Flying finish / Бурный финиш. Книга для чтения на английском языке

Patrick had shown me how. Quite different from doing it. I pared the pre-starting checks down to the barest minimum; fuel supply on, mixture rich, propeller revs maximum, throttle just open, brakes on, trimmer central, direction indicator synchronised with the compass.

My boats were burned with the first ignition switch, because it worked. The three bladed propeller swung and ground and the inner port engine roared into action with an earsplitting clatter. Throttle too far open. Gently I pulled the long lever with its black knob down until the engine fell back to warming-up speed, and after that in quick succession and with increasing urgency I started the other three. Last, I switched on the headlights: Alf might not have heard the engines, but he would certainly see the lights. It couldn’t be helped.[498] I had to be able to see where I was going. With luck he wouldn’t know what to do, and do nothing.

I throttled back a bit and took the brakes off and the plane began to roll. Too fast. Too fast. I was heading straight for the runway lights and could smash them, and I needed them alight. I pulled the two starboard throttles back for a second and the plane slewed round in a sort of skid and missed the lights and rolled forward on to the runway.

The wind was behind me, which meant taxi-ing to the far end and turning back to take off. No one ever taxied a D.C.4 faster. And at the far end I skipped all the power checks and everything else I’d been taught and swung the plane round facing the way I’d come and without a pause pushed forward all the four throttles wide open.

The great heavy plane roared and vibrated and began to gather speed with what seemed to me agonising slowness. The runway looked too short. Grass was slower than tarmac, the strip was designed for light aircraft, and heaven alone knew the weight of that packing case. For short runways, lower flaps. The answer came automatically from the subconscious, not as a clear coherent thought. I put my hand on the lever and lowered the trailing edges of the wings. Twenty degrees. Just under half-way. Full flaps were brakes.

Yardman came back.

Unlike Alf, he knew exactly what to do, and wasted no time doing it. Towards the far end the Citroën was driven straight out on to the centre line of the runway, and my headlights shone on distant black figures scrambling out and running towards the hangar. Swerve wide enough to miss the car, I thought, and I’ll get unbalanced on rough ground and pile up[499]. Go straight up the runway and not be able to lift off in time, and I’ll hit it either with the wheels or the propellers…

Yardman did what Alf hadn’t. He switched off the runway lights. Darkness clamped down like a sack over the head. Then I saw that the plane’s bright headlights raised a gleam on the car now frighteningly close ahead and at least gave me the direction to head for. I was going far too fast to stop, even if I’d felt like it. Past the point of no return, and still on the ground. I eased gently back on the control column, but she wouldn’t come. The throttles were wide; no power anywhere in reserve. I ground my teeth and with the car coming back to me now at a hundred miles an hour hung on for precious moments I couldn’t spare, until it was then or never. No point in never.[500] I hauled back on the control column and at the same time slammed up the lever which retracted the undercarriage. Belly flop or car crash[501]; I wasn’t going to be around to have second thoughts. But the D.C.4 flew. Unbelievably there was no explosive finale, just a smooth roaring upward glide. The plane’s headlights slanted skywards, the car vanished beneath, the friction of the grass fell away. Airborne was the sweetest word in the dictionary.

Sweat was running down my face; part exertion, part fear. The D.C.4 was heavy, like driving a fully loaded pantechnicon after passing a test on empty minis, and the sheer muscle power needed to hold it straight on the ground and get it into the air was in the circumstances exhausting. But it was up, and climbing steadily at a reasonable angle, and the hands were circling reassuringly round the clock face of the altimeter. Two thousand, three thousand, four thousand feet. I levelled out at that and closed the throttles a little as the airspeed increased to two twenty knots. A slow old plane, built in nineteen-forty-five. Two twenty was the most it could manage.

The little modern Cessna I’d left behind was just about as fast. Yardman had brought a pilot. If he too took off without checks[502], he could be only scant minutes behind.

Get lost, I thought. I’d the whole sky to get lost in. The headlights were out, but from habit I’d switched on the navigation lights on the wing tips and tail and also the revolving beacon over the cockpit. The circling red beam from it washed the wings alternately with pale pink light. I switched it out, and the navigation lights too. Just one more broken law in a trail of others.