by Paul Lally
From long Pan Am habit I had noted the latitude and longitude of Sentinel Island from the chart in the Desert Queen. It’s not that I didn’t trust my navigator to get it right, but because in my early career I had spent many a bullet-sweating hour as a navigator trying find out where the hell we were in time and space. I knew how important that first fix can be.
Written beneath our starting latitude and longitude, I had written that of our target in Hanford, Washington:
46°38’45.33’ N by 119°35’47.60’ W
Two small dots on a map, eight hundred-twelve miles apart as the crow flies. All I had to do was connect them.
Ziggy jumped out his seat when he saw me open the rear door of the flight deck bulkhead leading to the astrodome.
‘Where you going?’
‘To get a star fix.’
He scurried over. His face reminded me of a boy scout ‘Mind if I watch? This kind of stuff really interests me.’
‘So I’ve noticed.’
He winked. ‘You’d be surprised what strange things you need to know in my business.’
‘What exactly is your business?’
‘Two words.’ He raised one finger, then another as he chanted,
‘Make….believe.’
The navigator’s astrodome was a multi-windowed, streamlined teardrop housing protruding eighteen inches above the fuselage surface. And by standing on an aluminum stepstool in the baggage passageway, I had just enough room to fit my head, hands and bubble octant.
Ava held us on a steady course, but the occasional light chop made it difficult to work the instrument and keep my balance at the same time.
‘Grab my belt in the back and steady me,’ I said.
‘Wilco.’
‘And when I say go, start the stopwatch.’
‘Roger.’ A brief pause. ‘I know this sounds ridiculous, but I’m really having fun.’
I swung up the octant and centered the bubble on the night sky. The moon was long gone behind a high bank of clouds to the east, making it useless as a sighting target. So I turned my attention to the western sky which remained clear. An infinity of stars to choose from. At first just a confused jumble of pinpricks of light; some clustered, others as separate and alone up there as I was down here.
But then, the way you suddenly recognize a lover’s face in the midst of a crowd, I spotted the Orion constellation. Named the ‘Hunter’ for the way its stars suggest a hunter stalking his prey, I quickly found the three that make up his belt, the two his bow, the four his club, and finally at the top, the bright star Betelgeuse, his ‘shoulder.’
But I was hunting bigger prey tonight; the Big Dipper, in particular its bottommost star that makes the dipper’s cup because it points directly to the gleaming friend of navigators throughout the western hemisphere: Polaris, the North Star.
It took only seconds to rotate the octant’s mirror to ‘pull’ the reflected image of Polaris to the horizon. The ease with which I did, a miracle in a way, seeing as how I hadn’t done any hard navigation in years. That’s what RDF’s can do to you; make you forget how to find your way around the sky when they go belly up and you’re far from home.
The mirror image of the star swam around at first, but then steadied on the horizon.
‘Start your stopwatch.’
I quickly climbed down and played the flashlight on the face of the chronometer installed on a rack next to the astrodome.
‘Stop your watch.’
Surrendering to Ziggy’s questions, I explained how the chronometer was set to Greenwich Mean Time, and I would compare its exact time to tables in the Nautical Almanac that listed the position of each heavenly body for every minute of every day of the year. From that I could determine the Dixie Clipper’s position along a fixed continuum.
‘And then you’ll know where we are?’
‘More or less.’
He shook his head. ‘Amazing. So that means we’re still doing the mission?’
‘Unless something else happens.’
I played my flashlight past the mail cages to the relief crew sleeping quarters. Behind them lay the baggage compartments. Kind of creepy seeing the space empty like this. On a normal clipper flight it would be packed to the gills with expensive luggage and steamer trunks, along with the snores of crew members blending in with the engine roar.
‘Ziggy, when you were on watch last night did you check back here?’
‘Checked the whole plane. Why?’
‘See anything out of the ordinary? Hatches loose? Anything?’
‘Just this. A big dark nothing.’
‘Think I’ll check again.’
He grabbed my flashlight. ‘Go plot your course, captain. Leave this to me.
His Boy Scout enthusiasm made me laugh.
‘Okay, but be careful.’
He stuck out his chest. ‘I may be small but I pack a big punch.’
I gave Ava the new heading and she dialed it into the autopilot like she’d been doing it for years.
‘You’re a quick study,’ I said.
‘It’s all an act.’
‘Don’t believe you.’
‘That’s what good acting’s all about.’ Her toothy smile gleamed red from the cockpit’s night lighting. She adjusted rudder trim and her smile disappeared. ‘I’ve ridden horses that pulled this hard for the barn.’
‘You’ve got five thousand of them now.’
Because we were flying on three engines, the combined propeller torque from the two engines on our port wing kept pulling us in their direction. The rudder trim tab skewed us straight, but even so, we were still flying slightly sideways through the air, the way a car with a bent frame does on a highway.
Ava said, ‘Time to target?’
I laughed. ‘You sound like you’re in a war movie.’
‘Wish to hell I was.’
‘A little under seven hours if the wind and weather hold.’
‘Neither of which we know much about, correct?’
‘Roger. We’re flying blind in that department.’
‘And the radio department too. Any idea what happened?’
I told her what I thought, which wasn’t much beyond the obvious. But what seemed worse, as I spoke, is that I realized that the protective little bubble we seemed to have been floating inside of had burst the instant I yanked on that damned cable.
Ava heard me out, thought about it for a while, and then said, ‘I wonder if they know where we’re going.’
‘Could be.’
‘If so, that means they’ll be waiting for us. The surprise factor will be gone.’
‘Then we’ll have to figure out a way to surprise them.’
‘Such as?’
‘I don’t know yet, but I’ll think of something.’
She grinned. ‘That’s what I like about you, Sam. Even though you don’t have a clue, you always act like you do.’
‘I’ve been hanging around a pretty good acting teacher for a while now.’ She drew a sharp breath and her eyes widened. ‘I just had another thought: what if it’s somebody on the plane?’
‘Are you kidding? Who?’
‘Mason, maybe?’
‘Forget it.’
‘I’m just trying to consider all the possibilities.’
‘As long as they’re reasonable, yes. But Mason? Not a chance.’
‘How about Ziggy?’
We both burst out laughing, but to our chagrin, Ziggy leaned in between us and said, ‘Let me in on the joke, you two.’
I said, ‘Where’d you come from?’
‘Checked in the back like you said. Coast is clear.’ He handed me the flashlight and leaned in, interested and alert. ‘So, like I said, what’s the joke?’ Ava casually lied to spare his feelings, ‘I was just trying to break the tension with one your Harpo Marx stories.’
‘Which one?’
‘The time he ate the ladies’ menu at the restaurant.’
‘Yeah, that was funny, all right. But what about
the time I played golf with him and George Burns?’
‘That never happened. You hate golf.’
‘When two movie stars like them invite you to play, you love it.’
Ava surrendered with a wave of her hand. ‘Tell the story. True or false, it’s still funny.’
Ziggy dove right in. ‘Hot as hell that day, so the three of us show up on the course, take off our shirts to cool down and then proceed to play eighteen holes. Harpo shoots a seventy-five as I recall. I’m in triple digits, don’t ask. Burns is somewhere in between. Game over, back to the clubhouse we go for a drink or two or three. Manager comes up and says, ‘Sorry, boys, club members gotta’ wear shirts. Rules are rules.’
‘Fine, we say. Will do. Next day we show up wearing shirts like the man said. Even so, he throws us off the course before we even reach the second hole.’
‘Why?’ I said.
Ziggy shrugged. ‘The rules didn’t say anything about having to wear pants, so we left those at home.’
‘You showed up in your underwear?’
‘George and me, but Harpo doesn’t believe in wearing underwear.’
As I tried to imagine this, Ziggy raised his right hand. ‘Every word true. Swear to God.’
After he left, we flew in silence for a while, lost in our thoughts. If you spend endless hours in a cockpit, you tend to become introspective. It doesn’t matter if you’re the life of the party when you’re on the ground, when you’re up here at the mercy of Mother Nature who can clobber you in the time it takes to go from blue sky to thunderhead, you tend to think a lot.
My thoughts were centered on our sabotaged radio and who the hell did it. I tried to imagine just how he had managed to pull it off in a plane as closely guarded as ours. But I gave up on the particulars because it was getting me nowhere but angry.
More importantly, how reliable was my navigation as a substitute for the broken RDF? And even more important, how bad was our leaking fuel situation? We really were like a man running from the well to the kitchen with a water bucket full of holes. How much water would be left when we got there? If we got there at all. Mason and Orlando insisted that we could make it to the target with about an hour reserve to head for the coast and scuttle her.
The mathematics involved in these calculations was crippling. Not that I didn’t trust their fuel consumption numbers. It’s just that I would feel better if I could confirm them myself. I pulled out the slip of paper with their estimates and went to work again with my pencil.
‘Doing the fuel numbers?’ Ava said.
‘Yes. But my math looks shaky.’
She reached out her hand. ‘May I?’
‘Help yourself.’
I surrendered my notations and she bent over them, lips pursed, her pencil lightly tracing the agonizing path of my calculations. A slight shake of her head, followed by a quick nod. In less than a minute she handed back the paper.
‘They look fine to me.’
‘You know how to do this kind of thing?’
‘Look, my friend, I may fly a small plane but it still burns fuel like the big ones, and from there it’s just a matter of bumping up the numbers to see if they jive. And yours do.’
She looked out at the night sky, then back to me. ‘Not that I especially like the numbers I saw. It’s going to be a squeaker, but they’re spot on.’
‘Wind and weather permitting.’
We both laughed at that.
The clear weather held for three more hours, which got us out of Nevada and into southern Idaho. I managed two more star fixes before a line of cumulus clouds began rolling in from the west. After wasting time and fuel trying to climb above them, we failed at twelve-thousand feet and had to head for the bottom, which varied between two and three thousand above the ground. All I could do was hope that the position I got from my final star fix would last long enough for this stuff to break up. If not, it would be dead reckoning the rest of the way to the target.
It would have been much easier flying if we were doing it along the eastern seaboard. Clusters of lights from small towns coupled with the occasional airport beacon would have made it easier to keep one’s orientation to the ground in proper perspective. But out in the middle of
‘Nowhere Idaho,’ with the moonlight blocked by a thick ceiling of clouds,
nothing but velvet darkness on the ground, occasionally interrupted by a pinprick of light here and there, coming from the porch of a some ranch or farm house. I imagined husbands and wives, children and animals tossing and turning on this hot, dry August night, waking to the insistent drone of our engines as we flew high above and then falling back to sleep again. If only I could have done the same.
But instead, I hunched over the navigation chart table, lost in my calculations. The small gooseneck light cast a golden circle on the pencil line that stretched from Sentinel Island to our present location. Along the way, I had made tiny, precise pencil tics that represented each star sighting. After comparing relative airspeed to true airspeed and computing possible wind drift I confidently marked the most recent spot where I prayed we were.
Confidence is everything. Especially when it weakens, as mine did without warning.
It happened because I had made the mistake of thinking about what had happened so far, when instead, I should have been thinking about what was to come. The instant I got lost in the past a dark, silent rush of fear came at me from the depths like a man-eating shark bent on its prey. I took a deep breath, but that didn’t help. I bit my lip to break the hold, but no use.
My pencil snapped in my hand, its broken edge hurt, and I almost laughed out loud as I heard Fatt’s booming voice in my head shouting at me across time and space,
‘Action leads to discovery, God damn it, kid. Thinking just leads to more thinking.’
So I took a deep breath and took action by sharpening my pencil as fast as I could. It wasn’t much by Fatt’s standards, but at least it was action.
Two hours later, getting close to the state of Washington, my eyes burned from nonstop staring at the instruments, not trusting our autopilot to hold us on course, even though it was doing it without the slightest deviation.
The impenetrable two-thousand foot ceiling had remained monotonously the same, save for the occasional distant flicker of lightning to remind me of the danger that awaited us inside that soft billowy nothingness.
During the past few minutes I sensed the ceiling lowering even more.
Not a good sign. Time to find out how much. I disengaged the autopilot, advanced the throttles slightly and began a slow climb.
Ava, who had nodded off, stirred at the change in engine sound. She stretched and said, ‘Are we there yet, daddy?’
I was about to say something clever in return when a dark object flashed across our nose about a half mile ahead. It happened so fast that I barely registered it at first.
‘We got company.’
I flicked the intercom to ‘All’ to warn the crew. I continued our steady climb and the clouds drew closer and closer. After what seemed forever, but probably less than a minute, I began to think I had imagined it.
But just then a green navigation light appeared off the port wing and removed all doubt. I dialed down the cockpit lights to see well. A flash of lightning in the far off cloudbank outlined the crisp silhouette of the Me-109 compliance fighter. The Luftwaffe pilot had turned his cockpit lights all the way up so that I could see him vigorously gesturing downward with his thumb.
I hit the intercom. ‘Orlando, standby the waist gun.’
‘On my way.’
Ava let out a curse that would peel paint. ‘This is not an airplane ride, this is one damn thing after another.’
I waved back at the pilot and smiled like I was out for a Sunday stroll.
The pilot gestured to his headphones. He was obviously trying to contact us by radio. I pointed at my headset and shook my head. I doubt he understood my futile pantomime. But seconds later he removed all doubt by lowering
his landing gear and I knew we were sunk.
I hit the intercom. ‘Listen up folks. We’ve got about two minutes before this guy starts shooting at us. Here’s what I want everybody to do.’
It took about thirty seconds of those two short minutes to get across my plan of action. As I did so, the fighter’s navigation lights slid out of sight as he took up position on our tail. Seconds later the night sky lit up with the bright reddish-gold blobs of twenty millimeter cannon fire across our nose and into the clouds that swallowed up their menacing light.
Orlando said over the intercom. ‘He means business.’
‘So do we, I said.
To keep him happy, I began a slow descent like a docile lamb, and he soon drifted back to his original position, but now further off our port wing, his mission proudly accomplished.
Everybody ready?’ I said.
Ava, Mason, Ziggy and Orlando reported in. I risked a quick look over my shoulder to confirm their positions. Ava crouched by the navigator’s table, Ziggy to her left, his hand on the window latch. Mason at his engineering station, hand hovering over the emergency fuel dump valves. I couldn’t see the professor, but I knew he was strapped in.
‘Hang on tight, here we go,’ I said.
I shoved the throttles to takeoff power and dropped my left wing into a steep diving turn. The fighter vanished from sight, but I knew he would be after me like angry yellow jacket with a twenty millimeter sting.
Pitch black outside, no ground reference, my artificial horizon the only
thing keeping me upright as I quickly leveled my wings but continued my dive, building up as much airspeed as I possibly could to escape the Great White Shark on our tail.
130...140...150...the airspeed indicator kept climbing. I knew my time was up. The fighter must be on top of us by now, the pilot smiling, almost laughing at our big, lumbering plane centered square in his gun sight.
‘Stand by,’ I shouted.
The first string of tracers lobbed past us on both sides. He would soon have our range.
‘Dump fuel!’
‘Dumping!’ Mason said.