Opening paragraphs............................

     The vibrating clamor from the four great piston engines set teeth on edge and made and intolerable assault on cringing eardrums.  The decibel-level, Smith calculated, must have been about that found in a boiler factory, and one, moreover, that was working on overtime rates, while the shaking cold in that cramped, instrument-crowded flight deck was positively Siberian.  On balance, he reflected, he would have gone for the Siberian boiler factory any time because, whatever its drawbacks, it wasn't liable to fall out of the sky or crash into a mountainside which, in his present circumstances, seemed a likely enough, if not imminent, contingency for all that the pilot of their Lancaster bomber appeared to care to the contrary.  Smith looked away from the darkly opaque world beyond the windscreens where the wipers fought a useless battle with the driving snow and looked again at the man in the left-hand captain's seat.


-Alistair MacLean,   Where Eagles Dare