The Aeronaut

by Bryan Young

  The engine cycled up to speed, growing louder and louder the further down the runway Jacque propelled us. In the dark, the only thing I could see were the dim instrument lights illuminating my compartment and the runway lights that turned on only for the benefit of our departure.

  A weight grew in my chest and my loins as we got going faster and my head swirled as we pulled up off the ground. The airfield faded away behind us and the lights suddenly winked out, leaving nothing below us but blackness. If it weren’t for the sputtering engine noise and occasional spots of lit civilization beyond us, I’d have had no idea we were even in the air or in a plane. We could have been floating along on a fast moving barge on the water, or in the back of a truck on a road somewhere, heading toward the front.

  More than anything, it was frigid so high up. A conduit piped in hot air from the engine, but I felt that did more harm than good. Since it was aimed at my legs, it kept them just warm enough that it made the rest of my body jealous. I kept my face covered, my hot breath kept feeling in my mouth and nose, and the goggles blocked the wind from my eyes. The gloves kept me feeling my fingers. But the cold was bitter–almost as bitter as a winter in a trench.

  Putting the temperature out of my mind, I focused on the ground below and noticed things. The closer we got to a city, friend or foe, a blackout would ensue. Spotters would have heard the plane in the sky and called for all the lights in the town to be killed.

  Our waypoints disappeared by the time we reached them. At first, I thought I’d be able to keep track of where we were, but with the lack of landmarks and the disappearing cities, I was lost almost instantly. I felt I had a way with my sense of direction, too, especially with my experience in the air.

  I was wrong.

  Jacque must have had skills beyond my reckoning to make sense of anything below. Cambrai must have looked identical to Paris, Verdunne, Marseilles, or a hundred other French cities from the air at night.

  “Do you do this a lot?” I shouted back to the charismatic pilot.

  “Fly men behind enemy lines and drop them out of my plane? Non. But they say there is a first time for everything, oui?”

  “I meant navigating at night. It’s a mystery down there.”

  “Have faith, Monsieur. I will get us where we need to go. It’s the one thing I’m told I’m good at. Well, that and my way with a woman’s body.”

  That was more than I needed to hear, but I shrugged it off.

  “How long till we reach our… target destination?” I had meant to say ‘Cambrai’ outright, but the training of the intelligence stooges had sunk in a little too well.

  “A while. Best get some rest. You’re going to have a long night if you make it to the ground. I’ll get us there, don’t worry, trust me. We’ll only get shot at a little bit. I’ll stay away from the lines as long as I can. We’ll only cross when Cambrai is the easiest straight line from us.”

  There was no way I’d be able to get any rest. All I could do was clutch the panel in front of me and hold on for dear life. I knew my knuckles were white beneath my gloves. Fright came, but not from my position above the Earth. It came from thinking about how I was going to get down. And then what I’d have to do from there.

  Time passed. The heater managed to keep me from going numb. With nothing to do but stress about my mission, my thoughts turned to Sara. The comforting thought of having her arms wrapped around me and the throb of the engine and the whoosh of the air going by us was enough to lull me to sleep.

  Jacque called out, rousing me from my unintended slumber, “You get some good rest? Now is when matters get adventurous.”

  “How so?”

  “We’re passing the front,” she said as though we were on our way to a party and she’d just found the way.

  “Oh.” My over-loud voice had all the white pallor of a ghost’s.

  “It’s no worry. On the best nights, they don’t even notice we’re going over.”

  “I thought you said you didn’t do this that often. How do you know what the best nights are like?”

  “It’s always one of the best nights when you don’t get shot at,” the crazy Frenchwoman said with a smile.

  Her logic was impossible to argue with.

  The plane banked hard to the right, setting us on a northerly course, toward doom, death, and possibly Cambrai.

  “And away we go, my American friend. Never you worry, I’ll get us through this...”

  It was then I thought I saw a flash, a brief wisp of light in the distance. The most curious thing was that it seemed to be leveled at our altitude. “Did you see that?”

  “See what?”

  “A light.”

  “It’s a blackout.”

  “Not on the ground, there,” I pointed straight ahead.

  “In the sky?” For the first time, I heard a warble of concern enter into her elevated voice.

  “Where else?”

  There it was again, another flashing light in the distance. I hadn’t imagined it. It was there ahead of us, glinting in the night. I had expected to hear a wise remark out of Jacque, but none came. I looked back to see if everything was all correct with her. Her face, covered up with a fluttering scarf and the bug-eyed goggles revealed nothing to me, but the sharp maneuvers she engaged upon told a much more drastic story.

  The speeding bullet of a plane rocked back and forth in a rickety fashion, weaving evasively around an object I wasn’t even fully aware of.

  As we got closer, though, I could make out the rough shadowy shapes: we were on a collision course with a German zeppelin, running silent with the lights off.

  They were bigger than I remembered.

  We were mice to its lion.

  “Hold on to your hat, mon ami,” Jacque shouted, just before shoving her control stick with force, throwing her shoulder into it. Jacque lurched us forward, aiming the nose of the plane down toward the ground.

  The engine whined, pitched up in sound, and we descended altitude rapidly. My guts shot up into my chest, my groin felt like it was losing gravity, and all I could do was tighten my already death-like grip around the handholds.

  It’s amazing what power the mind has. I’m convinced the nosedive we went in to lasted all of a moment, but it felt like an eternity. Every molecule of air, every minute change in temperature and speed, all of it seemed so apparent in that half-second. Through all the terror of free fall, I managed just enough conscious thought to worry about more abstract concerns. Like whether or not we’d been seen. Surely we’d been heard, but if they hadn’t seen us, we could have been anything. If they had caught sight of us, somehow in the dark without looking for us, would they start shooting?

  We got our answer with the sound of a gunshot and the small yellow-red reports in the blackness, giving away their position.

  “It’s good they shoot, that way I’m sure not to hit them,” Jacque yelled, regaining her black humour.

  The echoed ping of a bullet hitting the fuselage accompanied by the spark just in front of me where the bullet hit the steel body of the plane forced me to flinch. It’s one thing to remain brave in the face of gunfire when I had a gun in my hand, a pack on my back, and it was my duty to do something about it. Instead, my only duty was to hold on for dear life until such time as I was to jump out of the plane. With the plane hurling us at speeds I could never dream of with my pack, getting shot at unnerved me more than I would care to admit.

  Choking back bile and taking deep breaths through my nose, I narrowly avoided vomiting.

  We buzzed left and banked back to the right, avoiding another zeppelin.

  Another group of muzzle reports lit up the night in front of us, followed by the cracks of rifle fire. In the dark, I couldn’t tell if we’d come toward a second zeppelin, or if we’d accidentally happened across some other monstrous sky bound leviathan of a sort we’d not yet seen during the course of the war. Anything was possible. They could have had a mythical dragon flying out there in the night and I would have n
ever seen it.

  “Are there any guns on this boat?” I shouted back to the pilot.

  “Non. Only a pistol under the seat. Also some grenades, but don’t use those. Trust me, they will not help.”

  She never elaborated on why I shouldn’t be using the grenades, but I found the pistol under my seat, a well-oiled trench sweeper of the Browning variety. With pistols in such short supply, she must have had a lovely time getting one that would do little more than occupy the bare compartment beneath the springy passenger seat of her experimental aeroplane.

  I pulled a round into the chamber and opened fire in the passing direction of the flashing muzzle flares. I got four shots in before the flying machine seemed to pass us by and the faint echoes of gunshots could only be heard behind us. There, I heard two more sharp, metallic pings of ricochets impacting the fuselage behind us, but as far as I knew, no damage had befallen us.

  “We’re hit!” Jacque exclaimed.

  “What?” The plane didn’t seem to be in any distress whatsoever, so my assessment of being in the clear had obviously been premature.

  Concern hit me in my gut harder than the wind hitting me in the face. If the plane was going to go down, how in the world was I ever going to make it to Cambrai to complete the mission? Sure, I’d make it to the ground, but I’d be behind enemy lines and lost. And what would happen to Jacque? The thought of vomiting returned.

  “We took one in the tail. I don’t know how bad it is...”

  “Well, how bad is it?”

  “I just said that I do not know how bad it is.”

  “Damn it.”

  “She is responding fine now, I do not think there is cause for alarm quite yet.”

  “Are you just saying that to calm me down?”

  “Maybe.”

  The night grew cold once more, no longer heated in the excitement. Hurtling over a war zone in the pitch blackness of night at seventy five miles an hour did nothing to calm my nerves. My grim work lay ahead, my blood hot from the fight. That’s the moment I finally felt invested in the mission. In the grand scheme of things, that altercation in the sky might have seemed like an insignificant blip, but it steeled my resolve. The sooner I got through this, the sooner I could get home to Sara. And perhaps I could do something good for the world to end the war. I’d forgotten through my time in the hospital and during my time with Sara that there was some good to be done. There were lives at stake, even if I didn’t know who those lives belonged to. Lives like Jacque’s. She seemed too decent a fellow to let down. If she was going to risk her life to get me to my point of ingress, I was damn well going to complete the mission.

  The night sailed by and I was unable to get any rest through the growing smell of smoke.

  “Are you sure we’re all right, Jacque?”

  “Oui. We’ll make it. If it takes all she’s got, she’ll make it.”

  “What happens to you, then?”

  “The Germans, they love me. They cannot catch me and they respect me enough to not capture me too violently. I can bring her down anywhere.”

  I was anything but reassured. “You can’t get captured.”

  “You worry too much, especially for an American. I’ll be fine. You worry about yourself. That is what Americans are best at.”

  Her crack, shouted through the passing wind, burned into me. But how much could I argue? “What if those zeppelins report us?”

  “How? We’ll be a distant memory by the time they report in.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Non. But work with me here.”

  The smell of the smoke grew pungent, like burning oil and the metallic tinge of steel rubbing against steel. Soon, the smoke visibly obscured my field of vision, even in the dark. What little I could see in front of me grew milky in the dark puffs of streaming smoke.

  “We’re close,” Jacque shouted.

  “How can you tell?” I coughed through the smoke.

  “You doubt me?”

  “Never.”

  “Good. Because I’m going to tell you when to jump, and then you are going to jump. Comprends?”

  “Oui.” I adjusted the goggles on my head and worked hard to swallow all the doubt and fear the entire journey had given rise to.

  “I’ll count down from cinq. Are you ready? You’re not nervous, are you? Because you need to calm yourself and get ready, because we’re almost there.”

  She talked through any answer I was ready to give, and kept counting as I double checked the tightness of the straps on my parachute and those that pressed my briefcase to my chest.

  “Quatre. We’re very close. Trois. It has been a pleasure to travel with you, Lieutenant Preston.”

  I exhaled my fear.

  “Duex. And an honor. Your mission is sure to be a success. It must be.”

  And I thought of Sara.

  “Here we are, then. Un!”

  That’s when I crawled over the side of the plane, keeping my hands crossed in front of me, one clutched against the metal briefcase, and the other clutched the pull string that would prove either my doom or salvation.

  I never saw Jacque again after jumping from the plane. I don’t know if she ever made it back, though I hoped most ardently that she did. And as much as I was concerned about the boisterous French pilot, the only thing I could see in my mind’s eye, jumping down into the unknown blackness below, was the perfect face of my wife.

  She opened her emerald green eyes and gave me that beautiful half smile that turned up her nose and brought her closer to the light that revealed each one of her alluring freckles that were flecked harmoniously across the tops of her cheeks and bridge of her nose...

  Then all I knew was free falling into the night with no net to catch me...

  Falling...

  Blackness...

  Then I pulled that thin, fragile cord...

  21

  Cambrai was an old city, with a deep, musty history entrenched down into its roots. It was, and I suppose still is, a city older than I was accustomed to as a native of the United States. The French don’t realize how beautiful their cities are because they have so much rich history on every street that serves as a skeleton with the flesh and blood of modern life grafted on to it. I thought of home: New York truly seemed new and even the old parts of it were young compared to a city like Cambrai.

  Consulting the map and compass in my case, I was shocked by the surgical precision by which Jacque had delivered me to my destination. I was just on the outskirts of town in a massive field along the road that led inside. I didn’t land in a German encampment and I didn’t land in the Escaut river, another key bonus for me.

  I’d be able to simply walk into the city under the cover of the rest of the darkness and check into one of the many inns the city boasted. I had German traveling documents and nothing on my person that would indicate that I was a French loyalist, let alone a duly appointed soldier in the French Army in occupied territory.

  Exhausted, I finally made it to the hotel that was circled on my map for me. It was a shabby place that seemed almost as old as the city, which must have been difficult in a city established in the middle ages or beyond. The red brick three-story was nestled between two taller buildings bricked in tan with wooden trim. I entered through the front; a sign in French and German outside assured me there was a room to let.

  The place was deserted of people and lit with two candles on holders, each dwindling with hours of burning. The area behind the desk was cluttered with old books and pencils, paper trailed everywhere. A half empty well of ink serviced an old feather used for the register sitting on the counter, full of a hundred different sorts of handwriting and cursive script in no less than four languages. Despite the clutter, that side of the desk seemed well kept, clean, free of dust.

  My side of the counter was a cobwebbed mess and caked in dirt. I wondered if any of the housekeepers had been on the other side of their desk since the building had been erected.

  I coughed, hoping a
ny sound would rouse whatever clerk worked at this ungodly hour into meeting me, but none came.

  I coughed again, louder this time. It was no trick since the dust began its work on my respiratory system from the moment I walked inside.

  But still no response came.

  Hanging above the registration book by a length of frayed rope was a metal triangle, and dangling from that was a metal stick tied to another length of even more frayed twine. Taking the metal stick in my hand, I circled it inside the triangle, making a barrage of dinging sounds that would certainly alert whatever napping worker that I was there and needed a bloody room before I collapsed.

  The ting-a-linging brought nothing but a noise from the closed office beyond that could have just as easily been a mouse or a feral cat as the inn keep.

  I beat the triangle once more, unsure if I would get any help until morning. I turned, hoping to see a chair or a couch I’d be able to curl up on if they never came.

  The longer I stood there the less sure of myself I became. My confidence gnawed at my center the same way the exhaustion did, putting me just off balance enough to grow irritable and cranky. Forcing myself to take a deep breath, I didn’t want to start a fight or cause a ruckus; that kind of behavior would get me killed.

  I forced another deep breath, then another, then beat the triangle again, sending the tinny notes into the space beyond.

  “Eh?” Finally, a voice roused from sleep. It was the kindly, curious squeak of an old lady. As she made her way out into the office, guilt hit me instantly. I didn’t want to interrupt the sleep of an elderly woman. That seemed somehow barbaric. She waddled through the stacks of neatly kept books and the wall of old-fashioned keys to make her way to the desk where I stood as though she’d been waiting all night for me. She looked like something out of a picture book, in a frumpy brown dress with white specks over it. She had a hunch to her that looked painful and it showed in her shuffling gait. Her spindly mop of silver hair was pulled back, hidden largely beneath a kerchief that matched her dress. She had the puckered face of a bulldog; with all the loyalty and sincerity of one as well. Despite her hunch, she was rail-thin, wasting away under the duress of the war.