Authors: Harry Bingham
The needle of his airspeed indicator was lifting. It hit fifty-seven miles an hour, then fifty-eight. The feel of the plane definitely changed. It had an aliveness that it had lacked before.
Willard knew now the plane would fly if he asked it to, but there was the problem of the trees to be considered. The runway angled away from the worst of the trees, but there was a solitary clump lying dead ahead of Willard’s course. The clump lay a hundred yards from the gully bottom, or perhaps two hundred and fifty from the end of the runway. With the plane as heavy and unresponsive as it was, it would be impossible to climb fast enough to avoid them. Once in the air, Willard could bank to right or left – but any turn produces a loss of airspeed, and Willard had far too little to afford anything of the sort. If he stalled the plane close to the ground, disaster was all but inevitable.
The end of the runway sped closer.
Eighty yards, sixty, forty, thirty… The first grey rock was a big one, a low-lying humpbacked beast, looking like a wild boar at sleep. If the aircraft wheel so much as nicked the rock, the plane’s motion would be violently interrupted.
The needle read fifty-nine miles an hour. The plane was begging to fly, and at last Willard let it go. He touched the stick so that the nose followed the tail into the air. The ground flew clear beneath his wheels. The humpbacked rock disappeared beneath the plane.
The trees. He couldn’t turn. He couldn’t climb. The way things stood at present, Willard was flying straight for the upper branches of an all-too-solid Canadian pine.
If he couldn’t turn and couldn’t climb, there was only one thing left to do.
Dodge.
Hunched over his controls, he waited for the trees to get closer. If he acted a moment too soon, he’d fail. If he acted a moment too late, he’d fail just as surely. Then, just as it seemed the trees were about to smack him in the face, he jerked back on the stick. The airplane, which had reached sixty-two miles an hour of airspeed, jerked upwards with surprise.
One of the things Willard had learned as a pilot was that height can be exchanged for speed, speed can be exchanged for height. He made the exchange. With the little bit of airspeed he’d built up, Willard flung the plane uphill. The aircraft lifted sharply, but it was running far too slowly to put up with that type of manoeuvre. The trees slipped beneath the aircraft, but the airspeed indicator was plunging rapidly downwards through the scale.
Willard knew what was coming and was ready.
The airplane lost speed and stalled. The wings were no longer delivering enough lift to fly the airplane. The airplane was no longer flying, it was falling.
But clear of the trees, and with the engines still screaming at full power, Willard was able to jam the nose back down again. Like a cyclist running out of power at the top of a hill, the plane began to curve back down again – and as it curved it built up speed.
Speed was everything.
Willard kept the plane headed downwards in a low dive. The ground rose to meet the plane, but the plane recovered speed. The wings spoke again. Breathlessly, Willard nudged the plane ever so gently leftwards to where the ground fell away to the lake.
The plane steadied. The ground fell. The plane lifted.
Knowing he was clear, Willard levelled his course up over the lake, scanned the horizon ahead for its lowest point and guided the plane slowly upwards and away from danger. The plane ran smoothly over the lake and into the sky. In theory, the plane was capable of climbing four or five hundred feet a minute. No matter how he set the controls, Willard wasn’t able to find more than about a quarter of that power. But he was OK now. No need to worry. He felt the breath of survival – the very feeling of life itself – spread slowly through him. He felt joyful; in control; like he’d conquered something inside himself. It was the opposite of the feeling that had dogged him all these months. He checked the map, set his course, began the thousand other routine checks and adjustments that would keep him busy for the rest of the journey.
Busy, but not too busy.
Positioned all alone between earth and heaven, a pilot is in the perfect place to think things through. To think out riddles such as: Why did a plane designed to leave the ground at fifty-three miles an hour refuse to leave it until fifty-seven or fifty-eight? Why did a plane with a notional climbing speed of four hundred and fifty feet per minute seem to manage only one-fifty at best? Why did a simple smuggling operation go to all the trouble of buying planes and building runways in such remote spots as Ruxion, Alberta? And what in hell’s name was Powell Lambert doing smack-dab in the midst of all of this?
A cockpit is the perfect place to think things through and Willard was ready to think. Before he’d even crossed the invisible line which took him from Canadian airspace into American airspace, he had figured out the entire thing.
It couldn’t last long and didn’t.
Mason tried getting the phone company to fix their lines; failed; then got the job done himself with phone engineers paid to make the trip down from Atlanta.
The intermission had lasted just ten days, but ten productive ones. On the last day, when Abe touched down on his cornfield, a softer landing now that the spikes of corn had been ploughed under, he greeted Haggerty McBride with a short nod.
‘McBride. This is the last lot of letters we’ll get for a while.’ He explained that Mason would have the phone lines up by the following day.
‘OK. We’ve done well, any case.’
Abe nodded and the two men went through the routine of checking Abe’s copies against the orginals, then signing them off. They sealed Mason’s originals up again, and ironed them flat. The entire procedure took less than ten minutes. Abe liked McBride’s brevity and directness. He liked the way McBride was scrupulous about re-gumming Mason’s envelopes so there was no trace at all of them having been opened; so there was not even a tiny blob of gum left anywhere except the flap where it was meant to be.
Abe got ready to leave again. He kept his stop-offs as short as possible, to ensure that if Mason had a guy watching out for his landing in Jacksonville, there would be no time discrepancy to account for.
But before he climbed into the cockpit, McBride stopped him.
‘I’ve been speaking with Bosse.’
‘Yes?’
‘We reckon we’re just about there.’
‘So soon?’
‘We’ve done very well. You have. We’ve accumulated more than we thought, faster than we thought.’
But McBride’s voice wasn’t congratulatory. It was reserved. A ‘but’ waited just out of sight. Abe prompted.
‘Right. Only?’
‘Only there’s one last thing we need.’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘We’ve got good material. Proof of alcohol importation. Proof of transport connections, finance connections, police connections. We know a lot of names. We can tie a lot of them into the business.’
‘Right.’
‘Only we don’t yet have the one thing we really need. If we really look hard at the evidence we’ve got, we can hit Mason for handling booze. We can hit the guys who physically load and unload the stuff. But the rest of them? How do we prove that the finance guys know they’re financing booze? That the railroad guys know they’re transporting it? They do, of course, we both know that. But we need to prove this thing in a court of law.’
‘What are you telling me?’
‘It was your idea to hit these guys for tax evasion. That’s why we got involved. It’s still the best route in. That way, anyone who draws a salary high enough to be declared for tax purposes is guilty. That way we pick up everyone we need.’ McBride paused to allow Abe to respond, but Abe said nothing, so the taxman continued. ‘We need the Marion payroll. Everyone on it, how much they earn. Plus the accounts, if you can possibly get them. Two or three years, ideally, but one year minimum.’
‘Accounts? You think they …?’ Abe tailed off. He didn’t have to ask. Marion was a heck of an efficient organisation. It didn’t run itself that way by accident. ‘You’re right. They’ll keep accounts. And payroll, I don’t know where. I don’t know how to get them.’
‘One other thing. It’s going to be helpful to us if you can get us the materials for us to copy and authenticate, and then return the orginals, so they don’t even know they’ve been gone. However fast we work, it’ll take days and maybe weeks to get all the arrest warrants we need. We don’t want to alert them beforehand. I know that’s a tough brief.’
There was a pause, a long one. There wasn’t much breeze out there on the cornfield, but what there was sighed through Sue’s wings and wing struts like a blues song.
McBride said, ‘You’ll need to think about it. We understand that.’
‘OK.’
‘Either way, just let us know.’
The taxman held his hand out and they shook hands: the first time they’d done so since their first meeting. Abe felt, more strongly than before, that McBride was a good man; intelligent and safe. He respected Bosse all the more for picking subordinates like this. And Abe understood the taxman’s request. It made sense. If he’d been in Bosse’s position, he’d have wanted the same thing.
But it was a hell of a lot to ask. So far, all they’d done was to snipe at Marion from a distance. He and Pen had managed things so that they had run almost no risk of being caught. He’d had rising hopes of ending this whole escapade soon; of escaping the network of ties and obligations that he hated with all his heart.
And now this. An invitation to enter into the very heart of Marion. To snatch its most secret possessions. To take them, copy them and return them, all without anyone knowing. It seemed impossible. But Abe knew himself by now. However reluctant he might be feeling, he’d always take the next step.
Little as he liked it, he knew that the only way out was forwards.
Up on the Canadian border, a November day doesn’t provide a whole lot of daylight in which to fly. But Willard wasn’t worried. Though he’d taken off later than he’d liked – engine checks and the extra fuel had delayed him – the extra gasoline had allowed him to skip Ben the Pilot’s refuelling stop just inside the US border. The rivers, railroads, towns and mountains disappeared under the airplane’s nose just the way the map predicted. And just as the sun was balling itself for one last shriek of rosy fury in the west, the little grass airfield at Shakeston came duly into view. Willard lost height and flew at low speed over the field to check it out.
The grass airstrip wasn’t long, but it looked very tidy: short grass, clean approaches, plenty of room to line up the approach against the wind. There was a new-looking hangar, a couple of tin-roofed office buildings, a windsock. There should have been a field identification number clearly painted in the north-west corner of the field, but there wasn’t. Willard snorted softly through his nose. At this stage, it would have been more of a surprise if there had been. On a short concrete strip alongside the two office buildings, there were three cars parked and a cluster of men.
Willard glanced at the men, then stared. One of the men was in uniform. Willard was still high enough that he couldn’t be sure, but it certainly looked as though the man was a police officer. He continued his flight path for a few seconds longer than he’d intended.
A police officer
? It would be the irony of ironies if Willard had finally bottomed out the mysteries of Powell Lambert, only to be jailed for the privilege.
He flew on uncertainly, glancing at the map for alternative landing sites.
Glanced at it, then tossed it aside.
He was being a fool. He brought the big-bellied aircraft around in a long swoop, lined up against the wind. He reduced power, dropped the aircraft and landed her – not a great landing, but good enough. He taxied up to the hangar and cut the power, first on the port engine, then the starboard. The noise died away. Willard felt the ringing in his ears which denoted the arrival of silence. His legs were cramped, his arms tired, his whole body frozen and sore.
He kicked at the cockpit door and it opened with a dull clang. Christ, he was cold! His woollen Brooks Brothers coat, gloves and felt hat had been nowhere near enough clothing to keep him warm eight thousand feet over the Canadian Rockies. The only time he’d ever been that cold before was on dawn patrols with Abe Rockwell, when they’d coaxed their little Nieuports to twenty-one thousand feet in search of German prey.
A ladder thumped up against the aircraft. Willard looked down. The cop was standing at the bottom. Willard felt a surge of anger. It felt like he was angry at the one last little joke being played on him, but in a way it was a burst of anger at everything that he’d been through since being given the boot by his studio and the whole fiasco of
Heaven’s Beloved.
He came down the ladder so fast, his hands burned and his descending feet almost kicked the cop in the face.
‘Hey pal, easy.’
Willard ignored the cop and strode over to the trio of parked cars. Anger gave him energy, but the cold made his movements jerky and stiff. A man detached himself from the group by the wooden office buildings and came over to Willard. The light was coming from behind the man’s head, and it was hard to make out the face. But Willard had got it all figured out, hadn’t he? He’d stirred things up enough. He’d more or less let Larry Ronson know what he was up to before he left. And Ronson was in on the whole game, wasn’t he?
The man ahead was visible only as a well-wrapped silhouette and a cloud of cigar smoke, but Willard knew who he was.
‘Hey, Powell,’ he said, when he was still some forty feet away. ‘I brought you your beaver skins. I might even have a bottle of Scotch or two in the back there, you never know.’
The silhouette revealed a set of white teeth, pulled back in a grin. ‘Nice work, Thornton. The guys tell me that isn’t an easy baby to fly. Reckon you’ve earned a bottle or two yourself.’
A bottle of Scotch.
The final confirmation of Willard’s suspicions had been his near-death experience by Ruxion lake. With one hundred per cent power to both engines, there was only one reason why a plane couldn’t fly and that was weight. The plane was overloaded.