One wing tank was full. A big, grinning man with sandy hair dragged the hose under the nose of the plane to take it to the other wing tank. Close by the nose wheel he slipped and steadied himself by the shaft which reaches down to the wheel’s hub. His position for a moment was absurdly ungraceful. When he straightened up, his arm slid into the wheel well. But he dragged the hose the rest of the way and passed it on up. Then that tank was full and capped. The refueling crew got down to the ground and fed the hose back to the pit which devoured it. That was all. But somehow Joe remembered the sandy-haired man and his arm going up inside the wheel well for a fraction of a second.
The pilot read one part of the flight orders again and tore them carefully across. One part he touched his pocket lighter to. It burned. He nodded yet again to the co-pilot, and they swung up and in the pilots’ doorway. Joe followed.
They settled in their places in the cabin. The pilot threw a switch and pressed a knob. One motor turned over stiffly, and caught. The second. Third. Fourth. The pilot listened, was satisfied, and pulled back on the multiple throttle. The plane trundled away. Minutes later it faced the long runway, a tinny voice from the control tower spoke out of a loud-speaker under the instruments, and the plane roared down the field. In seconds it lifted and swept around in a great half-circle.
“Okay,” said the pilot. “Wheels up.”
The co-pilot obeyed. The telltale lights that showed the wheels retracted glowed briefly. The men relaxed.
“You know,” said the co-pilot, “there was the devil of a time during the War with sabotage. Down in Brazil there was a field planes used to take off from to fly to Africa. But they’d take off, head out to sea, get a few miles offshore, and then blow up. We must’ve lost a dozen planes that way! Then it broke. There was a guy—a sergeant—in the maintenance crew who was sticking a hand grenade up in the nose wheel wells. German, he was, and very tidy about it, and nobody suspected him. Everything looked okay and tested okay. But when the ship was well away and the crew pulled up the wheels, that tightened a string and it pulled the pin out of the grenade. It went off.... The master mechanic finally caught him and nearly killed him before the MPs could stop him. We’ve got to be plenty careful, whether the ground crews like it or not.”
Joe said drily: “You were, except when they were topping off. You took that for granted.” He told about the sandy-haired man. “He hadn’t time to stick anything in the wheel well, though,” he added.
The co-pilot blinked. Then he looked annoyed. “Confound it! I didn’t watch! Did you?”
The pilot shook his head, his lips compressed.
The co-pilot said bitterly: “And I thought I was security-conscious! Thanks for telling me, fella. No harm done this time, but that was a slip!”