by Bill Mesce
“JesusJesusJesus!”
“Gimme a hand!” the flight mechanic screamed. This time he was behind the crate, his shoulder against the wood slats fighting desperately to keep it from sliding into the tail, trying to shove the crate back into its place. Harry joined him and found Woody Kneece by his side. A spiderweb of blood snaked across Kneece s face.
Side by side they somehow kept the crate in place, even as the slant of the deck sharpened beneath their slipping feet, rising in the nose. The engines screamed with every ounce of power and Harry heard the aluminum sinews of the Dakota moan with strain.
“JesusJesusJESUS!”
And then it was over. The C-47 found itself free of the death-grip of turbulence, flying evenly through a calm and quiet sky. Yet the engines were still bellowing at full throttle and Harry saw the flight mechanic with his face turned away from the window; his face screwed tight as if expecting something horrible and inevitable.
Then there was a smooth banking turn to port, the engines quieted, and the flight mechanic’s face opened in an unwinding sigh.
It would not be until some time after, over some comforting cups of coffee and cigarettes lit with shaking hands, that the men on the Dakota would manage to exchange tales of their individual participation and the whole story would come together. It was only then Harry could appreciate how close — and in how many ways — they had come to dying.
Doheeny had expected trouble from the outset. He had told the copilot to set his hand over his on the throttles to keep his hand from bouncing free should the worst occur. Though their landing gear was still extended when the windshear hit, they were already too far along their take-off to abort. He could only hope the Dakota could bull through the turbulence.
But the bullet of wind was too strong to fight. The initial impact rocked the Dakota, bringing up the starboard wing. Doheeny called to the copilot to raise the landing gear, reducing the ship’s drag and giving him more thrust to work with as he wrestled with the control yoke. But with the ship on the edge of inverting completely, the copilot needed both hands on the control yoke to help Doheeny bring the aircraft to heel. With an altitude of less than a hundred feet, the roll of the ship had already pushed the port wing dangerously close to the ground.
“I swear,” Doheeny recounted later, “that port wingtip was shoveling snow.”
It may very well have been. With a 120-knot takeoff speed, the plane’s wing could probably have knifed through the loose surface powder without consequence, but if it encountered something solid — or pushed into the terra firma beneath — the ship would have pitched forward and finished its journey as an exploding cartwheel tumbling alongside the runway of the Narssarssuaq aerodrome.
It took only seconds for Doheeny to recognize that the Dakota, already at near-stalling speed, couldn’t buck the turbulence. He’d sensed the shift forward in the ship’s center of gravity as the heavy crate in the cargo cabin slid loose, keeping him from getting the tail down to climb.
Despite the frantic flavor of the copilot’s chant of “JesusJesusJesus,” he knew what he had to do. With one hand still clutching the control yoke, the other frantically brought up the landing gear then darted about the throttle and mixture controls, the flap settings, trying to give the ship every possible bit of power and lift. The flight mechanic knew what he had to do as well: keep the loose cargo from dropping into the tail, forcing the plane into a climb and stall.
But when the ship had first leveled out and Harry had thought them finally safe, they were actually facing another dire problem: the one that had caused the flight mechanic to so obviously brace for imminent doom. They had been taken by a second current, this one pushing them inland. Lacking the horsepower to fight it, Doheeny had taken a gamble and ceded to Nature, turning with the new current to port, hoping to move with it. The maneuver had given him back control of the ship, but had put them in a frightful race. The port turn had put the aeroplane on a collision heading with the high ground that bordered the inland side of the airstrip. Could Doheeny clear the high ground before the tail-riding turbulence smashed them into it?
“If we’d had one more coat of paint on the belly of that plane,” Doheeny said later, “we would’ve hit.”
Referring back to their flight log and the time the copilot had registered for their takeoff, Doheeny later calculated that the whole incident had taken no longer than twenty to thirty seconds to transpire.
*
“How’re you feeling, Sarnoff?” Jim Doheeny asked the wireless operator.
“I’d rather not do that again, Captain.”
“How’s Ol’ Betsy?”
Sparks smiled down at the guitar. “Couple new dents but she’s OK. Maybe they’ll make ’er sound better than I do.” Doheeny slumped on the passenger bench near the wireless set. He looked too exhausted to stand. “How about this thing?” he said, nodding at the set. “This in one piece, too?”
“First thing I checked, Captain.”
“Get on your key. If the boys downstairs saw any of that, their hearts are probably in their mouths.”
“Mine, too.”
“Then it’s unanimous. Let them know we’re OK and on course for Iceland.”
In the rear of the cargo cabin a shaken Harry was trying to nurse his jangled nerves with a Lucky Strike. Across the cabin the flight mechanic, hobbled with his bandaged hand, was clumsily applying a strip of gauze to the ugly gash that ran the breadth of Woody Kneeces forehead. The flight mechanic’s awkward ministrations prompted winces and grimaces of pain from Kneece, but he voiced no complaint. Penance, Harry thought.
Harry heard a moan — half from fatigue, the rest from disgruntlement — from Doheeny as he tiredly pulled himself to his feet. Kneece saw the pilot heading his way and prepared to take his medicine. Kneece was as tall as Doheeny, but his more spindly physique looked eminently more fragile, particularly as Doheeny stood over him, glaring down with a repressed fury more intimidating than any pyrotechnic display of shouts and blows.
“Everybody OK back here?” Doheeny asked, although his eyes remained on Kneece.
“More or less, Captain,” the flight mechanic answered. “The captain —”
Doheeny cut him off. “I see.”
“We had a problem with the big crate, Captain. I guess I must’ve messed up the tie-downs back at —”
“It’s OK, Junior.” Doheeny took a breath that seemed to grow his shoulders a few inches in every direction. “Captain Kneece.”
Kneece nodded and began to stand. But Doheeny rested
one of his bearlike paws heavily on the captain’s shoulder, forcing him back into his seat. Doheeny turned to the flight mechanic and with a motion of his eyes sent the sergeant toward the cockpit, leaving Doheeny alone with Kneece and Harry.
“Captain Doheeny,” Kneece began, his voice apologetic. Harry noted the return of “Captain” to Kneece’s address of the pilot. “I don’t know how to —”
“You’re damned right you don’t,” Doheeny said curtly. “Just in case that knock on the head left things a little fuzzy for you, let me lay it out for you nice and clear. You almost got us all killed today, Captain. We were one stroke of dumb luck away from getting spread all over that runway like margarine. Call me thin-skinned, but I’m a little perturbed about that.
“As soon as we set down in Reykjavik I’m sending a dispatch to your boss back in Washington. It’s going to say you ought to be hauled up on charges and that I’d love to be the person to press them. It’s going to say you don’t have any more right wearing captain’s bars than my Aunt Fanny does. It’s also going to ask that me and my crew be relieved of this assignment because you’re a hazard, Kneece. You will get somebody killed.”
Harry could tell from Kneece’s face that the pilot’s declamation stung; all the more because even Kneece recognized the truth of it.
“Don’t get in a sweat, Captain,” Doheeny continued. “I’ve been flying for the Army long enough to know it’ll be a good da
y if you even get a slap on the wrist. They’re going to figure, well, as long as nobody got hurt… It’ll be on the record that I squawked, but you and me are going to be stuck with each other until you get to wherever you need to go. But there’s going to be a change in how it’s going to work on this aircraft from here on out —”
One of Doheeny’s meaty hands grabbed a fistful of Kneece’s flight jacket and raised him to his feet, pressing his back painfully into the arch of the fuselage. “You and me, we’re going to have an agreement. I agree that I’m not going to give you any advice on how to do whatever it is you’re here to do. And you are going to leave all decisions about flying this aircraft to me. All righty?” Doheeny pressed Kneece harder against the metal hull. “And if you do anything to bring any of my people even close to being hurt…” Doheeny released Kneece and the captain slid back into his seat. “I don’t care if we’re five thousand feet up and over the North Atlantic, Kneece, I swear to God I’ll boot your ass through that door myself.”
Chapter Six: Delos
Harry stood over the Officers’ Mess billiard table. They had laid the weapons out on the green felt: four carbines, four holstered automatic pistols, spare ammunition. “Eddie? When you…”
“Aye?”
“What was it like when… when you were hurt?”
I smiled at his discomfiture. “You’re a good and sweet lad, Harry, but the tact is wasted on the likes of me. I do know the ol’ thingie is gone, you know. Sparing my feelings is a moot point, old boy.”
“When I was in the plane, when we took off from the field in Greenland…”
“When you thought you were going to crash.”
“Yes. I wasn’t afraid. Not then, not while it was happening. I was sure we were going to crash, but I wasn’t afraid. That’s funny, isn’t it? I felt…”
“Cool. Detached. Every bit of it happened with astonishing clarity.”
“Yes.”
“But then comes the afterward”
“I wasn’t even thinking about it anymore, and that’s when the shakes came. I went into the toilet on the plane —”
“You may omit further details in that regard.”
“It’s funny, isn’t it? That it happens that way?”
“You need time to be afraid, Harry The more time you have to think, the more opportunity you have to be afraid. Fear ages much like wine.”
Harry reached out to touch one of the carbines with his fingertips. As if the weapon radiated a searing heat, they recoiled from the gleaming varnish of the walnut stock. “So, with you…”
“Was it like that for me? Not a bit. In fact, I can’t say I recall all that much of it. I remember the sound of the Nip planes, the sound of the bombs coming down. I was running — we all were — and then it’s lights out. I woke six days later on a hospital ship heading home, the last out of Singapore. Woke up and the little bugger was off. I felt like I had just closed my eyes. Like a magic trick: Close your eyes, then” — I whirled my hands above the contrivance affixed to my stump — “Presto! Disappeared!”
“That’s a hell of a trick.”
“Oh, yes,” I said. “I was quite impressed.”
*
Harry paused in the doorway of the chemical toilet. He took a deep draught of the chill air of the cargo cabin, purging the nausea, firming his legs beneath him. The flight mechanic sat huddled forward with Sparks, while Woody Kneece was in the after part of the cabin very much the errant schoolboy exiled to the dunce chair; slumped in his seat, sullen, and furious at his own stupidity.
“You made your first command decision,” Harry said, sitting beside him. “How does it feel?”
“You have these daydreams of being the guy who takes charge. Young Teddy Roosevelt.” Kneece bared his teeth in a mock T.R. grin. “Charge!” The levity swiftly faded. “In the dream you’re always right. There was this time back home, fella come in under another fella’s fence and stole some chickens. Well, Uncle Ray and I drive out, this old boy still has the stolen chickens in a bag on his porch, we make him give ’em back and apologize, make ’em both shake hands. They’re acting like everything’s fine, but on the ride back Uncle Ray says to me” — here Woody Kneece’s accent thickened until it had the quality of molasses — “‘Derwooood, I’ll bet you a cold drink an’ a bag o’ goobers we all’re comin’ on back here.’ Sure enough, next day there we are, because that chicken farmer peppered that other old boy’s bee-hind with birdshot. I ask Uncle Ray how he knew. They both looked square the day before. He just looks at me and shakes his head, Uncle Ray does, like he can’t believe how you could fit so much stupid in one head. And he says to me, ‘Derwooood, some no-‘count carpet-baggin’ white trash burns down yore house, runs off with yore wife, and shoots yore stud bull, then comes back to apologize. Yore damn guaranteed that old boy’s gon’ wind up facedown in a ditch ’cause, son, sometimes I’m sorry jus’ don’ cut it.’” Kneece looked toward the cockpit and added glumly, “But what else do you say?”
“I’d like to keep you from making another mistake, Woody. Actually, three of them. If you keep trying to make a connection between Grassi’s killing and what happened in London back in August, one, you’re going to waste a lot of time; two, you’re going to get some very important people very annoyed with you —”
“You think I’m worried about ruffling some feathers?”
“How far do you think you’re going to get irritating the hell out of the people whose help you’re going to need to get your questions answered?”
“You said three mistakes.”
“If we’re going to work together, we have to be going in the same direction. If we’re not, besides the wasted effort… somebody’s going to get hurt. I made that mistake once. I’m not going to make it again. If we can’t get together on this, I will get off this plane and catch the next ride home.”
“I’m still listening.”
“About what happened in London last summer — We’re going to leave it on this plane tonight, right now.”
“If you have a case to make, Major —”
“It’s simple, Woody. The soldiers we were investigating in that case were lost in action. They were dead before I even got to New York.”
“That’s what you meant: dead-ended.”
“Dead-ended. That case is over because there’s nothing left.”
“What about…?” As he had in Harry’s kitchen, he laid his fist alongside his jaw.
Harry felt a twinge in his hand only moderately less sharp than the one in his heart. “There was a woman involved. A girl, really. Grassi went to her, tried to use her to get me to take the case a certain way. That was Grassi going his own way; that was his command decision. And his miscalculation. The girl didn’t come to me. She took a bottle of sleeping pills.”
“Oh.” Kneece let a long moment go by. “Did she…?”
“I don’t know. She was still in the hospital when I shipped out. Grassi wasn’t even sorry. I think he felt worse that he got caught going behind my back than over what he did. When I belted him… Woody, I felt like that was the only thing I’d done right in the whole mess.”
They sat together for a while listening to the drone of the Dakota’s engines as the cold waters of the Denmark Strait slipped by below them. Kneece leaned over to look out the window.
“Gonna be a clear night all the rest of the way, looks like.”
Harry hadn’t heard him. He was sitting much as he’d found Woody Kneece earlier, sour-faced and angry with himself. His hand had begun to throb.
“OK, Major, you made your case,” Kneece said. “Unless something pops up contrariwise, this case starts in Greenland. London had nothing to do with it.”
Harry nodded approvingly Gratefully.
“You mind me asking something personal, sir? There’s a lot you’re obviously not telling me, OK, that’s how you have to play it and I’ll take your word for it that it’s over. But there’s something about that case still dogs you. The guys you were
after are dead. This thing with the girl, that sounds like it was Grassi’s fault, not yours. So what is it?”
“It’s like you were telling me, Woody,” Harry said. “‘Sorry just don’t cut it.’”
*
The wind tearing at the airstrip at Keflavik was brutal; the gusts had blown great stretches of the aerodrome clear of snow, revealing a ground that, under the bleaching moon, seemed lifeless and bare.
Harry wasted no time jogging after Jim Doheeny, hurrying across the windswept grounds for the warmth of the Ops shack. He felt immense pity for the souls trying to tough out the frigid night in tents whose canvas walls whipped so hard they cracked like gunshots.
In the Ops shack, “talkers” stood before maps, grease pencils in hand, following the movements of their trolling Catalinas, while another talker tracked what Harry thought to be a major outbound convoy as it passed the Outer Hebrides. Periodically, the rumble of aeroplane engines, as Catalinas taxied close by, joined with the wind gusts to rattle the corrugated walls and windows of the shack.
While Doheeny conferred with the Ops staff, Harry placed himself out of everyone’s way by the heating stove. He poured two cups of coffee and handed one to Doheeny
“How’s it look?” Harry asked him.
“Same story here we heard back at Bluie-West-One; before the weather broke bad, a lot of air traffic was coming through. They’re expecting it to pick up again once Kap Farvel clears. But for now, we look good. We’ve got the eastbound route all to ourselves, and they’re expecting as much as thirty-six hours’ decent weather between here and the Isles. You can give your pushy little Southern buddy the good news that I’ll probably have him in the Orkneys a little after midnight.”
“Listen,” Harry said, “my pushy little Southern buddy says don’t rush to get airborne. Upon reflection, it has occurred to him that no matter how early we get to the Orkneys, nothing productive is going to happen before morning. So, he says lay over for the night. Your crew can get some rest in real beds, get some decent food. If a takeoff at 0800 is good —”