The Devil's breath

he needs a doctor. Over,” Max said, remembering the radio procedure.

There was no doctor. Not in these parts.

“That must be!Koga,” Kallie said.

“All right, Max. Let’s get you down first. Can you see any landmarks? Over.”

Max peered down. From the air, the wilderness he had traveled across looked different. A ravine, scrubland, in the distance becoming more obscured by the dust, a straight line that was a dirt road. He clicked the handset.

“Nothing. Just … nothing. There’s a road, a track, dead straight. Running across my flight path. Bottom left to top right. There’s a huge storm behind me. I can tell you that.”

In the bar, Tobias had already unfolded a map. Kapuo and van Reenen scanned it, trying to get an idea of where Max might be. Kallie gestured for the handset and her father passed it to her.

“Where’d he take off from? What’s his compass bearing?” van Reenen instructed her. “If the storm’s behind him, he’s flying in a southerly direction.”

“Max, this is Kallie.”

The plane bellied into turbulence and the instrument panel shook on its mountings as a violent gust made it drop a hundred feet. Despite his seat belt, Max’s head hit the ceiling. He dropped the handset, his pulse raced, and the metal structure around him suddenly felt very flimsy. He leveled the plane, the horizon bar on the dial dipping left and right, but finally settling on an even keel. Max pulled back the handset’s coiled cable and pressed the transmit button.

“Kallie! Brilliant. I just fell into some kind of hole in the sky. This isn’t fun.”

“Max, I’m not even going to ask how you got up there-that can wait. What does your compass say? Over.”

The compass needle wavered as the plane was pushed this way and that. “South … southeast … a hundred and thirty something, hundred and forty degrees. You get that?”

“Got it.” Her voice crackled through the speaker. It was difficult to hear her without a headset, the plane’s engine rumbled loudly, its pitch changing as it dealt with the buffeting wind. “Where did you take off?”

“Below the Devil’s Breath somewhere. Can’t be sure. Must have been south. Must have been.”

Van Reenen turned the map, his finger tracing the possible route. Using the edge of a beer mat and a stub of pencil, he drew two intersecting lines. One from Skeleton Rock, through the Devil’s Breath, and the other from the approaching northerly storm.

“He’s going the wrong way. There’s nowhere we can talk him down. He has to turn towards us.”

Kallie pressed the transmit button. “Max, you have to turn the plane on to a southwest course. Repeat. Southwest.”

“Er … right … ah … er … turning it … er … pushing me down!”

“Lift the nose! Lift the nose. Get her level!”

Crackle. Static. Silence.

“Max?”

There was an agonizing pause.

“OK! I did it! Kallie … listen …!Koga’s skull is fractured. He’s really bad. Get a doctor and get me down. Can you do that?”

Van Reenen shook his head. “There’s a military hospital at Khomtsa.”

“It’d take him hours at his speed,” Kapuo said.

“You’re right. We get him down here, I’ll take the boy in the Baron,” van Reenen told them. His twin-engined plane could make the journey in less than half an hour.

Before anyone could say anything, Max’s voice filled the bar. “Kallie, the fuel gauge … both needles are below the quarter mark on the dial. I think I might be almost empty.”

Kallie barely hesitated, she shoved the handset into her father’s hand and ran for the door. “We don’t have time for him to find us. Keep him on course. I’ll find him.”

Van Reenen didn’t have a chance to argue. Kallie was sprinting for her plane.

Clouds snatched at the windscreen as light rain splattered on the plane’s skin. Max hadn’t realized that by keeping the nose pointed just above the horizon he had overcompensated. The altimeter showed 2600 feet. He must have been going upwards since he took off. He needed to get down to where he could identify features on the ground. No wonder the plane had been gobbling fuel-not that he knew how much he had had in the first place-one of the things he’d forgotten to check. Not that it would have mattered. He’d have taken the chance anyway.

He pushed the nose down gently. No sensation of dropping, just the view through the propeller’s flickering shadow. It could be really easy to gaze through that, see the ground coming up, closer, closer, until it was too late to pull up.

He was well below the cloud now, down to about 1000 feet. Still in the middle of nowhere. In truth, he didn’t want to land. That was a really scary thought. He was just fine, skimming through the sky. If he had an unending fuel supply he could just keep going.

Wake up! the voice in his head shouted. The hum of the engine, the whirring propeller and the exhaustion that was quickly claiming him had eased him into that strange dream state where he thought he was awake but wasn’t. His eyes didn’t want to stay open. He needed air. He wedged the side window open and felt the freezing-cold air prickle his skin.

“OK! I’m awake! I am awake!” he shouted to the sky. And then he heard van Reenen’s concerned, insistent voice. Max answered, assuring him that he was OK, but he was frightened that he had not heard Kallie’s dad calling him.

Van Reenen’s voice kept up a steady stream of instructions, mostly to keep him edging on course and telling him that Kallie was going to fly alongside him. Could he see her? Coming from starboard. Keep your eyes open. Stay on course. Stay level. Keep looking. Keep looking.

And then, like an ageing, overworked angel, the battered Cessna flew into view. A streak of sunshine escaped through the leaden sky, painting her wings a shiny gold. Max had never been so happy to see anybody in his life. Except his dad, that is. He waved. She smiled and waved back. Her plane was flying level, not twenty meters away.

“Kallie! Amazing! What do I do? Can you hear me?” he shouted into the handset.

“Loud and clear,” she replied. “I’m going to fly slightly ahead of you and a little higher. In a few minutes you’ll see what looks like a riverbed, but it’s a crack in the ground, then a couple of lumpy hills and, past that, there’s the runway.”

“Understood.” The tone of her voice meant there was no time to talk. She turned, he followed. He was surprised how easy it was to miss landmarks, the whole perspective when flying altered his awareness. He concentrated madly, trying to see where they were going, but the barren land yielded no sign of an airstrip.

“To your right, towards the horizon. You see the airfield?” Kallie said after about twenty minutes. He looked hard, his eyes scanning the ground.

“No!” he said, feeling the edge of panic in his voice. “I just can’t see it.”

“OK, relax, just follow me,” she reassured him, remembering her first solo flight. She’d thought she’d never find the airfield again-and that was down in Windhoek, which was big enough to be seen from space. She knew the difficulties Max was experiencing. “Look below my aircraft, let your eyes go to the horizon and then look left. There’s a plateau that looks like an upside-down iron….”

“Got that!”

“Look to the point of the iron, there’s a couple of buildings.”

Yes! The corrugated roofs made a wave of shadows as the light changed. “I can see it, Kallie. I can see the buildings and the strip. I’ve got it.” Relief flooded through him and he relaxed his hands, which had been gripping the controls too tightly.

“OK, Max. Fuel?”

He looked at the fuel gauge needles. They’d dropped to the bottom of the dial. “They’re in the red.”

She didn’t answer. And he realized this was it. One chance at getting the plane down in one piece.

“OK. You don’t have to spell it out, Kallie.”

“Excellent. So, normally we’d take a pass over the airfield, check the windsock and get the wind direction, but