Читать книгу Glory Boys - Harry Bingham - Страница 8

The pilot lifted his goggles and removed his helmet, all in the same motion. He let helmet and goggles drop to the floor. The air was still cloudy with dust and his eyes pricked.

With an automatic hand, he checked his switches (all off) and the cockpit fuel pipes (all sound). He sniffed to detect any escaping gasoline. The air stank of petrol, but the pilot had never been in a crash where the air smelled any other way. The pilot flexed his left leg, then his right leg, then both arms, then ran his hands over his back, neck and head. His left foot was sore where the rudder bar had snagged it, but apart from that, he seemed to have escaped uninjured. His left arm struck the instrument panel a couple of times softly.

‘Sorry, sweetheart,’ he muttered.

He lifted himself to the lip of the cockpit and stepped down to the ground. The movement made him grimace. Not because of the pain in his foot, but because the undercarriage should have been lifting the fuselage well clear of the ground. But the plane no longer had an undercarriage to speak of, and the fuselage was lying prostrate on the ground like a beached sea animal.

The pilot undid his flying jacket, wiped his forehead on his arm and stepped, blinking, away from the dust and the plane wreck into the brilliant glare of the sun.

And that was how they saw him first. Long afterwards, that was how most of them would remember him as well. A man a little less than medium height. Not big built, but light on his feet. Poised. A sense of athleticism held a long way in reserve. Fair hair very closely cropped. Skin deeply tanned. Eyes of astonishing blueness. His face lined but still somehow young. Or perhaps not young exactly, but alert, watchful. And smiling. That was how they first saw him.

Smiling.

The pilot was used to being stared at, but even for him this was something new. Independence, Georgia boasted a population of 1,386 and right now the pilot was being given the chance to inspect almost every last one of their number.

He wiped his forehead again. Leather flying clothes make a whole lot of sense six thousand feet up in an eighty-mile-an-hour wind. They make a lot less sense the second you touch earth. He shrugged off his jacket and advanced a few more paces. The town had grouped itself into a semicircle around him and was staring at him, like he was something out of the Bible.

‘Hi, folks,’ he said. ‘Seen better landings, huh?’

He laughed. Nobody else moved. They were still staring, still in awe.

‘Thanks for clearing a way for me. Things were getting kinda tough up there.’

There was a bit of shuffling amongst the townsfolk and one of them was pushed to the front.

‘Good afternoon, sir,’ he said. ‘My name’s Herbert Isiah Johnson, and on behalf of Independence and Okinochee County and on behalf of … of … everyone, we’d like to welcome you to Georgia.’

Johnson’s mumblings broke the spell. People surged forward.

‘Gee whizz, Ma, did you see the wing go pop…?’

‘Spark plugs, was it? I once saw that on a Model-T. Lousy sparks…’

‘You OK, pal? You shouldn’t be walking any, not after…’

‘He didn’t take a left. You go past the Ag-Merc, you have to jink a little to the left…’

‘I said them things weren’t safe to use. If the good Lord…’

But amidst the crush of people, there was no one more determined than Brad Lundmark, the red-headed kid who’d first understood the pilot’s need to land. Within seconds of seeing the pilot emerge safely from the wreckage, Lundmark was running. First he ran hard, round a corner, into a simple two-storey house on Second Street. He was inside for about twenty seconds, then came racing out again. He tore back the way he’d come and hurtled into the thick of the crowd. Doggedly, he fought his way to the front.

‘Excuse me, sir. Sir, excuse me, please. Please, sir…’

There was something in Lundmark’s single-mindedness which made other people quit talking, until he found himself talking into a vacuum.

‘Sorry. Sorry. Just…’ He held out the things he’d fetched from the house. They were a well-chewed pencil and a photo. The photograph had been neatly clipped from the pages of a boy’s magazine. It was unmistakably a picture of the pilot, a few years younger and stiffly dressed in military uniform. ‘Captain Rockwell, sir, I wonder if I could have your autograph.’