Characteristically, Persons himself did the heavy work of lifting and swinging the tail. The Cub bumped off the apron and out on the grass into the brightening morning.
“Switch off!” the cadet at the nose called. “Gasi Brakes!”
“Switch off, brakes,” Martinson called back. “Mac, where to? Got any ideas?”
While McDonough thought about it, the cadet pulled the prop backwards through four turns. “Brakes! Contact!”
“Let’s try up around the Otisville tunnel. If they were knocked down over Howells, they stood a good chance to wind up on the side of that mountain.”
Martinson nodded and reached a gloved hand over his head. “Contact!” he shouted, and turned the switch. The cadet swung the prop, and the engine barked and roared; at McDonough’s left, the duplicate throttle slid forward slightly as the pilot “caught” the engine. McDonough buttoned up the cabin, and then the plane began to roll toward the far, dim edge of the grassy field.
The sky got brighter. They were off again, to tap on another man’s tomb, and ask of the dim voice inside it what memories it had left unspoken when it had died.
The Civil Air Patrol is, and has been since 1941, an auxiliary of the United States Air Force, active in coastal patrol and in air-sea rescue work. By 1954when its ranks totaled more than eighty thousand men and women, about fifteen thousand of them licensed pilotsthe Air Force had nerved itself up to designating CAP as its Air Intelligence arm, with the job of locating downed enemy planes and radioing back information of military importance.