Читать книгу Aces Up - Covington Clarke - Страница 4

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The following morning dawned with the quiet splendor and benediction which April mornings bring to the rural province of Cote d’Or. By the time the sun had climbed above the low hills to the east and was turning the dew covered fields into limitless acres of flashing diamonds and sapphires, McGee and Larkin had hurried through breakfast and were on their way out to the hangars where the mechanics, following Larkin’s orders, would have the two Camels waiting on the line. As the car rolled along the smooth highway leading to the flying field, McGee sank back in the none too comfortable cushions and drank deep of the tonic of early morning.

“Some day!” he said. Larkin merely nodded–the only reply needed when Spring is in the air.

“It would be more fun to drive up to Paris,” McGee offered.

Larkin looked at him in surprise. “Where’d you get that idea?”

“Well, nearly all of my impressions of France are 42from the air. It stands for so many squares of green fields, of little rivers gleaming like silver ribbons interlaced through squares of green and brown plush, of torn up battlefronts where there is no life, no color–nothing but desolation. But this seems like another world. Here are spring flowers, the orchards are in bloom, and children are playing in the narrow streets of the towns. Flying over it, you look down on all that. You see it–and you don’t see it. But in driving we would feel that we were a part of it. There’s a difference. It gives you a feeling that you are better acquainted with the people, and you get a chance to smell something besides the beastly old Clerget motors in those Camels. I’m getting so I feel sick every time I smell burning oil. Let’s drive up, Buzz.”

Larkin, being in a different frame of mind, shook his head.

“No, you’re too blasted poetic about it already. Besides, we have permission to fly up, not to drive. I suppose we could get the pass changed, but why fool with your luck? And the quicker we get there the more we see.”

“All right, but on a day like this I could get more pleasure out of just wandering through the countryside than in seeing all the cities of the world rolled into one. Look!” he pointed to the flying field as the car turned from the highway. “There are the Camels, 43warming up, and filling this good, clean air with their sickening fumes. Bah! I hate it!”

“Say, have you got the pip? You talk like a farmer. Snap out of it! We’re headed for Gay Paree!”

The car had rolled to a stop at the edge of the field. McGee climbed out slowly. “All right, big boy. You lead the way. And no contour chasing to-day. I’m too liable to get absent-minded and try to reach out and pick some daisies. Besides, this motor of mine has been trickier than usual in the last few days despite the fact that the Ack Emma declares she is top hole. So fly high and handsome. Know the way?”

Larkin was crawling into his flying suit and did not answer.

“Know the way?” McGee repeated.

“Sure. That’s a fine question to ask a pilot bound for Paris. We land at Le Bourget field, you know.”

“No, I didn’t know.”

“Where’d you think you’d land–in the Champs Elysees?”

“I’m liable to land on a church steeple if that motor cuts out on me as it did yesterday afternoon–for no reason at all. Remember, no contour chasing and no dog-fighting. We’re going to Paris.”

Larkin grinned. Rarely did they go into the air together but what they engaged in mimic warfare–dog-fighting–before their wheels again touched the ground. It was the airman’s game of tag, the winner 44being that one who could get on the other’s tail and stay there. It was a thunderous, strut singing game wherein the pursued threw his plane into fantastic gyrations in a frenzied, wild effort to shake off the pursuer and get on his tail. It was a game in which McGee excelled. Although Larkin recognized this fact, he was always the first to start the dog fight and had never found McGee unwilling to play. As for contour chasing–well, they had broken regulations times without number, and to date had paid no penalty.

McGee, knowing what thoughts lurked behind Larkin’s grin, wagged a prudent finger under his nose.

“Mind your step, Buzz,” he warned. “We are supposed to be sedate, dignified, instruction-keeping instructors. Fly northwest to Auxerre, then follow the railroad toward Sens and on to Melun. Then swing straight north and come into Le Bourget from the east.”

“All right. All set?”

“Yes. You lead off and I’ll follow. Wait! On second thought I think I’ll lead and pick my own altitude. And if you start any funny business, I’ll leave you flat!”

They climbed into the waiting planes, whose motors were still warming idly. Members of the ground crew took up their stations at the wing tips. McGee was on the point of nodding to the crew to remove 45the wheel chocks when he remembered that for the first time in his experience as a pilot he had climbed into the cockpit without first casting an appraising eye over braces, struts and turn buckles. He promptly cut the motor and climbed from the plane, saying, half aloud; “I must be getting balmy. It’s the weather, I guess.”

“How’s that, sir?” asked the air mechanic.

“I say, it’s balmy weather we’re having.”

“Oh! Yes, sir.”

“You’ve checked her all over, Wilson?”

“Yes, sir. And fueled her according to Lieutenant Larkin’s instructions.”

“Hum.” McGee slowly walked around the plane, giving every functional detail a critical look, nor was he the least hurried by the fact that Larkin was displaying impatience. Satisfied at last, he climbed back into the plane. A member of the ground crew took his place at the propeller.

“Petrol off, sir?”

“Petrol off.”

Whish! Whish! went the prop as the helper began pulling it over against compression.

“Contact, sir!”

“Contact.”

The motor caught, coughed, caught again and the prop whirled into an indistinct blur. The sudden blast of wind sent clouds of dust eddying toward the 46hangar, but ahead lay the cool, fresh, dew-washed green of the field. McGee turned to look once more at the wind sock which, for want of a breeze, hung limp along its staff. He nodded to the men at the wheel chocks, waved his hand to Larkin and gave her the gun.

No pilot in the service could lift a Camel off the ground quicker than could McGee, but this morning he taxied slowly forward and was getting dangerously near the end of the field before he began to get the tail up.

Larkin, watching him, chuckled. “Guess he wants to take a spin on the ground,” he commented to himself. “Fancy that bird wanting to go to Paris by motor!” Then to show how little he thought of the ground he advanced his throttle rapidly and took off on far less space than should ever be attempted by one who knows, from experience, how suddenly a crowded Clerget-motored Camel can sputter and incontinently die. And as a parting defiance to his knowledge, Larkin pulled back his stick and zoomed. Altitude was what McGee wanted, eh? Well, here was the way to get altitude in a hurry.

McGee, glancing backward, saw the take-off and the zoom. “The poor fish!” was his mental comment. “If he shows that kind of stuff to this squadron they’ll be needing a lot of replacements–or yelling for a new instructor.”

47But the appreciative ground crew, watching, expressed a different view. “Boy!” exclaimed an envious Ack Emma. “Can that baby fly! I’ll tell the world! Watch him out-climb McGee. Did you see how McGee took off? Like a cadet doin’ solo–afraid to lift her. And they say he’s one of the best aces in the R.F.C. Huh! I think he’s got the pip! Ever since he first touched his wheels to this ’drome he’s been yellin’ about his motor bein’ cranky. And it’s all jake. She takes gas like a race horse takes rein.”

“Yeah,” growled a mechanic by the name of Flynn, who by nature and nationality stood ready to defend anyone bearing the name of McGee, “a lot you know about those little teapots in them Camels. You was trained on Jennies and–and Fords! What you know about a Clerget engine could be written on the back of a postage stamp. Say, do you know why he took her off so gentle? Well, I’ll spread light in dark places, brother. He took off slow because he knew you didn’t know nothin’, see?”

“Say, listen–”

The quarrel went on, despite the fact that the two pilots constituting the meatless bone of contention were rapidly becoming specks in the sky to the northwest.

At five thousand feet McGee leveled off and swung slightly west. He looked back and up. Larkin was 48five hundred feet above him and somewhat behind, but at McGee’s signal he dived down, taking up a position on the left. In this manner they could point out objects below and engage in the sign language which they had perfected through many hours spent in the air together.

As they flew along McGee felt his spirits mounting. It was a good world to live in and life was made especially sweet and interesting by the soft unfolding greens of a land brought to bud and blossom by April’s sun and showers. In the beautiful panorama below there was nothing to indicate that a few miles to the eastward mighty armies were striving over a tortured strip of blasted land that for years to come would lie fruitless and barren. Here all was peace, with never a hint–yes, far below on the white ribbon of roadway a long, dark python was slowly dragging itself forward. It was a familiar sight to Larkin and McGee–troops moving up to the theatre of war. And over on another road a long procession of humpbacked brown toads were plodding eastward. Motor lorries, carrying munitions and supplies. Strange monsters, these, to be coming from the green fields and woods of a seeming peaceful countryside. Forward, ever forward they made their way. Never, it seemed to McGee, had he seen roads choked with returning men and munitions. Was the maw of the monster there to the eastward bottomless and insatiable? 49Where were the roads that led men back to the land of living, green things?

As they passed over a town, McGee saw Larkin point down. On the outskirts of the village a great cross in a circlet of green marked the location of a military hospital. Ah! … Yes, some came back. But even then they must brand their pain-racked sanctuary with the mercy imploring emblem of the Red Cross so that enemy planes, bent on devastation, would mingle mercy with hope of victory and save their bombs for those not yet carried into the long wards where white-robed doctors and nurses battled with death and spoke words of hope to the hopeless.

It was a sorry world! McGee, who but a few short minutes ago was entranced by the beauty of the world, now felt a sudden, marked disgust. He pulled his stick back sharply. He would climb out of it! He would get up against the ceiling, where the world became a dim, faint blur or was lost altogether in a kindly obliterating ground haze.

On McGee’s part the action was nothing more than an unconscious reaction to distressing thoughts. Larkin, however, on seeing the sudden climb, grinned with delight. This climb for altitude was nothing more than the prelude to a dive that would start them into a merry game of hare and hound. So McGee had forgotten all about his doleful sermon against dog-fighting? 50And so soon. Ha! Trust the freckled “Little Shrimp” to feel blood racing through his veins when motors are singing sweetly.

Instead of following, Larkin decided to nose down and offer more tantalizing bait.

McGee, seeing the dive, found it more than he could resist. Besides, a merry little chase would serve to wash the brooding thoughts from his mind. This was a morning for sport, for jest, for youth–for hazard!

Forward went the stick and he plunged down the backwash of Larkin’s diving plane, his motor roaring its cadenced challenge. This was something like! Sky and ground were rushing toward each other. The braces were screaming like banshees; the speed indicator hand was mounting with a steady march that made one want to dive on and on and on until–

Larkin, in the plane ahead, brought his stick backward as he made ready to go over in a tight loop. McGee smiled and followed him over. When they came out of the loop they were in the same relative position–Larkin the hare, McGee the tenacious hound.

For the next few minutes the open-mouthed countrymen in the fields below were treated to a series of aerial gymnastics which must have sent their own pulses racing and which might well serve them for fireside narration for years to come.

51The two darting hawks Immelmanned, looped, barrel-rolled, side-slipped, and then plunged into a dizzy circle in which they flew round and round an imaginary axis, the radius of the circle growing ever shorter and shorter. Every action of the leading plane was immediately matched by the pursuer.

Larkin, realizing that his skill in manoeuvering was something less than McGee’s, decided to bring the contest to a close with a few thrills in hedge hopping.

Of all sports that offer high hazard to thrill satiated war pilots, that of hedge hopping, or contour chasing, occupies first place. This is particularly true when the pilot is flying a Sopwith Camel powered by the temperamental Clerget motor with its malfunctioning wind driven gasoline pump. The sport had been repeatedly forbidden by all the allied air commands, but these commands had to deal with irrepressible youth, which has slight regard for doddering old mossbacks who think that a plane should be handled as a wheel chair.

Larkin dived at the ground like a hawk that has sighted some napping rodent, and so near did he come that by the time he had leveled off, his wheels were almost touching the ground–and wheels must not touch when one is screaming through space at the rate of a hundred and forty miles per hour.

He glanced back. Sure enough, McGee was still on his tail. No hedge hopping, eh? Huh! Trust 52The Shrimp to keep young, he thought. Fat chance they had of getting old. Who ever heard of an old war pilot? Ha! That’s a good one! And here’s a double row of tall poplars fringing the road directly ahead. Hold her close to the ground and then zoom her at the last minute … landing gears just clearing the topmost branches … make it, and that’s hedge hopping. Fail to make it–and that’s bad news!

Larkin made it, a beautiful zoom that carried him over the trees by a skillful margin. Then he swooped down again, skimming along the level field on the other side of the road.

McGee’s zoom was just as spectacular and as nicely timed, but as his nose climbed above the first row of trees his motor died as suddenly as though throttled by the strangling hands of some unseen genii. Sudden though it was, McGee had sensed that he was crowding the motor too much and had tried to ease her off and still clear the trees. It was too late to relieve the choked motor but he did clear the first row of trees. He was about to close his eyes against the inevitable crash into the poplars on the other side of the road when he saw that two of the trees had been felled, and that so recently that the woodsmen had not yet worked them up. There was one clear chance left. If only he could slip her over just far enough to clear the outstretched limbs of the tree to the right.

At such a time seconds must be divided into hundredths, 53and action must be instantaneous, instinctive, and without flaw. McGee felt one of the spreading limbs brush against his right wing tip, felt the plane swerve for a moment, then respond to rudder and aileron. It was a case where one moment he was supremely thankful for flying speed, and the next, as the ground of the level field was flashing under the wheels, wishing that he had held to his resolution concerning hedge hopping.

The wheels struck hard. The plane bounded, high, and again the wheels touched. Again the plane bounded, and this time came down with a shock that left McGee amazed with the realization that the undercarriage was intact and that he still had a chance to keep her off her nose if only he could get the high-riding tail down.

Crash! Crack! The tail was down now … and broken to splinters, like as not. Never mind. … By some great mercy he was at last on three points and rolling to a stop.

He suddenly felt very weak. A narrow squeeze, that! Stupid way for an ace–and an instructor–to get washed out. Like a Warrior falling off his horse while on the way home from a victorious field.

He saw Larkin bank his ship into a tight turn, set the plane down in a perfect landing and come careening down the open field to stop within a dozen paces of McGee’s plane.

54Larkin, white-faced, tight-lipped, crawled from his plane and came forward on the double-quick. Not a word did he speak until he stood by the side of Red’s plane, his hands gripping the leather piping at the edge of the cockpit until his knuckles were white.

“What happened, Red? Gee, you’re white! All the freckles gone.”

“Lucky I’m not gone!” McGee answered. “My knees are too shaky to crawl out yet. It looked like finis la guerre pour moi for a second.” He turned and blew a kiss at the gap in the trees. “Thanks, Mr. Woodchopper, whoever you are. Buzz, never repeat that old poem about ‘Woodman, spare that tree!’ If he had spared those two–well! Take a look at my tail skid, Old Timer. Is it broken off?”

“No. It’s cracked and sort of cockeyed, but a piece of wire from that fence over there will fix it all O.K. What happened?”

McGee fixed him with a baleful glare. “You should ask–with as much experience as both of us have had with these tricky motors. I choked it down, that’s all. That same little fault has sent many a pilot home in a wooden box. Go get me a piece of that wire. We’ll fix the skid, somehow, and when I get to Le Bourget I’ll set her down on two points. And listen! From here on in we do–”

“No contour chasing,” Larkin completed, forcing a thin smile. “Seems I heard that somewhere before. 55Crawl out, Shrimp. You said you wanted to be out among the flowers and sweet things. Well, here’s a sweet thing, and this field is full of flowers. I brought you down low so you could enjoy them.”

“Yeah! I said I wanted to be among ’em–not pushing ’em up. Hurry over and get that wire before I do something violent.”