The Secret Warriors - By W.E.B. Griffin Page 0,128
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.