by Ian Hocking
He braced his neck against the buzzing canopy and used the radio operator’s bulkhead to launch at Commander Cook, who jerked away and pressed his shoulder into the yoke. Star Dust pitched earthwards. Shadows yawned. The sun, which had been obscured in the cloud-cloaked Buenos Aires, found his eyes. Before Cory could prevent it, the pilot hooked his neck and threw him against the empty starboard seat. The seat broke and Cory struck the cargo access panel. He struggled to right himself.
Cory gripped a fuselage handle. He reached for the hose that led to the pilot’s mask, but Cook was ready. His elbow split Cory’s lip. While he blinked to clear the dizziness, a second impact wrenched his neck. He lost his grip on the handle and fell across the unconscious body of the navigator, who had slid to the front of the aircraft.
‘God damn,’ he shouted. His accent was Georgian, that of his father. He demanded his automata ramp the release of neurotransmitters, inhibit their re-uptake, and dampen monoamine oxidase activity.
A freshness blew through his mind.
Commander Cook was buckled to his chair. He could not move as Cory worked his body. He knew where to strike the man, and how. The Irvin jacket offered little protection. Cory landed his last blow with a shout that his old instructor had termed kiai, a Japanese word meaning ‘concentration of spirit’: an incongruous memory to recall in the cockpit of this doomed plane.
When it was over, each watched the other, panting. Cory saw Cook reach for his mask, but his fingers slid from the clasp. Cory helped unfasten it. The orbit of his right eye was broken.
‘Help me pull her out,’ the commander said. His words were slurred.
Cory put his hands over those of the commander. The aircraft came level.
‘Don’t hurt. The passengers. Land the plane.’
‘Can this thing fly itself?’
Commander Cook indicated a lever to his left, mounted on the fuselage beneath the oxygen hose connector. ‘Auto controls clutch. And. And altitude control.’ Cory reached across and pulled the lever until it clicked. When he looked again at the captain, he saw that Cook was unconscious.
Cory struggled to maintain his focus. The crew was dealt with. He had stopped Harmer before the Mayday could be sent. And, as far as he could tell, none of the passengers knew what had happened in the cockpit. It was possible that Miss Evans would come forward to check the cause of the dive. But Cory still had time. He had the parachute and the aircraft was flying even and true. He could still make it.
First, he removed the oxygen masks of the crew and spoiled their seals. They might still wake at this altitude, but he wanted it to take as long as possible. As he worked, he looked at the turned head of Commander Cook. ‘Don’t hurt. The passengers. Land the plane.’
Cory sank to his haunches in despair. He rubbed the bridge of his nose and told himself that this would be worth it. He was fighting a larger war here. These were innocents but their deaths would not be uncounted. They would be stars on a wall somewhere. Cory would see to it.
The fire axe struck his shoulder with enough force to make him turn, biting down on his scream, looking up at the fury of Miss Evans. She put a foot in the small of his back to help work the blade free. As it came down again—certain to kill him—Cory made a fist and raised his arm with all the strength he had left. It looked like an absurd salute, but he prayed that the bones in his forearm would hold, and they did. The axe was deflected into the deck plate.
The block would not work a second time. Cory had to get to his feet. He did so with a flip that reignited the pain in his shoulder. The pain expanded and his head was consumed with disorienting flashes of electricity and cloudbursts of deadness and when his vision cleared he saw that Miss Evans was several inches above the deck where he had pressed her into the canopy by her neck. Cory looked in horror at his shaking hands. He let go and they both collapsed to the floor. Cory bit his tongue at the pain in his shoulder and waited for his wits to return. All the while, the engines pealed.
~
His pocket watch confirmed that he had only minutes left. The murder of Miss Evans had taken him outside of himself. He was no longer the man he had once been. That man who had proposed to Catherine: gone. With this realisation, his situational awareness returned. He began to work numbers, possibilities. Only minutes left.
He stepped between the seats, over the bodies, to the altimeter. They were at 21,000 feet and holding. Their speed was 190 knots.
Think, Georgia.
Miss Evans had fallen on her side with her arms and legs splayed. She might have been running. Cory thought about Patrick Harkes and wanted revenge. There was a principle in chess that a defensive move must go beyond defence. It must also attack. The escape with his life would be his defensive move, but his attack would be the transmission of the agreed signal. Jennifer, who was waiting for it, would understand that Cory had completed his secondary mission to kill Harkes. This misinformation would be worth the trouble if Harkes also intercepted it and derived the intended meaning. He would consider himself safe. A man who considered himself safe would not exercise the same caution when making his travel arrangements.
Cory smiled.
It had to begin with STEN.
Then E.
Wait; D, not E.
D, E, C.
STENDEC.
Not so difficult. Harkes would figure it out.
He pushed Miss Evans aside and shook Denis Harmer. Harmer blinked, but did not regain consciousness. Cory took the smelling salts from his pocket and broke a capsule beneath Harmer’s nose. The man’s swollen eyes widened. He rose to his elbows and his head bobbed within the turtle shell of his flight jacket. Cory pressed himself against the half-bulkhead of radio equipment to obscure Harmer’s view of the bodies and held his neck to prevent his head turning.
‘I’m pressing a nerve between the second and third cervical vertebrae,’ Cory said. He added an electromagnetic component to his voice that would register in Harmer’s headphones. ‘If you attempt to deviate from my strict instructions, you’ll be in more pain than you can imagine. Now: I want you to send our ETA together with a letter sequence.’
‘My eyes hurt. What did you do? Some chemical?’
‘It’s stuff from the fire extinguisher. Your eyes will clear in a minute. Now, I want you to send this sequence: Sugar, Tare, Easy, Negat, Dog, Easy, Charlie.’
‘Where’s the Skipper?’
‘You’ve got five seconds. Four.’
‘Alright, alright. Let me get set up.’
Harmer felt for the transmitter on the higher of the two radio panels. He plugged two jacks into the lower bank. He tried to face Cory, but Cory squeezed his neck. Harmer moaned.
‘Do what you’re told.’
‘You sound American. Is this some OSS caper?’
‘Send it now and I’ll let go. Make the message conform to all the normal conventions. I’m listening in. If there is even a hint of the word ‘hijack’, that’s it for you.’
‘But your code alone will indicate trouble.’
‘No. At worst, enigma.’
‘So it’s a game.’
The dits and dahs stopped his thoughts as Harmer thumbed the Morse paddle left and right. Cory felt the translation of the message flash through him:
Santiago tower from CS-59. ETA 17:45. S-T-E-N-D-E-C.
Cory watched the dials on the receiver. Nothing moved.
‘Did they get it?’ he asked.
‘Give it time.’
The reply came loud and clear from Santiago tower.
Dit-dit-dah-dah-dah-dit-dit.
‘What does that mean?’ asked Cory.
‘He doesn’t understand.’
‘Send the message again.’
‘Why? What is it?’
Cory adjusted his grip. ‘I told you to send it again. Quickly.’
‘OK, OK.’
As the Morse paddle flapped again, Cory listened to the blaring engines. The sky was overcast, for the most part, and the Lancastrian kept to the l
ine set by the rudimentary automatic pilot. Cory understood this machine. It was a workhorse. And, equally, so were the unthinking mannequins inside. The radio operator: his movements were correlated with his nervous chemistry, and the pitch of the aircraft, and his body within it. That movement itself correlated with the instant before. And that movement correlated with another movement, still earlier, until the movements described a sequence that could be reversed to the moment of his birth. And the dance partner was Time, always leading. Time the entrapper. The milonguera.
The radio man is a puppet. Watch his eyebrows gather. See his lips purse. It is an illusion worked by a grim operator. Each string leads to a bony finger. Say! Doesn’t the puppet look angry?
‘Was it worth it?’ Harmer shouted bitterly. He struggled to look at Cory. ‘All this,’ he gasped, ‘to send some bloody code-word?’
Cory looked at his own hand, holding the neck. Puppet? A better metaphor was the ventriloquist’s dummy. Cory let go.
Denis Harmer leaned around the bank of radio equipment.
Or was Harmer more like an animated cartoon? With motion comes the illusion of life. But each still frame betrays the lifelessness of the character.
~
Time did not keep pace with the acceleration of his thoughts. For Cory, time was an absolute whose minutes moved no faster than his Ramsey IV caesium oscillator. He killed Denis Harmer in 73,541,054,160 beam cycles. Eight seconds his murder. Then Cory rested the axe against the fuselage and pulled his white handkerchief from his pocket. He stilled the tremors in his fingers by twisting them through its fabric.
Though Harmer’s question needed no answer, he said, ‘Probably not.’
~
He considered the canopy. The air was opaque and depthless. There was an escape hatch directly above him, but it was not designed to be used during flight. The slipstream would toss him to the rudder fins. His only chance was through the door at the rear of the fuselage and, to get to it, he would need to deal with the passengers.
He touched his injured shoulder. The wound was deep and his left arm was weakening. Jack Gooderham, Peter Simpson and Harald Pagh were able men.
With a sigh, he took the oxygen pipe from Commander Cook’s mask and used the axe to cut a length from it. He made a V-shaped split in both ends and attached one to the spout of the fire extinguisher. He paused, reconsidered his plan, and detached it from the extinguisher. He licked his finger and pushed some spit into the canister. Then he reattached the assembly. His infallible chronometer marked fourteen seconds.
He leaned across Commander Cook and turned the cock for the passenger oxygen supply. With the flow stopped, he tore the main hose from the fuselage and pushed it into the other end of the pipe he had split with the axe. The oxygen supply was now connected to the fire extinguisher.
The toxic chemical within the extinguisher was carbon tetrachloride. The ichor in his spit would break the bonds of this molecule to release chlorine. His first option was a pair of chlorine atoms: chlorine gas. The lungs of the passengers would fill with bloody froth for a prolonged and excruciating death. No. He would not do that. His second option was chloroform: an anaesthetic. Carbon, hydrogen and chlorine. Where would he get the hydrogen? He reached behind the pilot and took the navigator’s tea flask. The lid sang as he opened it. Holding the canister between his legs, he unscrewed the base of the fire extinguisher. Then he mixed some tea with the tetrachloride and twisted the extinguisher shut.
He put his hand around the head of the extinguisher, where his spit had collected. He felt the ichor mobilise. The metal grew warm. Then hot. If he let go, the seal would pop under pressure and release the chloroform onto the flight deck. On the nano scale, I-Core particles marched to the drum of his caesium-beam oscillator and formed catalytic surfaces and micro chemical factories.
The odour of cooked tissue reached his nostrils. He released the canister and fell against the fuselage. There he gasped and frowned. He tugged a black glove from Commander Cook and slid it over his raw, burned hand.
Cory checked his pocket watch. It had passed 5:45 p.m. They were above Santiago. He recalled the conversation between Commander Cook and his boss, Don Bennett, back in Buenos Aires, when Cook had requested extra fuel. The Lancastrian should remain airborne for some time and ditch in the Pacific, never to be found.
Cory lifted the parachute. It was packed tightly as a flag and the straps were tangled. Seconds passed in confusion until Cory understood that the lemon-yellow hoop at the base was an inflatable collar. He put this over his head. The main chute hung low at his back and the reserve chute was a hard cylinder that bounced against his midriff. He fastened every buckle he could find.
Soon he would slip the bones of this legend—no more Colonel Wittenbacher—and sublimate to anonymity.
He shifted his attention to the gap between the shoulder of Commander Cook and the boxy compass atop the instrument panel. He knew that, at this elevation, the ocean should be visible. But the greyness outside was uniform. This might have been some form of limbo, infinite in all directions. Snow gathered at the corners of the panes.
Don’t spook yourself. Leave this aircraft. Let the dead die.
Cory stepped back, ready to turn, but there was a split in the cloud: a black vein. He frowned. The distant vein did not reappear. He switched his vision to the microwave band.
The clouds glassed. He saw patches of rock and steep snowfields dead ahead. The details grew from the centre like the deepest folds of a white rose: shadowed ridges and slashes of white. The flanks of the mountain expanded like widening arms.
Quietly: ‘No.’
~
As Cory blazed with chemicals that added power to his muscles, other processes enhanced his cognition. He parsed the engine sound down to individual pistons, extracted their echoes from the mountain, determined the time difference, and thus the distance
0.76 miles
between the Lancastrian and its grave.
He remembered the conversation between Cook and Bennett, where Cook had mentioned the
‘whisker off fifty-one thousand’
take-off weight. He looked at the cockpit instruments and saw the current fuel load and engine revolutions. He guessed the materials from which the Lancastrian was constructed. All these thoughts, and more, combined in an equation whose result was the sure knowledge that the Lancastrian would crash in fifteen seconds. It was possible to steer the aircraft, with feet to spare, over the southern shoulder of the mountain, but the required force on the yoke would snap the control rods.
Cory burst through the curtain that led to the alcove. His elbow struck the dishes and they tumbled to the floor, but the sound, as he entered the passenger compartment, was already behind him.
Ten seconds.
There was no time to snatch his cane, which still lay against the window. No time for anything. Cory ran through ribbons of a sweet-smelling odour. Chloroform. He fought to plant each footfall; a trip would cost him everything.
The hand of Peter Simpson rested upon his canvas sack; Sisyphus pardoned. Slumped Casis Said Atalah, his face swollen around his mask, held a rosary. Its crucifix swung against his knee. The forms of Jack Gooderham, Frau Limpert, and Peter Young were rigid and aloof. Chloroform had shut their eyes. Harald Pagh could no longer make jolly. He had fallen sideways, his head held upright by a taut oxygen tube. His time at the piano was over.
Wait, the passengers seemed to say. Fly with the stars.
Five seconds.
Cory grunted as he threw the door lever. The hatch opened onto mist and a ramp of mountainside, surging up to meet the airliner. He took a last breath and leapt into the cold. The rudder swished above his head and, for the first time since Buenos Aires, the engine sound faded. He saw the silk of his parachute spew upwards and fill with air. The harness bit his groin and armpits.
Beneath his shoes, the serrations of the mountain wrinkled. The irregular snowfields were marked with flecks of exposed rock, brown and rugged.
They expanded like waiting mouths. Cory missed one outcrop and angled his legs for a bluff. Then a fresh wind swirled. It brought snow and reinvigorated his parachute. Cory banked like a child on a schoolyard swing. His course was reset and the mountain fell away from his feet. He wafted east, downward, into the darkness of a glacial valley.
Turning, he watched Star Dust pass into the grey shelf that formed the south-eastern face of the mountain. Cory thought the explosion beautiful. It might have been a glimpse through the mountain of the setting sun. Then the grotesque: he saw the snow below the explosion pucker with debris. First wings, then seats, oxygen cylinders, Penguin paperbacks, a torn canvas sack that bore the arms of an English king, the boot of an airman, a human head. Cory lost his desire to look. The phantom sound of propellers lingered. But a thunderclap punctuated the sound, bringing silence.
These poor people.
No, not people. Zombies. Things with no mind.
The air was huge and everywhere. To prove he could, he shouted, ‘Lisandro!’
Lisandro was already dead and he knew it.
His feet struck a promontory and he screamed as both Achilles tendons snapped. He tumbled, cocooned in the strings of his parachute, down a cleft little wider than his shoulders. Pain-inhibiting mechanisms were tripped before his ribs broke, each snap like a pencil in a child’s hand. There was a pit of snow at the base of the cleft. His head pierced hard, packed snow.
Silence.
Upside-down and broken, Cory heard the tick of blood in his ears. Across his vision slipped bar-charts and line graphs describing the negative trends of his life: blood oxygen saturation falling; blood acidity rising; a lung punctured; ribs sprung; a collar bone detached. The automata wished to squeeze water from his tissues, conjure oxygen, and augment his respiration. Did he object?
Do I look like I give a fuck?
He imagined the parachute folding on the soles of his shoes. A silk bag. A cocoon.
~
In the still moments of his long life to come, Cory would remember that night and its silence. The dark was blindness until his vision slid into higher frequencies. Then the mountain reappeared as great and indifferent as it had seemed on the flight deck of the Lancastrian. A star-filled sky. Away, in the miles covered by his gaze, he could see no pockets of heat: no settlement, shed, or lone shepherd. His lungs burned in the deoxygenated air. Anaerobic respiration stung his muscles. He clawed from rock to rock. Sometimes he fell. Sometimes he slid. The rugged zip on his Irvin held, but the trousers of his tropical suit tore, and his knees bled sluggishly and gathered grit.