Giordino gave Pitt a mocking. a sorrowful look.
“Who ever told you that you could loop a PBY?”
“It seemed like the thing to do at the time,” said Pitt, a twinkle in his eye.
“Next time, warn the passengers. I bounced around the main cabin like a basketball.”
“What did you hit your head on?” Pitt asked quizzically.
“Did you have to ask?”
“Well?”
Giordino suddenly became embarrassed. “If you must know, it was the door handle on the john?
Pitt looked startled for an instant. Then he flung back his head and roared with laughter. The mirth was contagious, and Giordino soon followed. The sound rang through the cockpit and replaced the noise of the engines. Nearly thirty seconds passed before their gaiety quieted, and the seriousness of the present situation returned.
Pitt’s mind was clear, but exhaustion was slowly seeping in. The long hours of flight and the strain of the recent combat fell on him heavily and soaked his body like a numbing, damp fog. He thought about the sweet smell of soap in a cold shower and the crispness of clean sheets, and somehow they became vitally important to him. He looked out the cockpit window at Brady Field and recalled that his original destination was the First Attempt, but a dim hunch, or call it a hindsight, made him change his mind.
“Instead of landing in the water and rendezvousing alongside of the First Attempt, I think we’d better set down at Brady Field. I have a foreboding feeling we may have taken a few bullets in our hull.”
“Good idea,” Giordino replied. “I’m not in the mood for bailing.”
The big flying boat made its final approach and lined up on the wreckage strewn runway. It settled on the heat baked asphalt, and the landing gear bumped and emitted an audible screech of rubber that signaled the touch-down.
Pitt angled clear of the flames and taxied to the far side of the apron. When the Catalina stopped rolling he clicked off the Ignition switches, and the two silver bladed propellers gradually ceased their revolutions and came to rest, gleaming in the Aegean sun. All was quiet.
He and Giordino sat stone still for a few moments and absorbed the first comfortable silence to penetrate the cockpit after thirteen hours of noise and vibration.
Pitt flipped the latch on his side window and pushed it open, watching with detached interest as the base firemen fought the inferno. Hoses were lying everywhere, like highways on a roadmap, and men scurried about shouting, adding to the stage of confusion. The flames on the F-105 jets were almost contained, but one of the C- 133 Cargomasters still burned fiercely.
“Take a look over here,” said Giordino pointing,
Pitt leaned over the instrument panel and stared out of Giordino’s window at a blue Air Force stationwagon that careened across the runway in the direction of the PBY. The car contained several officers and was followed by thirty or forty wildly cheering enlisted men who chased after it like a pack of braying hounds.
“Now that’s what I call one hell of a reception committee,” Pitt said amused and broadly smiling, Giordino mopped his bleeding cut with a handkerchief. When the cloth was soaked through with red ooze he wadded it up and threw it out of the window to the ground. His gaze turned toward the nearby coastline and became lost in the Infinity of thought for a moment Finally he turned to Pitt. “I guess you know we’re pretty damn lucky to be sitting here.”
“Yes, I know,” said Pitt woodenly. “There were a couple of times up there when I thought our ghost had us”
“I wish I knew who the hell he was and what this destruction was all about?”Pitt’s face was a study in speculative curiosity.
“The only clue is the yellow Albatros.”
Giordino eyed his friend questioningly. “What possible meaning could the color of that old flying derelict have?”
“If you’d studied your aviation history,” Pitt said with a touch of good-natured sarcasm, “You’d remember that German pilots of the First World War painted their planes with personal, but sometimes outlandish, color schemes.”
“Save the history lesson for later,” Giordino growled. “Right now all I want to do is get out of this sweat box and collect that drink you owe me.” He rose from his scat and started for the exit hatch.
The blue stationwagon skidded to a halt beside the big silver flying boat and all four doors burst open.
The occupants leaped out shouting and began pounding on the plane’s aluminum hatch. The crowd of enlisted men soon engulfed the aircraft, cheering loudly and waving at the cockpit.
Pitt remained seated and waved back at the cheering men below the window. His body was tired and numb but his mind was still active and running at full throttle. A title kept running through his thoughts until finally he muttered it aloud. “The Hawk of Macedonia.”
Giordino turned from the doorway. “What did you say?”
“Oh nothing, nothing at all,” Pitt let his breath escape in a long audible sigh. “Come on — I’ll buy you that drink now.”
2
When Pitt awoke, it was still dark. He did not know how long he had slept. Perhaps he just dozed off.
Perhaps he bad been lost under the black cloak of sleep for hours. He did not know, nor did he care.
The metal springs of the Air Force cot squeaked as he rolled over, seeking a more comfortable position.
But the comfort of deep sleep eluded him. His conscious mind dimly tried to analyze why. Was it the steady humming noise of the air conditioner, he asked himself? He was used to drifting off under the loud din of aircraft engines, so that couldn’t be it. Maybe it was the scurrying cockroaches. God knows Thasos was covered with them. No, it was something else. Then he knew. The answer pierced the fog of his drowsy brain. It was his other mind, the unconscious one that was keeping him awake. Like a movie projector, it flashed pictures of the strange events from the previous day, over and over again.
One picture stood out above all the rest. It was the photograph in a gallery of the Imperial War Museum. Pitt could recall it vividly. The camera had caught a German aviator posing beside a World War I fighter plane. He was garbed in the flying togs of the day, and his right hand rested upon the head of an immense white German Shepherd. The dog, obviously a mascot, was panting and looking up at his master with a patronizing, doe-like expression. The flyer stared back at the camera with a boyish face that somehow looked naked without the usual Prussian dueling scar and monocle. However, the proud Teutonic military bearing could be easily seen in the hint of an insolent grin and the ramrod straight posture.
Pitt even remembered the caption under the photo:
The Hawk of Macedonia
Lieutenant Kurt Heibert, of Jagdstaffel 91, attained 32 victories over the allies on the Macedonian Front; one of the outstanding aces of the great war. Presumed shot down and lost in the Aegean Sea on July 15, 1918. For some time, Pitt lay staring in the darkness.
There would be no more sleep tonight he thought. Sitting up and leaning on one elbow, he reached over a bedside table, groped for his Omega watch and held it in front of his eyes. The luminous dial read 4:09.
Then he sat up and dropped the bare soles of his feet on the vinyl tile floor. A package of cigarettes sat next to the watch, and he pulled out one and lit it with a silver Zippo lighter. Inhaling deeply, he stood up and stretched. His face grimaced; the muscles of his back stung from the back slapping he had received from the cheering men of Brady Field right after he and Giordino had climbed from the cockpit of the PBY. Pitt smiled to himself in the dark as he thought about the warm handshakes and congratulations pressed upon them.
The moonlight, beaming in through the window of the Officers’ Quarters, and the warm clear air of early morning made Pitt restless. He stripped off his shorts and rummaged through his luggage in the dim light.
When his touch recognized the cloth shape of a pair of swim trunks, he slipped them on, snatched a towel from the bathroom and stepped out into the stillness of the night.
