He’d be better for sleep. If he could sleep.
The runway could accommodate 747’s, but Shine took off within the first hundred and twenty yards of the pavement. The Porter lifted at a one-to-one ratio, gaining a foot of altitude for every foot of forward flight. In a straight-sided gulley or a clearing literally blasted in triple-canopy jungle, such a takeoff might have been necessary. Here, it was necessary only because Shine needed to prove that he and the plane could do it every time – because next time it might not be a matter of choice.
They climbed at over a thousand feet per minute toward whatever Shine chose to call cruising altitude for this flight. It had been possible that he’d fly the entire seven hundred miles on the deck to prove his capabilities in the most bruising way possible. Probably he wanted enough height to engage the autopilot safely – and leave his hands free, since Gisela had decided to sit forward.
Even before the Porter leveled off, Kelly had unbuckled his seat belt and stretched out on the narrow bench. A severe bank to port would fling him across the cabin lengthwise like a log to the flume, but Shine wouldn’t do that except at need. The bench, trembling with the thrust of the prop and the shudder of air past the skin of the aircraft, made a poor bed … but better than some, and, in the event, good enough.
He dreamed again of ancient Amida, its black basalt walls shrugging off attack by the Romans who had raised them initially. And he dreamed of the Fortress; but in the way of dreams and nightmares, the two merged into a single, stark threat, in space and on the empty plains of Mesopotamia.
It was still dark when he awakened to the gentle pressure of Gisela’s hands on his shoulder blades. Shine was making his final approach to the airbase at Diyarbakir, headquarters of the Turkish Third Tactical Air Force.
And perhaps the headquarters of the Dienst and its Plan, as well as whatever the aliens had been doing when one was shot with Mohammed. Rise and shine, Tom Kelly, there’s no rest for the wicked in this life.
The airfield at Diyarbakir had been paved for fully-laden fighter bombers, but, as on takeoff, the pilot had his own notions of proper utilization. Kelly was scarcely buckled in across from the woman who had awakened him when the Turbo-Porter hit the ground at an angle nearly as steep as that at which they had lifted off.
The cabin bucked and hammered in sudden turbulence as Shine reversed the blade pitch and brought the aircraft to a halt against the full snarling power of the Garrett turbine. The engine braked them to a stop within seventy feet of the point they first touched down.
Shine throttled back. Over the keening of the turbine as it settled to forty percent power through a medley of harmonics, he shouted, “You got ground transport laid on?”
“Ought to,” Kelly answered, nodding and finding that the motion did not hurt him nearly as much as he had expected. The nightmares he had seen and joined had wrung him out mentally, but his physical state was surprisingly close to normal. He unbuckled himself and stood up, rocking as Shine changed blade pitch to taxi and tapped on the left brake to swing the nose.
Through the windscreen Kelly could see a control tower of dun-colored brick, with corrugated-metal additions turned a similar shade by the blowing dust. At the edge of the building was parked a Dodge pickup truck painted Air Force blue. While the pilot centered the Porter’s prop spinner on the vehicle, its door opened and the driver got out.
Shine braked and feathered the prop again, only ten feet from the bumper of the pickup. “Door-to-door service a specialty,” he shouted.
Kelly gestured Gisela toward the cabin door but stepped forward himself so that he could be heard, and heard privately. “Appreciate it, man,” the veteran said, shaking the pilot’s hand between the two seatbacks. “You done a good thing.”
Shine laughed without much humor. “Yeah, well, Tommy,” he said, “you meet up with any of the types who got back anyway, the ragheads – you tell ’em I’m sorry. There was orders, sure, but … you know, the longer I live, the less I regret the times I violated orders, and the less I like to remember some of the ones I obeyed. You know?”