Silver Stars (Front Lines #2)(27)
The cockpit door is still open, and Rainy can see the pilots are both awake, engaged, and tense, but not so tense that one doesn’t take a moment to glance back and grin at what must be a look of terror on Rainy’s face. His face is illuminated by the sickly glow of instruments and then in blazing white as a bolt of lightning flashes and fractures and crawls across the cloud face ahead.
Wind buffets the plane, sends it slipping sideways and off-center, like a car sliding on an icy road. Thunder batters them again and again, each clap more violent than the one before. The lightning is so close and so wild it seems to pass right through the plane, turning every last rivet blazing white and leaving behind an afterimage on her retinas. Static electricity raises the hair on the back of her neck and arms.
Hour after hour. Rainy has never been one to get seasick or airsick, but she clutches the paper vomit bag close, just in case, because the lunatic elevator ride they are on kneads and shoves and twists her stomach as if determined to reduce her to shivering, puking helplessness.
But eventually the lightning comes from farther astern and the thunder falls away to a distant, disgruntled rumble. The wind, however, intensifies, and the plane is a very small piece of flotsam on a continent-wide river of turbulent air. Up . . . down . . . up . . . down, like riding the Cyclone at Coney Island.
The loadmaster comes walking back, moving easily with the lurch, and carrying a small cooler and a thermos.
“Want to try to eat something?”
Rainy glares hatred at him and his sandwiches, but Cisco says, “Sure, whatcha got?”
“I got ham and cheese on rye, and I got tuna salad on white.”
The mention of tuna salad almost does it, almost has Rainy puking, and she would have but for the fact that her stomach is empty.
“Grab me a ham and cheese,” Cisco says. “And some coffee. Black.”
“Black it is, since we got no sugar and no milk,” the loadmaster says. “We’ll be landing in an hour. Might be a bit hairy.”
“Hairy?” Rainy asks.
The loadmaster holds his hand out flat, palm down, and simulates a plane trying to land in heavy wind. It is not reassuring.
And in fact the landing is not pretty. There is an unusual amount of bouncing and tail-skewing involved, but eventually the plane comes to a stop, the door opens, and Rainy piles out just as quickly as she is able. The ground is hard and it is wet and the sky is dark, but she barely restrains herself from falling to her knees and kissing it.
Cisco? Unaffected. “Now what?”
A jeep with its canvas cover up tears across the tarmac from the direction of a squat, unimpressive control tower, bearing a woman lieutenant and a male sergeant. Rainy remembers belatedly to salute.
“I trust you had a pleasant flight?” the lieutenant asks with the gleefully malicious grin common to airmen and sailors when dealing with earthbound folk. She’s wearing a black armband that reads OD—officer of the day. Or night, in this case.
Only then does Rainy realize she’s still clutching the unused vomit bag. She crumples it and shoves it into her pocket.
They are driven to a white plaster building full of unoccupied desks. Someone has thoughtfully laid out Azorean bread rolls, roast beef, a local cheese, giant cans of mustard and mayonnaise, and a dozen Cokes in a bucket of ice. The Coke settles Rainy’s stomach enough for her to recognize and feed a ravenous hunger.
“Where the hell are we, anyway?” Cisco asks.
The lieutenant answers. “Lajes Field, Azores. The island is called Terceira. It means third. There are nine islands all together. We’re about two thousand miles from New York and just under a thousand from Portugal, and no distance at all from the U-boats, although they’ve had their horns trimmed a bit. Soon as you’ve finished, we’ll drive you down to the harbor, Angra, the biggest city they got here.”
“Any action in Anger?” Cisco asks.
“Angra. Angra do Heroísmo.” Rainy recognizes a fellow linguist. The lieutenant has worked on her pronunciation, not a normal thing for American troops overseas. “It means Bay of Heroism. And to answer your question, no, no action unless you mean two bars serving bad beer, worse wine, and no whiskey.”
Cisco nods thoughtfully. “Sounds like an opportunity. You got horny GIs and . . . pardon my, uh, choice of words . . .”
“Oh, there’s a cathouse,” the lieutenant assures him, showing no sign of feminine embarrassment. “Like you said: horny GIs will find a way.”
They drive through slackening rain down a road paved with cobbles made of black lava. The road is lined with hydrangea bushes, blue and pink. The fields are small, extravagantly green rectangles marked off by low, volcanic-stone fences. The road winds and curves upward before beginning to descend into Angra. They pass a donkey cart and a small civilian truck, but that’s all for the half-hour drive.
The harbor is a small, neat bowl surrounded by two-story whitewashed buildings with red tile roofs. The only prominent building is a church with twin square towers topped by neat white domes. The Americans have erected an antiaircraft tower, but no German plane has the range or the inclination to fly this far. There are two naval vessels tied up on the ocean-facing side of the protectively curved pier. One is a small destroyer or corvette, Rainy doesn’t know ships well enough to know quite what to call it. But she recognizes the long, narrow, gray dagger of a submarine.