“There’s a road out there somewhere.” Bobby slapped Jack on the back and took his spot, sitting against the dune. He pulled the map out of his pocket and began to study it.
“Whole lot of good that will do you,” Jack remarked. “Completely lost our bearings in that storm.”
Bobby didn’t respond. He was concentrating. He had an almost photographic memory. It was part of the reason school had been so easy for him. He envisioned the Bedouin caravan they’d flown over, remembering the curve of the highway where it had been stuck. He placed his finger on the map and began counting… to fifty, no, sixty… “That’s how long it took before we saw the black curtain,” he explained. “Cruising at 196 miles per hour, we would have covered three and a quarter miles in that time.” He moved his finger that distance along the map. “Then it was another twenty seconds before we recognized the black curtain for what it was.”
“Twenty seconds means another mile,” Jack added, catching on.
Bobby moved his finger. “But then I gunned the throttle and began to climb. I’d lost track of time, then, concentrating entirely on controlling the plane. But I remember looking at the altimeter: it wasn’t until we reached twenty thousand feet that we cleared the storm. That’s a ten-thousand-foot climb from our cruising altitude, which would have required another two and a half minutes.” Bobby moved his finger again. “It was only another twenty seconds before I realized you’d been swallowed up by the storm. I pulled the plane into an Immelmann”—half a loop combined with a roll—“which would have placed me there.” Again he moved his finger. “Which means when I crashed, it would have been somewhere around here.” He used a pencil to draw a circle around his finger.
Jack narrowed his eyes. “If you say so.”
Bobby drew a line from the circle directly east. “And there’s the road.”
“You sure about this?”
“Anything beats sitting here waiting to die of thirst.” Bobby checked his compass and turned to face east.
“Fair enough. Let’s just hope we don’t run into a bunch of Nazi sympathizers on the way.”
Bobby patted the butt of the automatic pistol hanging from his hip. “You still have one of these, don’t you?”
“Sure. But it’s jammed with sand like everything else.”
“The Bedouin don’t know that.” Bobby checked his compass again and started to walk away from the plane.
Jack jogged up beside him. “Sure is hot, isn’t it? I can feel it through my boots.”
“Yeah, but at least it’s a dry heat.”
Jack laughed. The humidity had been a common complaint during their basic training in Florida. Only a few minutes into a run or a hike, and they were all dripping with sweat. At the time, Bobby and Jack couldn’t have imagined any heat worse. Their legs chafed against wet pants with every stride. It was like they’d just been thrown into a pool with their clothes on. Eventually, though, they’d all gotten used to the discomfort.
But this was something worse. The dry desert heat was dangerous. Bobby and Jack knew they were sweating just as much, maybe even more, than they did back in Florida, but they could barely feel it.
As they plodded on, the moisture evaporated faster than Bobby’s body could replace it. He felt light-headed and weak. It wasn’t uncomfortable, though. In a strange way, it was even a euphoric feeling. He could see the waves of heat rising off the white-hot sand. It didn’t look like heat—it looked like water. He watched Jack move his hand up and down through the waves as if expecting his arm to get wet. No such luck. Thank goodness Jack was with him. Marching with a buddy improved a man’s chances of survival by 200 percent.
They’d been briefed on desert survival. The British had already been fighting for months in Libya against General Rommel’s Afrika Korps. American Army Air Forces commanders knew it was likely their pilots would see action in the Middle East, so they made it a point to give them basic survival training in case they were shot down. This was how Bobby knew they should force themselves to swallow gulps of water regularly before dehydration overtook them. Dehydration was the most likely cause of death. The buddy system was crucial for fighting it. If one of them began to pass out, the other could administer water.
It turned out to be a three-hour hike. They didn’t seem to cover a long distance, but traversing hot, shifting sand proved even more difficult than they feared. Their canteens were empty after two hours.
By the time they saw the trucks, they weren’t sure they were real. It wasn’t until the drivers ran out to meet them, holding out bottles of water, that they knew they’d made it.
This time, they’d been lucky.
The truck drivers were from the US Army Quartermaster Corps. As soon as Jack and Bobby explained who they were and what had happened, the drivers offered them rides in the back of their trucks and radioed ahead to report finding the pilots alive. Bobby and Jack sat on crates of canned SPAM as the convoy bounced over the bumpy road to Tehran.
Four hours later, they finally rejoined the rest of their squadron. Major Bovington and the other pilots met them in the Tehran officers’ club, greeting the desert survivors with slaps on their backs and a round of stiff drinks.
Bobby felt guilty for going after Jack. If he’d been able to keep radio contact inside the storm, he suspected he would’ve heard the major ordering him to leave Jack behind. And he’d been responsible for the loss of a valuable plane.
To his surprise, Major Bovington was proud rather than angry. “You’re in the army now, son,” he explained. “We leave no man behind.” He wasn’t even angry about losing the planes. “We can build a plane in a couple of months. Know how long it takes to build a pilot? Twenty-one years.”
“I’m only nineteen,” Bobby responded with a cocky smile.
“And I try not to hold that against you.”
Suddenly the room went silent. The Russian pilots had arrived. And they were women.
No one quite knew how to react. They hadn’t expected women, and certainly not pretty women. They didn’t wear makeup, but their pale, freckled faces and sparkling eyes gave them a girl-next-door appeal. Their hair was pulled back severely, like a schoolteacher’s or librarian’s, and their uniforms, cinched tight at their waists with wide belts, were oddly appealing, especially the glimpse they provided of cute little knees peeking out from between the hems of skirts and calf-high leather boots. It all served to create a divide of silent discomfort between the Russians and the Americans.
Then Jack spoke, welcoming the women to the officers’ club and telling the Russian pilots that they were celebrating. His friend had just saved his life, rescuing him from the desert. Jack patted Bobby on the back.
Leave it to Jack to break the silence, Bobby thought.
The Russian pilots didn’t understand. Apparently, they couldn’t speak English.
Jack tried to speak more slowly. “Don’t you know how to celebrate?”
The Russian women glanced shyly at one another and spoke quietly in Russian.
“Celebrate. You know, a drink, a cigarette.” Jack pantomimed drinking and smoking.
The Russian women just nodded politely.
Jack narrowed his eyes, crossed the bar to the jukebox, and dropped a coin in its slot. He waited a moment for the record to flip. “Do you like Glenn Miller?”
Again, the women didn’t respond. But then the music began to bellow out of the jukebox’s tinny speakers. The girls broke into smiles; they couldn’t help it—the music was jumping. Jack started tapping his feet and snapping his fingers. One of the girl pilots followed his lead and did the same. Jack grabbed the girl and dragged her onto the dance floor. She laughed as he spun her and taught her to jitterbug.