Flying Finish

by Dick Francis

  I throttled back a bit and took the brakes off and the plane began to roll. Too fast. Too fast. I was heading straight for the runway lights and could smash them, and I needed them alight. I pulled the two starboard throttles back for a second and the plane slewed round in a sort of skid and missed the lights and rolled forward on to the runway.

  The wind was behind me, which meant taxi-ing to the far end and turning back to take off. No one ever taxied a D.C.4 faster. And at the far end I skipped all the power checks and everything else I’d been taught and swung the plane round facing the way I’d come and without a pause pushed forward all the four throttles wide open.

  The great heavy plane roared and vibrated and began to gather speed with what seemed to me agonising slowness. The runway looked too short. Grass was slower than tarmac, the strip was designed for light aircraft, and heaven alone knew the weight of that packing case … For short runways, lower flaps. The answer came automatically from the subconscious, not as a clear coherent thought. I put my hand on the lever and lowered the trailing edges of the wings. Twenty degrees. Just under half-way. Full flaps were brakes …

  Yardman came back.

  Unlike Alf, he knew exactly what to do, and wasted no time doing it. Towards the far end the Citroen was driven straight out on to the centre line of the runway, and my headlights shone on distant black figures scrambling out and running towards the hangar. Swerve wide enough to miss the car, I thought, and I’ll get unbalanced on rough ground and pile up. Go straight up the runway and not be able to lift off in time, and I’ll hit it either with the wheels or the propellers …

  Yardman did what Alf hadn’t. He switched off the runway lights. Darkness clamped down like a sack over the head. Then I saw that the plane’s bright headlights raised a gleam on the car now frighteningly close ahead and at least gave me the direction to head for. I was going far too fast to stop, even if I’d felt like it. Past the point of no return, and still on the ground. I eased gently back on the control column, but she wouldn’t come. The throttles were wide; no power anywhere in reserve. I ground my teeth and with the car coming back to me now at a hundred miles an hour hung on for precious moments I couldn’t spare, until it was then or never. No point in never. I hauled back on the control column and at the same time slammed up the lever which retracted the undercarriage. Belly flop or car crash; I wasn’t going to be around to have second thoughts. But the D.C.4 flew. Unbelievably there was no explosive finale, just a smooth roaring upward glide. The plane’s headlights slanted skywards, the car vanished beneath, the friction of the grass fell away. Airborne was the sweetest word in the dictionary.

  Sweat was running down my face; part exertion, part fear. The D.C.4 was heavy, like driving a fully loaded pantechnicon after passing a test on empty minis, and the sheer muscle power needed to hold it straight on the ground and get it into the air was in the circumstances exhausting. But it was up, and climbing steadily at a reasonable angle, and the hands were circling reassuringly round the clock face of the altimeter. Two thousand, three thousand, four thousand feet. I levelled out at that and closed the throttles a little as the airspeed increased to two twenty knots. A slow old plane, built in nineteen-forty-five. Two twenty was the most it could manage.

  The little modern Cessna I’d left behind was just about as fast. Yardman had brought a pilot. If he too took off without checks, he could be only scant minutes behind.

  Get lost, I thought. I’d the whole sky to get lost in. The headlights were out, but from habit I’d switched on the navigation lights on the wing tips and tail and also the revolving beacon over the cockpit. The circling red beam from it washed the wings alternately with pale pink light. I switched it out, and the navigation lights too. Just one more broken law in a trail of others.

  The runway had been laid out from due east to west. I had taken off to the west and flown straight on, urgent to get out, regardless of where. Too easy for them. I banked tentatively to the left and felt the plane respond cumbrously, heavy on my arms. South-west, into the wind. I straightened up and flew on, an invisible shell in the darkness, and after five minutes knew they wouldn’t find me. Not with the Cessna, anyway.

  The tight-strung tension of my nerves relaxed a little: with most uncomfortable results. I was suddenly far too aware of the wicked square of burn over my ribs, and realised that I hadn’t really felt it since the moment I found Simon. Under the pressure of events its insistent message hadn’t got through. Now it proceeded to rectify that with enthusiasm.

  Weakness seeped down my limbs. I shivered, although I was still sweating from exertion. My hands started trembling on the wheel, and I began to realise the extent to which I was unfit to fly anything, let alone take a first try at an airliner way out of my normal class. But far worse than the physical stress was the mental let-down which accompanied it. It was pride which had got me into that plane and up into the air Nothing but pride. I was still trying to prove something to Billy, even though he was dead. I hadn’t chosen the D.C.4 because of any passionate conviction that the ultrasonic gadget needed saving at all costs, but simply to show them, Yardman and Billy’s ghost, that there wasn’t much I couldn’t do. Childish, vainglorious, stupid, ridiculous: I was the lot.

  And now I was stuck with it. Up in the air in thundering tons of metal, going I didn’t know where.

  I wiped the sleeve of my jersey over my face and tried to think. Direction and height were vital if I were ever to get down again. Four thousand feet, I thought, looking at the altimeter; at that height I could fly straight into a mountain … if there were any. South west steady: but south west from where? I hunted round the cockpit for a map of any sort, but there wasn’t one to be found.

  Patrick had said we were in Italy, and Giuseppe was Italian, and so was the registration on the Cessna, and the ultrasonic device had been driven straight from Brescia. Conclusive, I thought. Northern Italy, probably somewhere near the east coast. Impossible to get closer than that. If I continued south-west, in the end I’d be over the Mediterranean. And before that … new sweat broke out on my forehead. Between the northern plain and the Mediterranean lay the Apennines, and I couldn’t remember at all how high they were. But four thousand was much too low … and for all I knew they were only a mile ahead …

  I put the nose up and opened the throttles and slowly gained height. Five thousand, six thousand, seven thousand, eight. That ought to be enough … The Alps only reached above twelve thousand at the peaks, and the Apennines were a good deal lower. I was guessing. They might be higher than I thought. I went up again to ten thousand.

  At that height I was flying where I had no business to be, and at some point I’d be crossing the airways to Rome. Crossing a main road in the dark, without lights. I switched the navigation lights on again, and the revolving beacon too. They wouldn’t give much warning to a jetliner on a collision course, but possibly better than none.

  The thunderous noise of the engines was tiring in itself. I stretched out a hand for Patrick’s headset and put it on, the padded earphones reducing the din to a more manageable level. I had taken it for granted from the beginning that Yardman would have put the radio out of order before ever asking Patrick to change course, and some short tuning with the knobs confirmed it. Not a peep or crackle from the air. There had been just a chance that he wouldn’t have disconnected the V.O.R. – Very high frequency Omni-range – by which one navigated from one radio beacon to the next: it worked independently of two-way ground to air communication, and he might have needed to use it to find the airfield we had landed on. But that too was dead.

  Time, I thought. If I didn’t keep track of the time I’d be more lost than ever. I looked at my watch. Half-past eleven. I stared at the hands blankly. If they’d said half nine or half one it would have felt the same. The sort of time one measured in minutes and hours had ceased to exist in a quiet street in Milan. I shook myself. Half past eleven. From now on it was important. Essential. Without maps or radio, time and the compass w
ere going to decide my fate. Like all modern pilots I had been taught to stick meticulously to using all the aids and keeping all the regulations. The ‘seat of the pants’ stuff of the pioneers was held to be unscientific and no longer necessary. This was a fine time to have to learn it from scratch.

  If I’d been up for a quarter of an hour, I thought, and if I’d started from the northern plain, and if I could only remember within a hundred miles how broad Italy was, then I might have some idea of when I’d be over the sea. Not yet, anyway. There were pinpricks of lights below me, and several small clusters of towns. No conveniently lit airports with welcoming runways.

  If I’d taken the Cessna, I thought wretchedly, it would have been easy. Somewhere, by twiddling the knobs, I’d have raised radio contact with the ground. The international air language was English. A piece of cake. They’d have told me my position, what course to set, how to get down, everything. But if I’d taken the Cessna, I would have had to leave the D.C.4 intact, because of the mares. I’d thought at first of piling a couple more five gallon cans under the big plane and putting a match to it, and then remembered the living half of the cargo. Yardman might be cold-bloodedly prepared to kill three airmen, but I baulked at roasting alive four horses. And I couldn’t get them out, because the plane carried no ramp. With time I could have put the engines out of action … and with time they could have mended them again. But I hadn’t had time. If I’d done that, I couldn’t have got the Cessna out and away before Yardman’s return.

  I could have taken Rous-Wheeler in the Cessna and landed safely and put Yardman Transport out of business. But I was as greedy as Billy: half wasn’t enough. It had to be all. I could choke on all, as Billy had.

  The useless thoughts squirrelled round and round, achieving nothing. I wiped my face again on the sleeve of my jersey and understood why Patrick had nearly always flown in shirt sleeves, even though it was winter.

  Italy couldn’t be much wider than England. If as wide. A hundred and twenty, a hundred and forty nautical miles. Perhaps more. I hadn’t looked at the time when I took off. I should have done. It was routine. I hadn’t a hope if I couldn’t concentrate better than that. A hundred and forty miles at two twenty knots … say a hundred and sixty miles to be sure … it would take somewhere between forty and forty-five minutes. If I’d had the sense to look at my watch earlier I would have known how far I’d gone.

  The lights below grew scarcer and went out. It was probably too soon to be the sea … it had to be mountains. I flew on for some time, and then checked my watch. Midnight. And still no lights underneath. The Apennines couldn’t be so broad … but if I went down too soon, I’d hit them. I gave it another five minutes and spent them wishing Billy’s burns would let up again. They were a five star nuisance.

  Still no lights. I couldn’t understand it. I couldn’t possibly still be over the narrow Apennines. It was no good. I’d have to go down for a closer look. I throttled back, let the nose go down, and watched the altimeter hands go anti-clockwise through seven, six, five, four. At four thousand feet I levelled out again, and the night was as black as ever. I’d certainly hit no mountains, but for all I could see I was a lost soul in Limbo. It wasn’t a safe feeling, not at all.

  When at last I saw lights ahead I was much more uneasy than reassured. It was twelve fifteen by my watch, which meant I had come nearly two hundred miles already, and Italy couldn’t be as wide as that. Or at least I wouldn’t have thought so.

  The lights ahead resolved themselves into little clusters strung out in a horizontal line. I knew the formation too well to mistake it. I was approaching a coastline. Incredulity swamped me. I was approaching from the sea.

  Nightmares weren’t in it. I felt a great sense of unreality, as if the world had spun and rearranged its face, and nothing was ever going to be familiar again. I must be somewhere, I thought, taking a fierce grip on my escaping imagination. But where on earth, where literally on earth, was I?

  I couldn’t go on flying blindly south-west for ever. The coast line must have a shape. About three miles short of it I banked to the right, wheeling northwards, guided by nothing more rational than instinct, and flew along parallel with the few and scattered lights on the shore. The sea beneath was black but the land was blacker. The line where they met was like ebony against coal, a shadowy change of texture, a barely perceptible rub of one mass against another.

  I couldn’t I thought, bullying my mind into some sort of order, I couldn’t possibly have flown straight across the Gulf of Genoa and now be following the Italian coast northwards from Alassio. There weren’t enough lights, even for that time of night. And I knew that coastline well. This one, I didn’t. Moreover, it ran due north for far too long. I had already been following it for fifteen minutes: fifty-five miles.

  It had to be faced that I’d been wrong about where I started from. Or else the directional gyro was jammed. It couldn’t be … I’d checked it twice against the remote reading compass, which worked independently. I checked again: they matched. They couldn’t both be wrong. But I must have started in Italy. I went right back in my mind to the flight out, when Patrick had first turned east. It had been east. I was still sure of that: and that was all.

  There was a flashing light up ahead, on the edge of the sea. A lighthouse. Very useful if I’d had a nautical chart, which I hadn’t. I swept on past the lighthouse and stopped dead in my mental tracks. There was no land beyond.

  I banked the plane round to the left and went back. The lighthouse stood at the end of a long narrow finger of land pointing due north. I flew southwards along the western side of it for about twenty miles until the sporadic lights spread wider and my direction swung again to the south-west. A fist pointing north.

  Supposing I’d been right about starting from Italy, but wrong about being so far east. Then I would have been over the sea when I thought I was over the mountains. Supposing I’d been going for longer than a quarter of an hour when I first looked at my watch: then I would have gone further than I guessed. All the same, there simply wasn’t any land this shape in the northern Mediterranean, not even an island.

  An island of this size …

  Corsica.

  It couldn’t be, I thought. I couldn’t be so far south. I wheeled the plane round again and went back to the lighthouse. If it was Corsica and I flew north-west I’d reach the south of France and be back on the map. If it was Corsica I’d started from right down on the southern edge of the northern plain, not near Trieste or Venice as I’d imagined. It wasn’t impossible. It made sense. The world began to fall back into place. I flew north-west over the black invisible sea. Twenty-seven minutes. About a hundred miles.

  The strings and patterns of lights along the French coast looked like lace sewn with diamonds, and were just as precious. I turned and followed them westwards, looking for Nice airport. It was easy to spot by day: the runways seemed to be almost on the beach, as the airfield had been built on an outward curve of the shoreline. But either I was further west than I thought, or the airport had closed for the night, because I missed it. The first place I was sure of was Cannes with its bay of embracing arms, and that was so close to Nice that if the runway had been lit I must have seen it.

  A wave of tiredness washed through me, along with a numb feeling of futility. Even if I could find one, which was doubtful, I couldn’t fly into a major airport without radio, and all the minor ones had gone to bed. I couldn’t land anywhere in the dark. All I looked like being able to do was fly around in circles until it got light again and land at Nice … and the fuel would very likely give out before then.

  It was at that depressing point that I first thought about trying to go all the way to England. The homing instinct in time of trouble. Primitive. I couldn’t think of a thing against it except that I was likely to go to sleep from tiredness on the way, and I could do that even more easily going round in circles outside Cannes.

  Committed from the moment I’d thought of it, I followed the coast until
it turned slightly north again and the widespread lights of Marseilles lay beneath. The well-known way home from there lay up the Rhone Valley over the beacons at Montélimar and Lyons, with a left wheel at Dijon to Paris. But though the radio landmarks were unmistakable the geographical ones weren’t, and I couldn’t blindly stumble into the busy Paris complex without endangering every other plane in the area. North of Paris was just as bad, with the airlanes to Germany and the East. South, then. A straight line across France south of Paris. It would be unutterably handy to have known where Paris lay; what precise bearing. I had to guess again … and my first guesses hadn’t exactly been a riotous triumph.

  Three-twenty degrees, I thought. I’d try that. Allow ten degrees for wind drift from the south-west. Three ten. And climb a bit … the centre of France was occupied by the Massif Central and it would be fairly inefficient to crash into it. I increased the power and went back up to ten thousand feet. That left fuel, the worst problem of all.

  I’d taken off on the main tanks and the gauges now stood at half full. I switched over to the auxiliaries and they also were half full. And half empty, too. The plane had been refuelled at Milan that morning, ten centuries ago. It carried … I thought searchingly back to Patrick’s casually thrown out snippets of information the first day I flew with him … it carried twelve hundred United States gallons, giving a range of approximately eighteen hundred miles in normal conditions with a normal load. The load, though unconventional, was normal enough in weight. The condition of the weather was perfect, even if the condition of the pilot wasn’t. Nine hundred miles from Marseilles would see me well over England, but it wouldn’t take much more than four hours at the present speed until the tanks ran dry and it would still be too dark …

  There was just one thing to be done about that. I put my hand on the throttle levers and closed them considerably. The airspeed fell back from two-twenty, back through two hundred, one-eighty, steadied on one-fifty. I didn’t dare go any slower than that because one thing Patrick hadn’t told me was the stalling speed, and a stall I could do without. The nose wanted to go down heavily with the decreased airspeed and I was holding it up by brute strength, the wheel of the control column lodged against my whole left forearm. I stretched my right hand up to the trimmer handle in the roof and gave it four complete turns, and cursed as a piece of shirt which was sticking to the furrows and burns unhelpfully unstuck itself. The nose of the plane steadied; ten thousand feet at one-fifty knots; and blood oozed warmly through my jersey.