'Truly, you are not romantic, Señor.'He grabbed the gear-lever and we went around a dark mountain corner on a prayer and very nearly a wing.
I said, when I had the breath: 'If that's romanticism, I'll take walking.'
He sounded suddenly contrite. 'You are right, of course One must live to fly this aeroplane.' And he lifted his foot.
It was a nice thought, if a rather surprising one. I just hoped he wasn't storing up his 'romanticism' for when we got the Mitchell. But for the moment, just doing the rest of the journey less than twice as fast as I'd have liked was enough for me.
FOURTEEN
J.B.rang ME ATthe Myrtle Bank two evenings later: the Mitchell had reached Barranquilla, so would I stay sober enough to catch a West Indian flight the next morning to connect with a Pan Am flight in San Juan to connect with… Barranquilla isn't a main-line station. I told her to forget it, then rang a friend and bought two very unofficial seats on a Venezuelan cargo plane that was going out to Maracaibo in the morning. From there to Barranquilla is just 200 miles across the frontier.
We ended up hiring a small plane for the last leg, but we reached Barranquilla at four in the afternoon, about twelve hours ahead of her schedule. And there, waiting for us outside the end hangar, was the Mitchell.
Nowadays military aeroplanes have the same sleek good looks as civil aircraft; it wasn't always so, and the Mitchell came from that time. She was thin, box-sided, square-cut, with a long sneering transparent nose, high cranked wings, huge engines and propellers, fat over-sized main wheels like big boots. Just sitting there, she had the hunched, cluttered look of an old soldier loaded with all his equipment.
But this one was a very old soldier indeed.
J.B. was staring with an expression of sick disbelief. After a while she said quietly: 'Jesus Christ.'
'Right – now name me the co-pilot.' Then I shook my head. 'If she really flew in from Buenaventura, she must work better than she looks.'
I was trying to persuade myself. The transparent nose had gone smoky and crackled with tiny veins, like the nose of a hardened boozer; the bare aluminium parts, even the props, were covered with the gritty white lichens of oxidisation; the painted parts – some idiot had painted the engines black to hide oil leaks, but also the one colour to over-heat them in this climate – were dulled and flaking. And the hydraulic system must have been leaking like an old shoe because the flaps were drooping half down, the bomb-bay doors half open.
I knew exactly what had happened. She hadn't been in the air for six months, and then somebody who knew a lot about aeroplanes but even more about money, had made her fit for just the 500-mile ride up from Buenaventura. In two ways, I had to take it from here.
I took a deep breath. 'All right. Now you find whoever's in charge. I want a Certificate of Airworthiness, the log-books -there's three of them – and any pilot's notes and engineering manuals he's got. Anddon't pay him a peso until I've checked them and her.'
She looked at me rather doubtfully, then nodded and went off towards the offices built into the side of the hangar. I started a slow clockwise circuit of the Mitchell, kicking the tyres, squinting into the engines – rust on the cylinder head bolts, of course – banging the inspection panels.
Just below the cockpit there was a piece of over-fancy script, mostly washed and faded away by now. After a bit of twisting my head and puzzling, I made it out:Beautiful Dreamer, with a 1940's-style reclining nude to match. So she'd actually seen squadron service in the war, twenty years ago.
Well, whatever had happened, they'd brought her back -and walked away. And now they were Air Force generals or farmers or just your Friendly Home-Town Used-Car Dealer. And probably it would take them a lot of thinking even to remember the name they'd given her.
But think, boys, try and remember. Just what made her that little bit different from the thousands of other Mitchells they built? How did she fly better than the book says, and how worse? What systems never went wrong – and which never wentright?
Just as man to man, boys – what's she like in bed? She's my girl now.
Then I shook my head and reached and slapped the metal below the cockpit – and nearly burned my hand off at the wrist. She'd been sitting in the sun all day. I took a pair of wash-leather flying gloves out of my hip pocket and pulled them on before I tried anything new.
J.B. came out of the hangar with a small, tubby man wearing sunglasses, a black moustache and a grease-stained whitepanamahat. She was carrying a handful of papers and not looking I-feel-like-singing about them.
'The certificate of airworthiness,' she recited tonelessly, 'was issued in Colombia two years ago and says it'slimitado. Limited – what does that mean?'
'Mustn't ply for hire or reward. I'd expected that. If you own it, you can have it flown how you like. What about the logs?'
She handed them over, three unimpressive little mock-leather volumes like autograph books.
The aircraft one had a chit pinned in the front headed 'as removed from military records' which showed the Mitchell had done about six thousand hours before getting a US Air Force overhaul in 1951 which, it claimed, brought her back to the perfection of having done zero hours. But they'd sold her off to Colombia before they could prove themselves wrong.
In Colombia she'd flown another 1,500 hours as a bomber and been given another overhaul which – surprise, surprise -had once more restored her to zero hours condition. However, again she'd been sold off fast – for 900 hours as a freight transport, and then 300 as a private passenger plane. But apart from the delivery flight, carefully entered up as exactly two hours fifty minutes – she hadn't flown this year.
J.B. said sombrely: 'How does it look?'
I shrugged. 'About as I expected. These things might be honest, might not-'
'Could we sue on them?'
'If things go wrong, we and the plane'll be at the bottom of the Caribbean. Tell him you'll pay him when I've checked it over.'
She gave me a very steady look and said, deliberately toneless: 'He doesn't speak English – he says. He also says he has another customer, and he wants his money right now.'
I grinned at the fat face under the greasypanama. I knew the 'another customer' line. 'Tell him,' I said, speaking slowly and carefully, 'that according to the log, this aeroplane has, like his sister, been a virgin three times already. I will sleep with her tonight and give my decision tomorrow.'
Our Friendly Home-Town Used-Aeroplane Dealer had gone as rigid as a girder. I knew the don't-speak-English line, too. Everyone connected with aeroplaneshas to speak English.
J.B. glanced sideways, saw interpretation was unnecessary, and asked me: 'Why tomorrow?'
'I won't do an air test until I've run up the engines properly, and I don't want to do that until this evening when the air's cooler. Tomorrow.'
She nodded, then handed me the last of the papers: a collection of stained, loose pages about the size of a science-fiction magazine. 'That's all he had.'
The top sheet was headed Flight Handbook, B-25N;USAP; revised to 15 August 1951.Applied to this old lady, science-fiction was about what it would be. I sighed.
J.B. said quickly. 'If you want to say the hell with this and go back to Jamaica, I won't be part of any suit against you for breaking your contract.'
'Thanks. But…' I looked up at the Mitchell again. Ever since I'd learned to fly, I'd had one dream every few months: that I was sitting in a plane I didn't trust, and hadn't any proper instruction about – and I had to fly her. Now I was looking at my bad dream.
There's always a way to walk away: to walk away first.
'Thanks,' I said again. 'But I'm a pilot – and I don't have any other plane to fly. I'll tell you tomorrow.'
She looked at me hard for a moment, then turned to the man in thepanamaand started talking fast, fluent Spanish. I walked away, ducked under the belly of the Mitchell, and 95 climbed up through the open hatch just forward of the bomb-bay.