Air Bridge

by Hammond Innes

  “Aren’t you coming with me?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “I’m due at Wunstorf at 04.00. Besides what’s the use? We’ve stooged the area for nearly an hour. We’ve seen nothing. To search it thoroughly on foot would take days. It doesn’t look much from the air, but from the ground——” He shook his head again. “Take a look at the size of this airfield. Just to walk straight across it would take you half an hour.”

  I stood there, staring at the dark line of the woods, the panic of loneliness creeping up on me. “I won’t be long,” I said. “Surely you can wait an hour for me—two hours perhaps?” The plane was suddenly important to me, my link with people I knew, with people who spoke my own language. Without it, I’d be alone in Germany again—in the Russian Zone.

  His hand touched my arm. “You don’t seem to understand, Neil,” he said gently. “You’re not part of my crew—not yet. You’re the pilot of a plane that crashed just north of here. I couldn’t take you on to Wunstorf even if you wanted to come. When you’ve finished your search, make for Berlin. It’s about thirty-five miles to the south-east. You ought to be able to slip across into the British Sector there.”

  I stared at him. “You mean you’re leaving me here?” I swallowed quickly, fighting off the sudden panic of fear.

  “The arrangement was that I should fly you back to Germany and drop you there. As far as I’m concerned that plan still holds. All that’s different is that I’ve landed you and so saved you a jump.”

  Anger burst through my fear, anger at the thought of him not caring a damn about Tubby, thinking only of his plan to fly his engines on the airlift. “You’re not leaving me here, Saeton,” I cried. “But I must know whether he’s alive or dead.”

  “We know that already,” he said quietly.

  “He’s not dead,” I cried. “He’s only dead in your mind—because you want him dead. He’s not dead, really. He can’t be.”

  “Have it your own way.” He shrugged his shoulders and turned away towards the plane.

  I caught him by the shoulder and jerked him round. “All right, he’s dead,” I shouted. “If that’s the way you want it. He’s dead, and you’ve killed him. The one friend you ever had! Well, you’ve killed your one friend—killed him, just as you’d kill anyone who stood between you and what you want.”

  He looked me over, measuring my mood, and then his eyes were cold and hard. “I don’t think you’ve quite grasped the situation,” he said slowly. “I didn’t kill Tubby. You killed him.”

  “Me?” I laughed. “I suppose it wasn’t your idea that I should pinch Harcourt’s Tudor? I suppose that’s your own machine standing there? You blackmailed me into doing what you wanted. My God! I’ll see the world knows the truth. I don’t care about myself any more. What happened to Tubby has brought me to my senses. You’re mad—that’s what you are. Mad. You’ve lost your reason, all sense of proportion. You don’t care what you do so long as your dreams come true. You’ll sacrifice everything, anyone. Well, I’ll see you don’t get away with it. I’ll tell them the truth when I get back. If you’d got a gun you’d shoot me now, wouldn’t you? Or are you only willing to murder by proxy? Well, you haven’t got a gun and I’ll get back to Berlin somehow. I’ll tell them the truth then. I’ll——”

  I paused for breath and he said, “Telling the truth won’t help Tubby now—and it won’t help you either. Try to get the thing clear in your mind, Fraser. Tubby’s dead. And since you killed him, it’s up to you to see that his death is to some purpose.”

  “I didn’t kill him,” I shouted. “You killed him.”

  He laughed. “Do you think anybody will believe you?”

  “They will when they know the facts. When the police have searched Membury, when they have examined that plane and they’ve interrogated——”

  “You’ve nothing to support your story,” he said quietly. “The remains of Harcourt’s plane are strewn over the countryside just north of here. Field and Westrop will say that you ordered them to bale out, that the engines had packed up. You yourself will be reporting back from the area of the crash. As for Membury, there’s nothing left of the hangar now except a blackened ruin.”

  I felt suddenly exhausted. “So you knew what I’d do. You knew what I was going to do back there at Membury. You fooled me into pushing out that load of scrap. By God——”

  “Don’t start using your fists,” he cut in sharply. “I may be older than you, but I’m heavier—and tougher.” His feet were straddled and his head was thrust forward, his hands down at his sides ready for me.

  I put my hands slowly to my head. “Oh, God!” I felt so weak, so impotent.

  “Get some sense into your head before I see you again,” he said. “You can still be in this thing with me—as my partner. It all depends on your attitude when you reach Berlin.”

  For answer I turned away and walked slowly towards the woods.

  Once I glanced back. Saeton was still standing there, watching me. Then, as I entered the darkness of the trees, I heard the engines roar. Through needle-covered branches I watched the machine turn and taxi to the runway end. And then it went roaring across the airfield, climbing, a single white light, like a faded comet, dwindling into the moonlit night, merging into the stars. Then there was silence and the still shadows of the woods closed round me. I was alone—in the Russian Zone of Germany.

  VII

  FOR A LONG time after the plane had disappeared I stood there on the fringe of the woods gazing at the empty expanse of the airfield. A small wind whispered in the upper branches of the fir trees and every few minutes there was the distant drone of a plane—airlift pilots flying down the corridor to Berlin. Those were the only sounds. The cold seeped through my flying suit, stiffening my limbs, and at length I turned and walked into the woods. A few steps and I had lost the airfield. The trees closed round me and I was in a world apart. It was very still there in the woods, even the sound of my footsteps was muffled by the carpet of pine needles. I could still hear the planes, but I couldn’t see them. The branches of the trees cut me off from the sky and only a ghostly radiance told me that the moon still filled the world with its white light.

  I found a path and followed it to the earth mound of an old dispersal point. The frost-cracked concrete was a white blaze in the moonlight, cutting through the dark ranks of the trees to the open plain of the airfield. I stopped there to consider what I should do. My mind went back to the scene in the plane. We had been flying almost due south when Tubby’s body slid through the open doorway. I had gone straight back to the cockpit and then I had looked through my side window and seen Hollmind airfield below me. That meant that Tubby had gone out north and slightly west of the field.

  I followed the line of the concrete till I came out on to the edge of the airfield and turned left, walking in the shadow of the woods till I reached the north-west extremity of the field. Buildings began there, shapeless heaps of broken rubble. I skirted these and entered the woods again, following a path that ran in the direction I wanted to go.

  It was four o’clock when I began my search. I remember thinking that Saeton would be at Wunstorf. The plane would be parked on the loading apron in the row of Tudors where it had stood before. Only the crew would be different—and the numbers and the engines. He’d be reporting to Ops and checking in at the mess, finding a bed in the echoing concrete corridors of that labyrinth that housed the human force of the airlift. He’d be one of them now, getting up when the world was asleep, going to bed when others were shaving. In a few hours perhaps it would be his plane I’d hear droning over on its way to Berlin. He’d be up there, with success ahead of him, whilst I was down in these grim, dark woods, searching for the body of the man who’d given two years to help him build those engines. Damn it, it wasn’t even his plane. It was my plane. Nothing was really his. Even the design of the engines he’d pinched from Else’s father.

  Blind anger drove everything else out of my head for a moment. Then I steadie
d myself, forcing my mind to concentrate on the thing I’d set myself to do. I decided to walk east and west, backwards and forwards on a two mile front working gradually northwards. The impossibility of complete coverage was apparent from the start. I had a small pocket compass, that was all. The trees, fortunately, were well spaced out, but they were all alike. There was nothing to guide me. It was obvious that at some points I should be covering the same ground twice, maybe three times, whilst at other times I should be leaving large gaps uncovered. But it was the only course open to me and with a feeling of hopelessness I turned west on my first beat. It was past five when I came to the western fringe of the woods and looked across the dreary flatness of the Mecklenberg plain with the moon dipping over it towards the horizon. And in that time I had stopped a hundred times to investigate a deeper shadow, a dead branch that looked like an arm or a patch of white where a beam of direct moonlight shone on the bark of a pine trunk.

  Dawn found me at the end of the eastward beat. The daylight penetrated slowly into the woods, a slight lightening of the deeper shadows, a paling of the moon’s whiteness. I didn’t really see it until I was in a clearing that showed me the bomb-battered ruins of the hangars that lay along the north fringe of Hollmind airfield. It was a grey dawn, still, but pitilessly cold, with great cloud banks rolling in from the north and the feel of snow in the air.

  I ate two sandwiches and took a nip from the flask Saeton had given me. There was rum in that flask and I could feel the warmth of it trickling into my stomach. But as I turned westward again on my third beat I was already tired. There was no breath of wind. The woods seemed frozen into silence. The only sound was the drone of aircraft. That sound had been with me all the time. It was monotonous, unending. But God, how glad I was of it! That sound was my one link with the world, with reality. And as the daylight increased, I began to look for the planes in the gaps in the trees. At last I saw one. It was flying across my line of march at about three thousand feet, the thick belly unmistakable—a York. That meant that it had come from Wunstorf. The men in that plane would have breakfasted before dawn with the electric lights on and the mess warm with the smell of hot radiators and food. They had hot food in their bellies and hot coffee.

  I stood there in the clearing, watching the plane till it was out of sight, the smell of coffee stronger than the smell of the pines, remembering a shop I’d known as a kid that had a big grinder always working in the window, spilling its fragrance into the street. As the plane disappeared over the tops of the trees another came into sight, exactly the same, flying the same route, flying the same height. I watched another and another. All Yorks. All exactly the same. It was as though they were on an endless belt going behind the trees, like those little white clay airgun targets you find at fairs.

  The smell of coffee lingered with me as I went on into the sombre gloom of the woods.

  Shortly after midday it began to snow, the flakes drifting gently down out of the leaden sky, dark, widely-spaced specks until they landed and were transformed to little splashes of virgin white. It was less cold after the snow began to fall. But by then I was feeling sleepy, exhausted and hungry. There were two sandwiches left and half a flask of rum. I saved them for the night and stumbled on.

  On my eighth beat I found a crumpled piece of metal. It was lodged in the branches of a tree—a piece of the tail-plane of the Tudor Saeton had pranged at Membury. It didn’t seem possible that it was less than twelve hours since I’d slung that fragment out of the open door of the fuselage with these woods flashing by below me.

  An hour later I nearly walked right into a Russian patrol. I was almost on top of them before I heard the low murmur of their voices. They were in a group, short men with round, sallow faces, black boots and brown tunics buttoned to the neck. The soldiers leaned on their rifles while two officers bent over a piece of metal that gleamed dully.

  I wondered what they’d make of these scraps of metal scattered through the woods as I slipped past them and continued eastward. The snow thickened and the sky darkened. Patches of white showed in the gaps between the trees and these I had to avoid for fear of leaving footprints. In the gathering darkness and my growing weakness every shadow became a Russian soldier. My progress became wretchedly slow. Finally it was too dark to go on and I dug a hole for myself close under the low-sweeping branches of a large fir and lay down in it, covering myself with pine needles.

  I finished the two sandwiches and drank the rest of the rum. But within an hour the warmth of the rum had completely evaporated; the cold of the night moved in on me, gripping my limbs like a steel sheet. Sleep was impossible. I lay and shivered, my mind a blank, my body in a coma of misery. The cold covered everything. The snow became hard and powdery, the trees cracked.

  By midnight I was so frozen that I got to my feet and stamped and swung my arms. My breath hung like smoke in front of my face. The snow clouds had passed. Stars shone frosty-clear above my head and the moon had risen showing me a beautiful, fairy-white world of Christmas trees.

  I started to move westward, walking blindly, not really caring where I went so long as I got some warmth into my limbs. And that was how I found Tubby’s flying helmet. I just stumbled on it lying on a patch of snow. I suppose what had happened was that it had been caught on one of the branches of a tree and when the snow weighed the branch down it had slipped to the ground.

  I don’t remember feeling any excitement. I think I was too numbed with cold to have any feelings at all. And I had no sense of surprise either. I had been so determined to find him that it hadn’t occurred to me that I should fail. I have always believed that if you go out for a thing hard enough, you get it in the end, and I didn’t bother to consider the virtual impossibility of the task I had set myself. But though I had found his helmet I could find no trace of Tubby himself. There was just the helmet. Nothing else.

  After a thorough search of the area I returned to the spot where the helmet had lain. The trees were very thick and in the darkness of the shadows it was impossible to see whether there was anything lodged in the branches. In the end I climbed to the top of the tree that overhung the spot. With my head thrust above the snow-laden branches I looked over a plain of white spikes that glistened in the moonlight. By shaking the tree I got rid of most of the snow. The needle foliage looked very green, but there was no sign of anything that would prove that this was the spot where Tubby had fallen.

  I was half-way down the tree, back in the world of half-light and shadows, when my hand slid from the gritty surface of the bark to something softer. My fingers closed on it, feeling the smoothness of light material. I didn’t need to look at it to know that this was nylon. I pulled at it and my hand came away with a torn strip of parachute silk about the length of a scarf.

  I was excited then. That strip of nylon silk showed that Tubby had pulled his parachute release before he hit the ground and I went tumbling down the tree, oblivious of the snow that fell on my neck and trickled in icy streams down my back, oblivious of everything but that single fact—Tubby wasn’t dead. He might have hurt himself, but he’d regained consciousness, he’d pulled the release and his parachute had opened. And I realised then how the fear of finding him, a mangled, blood-stained heap of broken bones and torn flesh, had haunted me. In a frenzy I searched the area again, trampling the snow in my haste to find out what had happened to him after he’d crashed through the trees.

  But the snow hid all trace.

  At length, utterly exhausted, I sat down on a dry patch of ground with my back against the bole of a tree and lit one of my last cigarettes. I had searched the area in a circle extending about fifty yards from the spot where I had come upon the helmet. I had found no trace of him. Clearly one of two things had happened—either he had been all right and had left the area on foot or else he had been injured and some woodman had found him and got him away. Or perhaps it had been the Russians who’d found him. Maybe the patrol I’d seen in the afternoon had come upon him and carted him off to
Hollmind. The possibility that he might be dead was nagging at me again. I had to be sure that he was alive.

  I got to my feet then. I would have to widen my search, radiate out until I found some trace. I began walking again, circling out from the spot where the helmet had lain. The snow helped me here, for all I had to do was walk outside the footprints I’d made on my previous circuit. The moon was high overhead now and it was much lighter under the trees. At four o’clock in the morning, after walking for over two hours in a widening circle, I stumbled upon a broad track running through the woods. One side of the track was sheltered by the trees and was clear of snow and there I found the marks of a farm cart. I traced it back to a spot where it had stood for some time. The tracks did not continue. They finished there and I knew then that Tubby was either dead or injured. Cold and wretched, I turned westward and followed the track till it left the shelter of the woods and ran out into the bitter flatness of ploughed land that was all white under the moon.

  The wheel tracks were lost under the snow now, but the track was still visible—two deep ruts swinging south-west towards a Christmas card huddle of steep-roofed farm buildings. As I approached I saw the yellow glow of a light. It came from the half-open door of a barn. Inside the barn a man was filling sacks with potatoes from a deep, square hole in the floor. Wooden boards heavy with earth were stacked against the heaped-up straw and earth had been piled near the door.