CHAPTER SEVEN

Down on Jungle or River?

EIGHTEEN thousand miles on a map. You can stand back and look at it. You can read the curving names of the countries at a glance. You can run your finger along the route in less than five seconds.

But that isn’t traveling over it, inch by inch, mile by mile. That isn’t looking down at it and seeing that it’s hard and big, and filled with strange things. That isn’t battling its elements, its people, its geography.

The Andes stood out like sentinels against the sky. Bleak, bitter, without a single relieving green spray. Snow lay heavily upon them. Clouds lay like beards against the steep sides. But the tops were bare and rugged. Barren of snow. Barren of clouds. Right-angled reaches of land which would never be of any use except as a barrier between the east and west coasts of South America.

Beyond them lay Brazil, jungle, uncharted rivers. But here were the Andes.

The Super-Comet bored toward the icy peaks, engines booming. Smoke Burnham’s hands were steady on the control wheel and his eyes were steady on the panel. From time to time a flurry of snow struck the shield before his face, momentarily blotting out the world. Then the sun would shine again.

Alex Montague was sitting at the radio, phones glued to his gray locks, his face intent on the dial.

The cabin of the mammoth amphibian was roomy, and it was furnished with plush and leather.

Mel King’s eyes were steady on Smoke’s back. Something like respect, something more than admiration, was mirrored on her face.

She had seen Smoke play tag with line squalls all the way across the Caribbean. She had seen him coast down to the water’s edge to pick up his drift from a steamer’s funnel. She had seen him sit there, hour in, hour out, hands on that wheel, relieved only occasionally by Alex.

She had watched the reflection of his face in the shield. His beard was making headway, but, like his hair, it was yellow and did not show. His shirt was a little torn, perhaps a little dirty. His bare arms were brown, stained by splotches of grease.

Smoke’s unjarrable nerves had brought them all the way down South America’s west coast, in sight of the mountains, in sight of the sea. He was always ready with a smile when he turned toward her. Then he would remember his work and turn back.

That hasty remembrance of work had always stood like the Andes between them. Flight had kept them apart—and Melanie King was now beginning to suspect that, perhaps, flight was worthwhile. She had flown, yes. But she had never known the steady devotion of a man to his work. She had never appreciated that there was anything but danger in that work.

Alex was speaking and his voice was clearly audible in the soundproof cabin. “Hagner is down.”

Smoke turned his head a little but did not take his eyes from the looming mountains. “Where?”

“Between Panama and Ecuador. Maybe along the equator. Eight hours overdue into Chile. No reports along the line.”

Smoke remembered the ranges up there, that chill plateau paradoxically along the supposedly hottest belt in the world. No place to land.

“Tough,” said Smoke. He took his wheel hand away long enough to light a cigarette. The Super-Comet flew serenely on. The compass shifted a fraction of a point.

“No further word from Jonesy,” said Alex. “They’ve patrolled the Caribbean for two days.”

“I said he hit a squall.”

Mel came up the aisle and stood at Alex’s side. “You mean he’s dead?”

Alex nodded, still staring at the dial.

“That’s the fifth,” she said in a low voice. She was watching the Andes come at them at four and a half miles a minute. The tan ground below seemed to creep.

“Yeah,” said Smoke, through lips which clenched his fag. “Inferior equipment.” Snow bombarded them again and he nosed up, increasing his angle of climb.

“Aren’t . . . aren’t you worried, Alex?” said Mel.

Alex glanced up at her. “Worried? Why should you and I worry, with that boy under the gun?”

“But,” replied Mel, “there was something mysterious about the way our broadcaster went out on us before we hit Chile.”

“You mean those smashed tubes? Some peon monkeying with it, that’s all—when we were putting in that change of gas.” Alex was thinking about Girard. Girard didn’t want them to come back. “Forget it, Mel.”

Patty got up, stretched with a glance at the Andes, turned around in the leather seat and was then promptly claimed by the sandman.

“Follow Patty’s advice,” said Alex. “She knows enough to trust Smoke.”

No other plane in sight. Nothing but mountains in front and foothills beneath. Nothing but snow flurries, and they would be gone when they built another thousand feet of altitude. The superchargers on the engines were yowling louder than the motors themselves, sending in the required oxygen. Air was getting thin up there.

“Who’s ahead of us?” said Smoke.

“Bradshaw and Klein,” replied Alex. “We’re second.”

“We’ll gain that over these mountains.”

“Why so?” said Alex.

“We won’t try for the peaks. We’ll take the pass that I’ve got marked on this chart.”

“Not afraid of this last batch of gas?”

“Why should I be? I strained it.”

“She doesn’t seem to have the soup, Smoke.”

“You’re dreaming!”

The foothills began to ascend below, as though the Super-Comet was coming down. However, a glance at the angle-of-climb indicator stated that they were only a few points below the stalling mark. Two thousand horses drank greedily of the tanks. Four whirling clubs shoved onward through the thinning air.

The Andes were there with them.

A peak reared up to the south—Mount Tupungato, 22,310 feet high. They were far below the summit, diminutive in a colossal world of chasms, ranges, mighty rivers.

A gust of wind struck the underside of the left wing. The ship careened drunkenly. Mel snatched at a chair and buckled on her safety belt. Another gust caught them amidships. They sank like an express elevator. A downdraft battered them back, like a smashing fist. A side current bore them relentlessly at a mountainside, hundreds of feet a second, until it seemed inevitable that they would crash.

Smoke, still puffing on the cigarette, shot the throttles all the way on and banked.

They rocketed straight for a blank wall. A lift caught them and shot them over the top of the ridge. A downdraft sucked them into the ravine beyond.

Mel’s head whirled in a giddy world where everything was suddenly very close at hand, everything, including death. The Caribbean squalls, the heat, everything paled beside this.

Mel’s head whirled in a giddy world where everything was suddenly very close at hand, everything, including death.

At three hundred miles an hour, Smoke shot them down the ravine. He charged one side as though bent on suicide.

“Here goes a bump!” he cried.

The ship staggered. The wings dipped and shivered. They soared up, up, up, lifted bodily into the incredibly blue sky.

Smoke’s words suddenly struck home to Mel. He knew what he was doing. He wasn’t flying blind. He knew where the upcurrents would be, where the downdrafts would hit them. He knew how to make the ricocheting wind help them.

A mountain was under them and a mountain was above them. They were mere Gullivers in Brobdingnag, and the Andes were the giants. They were a baby’s toy ship sent heartlessly into a hurricane.

Mel looked up into the shield and saw the reflection of Smoke’s face. It startled her to know that he was smiling. She had expected to see white knuckles and set jaw, and instead she saw a smile of pure pleasure.

For an instant it annoyed her, that smile. Then, when they sank down into another ravine and soared up the far side, she found the heart to smile with him. After all, it was fun, if you didn’t think too much about what would happen if an engine failed, if a wing buckled, if a sudden cloud enwrapped them. . . .

Like a scrap of paper in a typhoon they were thrown through the mountain-studded sky. Three hundred miles an hour. Five miles a minute. Four hundred and forty feet a second. A block and a half a second!

The Indians had toiled over these mountains, painful rods an hour, deluged by tumbling rocks of an avalanche, hacked down by the arrows of an enemy, plodding, plodding, plodding.

Two thousand horses. Five miles a minute. Ravines were under them and gone in the space of seconds. Mountains fled to the rear.

Abruptly the air was still. The throbbing motors dropped a note in their strident song of unbridled power.

Mel sat up, fearful that they were about to crash, that something had gone wrong.

Ahead, far ahead and below, lay green, flat plains. Smooth, soothing to the eye. Unlimited. The pampas of the Argentine!

Smoke turned as he glided down to a more breathable level. The dead cigarette was still dangling from his lips. “Have a nice roller-coaster ride?” he asked her.

At Rio, gliding up a bay of the purest turquoise, they bumped the dock and climbed out, thankful for a chance to stretch their legs.

“Go ahead,” said Smoke. “Get something hot to eat. I’m going to check these engines.”

Alex started to hang back, and then knew that he would only be in the way. He followed Mel up a smooth, paved street and tried to realize that they were in Brazil, in the southern hemisphere, some twelve thousand miles on their way.

An official stood below the wing and talked in broken English up at Smoke. “You skirt the coast, see? You follow the beach. That way you do not have to fight the jungle.”

“Rats!” said Smoke. “I’m going straight across to Panama.”

“I know of no rats,” said the official, swarthy and braided, and puzzled.

Mechanics were pouring gasoline into the tanks, drum after drum. Straining it through chamois. They cared but little how much gas they placed in the ship, how many thousands of gallons. Some Americano with more money than brains had said he would pay the bill. Some Americano named Girard. And all these planes would get their gas. No matter how many thousand gallons. They had never heard of Girard.

That is, no one but Manuel had ever heard of Girard, and Manuel was not speaking about it. He was standing up on the wing, watching the fluid gurgle into the wing tanks. And with each barrel he would drop a handful of white powder into the open hole. But before he dropped the white powder, he looked about to see that no one noticed. Especially that Americano there, tinkering with the motors. Americanos have a way of being fatal when angered.

Alex and Mel came back, laughing. Mel had a balloon she had purchased in a very Spanish toy store, and she was bouncing it on her palm as she walked.

Patty stood in the doorway of the cabin and watched her. Seeing the cheetah, the mechanics drew away, wondering why a man should want to carry a jaguar about with him. These Americanos! They carried jaguars and played with balloons. But then, a beautiful lady might as well amuse herself while she lived. Aviators and jungle . . .

Patty watched Mel come up the steps. Standing back, pretending not to notice, Patty yawned elaborately. Suddenly the balloon bobbed within a foot of her nose. She struck.

The balloon exploded.

Patty yowled, jumped far back into the cabin, and sat down, wrapping her tail about her legs with a very injured air. Patty did not like to have people laugh at her.

The Super-Comet taxied out into the stream, headed into the wind, and two thousand horses howled as she took the air.

“We’re heading west of north,” explained Smoke, munching on the sandwich Mel had brought him along with a thermos of particularly vile Spanish coffee.

“Across the jungles,” commented Alex.

The plane roared on a thousand feet above the crouching, spraddling trees. Mangroves, coffee bushes, rice paddies, tobacco and sugar cane whipped away from front to rear.

Night came like a light bulb suddenly turned off. After that there was only darkness and the roar of engines and the lighted panel in front of Smoke’s face. . . .

Mel dozed fitfully, lulled by the engines. Once she woke long enough to hear Alex say, “Connelly’s down in the Andes. Banner spotted the wreckage.” Then she was back in New York running her roadster full speed down an express highway.

Somebody was shouting, “Wake up!” But the car kept right on going and she couldn’t see anything except an instrument panel.

“Wake up!” cried Smoke again.

Terror clutched at her. Smoke looked so shadowy and unreal sitting before that panel. “What’s wrong?”

Not until then did she know that the engines were dead. Wind was sighing in the struts. Had they reached Panama again? No, Panama was miles from there, thousands of miles from Brazil.

And they were going down on soundless wings to a waiting jungle from which there was never any escape.

Stars were bright in the ebon sky. Nothing moved. Only the wind in their struts. A motor caught and then died once more.

Alex was hanging out the door. Something was in his hand. The world turned white below under the icy sputter of a flare.

“Anything?” cried Smoke.

“Reflection of something!”

“Water?”

“I don’t know. Circle!”

Another flare went over. The landing lights were pale white streaks out before them, reaching, reaching, trying to contact the forgotten jungles, trying to find water, a clear field.

Smoke, eyes straining into the black wall of silence, juggled the sluggish wheel. Going down. Down into what? Seven planes were out of it. Six would be heard no more. Would they be the eighth? He tried to jab the four throttles, but the engines were gone now. He had known they would go, an hour before, when they had first started to cough.

Four engines, all gone. Funny to think of Girard’s hand reaching out of the far northern country down into the thickest of Brazil.

For headlines. For circulation. For a ship which would stop that widely published threat of Japan. For the prestige of giving the government that plane.

For a fleeting instant Smoke wondered why he was here. Was it for the printed page? The speed? Or the sport?

The retreating wall which would suddenly be replaced by trees seemed to darken. Alex was hanging on, looking down, tossing flares like hand grenades as though to drive away the menace of trees. The fuselage flares were long gone, lost back there when the engines had first started to miss and chatter in their gas-starved bellies.

“Water?” begged Smoke.

“Can’t see,” said Alex.

Mel watched Patty pace restlessly down the aisle. Patty knew that something was wrong. Perhaps Patty, if she lived, would soon be back in her element, the jungle. But then, no one survives a head-on smash into trees. Branches would bite greedily into them, rip them apart. And the wreckage would be swallowed, soon to be covered by sinuous creepers. Another toll. Perhaps the eighth.

The printed page. The speed. The sport. Girard. A legion driven onward by spurs they could not name. A tan-faced, lean-jawed legion facing a wide, clear sky, their clear eyes unafraid.

Whispering struts. A murmur of sound which was the jungle. A mangrove came magically toward them, deceptively soft and inviting.

“Water?” pleaded Smoke.

Alex didn’t answer. He came back into the cabin, sat down and fastened his safety belt. He picked up a cushion and held it in front of his face. Mel hurried to follow his example.

Jungle. A thousand miles from nowhere. Months on foot. And if you were hurt, then you were lost. Living on monkey meat. Drinking water from stagnant pools. Listening to the shriek of a jaguar and the calls of strange birds. Patty was narrow-eyed and tense. The odors of land below were stirring strange things in her dun-colored breast.

“Water!” cried Smoke, his voice hollow and weirdly loud in the silence of whistling wind.

The black strip was under their hull. The big amphibian veered to the right, wings at four o’clock. The landing lights reached out with probing fingers, turning the black strip into a pale, iridescent green.

Trees bounded them. The ship sideslipped, came around again. The hull struck with a dull crack.

Spray rose in black plumes all about them, drenching them, but they welcomed it. The hull slid through the pale green fluid as though it was greased.

Smoke jockeyed the plane with deft, swift fingers. Gradually their speed diminished and then they were bobbing gently on the rippling wide reaches of the Rio Solimões, close to the Colombian border.

Smoke was instantly out of the cabin, climbing up to the motors on the wing. Alex handed him a flashlight and a wrench. Mel stared in front of her, seeing nothing, weak from reaction.

Smoke’s voice was cheerful. “These jets are all plugged with camphor! Listen. Get some buckets and drain all tanks into the empty center tank!”

It was odd, hearing his voice out of that hot, steaming night. Mel rose and rummaged until she found the buckets. Then she stepped out along the hull and met Alex.

“We need something to strain it with,” said Alex. “We’ve got to clean God knows how many hundred gallons of gas, while Smoke clears those jets. We need some silk.”

Her face in the light of his flash grew a little red. Then she went back into the cabin and came forth presently with something silk to strain a few hundred gallons of the fluid that would lift them out of this steaming swamp. After that, the gurgle of gasoline blended with the ripple of the stream, punctuated by the clanking of wrenches up on the wing, where Smoke worked feverishly to repair their maimed power plants. Mel was smiling, her eyes alight with a fire of resolve. She had been strengthened by something she could not name. By the sound of the wrenches? By the knowledge that they were far from the world? By the cries of the jungle at night?

Her arms were weary when the motors were running again. She was soaked with gasoline and her head felt light from the fumes. But she stood beside Smoke as he taxied out to clear water and started the plunging run which would whip them into the air.

After that she dozed once more, waking when they reached the cold gray harbor of Colón. She felt older, wiser, cleaner than she had when they had first touched this water. Importantly, cold in the brisk wind of a tropical morning, she stood by a tank and watched to see that nothing but strained gas was poured into the ship.

Then the Central American nations and Mexico and its high plateaus. A sweeping expanse of rough green and tan. Peons in the fields, plowing with yoked bull teams. Squat towns, all alike.

The dust and cries of Mexico City, and on again toward California.

Alex was at the radio, listening, his head bent forward, his eyes unseeing. Smoke’s yellow hair whipped as the wind rippled through a partly opened port.

“Five ahead of us,” said Alex, as though talking to himself.

“Who?”

“Doesn’t matter. The tenth ship is down.”

“Five ahead of us, eh?” said Smoke.

It seemed to Mel that they flew forever before they reached Lindbergh Field in San Diego. And then she felt as though someone had handed her a new life. It was so good to see honest American faces, to hear the hearty swearing of hurrying mechanics.

A weather bureau man was thrusting papers at Smoke through the door. “All closed in from Mississippi east. And getting thicker. Better pause awhile. No use killing yourself, Burnham.”

“Did the others go through?”

“Sure they did.”

“You don’t see me pulling any throttles, do you?”

The weatherman laughed and went away. And then they were flying in the dusk, headed east, with a tail wind helping them to attain a speed of five miles a minute.

The Super-Comet charged toward a gray horizon with renewed life. Airmail beacons were blinking dots down on the carpet of earth—that ever-unrolling carpet.

The fog hit them before they came to the big river. It curled through their struts and props and wrapped them in cotton batting. It blanketed the world, hid it from sight. They seemed to remain suspended, unmoving.

Smoke flew blind, not watching the fog. Only a few instruments on a panel, telling them that they were still right side up, still doing five miles a minute.

Smoke shut off the wing lights, and the fog went black. He turned them on again. White cotton was preferable to nothing at all.

Alex was tense at the radio. “They’re still ahead of us,” he said.

“She’s doing her best,” said Smoke. He was thinking about that note for fifty thousand. The note for two thousand. The hospital and hotel bills. The Mystery Ship and Girard. It was suddenly very close to him. The payoff would come high.

With clean gas pouring into them, the engines were doing better. With damp air roaring through the superchargers, they were straining themselves to the limit, racking their cylinders and crankcases.

Smoke pushed all four throttles up their tridents until they would go no further. Synchronization was gone. The engines were pounding against one another in a discordant bellow.