by Craig Thomas
The engines wound up once more and he sensed rather than saw the plane move away towards the taxiway and the threshold. He deliberately did not turn back or pause in order to watch its departure, but continued walking towards the opendoored maintenance hangar. Oslo's airport was little more than a garishly lit island above the subdued glow of the city and the darkness of the Oslof jord and the Skagerrak beyond it.
His sports bag brushed gently against his leg. He could already see the tailplane of an airliner being serviced, just as two nights before the
494 had been.
And, just like him, someone had walked into this hangar and announced he was from Vance Aircraft and had been sent to check out the fuel computer system. One of maybe a dozen men, most of whose identities he did not know, with the dark talent to create a computer-generated piece of sabotage.
Behind him, he heard a four-engined airliner lift into the night. Jimmy would have put Vance's jet on to the end of the runway by now. He glimpsed in his mind Barbara's face at one of the windows, the features of a stranger seen on a passing train, drained, weary, tragic like those of a woman in a Hopper painting. Out of which he had again walked, probably forever. He blinked in the lights of the huge hangar.
The dock gantry girdled the airliner like a whalebone corset. At once, but perhaps for no more than display, he was approached by a security guard. The man was in his early sixties, overweight, wary, the armpits of his uniform shirt stained by the perspiration of a hot night and nerves.
"What do you want?" he repeated in English as Gant shrugged at the Norwegian.
Slowly, Gant reached into his pocket and flapped Barbara's letter in the small breeze.
"I'm Gant. I'm here to see Olssen. I'll wait until you find him or can you take me to him? It doesn't matter which."
The security guard puzzled over the letter Gant had asked Barbara to write — just in case, he had said, I need to enlist some official help
…I lost my job, remember?
Probably because it assisted the man in unpacking his responsibility, the guard said:
"Olssen told me you would be coming I'll take you to him." He handed back the letter. Gant took it and then turned quickly, alarming the man.
Vance's private jet the one he had built and which now carried his casket rose above the glow of the airport, into the night, navigation lights brighter than the stars. He watched it until it banked slightly out over the fjord, then dismissed it from his mind. The sense of Alan Vance's body on board the plane depressed him with obligation, and promises given.
"Sure. Lead on," he murmured.
The scent of heated metal, fuel, oils restored an awareness of the immediate, the superficial. Work was evidently all but complete on the Sabena Boeing. Men were moving with the crispness of home going or loitering to gossip.
"Mr. Olssen Mr. Olssen!" the security guard called, waving to an overalled figure near the Boeing. This man has come to see you you expected him!" His was the eagerness to pass something that burned.
Olssen was at once studying Gant as he approached, as if matching his frame and gaunt features to some mental photograph. He held out an oil-stained hand, having wiped it on a rag.
"You're Gant," he confirmed.
"Sorry you had to come, that we meet like this."
"Sure." It was hotter in the hangar or perhaps it was the remembered heat of Arizona, and that other hangar where the first 494 had lain like the rubble of a condemned building.
"Thanks for seeing me."
"I understand that it is necessary. You must inspect our schedule, our records, on behalf of the FAA and the NTSB. I am not offended, it is routine."
"Yes."
"You will want to talk to others here, those who worked on the aircraft? They are about finished for the night…"
' I won't keep them — just those who saw the guy who claimed he was from Vance Aircraft. Then I'd like to talk to you you spent time with him, I guess?"
Olssen nodded.
"Yes, of course. And Jorgensen probably no one else. Like you, he came late, when we were almost finished on the aircraft—" His voice tailed away, as if he had suddenly become cautious, or perhaps merely reflective. His eyes suggested that he recollected their telephone call, his own protestations of innocence over the identity of Massey, as he had called himself. He blurted: There is no Massey, you said.
Have you checked with Vance Aircraft? Perhaps—" There's no mistake on my part, Mr. Olssen. Vance Aircraft never employed a deputy chief engineer called Massey. I have that from a man called Blakey, who is the chief design engineer."
Blakey had remained in Helsinki to oversee the further recovery of the wreckage, its investigation by the Finns, its eventual transportation, like the body of Vance, back to Phoenix.
"I am sorry, but I do not see that it is any of my—" Patiently, but with a flavour of threat, Gant said:
"No one is blaming you, Mr. Olssen, not right now. The man who called himself Massey let's talk about him, uh? While you introduce me to your schedule, the other paperwork on the 494 service job you carried out."
"Vance threatened me, this company! We have a good record, this hasn't happened-!"
"Sure," Gant soothed.
"Vance was angry. His company collapsed around his head.
He needed to blame someone."
They were walking towards Olssen's office. Olssen was about the same height, slightly stockier, running to the first fat of middle age. His eyes kept furtively glancing at Gant, who appeared oblivious of his attention.
"Mr. Vance did not come with you?"
"No." Why tell this man, when he could read it in tomorrow's paper?
"He didn't.
Now, Massey…?"
Olssen opened the door of his glass-walled office. The old desk was littered with forms, other papers. Grey filing cabinets, a rickety table piled with books and manuals, the scent of dust, oil. Gant found the cramped place comfortable, familiar.
Olssen dumped a file in front of him as he sat down on the single hard chair on the visitor's side of the desk. The gesture was one of self-satisfaction as well as ingratiation.
"Here is the schedule for servicing on the aircraft. I dug it out when you told me you would be coming. You want some coffee?"
"Mm oh, thanks." He unzipped the sports bag and drew out a small tape recorder.
"First, just describe this guy Massey for me, would you? What did he look like?
His accent, size, manner — take your time…" He placed the recorder on the desk between them. A family photograph lay on its back like a stranded insect amid the foliage of forms, regulations, a calendar.
Take your time," he repeated.
As Olssen cleared his throat, Gant leant forward with an eagerness that seemed to unnerve, even threaten the Norwegian. This man had seen him, the guy who had downed two aircraft and almost killed him in the third.
This man had seen Massey, who had killed Vance and over fifty others
She was alone in the toolshed again, and her arm where the skin graft still showed was burning. She had been trying one of Mummy's cigarettes. The toolshed, in a hot, dry summer, had caught fire from the matches she had dropped when the cigarette made her cough violently. She couldn't open the door and her throat was too raw and choked for her to scream. Daddy… Marian sat slumped into a foetal ball in the hallway of the flat, unable to open the door… She crouched in the farthest corner of the toolshed, her arm filled with pain so badly hurt that she could not relieve the pain by clutching it watching the flames lick up around old seed bags, dry canes, terra cotta plant pots, herself. Under the workbench, there were spiders but their clinging webs, filled with dead moths and flies, had to be ignored. Through a cracked windowpane, she could see the sunlight, the blue sky… The flames from the kitchen had reached the living room and flared garishly, orange-red, on the pale walls. The door wouldn't open, it was jammed somehow.
The sound of breaking glass must have been what had woken her, when some
thing burning had been thrown into the kitchen. She had seen the broken window in the moment before she had recoiled in sudden, recollected panic from the flames. Her arm ached deeply, to the bone.
She could not move, could not get out of the flat.
There was no one else in the building, the other occupants were away on long weekends or business. The burglar alarm was shrilling because of the rise in temperature. Someone would come, would come… She began coughing.
In the toolshed, she was coughing and her eyes were watering and she was screaming so loudly that someone must hear her, must, it was only the back garden of the army house they occupied on one of Daddy's postings somewhere… Someone must come, the burglar alarm was so loud. Someone had to come, she couldn't move, her legs and arms and whole body were frozen with panic. She knew what was happening to her, the past coming like a massive injection of something that attacked the motor muscles, the nervous system. The panic was so enveloping it was no longer fear but paralysis.
Someone must come, Mummy would… was shopping, she had taken the car… Daddy would… was somewhere else, there was a barracks inspection she had heard at breakfast… someone must come… The spell of the past, the straitjacket in which it held her, was too strong to be broken. She was helpless, the pain in her arm, remembered, overpowering her.
The flames crept into the hall and up to the workbench. Grass seed spilled from a bag being consumed by the fire, the smoke from her smouldering furniture made her retch… Someone, someone — rough material, the smell of tobacco as when her mother pressed her against a blouse or cardigan she was wearing. Big hands clutching her up and out of the spiders' webs. The low mutter of constant cursing. The smell of soap pressed into her nose from the cheek against which her face was thrust, the sensation of bristles. Then the jolting passage through the flames and smoke, the squeezing of the hands and arms that did not allow her to breathe as she seemed buried in rough khaki cloth. Then the sunlight, the blue sky, and the scent of dry grass mingling with the smouldering smell of her clothes as she was pummelled. A big hand struck her burnt arm and she screamed again and then lost consciousness. To wake up still on the grass, with big adult faces pressing chokingly close to her and among them, Daddy-woke up. The carpet in the hallway of the flat was smouldering, the living room was an inferno the flame seen through boiling grey smoke. Woke up.
She squeezed herself upright against the wall and grabbed the door handle, tugging at it until she remembered, with great, precise clarity, that it was jammed. By someone… She shook her head, the past nightmare slipping from her.
She blundered through the door of the spare bedroom at the rear of the flat, quite certain of her movements, her direction. Moonlight was coming through the window. The cathedral loomed across the Close. She thrust up the window and peeling paint flew off like white sparks. The glass reflected the fire inside.
Lance Corporal Davies had rescued her from that childhood fire… Just as he had rescued her every time the nightmare had come back, every time she had been terrified by fire. She climbed over the windowsill on to the fire escape… Corporal Davies, looking down at her, his face as white as Daddy's… Her feet touched the rung of the fire escape and she stumbled down it to the lawn behind the flats, coughing hard enough to make her want to retch. She slipped and fell on the dewy grass. Rolling on to her stomach, then rising to her knees, she looked back at the flat. The fire was visible at every window. She could hear the burglar alarm, and the noise of an approaching siren.
Its noise gradually drowned the alarm. Her arm hurt.
It was almost two in the morning. Olssen's patience was gauze-thin, Jorgensen's indifferent contempt undisguised. His own tiredness was hard to conceal. The tape recorder remained amid the litter of the desk as if part of it and of no immediate concern to any of them.
Olssen's team of service engineers had long abandoned the hangar and the Boeing to the security guard. Gant had examined the service schedule with Olssen, out of routine rather than anticipation. Unless one of his people had screwed up, the answer didn't lie in the documents or their computer-stored duplicates. But he'd known that anyway.
All that he had was the vague description of a tall, well-built man with an American accent would two Norwegians know whether it was genuine or assumed? who claimed his name was Massey and that he worked for Vance Aircraft. He had been wearing a check shirt, denims, a leather jacket, heeled boots.
His hair was greying, he had a moustache, and maybe he was around forty.
It wasn't enough… not nearly enough.
"Can I go now?" Jorgensen asked Olssen, deliberately ignoring Gant but speaking in English so that he would understand his exasperation.
Olssen looked obsequiously, and with some impatience, at Gant.
"Sure. You're no help anyway, buddy," Gant sneered.
"Maybe you'll do more good at home." He smiled without meaning, other than a frustration of his own.
"You want to get some sleep, too, Mr. Olssen? You want to leave me here—?"
He wanted to rid himself of them now. They could be of no more assistance to him. Only these two had taken any notice, held any conversation with the saboteur, and neither of them could give him enough to recognise the man, or to be able to trace him. A stranger had walked in off the street, committed the crime, walked out of their lives.
"Look, I can hand over any keys, papers to the security guy. I may be some time yet."
Olssen seemed relieved of caution and authority equally. Standing up, he said:
Very well, Mr. Gant I will leave you the office keys, and you can lock up behind you. Hand them to Halvesson when you have finished. Come on, Jorgensen oh, you know how to work the coffee machine?" Gant nodded. Then, good night, Mr. Gant. I'm sorry we had to meet under—"
"Yeah. Me, too. Thank you for your help."
"Do you think you will be able to identify this man? To think that it was a sabotage—" Jorgensen was already out of the door and had begun whistling as he walked away.
"I don't think we have any evidence for saying that right now, Mr.
Olssen. Let's just keep that between us, OK?"
"OK. I well, I wish you the best of luck. And thank you for understanding that there was no way that I could—"
"Sure. You couldn't have known. The guy had what looked like authority. I don't think anyone's blaming you." He shook the man's hand quickly and sat down again, at once picking up a sheaf of papers. Keys rattled on to the desk, and he heard himself wished good night once more."
"Night," he murmured. The door closed behind Olssen and Gant breathed deeply with relief, dismissing the last hours… But the disappointment leaked into the vacuum he created.
He was angry at the distractions of obligations, people, debts. Barbara had played on that. He had made easy promises as a consequence. Worse than that was the sense he had of being so easily reduced to impotence almost the moment he had begun something on his own initiative. He banged his fist on to the littered desk. The photograph frame jumped and the tape recorder moved; switched itself on. The button must have struck against something hard. He listened, as if transfixed, to the description of Massey with a fierce, renewed concentration.
But there was no sense of anyone he recognised. Presumably the man calling himself Massey was an American. Height, weight, features, dress… He switched off the recorder because it angered him like the buzzing of a wasp; it threatened his ego. Involuntarily, he got up from the chair and walked out of the office into the hangar. The Boeing sat like a promise on the oil-stained concrete. There weren't many men who could cause a plane like that to fall out of the sky without using a bomb. It was evident that the second 494 should have fallen into the sea and been lost, so the calculations were precise, the technology advanced. It was exactly the same pattern as the one he had encountered, instability succeeded by fuel starvation to the engines… He didn't know who, and he didn't know who had enough to gain. None of the big airplane manufacturers in the States would ha
ve sanctioned sabotage. The idea was crazy. So, who? The why had to be rivalry between manufacturers, not carriers. The 494 was flying only with Artemis and a half-assed company in New Mexico. But Artemis was small, too small to worry the big carriers except with insect-stings.
Irritation, not ruin. Vance was small, he couldn't have rivalled a big
US plane maker Was it an ex-employee gone crazy, seeking revenge? Someone Vance had teed off even more than himself? He rubbed his hands through his hair angrily, lifting his face to the gantries, struts, metal beams of the hangar's roof. Was it just his intelligence experience that sought a strategy, a carefully organised operation in this, rather than a human motive?
Something at the edge of eyesight, high up among the metal bones of the hangar… Then the voice of the security guard distracted him.
Irritated, he turned on Halvesson. The man was sweating, flustered.
"I… the telephone. My wife, she has been… I must go to the hospital, she is ill!" His terror was vivid, intense, as hard as a strong light suddenly shone into Gant's eyes.
"I cannot the company does not have a replacement, I must wait!"
The woman might be dying or simply dizzy. Halvesson's shock could distinguish nothing except fear.
The company won't let you go to the hospital, right?"
"No. I must stay here. My wife. I have just had a telephone call from the doctor who has seen her. He said I should hurry' The man had aged, lost all volition, as if he had collided with the doctor's injunction.
His hands flapped at his sides, his shirt was damp-stained across his chest, as well as beneath the arms. His face chalk white rather than flushed.
"I'm here," Gant said. I'll be here most of the night. You'd better go. Nothing's going to happen here."
"But you you can't, you don't have authority…"
"Olssen left me his keys. He thinks I can be trusted. You want to see your wife, fella, you take off." The quick sympathy he had felt was already evaporating. Halvesson was indecisive for perhaps half a minute, then he blurted: