High Risk 3.1

Previous    First

CHAPTER THREE

The set-construction people had put up some facades and tents that were supposed to suggest airfield buildings. Looking at the flimsy constructs, Casey couldn’t believe that they’d every persuade anyone. The cast and crew of High Risk were busily occupied around the set, which had also been decorated with a couple of the airplanes not being used today.

Casey was as far from the set as he could be and still be on the airfield. He was uncomfortably aware of how close to takeoff time it was getting, but he intended to stay out here for as long as he could get away with it. His stomach already seemed to be airborne, and he found himself staring blankly ahead at nothing, unable to keep his thoughts on anything for more than a fraction of a second. He hadn't been this nervous since his first solo. Except maybe the first flight after the accident. No, he didn't want to think of the accident. What he was about to do was frightening enough.


Besides, the next crash they wanted him to do was almost an exact copy of the one that had put him into hospital for six months in 1917. Now, that stunt was something to get worked up about.

He forced himself to think about where he was, why he was nervous. Last night's drinking session had broken up as early as Hart had threatened it would, though not soon enough to prevent Hamilton and Tennant from getting their snoots full to a considerable extent. Tillman had dropped Casey on the outskirts of Glendale—Casey had been unwilling to tell anyone that he was going to sleep in the High Risk hangar for as long as he could get away with it—at around ten-thirty, and Casey had been stretched out in his bedroll by eleven.

Which wasn't to say that he'd been asleep by eleven, or even midnight. The enormity of what he was being asked to do—crash an airplane and be filmed doing it—had hit home as soon as Casey had started breathing in the hangar's atmosphere of petrol and burnt castor oil. He still hadn't, it seemed to him, come to grips with it.

The morning's activities had helped distract him a bit. He'd done a few takeoffs and landings for the cameras, flying Hogan's good Tommy. The scout had been painted to match the one he was supposed to crash; Casey supposed that the paint job would be enough to convince most viewers that the two machines were one. The repetitive circuits had reminded him a bit of his days at the training squadron near Toronto, and that had been good.

He had also watched some of the filming, observed Hart and Desiree and their companions at work. It had mostly seemed dull and repetitive, save when Straebo, after several takes, suddenly started screaming at Richard Armstrong. The other actors seemed to think that this was perfectly normal behavior. Casey found it perplexing in its seeming arbitrariness: Armstrong was an ill-tempered idiot, but he didn't seem any worse an actor to Casey than any of the others. Rather than try to understand this, Casey absented himself from all movie-related activity and took himself off to the edge of the airfield, to walk and try not to think.

Suddenly, the world seemed to snap into focus. It was as if all he'd had to do was remember the second, more dangerous, crash—convince himself that things were going to get much worse—and then he didn't have to worry about today's stunt anymore. He strode back to the hangar where his Tommy waited.

Mitch got up from where he'd been lounging against the side of the hangar. "Ready?" he asked.

Casey nodded. "Let's do this."

* * * *

Mitch walked to the front of the Tommy and jumped up and down, semaphoring to where the DH-4 camera plane sat, engine idling, with Hogan in the observer's seat. Hogan's pilot opened up the throttle and the two-seater rumbled down the runway, lifting off after fifty yards or so. As the DH-4 began to circle the field, Casey shrugged into his leather flying coat—it was too warm for him to wear the thing on the ground, which struck him as ridiculous since it was October—and then Mitch turned to help Casey into the Tommy's cockpit.

"Hogan said to go over the script with you one more time," Mitch said, tightening the last of the straps.

"No need. I know what I have to do. Up to five hundred, over to the plowed field, then a careful spiral down to fifty feet."

"And remember to set the port wing down first," Mitch said. "That's where the attachments are weakened. And it's the port-side longerons that are double-taped." Casey nodded. "You just be sure before you go in," Mitch added.

The engine started on the first pull of the prop. It was ridiculous that Mitch had had to work so hard on that engine, when all they were going to do was destroy the plane. But the engine had to be running perfectly. They were only going to be able to do this once, and the last thing anybody wanted was an engine failure on takeoff. Casey least of all.

In spite of himself, Casey kept glancing at the lower port wing as he took the Tommy out to the centre of the field. It ought to hold; Mitch had done this several times before, and the weakened wing had always held out until the wingtip touched. It would be just his luck if this was the exception that proved the rule; so Casey continued to glance back and forth from the wing to the handful of instruments on the wooden panel at the front of the Tommy's small cockpit.

Once in position he held down the blip switch until the plane rumbled to a stop. When he was sure he was aligned properly, he released the switch. The engine re-started with a bang—he'd held the switch down a bit too long, and fuel had accumulated in the cylinders and cowling—but there was no time to think about that because he was moving faster, faster, and then the tail was up and the Tommy was off the ground and the wing had held, thank God.

He climbed carefully to five hundred feet, then slowly turned, as flat as possible, until he was heading toward the freshly-plowed field Hogan had rented for this stunt. The soft, crumbly earth was supposed to absorb some of the shock of the crash. Casey hoped that wasn't just banana oil on Hogan's part.

It took him a few seconds to spot Hogan's DH-4, by which time the two-seater had closed up and tucked in on his port side, just above and behind him. It occurred to Casey that he was out of practice; in France he would never have let anyone, friend or foe, get that close to him unnoticed.

Hogan swung his Bell & Howell around until Casey could see the lenses pointing right at him. Then Hogan waved with his right hand.

Go.

Casey nodded, and pushed the stick forward a bit. The Tommy, engine roaring, nosed down. Casey applied a bit of bank and rudder, praying that the wing would hold. The weakened attachments were supposed to make for a clean break when he touched the wingtip down, the idea being there'd be no splintering of the spars. Splinters at the speed of impact would be like shrapnel; the results wouldn't be pretty. But the precaution would be wasted if the wing gave out here. At this altitude, his parachute wouldn't open in time.

He was going too fast; at this rate he'd overshoot the crash zone and hit out of range of the ground-based cameras. Casey thumbed the blip switch.

Now he could hear the deep rumble of the DH-4's big Liberty in-line. He could even hear a bit of a hum coming from the rigging wires. One could almost think it was peaceful, up here. No wonder pilots liked to fly.

What does Desiree Farrell like to do? Casey shook his head; where the hell had that thought come from? Think about your work, idiot. He looked down, over the port side of the cockpit. The lower wing obscured a lot of his view, but he was pretty sure he was lined up nicely.

The Tommy shuddered as it approached stalling speed.

Oh, God. The engine was still off. Casey yanked his thumb off the blip switch, hoping the engine would still catch.

He felt the explosion almost before he heard it.

The Tommy jolted, and the front of the cowling was surrounded by a halo of fire, for a brief, fascinating second. Then the flame reappeared, curling around the port side of the cowling and lapping at the access panels. If it reached the fabric, Casey knew, he was doomed. The linen was coated with highly flammable nitrocellulose. In a way, it was as if he had wrapped himself in movie film: If the flames spread, he'd go up like a Roman candle.

In the back of his mind he knew what had happened, but there was no time to think about that. With no height in which to sideslip the flames away from the fuselage, he had seconds to get the Tommy down before the fire spread. Now he'd be crashing the plane not to impress the cameras but to save his life.

He cut the magnetos and reached for the fuel lever while edging the stick to the left to put the Tommy into a bank. It was hard to reach the fuel lever in the cramped cockpit, but the engine was still spinning and unless he got the valve shut, the engine would continue to suck in fuel to feed the fire.

Feeling blindly, he got to the lever just in time: he could no longer see sky in the space between the fuselage and upper wing, which meant he was about to hit. Bracing himself against the port side of the cockpit, he eased on left rudder to bring the nose earthward. The port wingtip brushed against something.

Casey heard a series of sharp bangs, saw a kaleidoscope of green and blue and black and orange. There was a sudden shock, and a flash of white that blotted out everything.

Silence.

When sensation returned, he realized that the straps that had been meant to help him now threatened to imprison him in a pyre. Frantically, he scrabbled for the belts, pulled them from the buckles. Somewhere in the distance, someone shouted. He heard screaming.

He also heard the ominous crackle of flame.

The last of the belts came free, and Casey drew his legs up close to the wicker seat, bracing each foot on a fuselage former. Gripping the leather coaming of the cockpit, he pulled himself up; something grated painfully against his side, and looking down he saw one of the heavily taped longerons had cracked inward. Without that tape…

Tucking his legs under himself, Casey planted his feet firmly on the seat and pushed up with all his might until he was free of the crumpled cockpit. As he landed in the turned-up dirt he rolled, hoping the tumble would take him far from the wreckage. It was suddenly very hard to breathe, but he forced himself to his feet and ran as best he could. They'd deliberately kept the Tommy's fuel tank nearly empty, but now all that meant was that there was a dangerous build-up of fumes in the tank. Casey remembered the old saying: Petrol burns. Fumes explode.

He didn't stop scrambling until he'd put a good twenty yards between himself and the flaming hulk. Then he fell, his face pressing into the soft, moist loam. Someone turned him over; he found himself looking up into the face of Barrett Tillman. For a second, they watched the Tommy burn.

Free to think and feel, Casey realized that his side and chest hurt with every breath. One knee ached, and the trickle of something warm and wet down his cheek was undoubtedly blood. Didn't do such a good job after all, he told himself.

Next     Prologue    Chapter One    Chapter Two