Memoir From Antproof Case (59 page)

"Ten radios," I said. "Fifty radios, just for you." I climbed into the plane and retrieved two gold bars that I then presented to him. "Melt them," I ordered, in what was getting to be a habit. "Get rid of the numbers and the seals." He was stunned, I suppose, because when he understood that I was giving them to him, making him immediately the richest man he had ever met, he tried to kiss my hands, but I wouldn't let him. Finally, he hobbled off into the night, barely able to carry his new wealth.

Up ahead, lightning warred in the clouds as if the world were coming to an end, and daylight struggled in vain against the weight of darkness. Despite the stinging wind-driven droplets, the crack of not-so-distant thunder, and the lift and drop of the wings in the violent air, I reeled in my seat and had difficulty keeping my eyes open. At two o'clock in the morning the fire was pink, with white ash that the wind blew into the night, layer by layer, on its stronger gusts.

My sight well accustomed to darkness, I saw quite clearly an agitated glow crawling from the direction in which the peasant had disappeared. It was light from the headlamps of a line of twenty or thirty cars or trucks speeding in my direction. That idiot had undoubtedly made a spectacle of himself and the gold in front of his entire village. Though they might have been peaceable people, it didn't matter. They had probably been drinking coffee all night, and with the plane loaded as it was my life was worth nothing. I was exhausted, and the storm was furious, but I had to get into the air.

I closed the door behind me, ran forward, bumped my head, fell into the pilot's seat, and began to start the engines. If the trucks turned onto the landing strip I wouldn't be able to take off, or, worse, I wouldn't be able to stop, and as I incinerated myself and every vehicle in my path, the flames would light up the night for fifty miles. What would these people know? They were capable of turning onto the field even as I was hurtling toward them far past the point of no return.

I worked as fast as I could, but it takes time to start four engines, and in the terrible moments of waiting I watched the string of foreshortened lights approach in darkness and rain, bobbing up and down with the contours of the road.

Right inboard, running ... left inboard, running ... right outboard, running. The left outboard, however, refused to start. It spun around, it coughed, and it sputtered. I adjusted the fuel mixture. The engine spat out a huge cloud of white, smoke. "Come on!" I shouted, giving it another try. "Come
on!"
It cycled with determination, it coughed again, it sputtered and sputtered, and then it took. Soon its many knife blades were twirling faster than human vision was made to see, and as I
pushed against the throttle the noise and vibration lifted me in my seat.

Brakes released. The plane pitched forward and began to roll. Fully loaded with fuel and a cargo of metal, with engines hot at maximum rpm, it would have made a magnificent sight as it plowed into the trucks. And if there were thirty trucks and each one carried, who knows, ten people, or just half that number? I would kill or maim two-thirds of them—a hundred people.

In an instant I had to decide whether or not to put on my lights. If I put them on, the convoy would see that I was rolling at great speed. Presumably, this would stop it from turning onto the runway.

I threw the switch. Now, I knew, the people on the trucks could see two great blinding lights rushing toward them on a parallel but offset track. They would have to be insane to turn onto the runway.

They were. They did. Not the lead vehicle, but one from the middle, the others following instantly and without hesitation. I was going too fast to stop. Had I tried to stop I would have plowed into them too slowly even to skip over them, like a perfectly aimed, slow-motion bowling ball.

So I pounded the throttles forward and my eyes leapt from the lights ahead to my instruments. I wasn't going to make it. I blinked the lights. Those idiots blinked their lights back at me! What were they thinking?

Then, as if struck by lightning, I realized that with the winds of the storm coming from directly ahead, my airspeed was more than sufficient for takeoff. I pulled back the stick as fast as I could, and I rose.

But the plane was so heavily loaded that the angle of ascent was nearly flat. Only seconds remained before a collision. I started to pull in the landing gear. The landing gear was normally slow to retract, and it had been damaged. It made all kinds of new noises as it was pulled in. I was suddenly right on top of the first truck, which had turned left to avoid impact.

With a tremendous thud the left wheel hit the roof of the cab and my right wing rose. I compensated but the left wing rose too much, because the landing gear had been snapped off like a chicken leg. I lifted the right wing, which had come within a few feet of the ground, and then, having cleared the other trucks, I was level and rising.

 

Never had I flown directly into the heart of a storm, for the P-51 has the speed and agility to dodge just about anything, and neither bombing raids nor fighter patrols were run in impossible weather. The lightning-infested bales of black cotton that lay ahead were new to me. I was awake, but I had neither the confidence nor the anger that swells as combat approaches. I was, however, unafraid. The immensity of the storm was the antidote to fear, if only because it was impossible to be afraid of everything, and as it got closer, it expanded until it became everything.

All I could do was climb. No fuel was left at Alto Parnaíba, and my tanks had fuel enough only for a straight shot through the storm. I knew I was going to hit the wall, but hoped it would be above the lightning.

Water sprayed from the holes in the windshields and ran over the instrument panels. Eventually its weight could take down the C-54, and I could do nothing to stop it. I reentered the clouds at fourteen thousand feet. It had been turbulent outside, but once within the clouds the plane immediately dropped down four thousand feet, caught in a column of air pushing toward
the ground like a piston. It felt like a dive even though the nose was angled up, and the only way out was to move slowly forward through the downdraft.

Finally, at 10,000 feet, the plane exited into relatively tranquil darkness that lit up like a flashbulb only several times a minute as lightning was diffused throughout the clouds. The wings were vibrating, the engines straining, and water sprayed through the windshields. When it had cracked the sky with lines like those in shattered glass, the lightning was less terrible than when it turned everything in the universe to the color of magnesium.

The plane was lifted, dropped, rolled, and pitched with such ferocity that I felt as if I were inside a bone in the jaws of an atropine-injected terrier. The cabin jingled like crazy. Straps and belts beat against the bulkheads like whips. I saw screws turning in their holes, and watched the needles on my many gauges snap back and forth in unison like the Rockettes. One second I had full tanks of gasoline, and not a tenth of a second later I was totally dry. One second I was at sea level, and another at 40,000 feet.

The vibration was so bad that my eyes started to dance in their sockets. I had no idea how much time had passed, or what altitude I had reached, or even if I were pointed up. I was freezing cold, with water spraying in my face, and my muscles were cramped from fighting the controls. But as the plane rattled and shook and I was about to lose my influence over it, perhaps to be turned upside down and slammed to the ground, I began, as always, to enjoy it.

I heard a note of music, a single note that rose as if from nowhere and was held impossibly long. I had heard it before, when I would dive after a plane evading me for its life, and shell casings flew from my cannons like tailings flying from a milling machine. There, in the storm, in ten-tenths cloud, once again, nothing of me was left as I rode on waves of pure force.

I had no objection to this. I felt neither pain nor fear. I sank from chamber to chamber deeper into the darkness of life and the light of the soul. All in all, it was a remarkably gentle thing, and the greater the force of everything flying apart, the stronger the presence of absolute tranquility. The feeling is like that of coming home. I wanted the plane to break apart, but at twenty-one thousand feet I broke through the surface of an endless mass of cloud and rode into a clear sky blazing not with the insanity of lightning but with the solidity of stars.

Dry air flooded the cabin, and, despite the roar of the engines, the world was silent. Below, the clouds flashed white in random syncopations that kept them continuously bright. I took my oxygen, found my course, and continued on with moonlit speed.

 

I came fully awake only at dawn. For hours I had been thinking and dreaming, shivering and faint. Though I would often fall asleep and then find myself jolted by the plane nosing up or down, I managed somehow to keep the compass dead on the right heading. When the sun finally lit the cabin and I came to my senses, I discovered that the source of this navigation miracle was that the water pouring over the instrument panel had shorted out half the electrical system. The compass had been faithful through the night to the magnetic field of the instrument panel. No matter which way I turned the plane, it always read the same.

I had absolutely no idea where I was. Though the sun had risen more or less where it should have, previous to that the sky had lightened far to my left and somewhat behind me. The land below looked like the interior rather than the coastal plain. All
across the horizon fat clouds like the floats of jellyfish rode in the buoyant blue sky, trailing dark veils of rain. But everything was mostly sunny and depressingly green, with hardly a river in sight and not a single road that I could see. It wasn't the Amazon; it was far too hilly.

Though I had less than an hour of fuel I thought that perhaps everything would come out all right if I flew east, that I would sight the coast and then discover that I was within striking distance of my destination. So I flew on for half an hour, searching for the thin blue line that would mean my salvation, but it did not appear. With, at best, twenty minutes' fuel remaining, I realized that I had been defeated.

The country below me was an endless carpet of corrugated green hills and occasional rocky outcroppings. In the creases of the hills flowed streams or brooks, but nothing sufficiently flat or wide for an emergency landing. The best I might do would be to come in along the top of a ridge, but as the ridges were covered with tall trees, that held very little promise.

Even an airport might not have been enough, in that a large part of the landing gear was missing or stuck. During the war I had seen bombers trying to land on a wheel and a door, and more terrible a sight does not exist than that of a plane, full of wounded men, that slowly cartwheels and breaks into flame.

If I survived the crash, I might not survive the wilderness. And even if I did I might lose the gold either to the undergrowth or to someone who would find it before I could return. Now the best that might happen was that, unharmed, I would reach my apartment in Rio de Janeiro and have to start all over again in a strange country where I knew neither one word of the language nor a single person. Though this was defeat, I felt immediately younger.

When I had only ten minutes of fuel in my tanks, I saw a road, one of those newly cut orange ribbons stretching like a ray of light through endless green. The corrugated landscape stopped at the edge of a green sea. The clay was probably impassable in the rainy season, and the track was empty for as far as I could see.

I flew along its length, reconciled to the fact that when my fuel was exhausted I would land on it as best I could, hoping to settle the fuselage into a narrow slot after the trees had clipped off both wings. I was unable to see from the air that the road was following a grade, but this came clear when a river appeared two miles to the right, where an outcropping of rock stepped down in the gradual descent of the terrain. The river issued from a green berm and a tangle of trees, plunged in a dazzling white fall, and then turned forty-five degrees from the road.

Though this stream was no wider than the road, I thought it might be more forgiving of a landing, so I flew along its length for a few minutes looking for an opening, but the straightest and widest section was at the beginning, just after the fall.

Banking 180 degrees, I began my descent. I didn't think I was going to come out alive, but at least I knew that the river was white and fresh, and that it ran fast.

As I dropped lower I discovered that I had underestimated it. It was wider than it had appeared from altitude. Were I to risk crashing headlong into the fall, I might be able to take the plane in over the water and clear the obstructions on the banks. I decided to do this, though I hadn't much running space.

The left outboard engine began to skip, so I knew I was just about dry. I lowered the flaps, knowing that once they hit the water they would act as a break and throw me and everything else in the plane forward with a shock that would probably kill
me. But I had no choice. If I raised the flaps even at the last moment, my speed would be too great and I would crash against the cliff behind the waterfall.

I was too busy to think. The foam at the base of the waterfall looked like snow, and when the plane hit, the impact was not as great as I had expected, because the water was so full of churning air. The plane slid faster than I thought it would, which was alarming. In an instant it went right through the fall and smashed against the rock wall behind it.

I was still conscious as the cockpit filled with water. The nose of the C-54 pointed slightly up because the waterfall pushed down the tail.

I unbuckled my seat belt and floated from it quite easily. The glass was still in all the windows, so I swam to the door in the fuselage, but it had been jammed shut. Sure that I was going to drown, I looked up in a gesture of pride and acceptance, and when I did I saw a rupture in the fuselage, and that right above me, in the ceiling of the plane, was a spacious opening.