Before the shooting he hadn’t been concerned about landing even if the fog remained because then he had flight instruments to tell him the attitude of the plane, whether he was going up or down, banking or turning or skidding even though he couldn’t see, and he had the radio to contact fields that had instrument landing facilities. He could be talked down even though the Cessna lacked complete navigational equipment.
That was impossible now. He was lost and blind and hurt, and there was no way he could go down into that fog without killing himself and perhaps people on the ground.
And with the blood running out of his calf and filling his shoe, he couldn’t even circle and hope the fog would lift before he ran out of fuel.
He slammed the useless earphones to the floor. Turner’s bullets had killed him as effectively as they had Marco.
Slowly bleeding, growing number from shock and cold, he clutched the wheel with both hands, circled slowly, and tried to think as his blood drained from him, eventually finding his mind drifting, images from his past coming and going; the day he met his wife for the first time; the first order he had written that had set his new business on its feet; the feeling he had when he first soloed and found himself alone in the sky.
He sank deeper toward unconsciousness and—as when he had walked between the parked planes—the roaring of the engines, the clouds overhead, and the fog below stirred forgotten memories of the war, this time of a day when he had been returning from a mission alone, separated from the others by a fight and bad weather.
Slightly ahead and below him he had seen another Mustang trailing a faint stream of black smoke and pulled up beside it. The canopy was half blasted away, bullet holes stitched through the metal skin behind the pilot, and a red-stained scarf wrapped around the pilot’s neck flapped in the airstream.
Eyes above the mask resigned, the pilot covered his eyes and then his mouth with his hand. Dunne knew what he meant. His instruments and radio were both out, and without them the man had no way to get through the clouds below.
Dunne motioned the man to take position on his wing, held up two fingers, and pointed down. The man nodded.
Dunne took them both down through the clouds, feeling his way lower and lower until the dark shapes of the trees lifted eager branches to pluck them from the sky, and then the field was below them and Dunne brought them both in.
The pilot had been a blue-eyed, dark-haired twenty-year-old named Castle on his third mission, holding himself tall and appearing older than his years.
“I owe you one,” Castle said quietly. “I’ll pay you back someday.”
A week later he hit a string of high-tension wires while strafing an airfield, his Mustang leaving a black scar in the snow of a farmer’s field.
Dunne jerked erect as one of the engines missed a beat. He was very tired. His head sagged again.
He fought off the stupor.
Once. Twice.
Each lift of his head became more difficult, and then it didn’t seem to matter any longer. His wife was gone, his business was gone, and in a larger sense, so was his entire life. In essence, he had been dead before he entered the operations building and found Turner there.
Still, he lifted his head again, something inside unwilling to concede defeat.
He blinked and drew a hand across his eyes.
Slightly ahead and to one side was a Mustang, so close he could see the rivets and the heat streaks from the engine, the canopy half blasted away, a red-stained scarf around the pilot’s neck, the man’s eyes above the oxygen mask.
Dunne stared. Castle. But the kid was dead. What was he doing here?
The conviction grew in Dunne that he was dying and the kid had come to lead him through the shadows to his eventual destination. He sighed. If that was the way it was to be, the matter was out of his hands.
He tucked his wing inside the Mustang’s resignedly, and with a dead man beside him and an unconscious maniac on the floor, he entered the fog-flying formation with a plane out of the past, not knowing where he was going and not caring, his mind frozen, until the pilot lifted a hand and pointed downward. Dunne took his eyes from the plane and saw a broad runway rushing beneath him. He cut the switches and brought the Cessna in on its belly, sliding and scraping along the runway. He was certain he was dead, but the only thing that concerned him was that wheels-up landing. It was a helluva way for an experienced pilot to arrive in heaven or hell, as the case might be.
He fumbled feebly at the seat-belt to get out to face whatever awaited him, but the effort was too great. He passed out.
* * * *
When he awoke, he was staring at a dun-colored ceiling, dimly remembering being lifted and carried, hearing concerned voices, being pulled and jostled. So he was alive after all. How or why he didn’t know.
The memory of that Mustang remained with the freshness of a dream retained. What had it been? An illusion? Hallucination? Ghost out of the past? The product of a lively imagination stimulated by circumstance? None of those things could explain how it had brought him down through the fog.
He lay still, a hollow feeling inside, trying to find an answer if there was one.
A woman came into the room, tall, her hair cut short and touched with gray. Once pretty, her face had matured into smooth planes that gave her an attractiveness and dignity youth could never have.
She smiled. “You would wake up when I was out of the room. How do you feel?”
“I haven’t decided yet.” Stethoscope plugged into her ears, she examined him quickly. “I think you’re fine, Mr. Dunne. If you want to get it over with now, you have my permission.”
“Get what over with?”
“Talking to all of the people waiting to see you. You’re a hero, you know. Everyone wants to know what happened, and you’re the only one who can tell the entire story. All anyone knows at present is what little we were able to get from Mr. Turner, who spoke mostly gibberish before we wired his broken jaw shut and strapped him to a bed in the psychiatric ward.
“You were very lucky. The man killed three people, attacked the two policemen attempting to bring him in, and escaped in the fog. It was rather obvious that he killed the other man in the plane and almost succeeded in killing you before you somehow subdued him, but there are many questions only you can answer.”
Dunne closed his eyes. Describing what had happened up until the time the Mustang had appeared and led him down would be no problem. The question was—how could he explain that? He looked up at her. "If you had a story you were certain no one would believe, would you tell the truth or would you lie?”
She smiled. “Mr. Dunne, I’m old enough to know that there are many occasions when telling the truth serves no useful purpose.”
She was right, thought Dunne. What had happened concerned him and no one else. He alone would have to live with it and accept it for what it had given him—the chance to go on from here.
That, at least, explained why the Mustang had appeared—the payment of a debt held beyond time and understanding.
The rest was masked by fog deeper than that the Mustang had brought him through; so dense and vast man had never penetrated it in the whole of his existence. He wouldn’t even try.
Fog Page 2