The Romanov succession

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. In those days we got our weather reports by phoning the next airfield and finding out if it was raining there.” Johnson grinned. “More reliable than the met forecasts we get now.”

Alex knew them all over the globe-the barnstormers and bush pilots who made their livings walking the wings of fabric-and-wood biplanes and slept out under the wings of their Jennies. “I’m surprised you opted for bombers then.”

“No future in single-seaters, Skipper. The war ain’t going to last forever. When it’s over they’re going to need cargo pilots, not peashooter jockeys. Old Pappy’s always thinking ahead, see.” He shook his head. “Besides I’ll tell you something else-if I’m going to get shot at while I’m up there I’d just as soon be in one of these babies.”

“It’s a big slow target for the enemy.”