“You can’t imagine it.” Those were his words. “Snow rising like smoke a thousand, two, three thousand feet from their peaks. A plane caught in the grip of such a storm is like a chip caught in a great whirlpool.”
Shivering at the very thought, Mary drew the covers close about her and at last fell fast asleep.
She was awake an hour before dawn and, disturbed by an overpowering sense of something wrong, drew on her clothes and walked outside. It was dark, gloomy, and chilly.
“Why did I leave my cozy bed?” she asked herself as she walked across the narrow airfield and then among the shadows of many planes to search out their own.
“There you are,” she whispered at last. “Good, old ship!”
To her surprise she saw that the door stood slightly ajar. Instantly her curiosity was aroused. Sparky, she knew, had not slept in the ship. For all that, he may have arisen early to look things over before the big day. That there were guards about she knew quite well, though she had not been challenged.
This, she told herself, was not strange. The moon was down. It was the darkest hour before dawn. There were more planes on the field than ever before in its history. No one would risk a light.
And yet, as she came close to their plane, she thought she caught a faint flicker inside its cabin. This did not startle her. Sparky was still in her mind. She would surprise him. It would be nice to spend an hour with him in their own ship before dawn on a day that should mean much to them.
With noiseless footsteps, she reached the plane, then climbed two rounds of the boarding ladder. Without a sound, she opened the door half way to peer into the darkness.
Did some good gremlin whisper, “Wait?” Who can say? She did wait. And then—she barely suppressed a gasp. The gleam of a tiny flashlight reflected by some bright object faintly illuminated a face within the cabin. It was not Sparky, not a man at all, but a woman. “The Woman in Black,” she thought, nearly falling from the ladder. She was sure that this was the woman who had fired a shot at her back there in the city.