Part 1

STORM

By Leland S. Jamieson

Illustrated by Paul Lehman

A vivid and very real story of airplane adventure--by the professional pilot who gave us “Altitude” and “Crash Pilot.”

The Rock Springs tornado was followed by the newspapers with credible accuracy from the time it howled down upon the little isolated village in the hills until the last one of the injured was laid safely in a hospital in San Antonio, yet the most dramatic note of the whole affair was sounded in a way that few people realized.

Rock Springs, being situated upon a low bald hill in a wide valley above the source of the East Nueces River, offered no resistance to the shrieking, tearing wind that whipped down from the dusk of a spring evening and smashed it into ruin. At seven forty-four in the evening, as tired ranchers were sitting down to their usual late suppers, the air was calm; at seven fifty-one the storm lashed out of black clouds and ripped every building from its foundation; at eight o’clock there came a lull, a period of perhaps ten minutes when not a breath of breeze flicked at the dust of crumbled stone that lay strewn across the streets. The murderous force lifted itself back into the heavens, leaving over Rock Springs the inky blackness of scudding clouds above, and the far echoes of the whirling wind as it sighed into the distance.

The sixty houses of the town were flattened to the earth when the wind had left them, and for a moment after the storm died there was no sound, as though the people who still lived were stunned into muteness. Then, almost immediately, there arose the cries of terror and anguish and desperation of two hundred people. Women groped in still fear for their children, calling names into the thick night, fumbling in delirium through the ruins of their homes, afraid to hope. Men sought their wives, sometimes to come upon a huddled form, silent and unmoving.

A breeze stirred ominously and dispelled the heavy air; and shortly afterward a booming rain whipped down in torrents of black water. The uninjured struggled on in their search tirelessly, frantically; night wore itself along, adding, minute by minute, to the suffering and grief. Lightning thrashed down in vicious tongues of livid flame, and in these eerie flickerings the search was carried on....

Mary Collins, the telephone operator in Rock Springs, was trying to get a call through to Uvalde when the storm beat down upon the village. She heard the Uvalde operator answer; then the line snapped as the sweeping wind struck it. She was trying to reestablish the connection when she heard the buildings on the other side of town clatter into fragments. The next instant her own building was down around her; she was in darkness as the storm passed on.

Stunned, groping her way out of the debris in blindness and fear, she heard the cries and shrieks and supplications of people all around her.

With a stab of torment in her mind she scrambled over the debris toward her home. Her parents--what might have happened to them! She fought her way, falling over splintered boards and timbers. In the terrible quiet following the wind she heard and felt the agony on every side of her.

How she got to her father’s house she never knew. She heard a voice which she recognized as her mother’s, and she hurried in that direction. By a flicker of lightning she saw her father stretched upon the ground, unnaturally--her mother bending over him. He groaned.

“Mamma!” the girl gasped in anguish. “_Daddy!_” She was in distraction. “Oh, what are we to do?”

“Mary?” Dr. Collins asked. “I’m not bad--a timber got me on the leg--it’s broken.” He did not add that two ribs were splintered and that he felt himself bleeding internally. He was a doctor--the only one in Rock Springs. As with most medical men his own injuries caused him no more emotion than those of other people. He looked at them objectively.

“The town’s wiped out!” cried Mary. “There are no lights--what shall we do?”

Suddenly Dr. Collins was speaking in his professional voice.

“Mary, you must go for help!” he exclaimed, with remarkable self-possession. “I’m hurt--we need a doctor quickly. Get to a telephone and call Uvalde--have them send a doctor. Tell them what’s happened--they’ll have to get medical supplies from San Antonio--serum and instruments. These people are suffering terribly! You must hurry!”

“But you--”

“Don’t think of me! I’ll get along--we’ll get to shelter somewhere. Hurry!”

The girl thought immediately of the car, and a lightning flash revealed it where it had been standing before the wind struck. But it was not a car now--it was a heap of metal on its side in the middle of the street. With a sob of anxiety for them, she kissed both her parents and started toward the road that led out of town, seeing her way by streaks of lightning that burned themselves out before her eyes.

The rain boomed down suddenly and beat at her, but she fought her way. The blinding whip of flying water cut at her face and body; the wind, rising again, sought to drive her back, but she went on. One mile, two, three. She knew that the nearest telephone by which she could call Uvalde was liable to be nine or ten miles down the rocky road. Ten miles through this storm! Dimly she wondered how far her strength would carry her.

For countless hours, through a torture of mud and water and driving wind, she struggled on, following a road that was at times beaten smooth by the fall of water, and at other times was a raging wash. She reached the limit of human endurance, and still fought her way along the road; she came to the time when she thought she would collapse from exhaustion, but the thoughts of human suffering there behind her goaded her to greater efforts.

Lightning, sheets and strings and chains of it, thrashed down on every side of her. Ordinarily she would have been afraid of it, but now it caused her no concern.

So when a bolt leaped down fifty feet in front of her, at the top of a hill, she paid it no attention. She passed that point, went a few steps beyond, and the second bolt struck. Unconscious, she pitched forward on her face....

At three o’clock in the morning Mary Collins staggered up to a rancher’s house near Camp Wood and beat feebly against the door. Presently the rancher appeared, holding a kerosene lamp above his head. He stared at the apparition in amazement.

“Storm--at Rock Springs!” the girl moaned. “People dead--dying! Get doctors--medicine! Hurry!”

After that she gabbled to him in delirium. He finally got a few disconnected facts about the storm. He tried the telephone, and at last Uvalde answered. He gave his orders quickly.... When he turned back to Mary Collins she had collapsed upon the floor.

* * * * *

Nick Wentworth, chief pilot of the Air Patrol, in San Antonio, was called out of bed at four-thirty in the morning by Doctor Wilson, from the Grayson Hospital. Grumbling a little, and somewhat startled by the urgency with which the man presented himself, Nick opened the door and let him in.

Wilson introduced himself in two words. He explained his presence quickly.

“Rock Springs--wiped out in--a storm! ” he panted. “The hospital is sending me--my mother was visiting there. It’ll take me five hours to drive in my car--can you take me, by air?” He asked the question as an order. “They’ve got to have a doctor--quickly! ”

Nick, dull and heavy-eyed with sleep, considered the possibilities of getting through. He could not take Wilson in his own plane, because it was a single-seated affair, built for speed and endurance in the air. Scott, his assistant, was gone, hence Scott’s plane was not available. Two of the Patrol’s ships were undergoing motor overhaul. There was only one plane left that Nick could take--an antiquated Vought, a spare, seldom used.

“I’ll go,” he decided. “Just a minute till I dress.” Before he dived back into his room he called the flying-field. After a persistent ringing, the telephone was answered by a field mechanic. Nick gave him quick instructions.

“She’ll be on the line tunin’ up when you git out here,” Barnes, the mechanic, replied. And then, quickly: “Hey, wait a minute! You can’t take that ship--it’s got a leaky radiator--we just discovered it yesterday.”

“Can’t take it? I’ve got to take it! You put it on the line, and have it started when I get there!”

Barnes grumbled something. Nick rushed into his room to dress, and Wilson paced back and forth in the other room of the apartment. The Patrol pilot returned three minutes later, buttoning up his coat. He stopped to get an extra helmet and a pair of goggles for Wilson.

“Let’s go!” he called. “I’ll have you there a few minutes after daylight--if that ship will fly at all.”

“What is it?” Wilson asked nervously. “What’s wrong with your ship?”

“Nothing that’ll stop us!”

But the physician was not satisfied. “This is important, Wentworth,” he warned; “if you have any doubts about getting me through, say so, and I’ll drive my car. It would be better to take a little longer and be sure about it. Those people must have medical aid--and my mother--I tell you, I’ve got to get there! ”

“You’ll get there!” Nick declared.

* * * * *

In the Patrol pilot’s car they raced through the dark of early morning toward the flying-field. Overhead it was cloudy, and the moon, although almost full, did not show through the bank of heavy vapor. On the road, as they shot through the darkness at nearly sixty miles an hour, they ran into a light ground fog, and Nick had misgivings. That light scum of mist might be the forerunner of a heavier fog as dawn approached.

Twelve minutes after they left the apartment they stopped by the side of the Vought, on the flying line. In the dim light the mechanics looked like ghosts crawling up around the motor. The ship had not been started.

“What the hell’s wrong with you?” Nick snapped at Barnes. “Let’s get out of here!”

“You’ll have trouble if you take this ship out without gittin’ that radiator fixed,” Barnes predicted. “That leak’s considerable. I wouldn’t try it, if I were you!”

In the pale yellow light of the hangar beacon Wilson looked at Nick inquiringly.

“I promised you I’d get you through,” Nick reassured him. “What if we do have to land for water once or twice--I can beat driving time by two hours! ”

Wilson nodded, satisfied.

He took his medical supplies and instruments from the car and passed them up to the mechanic in the cockpit, who stowed them away in the baggage compartment behind the rear seat. He was nervous and agitated, despite Nick’s assurance that they would get through all right.

Nick examined the radiator leak carefully. He was surprised that it was so large, but felt certain that the plane would stay in the air nearly an hour before a landing for water would be necessary. He nodded to Barnes to start the motor.

“Damn a storm like that one!” Wilson suddenly muttered. “You know, Wentworth, Nature’s a cruel thing sometimes. No telling--”

The motor blurped into a roar, red flame spurting from the short exhaust stacks and turning blue as it struck the air. Barnes gunned it up to twelve hundred revs and warmed it quickly.

“What will happen, Wentworth?” Wilson yelled. “What will we do when the radiator runs dry?”

“You spit on the motor--keep it cool!” Nick smiled grimly. He saw the look of blank dismay that Wilson shot at him.

Wilson had never been up in an airplane before, much less at night in a ship that apparently was not entirely safe. But he made no comment when Nick told him to climb into the rear cockpit.

Nick stepped into the front cockpit and settled himself in the seat. He did not bother with a test of his motor; he waved the blocks away, and when the mechanics did not see his hand because of the darkness he bawled at them vociferously:

“Pull ’em! What’re you waitin’ on?” The mechanics jumped forward behind the whirling propeller and yanked the chocks away.

Nick buckled his belt as he was taxying down the field. He whirled the plane around in the darkness and gunned the motor, lifted the tail on the take-off, and was gone into the night, the blue and red of the motor’s exhaust flickering away to the northwest.

It was so dark that he could not see the ground when he got into the air. The ground fog that he had feared had not materialized, for here and there, sprinkled out over a wide area, were a few lone lights; far off to the right, dwindling rapidly, was a bright cluster that marked the location of San Antonio.

Nick did not discover that the clouds were at a thousand feet until he climbed into them unwittingly--and simultaneously felt the wet mist on his face and saw the lights wink out below him. That wasn’t so good! There were hills ahead of him that reared rocky summits into the base of that thick mat of mist! He changed his course a little, swinging to the southward to stay away from the highest peaks.

Now and again he held his hand out one side of the cockpit or the other, his glove removed so that he might feel the stinging spray of water that whipped up in the propeller blast and spewed back beside the cockpit. The radiator was leaking more than at first he had suspected! He would have to land at least twice for water.

As he felt the constant, undiminishing spray come back and wet his hand he knew that he would be forced down, the first time, within twenty minutes. The ship wouldn’t stay in the air, from the time of the take-off, more than twenty-five or thirty. And the thing that worried him was that it would not be light enough to land for at least forty-five minutes!

He wished, now, that he had gone ahead with his plans to have wing-lights installed on this ship. But he hadn’t--he hadn’t thought it necessary. If he had had landing lights he wouldn’t have given a forced landing a second thought. But as it was, he did--several thoughts. He had had a forced landing once when he couldn’t see the ground well enough to pick out a field. Some of the pieces were still there.

* * * * *

Nick wasn’t greatly concerned about himself. He didn’t care particularly, for he had been subjected to so many dangers in the air during the past ten years that he had grown almost immune to fear for his own life. But he was worried about Doctor Wilson. He had promised to get the doctor through.

Perhaps he should have let Wilson drive, as the doctor had suggested. He had been too sure that he would get him through. He was almost as sure, now, that he wouldn’t! He knew that when this type of plane went to pieces it went all at once and with astonishing completeness. The wooden fuselage would buckle up like wheat straws if you put her in hard, and if the fuselage did break in two there was more than an even chance that one or both of them would get a longeron stuck through their backs!

He was glad it hadn’t rained in San Antonio for several days--he wouldn’t have to worry about mud if he got down in a fresh-plowed field. He turned a little more toward the south, skirting low over the foothills that he knew were there, although he couldn’t see them. He tried to think of some way out of the predicament; he considered, presently, the wisdom of turning back to the landing-field and landing by the floodlights. But he couldn’t do that; he would be out of water long before then.

The temperature gauge--the centigrade--did not show a rise for some minutes after the ship was in the air, for the morning was cold, and Nick gradually opened his shutters as the water was exhausted. But after they had been in the air a little more than twenty minutes the rise did come, slowly at first, then faster; and finally with a rush that sent the needle whirling up around the dial to the hundred mark, where it hesitated a moment and plunged back down to eighty. A minute later it rose suddenly and hit the peg again, only to drop once more. Nick knew that the next time it came up it would stay--the water would be boiling.

It was time to find a place to land, although the real emergency would not come until the motor began to lose revs due to the heat. But below, wherever the ground was, there was nothing to be seen but the black nothingness of night. In the east there was no light, for the thick clouds hid the glimmer of the dawn.

Nick was afraid he was still flying over the foothills. He turned sharply south, hoping that his compass was correct and that he would find an open field when the radiator forced him down.

Suddenly the needle of the centigrade spun upward and struck the peg again. It dropped slightly for an instant and then slammed up and hugged the peg and stayed there. The time had come! Nick heard the faint metallic knocking of the motor above the pound of the exhaust; he smelled the stench of burning paint. He cut the gun, and when he did a piston stuck and the motor froze. They were down!

But where? The first dim light of day was hardly visible in the east; below, a short thousand feet, the ground looked blank in darkness. It seemed impossible that Nick could pick out a field down there--and after he had picked it, land upon it. He muttered, grimly: “I can’t judge my distance from the ground within fifty feet! We’ll pile up sure as hell!”

He shouted a warning back over his shoulders to Wilson: “Hang on, fella! Get your goggles off your eyes! We may pile up!” He couldn’t see whether the doctor did as he was told. He heard a muffled shout behind him, but the words were whipped away by the rush of wind.

When the flame of the exhaust was no longer in front of him, Nick discovered that he could see a little; his eyes gradually became accustomed to the dark. He had lost nearly five hundred feet of precious altitude, wandering aimlessly, before he picked a field; and then all he could see was the dark gray outline against an inky background. He started a broad turn, cutting in sharper as he neared the ground.

“Get your arms in front of your face!” he shrilled at Wilson. “Sit tight!”

He whipped the plane out of the bank and leveled it out on the last straight shot into the field. He was coming in too fast for a normal landing, but purposely, for he meant to “feel” the ship down and let it settle in after one bounce--provided he hit the field. As he neared the ground the field seemed to lose its lighter color and blend into the shade of the darker stuff surrounding it. Nick knew that the dark stuff was mesquite.

“What if it’s all mesquite?” he exclaimed. “It wouldn’t be the first time! I’m a prize fool!”

The outlines of the brush and trees weren’t even visible as the plane slipped swiftly over them. Nick had seen the outline of the field for a few seconds only; now he was coming in practically “blind.” And he was coming in at more than eighty miles an hour!

He knew, before he reached the spot where he thought the edge of the field was, that he was too high to get quickly on the ground. He knew there was danger of “overshooting” the field--and piling up in the trees at the end of it. So, without knowing how far he dared slip the ship, he rolled it up with his ailerons and let it slide. He tried to see the ground, but couldn’t judge his distance accurately. With a sudden fear that he had gone too far, he kicked the plane out with his rudder and continued straight ahead.

Suddenly there was a soft impact against the wheels. The tires seemed to sink deep; the plane shuddered at the strain. It bounced high into the air, and as it settled back to earth Nick pulled the tail down.

But he still could see little of the ground. He couldn’t even see the horizon in front of him! There were no lights near by, and he didn’t have time to look at the instruments in the cockpit. A wing went down, and although he could feel it, he couldn’t get it up before they hit the ground again--on one wheel and the wing-tip! The tailspin skid bit into the soft sand, the ship spun around crazily, and for an instant it seemed that it would cartwheel and go over on its nose. But Nick prevented that; he fought the controls and whipped the wing up out of the dirt.

Doctor Wilson, ignorant of the narrowness by which Nick had prevented a serious accident, asked, unperturbed:

“What’s wrong--out of water? How long will this stop take?” It apparently did not seem strange to him that the ship was safely on the ground, even though he could not see across the field because of darkness.

“Yeah. Get out and see if you can find a windmill near here, or a farmhouse. I thought we’d get a lot farther than this before that radiator ran dry,” Nick replied.

* * * * *

Wilson jumped to the ground and struggled out of his parachute, then hurried off into the darkness. Nick got out and looked at the damaged wing. He tore away the portion of the fabric that was ripped open and would start a larger rent when the ship got into the air again.

If it did! The tires were sunk deep in the soft sand of the field--clear up to the rims of the wheels. Nick had been lucky to find a field at all in the darkness before dawn, but he had put the Vought into a place where the sand would suck the ship down when the take-off was attempted. He wasn’t sure that he couldn’t get into the air again, but he knew that the odds were all against him. He wished, fervidly, that he had allowed Wilson to make this trip by car.

And another new problem, which he had not foreseen before the take-off, had arisen when he learned that the radiator was good for less than thirty minutes in the air: Between the point where he had landed, and Rock Springs, there was an area of perhaps ninety-five miles of nothing but hills and tortuous creek beds. Nowhere in this area was a landing possible without completely wrecking the plane. And with the radiator as it was, the Vought could remain in the air only half long enough to cross these hills! Suddenly Nick heard the doctor’s voice in the darkness, across the field.

“House over here!” Wilson yelled. “Over this way.”

Nick ran in that direction, his shoes sinking deep into the sand.

“There’s a light off through the mesquite,” the doctor declared, when Nick reached him. “I think it’s a farmhouse.” He led the way.