Cherry Ames 05 Flight Nurse by Helen Wells Read Free Book Online Page B

right?”
    “Very all right!” She wished silently that Wade were as thoroughly reliable as Bunce.
    They leveled off at around four thousand feet and flew along smoothly in the morning sunlight. Now Cherry had to take back that mental comment. The cockpit door opened and in came the pilot. He walked 50
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    unsteadily down the aisle between the litters, his eyes glancing into each tier. He faced Cherry sheepishly.
    “Copilot took over.” Wade cleared his throat. “Uh—
    everyone comfortable?” Then, without any prompting, he raised his voice and self-consciously said:
    “Men, my name’s Cooper. I just want you to know that when I was in the ATC, I flew from San Francisco to Stalingrad through a series of storms with a load of machinery and we set her down without a scratch.” Wade said it all in one breath, as if he were ashamed of it.
    One weak voice called, “Get any vodka?” Wade relaxed. “Vodka and champagne and caviar—
    for breakfast! And they met us at the airport with a brass band!”
    There were amused murmurs and smiles along the tiers of wounded men.
    “Thanks, Wade,” Cherry whispered.
    “Sure. Take it easy, fellows!” Cherry whispered, “I thought you’d flown only in China.”
    “Well—I—uh—I have to go up forward now. ’Bye.” Wade stopped on his way up the crowded aisle to shake a soldier’s hand.
    “Nice guy,” said the patient at Cherry’s elbow. He turned his head contentedly and shut his eyes. Cherry could have hugged Wade at that moment.

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    The flight went off smoothly, and the patients (who had already had considerable hospital care) slept most of the way. Subsequent flights went off well, too.
    Cherry became familiar with the holding hospital at Prestwick, Scotland. Here patients waited six hours or three weeks, to be picked up by transatlantic ATC
    planes. Four hundred wounded were flown out every morning, westward over the Atlantic, fifteen enormous C-54’s at a time. The transfer hospital was a huge barn of a place. “Must be a good deal like lying in Grand Central Station,” Wade commented. The men there were cheerful, though, because they were going home.
    These short hops to Prestwick were easy, Cherry realized. When her team went into combat areas, it would not be so easy as this. Until then, jumping back and forth across the British Isles, eating in strange places, sleeping when and where she could, was a gypsylike existence.
    The trips back to home base were carefree. The plane then was empty of patients. They would carry back supplies from ships docking in Scotland, usually medical supplies. Once Cherry was entrusted with a precious package of oral penicillin, which an ATC plane had rushed from New York for a stricken soldier in a British hospital. Cherry thought it would have heartened that soldier’s family to see this swift, conscientious aid. On the way back, too, she had a chance to see from aloft 52
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    the long chain of American Army hospitals scattered throughout England.
    Cherry’s favorite perch on the way home was beside a low window, back in the fuselage. Lying flat, while floating along in the empty sunshine, she would watch the green hills skim by, listen to the motors’ ceaseless throbbing, and dream. Sometimes the sun would sink before they reached home. Then the cabin filled with shadows, while all around and under them, cloud banks piled up, savagely red, swiftly fading.
    Sometimes they flew at night. One particular night, an incandescent moon lighted the air. It seemed to Cherry their plane was flying right at the moon. Wade’s low voice called her up front. He dismissed his copilot.
    The silvery-white planet hung just outside the plane’s nose.
    “Bomber’s moon,” Wade said to Cherry. “Where is Bunce?”
    “Asleep on a litter.”
    “Want a blanket over your lap?”
    “Thanks.”
    He tucked her in,