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

It had to be faced[513] that Id’ been wrong about where I started from. Or else the directional gyro was jammed[514]. It couldn’t be. I’d checked it twice against the remote reading compass, which worked independently. I checked again: they matched. They couldn’t both be wrong. But I must have started in Italy. I went right back in my mind to the flight out, when Patrick had first turned east. It had been east. I was still sure of that: and that was all.

There was a flashing light up ahead, on the edge of the sea. A lighthouse. Very useful if I’d had a nautical chart, which I hadn’t. I swept on past the lighthouse and stopped dead in my mental tracks. There was no land beyond.

I banked the plane round to the left and went back. The lighthouse stood at the end of a long narrow finger of land pointing due north. I flew southwards along the western side of it for about twenty miles until the sporadic lights spread wider and my direction swung again to the southwest. A fist pointing north.

Supposing I’d been right about starting from Italy, but wrong about being so far east. Then I would have been over the sea when I thought I was over the mountains. Supposing I’d been going for longer than a quarter of an hour when I first looked at my watch: then I would have gone further than I guessed. All the same, there simply wasn’t any land this shape in the northern Mediterranean, not even an island.

An island of this size…

Corsica.

It couldn’t be, I thought. I couldn’t be so far south. I wheeled the plane round again and went back to the lighthouse. If it was Corsica and I flew north-west I’d reach the south of France and be back on the map. If it was Corsica I’d started from right down on the southern edge of the northern plain, not near Trieste or Venice as I’d imagined. It wasn’t impossible. It made sense.

The world began to fall back into place. I flew northwest over the black invisible sea. Twenty-seven minutes. About a hundred miles.

The strings and patterns of lights along the French coast looked like lace sewn with diamonds, and were just as precious. I turned and followed them westwards, looking for Nice airport. It was easy to spot by day[515]: the runways seemed to be almost on the beach, as the airfield had been built on an outward curve of the shoreline. But either I was further west than I thought, or the airport had closed for the night, because I missed it. The first place I was sure of was Cannes with its bay of embracing arms, and that was so close to Nice that if the runway had been lit I must have seen it.

A wave of tiredness washed through me, along with a numb feeling of futility. Even if I could find one, which was doubtful, I couldn’t fly into a major airport without radio, and all the minor ones had gone to bed. I couldn’t land anywhere in the dark. All I looked like being able to do was fly around in circles until it got light again and land at Nice… and the fuel would very likely give out before then.

It was at that depressing point that I first thought about trying to go all the way to England. The homing instinct in time of trouble. Primitive. I couldn’t think of a thing against it except that I was likely to go to sleep from tiredness on the way, and I could do that even more easily going round in circles outside Cannes.

Committed from the moment I’d thought of it, I followed the coast until it turned slightly north again and the widespread lights of Marseilles lay beneath. The well-known way home from there lay up the Rhone Valley over the beacons at Montelimar and Lyons, with a left wheel at Dijon to Paris. But though the radio landmarks were unmistakable the geographical ones weren’t, and I couldn’t blindly stumble into the busy Paris complex without endangering every other plane in the area. North of Paris was just as bad, with the airlanes to Germany and the East. South, then. A straight line across France south of Paris. It would be unutterably handy to have known where Paris lay; what precise bearing[516]. I had to guess again… and my first guesses hadn’t exactly been a riotous triumph.

Three-twenty degrees, I thought. I’d try that. Allow ten degrees for wind drift from the south-west. Three ten. And climb a bit… the centre of France was occupied by the Massif Central and it would be fairly inefficient to crash into it. I increased the power and went back up to ten thousand feet. That left fuel, the worst problem of all.