Читать книгу Аэропорт / Аirport онлайн | страница 14

“It’s all right. I won’t report on your wearing a non-reg shirt here. As long as you change it before you come on my flight.”

All right, he would change his unofficial shirt for a regulation one. He would probably have to borrow one. When he told them why, they would hardly believe him.

Demerest’s thoughts returned to the present.

Gwen was in the shower. When he went to her bedroom door, she called out, “Vernon, is that you?” Even competing with the shower, her voice—with its flawless English accent, which he liked so much—sounded exciting.

“I’m glad you came early,” she called again. “I want to have a talk. You can make tea, if you like.”

Inside his car, Mel Bakersfeld shivered. Was the shivering the reminder from the old injury of his foot?

The injury had happened sixteen years ago off the coast of Korea when Mel had been a Navy pilot flying fighter missions from the carrier Essex. He had a kind of instinct… In a dogfight with a MIG-15, Mel’s Navy F9F-5 had been shot down into the sea.

He managed a controlled ditching, but his left foot was trapped by a jammed rudder pedal. Somehow, underwater, his foot came free. In intense pain, half-drowned, he surfaced. Later he learned he had severed the ligaments in front of his ankle, so that the foot extended from his leg in an almost straight line.

He had the same kind of instinct now.

Mel was nearing runway one seven, left. Without ceasing, since the storm began, the miles of runways had been plowed, vacuumed, brushed, and sanded by a group called a Conga Line. He saw it now.

His arrival was noticed. He heard the convoy leader notified by radio, “Mr. Bakersfeld just joined us.” He had come out to inspect the snow clearance as a result of the adverse report by Vernon Demerest’s Airlines Snow Committee. Clearly, everything was going well.

Less than five years ago, the airport was considered among the world’s finest and most modern. Now travelers and visitors at Lincoln International saw principally the main passenger terminal—a brightly lighted, air-conditioned Taj Mahal and still admired it. Where the deficiencies lay were in operating areas – runways and taxiways. They were dangerously over-taxed. Only last week Keith Bakersfeld, Mel’s brother, had predicted grimly, “Someday there’ll be a second’s inattention, and one of us will bring two airplanes together at that intersection.”