High Risk 5.5

Previous    First

[Concluding chapter five]

Casey awoke suddenly, shaking, his ribs aching with an intensity totally unjustified by the extent of his injury. A nightmare, he thought. From the hangar, just a few feet away from his bed-roll, he smelled castor oil, remembered what it was that he was supposed to do later today, and suddenly knew just what it was that his nightmare had been about.



August, 1917, had been hot. Dressing for flying had meant stifling, sweaty discomfort for as long as he was on the ground. The discomfort lasted only until he was airborne, though: however high the temperature on the ground, at the altitudes he'd reached on his familiarization flights the temperature dropped to below minus-thirty. It hadn't been until he'd landed after his first flight in those temperatures that Casey understood why the windows in the mess were never opened, even in the hottest weather. The pungent smell of unwashed young male bodies, stale alcohol and burnt tobacco was justified by the comfort that hot room provided to a pilot coming back from two hours spent fighting off frostbite and numbness. The cold in the upper air over Flanders was the real reason Casey had moved to California after the war and intended never to go back to Toronto.

Casey had not yet reached his seventeenth birthday when he was posted to the Camel squadron, and although he'd been flying since the end of April and had accumulated nearly forty hours solo, he still felt his youth weighing him down, as though he were still a child trying to sneak into one of his parents' parties. At least the Flanders front had been quiet, and Casey and his fellow newcomers had been afforded the luxury of a few days to fly at patrol altitude but behind the Allied lines, familiarizing themselves with the landmarks they'd need to guide themselves back once they began crossing the lines on patrol. He was still a boy, though, and knew he would remain so until he'd survived a trip over the lines.

The day of his first patrol assignment had finally arrived, and as he sat in the Camel's cramped cockpit Casey realized that everything he'd learned in the last few days had vanished from his mind as surely as if he'd been drugged into unconsciousness. The controls and instruments—and the Camel had precious few of those—suddenly looked alien.

It was only the fact that he'd gone through the motions of start-up so many times lately that enabled him to keep pace with the other members of the flight as they fired up their Clerget rotaries, their Camels rumbling down the tiny field into the wind.

When he got the Camel off the ground, everything went wrong.

The Camel was easily the hardest of the Great War airplanes to learn to fly. Almost all of its weight was concentrated in the first few feet of the fuselage; this imbalance, combined with the gyroscopic forces generated by the spinning rotary engine, made the machine unstable and gave it a pronounced tendency to drop its nose and turn to the right. On top of this, its engine—like most rotaries—had no throttle. Speed was controlled by adjusting the fuel-air mixture or by shorting the ignition. Unfortunately for beginning Camel pilots, the fuel-air mix that was best for getting the machine off the ground rapidly became too rich as the Camel climbed. Immediately after takeoff, a Camel pilot had to simultaneously adjust the fuel-air mix and shift from hard right to hard left rudder.

On his first combat patrol, Casey managed the second of these without difficulty.

When the engine began to run rough and belch black smoke, he panicked. Pulling back on the fuel lever while adjusting the fine mixture control, he choked the engine. When its forward momentum slowed, the Camel—already near stall speed because Casey had been climbing—dropped its right wing and snapped into a spin. From two hundred feet, he had no chance to restart the engine or recover from the spin.

He had time enough just to realize how stupid he'd been before the Camel slammed into the turf at the far end of the field.

Later, some wag from a Corps squadron tried to tell him that the broken leg had saved his life. While Casey sweated out a fever in the hospital at Amiens, his squadron was thrown into trench-strafing attacks in support of the Cambrai offensive. The squadron lost a dozen pilots in under a month. Casey had no doubt that he would have died or been captured had he continued flying. But that hadn't made the shame or the pain any easier to deal with. And as soon as he could get himself cleared for flying duties again, he'd demanded to be posted back to the front.

They hadn't let him fly Camels, and that was fine with him. He found the heavier, more stable SE-5a much more to his liking anyway.

Something in him changed, though, in the six months it took him to recover from the broken leg. He could see himself that he wasn't as aggressive in 1918 as he'd been the year before.

And he'd had a slight limp ever since, to remind him of his clumsiness and lack of concentration.

Now he was proposing to repeat his folly of a dozen years ago, and do it deliberately. What the hell was I thinking? Even if my ribs were fine this would be a dicey thing to do. He would still do it, though. To stay in Los Angeles, to maybe buy a house—or course he'd do it.

Casey tried to get back to sleep, but his ribs hurt just enough to keep him awake enough to realize how full his bladder had become. Shouldn't have had all that water with supper, he thought as he struggled to his feet. Should have eaten in a speak-easy instead. A man's less inclined to over-drink when it's San Fernando Valley scotch he's taking on board.

It had been a long time since Casey had been surrounded by a silence this complete. Glendale Airport was noisier by day than any Western-Front airfield he remembered, but at night it made cemeteries look lively. I'm probably the only person out here, he thought.

Pulling on his shoes, he made his way toward the front of the hangar. He stopped when he remembered that it was locked up. He'd have to relieve himself outside. At least it was easy to see his way around; moon- and star-light, and a single bulb down the line at Wilson Aero Services, provided plenty of illumination.

Out of deference to Mitch and Hogan, Casey resisted the urge to piss against the wall of the hangar. Instead, he held himself in check until he'd walked to the dirigible shed across the narrow edge of the field, near the trees.

Once his bladder was empty, though, Casey found himself facing a new challenge. He was fully awake, and at a guess there were still several hours to go before he was supposed to be up. He was familiar enough with this situation to know that there was no point in returning to his bedroll yet; he'd have to walk himself tired.

He began by making a circuit of the field, scuffing the dew from the grass onto his shoes and trouser cuffs. Then he began exploring the edge of the trees, drawn by the sound of the river moving slowly past. Eventually he found a path that led down through the woods and to the river-bank.

The Los Angeles River wasn't as wide as the Somme, nor was it as slow. But it was wide enough for somebody who'd grown up near the tiny Humber River west of Toronto. For a while Casey just sat on the bank, enjoying the play of moonlight on the water, and the sound of the current. From time to time he'd catch a glimpse of something floating by, a bit of wood or piece of paper.

It was while he was following the progress of what looked like a bit of picket fence that he noticed something pale caught up in the trees a bit further downstream from his vantage point. He got up to investigate.

And stopped when he realized what it was.

Next     Prologue    Chapter One    Chapter Two    Chapter Three    Chapter Four    Chapter Five