The Templars, led by a brother from the far north called Ulli, stopped and turned frequently, observing the enemy moving slowly behind them. The Saracen riders would not waste their time racing after a few Crusader scouts; the knights would not be so stupid as to allow themselves to come close enough for an Arab arrow.
One of the Templars spurred his mount to the west and the others followed, falling in behind him. The hooves of their horses raised a small plume of dust. To their east the sky was dark with the cloud kicked up by tens of thousands of men and animals as they marched on Acre.
The knights reached the city walls before nightfall. The gates were not yet closed and men were busy in the dead-ground outside the fortifications. The great ditch was still being deepened, its sides made steeper.
The Mason stood, examining the base of the outer wall of the Accursed Tower as the patrol arrived. He showed no sign of having noticed the Templar detachment until its leader spoke.
“Tomorrow,” said Ulli. “Their cavalry will arrive tonight. They’ll need a full day to set out, maybe two.”
“Their array?” said the Mason, still looking at the stonework in front of him.
“We could see their main body. A light cavalry screen but the vanguard is traveling close to their main force. They don’t expect us to attack.”
The Mason finally turned from the wall to look at Ulli and said, “Would you?”
Ulli made no answer, none was required. He had been one of the Mason’s trusted men for several years now. Like the Mason, Ulli had little time for casual chatter, instead, he squinted up at the high walls of the tower. Of all the towers that ringed the city, this was the one where the Mason was most often found.
“How is the wall?” asked Ulli.
“The wall is as it looks,” said the Mason. “What you see is good enough, what lies beneath is the problem. It stands on dry sand and they did not dig deep enough when it was built.”
Ulli nodded, but said nothing. He was a fighter; the Mason was the thinker.
“Do something for me,” said the Mason. He was alone amongst the senior brothers of the Order in speaking this way. His instructions always had the air of a friend asking a favor. Ulli nodded. “Find Salvatore for me,” said the Mason, “tell him if he needs anything from outside the city he has till nightfall to get it.” Ulli nodded again and turned to carry his message. He did not bother to confirm that he would do so, no one ever declined to do a favor for the Mason.
Ulli and his men entered the city and threaded their way through the streets. The area around the walls was a hive of activity. Roads were being cleared, timber buildings hauled down, cart loads of sand and rocks dragged up the ramps to the battlements.
The colorful street mascots that marked the allegiance of the various quarters of the city were being taken down from their alcoves and packed in straw.
It took Ulli and his men an hour to reach the Templar castle. It took another hour to find Salvatore.
Unlike every other fighting man in the city, Salvatore was not on a wall or in an armory.
Ulli moved out of the light, deeper and deeper into the bowels of the huge building. The thickness of stone brought the temperature down until Ulli felt the sweat on his body turn cold.
On the advice of a brother who had seen Salvatore that day, Ulli walked down a low vaulted passageway, poorly lit and dripping with condensation. At the far end was a timber door.
He hammered on the door, waited, then hammered again. Nothing. Having no other ideas about where to find Salvatore, he drew his sword and struck the timber with the pommel end. Nothing.
Eventually, from behind the door, Ulli heard a scrape of metal on metal. A moment later the door trembled, and a small crease of light appeared. The door opened perhaps a finger’s width.
“What do you want?” said a thick voice.
“Brother Salvatore di Radda,” said Ulli.
“Who are you?” said the voice.
“Brother Ulli, I am sent by the Mason.” The door closed again. There was a long pause. Finally, the door opened, this time it swung fully back.
Salvatore stood in the doorway. His hair was plastered to his forehead and he wore nothing except a wet loin cloth, a small pool of water forming at his feet. The door was held by another man. This figure was carrying a hammer.
“You are sent by the Mason?” said Salvatore.
“I am. He says that if you need anything from outside of the city you will have to get it by nightfall,” said Ulli.
“I thank you for your trouble,” said Salvatore. “Tell the Mason that…” Whatever Salvatore was intending to say was cut short by a sound from the room behind them. It was a loud, solitary sound. To Ulli, it sounded like a large animal splashing in water or a wave breaking on rocks.
Salvatore, and his companion with the hammer, turned and looked back into the dark interior of the chamber. Without another word, Salvatore pushed the door closed in Ulli’s face, leaving him alone in a dim corridor far below the high Templar castle.
Control
Altitude twenty-six thousand feet.
Sparke now knew that his aircraft was falling out of the sky. Whatever the reason, he was now sure that the machine was in a steady, but rapid descent.
And with its nose up, it was almost certainly out of control.
Like all experienced crisis managers, Sparke had a working knowledge of how most mass-transportation technology worked. Along with a number of his senior peers he had been given privileged access to the archives of both the major manufacturers of civil airlines. His time spent in Seattle with Boeing, and Toulouse with Airbus had taught him what really happened when a large plane crashed.
He had seen the evidence of one flight when a plane lost power in one of its two engines. It made an emergency approach under full control only to have the co-pilot, who was tasked with shutting down the fuel supply to the dead engine, cut the supply to the working power-plant. They crashed into a motorway a hundred yards short of a safe landing.
He had listened in disbelief to the cockpit recording of a flight crew chatting about how to repair a faulty warning light as they sat in a holding pattern near their destination. In their enthusiasm for finding the defect, they forgot that they had set the controls for a slow, circling descent. No one survived the resulting crash.
His own data and the confirmation from his colleagues on the forum told him that his plane was in a classic stall. The engines were working so it kept moving forward, but the steep incline of the wings meant that the critical cushion of air that gave the aircraft lift had spilled out.
Since everything on board the aircraft was falling at the same speed, there was no sensation of downward movement; had the descent slowed, or increased, the passengers and crew would feel it, but this constant fall created the same sensation as flat, but bumpy regular cruising.
He looked over at Tilly. Even though she was wearing her seatbelt she had still managed to curl up in her over-sized seat, tucking her legs underneath herself. Whatever she was reading was obviously engrossing, but she must have sensed him looking at her. She looked up and smiled at him, pushing a stray strand of hair out of her eyes as she did. “Wee bit bumpy,” she said.
“Wee bit,” he replied, smiling, before turning back to his screen. In the few seconds since his last posting on the forum the thread had grown. Now several other people had joined the discussion.
“What’s that you’re looking at?” said Tilly. “Playing with your new toy?” She peered at the screen of Sparke’s tablet. “Oh look, it makes pretty pictures.” She squinted at the screen, and said, “What does it mean? That line is going down.”
“Not sure,” said Sparke. “Probably the pilot trying to fly under this storm so that they can get to some nice flat air. All this bumping is slowing down the champagne service.”
“Life is hell,” said Tilly, returning to her reading.
Sparke looked back at the chat thread of the forum.
Skywatcher: “
If your data is right you should be concerned.”
Sparke: “Confident of the data.”
Spotter 242: “I see you on the Global Tracker screen. Your data matches theirs. What’s going on? Sure you’re not just trying to fly under some chop?”
Sparke: “Definitely nose up.”
Skywatcher: “Also moving too slow. Very low ground speed.”
Sparke: “We are in a stall?”
Spotter 242: “Contacting the locals. Back in five.”
Sparke glanced out through the small window again. It was still too dark to see anything so it was impossible to gauge if the aircraft was still flying with its nose up or not, but there had been no sensation of any change since he had started tracking their altitude, so he had to work on the basis that they were still falling.
There were very few possible reasons for an aircraft to be in this position and none of them were good. The captain had already made at least one announcement since Sparke had noticed the drop in height, so it seemed safe to assume that the crew was alive and functioning. For some reason they were allowing their aircraft to fall out of the sky in a flat stall.
The armrest of Sparke’s seat held a handset that controlled the in-flight entertainment system. At the top of the control was a button to summon the cabin crew. He took a deep breath and pushed the button. A few seconds later a message appeared on the small screen that displayed the in-flight entertainment.
“We’re sorry, due to conditions beyond our control cabin service is not available. We will be back delivering our world-class service as soon as we can.”
Sparke pressed the call button again. An instant later a new message appeared. “We understand that this might be frustrating, but we suspend cabin service during turbulence for the safety of passengers and crew. Your safety and comfort are our first concern. Thank you for your understanding.”
This time Sparke pressed the call button and kept his thumb on it. The next message was in larger letters and flashed, “Are you, or any passenger near you, experiencing a medical emergency?” Next to the message were buttons, marked “Yes” and “No”. Sparke pushed the “No” button. Another message appeared.
“Are any passengers acting in a way that you feel might present a danger to the aircraft?” Again, there were two buttons, again he pressed the “No” button.
Another message appeared on his screen, “Many thanks for your feedback. Would you like to take part in our Passenger Satisfaction Survey? Your opinion is important to us.”
Sparke pressed the button again. “We’re sorry, due to conditions beyond our control cabin service is not available. We will be back delivering our world-class service as soon as we can.”
From his seat he was unable to see any of the cabin crew whom he knew would be strapped in to their own seats. He looked at his screen, “Altitude twenty-three thousand feet”.
All the evidence told him that he was the only person on this plane who knew that they were in a stall and heading towards the sea. He had tried the only approved process he could see for contacting the crew but had found himself in a cycle of automated customer service.
He considered for a moment going back into the system and giving a “yes” response to the question about being concerned about the behavior of another passenger, but he knew that this could well be taken as a potential terrorist alert, especially given the region they were flying towards. He also knew that the standard response to a terrorist threat was for the flight crew to throw the plane into a steep climb at full power in order to throw any potential hijackers off balance. This posture was precisely the one he wanted to get the aircraft out of, so ran the very real risk of making the situation worse.
There was one thing that the flight crew could not ignore, one that would automatically make them contact the ground controllers and report their current location, speed and altitude, and that was if someone began hammering at the cockpit door.
He looked over at Tilly, then placed his hand on the buckle of his seat belt and reached for the release mechanism.
The telephone always rings
Nothing good ever happened when Shauna’s desk phone rang, and now it was ringing. No one ever called her direct number to invite her to a party or to tell her that a pizza had been delivered.
It rang perhaps once a month, and in her experience it always meant something very bad was happening to someone, somewhere.
“Shauna Lomax,” she said. There was always that faint hope that this call would be different.
“Air Traffic Control here,” said the voice at the other end. “We have a concern over a civilian flight. Not in our space, not inbound to Israel.”
“So why is it our concern?” she said. There was another slight pause at the other end, something out of the ordinary for this type of call.
“Passenger on board is transmitting data that indicates that they are in a slow stall. They’re not in our sector. We thought this was one for you.”
“Stall?” said Shauna.
“Low ground speed, nose up, loss of altitude,” said the air traffic controller. His voice was devoid of any emotion. “If the data is right it can only be a stall. They’re going down.”
Shauna thought for a second, considering whether to ask for clarification before deciding that there was no point. If Air Traffic was worried, then she was worried.
“I’ll take it,” she said, hanging up. Flight 771 was hundreds of miles to the west, far out over the Mediterranean. She typed the flight number into her screen and saw that is was a London to Amman scheduled passenger aircraft.
Unlike her air traffic control colleagues, Shauna was not limited to aircraft flying through Israeli airspace. Shauna clicked on the icon on her screen.
“Flight 771, this is Israel Air Command. Flight 771, do you copy?” said Shauna.
In the cockpit, the captain looked at the radio control screen as though it had just bit him. Dealing with some fool of a military ground controller was bad enough, now he had Israeli Air Command involved, and that meant he would have to write the whole thing up in his log. In his airline’s operations manual, this would go down as a “Deviation”, not that this was any sign of failure on his part, but it would mean answering questions from his own Compliance Department. Nothing good ever came of talking to his Compliance Department.
The pilot drummed his fingers on the armrest, planning out his response. They had doubtless been listening in to his feud with that idiot ground controller.
“Israel Air Command, this is 771. Please be advised that we have the situation under control. Changing course in four minutes.”
Of all the things that Shauna had expected to hear from the aircraft, this was not one of them. Data was data, but she had learned that the one thing she should always trust was the opinion of the people on the spot.
“Flight 771, confirm that your flight is proceeding normally,” she said.
“We took a northern route around the storm,” said the pilot. “Returning towards our planned route any minute now.”
Behind the pilot’s voice Shauna could hear the sound of a cockpit alarm sounding, but she knew that civil airliners were designed to give out alarms much more readily than the military aircraft she was more used to.
“Acknowledged,” she said. She looked at the icon on her screen for 771. If anyone knew about the condition on the plane it was the pilot. Still, she had never been alerted by her own air traffic control without there being a reason. She picked up the phone. A voice answered on the first ring.
“I spoke with Flight 771,” she said. “The pilot reports that he is aware of the situation and that all is well on board.”
“He said that?” said the air traffic controller. “This was definitely 771?”
“London to Amman civil airliner,” she said.
“Let me check. Hold on.”
Shauna held the phone to her ear and listened to the sound of an impromptu conference at the other end. The controller came back online.
Before he had finished speaking, Shauna had clicked on her radio control.
“Flight 771, report your speed and altitude immediately. Flight 771, this is an emergency instruction to report. You are ordered to report your speed and altitude.”
In the cockpit the world of the pilot seemed to slow down. Everything around him came into sharp focus, and the memory of the idiot ground controller faded. In an instant the pilot could see the nose up trim of the aircraft, the ground speed indicator was showing an impossibly low number, then he looked at the altitude and then looked at it again. Flight 771 had dropped from over thirty thousand feet to eighteen thousand and was falling fast. He glanced across at his young co-pilot and saw a man frozen in panic and totally unaware of his surroundings.
The pilot’s mind was filled with one over-riding thought.
My God, I’m ruined.
The possible impossible
“Getting out of the city when all of the defenses are breached, the Saracens are attacking the coast and the harbor is in chaos is a simple thing,” said Salvatore.
The Mason smiled and turned towards him. “A simple thing? Now you have me interested,” he said. “Tell me the simple solution, please.”
“Just because I said it was simple doesn’t mean it’s easy,” said Salvatore. “In fact, the one person who knows most about it tells me that the idea is ridiculous. Still, let’s look at the basic problem. The idea of disguise is not practical. The risk of discovery is simply too high and I still have no idea what it might be that I will be protecting. If I can’t run, and I can’t hide, then the simplest solution is to make myself invisible.”
The Templar Scroll: Book six in the series Page 11