Martinson turned his head and leaned it back to look out of the corner of one eye at the back seat, but McDonough shook his head. There was no chance at all that the crashed bomber could be on this side of that heavy-shouldered mass of rock.
Martinson shrugged and eased the stick back. The plane bored up into the sky, past four thousand feet, past four thousand, five hundred. Lake Hawthorne passed under the Cub’s fat little tires, an irregular sapphire set in the pommel of the mountain. The altimeter crept slowly past five thousand feet; Martinson was taking no chances on being caught in the downdraft on the other side of the hill. At six thousand, he edged the throttle back and leveled out, peering back through the plexiglas.
But there was no sign of any wreck on that side of the mountain, either.
Puzzled, McDonough forced up the top cabin flap on the right side, buttoned it into place against the buffering slip-stream, and thrust his head out into the tearing gale. There was nothing to see on the ground. Straight down, the knife-edge brow of the cliff from which the railroad tracks emerged again drifted slowly away from the Cub’s tail; just an inch farther on was the matchbox which was the Otisville siding shack. A sort of shaking of pepper around the matchbox meant people, a small crowd of themthough there was no train due until the Erie’s No. 6, which didn’t stop at Otisville anyhow.
He thumped Martinson on the shoulder. The adjutant tilted his head back and shouted, “What?”
“Bank right. Something going on around the Otisville station. Go down a bit.”