by M. R. Hall
He had lost count of the times he had replayed the events of their final meeting in his mind. He had walked into the office at the end of the day to find her sitting with a computer on her lap. She had looked as startled as he was, and was wiping tears from her cheeks the moment they stepped the other side of the door. She hadn’t meant to cry – he understood that – but couldn’t help herself. She was still in love, and he was still fighting it. She had wanted him to touch her, a hand on her arm, a kiss on her forehead – anything – but he had denied her it all. He recalled the relief he had felt when she told him it wasn’t a personal visit, but that she needed advice – the kind only he could give.
She had insisted they talk somewhere where they couldn’t be overhead. Michael took her to pub a few miles from the airport. It had felt incongruous sitting in a 400-year-old snug bar listening to her talk excitedly about state-of-the-art avionics, but at least she was no longer crying. She had always been happiest talking about planes: her eyes would light up like a little girl’s. Male pilots were addicted to the freedom from responsibility flying brings, but for Nuala it was much more than that; she seemed fused with her passengers and crew in a way no male pilot ever was or wanted to be. He suspected that flying solo would have brought no joy to her at all.
She had talked non-stop for nearly two hours. He was treated to a detailed history of the evolution of fly-by-wire philosophy and technology which had culminated in the A380. She adored the aircraft and revered its architects and builders as heroes, which was why the faults she had come to believe had crept into its computers had troubled her so deeply. But there were some incidents which seemed beyond all normal explanation. Dan Murray’s near disaster with the disobedient thrust lever had been one of them, and Alan Farraday’s instrument blank-out another. What troubled her most of all was that there was no pattern to these errors, and by all accounts Ransome’s engineers were as baffled as she was.
It was Farraday who had forced the issue. Nuala had told Michael how Farraday had grown more anxious about the error he had experienced over the Pacific repeating itself. Unhappy with Mick Dalton’s failure to trace the cause of the fault, he had recruited Nuala to help persuade the chief engineer to copy the entire contents of the aircraft’s flight computers onto a separate hard drive, which he intended to have analysed by independent experts. Dalton had carried out the download, compressed the files and transferred them to Nuala. She was all set to transfer them to Farraday when he came off his motorbike.
She had met Dalton several times during December to discuss Farraday’s case and that of several other Ransome pilots who had experienced anomalies, hoping to trace them back to the same root but without success. Growing increasingly anxious for answers, she had cast the net wider on Airbuzz and been alarmed to discover a rash of reports of similar incidents from pilots working for several different airlines. The problem was so widespread that she started to canvass opinion on the forum as to whether a pilots’ committee should be formed to present their concerns to aviation authorities across the world.
A plan was beginning to take shape when she was visited at home on a Sunday afternoon by an American who had introduced himself as Doug Kennedy, and who claimed to be from the Federal Aviation Authority. She had immediately suspected that he was no mere airline official. She described him as having the hardness of an experienced military man beneath a cloak of civility. He knew all about Airbuzz and claimed that the FAA had also known that she’d been behind it for more than two years.
But far from threatening her, Kennedy had attempted to be friendly. The FAA was as concerned about the incidents as she was, he assured her, which was why they were planning on holding a series of high-level meetings to discuss each one. He wanted her to come to Washington for a week to share what she knew with a committee of industry experts. There would be engineers, avionics specialists, security and counter-terrorism officials present. They had the full backing of the US government and wouldn’t stop until they had solved the problem. Nuala hadn’t known whether to feel relieved that such powerful people were taking an interest, or frightened that she had been outed as a potential trouble-maker. Anticipating her concern, Kennedy assured her that her connection with Airbuzz would remain secret, but she was requested not to discuss their meeting or her invitation to Washington with anyone, especially her employers. She had agreed, and even signed a document to that effect, which Kennedy handed her before leaving.
That was shortly before Christmas. Over the next few days she had grown more and more uncertain about the mysterious American. She could find no mention of him on the internet and he had left only the sketchiest details of the arrangements: she was to be waiting in the lobby of the Embassy Suites Hotel, Washington, at nine a.m. on 10 January. She was to bring any relevant information she had along with her and to use her best endeavours to gain more in the interim.
Finally, on 28 December her concern had got the better of her and she travelled to Bristol to seek Michael’s advice. It became clear to him that she had become involved in something huge, but that she was only a tiny cog. The Americans would want her information, her silence and her insight into the mood of fellow pilots. His only concern was that she might find herself arrested in the States for some offence she had unwittingly committed, but she assured him that that had been another of Kennedy’s guarantees: her liberty was secure. She had committed no crime in spreading information via her forum, though he questioned the ethics of further alarming an already jumpy public.
Nuala’s greatest worry had been that if she obeyed Kennedy’s orders and Ransome Airways got wind of what was happening, she wouldn’t only lose her job but she would never work for a commercial airline again. Michael had no hesitation in advising her to tell Ransome everything: acting deceitfully was the one thing guaranteed to destroy her career.
Whether Nuala would have set off for Washington if he had told her not to, he could never know. What he could find out was whether her presence on the aircraft along with the others bound for Kennedy’s secret meeting was just an unfortunate coincidence or the very reason it went down. He would come away from Washington with an answer; he would make sure of it. He would stick a gun on Kennedy if he had to. Hell, it wasn’t as if he had anything left to lose.
The view from the window was hazy now they had climbed past 10,000 feet. He glimpsed the ground through fleeting gaps in the cloud; all that he had left behind seeming increasingly irrelevant as the plane powered towards the other side of the world. His only regret was that he hadn’t told Jenny Cooper a little more. She had crept up on him somehow, moving from stranger to friend within days. She had stirred up all manner of unexpected feelings in him – guilt, fascination, anger, desire – and if Nuala’s ghost hadn’t been hovering so close, he was sure he would have taken things further.
Jenny, Jenny. She cared so deeply. He should at least have told her about his last meeting with Nuala, but just as he was learning to trust her he had become frightened for her. Once he had heard about the Apaches and the explosion on the water the danger was more than theoretical. Kennedy and whichever branch of the mighty US state he represented clearly had serious weaponry at their disposal, and on British soil. Where the helicopters had sprung from remained an intriguing mystery to him. The mothballed former US airbase RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire was a possibility, but the old SAS HQ at Hereford was closer and a natural place for the US to establish a black operations capability, no questions asked. At full speed a couple of Apaches could have reached the crash site within fifteen minutes. If they were scrambled at the first sign of the aircraft being in trouble they could have made the Severn only ten minutes after 189 hit the water.
It had been unclear to Michael at first what had happened out on the estuary, but he’d since begun to form an idea. It seemed to him that Kennedy wanted all the information about whatever was going on in the aircrafts’ avionics for himself, or at least for his government. Knowledge was power. Witnesses, physical evidence, any
thing that might have handed the answers to others would have to have been neutralized. The man Brogan remained an enigma, but Michael’s best guess was that, having found him alive, the Apache crew were ordered either to kill him or bring him in. Maybe there had been a struggle and he had fought them off. They would have been in a hurry to clear the area before they were seen – search and rescue helicopters would have been only minutes away – which would explain why they might have made do with puncturing his lifejacket and cutting him adrift in the expectation that he would drown. But from the facts Michael had picked up from Jenny he was sure that the Irishman had swum to the little girl in the water and attempted to save her. Perhaps that was the deal he cut with his would-be assassins – spare my life to let me help the girl. Michael doubted anyone would ever know the full facts for certain.
What he did know was that Nuala had intended to take a copy of the data from Farraday’s flight computer to Washington on a portable hard drive. When Jenny got hold of Nuala’s laptop he had been certain it would contain a copy, too, but Kennedy’s people were good: their Trojan horse had worked far better than they could ever have hoped. The hard drive was wiped and the data lost. Until that moment he had been planning to tell Jenny everything; in his fantasy, the two of them would have copied the files and spread them far and wide across cyberspace. Screw Kennedy. Robbing him of his precious information was going to be sweet revenge. But fantasies seldom came true, and his was no exception.
Lying on the motel floor while Jenny slept he had tried again to start the laptop but to no avail. Tyax, Tyax, Tyax . . . the word went round and round his mind until he had wanted to bang his head against the wall. Then it had come to him, like a shaft of sunlight through a heavy sky: all those months ago she had sent him photographs of their trip to Canada. There had been too many to email so she had posted them on her account at datadrop.com for him to download. She knew he would never get around to setting up his own account so she had instructed him to use hers – Tyax was her password.
He left the motel room before Jenny woke and flew his clients through rough weather across the Channel to Guernsey, having hardly slept. He rushed to an internet cafe in St Peter Port and logged on to datadrop. He keyed in Nuala’s email address, entered ‘Tyax’ in the password box and there it was: hidden amongst her hundreds of backed-up files was ‘A380 FC’. The compressed data fitted onto three small memory cards that were currently zipped in his jacket pocket: the contents of two of the aircraft’s six flight computers on each.
His elation had been short-lived. Tommy Sanders was waiting for him on the ground at Newbury. He remembered him from his first tour in Iraq, a sly bugger who was known for eating more dinners in the US Air Force mess than his own. Always greasing up to the Americans and offering his men to do their dirty work. There were no tears shed when he hit thirty years’ service and was put out to grass.
‘Michael, old friend,’ he had said, striding across the grass with an outstretched hand. ‘How the devil did you get mixed up in this lot?’
Good question.
He had been charming, naturally, but there was no arguing with him. He was working directly for Kennedy and it had been his man following Dalton to their meeting at the lay-by the night before. The Americans were demanding to know everything there was to know about the downing of Flight 189 and failure to cooperate ‘wouldn’t be tolerated’. Michael hadn’t troubled to ask what form their intolerance might take. He had seen the CIA at work over many years in the Middle East and needed no lessons in what they were capable of.
The retired wing commander seemed delighted to be working for the big boys at last and not an embarrassingly ill-equipped limb of a colonial army. Michael could see the back of his head two rows in front of him. He was already wearing his headphones and watching the start of a Clint Eastwood movie: Dirty Harry. That was Tommy Sanders all over: peace through superior firepower.
‘One to go,’ both pilots called out in unison.
The altimeter ticked swiftly upwards through 30,000 to 31,000 feet, the height at which they would level off over mid-Wales before moving slowly on upwards to 41,000 once they were out over the Irish Sea. They had cleared the Severn estuary and were heading towards the NUMPO waypoint in South Wales. Clear skies had turned to high-altitude cloud that was becoming thicker by the second. The hum of the engines adjusted to a lower, almost inaudible register. Airspeed was a steady 465 knots.
The aircraft jolted slightly as they encountered the first belt of serious headwind. Captain Finlay adjusted the attitude a touch and kept a close eye on the artificial horizon. Even though the aircraft’s computers were busy transmitting instructions to the flying surfaces to carry out minute adjustments, he retained the illusion of being in complete control. The nose dipped through a pocket of turbulence and a ripple travelled through the aircraft’s hull as they bounced through it.
‘Seat belts?’ First Officer Cambourne asked.
‘Seat belts,’ Finlay answered, his eyes fixed on the screens in front of him.
Cambourne reached up to the overhead switch and activated the seat-belt warning lights. In the cabin, the chief steward would be telling passengers to return to their seats and remain belted in.
‘We’ll have plenty of this as far as Iceland,’ Cambourne said, consulting the weather display on his navigation screen. He checked the positions of other transatlantic aircraft up ahead following the same route. ‘Doesn’t seem to be causing anyone any problems.’
Finlay nodded. Some minor turbulence was fine, in fact he found it reassuring to be buffeted a little by the weather.
While Cambourne checked in with Shanwick to get the all-clear to proceed across the Atlantic, something caught Finlay’s attention on his multi-function display. On the right hand of the three screens that sat on the console between his seat and Cambourne’s to his left, was a message reporting a problem with flight computer one. He pointed it out to his first officer. ‘Take a look at that, would you?’
Cambourne quickly ended his conversation with Shanwick and turned his attention to his screen, which was showing the same message indicating that action was required to reboot a malfunctioning flight computer. It wasn’t one he recognized from his most recent simulator training.
He turned to the onboard information terminal to his left. ‘I’m going to look this one up.’
‘No problem,’ Finlay answered.
Cambourne pulled out the keyboard and tried to focus on the screen as he bounced in his seat.
Cambourne called up a list of error messages and tracked his finger down the screen looking for FC1 FAULT 00/81 Re-boot. ‘It’s not here.’
‘Say again?’ Finlay said, glancing over.
‘It’s not listed in the manual.’ Cambourne turned back to his multi-function display and saw another error message appear: ELEC AC BUS 1 FAULT. He flicked to the electrical system topographic on the system display screen. It showed no fault. Another message: DC ESS BUS FAULT. There was no corresponding sign of a fault on the system display. ‘Two electrical faults that aren’t showing up on the system display.’
‘Work through them,’ Finlay answered calmly. ‘There’ll be something.’
Cambourne turned back to the onboard information terminal with the aim of reminding himself of the correct protocol when two displays failed to correspond, but as he navigated back to the main menu the screen froze on the list of errors. He hit the enter key a second time. The screen flickered, switched momentarily back to the main menu, then dissolved to black, a single white cursor blinking in the upper left corner. ‘What the hell’s wrong with this now?’ He hit several more keys, but the screen remained stubbornly blank. ‘I’ve lost the OIT,’ Cambourne said.
‘So have I,’ came Finlay’s deadpan reply.
Cambourne spun around in his seat and saw that the screen to Finlay’s right had also gone blank. Both men were having the same thought at once: that shouldn’t have happened; the terminals were operated by separate computers. T
he whole point was that if one set of screens went down, the other didn’t.
‘Skyhawk 1–9-9, this is Bristol.’
‘Skyhawk 1–9-9, go ahead, Bristol,’ Finlay answered.
‘Skyhawk 1–9-9, you are requested to turn around and land the aircraft as soon as possible. Suggest Filton.’
‘Skyhawk 1–9-9, who is making this request?’
There was a crackle of static as the controller briefly conferred with someone Finlay assumed was his superior.
‘Skyhawk 1–9-9, the instruction comes from Ransome Airways. My information is that you have failed to transmit any ACARS messages sent during the last five minutes—’
Cambourne was watching another unfamiliar message appear on his multi-function display when it too flickered and turned to black. He glanced across at Finlay’s and saw the same thing happen to his. Finlay glanced down at the console as the system display dissolved into a series of jagged white lines . . .
TWENTY-SEVEN
IF IT HADN’T BEEN for the turbulence Michael might have drifted into sleep. Instead he lay back in a semi-doze, watching the cloud vapour whip over the leading edge of the port-side wing. He thought of Nuala, and for the first time fully appreciated the job she had done. Flying a handful of jockeys and rich playboys to and fro was one thing – they were risk takers by profession – but assuming responsibility for hundreds of civilian passengers who had placed their complete faith in you was something else. It was a load she had willingly carried every day, but he hadn’t even been able to bring himself to take responsibility for her. In an attempt to distract himself from his guilty feelings, he glanced out along the wing and noticed that something was different: the light at its tip had stopped blinking. Odd. He craned round to see if he was simply at the wrong angle when the aileron moved swiftly downwards and the aircraft turned violently to the left.