4
AEROPORT DE BISSAU
PORTUGUESE GUINEA
0225 HOURS
AUGUST 20, 1942
There was a radio direction transmitter at Bissau, a weak one. And when the CAT aircraft reached the area, they spotted a rotating beacon. But aside from a few faint lights—which could have been streetlights or anything—the beacon was the only aviation light. There were no runway lights. And there was no answer when Fine tried to reach the tower on the air-to-ground radio.
There was an hour-thirty fuel aboard. Sunrise was at 0455, twenty-five minutes after they would run out of fuel. There was no alternative airport.
They were flying two-minute circles around the flashing beacon, when all of a sudden approach lights and runway lights flickered, blinked, and then stayed on, and a voice came over the air.
“Aircraft in vicinity Bissau aerodrome, this is Bissau tower.”
The runway was rough, narrow, short, and—when they finally slowed down enough in the landing roll—they saw that it was paved with some sort of shell.
When they went into the cabin, Nembly was sitting on the makeshift toilet, hunched under a blanket. He was obviously quite ill.
“Fucking Spaniards and their fucking peppers,” Nembly said.
One man was both tower operator and airport manager. He was plump and olive-skinned and he wore a loosely woven shirt with square tails outside his trousers.
In broken English, he told them that when they hadn’t shown up on schedule, he had assumed they weren’t coming.
Fine managed to explain that they would need a ladder to inspect the engines.
A heavy wooden ladder was produced, which proved too short to reach the C-46’s engine nacelles. The airport manager sent for a truck. With the ladder on the truck bed, it was high enough. Wilson climbed very carefully up, worked the Dzus fasteners, and opened the nacelle cover.
“Looks all right to me,” Wilson called after three minutes of close inspection. “Maybe that Spaniard knew what he was doing.”
And then the ladder rung he was standing on made a cracking noise and gave way. Wilson fell outward, arms flailing. His forehead struck one of the propeller blades a glancing blow, but enough to open the skin. Then he fell onto the roof of the truck. The steel roof made a dull thump, and then Wilson slid off the roof onto the hood and then the ground.
He was unconscious when Fine reached him, and blood from the cut on his forehead covered his eyes and lower face. It was immediately evident that his left arm was broken.
Fine went quickly up the ladder and snatched the first-aid kit from its mounting just forward of the door. When he saw Nembly on the toilet, he realized for the first time that the C- 46 was without a competent pilot.
He went back down the ladder and rolled Wilson onto his back. First he applied a pressure dressing—a pad of bandage attached to cloth—to Wilson’s head to stop the bleeding. Then he found an ammonia ampoule, snapped the top, and put it under Wilson’s nostrils.
Wilson groaned, shook his head, tried to sit up, and then cried out in agony as the broken ends of the bones of his left arm ground against each other.
“Oh shit!” Wilson said. “It hurts.”
Fine found a morphine syringe in the first-aid kit and injected Wilson in the buttock.
There was a hospital, the airport manager told Fine, run by Catholic nuns. They put Wilson in the cab of the truck and took him there, a fifteen-minute drive over a very bumpy road. Twice Wilson asked to stop so that he could throw up.
With infinite gentleness, but no local anesthetic, two very obliging nuns, wearing thin cotton robes and headpieces, cleaned and sutured the deep cut in Wilson’s forehead, and then, making him scream despite the morphine, set his broken arm and wrapped it in a heavy plaster of paris cast.
Wilson sat up, his face gray and covered with beads of sweat.
“It’s a hell of a place to be marooned,” he said. “But it looks like this cockamamy operation is suspended again, at least until we can cure Nembly of his terminal shits.”
“There’s a schedule,” Fine said.
“Is the schedule that important?” Wilson asked after a moment.
“I think so,” Fine said.
“Well, I can sit there and work the flaps, I suppose,” Wilson said.
Four hours after they landed at Bissau, they took off again.
When he had it at cruising altitude and trimmed up, Fine went back in the cabin to check on Nembly. He was off the portable toilet, but not far from it, curled up under blankets. As he went back to the cabin, Fine consoled himself that even the worst case of diarrhea probably wouldn’t last more than twelve hours. By the time they reached Luanda, Nembly would be well enough to take the controls.
When he had strapped himself in the pilot’s seat, Wilson asked him if there was any Benzedrine. “I’m getting pretty damned groggy,” he said.
“Why don’t you get some sleep?” Fine said. “And take the Benzedrine when you wake up? I can handle it for a while.”
“I’ve just got to take a couple of winks,” Wilson said, making it an apology.
He fell asleep almost immediately.
Fine found the Benzedrine. It was guaranteed to keep you awake, he had been told, the price being that you slept like you were dead when they wore off. He decided against taking any yet. He would wait until he really needed one.
There was very little to do in the cockpit. The C-46 was on autopilot on a southeasterly course that took them over the South Atlantic. It was twenty-four hundred miles, say ten hours, from Bissau to Luanda. He knew he could not expect to hit it using only dead reckoning. It was like flying from Pensacola to Boston and back with no reference to anything on the ground and with no assist from navigational aids.
They were also now out of oxygen, which meant that he could fly no higher than 12,000 feet, which in turn meant the fuel consumption was considerably higher than it would have been at 20,000.
He drank all but what he guessed were two cups of the now-cold coffee in the thermos. He had to leave some for Nembly, he knew, presuming he recovered, or for Wilson if he didn’t.
He dozed off, caught himself, shifted in the seat, and flexed his legs and arms. He thought that perhaps if he took the plane off the autopilot and flew it, that might keep him awake. He really didn’t want to start taking the Benzedrine just yet.
He woke up, he didn’t know how much later, looked at the altimeter, and felt bile in his throat. The altimeter indicated 7,000 feet.
He knew what had happened. He had dozed off, apparently with the airplane trimmed in a very slight nose-down position. Losing this much altitude was bad, but it would have been worse if the nose had been elevated as much as it had been depressed. If that had happened, they would have just as gently climbed 5,000 feet, which would have taken them to 17,000. From 13,000 up there would have been increasing oxygen starvation. He would have been unconscious at around 14,000, and at 17,000 they would have all been dead.
He reached for the trim wheel and set up a slight nose-up altitude. Then he popped three of the Benzedrine capsules into his mouth and washed them down with a swallow of cold coffee. Benzedrine was no longer an option for later use; he needed it now.
He took the C-46 to 10,000 feet, then went aft again to check on Nembly. If anything, he was worse. Whatever was wrong with him, Fine decided, it had nothing to do with Spanish peppers.
But when he got back to the cockpit, Wilson was awake.
“Is there any coffee left?” Wilson asked. “I can watch the gauges awhile.”
“I just took some Benzedrine,” Fine said as he poured a cupful of coffee for Wilson.
“You should have woken me up,” Wilson said.
What I should have done, Fine thought, suddenly furious, when Canidy waved the flag at me, was tell him to stick it up his ass. Then I wouldn’t be in this fucking mess.
The depth of his anger surprised him. After a moment, he decided it was a symptom of fatigue. And fear.
The next thing he knew, he was coming awake. His bladder ached to be relieved of all the coffee.
The damned Benzedrine doesn’t work, he thought angrily.
The forty-eight-hour clock on the instrument panel had stopped. He looked at his watch. He had been asleep for two hours. The clock had stopped long before that. They had forgotten to wind it.
What else, in our fatigue, have we forgotten to do?
He wound the clock and set it, and then went aft to relieve himself. Nembly was shivering beneath his blankets, and the square aluminum box they were using as a toilet smelled so foul when Fine lifted the lid he thought he was going to be sick.