The Eleventh Man - Ivan Doig [64]
Ben climbed in behind Jake, keyed up and as ready as he could ever make himself be. No sooner had Jake put on his headphones than he motioned to the copilot's seat as if it was an easy chair.
"Sit down and relax. We need to wait half an hour, the sissy in the tower won't clear us for takeoff until they get here."
"Who?"
"The volunteer fire department from town. They're particular about their trees up here."
Ben settled in the seat, put up the collar of his flight jacket and tried to nap. The world of war marched through his head, ridiculous incongruities on parade. Years in uniform dwindled to this, two men trying to get an aging floatplane off a gravel runway some thousands of miles from the nearest combat. Survival perhaps dependent on a meat wagon and a fire engine in somebody else's country. The contradiction that an airplane amounted to anyway, a machine nominally too heavy to stay airborne due to the colossal engines needed to keep it airborne. Cass, all her P-39 flights with those hundreds of pounds of mechanism in back of her ears. A miracle every time. How long could miracles go on?
Jake was shaking him. "Here we go."
Ben snapped to. This time, he saw, the Canadian officer had positioned the medical rescue squad near the far end of the runway, with the firefighting equipment added.
"All right, Ben my boy." Jake sounded reconciled or ready, it was hard to tell which in the start-up throb of the Widgeon engines. "Third time is the charm."
"It beats 'Three strikes and you're out,'" Ben had to grant. He squeezed Jake's shoulder as he edged up out of the copilot's seat. "See you in the wild blue yonder, Ice."
He went to the rear of the cabin and crouched. Up front, Jake fed the throttles even more and started down the runway at full force again, the squishy plane wheels doing their determined best to plow into the gravel. Imagination ran rampant in a situation like this, but with his weight back there shifting the center of gravity toward the tail, it did feel to Ben as though the plane poised itself a trifle higher, at a more elevated angle, up there at the nose.
Noise poured over him and the ride was so rough he had to brace himself with both hands on the floor; otherwise, he stayed in football stance, ready to go at Jake's signal. He could tell they were nearly to the point of the runway where the drag of the wheels drew the plane into the gravel on previous tries. The part of the mind that deals with such things considered whether the battered metal of the hull would hold up through another highspeed skid or whether it would split open and he and Jake would smear against gravel at seventy miles an hour.
"Now:" Jake roared, his hands busy with the controls and the throttles, and Ben leaped catlike toward the cockpit, grabbing onto the crank that controlled the wing flaps. As fast as his hands could go he dropped the full flaps, and an instant later, hoping Jake's brainstorm had something to it, yanked the lever that pulled the landing gear up.
Its support gone from under it, held barely above the runway only by a sudden upthrust of air from the flaps, for a terrible moment the Widgeon seemed to hover in defiance of gravity, like a leaf on a last breath of breeze. It then gave a slight lurch upward as if startled. Don't stall! was the single thought in both men's minds. Jake did something, although Ben wasn't sure what, and the plane stabilized. They were airborne, at least at the elevation of a few feet. Now the line of trees was approaching fast. Delicately Jake fingered the controls and yelled, "Sandbag!"
Ben flung himself to the back of the cabin, half-rolling into his crouched position again, trying to make himself heavy. As he did so, the nose of the plane lifted with the shift