by Bill Mesce
“When did you get in?”
“Few minutes ago. The weather cleared Strømfjord late this morning. We took a swing west over the ocean, marking time until it cleared here.”
“What time is it now?” Harry squinted at his watch but couldn’t get the luminous face in focus.
“A little after three.”
Harry looked out the window into darkness. “A.M. or P.M.?”
Doheeny laughed. “P.M.”
Harry had been asleep five hours.
Doheeny slipped off his heavy mittens as he dropped onto Kneece’s bunk. He unzipped his parka and fiddled inside his outer garments until he produced a pack of cigarettes. He placed two in his mouth, lit them, then handed one over to Harry.
“Listen, Harry. Your pal Kneece is talking about us flying out of here today —”
“That’s got to be a joke. We just got here.”
Doheeny seemed amused at Harry’s shock. “You didn’t know?”
“The reveille thing was funnier.”
“The clan is gathering over at the mess hall right now. I’ve got my orders, and my orders say Kneece’s the boss. But leaving today isn’t a good idea. You have the rank on him, Harry.”
“I may outrank him, but I have no authority over him. This is his party.”
Doheeny nodded glumly, understanding. He stubbed his cigarette out on the metal frame of the bunk, stood, and zipped up his parka. “I’d appreciate it if you’d try to talk some sense to that kid, Harry, because he’s not using a whole hell of a lot of it. He’s got that mental disease.”
“Which mental disease is that?”
“The one we all had at his age. He thinks he’s going to live forever.”
*
Only Kneece was eating. The others — Doheeny and his crew, and Zagottis — ignored the plates of food in front of them. Even Doheeny’s copilot, circling the table as was his usual inclination, held a sandwich with only one bite missing.
Kneece seemed oblivious to the frustration directed toward him. His attention was completely dedicated to the serving of the ubiquitous Greenland lamb chops and a scoop of less appetizing powdered eggs.
“It’s not like I don’t appreciate your concerns,” Kneece was saying. Harry wasn’t sure who he was saying it to as Kneece had yet to look up from his plate.
“Oh, I think it is,” Zagottis snapped back, “otherwise we wouldn’t be havin’ this talk!”
Harry filled a cup of coffee at the serving counter and turned for the table. The flight mechanic flashed a quick smile of hullo before turning back to the discussion at hand. Harry saw that his right hand was heavily wrapped in gauze.
“Let me put something else out to consider,” Doheeny said. “I’m tired. My crew is tired. We were flying hard before we picked you up in Newark, we’ve been flying hard ever since. If you’d sent word you were going to be flying out today —”
“Mr Doheeny,” Kneece said, emphasizing the gulf between his military rank and Doheeny’s civilian status, “it was my understanding that ‘flying hard’ is what you ATC fellas do. Besides, you had a day lay-up with the storm. Look, I’m not trying to be a pain in anybody’s arse here, but I’ve got my priorities. Your crew can catch sack time on the plane. I don’t know why that should be a problem. They’ve been doing that since we left New York.”
Zagottis sneezed into his napkin. “Captain Kneece, you know I got to put this in the log. I got to put this down I warned you against this.”
“Fair enough, Commander.”
“Warned him against what?” Harry slid into a chair at the table.
“I’m tryin’ to explain to the captain there’s bad weather buildin’ south of us,” Zagottis told him glumly. “We’re gettin’ headwinds whippin’ through the offshore islands. If that sounds familiar, it’s ’cause the last guy thinks he can outfly those winds ends up on my runway lookin’ like this.” He poked his fork into Kneece’s pile of powdered eggs and let the runny stuff slough off the tines.
“The weather’s better than when we got here.” Kneece looked distastefully at the spot where Zagottis’s fork had stirred into his eggs.
“Let me tell you somethin’ about Greenland weather, Captain,” Zagottis shot back. “It’s bitch-evil even when it’s not snowin’. You don’t believe me, ask Hotshot McKesson. Oh, that’s right. You can’t! ’Cause Hotshot McKesson got himself permanently indisposed!”
“Commander, you told me McKesson was a rookie and he messed up like one. Mr. Doheeny is a veteran on this route. I guess I have more faith in him than you do.”
“Well, that just flatters me all to hell,” Doheeny said. “But this route veteran still says lay over for the night. Is twelve hours going to make that much of a difference?”
Kneece set down his fork and knife, dabbed at his mouth with his napkin. He looked from Doheeny to Zagottis. “Commander, can you guarantee me that this bad weather off the Cape is going to be gone in twelve hours?”
Zagottis turned to Doheeny with an I’m-sorry look; answered Kneece with a negative shake of his head.
“Thirteen hours? Twenty-four?” Kneece looked to Doheeny and shrugged. It was decided. “How long before we can be in the air?”
The way Doheeny was fingering the handle of his fork Harry thought the pilot might lunge across the table and stab Kneece with it. “We’ve got some cargo to unload. Then refuel. No later than 1800. Let’s go, fellas. We’ve got work to do.” Doheeny rose.
Zagottis did, too. “I’ll see about havin’ somethin’ hot put on the plane for you to eat before you roll.”
Doheeny thanked him. As he passed by Harry, the pilot stooped over, rested a hand on Harry’s shoulder, and whispered, “If you don’t talk him out of this, don’t get on that plane.” He gave Harry’s shoulder a pat, then followed his crew out into the cold.
They sat with the length of table between them, Harry studying Kneece across the tongues of vapor from his mug, the captain returning industriously to his plate.
“Ahem,” Harry said.
Kneece looked over. He folded his face into a vague impression of Clark Gable jauntiness, affected the King’s voice (as much as he could through a mouthful of food), and asked, “So! Come here often?”
“What’ve you been up to while I’ve been asleep, to work up such an appetite?”
“Oh, I’ve been busy, sir.”
“I’m sure.”
“I don’t know if you know it, Major, but you don’t sleep right. You throw yourself around on that mattress like you got a bee in your britches. Did you know that, sir? Why is that?”
“You talked to the ground crew like Zagottis suggested.” Kneece nodded. “And the docs at the hospital where they had Coster.”
“Did the ground crew see Grassi get on that second night train?”
Kneece shook his head and slurped his coffee. “Man, nothing stays hot here for long. The way everybody’s dressed like Eskimos around here the ground crew couldn’t tell who was who around that plane. But the doc who was duty officer at the hospital when the night train came in, he remembers Zagottis coming in to say good-bye to Coster and leaving, he remembers Coster leaving. He remembers Grassi leaving with him. And something else — He says Coster didn’t look happy when Zagottis brought him those orders to fly east on the night train. The doc says this was more than Coster just being shook up from the crash. He says Coster looked pretty damned scared. And mad. Doc says Grassi spent the better part of the night with him, talking. Whatever it was Coster was telling him, it looked to be getting Grassi all het up. So I read it like this and you tell me if I sound like I’m off in the trees or not: Coster’s so unhappy about where he’s going, he does a bunch of tattling to Grassi.”
“Knowing Armando, he probably smelled blood: a big, fat court-martial with him as a crusading prosecutor. That’d be enough to get him all het up,” Harry agreed.
“Coster’s so p.o.’d at Edghill — or whomsoever — that he helps Grassi b.s. his way onto that second night trai
n. But when they get to the Orkneys, whoever’s waiting there knows Grassi doesn’t belong on that plane.”
“And by then they have to assume he knows too much.” Kneece made a pistol of his fingers. “Pop! goes the weasel.”
“This doctor, did he manage to overhear anything that Coster and Grassi talked about?”
“Nope. Those two managed to keep it between themselves.”
“I’m surprised it wasn’t the strain of being discreet that killed Armando.” Harry cleared his throat, firmly announcing a change of subject. “I would think after seeing that wrecked C-47 you wouldn’t need Zagottis warning you more than once about winding up like McKesson.”
“I have to calculate maybe Zagottis is right about the weather. But I also calculate maybe it’s just he’s over-scared on account of he wound up with two corpses on his hands and a big hole in his precious runway Doheeny, well, I calculate maybe he’s just looking for a break. I’m not saying he doesn’t need it and I wish there was the time to give it to him. So, I add all that up to one side.”
“And on the other side? I know you’ve been concerned about the trail going cold —”
“I was concerned. But now I’m damned scared about it, thanks to you, sir.”
“Thanks to…?”
“You’re the one who pointed out to me just how fast these people can work. That’s the other side of the calculation. Somebody — or more than one somebody — got McKesson’s plane replaced, left Armando Grassi dead in the Orkneys, and put up Coster and Bell in two days. All that done in just two days, without leaving a whole lot of sign about the whos and whys and wheres. They’ve had almost three weeks since then to cover their tracks.” Kneece’s face grew pensive. “I have a lot of respect for you, sir. It’d bother me if you thought I was pushing like this just to —” He looked up. “This isn’t about a box of black-market grapefruit, Major. There’s three men lying graveyard dead, maybe four. I’m not going to give the sonsabitches who did that any more lead on me than they’ve got now.”
Harry unhappily had to admit that Kneece’s disquisition made estimable tactical sense. It also provided a hard-to-dispute compelling moral cause.
“Look, Major,” the younger man said, “I’d like to hear you’re making the ride with me, but if you don’t want to climb on that plane tonight, fine, I understand. I don’t have a problem with that. Hell, you left your family and came all this way… I asked you for more than a fella should, and you put in a lot more than I had a right to expect. You’ve been a big, big help, sir. My thinking is I owe you the trip home.”
“I wasn’t talking about going home. I was talking about —”
“Following me later? With all respect, Major, I have to be a little hard here. I can’t go trying to run the bad guys to ground all the time having to worry about you catching up to me.”
“What if I decide to follow on my own?”
“Your travel authorization is under my orders. If you’re not with me, you’re going to have to get your own clearance from Stateside.”
By which time, Harry thought, Woody Kneece would be in Burma if that’s where the trail led.
Kneece pushed his empty plate away. “The cook they got here’s got nothing on Blume’s man.” He poked at a morsel stuck between his teeth with his tongue. “Thoon’s’at p’ane’s’eady to go, if you’re not aboard… en’oy your Chri’ma’ a’ home.”
Harry sipped down the last of his cold coffee. “All right, Captain.” Harry rose from his seat and parked a haunch on the table where he could look down at Kneece. “I’ll leave with you.”
Kneece brightened. “I’m glad to —”
“But I want a promise from you.”
“Sure.”
“If, God forbid, something happens and you make it and I don’t… you tell it to my wife. Not the Army. Not by Western Union or telephone. You go to her, you look her in the eye, and you tell her.”
Kneece smiled coolly. “Awright, sir. You got yourself a deal.”
*
“Hey, Sarge! What’s he waiting for?” The oscillations sent throughout the body of the aeroplane by the twin engines gave Kneece’s voice a tremulous vibrato that was all too appropriate for the circumstances.
The flight mechanic, sitting across the cargo cabin from Harry and Kneece, was turned round, peering out a cabin window into the night. “Waitin’ for the wind to fall off a bit, I think.”
Above the idling growl of the Pratt & Whitneys, their voices had a tinny resonance rebounding off the walls of the near-empty cargo cabin. Most of the Dakota’s cargo had been off-loaded at Strømfjord and at the Narssarssuaq aerodrome. The cabin now seemed barren with just a few small items and one four-foot-square crate lashed to the deck.
Kneece crossed the cabin to sit by the flight mechanic and look through a neighboring window. Harry looked out his own side. The snow along the runway matting glowed and faded as the moon blinked through gaps in scudding clouds. The Dakota rocked uneasily, wind slipping off the water and across the ice of the Cape to wrap about the ship with a shudder. With each buffet, spindrifts of snow whipped up from the snowbanks, pinwheeling with dizzying speed before settling to rest again.
True to his word, Doheeny had had the Dakota ready for departure before 1800 hours. As the pilot climbed aboard he’d been obviously unhappy to see Harry seated in the cargo cabin. There had been a rapid exchange of silent communication — a glum look from Doheeny that transmitted “What the hell are you doing here?” responded to by Harry with a fatalistic shrug. Doheeny had inserted himself in the cockpit, starters whined, engines coughed and turned over. Once the engines settled into an even hum, Doheeny had conducted the ship to the end of the runway.
Which was where, some ten minutes later, it continued to sit. Each tick of the clock cultivated a seed of anxiety in Harry planted by Zagottis several hours earlier, when he’d warned of the danger of the flight.
“What happened to your hand?” Harry asked the flight mechanic, trying to sound casual.
The sergeant seemed glad for a reason to turn away from the window “Stupid,” he said, brandishing the bandage. “I was poking around that port engine last night, cleaning the gaps on the plugs. Couldn’t reach in far enough with my gloves on. Wrench froze to my hand. I should know better.”
“Does it hurt?”
The flight mechanic smiled. “Like a son of a bitch, sir.”
The Dakota continued to idle.
“You know…” Harry began to say, intending to suggest that perhaps a departure at this time wasn’t such a good idea.
“What?” Kneece called back. “You say something, sir?”
Harry let it go; they were moving.
He looked forward, saw but couldn’t hear Doheeny say something to his copilot who then set his left hand down atop Doheeny’s right which sat straddling the throttle controls. There was something so personal in the act that Harry turned away.
The engines picked up a notch, then began a steady increase in pitch and volume as the Dakota clattered and bumped its way ever faster down the runway matting. Harry could still feel the wind bounding against the fuselage, but the ship was moving steadily. Any attempt to find cause for comfort in this evaporated with one look at the flight mechanic.
This was not the young sergeant he remembered who had treated each takeoff and landing with the offhanded air of someone embarking on his morning commute to work. This time, the flight mechanic sat utterly still, his face hard, eyes closed, his good hand cradled protectively about his bandaged one.
The rearward cant of the deck evened as the tail wheel rose from the runway.
“Here we go!” Kneece called out. His exuberance sounded forced.
The transit of the Dakota grew suddenly smooth as the wheels cleared the runway.
“See, Harry?” Kneece called out. “It was worse flying down here from —”
“JesusJesusJesus!” The explosion of oath/prayer was from the copilot.
Windshear — solid as a
bus or cannonball — slammed into the Dakota.
The aeroplane lurched to port, rolling violently until it stood almost on its port wingtip. The movement flung Harry backward, knocking the wind out of him and sending the back of his head rebounding off the aluminum hull. Still, he fared better than Woody Kneece, who was catapulted across the cargo cabin. His forehead collided with one of the fuselage ribs and he fell back to the deck, dazed.
Stunned himself, Harry was dimly aware of Jim Doheeny yelling in the cockpit: “Gear up! Gear UP!”
The engines howled in a full-throttle agony as Doheeny fought the turbulence. On his back, Harry had a glimpse through the upside windows; clouds backlit by the moon streaming past the windows from top to bottom: the wind was not only pushing the ship up on her wing, but sideways as well. He rolled to his side, trying to get his feet under him. Another glimpse, this through the windows below him — the ground closer than he thought it could be without colliding with it, snowdrifts blurring by; he was sure they were being pushed directly over the burial mound of Hotshot McKesson’s shattered aeroplane.
“Major!” It was the flight mechanic. The initial lurch of the ship had sprung the lashings on the cargo crate. With the steep bank of the ship, the crate was no longer sitting on the deck but on the rim of the passenger bench: it was now sliding toward Harry, shifting the ship’s center of gravity dangerously forward and threatening to easily crush Harry in the process.
“Get the nose up!” Doheeny yelled toward the cabin. The flight mechanic threw himself between Harry and the crate. He straddled the up-angled edge of the bench, braced a foot against one of the fuselage ribs and put his back against the 600lb crate, slowing it enough for Harry to scramble to safety
Still short of breath, and dizzy from the blow to the head and violent motion of the ship, Harry’s stomach began to spasm. Another gust rocked the Dakota and the crate crashed to the deck and began sliding rearward. Harry found himself thrown to his feet. But before he could gather his wits about him and assess their new situation, he felt the deck tilt again, this time in a climb.