Hammond Innes
Air Bridge
CHAPTER ONE
It was dark and I was very tired. My head ached and my mind was confused. The road ran uphill between steep banks and there were trees with gaunt branches spread against the pale glimmer of the Milky Way. At last I reached the level and the high banks gave place to hedges. Through a gap I caught a glimpse of an orange moon lying on its back on the far side of a ploughed field. Nothing stirred. All life seemed frost-bound in the cold of night. I stood for a moment, exhausted, my knees trembling weakly and the sweat drying like cold steel against my skin. A little wind ran chill fingers through the bare spikes of the quick-thorn and I went on then, driven by the shivers that ran through my body. It was the reaction after the crash. I had to find somewhere to lie up — a barn, anything, so long as it was warm. And then I had to get out of the country. I was meeting the wind now, even as I walked, it chilled the sweat on my body. My steps no longer rang firm. The sound of them became a shuffle that was lost every I now and then in the lashing of the trees in a small copse.
The country around was quite flat now — a familiar flatness. The sharp edges of a large rectangular building stood for a moment black against the moon. It was there for an instant, gaunt and recognisable, and then it was lost behind the high earth mounds of a dispersal point. I stopped, my body suddenly rigid. The dispersal point and that distant glimpse of a hangar confirmed what I had already sensed almost automatically. The flatness that stretched before me was an aerodrome.
If I could get a plane! Damn it — I’d done it before. And it had been far more difficult then. I could remember the fir trees and the feel of the sand, almost silver in the moonlight, and the dark shadows of men against the hangar lights. The picture was so vivid in my mind that the same surge of excitement took told of me now, tensing my nerves, giving me strength. I turned quickly and slid into the woods.
It was less cold in the woods or else the sudden urgency of hope gave me warmth as well as energy. It was darker, too. I might have lost my sense of direction but always there was Jupiter, like a candle flickering amongst the branches, to show me the way the road had run. The trees clutched at me, whipping across my face, and in a moment I felt the warm trickle of blood from the cut on my forehead. The thick, salt warmth of it reached my tongue as I licked at the corner of my mouth. But it didn’t hurt. In fact, I barely noticed it. I was intent upon one thing, and one thing only — a plane.
I came out of the wood on the very edge of the perimeter track, a fifty yard wide ribbon of tarmac, rutted and hillocked by the frosts and marked with the dead stalks of summer’s weeds. Left and right it seemed to stretch to the horizon, and across the track was the airfield, a bleak, open hilltop, black under the moon, for the grass was gone and it was all plough. The curve of that hilltop was smooth and even like the curvature of the earth’s surface, a section of a globe hung against the stars. The only relief to that impression of void was away to the left where the black edge of a hangar seemed to be shouldering the moon up the sky.
I stood there for a moment, conscious again of the wind cutting through my clothing as the sense of emptiness drained the excitement out of me. The story of the ploughed-up grassland, the dead weed stalks and the frost-broken tarmac was evident in the dead atmosphere of the place. The airfield was deserted. It was one of the great bomber stations that had died with the end of the war. It was easy to see it as it had been, full of activity with the roar of planes coming in from a raid — big, graceful shapes, in silhouette against the flarepath, settling clumsily on to the runway. This sort of place had been my life for six and a half years. Now the planes only existed as ghosts in my mind. All about me was empty desolation, a slow disintegration moving inevitably back to the land from which it had sprung up.
With a feeling of hopelessness I started along the perimeter track towards the hangars. They would be just derelict shells, but at least they would give me shelter for the night. I felt suddenly sick and very tired — a little scared, too. The desolation of that airfield ate into me, bringing with it an awareness of my own loneliness.
The perimeter track seemed unending, growing wider and more desolate at every stumbling step as the wind thrust into my stomach till it chilled and stiffened my spine. Dizziness overtook me. It was the crash, of course, and the awful crack I’d got on the head. And then a flicker of hope came to steady me. The hangars now loomed black against the moon, big rectangular skeletons slowly crumbling away. But at the far end of the concrete apron there was one that looked whole and solid. The line of windows along its side was intact and reflected a glimmer of starlight.
I quickened my pace. It was just possible that some private owner, a local farmer or landowner, kept his plane up here on this deserted aerodrome. That was the hope that sent me hurrying across the apron to the deep shadows of the hangars. And as I slid from one hangar to the next I prayed to God there would be petrol in the tanks.
I was a fool perhaps to build my hopes on such slender foundations as the fact that one hangar was intact. But when you’re desperate you clutch at anything. Before I’d even reached the hangar I was already mentally in the cockpit of some tiny aircraft winging my way through the night towards France. I knew exactly how the coast would look as it slid beneath me and how the Channel would be gently corrugated at right angles to my line of flight as the waves reflected the slanting rays of the moon. I could see myself checking in at the little hotel in Montmartre where I’d stayed several times before and then after a rest, going to Badouin’s office. Badouin would fix it all for me. Everything would be all right as soon as I’d seen Badouin.
I reached the hangar and stood for a moment in the shadow of its bulk. I was panting. But I no longer felt sick or dizzy. I was trembling slightly, but that was just nerves. I had plenty of energy. Nothing could stop me now. I slid round the corner of the building and along the face of the huge sliding doors.
My luck was in, for the little wicket door in the centre yielded to the touch of my hand, revealing a dark void full of vague shadows. I stepped inside and closed the door. It was still and very cold with that queer musty smell of damp on concrete. Some glimmer of moonlight seemed to penetrate into the rear of the hangar, for the shadows resolved themselves into the nose and wings of a large four-engined plane. It was facing me head-on and it seemed enormous in the gloom of the hangar.
The incredible luck of it! I ducked under the port wing and moved along the fuselage, running my hand along the cold metal of it, searching for the door.
‘So. His work is not to be remembered.’
I stopped with a jerk. It was a girl’s voice that had spoken.
A man answered her: ‘I’m sorry. War is a dirty business.’
‘But the war is finished.’
‘Yes, but you lost it, remember.’
‘And because Germany loses a war, my father must suffer? My father has suffered enough, I think.’
‘Your father is dead.’ The brutal words were said in a hard, matter-of-fact voice.
A silence followed. Peering over the tailplane I could see the outline of two figures against the steady glow of a pressure lamp. The man was short, thick-set and powerful-looking and as he moved towards the girl he unmasked the lamp so that its dim light showed me the litter of a workbench running the width of the hangar and the dark shadow of a belt-driven machine lathe.
I turned quickly. The lamplight was glowing on the metal of the plane and as I slid along the fuselage towards the door I saw that it was a Tudor and its inboard engine was missing.
If I had gained the door unnoticed I should not now be setting down what must surely be the most extraordinary story of the Berlin Airlift. But my foot caught against some scrap metal and with the sudden clang of sheet tin I froze.