On Glorious Wings

by Stephen Coonts

  Leonard Wilby had begun to shake again and he found himself staring at the glistening surface of the hardwood tray for long moments, as if it might provide some measure of calm. Yet the tray was unrewarding. There was no answer written on it, no set of figures neatly spaced to rebuke him and show where he had made any mistake.

  He went back over his flight log once more, searching for a lost eleven minutes. He tugged at his second chin and tried to concentrate on the simple arithmetic involved in his last two wind computations. The difference between his own recorded position in the sky and the position established by the navigator of the Coast Guard plane was preposterous. Eleven minutes to the west . . . eleven minutes farther from the Coast, eleven minutes which could mean the difference between crawling gratefully into bed beside Susie, or perhaps never seeing Susie again. She would smell of liquor, probably, she always did, and she might refuse to wake up, but she would be there, warm and smooth and so like a little girl napping after the exhaustion of play. But those eleven minutes? Sullivan was calling for them—insistantly, as he had every right to do. He must know whether the Coast Guard navigator was right, or if Leonard Wilby, in whom he had placed so much trust, was right.

  “Leonard! Come on, fellow! What about it?

  Time’s wasting!”

  “In a minute, Skipper. I’m still checking.”

  Time was wasting? Time was running out altogether. The cushion of eleven whole minutes was gone somewhere, evaporated into the atmosphere while the man who must find them and fit them carefully back into the thin fabric of the next little time space shook like an epileptic. If you can find those minutes, the shaking will cease. Your confidence will return, old boy, so discover them quickly. Stop the shaking with the minutes. Find the minutes and find Susie. Minutes, minutes . . . who’s got the minutes? Susie has the minutes and she has them speared on the end of a toothpick in her Martini glass. Susie, give me the minutes . . . I need them instantly.

  “Come on, Lennie! What’s holding things up?”

  “I’ll be right with you.”

  “Hurry.”

  Hurry thoughts that were already speeding through the brain so fast it was almost impossible to do anything but sit back and watch them go by? You are going mad, Captain. The pressure is too much for you. Navigation is a precise and methodical business and it cannot be hurried. You must remember that I have found my way unerringly over the seas and among the stars for many years and therefore I could not be mistaken—not now, when the matter of eleven minutes means so much to all of us. It is the Coast Guard navigator who is mistaken. He is probably a very young man of little experience. He has probably been careless in his computations, because what is it to him if a mere eleven minutes vanish? He would just be eleven minutes older without suffering the passage of time. Eleven minutes to him would not seem like eleven years. He would not care about them in the slightest, because for one thing he would not have Susie to return to.

  “Oh God! Sweet, merciful God!”

  Leonard closed his eyes and pushed the words through his tight lips in a groaning whisper. For he had found his mistake and the enormity of it stunned him. He had done something which was past explanation—incredible. The shaking was to blame for it. It must have severed the audible senses of his brain, disconnecting them so completely they had failed to translate a most elementary message. It was easy now to read back and see exactly how and when the folly had been committed. Only a terrified man could be guilty of such absolute rejection of habit. Only a man who was frightened to his bones and blindly clinging to another man for his salvation could make such a mistake.

  The sight of the fire, the engine burning against the night, must have started the fear and it had leaped upon his brain. And watching the pilots, listening to them worry about the way the ship was flying, had completed the debacle. Leonard Wilby, experienced navigator, designated by the government and the airline as capable of finding himself without the aid of a crystal ball, had made a most rudimentary error in neglecting to transpose miles-per-hour into knots!

  For years he had obtained the ship’s speed from the indicator above his work table. It recorded in nautical miles, or knots, to correspond with all the world’s charts. But a pilot’s air-speed recorded in miles per hour, as it should, since a pilot’s chief concern was with approaches and stalling speeds, and miles per hour was the traditional way of marking them, as dollars and cents represented profit and loss to a business man. Pilots thought in miles-per-hour, navigators in knots. There was an important difference. A knot was approximately one and one-fifth miles. In this case the difference had become eleven priceless minutes. Leonard could remember it very clearly now. He had verbally asked Sullivan for their speed instead of taking it from his own instrument. Sullivan, watching the flight panel, had simply called off numbers—one thirty-two, and one thirty-six. He was speaking in miles per hour and Leonard was listening in knots. And without thinking he had written the figures down as knots on his log. Later, matched against his last position fix, the projected combination gave promise that they would reach the Coast more quickly—eleven minutes sooner than they actually would.

  “Skipper?” The shaking had stopped very suddenly and now Leonard was perfectly calm. His mind was clear and he was surprised to discover that he was no longer afraid. He stood up and hitched his pants over his potbelly. “Skipper, can you come here a minute?” He knew what he had to say and somehow it would be a relief to confess his felony.

  Sullivan came quickly to bend over his navigation table. “Well?”

  “I got bad news.” Leonard swallowed and watched the concern set more firmly into Sullivan’s eyes. “The Coast Guard is right. I made a dumb kid’s mistake. You can add eleven minutes on to our coast estimate.”

  “Eleven minutes . . .?” Sullivan shook his head unbelievingly. “You sure?”

  “I am now. I must have been out of my head. I’m sorry, Skipper. I guess I was just scared. . . .”

  Sullivan did not look up from the chart. The knobs on his jawbones moved slowly back and forth, and for a moment Leonard wondered if he understood what he had said. He appeared to shrink in physical stature as Leonard had seen him do earlier. He became a bent man, more aged suddenly than Dan or Leonard himself, and it was easy to pity him. As Leonard stood waiting, the idea of pitying Sullivan fascinated him until he could think of nothing else. Sullivan, too, would be thinking of the Coast, of the lights there, and of dear people waiting. Then gradually Sullivan’s face became firm again and the knobs were still. Leonard knew instinctively that he had reached the only decision left to him, really the one he had favored all along. He lit a cigarette and it must have been his last because he crumpled the package slowly and tossed it onto the chart. He reached across the table and took up the hard-wood tray. He examined it thoughtfully for a moment and passed his strong fingers across its polished surface. Then he handed the tray to Leonard and looked at him not accusingly, but rather as a man determined to blame himself.

  “I hope this will float,” he said quietly.

  There was now a gigantic cleavage in the sky-space which held the two airplanes. The ships broke out very suddenly from the clouds’ captivity, and temporarily without hindrance, they swam across an immense womblike cavern. All about them the clouds formed high, vaporous ramparts. Straight down, the black sea served as a foundation for these walls and the only illumination came faintly from the stars.

  The path of the ships across this chasm was marked only by their navigation lights. Those on Four-two-zero blinked alternately red, white, and green, in the special manner of airliners. Those on the Coast Guard plane were steady. They emerged almost simultaneously from the western embankment of cloud and continued toward the east as if supported on invisible wires.

  For several minutes they moved smoothly together across this space, signaling to each other with their landing lights like fireflies parading. As the ships neared the eastern side of the opening, their minute stature in the scheme of th
ings was emphasized by their slow approach to the clouds. In spite of the actual speed, they appeared to crawl toward the east, and when at last they were once more swallowed in cloud, their passage was ignored by the sky.

  The men who controlled the limping progress of Four-two-zero were long since disenchanted with the sky. Yet the break in the cloud deck gave them a little respite, in which visually observing a like creation, they were able to believe again that their own world had not abandoned them. The actual sight of the B-17, her graceful lines barely outlined in the starlight, was of greater morale value than all of the radio conversations with impersonal voices sunk beyond the horizon. Though they were well aware that the men on the B-17 were helpless to lend immediate aid—they could not trail a tow rope and pull the lame hulk homeward—still the sense of existing at the wrong end of a telescope was gone. With this and the temporary smoothness of the air and the cessation of rain, their spirits rose until they were once more inspired to act as if they could control their futures. And so they peered out of the left window eagerly, leaning across each other and shading their eyes, staring at the B-17, absorbing the sweet fact of its presence slowly.

  Sullivan broke their spellbound observation just before they plunged into the eastern wall of cloud and his voice had regained much of its authority.

  “Hobie,” he said firmly. “You go back now. Dan will take your place. Take the Gibson Girl along and get the passengers set for ditching. You’ll have plenty of time . . . so use it. I’ll turn on the seat belt sign ten minutes before we start for the water. Have everything set by then. When I turn on the no smoking sign, you and Spalding take your own brace and hang on.”

  “How about the rear door?” Hobie took off his earphones and hung them carefully on a hook at his side. He smoothed his hair automatically and stood up. His young face was covered with perspiration and his eyes were puffy, as if he had just awakened. He looked even younger than his twenty-two years, in the way that a young man who is really tired and suddenly dependent on bravado, can seem physically to recapture his childhood. “When shall I let the rear door go?”

  “As soon as you’re sure we’ve stopped. Don’t hurry . . . remember. Get your people in the raft and wait as long as you can for us. If we can get together . . . it will be just that much better.”

  “Okay.” He moved around the control pedestal and stepped down beside Sullivan. He looked thoughtfully at Leonard and then at Dan. This was a separation, a division of effort which he obviously viewed with distaste. Now he would be forced to make innumerable decisions on his own, and however small they might be, he knew they would have to be right.

  “Good luck to you guys,” he said sheepishly.

  He tried a smile and then walked reluctantly aft toward the passenger cabin. As he passed through the crew compartment he pulled down the Gibson Girl from the receptacle over the bunk which held it. This was a small, wonderfully compact radio transmitter, so-called because of the fashion in which its waterproof case was curved. Hobie, who was not at all sure about the derivation of the name since he could not remember ever having seen any girl named Gibson in the movies, was preoccupied with the technicalities of the machine. He mentally reviewed its remarkable operational ability and remembered that although it fitted under his arm quite easily, it had been the savior of many distressed persons. By simply turning a crank, its signaled SOS could be heard for more than a hundred miles and any surface or air ship could take a bearing on it. This was, he knew, one of the latest types and was equipped with a device for automatically tripping emergency alarm bells on ships scattered over a wide area. A kite for carrying the antenna aloft was provided if there was wind on the surface, and a hydrogen balloon was available if there was calm. It was a very wonderful little machine, capable of withstanding the most rugged treatment—yet Hobie held it tenderly against his side as he passed through the cabin door.

  “All right, Dan,” Sullivan said.“I’ll take her now.” He leaned forward and held the control wheel while Dan slipped out of the left seat. Their eyes met as they exchanged places, but they said nothing. The flight deck bounced as the ship re-entered the overcast and the rain came hissing angrily once more.

  Dan did not reoccupy Hobie’s seat immediately. Sullivan had put on his headphones and if any further communication was necessary during the next few minutes he could handle the message himself.

  Dan studied the fuel gauges, forcing himself to read them pessimistically. Then he did some simple arithmetic. The total in all of the tanks was now two hundred and twenty gallons! Two hundred and twenty gallons in an airplane that was consuming very close to two hundred gallons each hour, became a very simple equation. Too simple. Something would have to give very soon.

  Leonard was bent over his electric altimeter and stopwatch, unhappily seeking confirmation of the wind he already marked as a traitor. Dan stepped back until he stood beside him.

  “Anything new with the wind, Lennie?”

  “No.”

  “We’re not very fat then?”

  “No. I wish . . . Oh Christ, I wish we had another ten minutes of fuel! Just another ten minutes. . . .”

  “You’re sure that would do it, Lennie? You’re sure now?” Dan’s manner was merely curious and the tone of his questioning was as easy as it might have been on a routine flight. He could have been asking Leonard if he knew the league status of a baseball team. As he stood there, slowly passing the end of his finger down the long crease in his cheek, some of his calm was caught up by Leonard and he laughed bitterly.

  “As they say in the books . . . I have now positively established our exact whereabouts. Ten more minutes of fuel would see us through this thing.”

  “How much would the wind have to increase in velocity to accomplish that little thing?”

  “Twenty knots in the next hour.”

  “That’s asking for a lot.”

  “It couldn’t happen so I’m not even asking. But if it swung around a little more on our tail, and it seems to be doing that . . . well, it just could be.” With a forlorn gesture Leonard placed his hands on his knees. He looked up at Dan and shook his grey head. “Ah well . . . I guess they’ll pick us up before we get too damp. But it sure will worry Susie. She’ll lay down the law. Probably insist I quit flying.”

  “Will you?”

  Leonard squinted his eyes as if the question was a complete surprise to him and finding the answer brought him acute pain. He took his hands from his knees to massage his belly and then returned them decisively to his knees again.

  “No, by God!”

  “In other words, you’re not going to get gypped out of your pension?”

  “Something like that.”

  “You’ll get it, Lennie. I’ve got a feeling you’ll collect.”

  Dan walked back to the crew compartment. It was noisier here, with the engines pounding only a few feet beyond the thin aluminum skin. But he wanted to be alone for a few minutes and have a last try at solving the problem which had troubled him ever since the first radio contact with the Coast Guard plane.

  In the darkness he passed beneath the overhead ventilator. A fine stream of rain water leaked through the ventilator and splashed down his face and the back of his neck. Swearing softly, he stepped away from the ventilator and switched on the light. He yanked the black curtain across the passageway leading to the flight deck and switched on the compartment light. He leaned against the bulkhead, lit a cigarette, and thoughtfully watched the water pour down from the ventilator. Below it, there was now a large pool on the deck.

  If Sullivan had his way, Dan thought, the water in this compartment would very soon be far above anyone’s neck.

  He drew hard at his cigarette. This was hardly the sort of thing he had expected when he asked Garfield to let him fly again. He had foreseen that uncomfortable situations of a minor nature might come to pass and had deliberately prepared himself to face such embarrassment, but this . . .? On any flight he was likely to be the oldest crew membe
r and as such, he had told himself, he should know enough to keep his mouth shut no matter what the temptation to draw on thirty-five years of flying experience. This was different—or was it? There were so many factors to confuse the situation. It was time, almost past time, to do some swift and very clear thinking.

  Commandwise, the laws of the sky were almost exactly like the laws of the sea. The captain of an airplane was held solely responsible for the performance and safety of his ship; he automatically assumed the blame for any accident no matter whose fault it actually might be. His power, too, was absolute, and the cases of mutiny on aircraft were so rare they could not be worth considering. Once in ten thousand flights a crew member might openly question a captain’s judgment, but such arguments, if the captain permitted any discussion to develop, were inevitably settled on the ground. It was not that most captains closed their minds to suggestion the moment their wives sewed four stripes on their uniform sleeves—rather that any large aircraft was a very fast-moving, highly complicated beast—and the crew members themselves were the first to realize someone aboard must be in supreme command. At two or three hundred miles-per-hour, arguments could consume priceless minutes. No captain had ever been known to try deliberate suicide and so for all practical purposes arguments just didn’t happen.

  And now Sullivan intended to ditch. He proposed to put his plane and all the souls on board into the wild sea at night when the safety of land was only ten minutes further. Was he doing the right thing—the only thing that could be done?

  It was a question Dan had asked himself innumerable times during the past hour. If he could be sure that Sullivan was right, then he wouldn’t care so much what happened—since Alice and Tony were killed nothing seemed to matter very much—but was Sullivan right? Of course he would want to ditch while he still had enough fuel to give him power of maneuver. And he was wise in flying as long as he could so that the nearly empty tanks would give the ship greater buoyancy on the water. As captain it was not his duty to gamble. Gambling was for people who could afford to lose. But there were only those ten minutes—and fuel gauges were not exact to the gallon, any more than Leonard Wilby’s navigation was exact to the mile. So there could be a chance of making San Francisco airport, and if a part of that chance was luck, then luck must also play a part in how Sullivan managed finally to hit the water. The balance, it seemed, was almost exactly equal.