He thought it over a moment, and decided there was nothing to do but try. If it caught on fire again, there was no more CO2 to put it out. But maybe it wouldn’t catch on fire; maybe it would even run.
He took it out of feather, and the propeller started to turn. He found the gauge and saw there was some indication of oil pressure. He moved the throttle half open, then threw the feathering switch again. The blades began to turn, and then began to rotate, forced by the wind.
He looked at the ENGINE RPM indicator, aware that he had no idea at all whether it was operating.
And then, before he heard the burst of noise, the indicator needle leapt. Now he had three engines. That might be enough.
He looked at the airspeed indicator. He was making 230 miles per hour. The fuel gauges, if they were working, showed just over half full. There was no reason he shouldn’t try to make it back to England, even if he didn’t know where England was, except in the most general terms: somewhere west of where he was.
He saw a fighter plane above him and ahead of him. Without thinking about what he was doing, he pushed the nose forward. It was a fighter pilot’s response, a dazed fighter pilot’s response: If you don’t have a chance to get above your enemy, go down on the deck and pray he doesn’t see you.
He was now 200 feet off the ground, close enough so there was the sensation of speed.
God takes care of fools and drunks, he thought. If I set this thing down anywhere here, I’m liable to kill myself trying. If I don’t kill myself and everybody on here, we’ll all wind up as prisoners. What I’m going to do is try to take this sonofabitch home on the deck. When I get to England, we can all bail out.
An hour later, he passed a coastline; and an hour after that, with his fuel gauge indicators approaching zero, he saw another coastline ahead. By then he had calmed down. If he had managed to take the airplane three or four hundred miles 200 feet off the deck—sometimes actually flying between hills and around church steeples—there was no real reason he couldn’t get it on the deck at the first airfield.
He pulled gently on the wheel. What he needed now was some altitude so that he could see an airfield. He picked up the microphone and summoned one of the crewmen to the cockpit.
“I’ve never landed one of these things before,” he said. “And there is a good chance that the landing gear is damaged. When I find a field, what I suggest you do is bail out. Tell the others.”
The crewman came back in five minutes, just before he spotted a group of B-17s circling an airfield, obviously landing.
“We’ll ride it down, sir,” he said.
“Then you sit over there and read me the landing checklist,” Bitter ordered. The crewman looked in revulsion at the ghastly, bloody flesh-and-brain -matter-splattered copilot’s seat, but he finally sat gingerly down and started looking for the checklist.
Bitter tried the radio but got no response. The only thing to do was simply break into the circle of landing aircraft and chance that he wouldn’t get into a collision. Then he realized there was no greater danger breaking in among the aircraft about to land than waiting around at the end of
the line.
“Skipper,”a voice came over the earphones, startling him.“That’s Horham. If you think you can make it, Fersfield is about twenty miles. Steer 270.”
Bitter decided that trying to make another twenty miles was less risk than breaking into the traffic here, and turned so the vertical marker on the compass covered the 7 in 270.
There were no airplanes in the air over Fersfield, which was a relief. Which was immediately replaced by terror when there was a sharp blast right beside him in the cabin. He looked and saw that the flight engineer had fired a flare out the copilot’s side window.
“What was that for?”
The flight engineer gave him a strange look.
“Wounded aboard,” he said. “We fire a flare when we have wounded aboard.”
Ignoring the pain that shot through his knee and leg when he worked he rudder pedals, Bitter turned the B-17 onto its final approach path, retarded the throttles, and had several hasty, terrifying thoughts:
Flaps! What the hell kind of flaps do I use? Are they working?
The gear! How is this big sonofabitch going to handle when I put the gear into the slipstream?
The flaps and the gear.
Am I now going to dump it, after having brought it this far?
How am I going to steer this sonofabitch on the ground if my knee goes out?
Or I faint?
Should I go around and pick up altitude and let the others bail out?