Three hours later Dave and Freddy were stretching their legs up on the flight deck. They had had mess and in a short time they would report to Group Captain Spencer in his quarters. First, though they felt they would like a stroll and a few words together. Since the drawing, they had not had much of a chance to be alone. Though they had been relieved of all duties, they had not merely sat back and taken things easy. They were real pilots, right to the core, and as soon as Group Captain Spencer had dismissed them they had gone below decks to the repair station to have a look at the Skua that had been hoisted aboard. An inspection of the plane, as the Victory's mechanics worked on it, had brought to light the true reason for the retractable landing gear's failure to function. As Freddy had guessed, bullets had parted one of the cables, and a free end of the cable had been whipped up by the propeller wash to catch in the retracting gear and jam it so that the right wheel couldn't go more than a quarter of the way down.
That, however, was not the most important thing they found out. Inspection also showed that both of them had come within three inches or less of becoming dead pilots. Bullet holes in the fuselage and cockpit cowling (or hood) showed clearly how narrow had been the margin by which death had passed them by. Two or three inches one way or the other and they would most certainly have joined their Junkers and Heinkel victims down in the gentle blue swells of the Mediterranean.
And now they were walking down their dinner along the long narrow flight deck of the Victory.
"In case you didn't get the idea," Dave said, breaking a moment's silence, "you sure gave me a sweet case of heart failure in the Ready Room this afternoon. No fooling, I thought sure you were honestly giving me the cold shoulder. Gosh! I didn't know what to think."
"Let it be a lesson to you," Freddy replied with a grin. Then, in a serious tone, "But I should be sore at you for even thinking I'd pick anybody else but you. After that landing you made? I should say not."
"Thanks," Dave said. "But I was scared stiff bringing that ship down. And between you, me, and the stern of this deck, there was an awful lot of luck mixed up in that landing. A couple of times I thought she was getting away from me. I'd sure hate to have to do it every day."
"Well, it was perfect," Freddy said. "A hundred times better than a landing I recall you once made in the English Channel."[1]
"You recall?" Dave scoffed at him. "How could you? You were out cold that time, and you know it. And, boy, when I turned around and saw you—!"
Dave left the sentence hanging in midair and shook his head as though to drive away the heart-chilling memory.
"Gee, it sure is different down here, isn't it?" he said, changing the subject.