An hour later, when I found the Harvard, I had almost run out of fuel. The turtle lake had become a long ellipse, one of a cluster of small lakes separated by yellowing meanders. Algae covered the fuselage, but I could see the blurred numerals on its wing. Circling the lake at five hundred feet, I fixed its map position—once the lake warmed in the early spring, a month before we moved to the jet school at Winnipeg, I would rent an inflatable dinghy and show the Turks where their comrade was buried. I hoped that they would decide to leave him in the lake, sealed away from the world in his cocoon of algae, still embarked on his solitary flight.

Twenty miles from Moose Jaw the fuel tanks were empty. By luck I found an empty stretch of road between two deserted wheatfields. At the last moment, as I came in to land, I saw the fencing posts beneath their upholstery of snow. The Harvard touched down in a storm of icy mud that sluiced across the silent fields. It lost its starboard wing tip, then ground-looped and careened to a halt in the ditch beside the road.

Fifteen minutes later a mink farmer in a slush-covered Cadillac drove up as I sat stunned in the cockpit. He stared calmly at the blood leaking from my helmet and drew on his cigarette with his hard lips. At last he raised his window and rolled away. I learned later that he had never contacted the airfield, perhaps hoping that I would freeze to death behind my cracked windshield.

*   *   *

The senior Canadian officers hearing my case openly admitted their bafflement. I had been seen over Deer Lake, but they were puzzled that I had managed to consume the Harvard’s ample reserves of fuel. They had already decided that I should cease training and be returned to England, but they examined and reexamined my flight plan, suspecting that I had been navigating a secret course of my own.

Did they think that I might be planning to defect and was rehearsing the same escape flight made by Captain Artvin? In a sense they were right, as David was well aware. He made no attempt to intervene on my behalf, knowing that it was time for me to leave the air force. Whatever mythology I constructed for myself would have to be made from the commonplaces of my life, from the smallest affections and kindnesses, not from the nuclear bombers of the world and their dreams of planetary death. By revealing the location of the lost Harvard I might have persuaded them to alter their decision, but I had seen enough of the RAF. I wanted to forget Shanghai and the Avenue Edward VII and the flash of the Nagasaki bomb, and there was a simple way of doing so.