Read Online The Last Supper: And Other Stories by Howard Fast - Free Book Online Page B

into one of those damned sand mountains.”
    â€œThey’re not mountains, sir, just sandhills.”
    â€œThey look like mountains to me, and if we lose any more altitude, we’re going to hit one.”
    â€œIt does seem worrisome.”
    â€œIt’s going to be more than worrisome if we come down in the desert. It seems to me that we ought to turn around and go back to the airstrip.”
    â€œWe’ve thought of that, sir, but we’ve lost altitude since we went over a ridge back there. I don’t think we could get back to that airstrip.”
    In a way, I was relieved. “Well,” I said, “that does it. There’s only one thing we can do.”
    â€œYes, sir?”
    â€œGet rid of some of the Coca Cola bottles.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œGet rid of them, sir? I don’t understand you,” said the co-pilot.
    â€œDump them,” I said emphatically. “Pitch them out of the open doors. And keep dumping them until we’re light enough to make altitude.”
    â€œThe Coca Cola bottles, sir?”
    â€œExactly—that’s just what I had in mind, the Coca Cola bottles.”
    â€œYou don’t mean dump them? You don’t mean throw them away?”
    â€œThat’s exactly what I mean.”
    â€œOh, no sir,” said the pilot.
    â€œWe couldn’t do that,” said the co-pilot.
    â€œNot with Coca Cola bottles,” the navigator said seriously. Anything else, yes. Jeeps, tanks, guns—oh, yes, certainly, if the situation warranted it. But not Coca Cola bottles. I’m afraid you don’t understand about Coca Cola, sir.”
    â€œYou see, Coca Cola,” said the pilot, “well, I don’t really know how to explain. It takes years in the army to understand what I mean. I know you probably have had a great deal of experience, sir, but in the army it’s something else. You don’t just throw away Coca Cola bottles.”
    â€œOur manifest would be short,” the navigator said. “They would ask what happened to the bottles? We would say, we dumped them into the Arabian desert. Oh, no, no, sir. You don’t. You just don’t.”
    â€œI’ll take the responsibility myself,” I begged them. “Put it all on my shoulders. I’ll be responsible to the Coca Cola Company and the army. As a matter of fact, I’ll pay for the damn bottles.”
    â€œOh, no sir—you just can’t take such a responsibility.”
    Plunging wildly, I said, “I outrank all of you. Here’s my company status. Suppose I order you to.”
    â€œWell, sir, I’m afraid not,” the pilot said sadly. “You don’t really outrank us as a correspondent. I’m afraid you have no right to order us to do so.”
    â€œBut sooner or later, we’re going to hit one of those mountains of sand. Don’t you know what it means to come down in the Arabian desert? You know the Arabs don’t like Americans, and that’s if they find us and we don’t die of thirst, and if they find us, you know what kind of things they do.”
    â€œYes, sir, it’s a pretty bad situation, isn’t it,” the pilot agreed. “It’s a shame we have to be in such a situation, but I really don’t know what to do about it. The only thing we could think of was to call ahead to the next airstrip and tell them we’re coming in to reload. That’s about eighty miles from here and no bad ridges in between. We have a very good chance of making it, sir.”
    I appealed to their pride and pointed out what an ignoble way to die this was, crushed like an insect between sand and Coca Cola bottles; I drew vivid pictures of Arab atrocities against Americans, embroidering them with full barracks detail; I spoke of the process of dehydration in that desert heat and of how it feels to die of thirst, or how I thought it would feel to die of thirst from the best accounts I had