The Secret Warriors

When Canidy climbed off the wing, walked under the plane, and looked up at the door, Grunier was standing in it, still carrying the shotgun and wearing a look of mingled fear and determination.

“If you have anything to put aboard,” Canidy said to him, “do it now. We’re going.”

He had decided the night before that there was no sense taking chances now that they were so close. Two things—in addition to his own and Whittaker’s fatigue—bothered him. Since there were no cabin lights, the lashing down of the bags of ore could not be inspected. And he wanted to be very careful when he made the preflight inspection, which meant doing it when there was light stronger than a flashlight or the headlights of a truck.

“I am ready,” Grunier said, without emotion.

Whittaker came up from the tail.

“Okay back there,” he said. “You about ready?”

Canidy waved him up the ladder.

The European touched his arm.

“Bon voyage, bonne fortune,” he said.

“Thank you,” Canidy said, and climbed up the ladder.

Grunier backed into the cabin, as if afraid at the last moment Canidy would somehow keep him from going along.

Canidy pulled the ladder into the airplane and tried to put it in its rack. It was blocked by ore bags.

That didn’t matter; he laid it on top of some ore bags. Whittaker had had the Africans arrange these on the fuselage floor in stacks of three: two on the cabin floor, one on top of the two. Whittaker had then lashed the stacks down and had done a good job even by lantern light.

By the time Canidy went into the cockpit Whittaker had started the engines. Canidy strapped himself in, released the brakes, turned the C-46 back onto the runway, and taxied slowly down to the other end. It steered heavily.

“It’s heavy,” Canidy said, hoping he sounded less concerned than he felt. “You can feel it.”

“A hundred twenty bags at a hundred pounds,” Whittaker said. “Twelve thousand pounds. Six tons. That’s heavy, but within our max gross takeoff weight.”

“Even heavier if those bags weigh, say, a hundred twenty pounds,” Canidy said.

Whittaker’s smile faded.

“Jesus Christ, you’re serious!”

“I don’t think anybody weighed them,” Canidy said. “But this won’t be the first plane ever to take off a little over max gross weight.”

“The runway’s pretty long,” Whittaker said. “We’ll be all right.”

“I thought about weighing a couple of bags,” Canidy said. “Then I wondered where we could get a scale this time of morning.”

“It’ll be all right,” Whittaker said.

There was no point contacting the tower, and he didn’t. He ran the engines up, checked the gauges, took off the brakes, and advanced the throttles.

The rumble of the takeoff roll was heavier and more muted than it usually was, and acceleration was noticeably slower.

“Goddamned thing doesn’t want to go,” he said.

“I wonder,” Whittaker said thoughtfully, “just how much weight we do have aboard.”

The C-46 finally came off the tail wheel.

Canidy was watching the airspeed indicator move with maddening slowness to takeoff velocity when there was a sound like an enormous shotgun being fired.

A terrible vibration followed. Instinctively, he applied right rudder and pulled a little harder on the wheel, and the vibration stopped. But the rumble of the takeoff roll seemed undiminished.

“We’ve blown the left tire,” Whittaker said, and then very calmly, “and we’re running out of runway.”

There seemed, perversely, to be all the time in the world to make a decision.

“What should we do?” Canidy asked. There was bile in his mouth again.

“Cut the switches and pull the wheels,” Whittaker said. “If you get this big sonofabitch in the air and then come down, it’ll blow up for sure. And it’s not going to fly.”

Canidy dropped his eyes to the control panel. The airspeed needle was very far from indicating even a marginal takeoff velocity.

“Wheels up,” he ordered calmly as he reached forward to cut the main switch.

There was a split second when he thought he felt life in the controls, and there was a terrible temptation to take a chance, to ease back on the stick and see if he could get it in the air. He resisted it. Their only chance was to stay on the ground and pray that sparks generated by metal against the runway would not ignite the fuel that would almost certainly leak from ruptured tanks.

Then there was a loud, very frightening scream of tortured metal as the wheels folded inward, and the prop tips and then the fuselage dropped down to encounter the runway.

Canidy felt himself being thrown violently against his harness and for a moment heard an absolutely terrifying screech of metal being violently torn apart. Then his head struck the bulkhead by his side window, and everything went red, and then black.

Whittaker had the wind knocked out of him but did not lose consciousness as the plane skidded for what seemed like a very long time to the end of the runway and then off. With a final crash of crumpling metal, the C-46 came to a stop against a mound of what looked like mine tailings.

Being out of wind, unable to breathe, frightened Whittaker. He was convinced that it was a symptom of grave injury, most probably paralysis. But then, in short, painful intakes, he was able to begin breathing.

Then the terror of being paralyzed was replaced by the terror of being burned alive.

He tore off his harness, leaned over Canidy, unfastened his harness, and picked him up and out of his seat by brute force. He dragged him to the crew door. It was wedged shut. He laid Canidy to one side and kicked it open with both feet.

He then took Canidy’s wrists and started to lower him over the edge of the cabin door. He would have to drop him, but there was no choice.

Then he let him drop to the floor of the fuselage again. Once he dropped Canidy and then jumped out himself, there would be no way to get back into the cabin from the ground.

He remembered seeing the ladder, and went looking for it. He found it, way up in front of the cabin, and stumbling over the bags, made his way back to the door with it. He threw it out the door, then took Canidy’s wrists again.

When he let go of him, Canidy just crumpled onto the ground.

Whittaker exited the aircraft backward, on his stomach, so that he was hanging from the door with his fingers when he let go. He landed harder than he thought he could.

He picked Canidy up and got him over his shoulder, and ran for a hundred yards, expecting to hear the dull grump of igniting avgas any second. He found an undulation in the dirt, and dropped Canidy down in it.

There was no explosion. The plane just sat there.

He thought of Grunier.

Fuck him, I don’t owe him a thing!

After a moment, he ran back to the airplane, looked around for the ladder, finally managed to get it in place, and climbed up and into the fuselage.

He found Grunier crumpled against the forward bulkhead of the cabin, his face bloody, his neck broken, quite dead.

He stayed in the fuselage long enough to confirm the incredible: The auxiliary tanks had not ruptured. They were warped, but the seams had held.

He walked back to where he had left Canidy. Canidy was awake and sitting up, holding a handkerchief to a cut on his forehead.

“I wondered where the hell you were,” Canidy said.

“Who did you think carried you here? The good fairy?”

He knelt over Canidy and examined the cut.

“You’ll live,” Whittaker said. “Only the good die young.”

There was the sound of aircraft engines.

Whittaker stood up, then reached down and hauled Canidy to his feet so that he, too, could see the Curtiss C-46 with “China Air Transport” painted on the fuselage making its final approach to the Kolwezi runway.