Shelter Rock

by MP Miles

  Jim leant backwards and looked up into the wheel bay. When the aeroplane had left the Oklahoma City factory in 1945 the aluminium would have been painted a pale green. Now, getting on for forty years later, very little paint remained, just a few flaking patches in the dark corners that hadn’t been blasted by sand and grit from unimproved fields in wartime Europe and peacetime Africa. Jim had been flying for as long as the aeroplane, and in similar theatres. He knew that there was very little left of him that was original either, just a few flaking patches in dark corners.

  Jim was sixty years old, short and lean with a head disproportionately large to the rest of his body so that he looked like a cartoon of himself. His wiry frame wasn’t, as many unfairly suspected, due to a diet entirely of alcohol. Jim knew that those who thought this were wrong because to prove to himself that he wasn’t dependent he would stay dry one day every week. On that day he would eat.

  It pleased him that he could still pass any medical that his employer Skyways threw at him. He put this down to the tennis. Off court he became mild mannered and softly spoken but, slightly out of character, he played tennis hard, aggressively and always to win. Like flying he’d been playing a long time, since evenings at the Lisburn Racquets Club back in his hometown on the border of the counties of Antrim and Down. Recently, tennis had become gruelling. He’d become slower off the baseline than he used to be and sometimes when he got the ball from his pocket to serve, his hand would shake. He hoped his tennis partner had never noticed.

  Jim licked his finger and rubbed a streak through the dust on a stainless steel part of the undercarriage leg above the oleo, near a flange welded forty years previously. It had been beautifully done in perfectly regular overlapping crescents like half-moons. Jim mumbled to himself with satisfaction, unable to see evidence of the hairline cracks he was looking for, but his concerns remained. The undercarriage was robust at absorbing the vertical up and down loads when Jim landed deliberately hard onto short strips, or when Quebec Jean his co-pilot bounced her after flaring too high. It had been well engineered to withstand the fore and aft stresses of rough runways made of hard red Kenyan dirt, corrugated into deep creases. Jim looked for the tell-tale signs of fracture caused by sideways loading as twenty-six thousand pounds of aeroplane skipped across the runway, when landing in a crosswind for example, or when on take-off Jean wasn’t assertive enough with his rudder inputs to keep her tracking in a straight line while on the ground.

  Jean Dalbec had escaped a life in Canadian asbestos mines by learning to fly and, although young, had accumulated significant experience of bush flying. He scared Jim. Forty years of avoiding risk told him that Jean was one of those pilots, like some he’d briefly known, who were dangerously fearless. To Jim, fear had become a valuable defence mechanism. Pilots like Jim, who had flown in wartime while others tried to kill them, knew about fear. Talented but peacetime pilots like Jean Dalbec had been through a tough day when they’d spilt coffee down their trousers.

  Jim turned around and looked forward past the cowl flaps of the port engine, open like the petals of a small flower after a shower, through the rain, over the weeds growing vigorously in the deep cracks of the apron, to the rusty doors of the hangar that hung limp, immobile and mildewed. Jean was nowhere to be seen. Pallets strung with net and a sign of the favourite charitable aid agency of the month sat half in and half out of the hangar, water running off unprotected maize flour and powdered milk, gifts from the people of the USA. ACROSS: Aid Commission for the Rehabilitation of Southern Sudan. Jim, exasperated, sighed as he dismounted the aeroplane’s wheel.

  “Jean!”

  Jim put his hands on his hips and bellowed into the rain.

  “Jean!”

  A shape, barely visible through the fall of water, appeared at the wing tip.

  “Jean?”

  “No. My name is Ralph. Veronica sent me.”

  Afterwards, Jim remembered that it’d been when the boy had mentioned Veronica that he’d known that it would be a good trip, that the gear would hold up to another of Jean’s rough landings, that the wet load wouldn’t make them too heavy to take off, that Loki would have fuel for their onward flight to Juba and return to Wilson. The delayed departure, the rotten area forecast, the prospect of an uncomfortable night camping in the hold, all became instantly manageable. At the time all he’d been able to say was, ‘She’s a good girl.’ He’d meant it, and it had made him smile.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Ralph Phillips.”

  “Any relation to Jack?”

  “Who?”

  “Jack Phillips.”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Never mind.”

  He studied the boy standing in the rain. He looked light.

  “Do you think you can find a truck in the hangar and pull those pallets inside out of the rain? Could you do that for me?”

  “No problem. I love being around aeroplanes.”

  Jim grunted, suddenly and unexpectedly happy. There’d been a boy a long time ago in Northern Ireland who’d loved fetching and carrying at Long Kesh airfield just to be around aeroplanes.

  “I can take you to Juba,” he said to the boy. “We’ll go as far as Lokichoggio this afternoon and stay there the night.”

  Jim felt certain that the boy had no idea where it was.

  “Lovely. Thanks.”

  Ralph looked at the nose of the aeroplane.

  “What is this? She’s beautiful.”

  Jim looked at him and smiled.

  “This… is Betsy.”

  *

  In the cockpit the pilots were arguing. Jim sat with one buttock on the edge of his seat and scratched his head, while Jean Dalbec stood hunched against a panel and looked sullenly at the floor. Jim spoke quietly as if to a frightened horse, while Jean talked and ate at the same time, projecting small pieces of pastry and red meat onto the floor around him.

  Ralph made himself comfortable close to the cockpit among sacks of food aid and looked around. The fuselage sloped steadily downhill from where he sat to a wide double door still open on the port side at the tail. It was like sitting in the back of a Land Rover, bare aluminium ridged and riveted, the floor scuffed shiny with use, creased and bent where heavy loads had been dragged and dropped.

  Jean, still eating, walked sulkily to the tail to shut the hatch. He kicked the restraining straps that held the pallets securely as he climbed back towards the cockpit. He stopped by Ralph, peered through a yellowed Perspex window, broke off a handful of the pie and offered it to Ralph.

  “Tourtière?”

  Ralph shook his head.

  “It’s like pork pie.”

  “No thanks.”

  Jean nodded. Ralph felt he’d been rude in some way. He asked him about the aeroplane.

  “Is this a Dakota?”

  Jean shook his head side to side, scattering crumbs.

  “Kind of. It’s a DC3C. She used to be a C-47 and flew with the US Air Force. She survived the war, so in 1946 Douglas rebuilt her with two 1,200 horsepower Pratt and Witney radial piston engines and sold it on the civilian market. They reinforced the floor so she could carry a load of six thousand pounds and gave her a big cargo door. Problem is that if you have six thousand pounds of cargo on board you can only fill the fuel tanks to about two-thirds full or you’d be over the maximum weight. Still, carrying three tons for over a thousand statute miles is quite something for a forty-year-old aircraft.”

  He felt very proud of her.

  “Half a million rivets!” shouted Jim. “Tough as guts. One of these got rammed by a kamikaze pilot. He crashed, but the C-47 just shrugged and flew home with a Mitsubishi Zero-sized hole in the middle upper fuselage.”

  Jean swallowed a large mouthful of food.

  “This particular plane did a bad bounce in ’63 and ripped off most of the left wi
ng tip. She flew around minus half a wing and landed okay,” Jim said and peered at them over the back of his seat. “Something we don’t want to repeat, hey, Jean.”

  Jean stared through the window and wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve. He plugged two jack plugs into a frame and gave Ralph a headset. Ralph took it from him, unsure which way round to put it on.

  “How fast does she go?”

  “Jim doesn’t like to go too fast.”

  Jim knocked a clockwork gauge with his knuckle. A needle bounced inside the glass as he did it.

  “At one time she would have cruised at 180. We were lucky to see 165 a while ago. She’s probably gained a few pounds over the years,” he said.

  Jean spun around angrily towards Jim.

  “It was my idea to take the de-ice boots off and empty the de-icing fluid tanks. That gave us an extra fourteen knots to get us back to nearly 180.”

  Jean walked back into the cockpit and threw himself into the right-hand seat. He started mumbling to himself as if intoning a prayer.

  Jim tapped the end of the boom mic attached to his headset. Muffled thumps chased each other through Ralph’s head.

  “Ralph.”

  “Yes.”

  “We are going to Lokichoggio for the night and to take on fuel. Three hundred and sixty-three nautical miles. It’s about two and a bit hours.”

  “Okay. Not Juba?”

  “Not enough fuel for Juba direct. Our load is limited to just enough to get to Loki with a reserve, and we’ve reduced the weight of cargo to only four thousand pounds, otherwise with our performance here in Nairobi at this high altitude we won’t even get off the ground. Isn’t that right, Jean?”

  Jean said nothing.

  “We usually take off early morning when it’s cooler. That makes a little bit of difference. Doesn’t it, Jean?”

  Jim knew he was being unfair. The delay hadn’t been Jean’s fault. Through his headset Ralph heard Jean trying to talk to someone. Five Yankee Bravo Mike Bravo was obviously Betsy’s real name but no one wanted to respond to her. Jean talked to Jim instead.

  “Reduced power take-off?”

  “Are you kidding me?” said Jim.

  Among the DC3 community there was intense debate on the use of less than full power when taking off. In Betsy, Jim liked to use full power, forty-eight inches of manifold pressure and fully rich. Jean enjoyed discussing it because he knew how much it irritated Jim, who would always rise and take the bait.

  “Jean, if you always use derated power you’ll create ridges in the cylinder walls so that when you do need full power, like when an engine fails, you’ll break all the piston rings off. United Airlines proved in the 1940s that their engines lasted longer when used at full power.”

  Jean thought he’d fan the flames.

  “But in Quebec we used reduced power on take-off for years and never had a problem.”

  Jim tried to remain calm.

  “The enriching feature on the carb for additional engine cooling only operates at full power,” he said.

  “But full power is limited to one minute. That’s not long in the take-off sequence.”

  Jim knew that Jean enjoyed being deliberately argumentative.

  “Jean, you Canuck. Just work through this for me. Where are we?”

  “Nairobi Wilson.”

  “And that is in?”

  “Kenya.”

  “Good. Hot Kenya. Not cold Canada. And how high are we?”

  “It gets hot in Quebec City in the summer.”

  “How high are we?”

  Jean consulted a chart on the glare shield. He enjoyed this game.

  “Five thousand five hundred and forty-six feet above sea level.”

  “Excellent. So, considering the hot Kenyan temperature, and the high altitude, what altitude does the aeroplane think we are at?”

  “It’s not always hot. It’s May. This morning it was only sixteen degrees.”

  “Okay. This morning, how high did it feel?”

  “Our density altitude was 6,944 feet.”

  “Right. So, the aeroplane would perform as if it had been trying to take off at nearly seven thousand feet when we are only at 5,500. What would that mean?”

  “We couldn’t carry a full load.”

  “And? I feel like I’m pulling teeth here.”

  “We would have a long take-off run.”

  “How long?”

  “The graphs say that at twenty-three thousand pounds we would need a take-off distance to clear a fifty-foot obstacle of 5,400 feet.”

  “And how long is the longest runway at Wilson?”

  Jean looked away and smiled.

  “Five thousand and fifty-two feet.”

  “Thank you. Do you still not want to use full power?”

  Jim could have murdered a drink.

  “Just take it to the end of the runway. I want to feel the tailwheel in the dirt when we’ve lined up. And push those throttles to the stops when I say. Sweet Jesus.”

  *

  From a square window on the starboard side Ralph could see Lake Turkana, painfully blue. His eyes burnt as he looked at it, then watered as he focused on the brown of northern Kenya. Unlike Nairobi, it hadn’t rained here for a long time. There was nothing alive down there, a landscape of just two colours.

  A watery voice talked to him, filtered by the headset but still softly Irish.

  “Look roughly at the middle of the lake, on the far shore. There’s a sort of dimple.”

  “Yeah, I’ve got it.”

  “That’s a place called Koobi Fora on Allia Bay. Leakey’s dig, although Kamoya his sidekick is making all the big finds.”

  “Finding what?”

  “Man. It’s the birthplace of civilisation. Didn’t you know? We’re all African.”

  Ralph strained his eyes for signs of anything but saw no men, no civilisation, no Africans at all.

  “Is it far to Loki?”

  “Under half an hour to go.”

  “Have you been in Kenya a long time?”

  “Since the end of the war. Well, in Africa anyway.”

  “What’s Lokichoggio like?”

  “Dry.”

  Ralph looked ahead. To the north, a wide meandering sandy brown riverbed and Loki’s long runway were already visible. They were thirty kilometres from the Sudanese border and still in Kenya, but the last real Kenyan town was Lodwar, two hundred kilometres behind them. Loki didn’t look like a Kenyan town, or like any African settlement that Ralph had been through since leaving Cape Town three months previously. To the west, the sun was setting over the Sudanese state of Sharq al Istiwaiyya, Eastern Equatoria, but Ralph looked east over Turkana County into Ethiopia and it was already dark. Beyond, out of sight, was Arabia.

  Ralph, speculating anxiously on the route to Cairo, wondered what he was doing in Africa. He shivered, unsure whether it was from apprehension or a fever.

  *

  Captain Gray had control and landed on the unlit east–west runway in fading light, a ‘wheeler’ on the two main wheels only, rarely three-pointed, pinning the aeroplane to the ground with a sharp forward twitch of the control column, and running tail up to keep airflow over the rudder until abeam the hardstanding, softly down at the back controlling it all the way, unlock the tail wheel, differential power to turn while taxiing and save the brakes – forty years of flying distilled into a fluid, effortlessly gentle, sequence.

  Jim looked around to see who else was there. Unusual aircraft carrying ‘flag of convenience’ registrations, and in questionable states of serviceability, littered the apron. Unregulated operators from obscure Soviet states or Far Eastern peoples republics busily made money from aid agencies, grand or unheard of, until the cash or spare parts ran out. Carcasses of aircraft robbed of wheels, engines and
avionics rotted where ignobly pushed. They were the lucky ones. Others had blown tyres or gearboxes during take-off, or simply failed to stagger loaded and wheezing into the hot thin air, their charred remains bulldozed from the active runway. Loki was the ‘Wild West’ of aviation.

  Jim noticed a newer aircraft, the engines in nacelles on top of the wing rather than suspended below.

  “Hey, Jean, is that a new thirty-two?”

  Jean followed his gaze. It was a similar story every time.

  “It’s Russian. Looks just like an ordinary twenty-six to me.”

  Jim wasn’t to be corrected.

  “No. It’s the new Ant. I’ve got to talk to them.”

  Jean busied himself tidying the cockpit. There was only one thing Jim wanted from the Russians and it wasn’t discussing their new aircraft’s improved hot and high performance.

  *

  Ralph swung his legs over the edge of the open cargo door and jumped to the ground. Small campfires glowed in the dark, near and all around.

  There was no perimeter fence at Loki. Turkana people still lived among the acacia trees close to the narrow runway as they always had, seeking the blessings of life and occasionally appeasing ancestral spirits in the traditional way as heavy transport aircraft thundered overhead. Colonial administrators had at one time made Turkana a closed district, deliberately segregating them from the rest of Kenya. Little had changed with independence, Kenyans in government disputing their own census that showed Turkana people to be such a large and significant ethnic group, larger than the Maasai.

  Ralph walked slowly to the circular turning area beyond the threshold, people’s homes little more than a wingspan from the edge of the runway. The houses were a domed wooden framework covered in animal skins, big enough for a family of six. Goat and camel, corralled for the night, slept in brushwood enclosures.

  Women made use of the fringe of the hard runway to pound palm nuts, the dry husks blowing away in a light breeze. As he approached they lifted their colourful fabric wraps held like tunics on one shoulder to cover their shyly smiling faces. Their heads were shaved and strings of bead necklaces rattled at their throats. Men sat nearby on small one-legged stools chopping meat with a steel circular disc with a sharp edge, a wrist knife worn like a bracelet. They threw cubes of goat into a tightly woven basket to stew for dinner and eat with maize porridge. Ralph wondered if there might be food on the aeroplane.