So slowly it was sensed rather than seen, the mist gradually became lighter, indicating they were approaching the top. Dunne began to breathe again. The altimeter indicated a thousand feet.
The fog slid by quickly until they could look down and see it stretched in all directions like soft cotton batting that had been soiled here and there. Above, long dark strings of an approaching front masked the sun so they hung suspended between layers of mist and cloud in a gray, disordered world.
Marco wiped the perspiration from his face.
“Try the radio,” Dunne told him. He leveled off and started a big circle.
Marco said, “They’re calling us.”
The gunman thrust his face between them. “What do you mean they’re calling us?”
“They see us on their radar screens,” explained Marco.
“You mean they know I’m up here?”
“Not you,” said Dunne soothingly. “Someone. They don’t know who. That’s why they’re calling.”
The man snatched the phones from Marco’s head and pressed one to his ear. Dunne slipped on his set.
The voice was insistent and authoritative. “—please identify. Please identify. Penalties for violating regulations can be severe.”
“What’s he talking about?” asked the gunman.
“Nothing to concern you. They don’t like an airplane flying around in this weather without knowing who it is.”
The man cackled. “Tell him we’re an unidentified flying object.”
“I wouldn’t do that,” Dunne said.
The gun dug at his cheek, and the voice was cold. “If you won’t tell him, I will. How do I do it?”
Dunne nodded at Marco. Marco handed the man the microphone. “Just press the button to talk.”
The man held the microphone to his lips and yelled, “We’re from Mars, you creep! We’ve come to destroy the world!”
He laughed long and loud and crazily.
The controller’s voice came back, low and serious. “Unidentified aircraft, do you have a passenger aboard named Turner?”
The gunman screamed, the sound crashing around their ears. “You said he didn’t know I was up here!”
Dunne’s skin crawled. The police searching for Turner must have been close enough to hear them take off, put two and two together, and phoned the information in to the controller, asking him to keep track of them.
“You tricked me!” Turner yelled. “They weren’t supposed to know I was flying away like a bird!” He began to sob. “Damn it, I can’t even get away from them even up here! It’s all your fault!”
The insanity that lurked behind the wide eyes exploded in a deafening roar as he shot Marco.
The second bullet hit the instrument panel as Dunne desperately jerked the wheel over hard and threw Turner off balance; the third smashed through the directional gyro as he jammed the wheel forward; the fourth tugged at his sleeve and also smashed through the instrument panel as he kicked the rudder.
Turner fired the fifth just as Dunne rolled the plane fast, the bullet tearing through his calf and leaving his leg numb.
Then he pulled up hard, the force of gravity driving him into his seat and pinning the tumbling Turner to the floor. Still Turner pulled the trigger again, missing Dunne again and demolishing the panel further, but by then his head was between the seats, pinned there by the G-force, within reach of Dunne’s fist. He chopped down hard, catching Turner on the jaw and feeling it crack, and chopped again and again to be sure he was out.
He eased the plane level and sat breathing hard as pain slowly replaced the numbness in his leg. The air rushed through the holes Turner had drilled in the nose with a high pitched howl that filled and chilled the cabin. Hands trembling, Dunne dug out his handkerchief and knotted it around his calf.
He looked at Marco once and couldn’t look again. Marco had been a good friend.
Almost wonderingly, he ran a hand over the remains of the instrument panel. If Turner had taken aim, he couldn’t have done more damage. Those random bullets had not only smashed the instruments but had severed the vacuum and electrical lines so that almost all of the dials that hadn’t been splintered were inoperative.
Even the slight hum in his earphones was gone. One of those bullets had taken the radio out, too.
Shivering in the cold air rushing into the plane, wondering how he could still be alive, he was slow to think about the trouble he was in, and when he did, panic flickered inside and threatened to break out in a scream.
He was sitting above a heavy layer of fog with no way to get down through it safely.
Before the shooting he hadn’t been concerned about landing even if the fog remained because then he had flight instruments to tell him the attitude of the plane, whether he was going up or down, banking or turning or skidding even though he couldn’t see, and he had the radio to contact fields that had instrument landing facilities. He could be talked down even though the Cessna lacked complete navigational equipment.
That was impossible now. He was lost and blind and hurt, and there was no way he could go down into that fog without killing himself and perhaps people on the ground.
And with the blood running out of his calf and filling his shoe, he couldn’t even circle and hope the fog would lift before he ran out of fuel.
He slammed the useless earphones to the floor. Turner’s bullets had killed him as effectively as they had Marco.
Slowly bleeding, growing number from shock and cold, he clutched the wheel with both hands, circled slowly, and tried to think as his blood drained from him, eventually finding his mind drifting, images from his past coming and going; the day he met his wife for the first time; the first order he had written that had set his new business on its feet; the feeling he had when he first soloed and found himself alone in the sky.
He sank deeper toward unconsciousness and — as when he had walked between the parked planes — the roaring of the engines, the clouds overhead, and the fog below stirred forgotten memories of the war, this time of a day when he had been returning from a mission alone, separated from the others by a fight and bad weather.
Slightly ahead and below him he had seen another Mustang trailing a faint stream of black smoke and pulled up beside it. The canopy was half blasted away, bullet holes stitched through the metal skin behind the pilot, and a red-stained scarf wrapped around the pilot’s neck flapped in the airstream.
Eyes above the mask resigned, the pilot covered his eyes and then his mouth with his hand. Dunne knew what he meant. His instruments and radio were both out, and without them the man had no way to get through the clouds below.
Dunne motioned the man to take position on his wing, held up two fingers, and pointed down. The man nodded.
Dunne took them both down through the clouds, feeling his way lower and lower until the dark shapes of the trees lifted eager branches to pluck them from the sky, and then the field was below them and Dunne brought them both in.
The pilot had been a blue-eyed, dark-haired twenty-year-old named Castle on his third mission, holding himself tall and appearing older than his years.
“I owe you one,” Castle said quietly. “I’ll pay you back someday.”
A week later he hit a string of high-tension wires while strafing an airfield, his Mustang leaving a black scar in the snow of a farmer’s field.
Dunne jerked erect as one of the engines missed a beat. He was very tired. His head sagged again.
He fought off the stupor.
Once. Twice.
Each lift of his head became more difficult, and then it didn’t seem to matter any longer. His wife was gone, his business was gone, and in a larger sense, so was his entire life. In essence, he had been dead before he entered the operations building and found Turner there.