The odds, Biter thought, strangely calm, against getting this airplane back on two engines are staggering And even if I can get it to a decent cruising altitude, there will be swarms of fighters waiting to take us out The only chance we have is to keep doing exactly whati’m doing now. pying it 500 feet off the ground, headed in the general direction of England.
The flight engineer leaned over him.
“Everybody in the back is okay,” he said.
“What about the copilot?” Bitter asked.
“He’s bleeding bad,” the engineer said, and then asked what was on his mind, “Are you going to crash-land it, sir?”
“If we lose one of the two engines we still have, we’ll crash, period,” Bitter said without thinking.
He looked at the inboard port engine. The propeller was turning slightly in its feathered condition. The switch was still on, but there was no smoke.
He thought it over a moment, and decided there was nothing to do but try. If it caught on fire again, there was no more CO2 to put it out.
But maybe it wouldn’t catch on fire, maybe it would even run.
He took it out of feather, and the propeller started to turn. He found the gauge and saw there was some indication of oil pressure. He moved the throule half open, then threw the feathering switch again.
The blades began to turn, and then began to rotate, forced by the wind.
He looked at the ENGINE RPM indicator, aware that he had no idea at all whether it was operating.
And then, before he heard the burst of noise, the indicator needle leapt.
Now he had three engines. That might be enough.
He looked at the airspeed indicator. He was making 230 miles per hour.
The fuel gauges, if they were working, showed just over half full.
There was no reason he shouldn’t try to make it back to England, even if he didn’t know where England was, except in the most general terms, somewhere west of where he was.
He saw a fighter plane above him and ahead of him. Without thinking about what he was doing, he pushed the nose forward. It was a fighter pilot’s response, a dazed fighter pilot’s response, If you don’t have a chance to get above your enemy, go down on the deck and pray he doesn’t see you.
He was now 200 feet off the ground, close enough so there was the sensation of speed.
God takes care of fools and drunks, he thought. If I set this thing down anywhere here, I’m liable to kill myseg trying If I don’t kill myself and everybody on here, we’ll an wind up as prisoners. What I’m going to do is try to take this sonofabitch home on the deck. When I get to England, we can all bail out An hour later, he passed a coastline, and an hour after that, with his fuel gauge indicators approaching zero, he saw another coastline ahead.
By then he had calmed down. If he had managed to take the airplane three or four hundred miles 200 feet off the deck–sometimes actually flying between hills and around church steeples–there was no real reason he couldn’t get it on the deck at the first airfield.
He pulled gently on the wheel. What he needed now was some altitude so that he could see an airfield. He picked up the microphone and summoned one of the crewmen to the cockpit.
“I’ve never landed one of these things before,” he said. “And there is a good chance that the landing gear is damaged. When I find a field, what I suggest you do is bail out. Tell the others.” The crewman came back in five minutes, just before he spotted a group of B-17s circling an airfield, obviously landing.
“We’ll ride it down, sir,” he said.
“Then you sit over there and read me the landing checklist,” Bitter ordered. The crewman looked in revulsion at the ghastly, bloody fleshandbrain-mater-splattered copilot’s seat, but he finally sat gingerly down and started looking for the checklist.
Bitter tried the radio but got no response. The only thing to do was simply break into the circle of landing aircraft and chance that he wouldn’t get into a collision. Then he realized there was no greater danger breaking in among the aircraft about to land than waiting around at the end of the line.