автордың кітабын онлайн тегін оқу The Memories of Dead Pilot
Sobeshchakov Yuriy
The Memories of Dead Pilot
While day-dreaming about his sexual exploits, a young pilot of a strategic bomber crashed into the icy waters of the Pacific and killed his entire crew. Fate was kind enough to give him a second chance, but nobody can change that much in a few years. Later, while flying in Vietnam, working for what was supposed to be easy money, he crashed his plane again. This time he did not survive and killed his six crew members as well three dozen local residents of the jungle.
The main character once said:
“I always compared human life with a back of zebra, but just recently I suddenly reached up to the deeper meaning of this banal comparison. Everyone knows about the alternation of bands on the sides of the animal, but not all extend their view the rest of zebra’s body. And if someone dares to do so, he or she was surprised to find that all these stripes on zebra ended under the tail in a big ass. And no matter what bands in life were more — white or black, in the end, we all find us there”.
Despite the fact that the story is set in the late eighties, it is as relevant today as it was then and will continue to be pertinent because human essence does not change. A man, like any living being, will always need food and sex, and to meet these needs money.
Because of this, the story is filled with sex, greed, malice and treachery, and is not recommended for readers under the age of eighteen.
“The Hero of Our Time, my dear sirs, is just that: a portrait, but not of one man; it is a portrait comprised of the faults of our entire generation, in the full bloom of their development.”
Mikhail Lermontov 1841
“There may have been a time much worse than this, but never one more foul…”
Prince Hamlet
The main characters, and all other admirals and officers, their wives and mistresses, colleagues and drinking companions, have no real prototypes but have been invented by me with the sole purpose of blackening our shining past — a past in which the values of family, of religion, of recognizable morality were replaced with belief in the Communist ideology. And if by chance it suddenly seems to you that something of the sort was or might have been, don’t believe it.
It was not.
Prologue
Everything hurts. Darkness. I don’t see anything. I open my eyes and begin to distinguish objects around me. I see the reason for the unbearable pain — the plane’s control column against my chest thrusting me back into my bulletproof seat. I feel a burning in my belly; it’s clear that I have some broken ribs and that there must be some internal bleeding. What happened with my crew? I turn my head slowly to the right.
Nothing remains of the navigator’s cabin in the nose of the plane. A direct hit against the concrete drainpipe has turned Captain Vasiliev’s work area into a maelstrom of aluminum, glass, crumpled navigational equipment and random bloodied body parts.
The flight engineer Gennady Rybnikov, who had been sitting between me and the co-pilot during the final approach, is bent double. The seat belt, while preventing him from flying out through the windshield, melded his forehead into the instrument panel. His hands hang lifelessly, and blood drips from his head onto the back of the radio operator. Dead…
Moments before our impact with the collector column of the storm drain at Cam Ranh, the formerly American but now Russian air force base, the radio operator, Nikolai Onopriyenko, had been sitting behind my co-pilot, tapping out the Morse code report of our landing to the headquarters of the fifteenth flotilla of the Pacific fleet. He had tried to crawl under the flight engineer’s seat to the navigator in the nose of the aircraft — obviously he wanted to see how I was going to land the plane on only half of the main landing gear. To him, it was more terrifying to remain ignorant of what was happening than to look the danger in the face. He had almost reached the cabin when the shock of the impact smashed threw him against the navigation equipment.
…..My co-pilot is sitting without his head, amputated along with the headrest of his seat, by the ragged lining of the fuselage. His head, lifeless and immobile, held in place on the radio operator’s worktable by the headset, is cocked over to me and blank eyes stare back at me with what looks like contempt and shock. He didn’t get the chance to tell me how much the Vietnamese paid for transport on our plane from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh…
Before takeoff, the flight engineer succeeded in cramming thirty locals into the pressurized cabin designed for ten without permission to transport them.
On our way to the former capital of South Vietnam we were reassigned to go to the port city of Haiphong to pick up cargo, which had come by sea from the Soviet Union. Knowing that landing at this intermediate stop was going to cause no end of unpleasantness — like a long prison term for using USSR Ministry of Defense property to transport illegals — I quickly hatched a Plan C, as there was no Plan B. I sent the co-pilot, Sergey Kovalenko, to compile a list of passengers and get the signature of the senior aviation supervisor of the Hanoi International Airport military sector. Not a small task, and it would be costly. The normally stern Major Smirnov was ready to sign anything if the price was right, so I was sure that my assistant would be able to come to a meeting of the minds with him.
Fifteen minutes later Sergey returned. He looked very upset.
“What happened?” I asked.
Breathless, he replied. “For his signature Smirnov wants twenty-five percent of the money collected from the Vietnamese.”
“Yes. And how much would that be?” I took the handfuls of bills thrust at me with no time to count it.
“Let’s say, you don’t want to know. This escapade of yours is definitely not going to be a money maker.” I groaned. Takeoff was imminent and I decided to deal with the financial questions after returning from the mission.
…But now Kovalenko wouldn’t be saying anything to me or any military investigator.
Rescuers run towards the plane from all directions. Oh won’t they be surprised to find my precious human cargo. But why were they all so quiet back there? Circling to land I had drained the fuel from the wing and fuselage tanks almost down to dry, precisely the reason we didn’t explode on impact. So while the command cabin is a twisted mess, the passenger cabin should be fine. Right? But they aren’t making a peep. It was strange. Well, to hell with them.
Rescuers are all around now trying to direct my broken carcass out through the twisted metal. All I can really see, clearly that is, is a need to recall just how it was that I got myself into this shit-hole — both literally and figuratively. Memories are a bad sign. Clearly my brain has concluded that this organism will not survive and has decided to review the most significant episodes of my squandered life.
Chapter 1
Yelizovo Airport on the Kamchatka Peninsula met me with a warm wind and drizzle. With October drawing to a close, frosts were already reported elsewhere in the middle latitudes of Russia — but here on the peninsula there were still leaves on the trees, though only yellow and red. Visible across the contrails flowing off the wing of the IL-62 commercial liner, birds that had not yet departed for the south flocked low in the sky, perfecting their formation flight skills. It seemed a fitting introduction to my first posting immediately after graduating from the Navy’s Aviation College. I hoped I would soon be up there with the birds, doing what I was destined to do: fly. They, like me, are preparing for a long journey.
The thought of the birds preoccupied my musings as I walked along the pedestrian walkway from the airport building to the headquarters of my new squadron.
The officer on duty, a grimy captain, giant of a man, met me in the hall of the one-story fifties-era building and accompanied me to the reception room of the commander of the rocket carrier squadron. Behind a worn but sturdy oak desk sat a young and quite beautiful sergeant. Dressed in a cream blouse, a black necktie and a black skirt, she seemed somehow out of place in this remote station. Yet, visible in the space between the two columns of the desk her slender legs, crossed provocatively, offered up a most unexpected welcome. The officer accompanying me exchanged a few words with her, none of which I paid the slightest attention to as my thoughts were on the hemline of her skirt. Heeding my hungry gaze she lifted the telephone receiver and then, giving me inglorious look in return, reported my arrival to the commander.
The captain nudged me with his elbow and whispered, “Don’t get your hopes too high. She has bigger fish to fry, if you get my drift…”
The girl hung up the phone, silently nodded us toward the commander’s door, drumming her slender fingers on the keys of her typewriter.
From the commander’s office I came out as a co-pilot of Commander Major Gribov’s crew. The co-pilot of an old rocket carrier, an outdated TU-16, with God knows what designation. But nobody had offered me anything better. I spent four long years flying in this position, whiling away my bachelor existence in wild drinking bouts with my coworkers and love adventures with the garrison beauties. Unfortunately, there were no commander’s secretaries among them. It was rumored that the girl was not merely an excellent typist, but had many other talents as well.
I could have flown as a co-pilot another three or four years, but my commander had served in this garrison too long, and no longer considered it necessary to keep his thoughts and feelings to himself. Assuming that he had the right to say whatever he felt like, he provoked a scandal with his bravado. It gave me the opportunity to get away from the fatal triangle of the card table, strangers’ beds, and bar counters.
It happened that during a typical drinking bout Major Gribov told his friends a harmless anecdote, which was essentially an account of a conversation between the Secretary of the Communist party organization and the priest of a nearby church.
“Father,” said the party organizer, “let me have some chairs for the communists. Tomorrow I have a meeting about the plan.”
“I won’t give you any,” answered the priest. “The last time, they carved indecent expressions on them with their pocket knives."
“Well, then, I won’t be sending you any more pioneers to sing in the church choir,” answered the party organizer.
“Then I won’t send you any monks for Saturday volunteer work,” the priest parried.
“Then I won’t give you any members of the Young Communist League for the procession of the cross.” As a true communist, the party organizer refused to give in.
But the priest had an ace up his sleeve.
“Then there won’t be any more nuns for the sauna.”
The party organizer fell silent for a moment, and then barked into the telephone:
“For such words, Father, you are going to have to surrender your party membership card.”
We laughed heartily at the joke, but in a few days the good major became the object of a serious investigation by our Party Committee. Who wrote the denunciation I was unable to ascertain. I was not a party member and so the suspicions of my coworkers passed me by. The unlucky comic was excluded from the party by a majority vote, and then after a time, as was to be expected, he was removed from his post.
The next day I was summoned for an interview with the squadron commander. The fact that the entire staff of our squadron had gathered in his office was a surprise to me. I stood opposite the commander’s desk, in the middle of his heavily-worn rug, and began to ponder. Why is such a pompous meeting being held in my honor?
The chief of staff asked me several questions about my biography, and checked my answers against the data contained in my personnel file. It was as if he were trying to convince himself that I was indeed the man I put myself forward as being. And if I am not that man, then did I have my cover story down pat. Apparently my answers coincided with what was written in the red file folder, because, after closing it with a smirk, he put this secret document on the desk in front of the commander.
The squadron commander lowered both hands to the file, concealing the coat of arms of the Soviet Union, which was embossed on the top. He glanced over all his assistants and deputies who were ranged against the walls, sighed deeply, and said:
“Well, then, Popov, your time has come. The Motherland in my person and the Party in the person of the deputy commander of political affairs have decided to entrust you with the position of rocket carrier commander.” The highbrow words, cheesy as they were, caused a lump of pride to rise in my throat. Even my shoulders straightened involuntarily. Apparently oblivious to my newfound reaction to praise he continued on… “However, we do have a few unresolved issues with you.”
The lump formed of pride was replaced by an urge to gag as I waited for the hammer to fall.
“You must promise me that you will carry out the following conditions: first, you must enroll in the communist party; second, you must marry; and third, but not the least in importance, you must curtail your drinking.”
Somehow, the hammer stayed aloft and in the space of a breath I managed to process the demands. First, if the Party was blind enough to have the likes of me, fine. Marriage, how tough can it be? And drinking, well that is a problem. Vodka has always been a good friend. But friends come and go, right? I sighed with relief and perhaps too quickly, signed the papers pushed my way across the desk. In essence, I had just promised to fulfill all three conditions — within the next six months.
Chapter 2
The promotion, along with the elevated respect of those around me and a small raise in pay, meant a large number of new responsibilities. I could no longer disappear for my two days off and spend them in Lyudmila Salnikova’s bed, or present myself to the doctor for pre-flight exam with a face puffy from vodka. Sometimes while measuring my blood pressure the doctor would say, “Popov, I wish you’d at least breathe in some other direction. Your exhaust fumes are making my eyes water.” Yes, my carefree youth was at an end. And as it happened the cause for my newfound sense of pride would be very short-lived.
Two days later I sat with all the other aircraft commanders listening to the flight assignments for the following day. The heads of the various flight services took turns reporting about what we could expect tomorrow in the way of weather, potential enemies, supply, maintenance and communications. All of this barely registered in my consciousness. To me, the high points were: tomorrow morning at 0800 hours I would take off first, and, four hours later, would return to base. In another four hours I would be drinking a beer in the officers’ mess with my friends, celebrating the successful conclusion of my first battle mission. For the hundredth time I looked over the couple of dozen nine-by-six foot placards depicting various catastrophes involving TU-16s over the past ten years and for the hundredth time was surprised by what monumental screw-ups some of the pilots before me must have been. Almost all of the crashes had been caused by pilot error or by improper decision-making: translated in official terms, “the human factor.” Poor, unlucky and unskilled bastards. There is no way to get me to fly into a hill like them. I won’t let anyone kill me. It’s no accident that I’ve been entrusted with flying on battle watch to the Aleutian Islands. I grinned at the thought.
I had flown there many times as a co-pilot, but only one thing had been part of my responsibilities then — not to interfere with anything. Now the situation had changed. But I couldn’t change. My crew and I had devoted in fact all of one hour of preparation for the flight along the American border, but then more experienced pilots from other crews approached us and we went to the sports arena of the garrison to play volleyball. The last two hours of preparation for tomorrow’s flight we spent playing cards in the doctor’s office. The doctor had hung a sign saying “Do Not Enter: Patient Exam in Progress” on the door, which was padded with cotton and covered with black leatherette. Our excited and at times disappointed cries were not audible to anyone.
On the morning of the next day I sat in the pilots’ mess and waited for the waitress Lyudmila to bring me breakfast. My little dalliance with her had come to an end some six months earlier, but until recently we had remained friends. However, when the rumor circulated around the garrison that I had got married, her attitude toward me changed sharply.
Nobody knew yet who my wife was and why a confirmed bachelor had undertaken such a big step. Returning from leave I informed the commander about the fulfillment of one of his three conditions, and he hadn’t made any secret of it. As a consequence of his lack of reserve, the service provided for my crew in the pilots’ mess had markedly worsened. The squadron humorists had missed no chance to make jokes about this.
“It’s best not to share a table with you now, Alex.” Or: “That’s it, Popov. You’re past it now. Now that you’re married, you’re gonna be last in line to eat.”
On any other day I probably would have stayed until the end of breakfast without reacting to the jests of my comrades. And after waiting for all the flyers to leave, I would have had a heart-to-heart talk with Lyudmila. But this was a special day for me. I was in a hurry to get to the pre-flight briefing, and I had no time to wipe away the tears of my erstwhile mistress. Trying to get the waitress’s attention, I first put one hand up like a diligent student, and then the other. The pilots started to turn around and look in my direction. Many of them set down their forks to await developments. And when Lyudmila passed my table by in the usual way, she said contemptuously: “Popov, you could raise your leg as well, but you’re going to be the last to eat anyway.”
I answered fairly loudly, pronouncing each word distinctly, and tried to put into each of them all the sarcasm of which I was capable: “Lyudmila, raising legs, especially parted, is more in your line, I’d think.”
The squad burst into laughter. The girl was caught out by the malicious jest, and threw the tray full of dishes on the floor. Bursting into tears, she fled to the personnel room. In a few minutes the person on duty in the mess sent over a new waitress, Veronica, who immediately came over to our table, and while we chose our breakfast took the opportunity to say to me:
“I always told her that she could expect nothing but filth from you.”
Chapter 3
We were the first to take off. After achieving flying altitude I turned the aircraft towards the Komandor Islands. Leaving the last bit of dry land belonging to the Soviet Union far behind, we turned towards the American border. My battle mission included verifying the anti-aircraft defenses of the potential enemy. At a distance of two hundred miles from Attu Island I began the descent. At an altitude of one hundred and fifty feet and a speed of six hundred knots, we headed towards the enemy islands. When we had approached to within one hundred miles of them I saw a pair of fighters. Our little war game had ended. Our aircraft had been detected and, theoretically, shot down. But we did not consider ourselves to be losers. After all, six minutes before, my navigators had worked out the training launch of missiles against the American air force base. The three-ton miniature plane, breaking away from the pylon of my aircraft, would reach a height of sixty thousand feet, and from there, would come down on the Americans almost vertically, scattering the concrete squares of their runway for hundreds of feet around.
The fighters rushed past us, turned sharply, and hung over the left and right wings of my aircraft. The pilot of the leading fighter saluted me and made a sign for me to open the bomb compartment. I reduced the flight speed and transmitted his request to my navigator. When the green light glowed to show that the “bomb compartment is open”, I gave the American pilot the thumbs up. He understood this international gesture correctly. He slipped beneath the fuselage and, having convinced himself that, as usual, our bomb compartment was empty, he took his place above the left wing.
Escorted by the American aircraft, we reached our cruising altitude and flew about an hour together. Then I waved at the fighter pilots and took a course towards Kamchatka. The pair of F-15s accelerated, and, catching up with us, rolled and banked away.
That’s it, I thought in relief. My first battle assignment has been successfully completed. I called out to anyone who cared to listen, “Let’s get the hell out of here!”
The nervous tension subsided and I began to relax, even daydreaming about the leave I had just completed…..
Two months before, having received my leave ticket from the hands of the chief of staff, the whole crew and I had left for Vladivostok. After that our paths diverged. My crew flew off to their relatives, while I settled into a hotel with the romantic name “Dawn of the East.” The object of my attention was the discotheque of the medical school. After two weeks of drinking bouts with the students, and having slept my way through the entire physical therapy department, I unexpectedly encountered a point-blank refusal from a future physician to spend a charming night of love in a dark place. This took the wind out of my sails to such an extent that I couldn’t think of anything else except the woman who had turned me down.
“How could that be?” I reasoned. “To say ‘no’ to me, to a naval pilot? I haven’t ever heard that word before from women, and, most importantly, I don’t want to hear it now.” But the beauty turned out to be more stubborn and certainly smarter than I. As a result, by the middle of my leave we were married. There was one more factor that had influenced my hurried decision — her father was the head of the Pacific Coast Defenses, and although he had no connection to aviation, he nonetheless bore the proud title of rear-admiral, a rare commodity in the Pacific fleet….
I heard the navigator report: “Commander, we’ve reached the descent point.”
“Roger that.” I pushed the control column forward, lowering the nose of the aircraft while simultaneously slowing the engines’ revolutions per minute to idle. It immediately became much quieter in the cabin. Looking over at the co-pilot, I noted his bored stare, his thoughts elsewhere. Ice floes are only so interesting and that only lasts a while. The poor fellow really did not have much to do, true to this assignment. Ahh, the life of a commander. My thoughts returned to Vladivostok and my new wife.
The second half of my leave was taken up with our honeymoon. The speed of our wedding left no room for vacation planning and the approaching winter term did not leave my wife even a week of free time. So it was my parents-in-law that came up with the solution. They took up residence in the posh hotel downtown, giving us free reign in their home. We spent almost the whole time in bed, alternating reading Olga’s lectures with practical exercises in more profound and all-inclusive study of human anatomy. We devoted special attention to the differences in structure between the male and female bodies. And although we did not make any great new discoveries, pleasure from the process of studies was obtained on both sides. The pleasant memories brought a smile to my face…
“Commander, the screen of my on-board radar has gone out!” The voice of the navigator brought me back to stark reality. It’s odd that the sound is coming to me directly, and not through the headset of the aircraft communication system. I looked at the instrument panel. There were more than thirty instruments on it, but I was interested in only two of them — those that indicate the revolutions per minute of the left and right engines. The pointers of both of them vibrated, indicating autorotation, a stall. I checked fuel flow. Nothing! “Shut off all electrical devices!” I yelled to the two navigators and the co-pilot. Then, I looked at the engine control levers and immediately our circumstance became clear. Eight minutes prior, commencing the descent from thirty thousand feet, shifting the engines from cruise to idle, I must have pulled them a bit further, into the stop position. Without having verified the instrument indications, my aircraft had descended smoothly to ten thousand feet. During that time the working aviation equipment and most of all the powerful on-board radar had completely discharged the batteries.
I pressed the “air start” button for the third time without effect. On the older model of the TU-16 there was no “lock flight idle” to prevent the unhindered shift of the control levers through their full range. And, engulfed by my pleasant recollections, I had turned off both engines by mistake.
At the beginning of the fifties, when Stalin’s aircraft designers had been planning this type of aircraft, they had not anticipated that, for one, forty years later the planes would still be flying, and secondly, that the pilots flying them would have their minds on a woman, rather than the engine, rotating underneath them.
Sure, I admit to being distracted, but I didn’t deserve to die. The water was coming up fast and I couldn’t even send out a “Mayday.” Already, it was too late to parachute out of the aircraft and besides, such a course would have been useless anyway. The wind chill associated with bailing out into minus twenty six degrees added to the shock of smacking into near freezing water, combined with struggling to get out of the icy water into an individual rubber boat, a body could only survive, at best, two hours. Desperately, I tried to locate a route more or less clear of ice floes. Making the adjustments to starboard and an instant before we hit the water I pulled hard on the control column, slowing the descent enough to allow the fuselage to kiss the water, followed instantly by the knock out punch as the nose dipped, pushing the glass of the navigators compartment under water.
Somehow, we were in one piece and everyone was alive. Now we had to get out of the plane as quickly as possible.
While I was occupied with the landing, the navigator, bombardier and the co-pilot, abandoning their working positions, moved to stand alongside my seat, ready to operate the emergency hatch over our heads. After a brief struggle, they got it free, allowing me to crawl out first. I ran back along the top of the fuselage to the mid-station hatch, blown open automatically from the impact with the water. I grabbed for the silk lanyard, held aloft by a compressed air balloon, and attached to the orange sheltered inflatable emergency raft bobbing by the open hatch. I got my knife out of my flight jacket, cut the balloon free, winding the remaining lanyard around my hand and stumbling, slipping, pulled the raft behind me to the nose of the aircraft. By now, the three crewmembers stood as a unit on the fuselage, ready to descend onto the port wing, now partially awash with tiny wavelets and a patina of ice spread over the super-cooled metal. Just as my brain registered the danger presented by the iced aluminum and an instant before my voice caught up, my co-pilot jumped down onto the wing. His legs slipped out in disarray, causing him to loose balance. He fell heavily on his back, sliding down the wing. As he slipped he waved his hands in jagged gyrations, trying to catch hold of something, anything. In a choked-off cry of despair he disappeared beneath the water. His fur parka, warm coverall, and high leather boots lined with dog fur all acted like a huge sponge, sucking in water, removing any chance for him to stay on the surface for even for a moment.
Sickened by what we had seen, we stood motionless by the open upper hatch of the cockpit — until the pinging of metal against glass brought us back to our senses. The gunner and the radio operator, at the tail of the pressurized hull were smacking the butts of their pistols against the plexi-glass of the rear hatch. The muted sounds of their desperate efforts transmitted eerily along the full length of the fuselage. The tail section hatch that, under normal conditions, opened downwards, was now under a minimum of three feet of frigid water and the back pressure made opening it impossible, trapping the two NCOs in the sealed compartment. Without sufficient prior warning of an impending emergency water landing, they had remained in the compartment — now, with absolutely no possibility of getting to them from outside or for them to escape from within.
Terrified by the gruesome death of the co-pilot and now besieged with the terrible frigid fate of the two in the aft, the navigator, the bombardier, and I helped one another to descend carefully onto the wing. Then we pulled the raft as close as possible to the aircraft, and I ordered the bombardier to jump in first. The lieutenant, who had only begun service a month previous, gave me a resigned look, but trusting my experience, jumped. It was impossible to get a good running start on the slippery wing, and he missed his landing by inches. His right leg, striking the resilient rubber wall of the raft, bounced him up and over the water. In he went, submerging fully in a wave — but against all odds, he managed to seize hold of the thin safety line girdling the raft. After a couple seconds, when he again appeared on the surface, the navigator fell on his knees and seized his young colleague by the collar of his flight jacket, preventing him from going under again. I pulled the cord of our raft taut to the trailing edge of the wing and we helped the lieutenant clamber first onto the flap and then tumble into the raft.
While we were struggling to save the life of the bombardier the aircraft was slowly sinking into the ocean. Wavelets over the wing became full waves. Icy water bathed the tops of our boots. Clambering into the inflatable shelter after the wet bombardier, the navigator and I began to row furiously, trying to get away as far as possible from the plane.
The raft floated past the tail compartment and to my horror, I saw that the gunner and the radio operator, like wild animals, shooting at the glass. Deafened and panicked, it seemed to me at that moment as if they were shooting at us. Horrified, I shifted my gaze away, putting more force behind my rowing. I said to the navigator:
“They know that the glass of their compartment can’t be broken even by the impact of a twenty-millimeter automatic gun. They’d do better to leave a bullet or two to shoot themselves with; otherwise they’ll die horribly from suffocation.”
“True commander, but I suspect their deaths, like the co-pilot’s, will be on your conscience.”
“Row harder, damn it. The plane will go under any minute now. Our raft could easily be caught in the whirlpool. We get as far away from this place as far as we can. We’ll talk about my conscience later,” I said, and, after a moment’s thought, added: “If we survive.”
The bombardier didn’t interrupt as he lay in fetal position and shivered. About a hundred feet away, the aircraft began to lift its nose higher and higher and, coming almost to the vertical, suddenly plunged beneath the water. Huge air bubbles escaping from the forward hatch produced a mighty geyser, the last testament of a proud aircraft. I buttoned up the rubber door of the raft in time. We were carried upwards and then thrown down. The sea, having taken three victims out of the six in the crew, grew calm once more.
Now we had to conserve our strength and wait.
Our fate was in the hands of the operator of the long-range radar. I was certain that he was tracking us and would immediately report the disappearance of our aircraft from the radar screen. I imagined that after his report all the forces of the fleet would be searching for us and would find us without fail. I told the navigators this. The bombardier answered gloomily:
“The hell they’ll find us.”
And his older colleague, with bitterness in his voice, objected to him quietly:
“They will certainly find us, but when?”
