Eagle in the Sky Read online

  David looked quickly about him and realized with a shock how far he had fallen in that terrible tumble down the sky. He was only two or three hundred feet above the earth. He was not sure of his direction, but when he glanced at his doppler compass, he found with mild surprise that he was still heading in the general direction of home.

  The engine vibration increased, and he could hear the shrill screech of rending metal. He wasn’t going to make it home – that was certain – and there was insufficient height to jettison the canopy, release his straps and attempt to . scramble out of the cockpit. There was only one course still remaining, he must fly the Mirage in.

  Even as he made the decision his one good hand was busy implementing it. Holding the stick between his knees, he let down his landing gear; the nose wheel might hold him up long enough to take some of the speed off her and prevent her cartwheeling.

  He looked ahead, and saw a low ridge of rocky ground and sparse green vegetation. Disaster lurked for him there – but beyond it were open fields, ploughed land, orderly blocks of orchards, neatly laid-out buildings. That in itself was cheering. Such order and industry could only mean that he had returned across the border to Israel.

  David skimmed over the ridge of broken rocks, sucking in his own belly as though to lift the Mirage bodily over the hungry teeth of granite, and ahead of him lay the fields. He could see women working in one of the orchards, stopping and turning to look at him. So close that he could clearly see the expressions of surprise and apprehension on their faces.

  There was a man on a blue tractor and he jumped from his seat and fell to the earth as David passed only feet above his head.

  All fuel cocks closed, all switches off, master switch off – David went into the final ritual for crash-landing.

  Ahead of him lay the smooth brown field, open and clear. He might just be lucky enough, it might just come off.

  The Mirage was losing flying speed, her nose coming up, the airspeed needle sinking back, 200 miles per hour, 190, 180, dropping back to her stalling speed of 150.

  Then suddenly David realized that the field ahead of him was latticed with deep concrete irrigation channels. They were twenty feet wide, and ten deep, a deadly hazard – enough to destroy a Centurion tank.

  There was nothing David could do now to avoid their gaping jaws. He flew the Mirage in, touching down smoothly.

  ‘Smooth as a tomcat pissing on a sheet of velvet,’ he thought bitterly, aware that all his skill was unavailing now. ‘Even Barney would have been proud of me.’ The field was rough, but the Mirage settled to it, pitching and lurking, shaking David ruthlessly about the cockpit, but she was up on all three wheels, losing speed handily, her undercart taking the strain. However, she was still travelling at ninety miles an hour when she went into the irrigation ditch.

  It snapped her undercart off like pretzel sticks and she nosed in, struck the far bank of concrete that sheered through metal like a scythe, and sent the fuselage cart-wheeling across the field with David still strapped within it. The wings broke away and the body slid on across the soft earth to come to rest at last, right way up like a stranded whale.

  The whole of David’s left side was numb, no feeling in his arm or leg, the straps had mauled him with their rude grasp, and he was stunned and bewildered in the sudden engrossing silence.

  For many seconds he sat still, unable to move or think. Then he smelled, it, the pervasive reek of Avtur jet fuel from the ruptured tanks and lines. The smell of it galvanized him with the pilot’s deadly fear of fire.

  With his right hand he grabbed the canopy release lever and heaved at it. He wasted ten precious seconds with it, for it was jammed solid. Then he turned his attention to the steel canopy breaker in its niche below the lever. This was a tool specially designed for this type of emergency. He lifted it, lay back in his seat and attacked the Perspex dome above his head. The stink of jet fuel was overpowering, filling the cockpit, and he could hear the little pinging and tinkling sound made by white-hot metal.

  His left arm hampered him, he had no feeling or use in it. The straps bound him tightly to his seat and he had to pause in his assault upon the canopy to loosen them.

  Then he began again. He tore an opening in the Perspex, the size of a hand, and as he worked to enlarge it, a ruptured fuel-pressure line somewhere in the shattered fuselage sprayed a jet of Avtur high in the air. It fell in a heavy drizzle upon the canopy like a garden sprinkler, poured down the curved sides and dribbled through the hole David was cutting. It fell into his face, icy cold on his cheeks and stinging his eyes, it drenched his shoulders and the front of his pressure suit, and David began to pray. For the first time ever in his life the words took on meaning and he felt his terror receding.

  ‘Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.’

  He prayed aloud, striking up at the softly yielding Perspex and feeling the soft rain of death in his face. He tore at the opening with his hands, bringing away slabs of transparent material, but ripping his gloves and leaving his blood smearing the jagged edges of the opening.

  ‘Blessed be His name, whose glorious kingdom is for ever—’

  The opening was large enough. He hauled himself up in the seat, and found himself caught by the oxygen and radio lines attached to his helmet. He could not reach them with his crippled left arm. He stared down at the offending limb, and saw the blood welling out of the torn sleeve of the suit. There was no pain but it was twisted at a comical angle from the elbow.

  ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart—’ he whispered, and with his right hand he tore loose the chin strap and let his helmet drop to the floorboards. The Avtur soaked into the soft dark mop of his hair and ran down his neck behind his ears, and he thought about the flames of hell.

  Painfully he dragged himself out through the opening in the canopy, and now not even prayer could hold off the dark hordes of terror that assaulted his soul.

  ‘For the anger of God will kindle against you—’

  Laboriously he crawled across the slippery sleek metal of the wing root and fell to the ground. He fell face down and lay for a moment, exhausted by fear and effort.

  ‘– remember all the commands of God—’

  He heard voices then as he lay with his face against the dusty earth, and he lifted his head and saw the women from the orchard running towards him across the open field. The voices were shrill but faint and the words were in Hebrew. He knew that he was home.

  Steadying himself against the shattered body of the Mirage, he came to his feet with the broken arm dangling at his side, and he tried to shout to them.

  ‘Go back! Beware!’ but his voice was a throaty croak, and they ran on towards him. Their dresses and aprons were gay spots of colour against the dry brown earth.

  He pushed himself away from the aircraft and staggered to meet the running women.

  ‘Go back!’ he croaked in his own terrible distress, with the grip of his G-suit strangling his movements and the evaporating fuel cold as ice in his air and down his face.

  Within the battered hull of the Mirage a puddle of Avtur had been heated by the white-hot shell of the jet compressor. Its low volatility at last was raised to flash point and a dying spark from the electronic equipment was enough to ignite it.

  With a dull but awful roar, the Mirage bloomed with dark crimson flame and sooty black smoke, the wind ripped the flames outwards in great streamers and pennants that engulfed all around them, and David staggered onwards in the midsts of the roaring furnace that seemed to consume the very air.

  He held his breath – if he had not, the flame would have scorched his lungs. He closed his eyes tightly against the agony and ran on blindly. His body and his limbs were protected by the fireproof pressure suit and boots and gloves – but his head was bare and soaked with jet fuel.

  As he ran his head burned like a torch. His hair frizzled off in a stinking puff of flame and the skin of his scalp and neck and face were exposed. The flames burnt hi
s ears off and most of his nose, they flayed off his skin in a blistering sheet and then they ate into the raw flesh, they burnt away his lips and exposed his teeth and part of the bone of his jaw. They ate through his eyelids and stripped the living meat from his cheeks.

  David ran on through the burning air and smoke, and he did not believe that such pain was possible. It exceeded all his imaginings and swamped all the senses of his body and mind – but he knew he must not scream. The pain was a blackness and the vivid colours of flame in his tightly closed eyes, it was a roaring in his ears like all the winds of the world, and in his flesh it was the goads and whips and burning hooks of hell itself. But he knew he could not let this terrible fire enter his body and he ran on without screaming.

  The women from the orchard were brought up short by the sudden forest of flame and black smoke that rose up in front of them, engulfing the squashed-insect body of the aircraft, and closing around the running figure of the pilot.

  It was a solid impenetrable wall of heat and smoke that blotted out all ahead of them, and forced them to draw back, awed and horrified, before its raging hot breath. They stood in a small group, panting and wild-eyed.

  Then abruptly a freak gust of wind opened the heavy oily curtains of smoke, and out of them stumbled a dreadful thing with a scorched and smoking body and a head of flame.

  Blindly it came out of the smoke, one arm hanging and its feet dragging and staggering in the soft earth. They stared at this thing in horror, frozen in silence, and it came towards them.

  Then a strapping girl, with a strong brown body and a man of dark hair, uttered a cry of compassion – and raced to meet him.

  As she ran, she stripped off her heavy voluminous skirt of thick wool, leaving her strong brown legs bare. She reached David and she swirled the skirt over his head, smothering the flames that still ate into his flesh. The other women followed her, using their clothing to wrap him as he fell and rolled on the earth.

  Only then did David begin to scream, from that lipless mouth with the exposed teeth. It was a sound that none of them would ever forget. As he screamed the eyes were open, with the lashes and brow and most of the lids burned away. The eyes were dark indigo blue in the glistening mask of wet scorched meat, and the little blood vessels, sealed by the heat, popped open and dribbled and spurted. As he screamed, the blood and lymph bubbled from the nostril holes where his nose had been, and his body writhed and heaved and convulsed as spasm after spasm of unbearable agony hit him.

  The women had to hold him down to control his struggles, and to prevent him tearing with clawed fingers at the ruins of his face.

  He was still screaming when the doctor from the kibbutz slashed open the sleeve of his pressure suit with a scalpel and pressed the morphine needle into the twitching, jumping muscles of his arm.

  The Brig saw the last bright radar image fade from the plot and heard the young radar officer report formally, ‘No further contact.’ And a great silence fell on the command bunker.

  They were all watching him. He stood hunched over the plot and his big bony fists were clasped at his sides. His face was stiff and expressionless, but his eyes were terrible.

  It seemed that the frantic voices of his two pilots still echoed from the speakers above his head, as they called to each other in the extremes of mortal conflict.

  They had all heard David’s voice, hoarse with sorrow and fear.

  ‘Joe! No, Joe! Oh God, no!’ and they knew what that meant. They had lost them both, and the Brig was still stunned by the sudden incalculable turn that the sortie had taken.

  At the moment he had lost control of his fighters he had known that disaster was unavoidable – and now his son was dead. He wanted to cry out aloud, to protest against the futility of it. He closed his eyes tightly for a few seconds, and when he opened them, he was in control again.

  ‘General alert,’ he snapped. ‘All squadrons to “Red” standby—’ he knew they faced an international crisis. ‘I want air cover over the area they went down. They may have ejected. Put up two Phantom flights and keep an umbrella over them. I want helicopters sent in immediately, with paratrooper guards and medical teams—’

  Command bunker moved swiftly into general alert procedure.

  ‘Get me the Prime Minister,’ he said. He was going to have to do a lot of explaining, and he spared a few vital seconds to damn David Morgan roundly and bitterly.

  The air force doctor took one look at David’s charred and scorched head and he swore softly.

  ‘We’ll be lucky to save this one.’

  Loosely he swathed the head in Vaseline bandages and they hurried with David’s blanket-wrapped body on the stretcher to the Bell 205 helicopter waiting in the orchard.

  The Bell touched down on the helipad at Hadassah Hospital and a medical team was ready for him. One hour and fifty-three minutes after the Mirage hit the irrigation canal David had passed through the sterile lock into the special burns unit on the third floor of the hospital – into a quiet and secluded little world where everybody wore masks and long green sterile robes and the only contact with the outside world was through the double-glazed windows and even the air he breathed was scrubbed and cleaned and filtered.

  However, David was enfolded in the soft dark clouds of morphine and he did not hear the quiet voices of the masked figures as they worked over him.

  ‘It’s third degree over the entire area—’

  ‘No attempt to clean it or touch it, Sister, not until it stabilizes. I am going to spray with Epigard, and we’ll go to intra-muscular Tetracycline four-hourly against infection—

  ‘It will be two weeks before we dare touch it.’

  ‘Very well, Doctor.’

  ‘Oh, and Sister, fifteen milligrams of morphine six-hourly. We are going to have a lot of pain with this one.’

  Pain was infinity, an endless ocean across which the wave-patterns marched relentlessly to burst up the beaches of his soul. There were times when the surf of pain ran high and each burst of it threatened to shatter his reason. Again there were times when it was low, almost gentle in its throbbing rhythm and he drifted far out upon the ocean of pain to where the morphine mists enfolded him. Then the mists parted and a brazen sun beat down upon his head, and he squirmed and writhed and cried out. His skull seemed to bloat and swell until it must burst, and the open nerve-ends screamed for surcease.

  Then suddenly there was the sharply beloved sting of the needle in his flesh, and the mists closed about him once more.

  ‘I don’t like the look of this at all. Have we taken a culture, Sister?’

  ‘Yes, Doctor.’

  ‘What are we growing?’

  ‘I’m afraid it’s strep.’

  ‘Yes. I thought so. I think we’ll change to Cloxacillin – see if we get a better response with that.’

  With the pain, David became aware of a smell. It was the smell of carrion and things long dead, the smell of vermin in dirty blankets, of vomit and excreta, and the odour of wet garbage festering in dark alleys – and at last he came to know that the smell was the rotting of his own flesh as the bacteria of Streptococcus infection attacked the exposed tissue.

  They fought it with the drugs, but now the pain was underlined with the fevers of infection and the terrible burning thirsts which no amount of liquids could slake.

  With the fever came the nightmares and the fantasies to plague and goad him even further beyond the limits of his endurance.

  ‘Joe—’ he cried out in his agony, ‘try for the sun, Joe. Break left now – Go! Go!’ And then he was sobbing from the ruined and broken mouth. ‘Oh, Joe! Oh God, no! Joe.’

  Until the night-sister could no longer bear it and she came hurrying with the syringe, and his screams turned into babbling and then into the low whimper and moan of the drug sleep.

  ‘We’ll start with the acriflavin dressings now, Sister.’

  When they changed the dressings every forty-eight hours it was under general anaesthetic for the entire head
was of raw flesh, a bland expressionless head, a head like a child’s drawing, crude lines and harsh colours, hairless, earless, streaked and mottled with yellow runs and patches of soft pus and corruption.

  ‘We are getting a response from the Cloxacillin, it’s looking a lot healthier, Sister.’

  The naked flesh of his eyelids had contracted, pulling back like the glistening petals of a pink rose, exposing the eyeballs to the air without respite. They had filled the eyes’ sockets with a yellow ointment to soothe and moisten them, to keep out the loathsome infection that covered his head. The ointment prevented vision.

  ‘I think we’ll go for an abdominal pedicel now. Will you prep for afternoon theatre, please, Sister?’

  Now it was time for the knife, and David was to learn that the pain and the knife lived together in terrible sin. They lifted a long flap of skin and flesh from his belly, leaving it still attached at one end, and they rolled it into a fat sausage, then they strapped his good arm, the one without the plaster cast, to his side and they stitched the free end of the sausage to his forearm, training it to draw its blood supply from there. Then they brought him back from theatre and left him trussed and helpless and blind with the pedicel fastened to his arm, like a remora to the belly of a shark.

  ‘Well, we have saved both eyes.’ The voice was proud, fond almost, and David looked up and saw them for the first time. They were gathered around his cot, a circle of craning heads, mouths and noses covered by surgical masks, but his vision was still smeary with ointment and distorted by the drip irrigation that had replaced it.

  ‘Now we will go for the eyelids.’

  It was the knife again, the contracted and bunched-up eyelids split and re-shaped and stitched, the knife and pain and the familiar sickly taste and stink of anaesthetic that saturated his body and seemed to exude from the very pores of his skin.