The Last Bridge

Chapter Six 2330 Hours

McKuen was not used to flying a DC-3 without radio contact with the ground, at night, with rainclouds socking the coast in. He scowled at the silent radio dial. His instructions were to keep radio silence and stay as far from main-traveled air corridors as he could. It was typical Army work, the brass not letting the left hand know what the right was doing — he was spotted by coastal radar five minutes after takeoff and tailed for ten minutes across the sky by a pair of Skyraiders. They had looked him over carefully, buzzed him to indicate he was out of ordinary, flight patterns, and finally returned to base, after which Captain Saville had come forward to the cockpit and told him to fly a zigzag course. McKuen had said, “And who is it we’re trying to fool, my good Captain?”

The old gooney bird had no numbers or insignia on its battered shell. He was under explicit instructions to keep no log, which was well enough because the automatic gyropilot was in poor working order, and he and Shannon together had their hands full navigating and flying through the soup. The thought of bucking the old plane all the way to the Chinese border put a sour tilt on his customarily jaunty lips.

Four passengers rode in the fuselage — Saville and three sergeants, two of them Vietnamese. Half the remaining space was littered with equipment, packed into parachute harnesses — Russian rifles and AK submachine guns, Czech grenades, East German radios, American drugs repacked in Chinese-made containers — all of it captured from the enemy over a period of years. Just like this plane, McKuen thought. Probably none of it worked right. He looked at Shannon. Shannon’s young imperturbable face was half-lighted by the worn-out panel illuminators. McKuen said, “Chewing gum, rubber bands, and paperclips. That’s all we’ve got to hold this crate together with. If this old gooney lasts another six hours in the air, I’ll kiss its tail.”

Shannon didn’t answer. He was shooting the stars. When he got through he said, “Hell of a crosswind through here. What time’s that typhoon supposed to hit?” He put the sextant down and made notes on his knee-clip pad. “Time to go down,” he said. “Nha Trang’s under that goop somewhere. I hope the ceiling hasn’t dropped.”

“If it dropped much, me boy, it’d be underground.”

McKuen pushed the wheel forward and grinned. “I hope nobody put a chimney in that cloud.” They roared down into the gray layer.

Shannon said, “Easy, Lieutenant. I don’t trust that altimeter.”

“It’s only off by one or two hundred feet,” McKuen said. As he spoke the last word, the nose broke through the clouds and through the splash of rain he saw dim reflections on the crests of ocean waves. The sea was not more than two hundred feet below them; the altimeter needle was just wavering downward past the 1,000-foot mark. As McKuen leveled off, the needle swayed down to ground-level and bounced back up to two hundred, where it settled.

“Pretty good altimeter,” McKuen said, “long as you be giving it plenty of time to make up its bloody mind.”

“I just took a bath. Don’t need another one.”

“Mister Shannon.”

“Sir?”

“Who’s after navigatin’ this aircraft?”

“Oh,” said Shannon. “Sorry. Nha Trang ought to be over to port somewhere.”

“I can see that all for myself,” McKuen said, banking slowly toward the lights of the landing field. “Give me wind speed and direction.”

Saville popped his head into the cockpit. “You can break radio silence,” he said.

“Thank ye,” McKuen said drily. He reached for the headset.

Saville went back into the plane. Shannon squirmed in the right-hand seat. “Wind’s coming off the ocean, Lieutenant. Pretty stiff — about twenty miles.”

“About, Mister?”

Shannon flushed. “Lieutenant, we’re lucky to get any reading at all with these gauges.”

McKuen ran craggy fingers through his red hair. He spoke into the radio: “Hey, Tower. This is Yankee Six Four.”

“Reading you, Yankee Six Four. That you, Irish?”

“Give me the wind, Tower.”

“East twenty-three miles. Ninety degrees exactly.”

The wind was off the sea, which meant he should come in from the west, but the buildings and trees were there, and the hills, and the sluggish old plane would not drop fast enough after going over the top of the tower. And so he had to come up the beach from the south and make a sharp turn onto the landing strip. The landing gear was slow, and the controls, bucking the twenty-three-mile crosswind, reminded him of flying a reconverted Liberator — than which there was no more difficult truck of the air. The slant of the rain and his own drift confirmed the tower’s report on the wind. He said, “The strip will be slick as oil. I hope these bald tires hold on it.”

Number two engine, on the right, was clogged with oil or water or rust or something and not running up to par. From the rattles coming out of the fuselage he knew it was long past time to go around replacing rivets and tightening bolts, and he said in a thin voice, “It’ll be ever so nice if the wings stay on tight.”

Shannon tipped his head into the center space to yell back at the passengers, “Brace in, back there.”

McKuen said brightly, “Anybody got a little white paper bag?” And then he hit the field, not very neatly, on one wheel and then the other, because he was aileron-against-the-wind, and on the runway the plane heaved into a brief side-skid before the tail touched ground. He turned rudder and wheels into the skid and applied brakes gently, and just managed to avoid stopping the airplane against a weatherbeaten hangar, though his wingtip missed it by only a few yards. When he cut the ignition off both engines, he sat and ground his jaws for a moment. “Much as I dearly love Mr. Douglas’s finest airplane, I can think of types I would rather fly at such a time as this. I’ll thank ye for your gratitude, Mister.”

“What?”

“You are alive,” McKuen told him, “and on the ground. I believe you owe me a drink for that.”

“Lieutenant,” Shannon said, “I’ll buy you a Goddamn case of Irish whisky if I ever get the chance again.”

Saville came forward. “How’s it fly, George?”

“It won’t be needing much,” McKuen told him. “Maybe new wings and engines, maybe new controls and fuselage.”

“It’ll do,” said Theodore Saville. “Top up the tanks and make whatever maintenance repairs you can.”

“How long have I got?”

“Maybe half an hour, maybe an hour.”

“Captain, it’ll take a month.”

“Then you’d better get busy,” Saville said. “As soon as Major Parnell gets here, we’re taking off.”