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 Citroen 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. 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. 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; 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, 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.
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. 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. Childish, vainglorious, stupid, ridiculous: I was the lot.
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 — 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.