The cargo plane's engines grew even louder now, tantalizingly near, though the plane remained beyond the patch of open sky that the surrounding woods permitted them.
“It's close,” Slade said.
Suddenly, the big aircraft was there. It came in so low over the pines that Kelly had difficulty separating it from the black trees. It carried only two running lights, one on each wing tip, and it seemed more like some gigantic bird of prey than like a machine.
“Here comes the plane,” Slade said, though everyone had already seen it. Nothing ever improved. Not even the lieutenant.
“He isn't putting it down fast enough,” Lieutenant Beame said. He thought: Christ, it's going to plow right through us, knock us down like three bowling pins at the end of an alley.
The DC-3 slanted in fast, correcting.
“Not enough,” Kelly said.
The pilot had not cut back. The props churned as thunderously as when the craft had slipped in over the trees.
“What the hell's he doing?” Lieutenant Slade demanded.
The big plane roared toward them, a prehistoric behemoth bellowing a mindless battle cry. Its tires were still off the rugged, oiled strip. The tiny running lights on its wings seemed, to Kelly, to swell until they were gigantic searchlights.
“Run!” Beanie shouted. But he couldn't run. He could only stand there, hypnotized by the onrushing plane, blinking at the half-seen blur of the whirling props.
The pilot gave up on it. The craft rose sharply, tilting dangerously toward the dark earth, swooped over the three men and the trees behind them, racketing away across the forest.
“He's going to try again,” Lieutenant Slade told them.
Able to run now that it wasn't necessary, Beame turned and loped into the trees, bent and vomited on a patch of wild daisies.
The moment the DC-3 had passed over them, all the fear went out of Major Kelly. Temporarily, at least. He had watched the plane plunging toward them, and he had been sure that he would die in seconds. The whole situation had that ironic touch which was so much a part of the war: surviving the Stukas and the Germans, he would now be slaughtered accidentally by his own people. When he wasn't, when he realized that the plane had passed over and left him unhurt, he chose to take his safety as an omen. If he had not been killed that time, he would not be killed the next. The pilot would put his ship down, and everything would go as planned. He would survive. For tonight, anyway. Maybe he would be blown to bits the first thing in the morning, but for the remainder of the night, he could rest easy.
The engine noise of the DC-3 faded, moving around them, then grew in volume again as the pilot made his second approach.
“Here he comes again,” Slade said, unnecessarily.
Beame, back from vomiting on the daisies, said, “God.”
The transport came into sight again, over the trees. It slanted in much more quickly than it had before. In fact, it angled too sharply, touched the runway at too high a speed, bounced. Tires squealed. The walls of the forest threw back echoes that sounded like anguished human cries. The aircraft shuddered, touched again, bounced again. The third time down, it stayed down. Its engines, thumping like a hundred hammers slamming into a block of wood, cut back, whined down, stopped with a suddenness that left them all deaf.
The silence of the night rushed in like collapsing walls of cotton, and they were too stunned to hear anything at all. Gradually, they began to perceive the crickets once more, the frogs, the breeze in the trees, the pounding of their own hearts.
“She's down,” Slade said.
Even if they hadn't been watching, they would have known the plane was down, for in the cricket-punctuated night, they could now hear the pilot screaming. At some point during the flight from the west, he had cranked open a vent window, and now his arm was hanging out that window, and he was beating on the side of the plane. The sheet metal boomed like a drum, counterpoint to the pilot's unmelodic wailing.
Lieutenant Beame ran to the flare on the right, threw sand on it, and watched it sputter out. I would have gone out as easily, he thought, if the pilot had muffed that first try. I would have blinked out like a damped flare. He turned quickly and walked to the second spot of blue light, unwilling to carry that train of thought any further. He threw sand on this flare and looked toward the far end of the strip where someone else was just smothering the flares down there.
Above the runway, though he was still screaming, the pilot put out the running lights on the wings of the DC-3.
“There go the men to unload the plane,” Lieutenant Slade said.
Beame squinted, but he could not see them. He had been night-blinded by the flares.
“Oh, God,” Lieutenant Slade said, his voice breathy. “Isn't it all so inspiring?”
8
Lily Kain's high heels went tock-tock-tock on the wooden landing steps as she climbed up the hatchway in the hull of the cargo plane. She went inside, into darkness, her footsteps echoing from metal walls. Hunched over to keep from hitting her head on the low ceiling, and careful not to touch the loops of poorly insulated wire which drooped from their overhead moorings, she went forward to the cockpit and leaned inside.
“Hello there!” she said, trying to be cheery and sexy.
“Hello,” the copilot said, turning around in his sweat-stained flight seat. He was a tall, thin kid from Texas with an Adam's apple that made him look like he'd swallowed a whole orange and got it stuck in his throat.
Lily ignored him. He was too young and ineffectual to help her. She turned all her charm on the pilot, who had just stopped screaming, and she said, “Hello there!”
“Hello, Lily,” the pilot said. His voice was hoarse.
“That's a nice costume you're wearing,” the kid from Texas said. He gulped wetly, as if the orange had come unstuck.
During the day, when the heat baked the earth and the trees stood limp and parched, Lily Kain wore a dancer's costume, even though the men had begun to call her Miss Cock Tease. She couldn't understand why they were upset by her near nudity; after all, they walked around shirtless, alt bronze and hairy. Didn't they understand that all those lovely, bunched and sunbrowned muscles made her horny? Sometimes she wanted to grab one of them and throw him down and rip off his khaki slacks and rape him. The only thing that gave her pause was the knowledge that, in the Army, rape was a crime punishable by ten years to life imprisonment. That would make her anywhere from thirty-four to — when she got out. It just wasn't worth it, not for a transitory thrill.
In the evenings, if it was cool, she wore one of Major Kelly's work uniforms which she and Nurse Pullit had cut down to size and resewn by hand. Lily's street clothes had been carried off with the rest of her USO troop, and she had been left behind with nothing more than a trunkful of scanty costumes. At least the work uniform afforded her a means of modesty whenever the mood struck her. It seldom struck her. Modesty just wasn't worth it.