Second Wind

by Dick Francis

  I said, “A suicidal pilot is the last thing I need!”

  “It may be the last thing you get.”

  “I’ll never forgive you ...”

  The man at Luton said in our ears, “We’ve an old D/F machine here. Do you know how to fly a QDM?”

  Kris said, “Sure,” and I said, “Yes,” but we should both have correctly said, “Affirmative,” which would still not, in my case, have been the truth. D/F meant Direction Finding and QDM was an air code asking for a direction to steer, and that was the extent of my own knowledge. Kris, I thanked the fates, muttered that he had done a QDM approach once, years before, when he had got lost.

  Did he remember the procedure?

  Not clearly, he said. A joke, he thought it. He typically would.

  Our helper at Luton resignedly told Kris to press the “transmit” button and say nothing, then turn left and after two minutes transmit again, and he told us he now knew which blip we were on his dial, and he knew what we should steer to reach him, but he couldn’t tell how far away we were from him, and he wouldn’t know until he could see us on his doorstep.

  He might see us, we told him, but we couldn’t see him. Oil seemed to be coming out faster. Forward visibility had reduced pretty much to zero. The side windows were starting to fog, with droplets blowing backwards in streaks.

  We traveled straight to Luton airport with his expert help, Kris again flying on instruments as if born to it and telling weak jokes all the way. Lights were starting to show on the ground in the still see-through bit of glass along the lower edge of the side windows. Kris’s stream of jokes dried as the radio operator carefully steered him round in a pear-shaped sky pattern that ended with the Cherokee lined up with the single wide runway that now lay a mile straight ahead.

  The runway ran from west to east. We were to land towards the west, into the prevailing wind.

  To my private dismay, landing to the west meant also facing into the setting sun. The last rays of sunset hit the oil and made the windshield a glowing golden enclosing glory, exciting and beautiful and more deadly than ever.

  “Jeez,” Kris said, “I’ll write a poem.”

  “Not just now.”

  “Say your prayers.”

  “You keep your mind on getting us down.”

  “We’ll get down anyway.”

  “Safely.” I said.

  He grinned.

  The voice from the control tower said in our ears, “I see you clearly. Lower flaps ... descend to two hundred feet ... maintain heading ... allow for a ten-knot cross wind from the left ...”

  Kris checked that I’d set the altimeter to match the height of Luton’s airfield above sea level and lowered the flaps, the wing sections that gave greater lift at slow speed.

  “This isn’t Odin,” he said. “Pity really. We could do with a nice warm sea here for a splash-down landing.”

  I’d thought the same. The oil was thicker on the windows, and getting progressively worse.

  “You’re about a hundred feet up,” the radio said in my ear. “The runway’s straight ahead. Can you see the ground at all?”

  “Can I, shit,” Kris said, which wasn’t in the air manual.

  He throttled back the power to settle onto his normal landing speed and held the heading straight.

  The tower said, “Stay straight ... good ... reduce power ... no, increase power ... hold it steady ... reduce power ... sink ... straighten the rudder. I said straighten ... straighten.”

  Traveling at landing speed we hit the ground extremely hard and bounced back into the air with every bone shaking, with even our eyes insecure in their sockets.

  Our airspeed read eighty miles an hour on the dial and was now dropping too fast. At sixty we’d be going too slowly for the wings to keep us aloft.

  “Power on,” yelled the tower. “Power ... level out ... left rudder.”

  “I can’t see a bloody thing,” Kris said, his teeth grating from the shock through our bodies.

  “Power ... POWER ...”

  Kris pushed the throttle open and held the nose steady, and again we hit the ground with a frightful crash, though this time we bounced off grass, not off the hard runway, and were heading heaven knew where, still with a lethal but necessary airspeed giving us lift enough for a livable landing and still with the setting sun golden red in our eyes.

  Kris said loudly, “To hell with this.” and pulled the throttle right back, chopping off the fuel and stopping the engine. which would have been fine if we’d had any wheels on the ground, instead of ten feet or more of air beneath us.

  Normally Kris’s landings consisted of a smooth nose-up float followed by a feather-soft transference of wheels to earth. This time with the speed dropping off alarmingly fast, leaving Kris progressively without any effective control, we hit the ground again and bounced again into the air and bounced again, slowing, slowing, each bounce shallower but at the wrong angle for the wheels to stay down.

  Kris from instinct finally pulled the control column yoke right back, raising the nose until the wings stalled and, with no lift left, the airplane’s propeller dipped down and dug a deep groove in the earth. There was a screeching and a banging of metal and there were human bodies being flung about. There was a terrifying sudden and final standstill with the fuselage and tail pointing halfway to the sky.

  The oil on the windshield still shone radiantly, the glass unbroken, the last red-gold gleams of sunset slanting across towards a motionless dusk.

  Silence. Stillness. My head rang.

  It had been a miraculous deliverance and a splendid piece of flying, and within a minute we were surrounded by foam trucks and ambulances and police cars and half of the county of Bedfordshire that had been listening on the so-called “private” frequency dedicated to our troubles.

  9

  Kris had been knocked out by the last going-nowhere impact and was half hanging in his seat belt and half lying on the control column. I’d felt in myself a sort of resilient cracking bounce in my chest, disorienting but not disabling, nothing to stop me from trying to unlatch the door, which when it came to the point I couldn’t do, as it seemed to be bent.

  I’d reached a woozy level of thinking “fire” and “dammit we have fuel in both wing tanks this time,” and various comforting little items along those lines, but the rescue mob outside jimmied the door open and scooped us carefully and quite fast out of our nose-down cabin and covered the fuel leaks around them and us with foam and expedition.

  Kris woke up moaning, a noise that shocked him into silence and a weak grin. By the time the first news camera with microphone was seen advancing among the uniforms, his concern had been wholly transferred from the living to his mangled treasure, which no one would let him inspect.

  I could have told him that the obvious damage was a nose wheel with broken struts, three burst tires and propeller blades bent into right angles.

  I stood on the grass, shivering, while someone with kindness wrapped a blanket round my shoulders; and I watched Kris lose the battle against stretcher-bearers and other good-natured forms of restraint.

  It was inevitable, I supposed, that the question of why had the oil leaked out of the engine should be one of the first needing an answer and almost the last to get it.

  For some reason my mind was inclined to clear sharply sometimes in a crisis, and it was then with a jolt that I remembered Kris’s friend setting out the landing lights at White Waltham. Our savior from the Luton tower, coming down from his heights, promised amiably to alert him, with a consequent widening of the bad and good tidings, and no chance of a modest disavowal. Everyone at White Waltham chatted onwards and agreed that the weathermen had nine, or better, twenty-nine lives.

  Being carried off by paramedics—against his will—Kris urgently told me as he passed to stay with the Cherokee to the death (or to the scrap heap), as oil should not have got past his eagle-eyed checks; and indeed I was well aware, as he was carted protestingly to onward transport, that
we had in fact flown safely to Doncaster a few hours earlier with the engine oil intact.

  I folded the blanket from around my shoulders, returned it noncommittally to an ambulance and, covering most of my too easily recognized face with a hand, became a gawping bystander among others. Never mind that Kris wanted to know, I too was fairly anxiously curious. Except for the direction-finder and its operator in Luton’s control tower, and but for Kris’s “give-it-all-you’ve-got” semi-crash landing, the BBC would have lost two forecasters permanently, and on a cloudless fine evening, no less.

  Inevitably in the end Kris and I became news fodder with names, but I did stay with the Cherokee to the crane-lifting stage, for which Kris next day (out of hospital custody), said, “Thanks, kiddo,” absentmindedly and demanded to know what I’d learned.

  I said, “When we ... er ... landed, there was no dipstick in the engine.”

  He stared at me fiercely. We were up in my attic surrounded by the Sunday papers he’d brought with him. All the later editions had given us front page slots with a frame or two of the nose-down wreck and our best BBC faces, with unstinted and not unduly complimentary comments on our recently reported escape from our flight through a hurricane. Two crashes within two weeks was excessive.

  “It was not pilot error.” Kris asserted, deliberately ignoring any possible embarrassing reference to fuel tanks. “You saw me use the dipstick yesterday morning when we took off. I wiped the stick clean and put it into the engine sump to make sure there was enough oil, and there was. And I put the dipstick back and screwed it up tight, and no oil came out on the way to Doncaster.”

  “No,” I agreed.

  “And I didn’t look at the oil level again at Doncaster. Go on, say it, I didn’t do that check again as we hadn’t come far from White Waltham—like I didn’t check the oil that day for coming home from Newmarket. No one checks the oil after such a short flight.”

  I said, “You certainly did not remove the dipstick at Doncaster and not put it back.”

  “You’d swear to it?”

  I’d been semi-asleep at Doncaster but 1 would have bet my life on his carefulness ... as indeed I had done in Odin ... and nearly drowned for it ...

  At Doncaster there had been no pressure on him. The panic scale had registered zero. He wouldn’t have made an elementary mistake.

  The alternative had to be faced. Someone else. not Kris. had taken out the dipstick at Doncaster and not put it back.

  Kris shook his head to any question about Robin Darcy. but in good spirits collected his newspapers and went down my stairs, slowly for him because of the medics’ warning of dizziness and concussion; and I finally admitted to myself, chiefly as a result of a stabbing indrawn breath, that I’d possibly cracked a rib or two at Luton.

  I’d been treated well there, courtesy no doubt of my employment by the Weather Center, and I’d learned how very lucky we had in fact been, as the single wide runway and the airport itself lay on a hill above the town. The control tower people, aghast, had seen our first heavy bounce throw the Cherokee off its straight course. and we’d been heading across grass towards a steep downwards slope when Kris had opted for his dramatic full stop.

  Kris’s Cherokee would be stowed safely in their hangar, they said, and there it would stay until the accident inspectors came to write their report. I would please meanwhile not talk about no dipstick. Silent as mushrooms, I said.

  I called my grandmother and dispelled a flourishing outbreak of heebie-jeebies. The Stuart feet, I assured her, may have been in the recent wars but were this time safely on the ground. She could however hear the lighthearted relief in my voice and unerringly understood it.

  “You might not always escape,” she said worriedly. “Wear a bulletproof vest.”

  By Monday morning we had yielded the front page to an eloping heiress and there was no denying the fact of my cracked ribs. Maybe two, I thought: not more. And no lungpiercers, the really extremely bad news.

  I’d done much the same damage once before by falling down a Welsh mountainside. A visit to a doctor resulted at that time in “grin, bear it and take aspirins” advice: after Luton there seemed nothing to improve on that, except the distraction attained by looking up snowfalls in Europe.

  Glenda surprisingly was apparently right. If her dominating George had reported icy temperatures as an excuse for infidelity, he hadn’t been truthful, regardless of faithful.

  I made a list of the actual air temperatures and inches of snowfall for all the places and cities I’d been given, and none of them matched. Either Glenda or George, or both, was playing winter games.

  I telephoned Belladonna, reckoning to catch her at breakfast after she’d come in from riding morning exercise, and I located her with Loricroft and Glenda, eating cornflakes in the Loricroft kitchen. Racehorse trainers, it seemed to me, led half their days in the kitchen. It was warm there in winter, Bell explained.

  Kris had refused sick leave, she said, and would be forecasting on Radio Four, as scheduled, and he had already told her that for the five weekdays ahead, starting on that day, Monday, I would be doing television forecasts in the evening after the six o‘clock and nine o’clock news.

  “Mm,” I agreed. “Could you and Glenda spare me any time tomorrow morning, if I come over?”

  “Is it good news for Glenda? Do you want to talk to her? Will you be bringing Kris?”

  I said, “Maybe. Perhaps. And no.”

  “Hang on,” Bell said and put her hand over the microphone, I guessed, while she asked her boss and his wife for their reaction, because in a minute or two she was saying. “Perry? How about Wednesday? George says if you’re here early enough you can see his jumpers going over the schooling fences.”

  I gathered I was being offered a medium honor which it would be impolite to refuse: I agreed on eight-thirty Wednesday, though I would rather have gone a day sooner.

  Until then ... Until then there was first of all Jett van Els, whose third week with my grandmother had concluded that Monday morning. At ten she had changed places with another of my grandmother’s “dear girls,” and at one o’clock she met me in a sandwich bar for lunch.

  She came dressed not in the nurses uniform familiar to me. but in black pants, a thick white sweater and a boxy scarlet coat with black and gold buttons. I greeted her with frank admiration and the first thing she said was. “You’re not well.”

  I kissed her anyway.

  “I’m a nurse, remember.” she said. “and I’ve seen pallor in too many faces.”

  She made no more fuss about it. however, but hung her coat on a nearby peg and read the possible menu with half her attention.

  “What job do you start next?” I asked, settling on cheese and chutney in brown bread for myself, but not caring much what I ate.

  “I’m taking a week off, and next Monday I’ll he back with Mrs. Mevagissey.” She spoke calmly as if this program were usual. Normally, if a nurse returned, it would be after at least a month.

  “Did she agree?” I queried, my eyebrows rising.

  Jett smiled at my surprise. “Your grandmother warned me severely not to grow fond of you. as you were inconstancy personified, or words to that effect.”

  “She doesn’t want you to be hurt.”

  “And will I be?”

  It wasn’t the sort of exchange I’d ever before embarked on.

  I said weakly, “It’s too soon to tell.”

  “I’ll negotiate terms of disengagement.”

  We ordered food. She chose tuna, which I’d never liked, and I found I hoped her future plans wouldn’t take her far away. Jett van Els, with or without Belgian father, was more likely to leave Perry Stuart in tatters than the other way round.

  “Seriously,” she said, having healthily dispatched the tuna, “what’s hurting you?”

  “Onset of broken heart?”

  She shook her head, smiling. “I saw the papers yesterday, with your grandmother. It’s amazing you and your friend Kris survive
d at all.”

  I said I’d probably cracked a rib or two, which could be a bit frustrating in the active love department, for a couple of days.

  “Think in terms of a week or two,” Miss van Els instructed. “Or a month or two.” She smiled with composure. “The first rule of disengagement is to take your time at the beginning.”

  “How about lunch tomorrow, then?”

  “All right,” she said.

  Although I wouldn’t do my act before the cameras until well after six o’clock, I was always at work in plenty of time before two, when the twice-daily conference on world atmospheric conditions took place.

  One had to consider as a whole the jacket of air swirling round the spinning planet and to foresee if possible how far the low pressure systems in hot areas might deepen further still, to give rise to gales.

  I had always found it extraordinary that people turned their backs on physics as a subject at school and university, even if public opinion was at last gradually changing. Physics was the study of the hugely powerful invisible forces that ruled the way we lived. Physics was gravity, magnetism, electricity, heat, sound, air pressure, radioactivity and especially radio, the mysterious forces that clearly existed, whose effects were commonplace, whose powers were unlimited, and which could not be seen. Every day I dealt with them as friends.

  No one at work made much comment on Kris’s or my Saturday escapade. as our colleagues seemed to have exhausted their “welcome backs” after Odin. Their matter-of-fact approach suited me fine, though perhaps I would have preferred a more concerned response to inquiries into the fate of a missing dipstick further north. When I telephoned for news, I got nowhere, as it wasn’t my dipstick, I was told. When Kris telephoned, at my prompting, he still got nowhere, as nothing could be discussed unless he made the journey to talk to them in person.

  “Get Luton to ask,” I suggested, but Luton received only a suggestion that Kris himself should be more closely questioned.