Amerika Read Free Page B

heart become one with the stick and rudder pedals and ailerons and elevator and you’re no longer flying an airplane, you’re just flying.
    A big BANG from the back.
    ‘Try it now,’ Orlando shouted,
    I cranked the landing gear handle. Something clicked, and the drawbars on both wings rose, lifting the wheel struts in turn, and the tires pivoted smoothly into the ‘up’ position.
    ‘Perfect!’
    ‘Now the other way.’
    ‘You sure?’
    ‘Trust in the Lord.’
    I did as I ordered. They worked perfectly.
    Orlando dropped down into the right seat. He stroked the chipped and battered instrument panel.
    ‘Poor girl’s been through a lot.’
    I pointed down. ‘So has New York.’
    We were still well outside the ‘No-Fly’ zone, but even so, any minute I imagined Me-109’s swooping down on us like greyhounds toying with a groundhog. I leveled off at two thousand feet. From here difficult to see much of the atomic bomb damage. The summer ground haze didn’t make it any easier. But what I could see matched up with the devastating photographs and newsreels that had flashed across the nation during that terrible week. That had been in black-and-white. This was full color.
    Right around 82nd street, you could see a radical change in the skyline. From the beginning of the Manhattan Island down to that spot, the shapes of various apartments and office buildings and skyscrapers reached upwards like so many different fingers and thumbs. But from 82nd street down to the Battery, like a giant foot had crushed everything flat. In a white-hot, shattering instant, the nuclear blast formed a crater a half-mile across and destroyed a full third of the island. Final casualty counts were over eight-five thousand dead and wounded. New Yorkers never saw it coming. Neither did Washingtonians. How could they?
    Afterward the Nazis bragged how their two-stage A9-10 intercontinental rockets had performed flawlessly on their four-thousand mile, pre-emptive strikes. Newsreels showed simulated animation footage of the two-stage beasts lifting off their launch pads at Peenemünde. At sixty-thousand feet, the first stage burnt out and fell to the ground by parachute, while the second stage accelerated to over three thousand miles-an-hour and became a silent, nuclear-tipped poison dart.
    ‘Time to be good citizens,’ I said, and turned on the radio. For a moment I forgot the assigned frequency. Then it came to me, and with it a flash of anger at what I had to do. I let it pass before I keyed the microphone.
    ‘New York Control, Carter Air four-five is with you at two thousand feet, heading two-ten degrees.’
    Hiss, crackle; lousy radios. Then a German-accented voice, clipped and precise: ‘Carter Air four-five, why are you not at your assigned altitude of three thousand meters?’
    ‘In-flight emergency.’
    A long hissing wait. ‘You are declaring an emergency?’
    ‘Negative. It’s been resolved. Climbing to assigned altitude now.’
    ‘Roger, maintain proper separation from no-fly zone, according to procedures.’
    ‘Affirmative.’
    ‘Be advised your approved flight plan closes at--’ the voice paused. I could almost hear the chromium steel gears meshing in his Nazi brain as he performed the calculation. ‘Zero-two hundred hours tomorrow.’
    I felt like somebody had punched me. ‘My flight plan was approved for twenty-four hours. You cut it in half.’
    ‘That is the plan I have before me.’
    ‘With all due respect, there’s been a mistake. I can’t fly non-stop to Key West, Florida. That’s over sixteen hundred miles from here. I have to refuel, I have to sleep.’
    ‘You will land your aircraft on or before zero-two hours hundred tomorrow morning. If you wish, you may re-apply for an additional flight plan to continue your journey. New York Control, out.’
    I stared at my microphone as if the Nazi was going to climb out of it, give me a ‘Heil Hitler’ salute and click his heels to seal the deal.
    Orlando said,