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

The runway had been laid out from due east to west. I had taken off to the west and flown straight on, urgent to get out, regardless of where[503]. Too easy for them. I banked tentatively to the left and felt the plane respond cumbrously, heavy on my arms. South-west, into the wind. I straightened up and flew on, an invisible shell in the darkness, and after five minutes knew they wouldn’t find me. Not with the Cessna, anyway.

The tight-strung tension of my nerves relaxed a little: with most uncomfortable results. I was suddenly far too aware of the wicked square of burn over my ribs, and realised that I hadn’t really felt it since the moment I found Simon. Under the pressure of events its insistent message hadn’t got through. Now it proceeded to rectify that with enthusiasm.

Weakness seeped down my limbs. I shivered, although I was still sweating from exertion. My hands started trembling on the wheel, and I began to realise the extent to which I was unfit to fly anything, let alone take a first try at an airliner way out of my normal class. But far worse than the physical stress was the mental let-down which accompanied it. It was pride which had got me into that plane and up into the air. Nothing but pride. I was still trying to prove something to Billy, even though he was dead. I hadn’t chosen the D.C.4 because of any passionate conviction that the ultrasonic gadget needed saving at all costs, but simply to show them, Yardman and Billy’s ghost, that there wasn’t much I couldn’t do[504]. Childish, vainglorious, stupid, ridiculous: I was the lot[505].

And now I was stuck with it. Up in the air in thundering tons of metal, going I didn’t know where.

I wiped the sleeve of my jersey over my face and tried to think. Direction and height were vital if I were ever to get down again. Four thousand feet, I thought, looking at the altimeter; at that height I could fly straight into a mountain… if there were any. South-west steady: but south-west from where? I hunted round the cockpit for a map of any sort, but there wasn’t one to be found.

Patrick had said we were in Italy, and Giuseppe was Italian, and so was the registration on the Cessna, and the ultrasonic device had been driven straight from Brescia. Conclusive, I thought. Northern Italy, probably somewhere near the east coast. Impossible to get closer than that. If I continued south-west, in the end I’d be over the Mediterranean. And before that… new sweat broke out on my forehead. Between the northern plain and the Mediterranean lay the Apennines, and I couldn’t remember at all how high they were. But four thousand was much too low… and for all I knew they were only a mile ahead.

I put the nose up and opened the throttles and slowly gained height. Five thousand, six thousand, seven thousand, eight. That ought to be enough. The Alps only reached above twelve thousand at the peaks, and the Apennines were a good deal lower.

I was guessing. They might be higher than I thought. I went up again to ten thousand.

At that height I was flying where I had no business to be, and at some point I’d be crossing the airways to Rome. Crossing a main road in the dark, without lights. I switched the navigation lights on again, and the revolving beacon too. They wouldn’t give much warning to a jetliner on a collision course, but possibly better than none.

The thunderous noise of the engines was tiring in itself. I stretched out a hand for Patrick’s headset and put it on, the padded earphones reducing the din to a more manageable level. I had taken it for granted from the beginning that Yardman would have put the radio out of order before ever asking Patrick to change course, and some short tuning with the knobs confirmed it. Not a peep or crackle from the air. There had been just a chance that he wouldn’t have disconnected the V.O.R. – Very high frequency Omni-range[506] – by which one navigated from one radio beacon to the next: it worked independently of two-way ground to air communication, and he might have needed to use it to find the airfield we had landed on. But that too was dead.

Time, I thought. If I didn’t keep track of the time I’d be more lost than ever. I looked at my watch. Half-past eleven. I stared at the hands blankly. If they’d said half nine or half one it would have felt the same. The sort of time one measured in minutes and hours had ceased to exist in a quiet street in Milan. I shook myself. Half past eleven. From now on it was important. Essential. Without maps or radio, time and the compass were going to decide my fate. Like all modern pilots I had been taught to stick meticulously to using all the aids and keeping all the regulations. The ‘seat of the pants’ stuff of the pioneers[507] was held to be unscientific and no longer necessary. This was a fine time to have to learn it from scratch[508].