The wheels touched and bounced, touched and stayed down, squeaking and screeching on the rough surface. With muscles like jelly, with only tendons, I fought to keep her straight. I couldn’t crash now... I wouldn’t. The big plane rocketted along the bumpy concrete... I’d never handled anything so powerful... I’d misjudged the speed and landed too fast and she’d never stop...
A touch of brake... agonising to be gentle with them and fatal if I wasn’t... They gripped and tugged and the plane stayed straight... more brake, heavier... it was making an impression... she wouldn’t flip over on to her back, she had a tricycle undercarriage with a nose wheel... I’d have to risk it... I pulled the brakes on hard and the plane shuddered with the strain, but the tyres didn’t burst and I hadn’t dipped and smashed a wing or bent the propellers and there wasn’t going to be a scratch on the blessed old bus... She slowed to taxi-ing speed with a hundred yards to spare before the runway tapered off into barbed wire and gorse bushes. Anything would have been enough. A hundred yards was a whole future.
Trembling, feeling sick, I wheeled round in a circle and rolled slowly back up the runway to where it ran closest to the airport buildings. There I put the brakes full on and stretched out a hand which no longer seemed part of me, and stopped the engines. The roar died to a whisper, and to nothing. I slowly pulled off the headset and listened to the cracking noises of the hot metal cooling.
It was done. And so was I. I couldn’t move from my seat. I felt disembodied. Burnt out. Yet in a sort of exhausted peace I found myself believing that as against all probability I had survived the night, so had Gabriella... that away back in Milan she would be breathing safely through her damaged lung. I had to believe it. Nothing else would do.
Through the window I saw Tom Wells come out of his bungalow, staring first up at the circling fighters and then down at the D.C.4. He shrugged his arms into his old sheepskin jacket and began to run towards me over the grass.