Yesterday's Flight

by Martyn Ellington

  He heard nothing but static. “I say again, Mayday! Mayday! This is flight 993 American Air Cruises, we have hit bad turbulence and sustained casualties over…”

  Still nothing. He pulled his headset off and looked at the dashboard to check the flight and fuel status.

  After checking on the few passengers they had on board and doing her best to reassure them, Lynsey returned to Holly to see how she was holding up; she knelt quietly down beside her and found her asleep, Lynsey smiled and pulled the blanket further over her. She looked peaceful and restful; a sharp contrast to how she had been a while ago. She carefully lifted the edge of the blanket that covered her left arm, the bandage was holding and the bleeding had stopped but she could see the bruising starting to radiate from the fracture area. Lynsey gritted her teeth and drew a breath back through them, “That’s gotta hurt, sweetie,” she whispered to herself as she covered her over again and stood up, turned and headed for the flight deck.

  “Captain, how are things in here?” Lynsey walked slowly in. She was tired now and drained, a bit like Holly but unlike Holly, she couldn’t yet take a rest.

  Due to cutbacks at the airline they had decided that any flights with less than thirty-five passengers, and this particular red eye had only eighteen, would only need two cabin crew and two flight officers. With Holly out of action, that left her to carry the load.

  Lynsey sat next to David and turned to look at him, “Where’s Steve?” David looked down before he turned to face her, his expression a mixture of sadness and inevitability, he simply gave a small movement of head and whispered, “No, he didn’t make it.” Lynsey covered her mouth with both hands and gasped. Her eyes filled up instantly as if someone had turned on a tap, tears began to stream down both her cheeks; carrying with them her black mascara. Removing her hands from her mouth she stuttered, “How? Where?”

  “In the cargo hold, broke his neck, it would have been instant.”

  David looked down again and away from her.

  “We, we,” she stuttered again, “we need to inform the airline.”

  “I can’t, I can’t get anybody on the radio, it’s as if there is no one out there, the instruments aren’t reading anything; no GPS, nothing on radar; just nothing and look, I’ve been looking at the night’s sky. I’ve flown this route time and time again and I don’t recognise the sky even though we’re off course I should still be able to see familiar scenes.

  Lynsey’s tears had stopped, her anguish now replaced with a sense of concern.

  “So, what does that mean?”

  “Honestly, I don’t know, Lynsey, I reckon we have 3-hours of fuel left in this holding pattern and the sun should be up in 2-hours, so that gives me an hour of daylight to find something or,” he paused, “somewhere to land.”

  Lynsey sat back in the co-pilot’s seat.

  “So, what do we tell the passengers?”

  David looked at her and shrugged his shoulders.

  The plane continued its circling. David and Lynsey sat in silence, the relentless static was still coming over the radio speakers and was now just becoming yet a another background noise, dissolving into all the other sounds that can be heard in the flight deck but are so easily ignored.

  As the day started to break the sun broke through the windows of the flight deck streaming in and bathing David in a warm light, but this light was different from the scolding pure white light he had experienced the previous night, this warmth was very welcome, and just for a small moment he allowed himself the luxury of enjoying it.

  He rubbed his face and breathed deeply as if he was showering in it. Lynsey had continued to come in and out, continually checking on Holly and the passengers. On this visit she brought him a coffee. David placed it down in the usual spot but before he let go of the handle he took a second and had a flashback to the last coffee that was there and saw again the vibrations on the surface just before the event had happened.

  He blinked hard and realised it was just a flashback, sighing heavily and smiling he looked up and smiled at Lynsey.

  “Thanks Lyns, how’s things out there?”

  “Oh, as well as can be expected. Holly is resting, but her arm is bruised really badly, and the passengers are ok-ish, thankfully none of them have noticed we’re circling for now.”

  “For now,” David replied, “but the sun is up and now they have landmarks to look at.”

  “How we doing for fuel?” Lynsey asked the question but she really didn’t want to, it was the same kind of feeling she had the last time she rang her credit card company for a balance, she knew she had to ask but she dreaded the answer.

  “We have about 45-minutes, Lynsey, its time to find a place to land.”

  She looked at him and sighed, she had a look of acceptance on her face. Lynsey wasn’t a pilot but she had worked for the airline and flown enough times to know what was about to happen, and she knew that what was about to happen was an emergency landing. She looked one last time at David, nodded and stepped out.

  “Ladies and Gentlemen, this is the captain speaking. Due to circumstances that we don’t fully understand, I’m afraid to inform you that I am going to have to make an emergency landing. Lynsey our senior flight attendant will soon be round to ensure you are all aware of what to expect. Unfortunately, Holly was injured in the turbulence and won’t be able to assist any further.”

  David started to bank the plane, taking manual control of it again he disengaged the auto pilot. The on-board computers had done their job now and as clever as they were and good as they were, it was time for the human touch. He started to scan the horizon looking for familiar landmarks, but nothing of what he saw down there looked familiar. He expected to see the national park but instead all he could see for as far as he could were thick lush forests. He felt the adrenaline kicking again, but this time he got it under control, this time he was going to control it. He figured he had around 30-minutes of fuel now and that was barely enough to do what he had to do. He had to find a strip of land and now.

  He banked left and found what he was looking for, he had no choice he had to make a decision and he had made it, that was where he was going to land, or to be accurate it: where he was going to make a controlled crash. He knew he was going to need all the 900-metres this aircraft needed and depending on the conditions of the improvised landing strip, even that might not be enough. He turned the aircraft and started to make his approach.

  Bruce was in his tent; he had just woken up, they had been here two weeks now, and he had hated every day more than the last. He hated the heat but worse was the dust. God, he hated the dust.

  He was perched on the edge of his bunk resting his elbows on the sides of his knees; his head supported by his hands. The early light of Death Valley was streaming in through the yellow canvas as was the smell of freshly-brewed coffee. He rubbed his hands over the top of his head and stood up stretching out as if he was reaching for something.

  “Bruce, are you decent in there?”

  “I’m dressed, Susan but it’s too damn early for me to be decent about anything!”

  Susan laughed, she was used to his rough demeanour by now, especially this early in the morning and she could tell from his reply that last night had not been a good night for him.

  “Come on, Bruce, we’ve finished looking at the first two bodies from dig bravo.”

  Bruce steadied himself and stepped out the tent. 8:37am, his watch read, sighing heavily he looked at Susan through squinted eyes as they got used to the sun that already started to annoy him.

  “Why this early, Susan?”

  She just smiled and turned, “C’mon, let’s go see.”

  “Not without a coffee, that’s first, those fossils can wait for another ten-minutes.”

  “I’ll meet you over there then.”

  Susan walked off and Bruce headed for the kitchen tent.

  With his morning coffee in one hand and his other hand over the top of the cardboard cup to stop any spilling or esc
aping before he had chance to drink it, he made his way slowly over to the large field examination tent they had erected over dig bravo.

  As he walked in he could see Susan standing over the examination table they had put the first two bodies on.

  “So, what can you tell me about John and Jane Doe here?”

  Susan turned her head over her shoulder and smiled, she didn’t need to turn completely around, she could recognise that voice anyway.

  “Well, as you know, one’s male and the other female, what we have established is that John here, has a dislocated shoulder from a heavy impact, but the interesting thing is how he died.

  “Go on,” said Bruce, as he sipped a little more coffee, “His neck is very badly broken, you see here just below the skull it suffered a massive impact from behind him, so we’re not too sure what caused it but it’s a safe guess to say he didn’t see it coming.”

  Bruce held his coffee out to one side so he couldn’t dribble any on the bodies.

  He was now bent over, partly out of respect for them, partly because he needed every drip of caffeine to get him started but mostly because it would be just plain embarrassing.

  Susan held her pen close to where the point of trauma had taken place, and even though they were fossils now, he winced as he imagined the force that his neck must have taken.

  “Do you think someone did that?”

  “I doubt it,” Susan replied candidly, “it would have taken a big man to do that, the object - whatever it was - was brought down on him, and given his height at around 6’ they would have needed to be much bigger or standing on something to get the elevation.”

  Bruce turned to the female remains.

  “Ok, what about Jane here?”

  “Ah, she’s more interesting. You can see her left arm had a bad break of the radius bone, and it seemed it never healed before she died.”

  “What could have caused it?”

  “Again, its just best guess, but as with her friend here what ever it was, there was force involved.”

  Bruce moved closer in for a detailed look. Turning to Susan he shrugged his shoulders, “So, what do you think killed her then?”

  “Well, forensically we can tell she died while she was still young and the break in her arm wasn’t that old; we can tell that by the stage the bone is at in the healing process. Our best guess is that the trauma to the area must have allowed some kind of infection to get in and ultimately she died from some sort of septicaemia poisoning.”

  Bruce stood up and looked bewildered.

  “What is it?” Susan asked. “These two fossils here were once modern people, who we think are off that plane over there that shouldn’t be; yet they died from traumatic injuries and bad infections around 65 million years ago.”

  Susan just stared at him, “I don’t know what else to tell you Bruce.”

  Bruce pulled in a deep breath to fill his lungs then let out a heavy sigh. “Tell me, is there anyway at all these people can be identified?” Susan looked at him with a look of excitement growing across her face, like someone who was opening a present and starting to realise that what was in under all the wrapping paper was the thing they had wished for. “You know, we just might be able to, there has been work done in the past to restore the faces of Homo heidelbergensis and other early man, they weren’t anywhere near as old as these but they might be able to do something.”

  “Ok, Susan, get in touch with whoever it is that does this and tell them it’s a priority.”

  He turned from the table and headed to the mass grave where the other body still laid; squatting down he stared at it intensely. “I have a million questions for you and you can’t help.” Raising himself back up and gulping down the last of his coffee he headed for dig site charlie to see what further work had been done on the remains of the aircraft since Bruce had last seen it 24-hours ago.

  They had first discovered the plane just over a week ago. Susan’s contact had provided the equipment they just couldn’t have done without, but Bruce still wondered at what cost and if he could be trusted as much as Susan insisted he could.

  Bruce approached the dig site - which, as with the other two sites - now had a huge tent over it, covering the remains of the aircraft.

  Entering it, Bruce could see the half-excavated plane, its paintwork was badly marked almost scratched down to the bare metal, years of erosion from sand, earth, water and high winds had scratched off all the markings and corporate livery that had no doubt once announced to everybody who saw it what it was and who’s it was. Huge powerful orange lights illuminated the entire area. Because of the strength of the sun, they had taken the decision to protect it, the canvas covering it was a dark blue; unlike the other sites which were white to maximise the available daylight, and out here there was a lot of daylight.

  The ‘aircraft hangar’ - as it had now become affectionately known - was also air-conditioned. It was strange walking into this self-sealed environment from the scorching desert outside. In here it was cool and everything was immersed in an eerie orange glow. The half-visible plane and especially its tail even with the missing section was rising out of the desert floor like some huge leviathon rising out of the depths of the sea in Greek mythology.

  Bruce looked around for Simon, who was running this dig now under Susan’s stewardship, and given his huge amounts of energy and excitement for the whole thing he was making good progress. They had dug down far enough to know that the aircraft was sealed up, all the exterior doors had been closed and all the window blinds had been drawn down, tantalisingly they could not yet see into it.

  Bruce noticed Simon standing by the forward entrance door on the left side of the fuselage; just behind the flight deck windows and in front of the row of small windows that once allowed the passengers behind them to gaze ‘sometimes in wonder’ he thought, at the earth below them.

  “Simon!” Bruce shouted as he nodded his head up to get an extra few decibels out of his already booming voice.

  Simon turned slowly, his left hand fixed steadfastly to the door and his right hand on his hip.

  Bruce walked over to him and took a perspective look at Simon and smiled. Suddenly Simon didn’t look like the over-eager, sometimes annoying and awkward young man that he climbed out of the Landcruiser with those two weeks ago. Now he looked like a fully competent and capable field investigator.

  “Hi! Bruce, come and see this.” He removed his hand from his hip, something Bruce was glad about.

  “Now he doesn’t look like a teapot,” he chirped to himself. Bruce reached the dig, looking down into it he could now see the bare tops of the wings and more importantly he could see that the landing gear was down from the earth the team had cleared away underneath it.

  Bruce looked at Simon, “It landed?”

  “Yup, and looking at the structure of the under carriage it was a controlled landing.”

  Bruce crossed his arms across his chest and rubbed his thick tangled beard. “What’s the puzzle, Bruce?” Simon had been on enough field trips with Bruce to know what this look meant, and what it meant was that Bruce was stuck, he had a question that couldn’t be answered, and that wasn’t something he liked.

  “Simon, have you looked at the aircraft?”

  Simon looked at him, puzzled.

  “Ermm, I have, I am now.”

  “No, Simon, have you really looked at it?”

  Simon took a step back and looked as far as he could along the length of it.

  “You still don’t get it, Simon, do you? You still haven’t yet seen the biggest question we should be asking!”

  “Ok, Bruce, I give up, what is the biggest question we should be asking? You tell me.”

  Bruce pointed in the general direction of the grave.

  “What’s happened to the remains of what we think are a few of the crew or passengers?”

  Simon frowned and bit his bottom lip, “They fossilised!”

  “Ok,” said Bruce, “And why did they do that?”
/>
  “We think, because of the time they have been down there, but until we get the carbon dating back from John Doe tomorrow…”

  Bruce cut across his words, “Don’t over think it, Simon, we pretty much know it’s about 65 million years and the first thing…the very first thing (Bruce’s voice was raising now because he was getting frustrated) we saw was the skull of some animal that had been killed by this plane and that lived 65 million years ago.”

  Bruce rolled his hands as if to encourage Simon’s thought-process.

  Simon stood back, his faced panned into a solemn expression as if he had turned to stone on the spot. It was an expression that Bruce had not seen since they first saw the tail piece of the plane lying on the skull. He turned slowly to Bruce, “I need to call a team.” Bruce smiled and just nodded. Simon had finally understood what Bruce was driving at.

  The thing that everyone had missed, because they had been so busy trying to uncover the aircraft, they had missed the most obvious question: why had the plane not disintegrated? By now the air frame, metal, glass and even the plastics should have decomposed, but they hadn’t. The plane was dirty, it had been buried over time as all artefacts and remains are, it would never fly again and there were signs of rust and decay, but it looked like an aircraft that had been left out for fifteen, maybe twenty years, not 65 million years.

  Bruce started his way back out the hangar. He stepped out of the orange air-conditioned environment back into the baking midday sun. He pulled his baseball cap out of his back pocket and tucked it on his head.

  Back in the hangar Simon took his phone out of his pocket and called the office.

  “Hi! It’s Simon at the Death Valley site, I need a metallurgy team down here, I have a plane that…” he paused… “That shouldn’t be anything but a pile of dust!”

  Chapter Three