then it all went still. The running guard was halfway across the runway and still zigzagging; the first man was drawling in Alex’s ear, “You all right sir?” and reaching for his pistol. Alex handed it to him.
They heard the roar of an automobile and the sickening grind when its gears jammed into first; the screech of tires and then Alex had a glimpse of the moving black roof of the car. The guard beside him fired the last two out of his pistol and went into his pocket for a new magazine. His partner was pounding into the scrub across the field but the car had gathered speed; it wheeled inland to be absorbed into the Boston traffic.
“Shee-yit,” said Pappy Johnson.
It took five hours and a telephone call to Washington before the Boston police allowed them to take off and even then all of them had to sign affidavits. A nervous doctor wanted to put Alex into hospital for observation but he managed to veto that. A big splinter from the doorjamb had gone straight through the fleshy outer part of his right thigh, drilling a subcutaneous tunnel and shredding the skin on the way out; the doctor ran an alcohol swab clear through it to cauterize the wound and taped it up with heavy bandaging. It hadn’t bled much; there weren’t many blood vessels in that part of the anatomy. Nor were there many nerves. A muscle had been frayed. It was more stiff than painful when he moved it.
The doctor said, “Best thing to do is sit on it. Tourniquet effect. Wad something up and put it under the bandage. Move it every ten minutes or so. An hour or so you’ll go into minor shock-don’t worry about it if you spend the next twelve hours asleep. But keep as warm as you can. Have you got heat in that plane?”
Pappy Johnson said, “No. We’ll be using electrically heated flying suits.”
“Set his up as high as it’ll go.”
They had dug the bullet out of the wall inside. It was a jacketed. 30’06-the standard hunting and military caliber; they’d been sold by the millions in war-surplus ever since 1919. The police were sending it to the FBI lab along with whatever other clues their technicians had discovered in the sniper’s shooting position but that was seacoast sand and it hadn’t held footprints or tire tracks. They weren’t going to learn anything.
It was still daylight when they drove him down the runway to the hardstands. Pappy Johnson chinned himself up into the forward hatch of the leading B-17 and reached down for the luggage and then Spaight was boosting Alex up inside the cramped forward cabin of the bomber. He had to go under the pilots’ seats into the Plexiglas nose of the plane where the bombardier and navigator usually sat. It was a matter of picking a path across a tangle of boxes and cables and fire extinguishers and the exposed inner structurings of the airplane. Spaight gripped his elbow but Alex said, “All right, I can walk,” and climbed forward slowly; he’d been injured enough times to respect the practicalities.
Above him he saw Johnson hunch into the austere cockpit, splashed with its hundred droplets of glittering instrument faces. The copilot was a young man with gangly grasshopper legs and red hair; he was reaching for a clipboard. “Six-tenths stratocumulus at five thousand feet, Captain.”
“Okay. Wind ’em up if you’re done with the preflight.”
Spaight helped Alex into the wired jump suit and the parachute pack; they settled into their seats while the engines hacked and wheezed and came alive one by one. Spaight handed him the flying helmet and he put it over his head: stiff leather chin cup, fur-lined visor, throat mike, earphones, goggles strapped up against the forehead. Now he could hear the pilots’ chatter again and presently the tower said, “Army Seven Nine Six, runway four, you’re cleared for takeoff,” and the airplane began its ponderous roll, bouncing on its tail wheel. He felt the tremors against the raw wound in his thigh.
The Flying Fortress roared down the runway. Tugged upward by the vacuum created above its cambered wing surfaces it lifted off, banking steeply; the city of Boston tilted and swayed beneath him and then they were climbing out to sea with the long arm of Cape Cod curving away like a crab’s claw.
They ran up the Maine coastline with cloud tendrils slipping past the wings. The synchronized engines sent smooth tremors through the plane at rhythmic intervals. Pappy Johnson came on the headset:
“We’ll do this lap at ninety-five hundred feet. You won’t need oxygen. How’s the patient?”
“Still respirating,” Alex said.
Spaight reached over to check the dial of the thermostat on his suit. Alex was still sweating from the ground- level heat and he pushed Spaight’s hand away. Spaight switched off his throat mike and leaned forward to be heard above the racket:
“That had to be the same people that killed Devenko.”
Alex nodded.
Spaight said, “They won’t quit after one bad try, Alex.”
“Next time we’ll give them a little bait, I think.”
“What?”
“Let’s take the next one alive, what do you say? I’d like to hear the answers to a few questions.”
“You can’t hear much if you’re dead.”
He felt near it by the time they came down over the lakes of Newfoundland into the barrens of the wilderness base at Gander. He was awake again but only just; all his joints were stiff with cramp. When the engines died out the silence left him with a lightheaded sensation of nightmare unreality.
There wasn’t much feeling in his fingertips but he got the parachute pack unbuckled and stumbled to the hatchway. They lowered him gently to the gravel and he started walking aimlessly in the dawn with Spaight at his shoulder trying to conceal his troubled concern. “Should you be walking on that?”
“If I don’t I’ll have bedsores,” he said drily.
“I hope you were kidding about baiting them into another try.”
Alex shook his head, trying to clear it. The air was cool and sharp with a damp chill; the sky was half clouded with a band of red spreading above the dreary eastern horizon. He shivered a little. “If they’re going to try anyway I’d just as soon have it on my terms.”
“They could be sighting in on you right now.”
“In Labrador?”
“Who knows who they are, Alex? Who knows how many they’ve got? They reached Devenko in the Pyrenees-they reached you in Boston. They’ve got a hell of a net.”
“Or a handful of people with good sources of intelligence.”
“We need to know where to look for them. Haven’t you got any ideas at all?”
“The field’s too wide. I haven’t got time to waste on it. The other thing comes first.”
“Not if you’re killed it doesn’t.”
“We’ve been around that bush before. We’ll just have to see to it that I don’t get killed, won’t we.”
Spaight said morosely, “Isn’t that a little like asking the sun not to come up in the morning?”
The rest of the planes trickled down to base within the next ten minutes and it took nearly an hour getting them all ready for the long nonstop transatlantic jump. Alex went into the ops shack and sat by the round metal stove in the middle of the room. The place had the flavor of a pioneer camp but air traffic roared in and out incessantly: it was the intermediate stop for aircraft to and from England-British planes, Americans, Royal Canadian Air Force. Pursuit planes came in and out with wing- and belly-tanks for extra fuel range; some of them could make the jump and some of them had to fuel again in Greenland and Iceland. Convoy patrols and sub-chasing PBY amphibian Catalinas chugged across the field at steady close intervals and there wasn’t a ninety-second silence between any of the takeoffs and landings. On top of the ops shack a radar dish swiveled and six radio controllers kept moving up and down the tower steps with coffee and cigarettes. They had grey weary faces like combat veterans who’d been too long in the front lines.
Finally Pappy Johnson came in and took a seat beside him, wrapping his hands around a hot coffee cup. “Copilot’s filing the flight plans. How you making it, Skipper? You look a little like a ghost right now.”
“I feel a little like one.”
“You going to be all right?”
“I’ll sleep my way over. I should be all right by the time we get to Scotland.”
“That thing going to leave you a limp?”
“No.”
“I reckon you’re a little more used to getting shot to pieces than I am. I mean those scars all over your neck and all.”
“You’ve never flown combat, then.”
“Naw-I got into this lunacy from flying airmail. I started out with air shows and then got work doing the mail.
