The Other Side of Midnight

"But there's one thing you have to know out front. We all belong to a union, Douglas, and promotions are strictly by seniority."

"I understand."

"The only thing you might not understand is that these are damn good jobs and there are more people coming in than there are leaving. That slows up the rate of promotion."

"I'll take my chances," Larry replied.

Sakowitz's secretary brought in coffee and Danish pastries and the two men spent the next hour talking and getting acquainted. Sakowitz's manner was friendly and affable, and many of his questions were seemingly irrelevant and trivial, but when Larry left to go to his first class, Sakowitz knew a great deal about Larry Douglas. A few minutes after Larry had departed, Carl Eastman came into the office.

"How did it go?" Eastman asked.

"OK."

Eastman gave him a hard look. "What do you think, Sak?"

"We'll try him."

"I asked you what you thought."

Sakowitz shrugged. "OK. I'll tell you. My hunch is he's a goddamn good pilot. He has to be, with his war record. Put him in a plane with a bunch of enemy fighters shooting at him, and I don't think you'll find anyone better." He hesitated.

"Go on," Eastman said.

"The thing is, there aren't a hell of a lot of enemy fighters around Manhattan. I've known guys like Douglas. For some reason I've never figured out, their lives are geared for danger. They do crazy things like climbing impossible mountains or diving to the bottom of the ocean, or whatever the hell else danger they can find. When a war breaks out, they rise to the top like cream in a cup of scalding coffee." He swerved his chair around and looked out the window. Eastman stood there, saying nothing, waiting.

"I have a hunch about Douglas, Carl. There's something wrong with him. Maybe if he were captain of one of our ships, flying it himself, he could make it. But I don't think he's psychologically geared to take orders from an engineer, a first officer and a pilot, especially when he thinks he could outfly them all." He swung back to face Eastman. "And the funny part is, he probably could."

"You're making me nervous," Eastman said.

"Me, too," Sakowitz confessed. "I don't think he's--" He stopped, searching for the right word, "stable. Talking to him, you get a feeling he has a stick of dynamite up his ass, ready to explode."

"What do you want to do?"

"We're doing it. He'll go to school and we'll keep a close eye on him."

"Maybe he'll wash out," Eastman said.

"You don't know that breed of cat. He'll come out number one man in his class."

Sakowitz's prediction was accurate.

The training course consisted of four weeks of ground school followed by an additional month of flight training. Since the trainees were already experienced pilots with many years of flying behind them, the course was devised to serve two purposes: the first was to run through such subjects as navigation, radio, communication, map reading and instrument flying to refresh the memories of the men and pinpoint their potential weaknesses, and the second was to familiarize them with the new equipment they would be using.

The instrument flying was done in a Link Trainer, a small mock-up of an airplane cockpit that rested on a movable base, enabling the pilot in the cockpit to put the plane through any maneuver, including stalls, loops, spins and rolls. A black hood was put over the top of the cockpit so that the pilot was flying blind, using only the instruments in front of him. The instructor outside the Trainer fed orders to the pilot, giving him directions for takeoffs and landings in the face of strong wind velocity, storms, mountain ranges and every other simulated hazard conceivable. Most inexperienced pilots went into the Link Trainer with a feeling of confidence, but they soon learned that the little Trainers were much more difficult to operate than they appeared to be. It was an eerie sensation to be alone in the tiny cockpit, all senses cut off from the outside world.

Larry was a gifted pupil. He was attentive in class and absorbed everything he was taught. He did all his homework and did it well and carefully. He showed no sign of impatience, restlessness or boredom. On the contrary, he was the most eager pupil in the course and certainly the most outstanding. The only area that was new to Larry was the equipment, the DC-4. The Douglas planes were long, sleek aircraft with some equipment that had not been in existence when the war began. Larry spent hours going over every inch of the plane, studying the way it had been put together and the way it functioned. Evenings he pored over the dozens of service manuals of the plane.

Late one night after all the other trainees had left the hangar Sakowitz had come upon Larry in one of the DC-4s, lying on his back under the cockpit, examining the wiring.

"I tell you, the son-of-a-bitch is gunning for my job," Sakowitz told Carl Eastman the next morning.

"The way he's going, he may get it," Eastman grinned.

At the end of the eight weeks there was a little graduation ceremony. Catherine proudly flew to New York to be there when they presented Larry with his navigator's wings.

He tried to make light of it. "Cathy, it's just a stupid little piece of cloth they give you so you'll remember what your job is when you get into the cockpit."

"Oh, no, you don't," she said. "I talked to Captain Sakowitz and he told me how good you are."