Chapter Twenty-six 1110 Hours

Cold and wet, the rain and thin air rushed through the airplane. Engines throbbed unevenly. A heavy fog of condensation clouded the cockpit. McKuen batted at it with a frozen hand; there were mountains in the vicinity, and he was not above the highest of them. He did not look to his right — Shannon’s last cry still echoed through his head, and Shannon had died, quickly, in a single spitting shriek of terror. But in McKuen’s mind it took Shannon a long time to die, at the end of which time McKuen stared out of charcoal-hollow eyes into the opacity of the sky and finally realized that a friend, a comrade, was dead.

It was one thing to maintain courage in the midst of a crowd of fighting men. It was another thing to maintain it alone. There was no one to see the sucking spasms that distorted McKuen’s mouth. He rode in a dying airplane, in a seat beside a dead man, imprisoned in his chair. He could not leave the controls even to move Shannon’s body out of sight — and if he had, it would have served no purpose. Shannon was dead, and it made no matter where his corpse lay.

He told himself, “You’ve got to let him die, McKuen. A soldier’s got to accept the loss of another soldier.” He asked himself, “By the Lord above, why this? Why me?” He found himself humming a tune he did not like, and went on humming it because he was afraid to stop.

“Shannon, you poor ignorant bastard,” he shouted. “Why didn’t you keep your bloody ass down?”

He laughed hysterically: “He’s got thirty percent more cavities, by God!” And his face stiffened in horror. “Jesus — Jesus. What are you talking about? God, forgive me.”

He looked at Shannon. “I didn’t mean it, Mister. I didn’t mean it, for God’s sake. You know me, Mister — I never know when to keep my mouth shut. Shannon...?”

He slapped himself across the side of the face. A downdraft of cold, heavy air made the gooney bird plummet. His stomach turned. Something stood beyond the swirl of rain — a heavier mass. He saw it once, and again, and lost it in the weather; but it was there, dark and solid in the sky, a mountain. He kicked the pedals and banked the wheel; he went into a climbing turn, but the spiral was a feeble one; number two was half-choked, and the gooney bird would not reach for higher altitude. His eyes flashed from the gray obscured sky to the instruments over again. He kicked the throttles up and back, trying to flush the clogged engine clear. The compass was swinging around dizzily. Number two roared with a burst of vigor, and he pulled the wheel into his belly, trying to gain altitude while the balky engine’s enthusiasm lasted. The altimeter needle swayed back and forth across the dial; he had the feeling he was somewhere above seventy-five hundred feet, climbing for eight thousand. It was hard to breathe; the plane’s speed sucked air out of the cockpit through the dotted streaks of bullet holes. He fought his way through a violent fit of trembling and reached under the seat for the Thermos jug of coffee. It made him think about Shannon. He said, “Mister, you were lucky after all. I don’t even know which direction we’re after.” He shook his head slowly. He said, “A fella wishes he’d had the chance to know you better, Mister.” He had not known Shannon well at all; he missed the man terribly. He would have to write to Shannon’s fiancée. He wondered what he could say. The whole world was tied up in a knot of rope and labeled “Classified — not for fiancées.” He uncapped the coffee jug and lifted it to his blue lips.

That was when he heard the crack of ice on the wings.


There was no sound like it; no one could mistake it for anything else. He read the outside-temperature gauge: twenty-nine degrees, if the gauge could be relied on.

The gooney bird ran in and out of thick clouds. It slammed around in the air, unsettling him; he heard a splintering racket, a rending crack. It stretched through time like the magnified noise of a long sliver being pulled slowly away from a dry wooden board. The plane rocked. Flying ice banged against the fuselage like the sound of empty metal drums falling down a long cement stair. The plane lurched as it lost the weight of ice chunks; he felt the slow, hard pull of the controls that came from a thickness of ice blunting the leading edges of the wings.

And he was afraid.

Ice could coat the propellers. It could weigh down the wings. It could form on the windshield and blind him. It could fill the engine airscoops, blocking the flow of air to the carburetors and killing the engines. It could coat the ailerons and elevators, the vital control surfaces by which he guided his flight. It could do any of these things; it could do several of them; it could conceivably do all of them. That was ice. And he was afraid.

He sought clear air, but there was no open sky without wet, ice-forming clouds. It was a murky sky, and he flew alone with a shuddering, ox-like airplane and a dead companion and a sky full of ice. The weight of it was pulling him down toward the mountains; he had lost at least six hundred feet of altitude in ten minutes. He could not climb above the clouds — the gooney bird’s engines ran flat-out and only just kept it in the air at all.

He reached for the controls that operated the leading-edge ice bladders; they expanded slowly and contracted, breaking slabs of ice away from the wings. Enormous pieces of ice spun away. He heard them bang against the airplane, jarring his ears. The compass steadied, and he discovered he was pointed due north — north over China. To the west and south-west stood even higher mountains between him and the neutral safety of Laos. He knew, with a sudden calm certainty, that he would never make it to Laos. He would reach the end of his flight somewhere in the course of the next half-hour, hard against a mountain peak, driven down by a crucifix of ice.

At lower altitudes, the air would be warmer. He had to cross the shortest axis of the mountains and head down toward the lowlands — that would melt the plane free. He looked at the fuel gauges — maybe another hour’s gas. In any event, it was not enough to reach Laos even in good weather. He had spent too much time fighting ice and tired engines.

“Back we go, Mister.” He banked around and pointed the craft southeast. It flew sluggishly, ponderously, awkwardly; but it flew. Rocks of ice banged hollowly along the fuselage. His face prickled with cold; there was no feeling left in his hands. He had a strange involuntary daydream: an eternity of waxen dolls smiling with sadistic courtesy. He awoke with a start. A blade of ice ripped away from the groin of left wing and fuselage. It rattled back along the plane, and when it broke against the tailplane the gooney bird bucked and started to sideslip. He fought back on course, headed back the way he had come, toward the interior and, beyond that, the sea. He watched the altimeter closely, and he prayed.

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