'You'd think a man would be entitled to some peace and quiet on his own flight-deck.' He slid open his side screen. "The young lack so many things, like appreciation of a fine pipe tobacco or faith in their commanding officers.' He sighed heavily, carefully marked the place in his book, folded the rest away and straightened in his seat. That's to say, no, sir.' 'Part of the malaise of our time,' Carpenter said sorrowfully. 'Flying Officer Tremayne, you have that look of pained apprehension on your face again.' 'Yes, sir. Banned, of course, young Tremayne this to the fresh-faced youngster in the co-pilot's seat - 'so I can't let you have it till you grow up.' He broke off, fanned the smoke-laden air to improve the visibility, and peered accusingly at his co-pilot. He puffed deeply on an ancient briar that smelt like a fumigating plant. From what little Smith could occasionally see of the lurid cover, depicting a blood-stained knife plunged into the back of a girl who didn't seem to have any clothes on, the Wing Commander held the more serious contemporary novelists in a fine contempt. Before him, at a comfortable reading distance, a book rested on a hinged contraption which he had swung out from the cabin's side. Quite dearly, he found the shuddering vibration as soothing as the ministrations of the gentlest of masseurs, the roar of the-engines positively soporific and the ambient temperature just right for a man of his leisured literary tastes. Any comparison with a Siberian boiler factory he would have regarded as the ravings of an unhinged mind. Wing Commander Cecil Carpenter was as completely at home in his environment as the most contented oyster in his shell in Whitstable Bay. Smith looked away from the darkly opaque world beyond the windscreens where the wipers fought a useless battle with the driving snow and looked again at the man in the left-hand captain's seat. On balance, he reflected, he would have gone for the ®Siberian boiler factory any time because, whatever its drawbacks, it wasn't liable to fall out of the sky or crash into a mountain-side which, in his present circumstances, seemed a likely enough, if not imminent contingency for all that the pilot of their Lancaster bomber appeared to care to the contrary. The decibel-level, Smith calculated, must have been about that found in a boiler factory, and one, moreover, that was working on overtime rates, while the shaking cold in that cramped, instrument-crowded flight-deck was positively Siberian. ![]() Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, Alistair Maclean - Where Eagles Dare The vibrating clangour from the four great piston engines set teeth on edge and made an intolerable assault on cringing eardrums.
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