She opened her eyes and found herself looking directly out of the galley window at the huge volcanic ash plume soaring into the darkening sky above them. She could see lightning bolts flickering back and forth within it, menacing and beautiful all at once. She could hear that many of the passengers were crowding one side of the aisle again, probably craning their necks for a glimpse of the majestic and yet terrifying display of nature’s might mere miles from where they were flying.
‘You’re a remarkable young lady.’
Somehow, she managed to drag the shattered parts of her personality back together again and make her numbed lips work once more as she turned and saw the old man alongside her. He must have followed her back to the galley, and yet she had barely known he was there.
‘Doesn’t feel that way,’ she mumbled.
The old man smiled and turned to leave. ‘It never does, but that’s what courage feels like. Still, this doesn’t change our situation. We need to land, soon.’
***
XVII
Jason leaned forward in his seat and peered up and to the right as the Airbus turned gently through its orbit, and he saw the immense ash cloud hove into view. He had seen such sights a thousand times on the television but never like this, up close and in motion even as he watched.
‘Hell of a thing,’ Reed said as he too leaned in for a better look.
Jason reckoned that it already reached up to sixty thousand feet, well into the stratosphere, and was perhaps eight or nine miles wide. It had burst up through the layers of cloud below them and now dwarfed the ranks of white cumulonimbus clouds around it. Jason wondered just what kind of prehistoric hell on earth was being created down there on the surface, as the violent eruption competed with the tremendous Atlantic storms rushing in across Iceland’s glacial wilderness.
As he watched he saw the interior of the cloud flickering with intense lightning displays, crackling bolts of energy darting this way and that. Aviation law prevented most airplanes from flying within ten miles of a cumulonimbus, although airliners were designed to survive lightning strikes and frequently did so. However, no commercial pilot would ever consciously choose to enter such a storm with civilian passengers aboard, and now Jason was uncomfortably aware of their proximity to the growing ash cloud.
‘This is getting tight,’ he said as the Airbus turned away from the cloud and toward the sunset once more, brilliant golden light filling the cockpit.
As if on cue, Jason heard the radio crackle.
‘Phoenix three seven five, what’s your status?’
Captain Reed replied to Narsarsuaq.
‘We’re still in orbit overhead Keflavik. The ash cloud is becoming an issue here. Any news on the ground teams?’
‘Negative, they’re in transit but we don’t have a revised ETA for them and we can’t reach them on the radio. What’s your fuel status?’
Reed glanced at the instruments. ‘Forty–one minutes and counting. We’re also looking at low light conditions at the surface within thirty minutes, possible category two or three ILS landing depending on conditions at Keflavik.’
‘Copy that, we’ll be on hand to assist. Maintain altitude and orbit.’
‘Wilco.’
Jason bit his lip and looked again at the immense pillar of ash towering over them as the Airbus slowly completed another circuit. The lightning storms raging within its tumultuous and billowing clouds were becoming brighter as the sun lowered in the sky to the west. He was staring at it when the intercom beeped and he heard Becca’s voice once more from outside the cockpit.
‘Guys, we’ve got a new problem here.’
Jason sighed and looked at Reed, who got up and unlocked the cockpit door. Becca hurried in and closed it behind her.
‘How are the passengers holding up?’ the captain asked.
‘They’re fine,’ she replied, deciding to gloss over the near–riot that had just occurred at the rear of the cabin, ‘but the airline pilot came to the galley and said that the ash cloud is now as big a danger as the air down below.’
‘You told him about Keflavik?’ Jason asked in horror.
‘He’s switched on,’ Becca snapped back, not in any mood to debate the point. Jason recoiled in surprise but said nothing as she went on. ‘He saw right through the announcement but he’s smart enough not to let on anything to the other passengers.’
‘What did he say about the ash cloud?’ Reed demanded.
‘He said that once it gets too big for the heat of the eruption to support it, it will collapse back down and cause a kiroplastic flow.’
Jason smiled grimly. ‘Pyroclastic,’ he corrected her, understanding what the old airline pilot was referring to. ‘But he’s right, if that cloud drops it’s going to take out one side or other of the Blue Mountains. If it drops to the west of them, Keflavik and Reykjavik will be totally wiped out.’
Like an immense avalanche of dirty grey soot and ash, Jason knew that the temperatures inside a pyroclastic flow could reach thousands of degrees and they were known to roast alive anything that they encountered, burning and then burying whole forests and laying waste to entire regions. They moved at hundreds of miles per hour, and there was no creature alive or that had ever lived that could hope to outrun one.
Captain Reed crouched down in his seat again and peered out of the cockpit windows at the huge ash cloud, saw its immense upper heights stretching across the sky above them.
‘If it comes down while we’re here,’ Jason added, ‘it might scatter enough material to clog our engines.’
Captain Reed shook his head.
‘No, what’s directly above us is being carried away by high altitude jet streams. It won’t come down on us, but you’re right. The rest of the cloud will collapse eventually and when it does everything will be toast down there. We can’t take the chance that Keflavik will escape unscathed.’
Becca stared in astonishment at them both. ‘The volcano is twenty miles from the airport.’
Captain Reed nodded. ‘Sure it is, and it’s on high ground. Everything is downhill from there and we’ll have to circuit out by at least ten miles to pick up Keflavik’s ILS approach, shortening the distance. I’ve seen what these eruptions can do on television. Even if we’re clear of any pyroclastic flows, the ash fallout can reach Keflavik easily and there’s no way our engines will survive that.’
‘Maybe the winds will carry it in the other direction,’ Jason said. ‘Akureyri was concerned about ash fallout due to the prevailing winds.’
‘The winds will carry the higher material, yes,’ the captain agreed, ‘but for the pyroclastic flow the weight of collapsing material will easily overwhelm any local winds. If that thing comes down, our only landing site could be taken away from us.’
Jason stared into the sunset sweeping across the horizon, the shadows inside the cockpit moving slowly as the airplane turned. As if the volcanic eruption wasn’t enough, they now risked losing their only available landing site.
‘We can’t deadstick the plane into Keflavik in those weather conditions,’ Reed said, ‘which means if that cloud starts to collapse, we’ll have to head in and land whether we like it or not and that means we’ll…’
‘…get toasted by the pyroclastic flow,’ Jason finished the sentence for the captain, and then they both seemed to become aware again of Becca’s presence in the cockpit.
‘There’s more,’ she said. ‘When we tried to land the first time some of the passengers got a brief Internet connection, and the news is already alive with reports of a major toxic cloud over Iceland.’
‘They all know?’ Jason uttered, horrified all over again.
Becca nodded.
‘How come they’re not leaping out of the damned windows or beating down the cockpit door?’ Reed asked.
Becca kept her voice even. ‘Chloe and I are keeping them calm as best we can, but ultimately you’re going to have to make some kind of official announcement. They feel like they’re being kept in the dark
and some of them are getting irritated.’
Reed nodded slowly. ‘Good work keeping them under control, Rebecca. I’ll come out when I can think of something to say to them that doesn’t sound like we’re already dead.’
Becca had never thought that she would hear a pilot as experienced as Reed say something like that, and the knowledge that he was even considering them to be facing certain death took the wind from her sails. Her shoulders slumped and she leaned against the cockpit wall.
‘So, we’re stuffed then.’
Jason stared at her for a moment as though he was looking at someone entirely different, and then looked at the captain.
‘What if we head west, away from the cloud and the spreading ash, and then used the tailwind to bring us back into Keflavik?’ he suggested. ‘It might give us some extra time and let us sneak in under the cloud if it starts to drop?’
Reed frowned uncertainly.
‘We could make an overhead join at Keflavik to bring us around so we can land into the wind,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘It’ll burn more fuel.’
‘Yeah, but we don’t have any other traffic to worry about and that ash is moving further over our heads by the minute. Any way we can avoid it has to help, right?’
Reed looked at the fuel gauges one more time and then he nodded.
‘It’s a plan,’ he agreed, and keyed his microphone. ‘Narsarsuaq, phoenix three seven five is heading west to avoid the ash cloud.’
‘Roger phoenix,’ came the reply. ‘Maintain altitude.’
‘Wilco.’
‘What do I tell the passengers?’ Becca asked as the captain released the transmit switch on his control column. ‘They’re going to be watching everything that we do now.’
‘Tell them as much of the truth as possible,’ Reed repeated. ‘We’re staying away from that ash cloud and waiting for a gap in the weather to land. I’ll be out in a minute to address them directly.’
Becca sighed and turned to the cockpit door. Jason watched her open it and slip a smile on her face as though nothing was wrong before she closed the door behind her. Jason got out of his seat and locked the cockpit door behind her before sitting back down and rubbing his forehead.
‘Why not just force land at one of the other airfields?’ he suggested. ‘The hell with the length, at least we’ll be on the ground and away from the eruption.’
Reed shook his head. ‘They’re all way too short Jason and you know it. We’d run off the end and risk bursting into flames in a collision with terrain, or plunging off the coast and into the North Atlantic. Plus, we’d be downwind of the majority of that ash cloud which would strand us and the passengers. Heading east will only increase our problems, and we can’t try for Akureyri with the weather the way it is because the crosswinds and turbulence will be far more than this airplane can take. If that airport’s closed, it’s for a good reason. We could make it there but then kill everybody just trying to land.’
Jason nodded, knowing that the captain was right but unable to accept that they literally had no other options. Surely a forced landing, however dangerous, was a better option than just waiting to run out of fuel or landing at Keflavik only to get roasted alive by volcanic debris?
‘What about climbing to our absolute maximum altitude and trying to glide to the Faroe Islands? We could try to calculate the tail wind and…’
He was cut off by a furious banging of fists and a man’s voice on the other side of the cockpit door. ‘You in there! Open this door immediately and tell us what the hell is going on!’
***
XVIII
‘This is utterly unacceptable.’
The words of the lank–haired man were uttered loudly enough to be heard half way down the cabin by the other passengers above the hum of the airplane’s single functioning engine. They had seen the dark–haired flight attendant enter the cockpit moments before, the door closing and locking behind her. Although nobody knew what was happening inside the cockpit, the man’s repeated assertions were being heard by everyone with mixed results.
‘Quit whining. She’s gone in there hasn’t she?’
‘No, he’s right. Why aren’t they telling us everything?’
‘They know what they’re doing, they’re professionals, right?’
The lank haired man rose up in his seat and looked back at the other passengers. ‘How do we know that they have any idea of what to do next?’
‘What, you’re a pilot now are you?’ someone uttered from further back.
‘They’ve been lying to us from the moment this all started!’ the lank haired man insisted. ‘Doesn’t that bother any of you? Isn’t anyone in the slightest bit annoyed that those two toffee–nosed pilots haven’t shown their faces out here once yet to explain what the hell has been going on? They’re playing with our lives!’
A silence descended on the cabin as the passengers saw Chloe making her way up the aisle with more refreshments. The stewardess glanced this way and that as she walked, aware that something was going on at the front of the airplane but a little too far away to hear it all.
‘She’s with them,’ the lank–haired man insisted, his voice lower. ‘Whatever they do or say, she’ll just go along with and she’ll tell them about anything we say or do.’
A middle–aged woman glanced at him in disgust. ‘What utter rubbish. What do you think this is, a concentration camp? If we’re facing a serious situation up here then so are they.’
The lank haired man scowled but did not reply.
‘They’re not coming out to say anything though,’ said another younger man in a business suit, his laptop computer open as he worked on some document or other. ‘The pilots clearly don’t want us to know everything, and it’s only good luck that our phones picked up the news reports. Do you think they’d have told us about any of this if that hadn’t happened?’
‘That’s my point,’ the lank–haired man agreed. ‘We’re sitting here letting them sleepwalk us into some kind of disaster. That volcano must be preventing us from landing down there. For all we know it’s a flaming wasteland and we don’t have enough fuel to fly anywhere else!’
The cabin fell into silence once again as Chloe made her way to the front of the plane, and this time the silence wasn’t because of her presence. She too had heard the claim loud and clear and she found herself thinking the exact same things as the passengers around her. What if the plane simply cannot land, and cannot divert to another airport? She knew that they had been almost at the end of their flight and that meant that there would be low levels of fuel in the airplane. She had once been talking to a pilot during an overnight stay in Majorca and had asked him why, when planes were forced by an emergency to land again just after take off, they spent hours circling and dumping all of their fuel out over the ocean? He had explained that although an airplane could take off with a full load of fuel, it could not land at the same weight because the impact of tens or even hundreds of tons of airplane on the undercarriage at landing would risk collapsing it and causing a major incident. That was not to mention the inherent danger in landing an airplane filled with tons of highly volatile aviation fuel. Therefore, fuel was dumped to reduce the landing weight and also to make the plane a touch safer to land.
Chloe looked out of the windows as the plane turned, saw the gargantuan ash cloud drifting past on one side of the plane and the gorgeous flare of the sunset on the other casting beams of golden light through the airplane. They were still over Keflavik and low on fuel. If there had been some other place to go, they would have diverted there already by now.
‘You’re thinking what we’re thinking, aren’t you?’
The voice woke her from her thoughts and she turned to see the passengers looking at her, the lank haired man’s gaze seeming to bore like lasers directly into her mind.
‘You think that we’re doomed somehow,’ he added.
‘I’m thinking that I wish I knew what was happening down there, just like we all do,’ Chloe countere
d as she handed a carton of fruit juice to the boy with the sick bag clutched in his little hand.
‘You’re okay with lying to children?’ the lank haired man uttered.
‘Why don’t you put a sock in it?’ a deep voice rumbled from two rows back.
Chloe saw two thick set, burly men sitting together and glaring at the lank–haired man as though they were about to get up and confront him.
‘That’s enough,’ Chloe admonished them. ‘We need to keep our cool up here or we’ll be in trouble no matter what the pilots do.’
‘Do you think the pilots will tell the other stewardess what’s really going on?’ the mother of the poorly boy asked her.
Chloe was well aware that the little boy was listening to the entire exchange, and she picked her words with care.
‘Becca is the senior flight attendant on board, and as such they’ll tell her all they can.’
The lank haired man scoffed and shook his head. ‘Sure, like they did the last time and the time before that.’
Chloe ignored him, but the two burly men behind growled again. ‘You don’t shut up, I’m gonna take this magazine and shove it up your ar…’
‘Are we not above this?’ Chloe cut in as she confronted the two muscular men in Row Eight. ‘Violence never solves anything.’
‘It would sure as hell silence that jerk at the front,’ said someone from Row Fourteen.
The lank haired man scowled again but shook his head.
‘You saw it yourselves, the stewardess here is as in the dark as we are. And you can sit there and threaten me all you like, but we’re all stuck up here together and I just want the crew to be honest with us and tell us what we all have a right to know. Is that somehow too much to ask?’
Altitude (Power Reads Book 1) Page 9