'Shaw' excerpt:
The wind was howling through the
cabin, drowning out the baby’s cries, and without his seat straps Mike had
freer movement to turn and check but communicating was difficult. Passengers
were a rarity and he had no headset for the observer’s position
Mother and baby were physically
unharmed, as was Henry, so only Mike had any injuries, the flying glass had
opened the left side of his face, which was bleeding heavily. He had also been hit
in the left side of his chest, but try as he may, he could not detect an entry
or exit wound, nor any trace of bleeding, but the pain was slowly taking hold.
It was puzzling, the bullet had all but driven the breath from him, and so
there should be an obvious wound in evidence.
Mike explained briefly, but adding
that he was not currently experiencing any light headedness or weakness.
Barfight Zero Nine checked out the
battered Bird Dog, top, bottom and rear.
“Rodeo, Barfight?”
“Go ahead?”
“You have a few holes, an antennae
that appears to have been shot away… and as well as some oil leaking from the
engine cowlings underside, you are losing either coolant or fuel in a slight
vapour trail.”
The Continental O-470 engine was
air-cooled so it would not be glycol that he was losing. Mike checked his
gauges, the engine temperature was okay, so too was oil, at the moment, but he certainly
seemed a little light on fuel. The Bird Dog had a maximum range of 530 miles
and he had been half full when he was on the ground at LZ Audrey, so that equated
to 265 miles, plenty of reserve for him to reach Quang Tri, 136 miles distant,
the nearest airfield.
After some quick calculations he
knew that with the current loss rate he had barely enough to make it.
Quang Tri’s single runway ran
NW/SE and he was flying into the headwind from the east, which was not helping
his predicament whilst he still had fuel. However, once the propeller shuddered
to a halt he could well need that easterly, at least until he turned onto
finals and lost its benefits.
He was currently flying at 5,000ft and
declared his intention to climb to 10,000ft. He would have preferred to fly
higher but he was not a paediatrician and did not know how the baby’s little
lungs would cope in an unpressurised cabin.
The Bird Dog had a 9:1 glide ratio,
meaning that it could cover 9 kilometres for every thousand metres of altitude
lost. In theory at least, that gave him 90 kilometres, a shade under 56 miles,
to play with once the fuel ran out. That was always assuming that the fuel
outlasted the oil. His oil pressure was reducing and the engine temperature had
climbed a couple of degrees. If the oil ran out first he would have to shut the
engine down in order to avoid a fire.
The sky was a deep blue and only
out at sea could he see the first clouds forming.
Time passed as clouds and the
Cessna closed on each other, the small flat six ran smoothly and it was, Mike
decided, the kind of day to be chilling beside a beach with cold beer at hand
in the Keys, not shot up in a SE Asian war.
He tapped each gauge in turn,
seeking an accurate indication of the fuel and oil that still remained. The oil
pressure gauge was hovering over empty but the fuel was already in the red. His
engine temperature was high, but not dangerously so, but that could alter
pretty damn quickly.
The faint outline of the Thach Han
River appeared, glistening in the sun, 30 miles distant. Beside the river lay
the airfield, not yet identifiable in the heat haze.
Barfight Zero Nine stayed with
them but the other five Barfighters and Jupiter’s T-28s peeled off, entering
the circuit and landing to refuel and rearm.
There was no warning, no dramatic
moment with the engine coughing and spluttering, the 213hp Continental simply
stopped as the last drop of fuel was consumed. The propeller, its blade angle design
the result of mathematical equations and skilful engineering to ensure the efficient
conversion of brake horse power from the engine into useful thrust, was now as
useful as a dead stick, hence the term.
It was not silent in the small cabin
without the engine noise, the wind still whistled through the shattered windows
and bullet holes but at a greatly reduced rate. The air speed indicator wound
down from 130 to a mere 45MPH.
It was still busy on the ground
with the constant arrival of aircraft requiring rearming and refuelling, but
that came to abrupt end as Barfight informed the tower that Rodeo Zero Seven
was ‘dead stick’, no engine. In Flight Ops they chalked ‘WOB’ on the board next
to Mikes call sign and sortie number as Barfight declared ‘07’ had wounded on board.
The ambulance and fire truck had scrambled and were sat a safe distance from
the end of the runway with motors idling, waiting to follow the aircraft as it
touched down, or indeed if it ploughed into the trees short of the runway
threshold. There was an unmarked route through the wire entanglements and mines
beyond the perimeter which the drivers had memorised for such eventualities.
Rooney got the word early, of
course, and left the mess hall to watch, standing near the runway with crossed
fingers.
Seven of the Trojan T-28s, which
had been involved in the rescue, landed first and the crews also made their way
over. Major Sherman, the 19th TASS detachment’s CO, sought them out for a first-hand account of what
had befallen Phoenix Zero Four and Rodeo Zero Seven.
“Were is he?” asked a voice, and
Rooney saw that it was Hector Ortega, wiping his grease and oil covered hands
with a kerosene soaked rag, Airman Lynch was at his side, shading his eyes from
the sun as he peered up at the sky.
“Probably planning on short
finals.”
“Why is that?” asked young Lynch.
“Winds from the east, not the
north west, the way the runway is laid out,” Rooney explained. “When he turns
in he’ll drop a-ways… hot day like this the air is less dense, it could be like
riding a winged brick when he turns onto the approach.”
“Damn, we just got done fixing it
only this morning.”
“Well look at it this way, maybe it
was your doing such a good job is the reason he is coming back at all, Airman.”
Rooney noticed that Captain
Dunstan was stood a little apart from everyone else, and he thought that 19
TASS’s Executive Officer looked exactly like those people who go to watch NASCAR
just for the chance to see someone die.
They heard the sound of Rodeo’s
shepherding T-28 first; it was circling above a slowly moving speck that had to
be the Cessna O-1A Bird Dog.
As the line Mike was taking closed
on that of the runway’s approach he began a gentle turn, reluctant to lose a
single unnecessary foot in altitude. They had lost 8,000ft in gliding this far,
which highlighted the difference between what an engineer’s slide rule says should
occur and what actually happens in reality.
Their rate of descent increased as
they lost the wind’s air flow over the wings, causing Juiqi to call out in
fear. They were indeed descending more rapidly than Mike was happy with. He applied
left rudder, yawing 40° into the wind and leeching some of its buoyancy.
Just off the line of approach was
a dark area on the ground, a true blot on the landscape, an area which had
proven to be a popular mortar baseplate position for hit and run attacks by the
Viet Cong. In order to deny to the enemy the cover of trees and foliage, that
area had been thoroughly napalmed.
Mike guided the Bird Dog above it
and smiled as they were buffeted from below by the small, but welcome, thermal that
the dark area produced. Seeking out dark patches on the ground, such as woods,
ploughed fields and built-up areas, was a well-known technique used by glider
pilots and birds, but unlike lightweight gliders and avians, his aircraft was
too heavy to fully capitalise on it, it could not soar upwards in a spiral to
greater altitude.
Every little bit helped though, at
this point.
Having transited that small area,
Mike renewed his former south easterly course.
As the Bird Dog grew larger, and
lower, those on the ground gave voice to their feelings, shouting encouragement
that Mike could not of course hear.
Ground crews stopped what they
were doing to watch the drama unfold and clerks left the air conditioner’s balm
to step outside and watch, and then to join in.
Rooney, Hector and Airman Lynch
were shouting as loudly as anyone, it was infectious and even the base
commander had stepped out of his office to watch. Only Gordon Dunstan wore a veiled
look of anticipation.
The voices fell silent as the
glide became a dive.
‘Ground Rush’ is a sensation
familiar to all parachutists, as well as any air traveller who has stared at
the ground as they came into land, that transition of the senses from ‘floating’
to ‘falling’. Henry’s view was a little limited but that sensation arrived as
Mike cancelled their yaw to the left and the aircraft’s nose dropped steeply.
Peering awkwardly around the
girl’s shoulder he could see that the minefield set before the airfield’s
perimeter was looming up, not the runway.
Mike’s eyes flicked from the
altimeter to the air speed indictor and back, picking his moment before cashing
in the airspeed that the dive had built up, trading it for lift, pulling back
on the column with wings level. They soared above the mine field and cleared
the 8 foot high coils of stacked barbed wire, separating it from the runway,
with three feet to spare. As the speed bled off and gravity was about to take
over he flared, settling the Bird Dog onto the tarmac in a perfect three
pointer and rolling to a halt.
He was blocking the runway but in
a moment there was no shortage of willing hands to push it clear across to the
hangar it had left only a few hours previously.
Mike climbed painfully from his
seat after retrieving Ali’s photo and returning it to his wallet. He was
favouring his left side, almost hunched over, and drying blood coated the left
side of his face from the cheek bone on down, matting into the cotton of his
flight suit. He turned back to the runway, raising a hand high in a gesture of
thanks as Barfight Zero Nine touched down on the tarmac.
Juiqi and the baby were taken to
the ambulance and Henry helped Mike fend off the congratulatory slaps on the
back as they followed.
