by Max Hennessy
‘OK.’ Her voice was calm again now.
‘And let’s have something to eat,’ Ira suggested. ‘It looks as though things might grow interesting from here on, so let’s start with full stomachs.’
She began to pass cold sausages and rolls, and the tin cup of coffee. The coffee was almost cold now, but it was refreshing and they felt better for it. Just as Ira was finishing it, they caught the third hesitation from the engine, this time a much longer one. Carefully, he set the cup on the floorboards by his feet, moving without panic, his mind clear with the clarity of experience.
‘Pump, Alix,’ he said, and as the hiss and squeak of the pump started, they heard the engine catch again.
‘Keep it going,’ Ira said. ‘Let’s give it a few minutes this time.’
For a while, they sat listening to the roar of the engine, and as she stopped pumping, the steady note continued for a time, then, quite unexpectedly and with a horrifying emptiness after the hours of sound, it stopped dead without warning.
* * *
The silence was tremendous and terrifying, particularly in the darkness, and it seemed that the ears would never adjust to it. It was a silence of death, doubt and non-existence, and it stunned them so that they could feel neither fear nor hope. Suddenly, there was nothing. Ira shouted at once:
‘Pump, Alix!’
He forced himself to keep calm, his hands moving quickly and surely over switches to check they’d not been knocked off accidentally, his eyes flickering over the dials. The law that said that for safety he should direct the nose of the plane downwards instead of clawing for altitude seemed insane just at that moment, but though his heart rejected the idea, his mind told him coldly that the teachings of 10,000 instructors, many of them long since screwed down in Valhalla, were dead right.
The nose of the machine was down now and they could hear the rush of air past them as they dived. Somewhere in the darkness, he heard the rattle as the coffee cup rolled, and he was aware of Alix groping for the cocks to the petrol tanks. The beam of the torch on the dashboard had not wavered.
‘Right-wing tank,’ she announced calmly, her voice loud in the silence. ‘Pump off.’
Ira checked the switches and the throttle again and thrust the stick further forward.
‘Hold tight,’ he said. ‘This is going to be steep. What’s the altitude?’
‘Five thousand five hundred.’
‘Let’s hope the engine starts.’
They were dropping steeply now and they could hear the whine of the wind rushing past. It was a horrifying experience with the sea hidden by the darkness and only the unsteady beam of the torch to illuminate the instruments.
His eyes flickering occasionally to the turn-and-bank indicator, Ira watched the altimeter unwind, his mind busy as it grappled with the problems of the emergency. He felt aware of nightmare imaginings as his mind raced ahead to the question of how long he dared keep up the emergency dive to restart the motor. Some time soon, whether the engine fired or not, he’d have to pull out and if by then there was still no sign of life they could only begin to consider the best way to put the machine down in the sea in the darkness.
The altimeter needle was still moving backwards, a thousand feet or more, until it was reading only 4,000, and he worked his feet on the rudder, fishtailing the machine, aware that he was holding his breath and that his heart was thudding in his chest.
‘Three thousand eight hundred. Three thousand seven. Three thousand six…’
Alix was calling off the altitude in a loud steady voice, as Ira, his heart cold despite his calm, stared with narrow eyes at the turn-and-bank indicator. Then, with a bang, the engine caught. Ira’s heart seemed to stop, as though his mind refused to believe what it heard, and as he eased the stick back gently the altimeter needle began to slow down.
‘Three thousand five. Three thousand four…’ The readings were coming more slowly now, but not slowly enough, because the machine was still heavy with the petrol it was carrying and he couldn’t risk wrenching off the fragile wings by pulling it out of the dive too quickly.
‘Three thousand.’ Alix paused as the needle steadied and began to move the other way. ‘You’ve got her.’
Ira drew a deep breath and he felt her move uneasily in her seat alongside him. If the engine had been silent for another minute, their lives would probably have ended in a splintering crash, the sloshing sound of sea water and the blackness of oblivion.
‘I’m going up again,’ he announced. ‘Let’s have plenty of height in case that happens again. I’ll get as high as I can. It’ll use petrol but we can’t risk being too low.’
He had been on the point of saying that, whatever happened, they mustn’t risk ditching in the dark, but he changed his mind abruptly and decided not to. There was no point in voicing his fears – not yet, especially with the engine beating strongly again now.
‘How are the gravity tanks, Alix?’
She looked at the readings in the log book. ‘Hundred and sixty gallons. Most of what we’ve burned has come from the main tank.’
‘Let’s keep her on gravity as long as we can. We’ll go on to main tank and hand pump as late as possible.’
Ira glanced at the chart, his mind working out little sums. They were burning roughly nine gallons to each hundred miles they flew, and with what they still had in the wing tanks, they would still have several hundred miles to go – several hours of pumping – when they were forced on to the main tank.
It was a long time, but if he leaned the mixture and cut the revs there was still a chance they could do it.
Chapter 10
The moon was edging up behind the mass of cloud now, illuminating the curves and peaks of mist, touching the edges with silver and throwing night-black shadows into the valleys so that they looked like vast pits leading to death itself. There were islands and continents below them and about them, and enormous towering mountain ranges as the silver glow drove through the screen of cumulus. Above, thin cirrus-like layers picked it up on their undersides, then the moon itself emerged, pale, cold and disinterested, a celestial witness to the struggles of the tiny winged machine threading between the clouds towards the east, a minute speck in the vast complications of the heavens, a mere insect dwarfed by space and the tremendous towering cloud formations.
They were waiting now for daylight, saying nothing, trying not to say anything, aware that nothing they said could help, aware that it was wiser to save their breath for the effort they knew they would have to make before long.
At least daylight would give meaning to their efforts. With daylight they would see what they were doing, and be able to orientate themselves above the heaving sea.
Already they had switched from the nose tank to the right-wing tank and from the right-wing tank to the left-wing tank. Any moment now they would have to switch to the centre tank, and after that they could expect little more than an hour’s grace before they were trying to maintain height with only a small hand pump between them and failure.
‘Centre tank,’ Alix said, moving in her seat and reaching forward to adjust the cocks. ‘Gives us an hour.’
Her voice was quite calm and Ira nodded.
‘Let’s run it as fine as we can,’ he said. ‘But let’s change before she stops. We can’t risk having the engine cut again.’
She leaned forward to look at the charts and he saw there were smears of blood across the paper. She caught him looking at it and held up her hand. In the light of the torch, he saw there were deep gashes on her finger-ends.
‘The petrol cocks are sharp,’ she said. ‘It’ll be worth remembering when we build the next machine for the airlines.’ She gave him a compass bearing, and as he repeated it he found himself wondering how much he could rely on it. Even Sammy’s Chicks’ Own was a Hughesden, and if it were as unreliable as the others, there was no knowing where they’d hit the European coast.
The sky was brightening a little now, however, with the first hint of
morning twilight. It was close to the longest day of the year so that they had the full advantage of the short hours of darkness, but there was still no sign of the sea below, nothing but a vast stretch of grey woolliness like the back of an old sheep that they knew was low-lying fog, clinging to the ocean, no gaps in the endless grey prairie anywhere. It was hard to believe there was another world beneath them.
Ira’s hand moved over the stabiliser. As the petrol in the wing tanks burned away, the machine was becoming tail-heavy again, as it had been when they’d set off. It had been his intention to burn off enough from the fuselage tank to balance the machine but that plan had had to be shelved now and with every mile they flew the machine was growing progressively more tail-heavy.
Below them there was still no break in the fog, and Alix seemed to sense the thoughts that were racing through his head. She put her finger on the map.
‘There,’ she said. ‘That’s where we should be – if the compass is reading anything like true.’
They appeared to be on course, but Ira had an uneasy suspicion that they’d been led astray during the hours of darkness, though he had no proof beyond an experienced pilot’s feelings that something was wrong.
‘Last night,’ Alix said, ‘I thought of suing the Hughesden Company over what’s happened, but then I thought again. I guess there’ll be no suing done. If we succeed, we’ll succeed in spite of them. If we fail’ – she paused for a moment as though she didn’t wish to consider the possibility – ‘then we’ll offer no excuses.’
They took a sight with the drift indicator, trying to work out the wind velocity and balancing it against the petrol left in the tanks.
‘I think the wind’s been almost on our tail most of the night,’ Ira said. ‘We’re probably further along than we think.’
It was a comforting thought and they sat in silence for a long time, watching the clock, stupefied by the roar of the engine which had been pounding at their senses for almost a whole day now, then Alix shifted restlessly, her hand reaching forward.
‘This is it, Ira,’ she said. ‘We’ve got to go on to the main tank and use the hand pump. Do you want me to hold off any longer?’
Ira shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Let’s go on to it now. It pumps a pint a stroke. That’s eight strokes to the gallon. The wing tanks hold a hundred and fifty gallons or around one thousand two hundred strokes. We’re burning roughly nine gallons – seventy-two strokes – an hour, over a stroke a minute. I’ll take first spell. You fly her because we’ll have to pump pretty steadily from now on.’
As he gripped the pump handle, he began to wonder for the first time if they would have been wiser to carry the heavy radio that Courtney had wanted, then he thrust the thought aside. Under the circumstances and knowing all they had, they were right to refuse it, and it was no good whining now when they felt they might need it. With the extra weight, they might never have cleared the telephone wires at the end of the runway, might never have been able to edge round the tree-fringed Long Island hill. Their point of balance between success and disaster at that moment had been such that only a few extra pounds might have proved fatal.
For a long time, he pumped with his left hand while Alix handled the controls, the engine beating strongly and certainly, then, as his muscles grew tired, she took over with her right hand while he handled the controls.
As they exchanged jobs, he saw she was looking at him with a warm expression, almost as though she were in his debt and glad to be sharing the danger and the work, as though she’d learned things about herself she’d never known before and might never have known but for this.
He reached out his left hand and laid it on hers for a second, and her eyes lifted towards his, quite unafraid.
‘How about the pump?’ she asked. ‘Is it likely to seize up?’
He shook his head. ‘They’ve been used for refuelling for hours at a stretch.’
The fog over the water was breaking up a little now, and with the glow of the rising sun in their faces they descended towards it. The wisps seemed to snatch at the wings as they passed through it, then they saw the waves beneath them at last. The spray indicated the wind was still behind them but there were a lot of white caps, as though the waves were steep, and Ira found himself unable to avoid calculating how best to drop the machine among them if he had to. It was a bitter thought after flying so far.
For a long time, neither of them spoke, then as the pumping slowed and Ira’s eyes swept over the dashboard again, his hand hovering over the throttle, he suddenly noticed the smell of petrol had increased. For a while he made no comment, hoping it was imagination. With the vast tanks they carried and the amount of spillage through the vents that there’d been, the whole machine had stunk of fumes from the start, but it seemed now to be growing more powerful. He glanced at Alix, wondering if she’d noticed it, too, but she said nothing and continued to pump steadily. Then he decided the smell was increasing all the time and he saw that she kept turning to look back at the tank behind them.
‘You’ve noticed it, too?’ he said.
She nodded. ‘What is it, Ira? A leak?’
He moved his shoulders uncertainly. ‘Might be. Maybe those Hughesden fitters weren’t as good as they claimed. If it’s only a small one, we’ve nothing to worry about. We can always punch a hole in the floor to let it out. If it’s a big one, we’ll have to face it when we come to it.’
‘Will it get worse?’
‘Vibration won’t help. I’m just praying it isn’t in the lead from the main tank through the pump. If it is, we can’t transfer.’
They were both glancing about the cabin now, studying the fuel pipes leading to the wing tanks.
‘It must be somewhere out of sight,’ Alix pointed out.
‘It would be!’
‘That lousy contract!’ she said bitterly. ‘I don’t know what to say.’
‘Not your fault.’
‘Maybe it wasn’t but I still feel guilty. As long as I live I shall feel responsible if we fail.’
The sun had appeared now, shining into their faces and glinting on the water, and they could see spray whipped off the crests in rainbow wisps that gave them the drift. Alix watching it with strained eyes.
The thought of failure had kept occurring to Ira, too, during the night, but he had constantly thrust it out of his mind. Now that she’d spoken of it, however, it seemed easier to face and he made a decision with which he’d been toying for some time. It was easy to ignore their problems but it was pointless taking unnecessary risks which could in the end prove nothing.
‘I’m turning south,’ he said abruptly. ‘I’m sorry, Alix, but with this leak I don’t see any alternative. If anything happens we’ve got to be where we’ve got a chance of being picked up. I think we’re still north of the shipping routes. I’ll fly south-west for a while and see what happens.’
She didn’t reply, depressed by the thought of failure. The day was brilliant and there was so much hope about it, it was hard to accept that the chances of success were beginning to slip further through their fingers all the time.
Clouds still lay in front of them and to each side, particularly to the north, and the sun was sprinkling diamond points of light across the water towards them. But their speed had dropped as Ira leaned the mixture to make the most of what fuel they had left. He decided that as they drew nearer to the coast of Europe they were running out of the area of strong westerly winds and were now hardly being helped at all.
Patches of cloud shadow looked like islands ahead of them and Alix glanced at him and jerked a hand forward. Ira shook his head.
‘Cloud,’ he said shortly.
‘For a minute I thought…’
‘So did I. But it isn’t.’
She had seemed overjoyed for a second. ‘I thought we’d made it,’ she said slowly.
They were both growing increasingly aware of stiffness and cramp by this time. They’d been wedged into the narrow cockpit, hardly able to move
, for nearly thirty hours. It was hot, too, with the sun streaming towards them, and the flying suits they’d worn against the chill of the night were suddenly too heavy.
They studied their calculations for a moment, trying to work out their position, but without a landmark or a true reading on the compass they were unable to judge how far from success they were or how near. They had been driving eastwards at high speed during the night, with the wind on their tail, and Ira found himself wishfully thinking that perhaps they were nearer to land than they had imagined. If they could only make a landfall they could hardly be said to have failed, even though they couldn’t qualify for the prize they sought. Whatever happened now, theirs would not be a humiliating failure, and there was still a hope that they might even succeed. If the wind had been blowing strongly all night – and by the look of the waves, it might well have been – they might have averaged even 130 miles an hour at times.
The brilliance of the sun on the sea was making them squint and he realised he was watching the water now for signs of life, for the first signs of Europe. The smell of petrol was growing stronger and he was satisfied to accept that their chances of reaching Paris were dwindling all the time, but he forced himself back to the problem of navigation, all thought of drowsiness gone and alert now as he would ever be. He had a feeling that they were near the tip of Ireland, probably en route for Cornwall, or probing the peninsula of Brittany. Their deliberate deviations from course had been small.
His eyes narrowed abruptly as he saw movement below that did not belong to the sea and he squinted down into the glare that the sun was bouncing up. There were birds below them, not one but several. Though he couldn’t make out what they were, they were the first sign of life they’d seen and he prayed that it was a hint of approaching land.
‘Look, Alix! Birds! Probably land-based birds!’
Even as he spoke, the engine began to splutter again – for the first time since the terrifying stoppage during the night.