The Last Bridge

Chapter Nineteen 0915 Hours

McKuen paused to extract a handkerchief from his pocket and wipe his face dry. He sat astraddle the number two engine nacelle, with the cowling open and his hands grease-black. He felt a deep ache in his long back.

Mister Shannon stood on the metal-mesh runway below him, festooned with small arms. Rainwater dripped off the bill of Shannon’s cap. He said, “How about it, Lieutenant?”

“I’ll not be making any promises. I ain’t a bloody mechanic.”

“Can we get her airborne?”

“And what if we do?” McKuen snorted, and bent forward to bolt the cowling down.

Shannon started to talk again; McKuen paid no attention to the words until suddenly he shot upright and said, “Quiet.” He turned his head slowly to catch the warning sound again on the flats of his eardrums, and finally he found it, a faint buzzing hum in the sky. “Piston engines,” he said. A transport, or a lonely reconnaissance bomber. “Can’t see us through the soup, anyhow. And it’s thankful I am.”

He held on to that hope while the airplane noise advanced, growing louder in the obscure sky, until he knew the plane was close overhead. And thereupon the wingtip lights appeared over the mountain, vague within the clouds, moving smoothly across his range of vision. “Twin-engine Ilyushin,” he said. “Maybe fifteen hundred feet up. He’s looking for something.”

The plane changed course, moving in a slow circle. “Looking for us,” said Mister Shannon on the ground. They waited motionless with their heads thrown back. Rain slanted against their faces; McKuen blinked. The Russian-built search plane circled the mountains, moving in and out of view in the clouds; finally it zigzagged out of sight past the mountains, and McKuen said, “They didn’t spot us.”

“How do you know?”

“I don’t,” McKuen said. He slid back along the wing to the trailing edge and dropped to the ground. “I think maybe we ought to sit tight for a while. If we take off now, they’ll pick us up on radar — they’re waiting for us.”

Shannon said, “I’m hungry.”

“Anyone for pinochle?”

“Lieutenant.”

“What?”

“Suppose we get her off the ground. What then?”

“We point ourselves across the mountains and try like hell to get to Laos before the Reds can get fighters on our tail.”

“Lots of luck,” Mister Shannon said.

“Aye. And then some.” McKuen batted his arms together. “Let’s not be standing out here all day in this freezing bloody rain.”