Time and space are no match for fate in this week’s amazing tale of crossed signals in the midst of terror from Rick Wilber.
August travels with the Sunday Morning Transport include stories by Christopher Campbell, Curtis Chen, Marie Brennan, and Rick Wilber.
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~ Julian and Fran, August 23, 2026
Two Days in May
by Rick Wilber
I
May 5, 1940
Darkness. Pain. An awakening. Peter Shippey is still alive. He has no recollection of how he managed the takeoff. He remembers setting the prop pitch to fine and shoving the throttle forward and after that it’s all gone black. Did he manage the slats and flaps? Did he adjust the trim as he pulled back on the stick? He must have. Christ Almighty, how the hell did he get over the trees at the end of the field?
He shakes his head, takes a breath. Got to get a grip on things. He does so, literally, by holding the small circular top of the stick as he recalls a little more. He’d been dodging those damn machine gun rounds even as he approached the trees at the end of the open field where he’d been ambushed. He’d cleared the trees, branches and leaves flying everywhere around, when his front screen cracked with a line of bullet holes and his back took a hard jolt and he’d died, or thought he had. Had the armored seatback stopped a round from that machine gun? He didn’t know, but by god, he was lucky. The Lysander is a sturdy old girl. She’s been hit, and badly, and yet here she is, flying along like a dog with two tails.
Now he’s in low clouds, the rain still coming down, some of it seeping into the cockpit through the holes and cracks in the canopy. He looks around the cockpit. The control panel in front of him is smashed and shattered. He has no way to know his altitude or his direction in this midnight cloud and darkness. No way to know anything much, really, except that, miraculously, he is still in the air, the Lysander’s air-cooled engine running loud and smooth, his rudder working fine.
He checks the sky around him, but there’s nothing but black. The ride is turbulent, wild gusts of thunderstorm winds and the crack of lightning nearby. That’s good. If he can keep his plane in the air, there’ll be no Luftwaffe planes flying around in this weather looking for him.
The agent he dropped off a few minutes ago just across the border in Germany must be dead, he thinks. Or maybe she escaped the trap, or maybe she’s a double agent and glad to be home in Germany to tell her handlers everything she’s learned in London. All of that is not his worry. His job was to deliver her and he’s done that, landing in that postage stamp of a field just as the rain began.
He shakes his head again to clear out some more cobwebs. Time to go home. But where, exactly, is that? He’s not willing to try to drop below the cloud deck to see where he is, afraid that he might run into a Dutch windmill or sink into a polder. He can’t be more than five hundred feet up.
Eventually he’ll have to take that chance, but not yet. Instead, to be safe, he goes into a gentle climb. The Lysander responds nicely to the stick.
He holds it steady. Lysanders are single-wing planes built for reconnaissance and artillery spotting. The planes were slow and easy targets at the start of the war, but as Europe has been swallowed up by the Nazis, the planes have come into their own. Those huge wheels and sturdy wide wings are perfect for short takeoffs and landings. Shippey can land his plane and take off almost anywhere there’s open ground, making the short flight across the Channel to sneak onto a field in the dead of night and drop off or pick up special agents. It’s worked before, but not this time.
So, where the hell is he? And at what altitude? All he knows for sure is that the engine is running fine, the Lysander is in the air and slowly climbing, and he is heading . . . somewhere.
The wireless crackles. This isn’t possible. The wireless has three bullet holes through the heart of it, the microphone is shot through and the cord cut, the receiver knocked half out of its socket, and the broken and cracked tubes are visible to him. It’s dead.
But it crackles, and then, clear as a bell in his headphones, he hears someone talking, the words barely distinguishable. He can’t understand any of it, but it sounds Dutch, not German. The Dutch are not in the war yet, still a neutral country, at least for now. Should be safe, so: “Mayday, mayday, mayday,” he says in English. “This is RAF. I’m in a Lysander and I need a place to land, and soon. Shot up badly. Mayday, mayday, mayday.”
There is no response for a very long minute. Then: “Englander, Ik spreek geen Engels. Spreekt u Nederlands?”
This is meaningless. He looks at the fuel gauge. It is edging toward empty, so there is a leak. Jesus, things look bad.
