At seven-thirty the next morning we – the Mitchell and I – lined up on the runway. It was the still clear time between the land breeze and the sea breeze, between the morning mist and the heat haze. As good as I'd ever get.
The cockpit windows were open and the engines were giving off a terrific dry clatter a few feet from either ear, sounding as if they were trying to eat their own insides. But it was the same noise they'd made at the run-up the night before, soperhaps it was the sound Wright Cyclones always made.
I looked carefully around the cluttered cockpit. The flight instruments were still dead; I wouldn't know about them until we were in the air. But the engine instruments all seemed to be registering.Supercharger to low gear; booster pumps to 'emergency'; mixture… I had the page of the flight manual which gave the landing and take-off checklists, but nothing to show at what speed she left the ground – or ought to. Well, I could guess: it was going to be over 100 mph, probably nearer – No. Stop guessing, Carr. You're going to get the fastest flying lesson of your life on this runway. Don't cloud your tiny mind with preconceptions.
A Spanish accent in my headphones said: 'Mitchell on runway, you're clear to take off.'
I pressed the transmit button on the wheel. 'Thank you, tower.'
A last slow look around. Engine and oil temperatures going up… throttle and pitch locksoff… flaps full up – I'll use them when I've learnt to trust them… harness and hatches all secure… No parachute. But nobody jumps from a first flight; nobody writes a divorce clause into a marriage; nobody has a taxi waiting at the door when he gets into bed with the girl for the first time.
Nobody jumps from a first flight. Not in time, anyway.
The tower said languidly: 'Mitchell, you are still clear to take off.'
D'you think I'm sitting here waiting for a sun-tan, you stupid fat slob?'Thank you, tower.'
But the engines were collecting a tan: the temperatures were on the edge of the red line. Still, one last, slow look around… ah, the hell with it. She's an aeroplane and I'm a pilot. And neither of us virgins. Something'll happen. I pushed the throttles to thirty inches of boost and flipped off the brakes.
Suddenly we were running.
No control, none at all. The wheel limp and loose, the rudder pedals flopping meaninglessly… and beginning to swing left. Left? Why the hellleft? Wake up, Carr: these are American engines, turning the opposite way to British ones, sowe swing left, not right… Dab of brakes… more. Jerk. Straight again… But a bad start.
Still no control…50 mph… andstill no – yes, now. The pedals hardening, the wheel growing stiff in my hands… now, control… touch of right rudder, nicely done, you're no beginner, Carr – did she notice that?…60… more rudder…70…75… nosewheel should come unstuck now, back on the wheel, back more -God, but she's heavy. Wake up, you overfed bitch… The nose suddenly pivoting at the sky.Hold it down, careful, don't try and rush things.
Eighty…85… How much runway have we used? And what happened to that extra 4,000 feet they've talked about building all these years?…90… coming up to 95… getting time to fly. Slight back pressure on the wheel – and nothing. Nothing.
One hundred… Ifelt back on the wheel, gentle fingertip movements searching ever-so-delicately for a response, a waking, a willingness… ahead the end of the runway, the scrubland beyond, and then the roofs of the town…
One hundred and five… I gotfirmeron the wheel…
One hundred and ten… Damn it, I'm the boss around here. Nowfly, you bitch!
And suddenly but smoothly, to show thatnow was exactly her moment, she flew.
The scrubland flicked beneath, then the town itself. At 175 mph I let her lift into a shallow climb – and we were running gay and young up the morning sky, twisting, solid but fast on the controls, into a wide climbing turn.
Finally I levelled off, throttled back, and stared, rather surprised, round the cockpit. It was still a junkshop window of non-matching instruments, sweat-corroded levers wrapped in sticky black tape, cheerful little notices sayinglimiting speed 349mph with the 349 scratched out and 275 scratched in. She was an old over-painted hag, but she'd once been young and powerful, and she hadn't forgotten the great days.
There had tobé areason why she'd lasted twenty years, longer than I'd been flying myself.
So perhaps, after all, there was more than money in it. 'I'm sorry,' I said softly, 'that I called you a bitch.'
I had her refuelled while J.B. settled our account and we flew out, all three of us this time, for Kingston at nine-thirty. I was anxious to get airborne before the midday heat.
A full set of,airline radio equipment would have cost three times as much as we were paying for the entire aeroplane, so we weren't over-equipped in that direction. The Mitchell had a ten-channel VHP set without crystals in half the channels, an elderly radio-compass, and that was all. So a 500-mile ride over the sea left an awkward gap in the middle where I couldn't raise a single station. Not that I was worried about navigation – Jamaica's too big to miss entirely – but I'd have liked to have someone to say goodbye to if the occasion arose.
But it didn't. We landed at Palisadoes soon after noon.
I planned to keep the Mitchell there a few days, learning about her while I had a long runway for errors, and getting her hydraulics patched up. We parked off behind the pier of cargo sheds and went to phone Whitmore.
He wasn't available, but J.B. got Luiz at Oranariz. After a bit of chat she put me on for a technical report.
'Tell Whitmore,' I reported, 'that she's a tired old lady, but still a lady. There's a bit of a bombsight mounting left in the nose, so you can probably fix a camera on that. And you could work another sideways out of the old gun windows down behind the bomb-bay, if you want to. We've got about three hundred dollars-worth of work to do on the hydraulics and rewiring the intercom system. But that should cover it.'
'Fine. Get J.B. to sign you an okay, and you can get somebody started on it.'
'And tell him I'll fly her up to Ochoríosas soon as it's done. Two or three days.'
'I will tell him. Have you seen Diego Ingles yet?'
'No. Was he supposed to be here?'
'I expected him to be. He and I drove down last night to meet you when we thought you were coming then. I had to be back at work today, but he was most anxious to see the new aeroplane so he stayed.'
'Well, it's a bit early for him to be up and about yet. You want to speak to J.B. again?'
'No – only tell her to hurry back. One of the extras has broken his ankle and talks of suing us for a million bucks. We want her to break his spirit also.'
I rang off and passed on the message. J.B.'s eyes guttered ferociously. 'Goddamned extras who try and make a name by doing something crazy in camera and break their necks andthen sueus. I'll see that bastard never works in pictures again.'
Suddenly she wanted to be off and into the fight. I watched her go. She was quite a lawyer. Perhaps even quite a woman -if her lawyer let her be.
I went upstairs and had my usual lunch of beer and hot dogs before starting work on the Mitchell. Word of her had got around already – an airport's a small village when it comes to gossip – and die refuelling supervisor was almost polite to me. I knew why, too: the Mitchell's fuel Consumption seemed to work out around 145 gallons an hour – five times as much as the Dove's.
After that I waved Whitmore's name and income around die hangars until I had a couple of mechanics tracing down the hydraulic lines. I could see from their faces that diey didn't believe what they were finding and couldn't find anything they might have believed.
But she was like that all the way through. As a plane built towards the end of the war, she had started life full of hasty modifications: extra gun hatches chopped out all over, chunks of armour plate slapped on here and there, auxiliary fuel tanks stuffed into every corner. And since then, most of the gun hatches had been roughly sealed up, yet anodier tank had been built into the bomb bay, somebody had added diree swivelling armchairs and piece of carpet in die narrow cabin behind die bomb-bay, carved out four pordioles and installed a hot-air system diat looked like two metal pydions in position 69.
I had a short sentimental moment of wanting to strip her down and bring her back to being Beautiful Dreamer again. But die idea passed: she had more 'improvements' to come, yet anodier job to do. And at her age, that was glory enough. Iwent back to work with an uneasy feeling that the same thought might apply to pilots.
By five o'clock, when my mechanics started showing symptoms of raging thirst, we had a rough idea of how the system worked, even if not why, and had found two leaking joints, a sticky valve, and a shaky pump. After an hour of overtime rates we had the pump stripped and knew what parts we needed. I sent an Aircraft-On-Ground cable to North American in California asking them to air-freight spares if they had any left, then called it a day.
Diego still hadn't shown up, which was odd if he really wanted to meet the Mitchell – but not so odd if he'd found something else twenty years old and rather less modified. Aeroplanes ran a bad fourth to sex in his life.
By the time I'd cured my own thirst and went over to collect the jeep from the cargo pier, we were into the short tropical twilight. The tall lights around the loading bay came on as I walked across, turning the concrete blue and cold in contradiction to the soft warm air. Everybody else had gone – cargo planes, without passengers to worry about, work union hours -and all the sheds were locked except the last, which never held anything but my jeep and a few cargo trolleys.
I drove round the end of the terminal pier heading for the back gate, slowing up for a last look at the Mitchell. She stood there, dark, lonely, but with that watchful look all nose-wheel aeroplanes have, unable to sit back and rest on their tails. A cluttered old lady on sentry duty…
Hell, I was getting sentimental about that box of junk. Still, I didn't have any other aeroplane to get sentimental about now. Or maybe it was because she'd once fought a war.
I was about to pull away when I remembered the heap of plastic covers that I'd used to stretch over the Dove's engines and cockpit when she was standing in the sun. Without the Dove, they'd sat in the back seat of the jeep all week, and I was lucky nobody had pinched them. There are enough Jamaicans for whom a few square feet of plastic are halfway to a house. Now, maybe, the Mitchell could use them. I got out and yanked them off the seat.
Then I knew what had made Diego late.
He'd been there some time, so he just stuck out over the side of the jeep, stiff as the plank from the side of a pirate galleon. Then the drag of the covers, as I dropped them, toppled him over and he fell with a sound I can hear again whenever I close my eyes. I closed my eyes then, too.
When I had them open and focused again, he was lying beside the back wheel, in the curled, crunched shape set by the space behind the jeep's front seats. Not because I wanted to, but because I had to know, I rolled him so he balanced on his back, and in the dim back-glow of the neon lights on the far side of the cargo pier I could see the splatter of black blood on his white shirt front. When I looked closer, there wasn't just one hole, but dozens of small ones.
Then I started the long walk back across the bright cold concrete to the warm lights of the terminal. Except that I ran a lot of it.