The Last Bridge

Chapter Thirty-five 1245 Hours

Strange air pressures built up in the clouded skies; at this particular instant McKuen’s altimeter read twelve thousand feet. “Ridiculous,” McKuen said. “Mister, we have been banging around up here for more than an hour, and I’d just like you to be knowin’ that we have twelve minutes’ fuel in the tanks and I dinna ken where the bloody hell we are, if you’ll be kind enough to pardon me Scottish. We should have been over the briny Goddamn deep twenty minutes ago, if the compass is anywhere near right. But we just passed a bloody mountain peak. Either we have been fighting a forty-mile-an-hour head wind or we are flying at ninety-five miles an hour, which perhaps you know is quite improbable, not to say bloody impossible.”

After a moment’s droning silence, McKuen said, “Of course, being dead, Mister Shannon cannot well be expected to reply. Mister, you are Goddamn bloody well lucky.”

He had been talking steadily for a quarter of an hour.

“To hell with it,” he said. “By your leave, Mister, we’ll be going down for a look.”

The gooney bird vibrated intensely; the panel bottomed on its rubber mountings. McKuen pushed the control yoke forward. He set his teeth. His lips were insensitive; his hands were chilled to unfeeling. The artificial horizon indicator had rolled over on its back and expired. The head temperatures of both engines continued to climb; and another backfire might stall them. According to the altimeter, updrafts and downdrafts were plunging the plane up and down at the rate of several thousand feet a second. McKuen snorted. Even the seat of his pants gave him no help; he might have been upside-down. Looking through the bullet-cracked windows did no good — a solid gray mat of cloud pressed against the glass like an enormous nose. McKuen’s face lengthened dismally. He fumbled for a cigarette and lighted it, and smoke idled around the cockpit, fogging about his head, caught there in crosscurrents. The dead springs of the seat jarred his buttocks. A loose piece of wire hung from overhead, swinging crazily. The wing temps had warmed up, but now and then a loose chunk of ice broke off and banged against the plane. Crazy spasms ran through all his muscles. Beads of water scraped along the glass — and at least that was better than frost. He crushed out the cigarette in the rusty ashtray; he had hardly taken two drags. Through the window he could only make out the vague dark outline of the wing, the ghostly red exhaust of number two. The altimeter settled at sixty-eight hundred feet.

“Where’s the bottom of this puking-ass cloud?” He was sure to fly into a mountain. Back in the fuselage a loose bolt complained with an insistent rattle. “It will be kicks, Mister, to fly around up here until we run out of bloody petrol. Six or seven minutes, Mister. That’s all. McKuen, you smoke too Goddamn much. It will take two years off your life.”

He straightened out the crumpled cigarette and lighted it again. “I feel like the cheese in a sandwich.” After a moment he said, “Pretty soon somebody’s teeth will bite into it, what?”

The temp gauge went down to thirty-two, but that was not yet quite cold enough to ice up the wings again. He throttled back, seeking an added few seconds of fuel. There wasn’t much choice left. He checked his parachute harness.

“Like jumping onto a yogi’s bed of nails,” he said. “Mister, I’ll tell you one thing straight. If I get out of this, I will spend the rest of my life at sea level on my belly. I will never so much as go up in an elevator. What’s that, Mister? What do you mean, don’t I like to fly?”

He said more quietly, “I like flying the way an alcoholic likes whisky, Mister. That’s how I like flying.”

He pushed the yoke forward and tipped the plane down. His mouth became a longer and thinner line. “Mister, there has got to be a break in this stuff.” He banked around. The plane rattled, and number two began to choke and cough. He reached for the mixture controls, but by the time he moved them, number two had packed up. It feathered for a moment and stopped.

“Ah,” he said. He fed more fuel to number one and kicked his rudder over to compensate for the uneven pull. He cursed the useless artificial horizon. A loose engine mount on number one threatened to shake the plane to pieces.

It bucked and halted, jerked and faltered, pitched and swung. The wheel trembled violently, bruising his hands. He cursed, and flew into a ragged wide circle of open sky.

When he looked down, he could count the stones on a mountain peak under the left wing.

“No shit?” was all he could think to say.

Sudden sweat ran down his face. The mountainside fell away below him, and he saw a tortured valley running away underneath toward a high cleft peak. The plane chugged and canted over to one side, limping. “Wait a minute, Mister,” said McKuen. His numb hands pawed and fumbled at the chart. “Wait a minute. That’s it, Mister — the bloody Sang Chu gorge. How in hell did I get down here? Must be twenty miles off our course.”

The plane glided forward, one engine turning over, losing altitude slowly. Sunlight splashed the mountains. Six or seven miles to the gorge. At two miles a minute or less, where was he going?

A few hundred feet beneath him, the black jungle top of a hill loomed and swept past. McKuen spoke calmly:

“Hallelujah, Mister. We are going to knock down a bloody bridge.”

The airplane dinned a raucous score of noises against him. He threw the ends of his seat belt aside. “We need a bit of altitude,” he said. He pushed the throttle full forward and twisted the mixture controls. He trimmed his flaps and elevators. The head temperature on number one climbed into the red zone. He laughed at the gauge. “Burn yourself to bloody charcoal. But dear God get me up! Give me three precious beautiful Goddamn minutes of power!”

He needed a few hundred feet more — perhaps five hundred feet. He had to clear the jungle ridge; he had to fly into the gorge. He would be coming up from under. He would be flying past treetops. He had to pull the plane up into the air by the brawn of his arms, four hundred or five hundred feet up from the trees on the sides of the gorge.

“Dear, dear God!”

He changed the pitch of the propeller. He kicked the rudder over and tacked back and forth as if the gooney bird were a sailboat. The fuel needle bumped its ledge and lay at bottom. Number one roared beautifully through the sunlit sky.

The right wing whipped high. He fought it down with the wheel. He pointed his nose at the cliff ahead and finished the turn, swinging upward into the gorge. He had to stand on the left wing to break past the rock. The airspeed needle wound upward and downward without provocation. McKuen smashed the submachine gun into his port window, breaking the glass out. The full force of the wind hit him in the face. The cliffs rushed toward him. He banked left. The dark green line of the Sang Chu ran forward winding out of sight. He had cliffs on both sides of him; they seemed close enough to brush the wingtips. The top was out of sight overhead. He bolted into a turn, oversteered and executed an S-turn to avoid the far wall; and above him, ahead of him, he saw the glint of sunlight on the ironwork of the great bridge.

The bridge came down toward him, a mile and then less than a mile. “Up — up!” He reached out and yanked Mister Shannon’s coat open; he jerked Shannon’s dogtags off and locked them in his fist. “The very best to you, Mister.”

Flaps whined down. The bridge came closer and closer; number one chugged through the thick air; rock walls leaped crazily past his wings. McKuen pulled the wheel back and draped both of Mister Shannon’s dead arms over the right-hand wheel to hold it back. He kicked the throttles. “Please,” he whispered against the roar of the wind and the pound of the engine. He twisted his shoulders and thrust himself through the smashed-out window.

He had an instant’s glimpse of men on the bridge, turning to face the plane with awe. The bridge rushed down toward the struggling gooney bird. It was tilted far over on the left wing, starting to spin forward. The nose was aimed straight at the center of the bridge span. The wind gripped McKuen. He put one foot on the sill. The wind sucked him out. Out and back into the air: he saw the gooney bird’s rudder flash by. He yanked the ripcord.

The drop — a few hundred feet. He did not know whether his chute would have time. He fell upside-down, turning through the air. The walls, the jungle, and the sky pirouetted. The whole world was filled with the spark and roar of the number one engine. Just beyond the high arc of the bridge was a long bend in the walls; the plane seemed to curve toward the near cliff. McKuen twisted his head to see.

Number one broke and caught, broke again. There was a split second’s absolute silence, cut in half by the scream of a man on the bridge; the airplane, without power, began to nose over. A quarter of a mile from the bridge, falling through space, McKuen saw the plane rush silently against the center span. The plane’s flight was a smooth curve, and abruptly it broke. The nose went down: the tail, flipping up like a marlin’s, ripped into the bridge. McKuen saw one of the tail surfaces, sheared off, fly over the top of the bridge as if catapulted. The sound wave reached him, a tearing of shrieking metal. The amputated fuselage spun hard against the cliff beyond the bridge. He saw the gooney bird break apart, one wing caroming across the chasm. The rudder plane swung from a wire crossbrace on the bridge, banging against the bridge bed.

And the bridge held firm.

There was a racket of falling metal. McKuen’s chute sprang open. He saw jungle rushing upward. There was a sudden jolt. The silk billowed out overhead. He heard a crack of steel — the broken rudder plane fell away from the bridge. He had a distinct image of the bridge, crippled but intact, its span dented and buckled, but unbroken. The rudder plane fell spinning.

McKuen dangled from the shroud lines, swinging from one end of an arc to the other; he swung across once, reached the apex of the swing, and then the black-green jungle whipped up.

Branches and limbs beat against him. His head rocked back; his shins stung. He plummeted through leaves, breaking off branches, bruising every inch of his body. The harness jerked him up, stopping his fall; he hung twenty feet above the ground.

He caught his breath. He heard a continuing distant rattle of crashing metal. The pieces of the airplane were coming down the cliffs, bouncing from rock to rock. He said, “You got to be kidding. How come my neck isn’t broke? You got to be kidding. You got to be.”

He swung himself back and forth like a boy on a swing. He got a grip on the twisted trunk of the big tree and lodged himself there in a groined limb, getting out of the shroud harness. Sharp pains burned in every part of him. His kneecap felt paralyzed by pain. Both hands were bleeding. “Mother of God,” he murmured. He sat in the angle of the tree limb and cried.

He climbed down into the undergrowth. He pulled out his shirttail and cut a long ragged cloth from his undershirt; he tore it in two and wrapped the cloth around his hands. He thought, “What in God’s name came over me? What in hell am I trying to do flying airplanes into bridges? McKuen is off his bloody skull.”

He stood up straight and felt the forty-five automatic in its holster. “They saw me come down,” he said quietly. “All right. So how in the hell am I going to get out of this?”

He pushed into the steam-misty jungle. Shannon’s dogtags were tangled around his left wrist.