by A. J. Roe
He stopped at the only building he could see other than a small hangar. It was a rusted, dark red shipping container. Rick shuddered thinking back to his last experience in one and swore for a moment he could still smell the squid.
Inside the makeshift office were a couple of swivel chairs and a desk spattered with engine oil. The whole place was thick with the reek of old cigarette smoke and was dotted with overflowing ashtrays. Chain smoking seemed to be pretty much standard practice in this part of the world.
Rick walked up to the desk and greeted the occupant. He was a middle-aged Chinese man in overalls, with thin black hair, a big gut and a friendly smile.
“I want to hire a plane.” Rick said, making it clear that he meant business; not that the old owner seemed to notice or care.
“My name is Chodak.” He smiled and answered in heavy-accented English “You want a tourist plane? We can go round the valley, very beautiful. When do you want to go?”
“Right now.”
“Now? No planes available, all pilots are out. Tomorrow, okay?”
“No. This is urgent. I’ll pay double,”
“Double?” The man's eyes lit up. “I normally don't fly but short trip okay. Where you going?”
“Mount Kailash.”
the pilot’s belly shook as he chuckled at the request. “What is it with that mountain today?”
“Someone else wanted to go there?”
“One man called me in morning, he wanted helicopter.” Rick swallowed hard. This was fast becoming a death race.
“What did you say to him?”
“I say ‘No’. Too risky. Army always watching.” Chodak mimed firing a rifle at the roof of the makeshift office. “Today winds too strong anyway. At dawn, maybe okay, but not now.”
Chodak spun an ancient computer monitor from his desk towards Rick. It was stained almost entirely yellow from cigarette smoke and the buzzy, pixelated screen showed a topographic map with a dark mass of clouds moving fast over a mountain range. The storm already covered most of the eastern side of the main peak. “You wait, maybe tomorrow, maybe next day.”
“I can’t wait,” Rick replied. “Take me right now and I’ll pay five times the price.”
The grin fell from the pilot’s face and was replaced with a wide-eyed silence. “Five times?”
Rick flicked open the van driver’s wallet. He pulled out a fat wad of notes and slammed them down on the table, not actually aware if that was actually a lot of money. A smile began to spread across the pilot’s face. “I’ll give you this now and the rest when we get back,” Rick said.
Chodak’s hands were shaking as he gleefully scooped up the cash. “Okay,” he stammered, a smile breaking through the surprise, “Err, wait me half hour?”
Rick forced a grin back, knowing full well that whenever things were going well for him some unknown damn disaster would be waiting just around the corner. Once again, his gut was dead right.
34
The powerful chemical stench of aviation fuel hung in the air as they clambered out of the old van. On Chodak’s instructions Rick had driven right down the runway towards the hangar and pulled up beside the plane.
The light twin-propellor aircraft looked worryingly old. It’s white paint and turquoise racing stripe paint were both peeling off the fuselage revealing a russet brown layer of rust beneath. A line of faded text on the side read ‘Antonov AN-28’. Rick’s palms grew sweaty at the sight of it.
“No worry,” Chodak said, catching his line of sight. “Best plane here. Only crash twice.”
Does he mean this kind of plane or this actual plane? Rick wondered. From the sight of the other vehicles they’d passed by driving out to the airstrip, being the best plane here didn’t look to be much of an accolade. Suddenly the cargo bay of the passenger jet didn’t seem so bad.
Chodak went on to explain with broken English that he’d chosen this one deliberately as it should be small enough to go undetected by the military radars that were constantly scanning the local airspace.
There was a kind of grim positivity to the situation at least. If things went wrong, at least he wouldn't be languishing in some Chinese re-education camp while waiting for the end of the world.
From a good twenty yards away, Rick stood and watched while Chodak worked around the plane, casually checking the oily landing gear and fuel levels with a lit cigarette hanging from his lips. When the pilot seemed sure everything was relatively unsafe, he climbed up into the cockpit. The pilot waved over to his customer to get his attention and followed with a thumbs-up.
Rick forced a smile onto his face and returned the gesture before heaving himself into the aircraft via a door at the rear that flipped up like a car boot.
The twin propellers began to spin, sending a pulsing vibration through the cockpit, running up through the chair and rattling his teeth. The aircraft began to roll north towards the runway and the sound of the engines soon picked up. Chodak pulled a set of headphones down over his ears and pointed up to a small shelf compartment on the ceiling for his passenger to do the same.
“Let’s fly,” Chodak shouted through the crackling radio and pulled out the throttle lever, sending the vehicle into a shaky dash.
The nose began to lift from the ground and banked sharply into a near vertical incline. Rick’s stomach leaped up into his throat from the sudden bottom-out.
In an attempt to draw his focus away from the shaky climb, sounds of spluttering engines and rattling metal, Rick closed his eyes and concentrated on breathing.
Slowly in and slowly out, trying to quell the mountain of fears that was looming towards him almost as fast as the peaks on the horizon. He didn’t want to think about the reality of flying this tiny plane directly into the blistering storm ahead. Nor did he want to think about the Chinese military presence that surrounded them on all sides and were well-known for their ‘shoot first, ask questions later’ policy.
Once they reached cruising altitude, the rocking and heaving of the tiny plane was almost soothing. Rick dozed for the first hour or so but the moment they hit the mountain range to the west, wind speeds picked up and a round of bone-jarring turbulence began.
Gazing out of the rear window, from where he was strapped in behind the co-pilot’s chair, the sky was light and clear. From the windshield however, it was a different story. The scene ahead was black as death, thick rolling clouds were broken only by bolts of lightning that stretched from the snowy mountaintops high into the stratosphere. Fortunately, the aircraft banked sharply southwards before they got too close.
Rick’s side of the cabin tilted down with the turn, allowing him a truly breath-taking view of the lands below. White capped mountains, interspersed with green grassy plateaus, stretched endlessly onwards. They were split by churning glacial rivers and rocky crevices that ran like thousands of capillaries across the landscape, feeding and nourishing the environment like a living body.
The vast rivers below had probably been flowing long before humans even came onto the scene and would likely still do so long after they were gone. Is it pointless trying to postpone the inevitable? Maybe it’s just time for our species to make way for something new?
Suddenly, Rick felt like he could see the big picture, or a glimpse of it at least and it was beautiful. But when his thoughts returned to Ellie, Yuriko, Sanjay, even Sarah, all logic was drowned out by overwhelming fear, not just for his own life, but for the ones he loved.
The turbulence eventually settled and Rick unclipped his seatbelt. He stretched his legs out as best he could behind the pilot’s seat trying to subdue the pins and needles in his feet. The interior of the plane was roughly the space of a five-seater car but a huge chunk of that was taken up at the front by the cockpit controls.
After a wasted few minutes trying to get comfortable Rick clambered up into the front seat beside Chodak.
“Everything okay?” he said, slumping down on the faded, worn grey leather. The pilot turned and gave Rick a quick nod bu
t there was a definite look of apprehension in his eyes.
Following the Chodak’s line of sight, it was easy to see why. A wave of rolling black clouds was thundering from the west at a tremendous pace, while the peak of the mountain emerged from the darkness like an island protruding from a stormy sea. Shards of lightning split the swirling black ahead like fractures in glass. “Too fast to turn back,” the pilot muttered, “This was bad idea.”
Rick’s heart raced as the first of the storm winds whipped into the hull, throwing the tiny aircraft like a ragdoll. Chodak had tried to warn him, but like always, Rick had been too stubborn to listen. Now they had a big damn problem.
35
An icy wind poured in through the fuselage. Rick was momentarily transported back to the days he and Sanjay had spent on the moors. If he knew what he was getting into then he would’ve thrown his equipment down on the slimy shingle and walked away. Maybe they would have had a relaxing Guinness or two in the local pub before driving back home, where he would have put his feet up on his flatpack coffee table and watched terrible, low-budget daytime TV for the next week. Instead, he was here, wondering if he might ever see his friend’s face again. It didn’t seem likely. He couldn’t bear to ask himself the same question about Ellie.
Right now, there was a much more pressing problem. The heavy blanket of wind had caused their speed to drop and the light aircraft was beginning to veer sideways, the right-hand wing rising high above the left. Through the pilot's side window, Rick could make out tiny villages and patches of farmland rushing along below where they dotted the foot of the mountain. He wondered if they were looking up at the falling plane with the same sense of dread that he felt.
The dashboard lights were flashing red and orange and several high-pitched alarms started to trill. “Stall, Stall,” Chodak shouted.
Naturally, Rick assumed from his only frame of reference that a stall in a plane was like that in a car, where the engine simply cut out and they could cruise down to safety.
Chodak knew how much worse it was. He wrestled the controls in an attempt to pull the plane up high enough that they wouldn’t lose lift beneath the right wing and drop like a stone, but the small engines no longer had the power to fight the storm’s down draught.
“Seatbelt!” Chodak shouted.
Rick’s shaking fingers fumbled as he attempted to do up the buckle on the co-pilot’s chair. Finally, he got the black five-point straps across his chest clipped in. They were clearly not designed or adjusted for someone his size and the middle belt rose up from the seat between his legs, crushing his balls.
“Thyos, I need you now,” Rick said, wincing in pain. No answer. Why am I not surprised?
The nose and right wing of the aircraft rose ever further, until they were almost flying sideways. Suddenly, they dropped in altitude, a few hundred feet at least.
Despite all of Chodak’s best efforts, they were now headed down fast. Panic overtook the cabin of the tiny aircraft. The snowy mountain was closing in quickly below and a crash landing was inevitable. The pilot yelled something in Chinese at Rick over the squeal of alarms and rushing winds; it didn’t take a linguist to figure out his meaning.
Cradling his head between his arms, with the relic still clasped in his left hand, Rick could see Chodak from the corner of his eye. The pilot was wrenching the yoke upwards, trying to level out.
“Come on Thyos?” Rick pleaded, almost shouting, “Give me something to work with, anything, please?”
“On the western slope of the mountain is a thick patch of forest, the pilot is trying to level out and bring the plane down on the incline before the trees. At this speed you will not be able to stop in time. You must get him to steer down exactly when I say or your chances of survival become practically zero.”
The aircraft pulled a hard left, circling one-hundred-eighty degrees before the snow-capped peak and backtracking. The left wing was hanging disturbingly low, dragging them down in a way that reminded Rick of Ivan’s crippled leg.
Chodak followed the loop through until they were aligned with the slope, now just a couple of hundred feet below.
Somehow, even more lights and alarms on the beat-up old aircraft began buzzing and flashing frantically until it was lit up like a Christmas tree. Chodak attempted to lift the nose of the plane and the wind became a vicious roar on all sides.
“You have to st-” There was a sudden bump as the plane dropped through a patch of low pressure and the relic leaped out of Rick’s hands and landed down into the footwell.
Just as he reached out, another jolt sent the relic bouncing beneath his seat and into the rear of the cabin. Rick bit his lip, fighting the urge to scream. When do we steer down??
Beyond the scratched and worn cockpit windshield, a carpet of white was rushing by faster than Rick’s eyes could even process. A mile or two ahead, through the thick blanket of snow, emerged the jagged outline of a forest, trailing across at the foot of the mountain. We’re never going to stop in time, Rick realised. The choice was now between dying down in the snow or with a faceful of tree.
“Let go of the handle!” he shouted.
Chodak’s face was pale as a ghost, he was pulling the controls as high as possible, his arms trembling with exertion.
Rick’s heart was racing, his vision became a pulsing tunnel, as a cocktail of chemicals burst through his veins, urging him to take control. It’s now or never.
He grabbed Chodak’s arms and ripped them from the yoke. The pilot fought back for a moment, before seeming to resign himself to their grisly fate and simply let go. Rick forced the grey control lever all the way forwards with every ounce of his strength, until he could feel the steel straining in his hands.
The next second seemed to stretch out for minutes. The plane’s nose dipped down suddenly. There was an explosion of noise and a blinding flash of snow as it collided with the frozen mountainside.
The Antonov AN-28 threw its weight forwards and the rear shot up behind them until they were almost vertical. Instead of flipping, they teetered, surfing on the nose for a moment before plunging back down into the snow. The momentum slammed Rick’s head into the thick padded material of the chair with such force his world seemed to spin and he nearly blacked out.
When his senses returned from the abyss, a deafening squeal was filling the cabin. The underside of the plane had met the rock and ice and was screaming like a vast, dying, steel monster as they vaulted down the steep slope at several hundred miles per hour.
With two almighty rips, just an instant apart, the propellers were torn from the engines and flew off, instantly disappearing among the billowing black smoke, ice and snow.
The next moment, the wing on Rick’s left tore itself free and it too disappeared into the maelstrom of destruction.
Following the rocking momentum, now with nothing to stabilise it, the plane rolled over on its right-hand side.
The interior turned to black as the cockpit met the ground, illuminated only by the disco of coloured lights flashing on the dashboard.
It took a second for Rick’s new world to emerge into focus as his brain was barraged with an onslaught of sensory input. A single strap of the seatbelt remained locked in place, suspending him half-asphyxiated, by the throat and causing his head to pool with blood.
Amid the swirling white torrent of ice and snow overhead, with every bounce and glimmer of daylight, the menacing green of the forest loomed ever closer.
A splatter of burning hot blood sprayed across Rick’s face. It took a moment for him to realise it wasn’t his own. A strut of iron, from some unknown part of the fuselage had been thrown forwards, clean through both his seat and chest. The pilot’s eyes were filled with desperation as the remaining moments of life fast drained from his being.
There was a colossal slam, a shattering and twisting of wood, steel, ice and stone as the plane came to a standstill. Somewhere to Rick’s left (or was it his right?), orange flames were already beginning to lap the twisted m
ess of metal.
36
The air caught his nose and Rick spluttered. It was thick with burning oil and plastic-fuelled smoke. The next cough gave way to a fit of convulsions so violent that it felt as though a razor blade was rattling around in his lungs.
Through smoke-stung tears, Rick tried to make out his surroundings. The twisted shell of metal below as he dangled upside down, two feet from the roof of the cockpit, was disorientating. At his side, Chodak still hung. The pilot’s face was lifeless, his eyes staring blankly ahead while his mouth hung open, frozen in the final twisted scream from the throes of death.
Dragging his eyes away from the corpse and back towards his own predicament wasn’t hard, the heat to his rear was swelling as the fire escalated with each passing second. Rick slammed his left hand against his chest, running it across the straps until he found the release catch and dropped headfirst onto the oily steel.
It took a moment for his vision to stop spinning. As soon as Rick’s mind reorientated, he clambered to shaky feet and stumbled from the burning cabin and out into the relative relief of the thick snow. Only then did he notice they were still a good two hundred feet from the forest, his life saved by a single young tree that stood out alone among the drifts.
Swallowing gasps of icy air that pierced his lungs, something caught the corner of Rick’s eye.
As if it wanted to be found, the bone handle of the relic sat poking out of the black-streaked blanket of white. It was about halfway between his position and the rear section of the cabin which lay fifty feet north.
Rick stumbled to his feet and clenched his teeth; the site was rapidly becoming an inferno but he hadn’t just survived a plane crash to give up now. It was fate that had kept him alive this far. This was his destiny.
Half wading, half swimming, he crossed the oil-streaked snow drifts, covering his face with his forearm like a vampire. It did little to shield him from the heat that was threatening to sear every exposed inch of skin like a cheap steak.