A new voice reached out to her from a seat a few rows forward.
‘Nothing to be concerned about, she says,’ said a youth to his teenage friends around him. ‘Shutting one engine down to keep us in the air longer, she says. If they shut the other engine down, we’ll be up here all night.’
A ripple of grim laughter from his friends broke the tension and Becca slipped away as subtly as she could and made it back to the galley. She hit the intercom switch to the cockpit and heard Jason’s voice once more.
‘What the hell is going on up there?’ Becca snapped. ‘You’re going to have to give us something to work with or the passengers are going to start giving us a hard time.’
‘We need to stay up here as long as we can and find a decent gap in the weather. It’s not safe to land at the moment, you saw that.’
‘I saw rough weather, not a bloody hurricane!’ Becca hissed. ‘Tell us what’s going on!’
‘I did!’ Jason protested. ‘We can’t land at Keflavik at the moment due to environmental conditions on the ground.’
Environmental conditions? Becca frowned. That was an unusual choice of words for heavy weather, and suddenly her suspicion that the pilots weren’t telling them everything blossomed more brightly within her.
‘Has something happened at Keflavik?’
‘Bad weather,’ Jason replied, ‘I’ve got to go.’
The line went dead and Becca punched the wall in frustration. She turned away and almost walked into the mother of the young boy who had been sick earlier. The woman stared at Becca for a long moment.
‘Can I help you?’ Becca asked, recovering herself quickly.
The woman stared at Becca for a moment longer and then handed her another full sick bag that she had tied off.
‘He’s feeling better now we’re out of the bad weather again,’ she said simply. ‘Although that sounds like the least of your, and our, concerns.’
With that, the woman turned and headed back down the aisle toward her seat.
***
XIII
Jason tapped digits into the flight planner on his lap as he calculated the revised single–engine fuel burn figures and checked them against the fuel remaining in the tanks. The descent back to Keflavik, weather allowing, could be made mostly under idle power provided they could avoid the worst of the storm cells thundering across the North Atlantic below them. But even with that factored into the equations it didn’t leave them a lot of extra time. Shutting down one engine required a little more thrust from the other to maintain the aircraft’s safe minimum airspeed as it loitered in the high atmosphere, barely exceeding two hundred knots indicated.
‘One hour and four minutes, absolute best case,’ he reported to Captain Reed finally. ‘Right now, all that engine is doing is turning fuel into noise. We might be able to make a single go–around if things don’t work out first time but that’s it.’
It wasn’t a great prognosis and he could tell that the captain knew it, but then nothing about this flight had gone in their favour so far since they’d entered Icelandic airspace.
‘One hour four,’ Reed reported in to Narsarsuaq as he and Jason reset their stopwatch countdown timers to the revised setting. ‘That’s all we’ve got.’
‘Roger that Phoenix,’ came the reply. ‘We’re getting intermittent reports of survivors on the ground contacting police, and making long distance calls to relatives around the world alerting them to what’s happened at Kelfavik. East Iceland appears unaffected but the volcanic eruption is already starting to make the news, as is the silence around the south west of the island. The geological survey team we’re in contact with are already moving toward the airport but they’re at least an hour away and that eruption is unleashing hell on earth down there. It’s going to be damned tight.’
‘What about emergency services?’ Reed asked.
‘We’re in touch with units on the north and east of the island but they’re further away than the geological team and they have that eruption in the way. We’ve got reports of extreme ash fallout and magma flows running the length of the Blue Mountain chain. Basically, anybody east of it is going nowhere near it. About all we can hope for is that a few ambulances can make it in from the communities to provide oxygen sufficient for all passengers to make it off the plane and out of the danger zone. We’re working on it.’
Jason listened as the captain asked a few more questions in the hope of revealing some solution to their dilemma, but there was no way they could avoid the fact that they were going to have to land at Keflavik whether they liked it or not. Narsarsuaq promised that they would stay in touch on the channel and then Captain Reed acknowledged their report and they were gone again.
The captain said nothing, instead looking at the clouds far below as Jason thought for a moment.
‘Didn’t the crew of Apollo 13 build their own carbon dioxide scrubbers out of whatever materials they could find in their space capsule, while returning from the moon? They did enough to survive until they reached earth, right?’
Reed nodded, not taking his eyes off the sky ahead.
‘The NASA engineers built the system on the ground and then instructed the astronauts to follow their lead,’ he agreed, ‘but we already have carbon dioxide scrubbers installed in this aircraft. Our problem is that the air system in the cabin relies on about fifty per cent of its supply from air outside the aircraft, with the other fifty per cent being recycled from the inside. The system wouldn’t work on the ground if the atmosphere was contaminated with carbon dioxide, it would be overwhelmed within minutes.’
Jason sighed and scanned the horizon. Then he noticed the angle of the sun as it swept around, the airplane turning in its gentle orbit under the control of the autopilot. The captain had used the aircraft’s GPS system to program a series of “virtual waypoints”, the Airbus flying from one to the next in a simple oblong racetrack pattern. Now, the sun was moving past in front of them and was low over the horizon.
‘Damn,’ Jason uttered as he glanced at his watch. ‘Another couple of hours and that sun’s gone, which means a night landing.’
‘We’ll be on the ground by then,’ Reed pointed out, remaining optimistic.
As the airplane turned slowly and the shadows of the cockpit moved, so Jason noticed something else to his right and his heart flipped in his chest.
‘We might have to land before that,’ he said.
Captain Reed looked across at him, puzzled, and then he saw what Jason had seen and his confusion turned to alarm.
‘It never just rains, it bloody pours,’ he uttered.
*
Becca heard a commotion from the galley, where she was refilling the coffee and tea urns ready to serve the passengers. She hurried out as she heard gasps and exclamations and a flurry of cries of alarm, to see Chloe and about half the passengers crowding to the right–hand side of the cabin.
‘Can you see it?’
‘What is it?’
‘Oh my God, that’s coming right at us!’
Becca hurried to one of the windows and leaned across alongside three teenage girls who looked like they were Icelandic, probably on the return journey home. Becca ducked down for a glimpse and then she saw it and her heart plunged in her chest.
Across the entire eastern horizon was a vast and growing pillar of billowing black ash that had broken through the upper layers of cloud and was rising up into the troposphere and beyond. Even though she could see it was some distance away from them, the cloud was rocketing upward as though fired from a cannon. She felt a sudden and primal fear of the sheer energy the eruption must have unleashed to propel the massive cloud upward at such a velocity. The immense wall of grey and black spread like a giant black anvil across the heavens, and suddenly Becca had some idea of what might have happened down in Keflavik.
‘That’s a volcanic eruption!’ someone exclaimed.
‘No flies on you,’ uttered another passenger from nearby.
Becca, like most
people in the United Kingdom and Iceland, knew that some years before a volcanic eruption on the island had halted all flights in the region for days as a result of the gargantuan ash cloud the volcano had created. Filled with countless trillions of ash particles that were lethal to airliners, capable of clogging their engines and preventing other instruments from working correctly, the ash cloud had taken days to clear and disrupted travel in the region for weeks.
Becca guessed that the ash pillar itself was maybe twenty miles away, thrusting up through the dense cloud cover and towering overhead, far higher than they were flying. The problem was that it was also spreading out in different directions as the ash was caught up in the various airflows and jetstreams of the upper atmosphere. As several of the passengers had noted, much of the cloud was pointing right toward them.
Becca backed away from the window and glanced across at Chloe. They shared a single look and then the questions started.
‘Is that why we’re not landing?’
‘What’s happened down there?’
‘Does anyone on the ground know we’re still up here? It can’t be just the weather.’
‘Can we turn back?’
Chloe began answering the questions as fast as she could, but with one hand behind their backs Becca knew that she was struggling even before she started. They couldn’t provide anything more than nebulous assurances of safety and that wasn’t going to be enough. The expressions on the faces of the passengers changed quickly, from curiosity and uncertainty to real concern and even anger. They suspected that they were being kept in the dark and they wanted answers.
The mother of the sick child pointed directly at Becca, her gaze accusing.
‘She knows what’s happening down there, she’s been talking to the pilots about problems at Keflavik!’
***
XIV
Becca stared in horror at the woman pointing at her, and then at the hundred or so other passengers who turned their gazes from the volcanic plume to watch her expectantly.
‘The pilots told me that there was an issue at Keflavik,’ she replied loudly enough to be heard by everyone, forcing a smile onto her face. ‘They didn’t say what it was, other than the weather.’
The man with the pale skin and the lank hair, who looked as though he was suffering from travel sickness, pointed out of the windows.
‘Were they going to mention the gigantic, apocalyptic volcanic eruption happening out there or did it just somehow slip their minds?’
‘The pilots are doing everything that they can right now to make your journey as comfortable as possible so if you could just retake your seats and…’
‘We have a right to know what’s going on,’ the lank haired man interrupted her, standing from his seat.
Becca waved him down, eager to avoid a confrontation that might escalate into something worse.
‘I will call the pilots immediately and find out what’s happening, I promise, but for now I would like to ask you all to sit back down while I do that.’
There was a rumbling of discontent from the passengers. The lank haired man eyed her testily, his skin pale and his gaze unsteady, but he reluctantly sat back down. Becca turned and walked swiftly back down the plane, and she could see some of the passengers casting dark glances at her and Chloe as they both hurried aft toward the sanctuary of the galley.
‘Damn it Becca, what the hell is going on?’ Chloe demanded as they reached the meagre cover of the galley at the rear of the airplane. ‘The passengers nearly lost it there and we can’t control all of them if they start making demands.’
‘I know,’ Becca snapped, and then caught herself and took a breath. This wasn’t Chloe’s fault and neither was it hers or that of the pilots. This was something that nature had hurled at them and they needed to just get through the next hour or so. As the teenage youth had so cynically put it, they couldn’t stay up here all night. ‘Just keep it together a little longer while I try to get to the bottom of this, okay?’
Chloe nodded, unconvinced, and Becca turned and struck out for the cockpit. She knew that using the plane’s intercom to talk to the pilots was not going to be enough to convince the passengers that she was doing everything that she could for them. She knew that they needed to actually see her doing something about it, and so she walked with a purpose along the aisle.
She kept her gaze pointed straight ahead but she could see from the corner of her eyes the passengers turning their heads to look up at her as she passed by, their expressions full of foreboding and distrust.
Becca kept telling herself as she walked that most times, these kinds of crisis ended in a massive anti–climax; that the airplane was suddenly given clearance to land and touched down safely minutes later. Passengers would suddenly be smiling and relief would fill the cabin and the cockpit as everyone disembarked and joked about how close they had felt to certain disaster. She had experienced just such euphoria on countless occasions as one airplane or another had rushed through horrendous weather to land at airports across Europe, the passengers clutching their seats and even each other as wings rocked violently and the fuselage rolled from left to right. Then there would be the sight of the runway and airport out of the windows, the sudden rising of the nose and a thump that reverberated through the airplane as it touched down amid squealing tyres and the roar of reverse thrust. Even Becca would let out a sigh of relief as she heard applause break out among the passengers, knowing that the pilots could also hear it from the cockpit and would likewise be smiling as they taxied the airplane on the blessed safety of terra firma.
Becca pressed the intercom button on the outside of the cockpit, just below the access keypad.
‘I need the passengers to see me to talking to you both, right this minute.’
Moments later, the cockpit door locking mechanism opened and she walked in.
The cockpit was a surprisingly small space, with a tiny aisle behind the two pilots’ seats and room for only a small fold–down jump seat. Becca closed the cockpit door and sat down on the seat, waiting patiently for the captain and the first officer to complete whatever task they were undertaking and turn their attention to her. She could hear Captain Reed talking to someone on the radio, and she could see the banks of screens and dials on the instrument panel glowing before her, a brilliant blue and white sky outside the windshield.
It was Captain Reed who first turned in his seat to face her. ‘How are you holding up out there?’
Becca liked Reed. A senior captain with huge experience and an amiable nature, he was a favourite with the cabin crew and she had no qualms about talking to him openly.
‘The passengers are getting annoyed. They’ve see the eruption cloud and they know that something major’s gone wrong. One of them is even a former airline pilot and he knows that you’re keeping information from them.’
Reed and Jason exchanged a glance and Becca knew that the old man had been right. They were withholding something and the knowledge angered her somewhat.
‘We can’t do our jobs if we don’t know what’s going on,’ she insisted. ‘Chloe’s getting nervous and so am I. Just tell me what we’re up against here. Why can’t we land at Keflavik and at least get the passengers off the plane?’
Reed hesitated for a moment longer, and then he turned in his seat to speak to her more directly while Jason monitored the instruments.
‘Keflavik is beneath a toxic cloud of gases that were released by the eruption and an associated sub–aquatic earthquake that occurred off the coast. There’s enough carbon dioxide down there to overwhelm our scrubbers, and most of the populations of the cities in the region have perished. Reykjavik is under the same cloud, and our only other diversion airports at Akureyri and Egilsstadir are closed due to severe weather and the potential threat of ash clouds. Narsarsuaq in Greenland is out of range and no other local airfields can handle this aircraft. We have an hours’ worth of fuel remaining at the most, and then we’ll have to land immediately and take our chanc
es that the storms down there have broken up the toxic gases.’
Becca sat in silence for a long moment as she digested what the captain had told her. For what felt like a long time she could not bring herself to speak. Sure, she had known that there was a problem, but not for a moment had she feared that their lives were in direct and unavoidable danger. Captain Reed had done precisely what she had asked and given it to her straight, and now she wondered if she wouldn’t have been better living in blissful ignorance. If they landed they might die, but there was nowhere else to go.
‘Is there nothing that can be done?’ she asked.
‘Everything that can be done is already being done,’ Reed replied. ‘There’s nothing else we can do but hope that when we touch down at Keflavik, the air has cleared enough that we don’t suffocate.’
The captain’s frank admission was all the more terrifying for its candour. Becca briefly thought that she might vomit, and then a rush of images of her family and friends flashed through her mind and she threw her hand to her mouth and squeezed her eyes shut.
A brief wave of terror washed over her and she sucked in a few breaths, waiting for the anxiety to subside. Her legs felt weak and her stomach was turning over inside of her as she tried to master the deluge of panic.
‘Are you okay?’
She realised that the captain and the first officer were both watching her with concerned expressions. She sucked in a breath of air and nodded.
‘I’m fine, I think,’ she replied, her voice rough with anguish. ‘It’s not every day that you find out you’ve got about an hour to live.’
Captain Reed reached out one hand and rested it on her shoulder, then squeezed gently.
‘We’re not down and out yet, and there’s a good chance that this toxic cloud will be blown clear on the westerlies gusting about down there. The longer we can stay up here, the better our chances when we land, okay?’
Altitude (Power Reads Book 1) Page 7