a crutch, Ice," Ben gritted out, hands and eyes busy in several directions. "Here, do something with this airplane."

"Just when you're getting used to it? Wouldn't be fair." The big man sat back comfortably to spectate. "Don't worry, Uncle Jake is here to hold your hand."

"Then get busy and do it." Ben squirmed, feeling his face redden as he had to put the question the rawest rookie pilot would hate to ask. "I give up—did they forget to put the compass in this turd bird?"

Yawning, Jake squinted into the glare of the morning sun. "What, you don't know east when you see it?"

That again. Isn't there any other direction anymore?
"Goddamn it, Jake, I mean it. If I can't get a compass bearing I'll eventually have this thing headed off the map somewhere. Let's don't fool around in the middle of Alaska, all right?"

Jake was unfazed. He sat there loudly humming the chorus that went "Some people say there is no Hell, but they're not pilots, so they can't tell" until finally, when Ben had run out of swearwords, he rolled his eyes.

Ben's gaze ascended along with his, to the front ceiling of the cockpit where the compass hung like a bat.

"That maybe is one of the things they're gonna modify in this clunker," Jake speculated as Ben sheepishly adjusted course to the compass setting. "Now then, you ready to fly like a sane person?"

"Damn you, you know I am."

Bursting into laughter even though he still was struggling to tame the Widgeon's twenty-eyed dials and sluggish wings, suddenly Ben had never felt better. It ran through him like the thrill when he first soloed, the magic of being lightly attached to the sky. With Jake there beside him to coax and scold and to master any of the alchemy of the cockpit he erred on, the plane was his until they reached the barrier mountains and tricky downdrafts, perhaps half an hour yet. In that window of time, he hoped with all he was worth that Cass right then was flying too, the invisible musculature of the air supporting them both at once.

Eventually Jake took over and thriftily landed at the dirt runway at Northway at noon, and by late afternoon they were far into Yukon Territory. They overnighted in a cold Quonset hut at Whitehorse, then kept to the pattern the next day, Jake handling the plane in and out of dirtpacked Canadian refueling fields and then Ben's exultant turn at the controls whenever the terrain was not producing choppy air or something else insidiously murderous. His flying intervals became less as mountains grew, and he believed even Jake was relieved when at last they crossed the Rockies and ahead lay the hill country around Newbride, the final refueling stop before the big base at Edmonton.

"Circle a few times so they can get a good look at us," Jake unexpectedly turned the plane over to him when they were a few miles out from Newbride. "The radio's on the fritz, let me work on that." Slipping his own earphones on, Ben heard static and a voice that sounded a lot farther off than the airfield in the middle distance. Treed hills and straggles of the town penned in the field, but it appeared to be a more substantial runway than the dirt patches they had been putting down on farther north. Ben was ready to be on the ground. The air turned bumpy, and he concentrated on holding the altitude while Jake fiddled with the radio as if profanity was the sure cure. After many oaths, a particularly lurid outburst got through and he turned toward Ben and winked. "Sorry about that, tower. Requesting permission to land. Over." When the radio back-and-forth was done, Jake checked the altimeter and throttle settings and everything else Ben had conscientiously been trying to mind, but made no move to do more than that. "Want to brush up on your landing skills?"

Temptation nearly overwhelmed Ben. "Love to, but the air has more lumps in it than I like. You take it."

Jake sighed. "Okay, if you don't want any fun out of life. Looky there, nice gravel runway and everything, and you chicken out. I just don't know about you sometimes, Ben buddy." Taking the controls, he aligned with the runway, and as if showing how it was done, waddled the plane down to a perfect touch.

Abruptly the runway seemed to devour the Widgeon. With a sickening lurch the plane nosed over and skidded along on the belly hull at high speed, metal screeching hideously on the runway surface.

Ben shouted, "Put the wheels down!"

"The sonsabitches are!" Jake shouted back. "It's
fresh
gravel!"

The hair-raising grating sound continued to fill the cockpit, both men tossed in their seats by the rough ride, as the plane plowed along. Eventually it ground to a halt.

There was a moment of sickening silence, then the strange wail of the Canadian version of a meat wagon reached them.

"I thought you were going to land it, not fly it into the ground, Ice. You all right?"

Jake rose out of the pilot's seat as if it had offended him. "Never mind me, how's the frigging airplane?"

They scrambled out as the ambulance crunched to a stop a little distance away and a Royal Canadian Air Force officer came leaping off its running board. The back doors flung open and a couple of teams of medics poured out, stretchers ready. They all halted at the sight of Ben and Jake standing nearly to their ankles in the runway gravel, gazing at the furrows made by the Widgeon's thin wheels in the loose surface and cursing violently together.

"Tch, tires of that sort," the Canadian officer said with a mild frown when things settled down. "We've had your P-39s and our own planes through here, no trouble. If it's a hard surface you're looking for, though, you're a bit preliminary." He gestured toward heavy equipment parked at the side of a hangar. "We'll have it tarmacked by this time next week, we figure."

Jake looked pale as he turned toward Ben. "I'll miss the next bomber run to Alaska. Grady will have my ass."

And your flying time will be just what it was. And Tepee Weepy will turn me inside out for missing a deadline.
"Try it in the morning?" Ben came out with, not knowing what else to say, as a bulldozer coughed to life and clanked out to tow the Widgeon to the paved apron outside the hangars.

They were out on the flight line in the Canadian dawn. Like odd postulants, the two of them knelt under the Widgeon's scarred but intact hull and almost prayerfully began to let air out of the narrow tires on the landing struts. When the tires squished down to nearly flat, Jake proclaimed: "Let's see if that gives the damn things enough surface."

They strapped in, and Jake taxied out, revved the engines to an alarming roar and started down the runway. The entire airfield personnel clustered outside the hangars to watch, and the meat wagon had its motor running.

Shuddering and rattling, the Widgeon struggled mightily to free itself of the ground and there was a brief moment when Ben thought it had. But the more power Jake fed it for takeoff, the more the acceleration of force on the skinny wheels drove them down into the coarse gravel, even as deflated as they were.

As sharp as if it were on their own skin, both men felt the first scrape of the underside of the plane coming into contact with the runway. There was another interminable hideous screech of aircraft metal against rough surface until the Widgeon skidded to a stop, stranded there in the middle of the airfield like a fish on land.

Jake killed the engines.

"Damn," he said, barely above a whisper. The bulldozer lurched out and towed them back to the parking apron.

Before getting out to face the Canadian contingent, Jake sat in the cockpit chewing his lip. "I hate to start taking the plane apart. Grady will—"

"—have your ass, and rightly so. But maybe only half your ass," Ben told him with more hope than he felt, "if we can get what's left of this thing back to East Base more or less on time."

Looking over his shoulder, Jake took inventory of the interior of the plane and conceded. "Okay, okay. Let's see if our hosts would like some nice plane seats for their canteen."

Once the ground crew had unbolted the passenger seats and lugged them off merrily as scavengers given a shipwreck, Jake lined the lightened plane up with the waiting runway and gave it the gas. Glued to the side window as the twin engines raged and the plane shuddered against the drag of the wheels in the gravel, Ben saw they were past their previous skid marks and thought they might make it this time. Then, agonizingly, they heard the telltale scrape again and in no time the friction of another skid slewed the Widgeon to another dead stop in the middle of the airfield.

"This is starting to get on my nerves," Jake spoke first in the quiet of the cut engines.

Ben indicated toward the bulldozer operator climbing back onto his big yellow machine. "Think how bored that cat skinner is getting."

While they waited to be towed back to the hangar apron again, Jake softly tapped a big fist against the steering column. "Got one more trick up my sleeve. It takes some doing, old buddy. By you."

"As long as it doesn't take buckets of blood," Ben answered, "let's hear it."

He listened without saying anything more until Jake laid out the whole scheme. This time he indicated toward the forest at the end of the runway. "If it doesn't work, don't we end up with a plane in those trees?"

"The damn thing isn't any good to us the way it is," Jake provided in all reasonableness.

That much was unarguable, and the rest came down to the skills the two of them could muster in what they had been trained in. Ben took another look at the trees and swallowed hard, but got the words out: "Go for broke, Ice. You're the pilot, rumor has it."

Jake clapped him on the shoulder. "And you're the sandbag, so here's how I want you to do it."

Back at the hangar apron, they ran through the maneuver in the silent plane a number of times. The Canadian ops officer puffed out his ruddy cheeks when Jake told him what was intended, but the truth was, he wanted the high-and-dry floatplane off his airfield as badly as they did. "Have a go," he bestowed ultimately and went off to alert his ambulance crew.

Ben climbed in behind Jake, keyed up and as ready as he could ever make himself be. No sooner had Jake put on his headphones than he motioned to the copilot's seat as if it was an easy chair.

"Sit down and relax. We need to wait half an hour, the sissy in the tower won't clear us for takeoff until they get here."

"Who?"

"The volunteer fire department from town. They're particular about their trees up here."

Ben settled in the seat, put up the collar of his flight jacket and tried to nap. The world of war marched through his head, ridiculous incongruities on parade. Years in uniform dwindled to this, two men trying to get an aging floatplane off a gravel runway some thousands of miles from the nearest combat. Survival perhaps dependent on a meat wagon and a fire engine in somebody else's country. The contradiction that an airplane amounted to anyway, a machine nominally too heavy to stay airborne due to the colossal engines needed to keep it airborne. Cass, all her P-39 flights with those hundreds of pounds of mechanism in back of her ears. A miracle every time. How long could miracles go on?

Jake was shaking him. "Here we go."

Ben snapped to. This time, he saw, the Canadian officer had positioned the medical rescue squad near the far end of the runway, with the firefighting equipment added.

"All right, Ben my boy." Jake sounded reconciled or ready, it was hard to tell which in the start-up throb of the Widgeon engines. "Third time is the charm."

"It beats 'Three strikes and you're out,'" Ben had to grant. He squeezed Jake's shoulder as he edged up out of the copilot's seat. "See you in the wild blue yonder, Ice."