by Anthony Grey
TAIPEH, June 1972—According to a certain source, the nine passengers on the Trident, including the woman, were all under fifty years of age and in the woman’s purse was a man’s French cap. Since a woman as old as Yeh Clam would not have need of such an article, this suggests Lin Piao and his wife might not have been on that plane.
Issues and Studies,
Journal of the Institute of International Affairs,
Taiwan 1 June 1972
8
‘The Russians, not to put too fine a point on it, were baffled.’ Dr. Vincent Stillman leaned his folded arms on the edge of the lectern and gazed up at the ceiling. Lost in thought, he opened his mouth wide and those members of the East Asia Study Group sitting in the front row were able to see that his teeth, like his ragged moustache, were also stained bright yellow with nicotine. For a moment his head seemed to shake almost imperceptibly on his shoulders.
‘The Trident had come in too low, remember, for their radar screens to pick it up. So the first thing they knew of its presence was when it crashed. Their nearest radio-sonde observations from the Soviet rocket base near Choibalsan, a hundred miles away, showed there had been no unusual meteorological conditions. The weather was fine that night with only moderate wand and there was no evidence to indicate the presence of clear air turbulence in the region.’
Scholefield glanced quickly round die room. All seventeen members of the group were listening intently to Stillman now. Harvey Ketterman, be noticed, was leaning forward on the seat in front, his head cocked on one side and his eyes closed in an attitude of intense concentration. For a brief moment Nina caught Scholefield’s eye from her seat at the end of the front row. Her face puckered with concern and she shot him a quick worried smile. A rustle of paper drew his attention back to Stillman and he watched him fumbling with a sheaf of notes on the lectern.
‘You’ll all no doubt be familiar with Premier Chou En-lai’s famous account of what happened to the Trident, given to a group of American newspaper editors in October 1972.’ Stillman looked up, then picked the top sheet off the lectern and read from it. “Its fuel was nearly exhausted,” said Chou, “so it bad to try a forced landing. It slid a good distance on the ground leaving behind very clear marks. When the plane landed, one of its wings first touched the ground and caught fire and all the nine persons on board were burned to death.” Stillman dropped the paper back on the lectern and bared his yellow teeth suddenly in a crooked smile, directed towards the ceiling. ‘I’m surprised that’s not been seen in the West for what it is—a modern Chinese fairy story.’ The smile faded only very slowly from his face. ‘The disposition of the wreckage of an aircraft is one of the most important clues about how the crash has occurred. An experienced air accident investigator can tell a lot from how and where the various bits and pieces come to rest.’
He raised his arm abruptly in a signal to the projectionist behind a small window at the back of the room. The lights immediately went out and an illuminated slide appeared on the white screen behind the dais. It showed the burned-out hulk of an aircraft’s main fuselage silhouetted against the sky on a flat, grass—covered plain. In the far distance the rear fuselage, engines and tail unit which had broken off cleanly were visible standing up perpendicularly as though undamaged. One wing, on the starboard side of the main fuselage, was still intact.
‘As you can see, gentlemen, the distribution of the wreckage was not inconsistent with Chou En-lai’s explanation,’ said Stillman’s voice from the darkness. ‘But it does seem very odd to me that nobody in the West has ever bothered to ask how, if the Trident really did run out of fuel, its empty tanks were able to produce such a fierce fire that it burned all the occupants beyond recognition.’
Everybody gazed in silence at the slide of the crashed aircraft. ‘And since, as you can see, the aircraft came down practically intact why didn’t anybody manage to get out? They would have had a good chance of remaining conscious in these circumstances. Has nobody ever wondered that?’ Again nobody broke the rhetorical silence. ‘It takes a good many minutes in a fierce fire, you know, before all the skin and superficial flesh on the human body gets burned to the extent that these fellows were.’
The slide changed abruptly and the starkness of the next image provoked an involuntary murmur of shock around the room. Scholefield clearly heard Nina’s separate gasp of horror. On the screen nine charred corpses had appeared, laid out in a row on white sheets. The photograph had been taken by a cameraman standing at normal height and the bodies seemed to resemble poorly-constructed human-sized puppets fashioned from blackened papier-mâché.
The tense silence in the darkened room was broken by the scrape of a match and a tiny bud of flame flowered brightly in front of Stillman’s face. His sagging features were illuminated theatrically for a moment as he lit another cigarette. Again his head seemed to quiver momentarily on his shoulders. ‘It didn’t take the Soviet Army pathologist boys long to discover that three of these corpses had bullets lodged in them,’ he said quietly, turning back to the screen. ‘Two lots were of rifle calibre and the other one was a smaller revolver bullet. All the weapons were found in the wreckage and matched up with their respective bits of lead by their ballistics boffins. But there were no bullets in the pilot. His body was found at the controls—and this was what worried the Soviets. Because although there may be popular misconceptions nowadays about what happens when you fire guns in pressurised airliners, these were not shared by our Russian friends on the spot. They knew that air pumps are perfectly capable of maintaining pressure differentials in spite of leaks from. several bullet holes. You’ve got to have a fairly massive hole, you know, gentlemen, three or four feet square, before it beats the pumps.’ He stopped and removed the cigarette that his audience had been watching jiggle between his lips in silhouette against the light of the screen. ‘You could stage the gunfight at the O.K. corral, you know, in the pressurised cabin of a modern airliner and I doubt if even that on its own would bring it down.’
He turned suddenly and noticed that the slide of the charred bodies was still showing. ‘Let’s lose that now shall we?’ he called quickly to the projectionist. ‘It’s not all that pleasant, is it?’ When he was satisfied the screen behind him was blank he turned back to his audience. But he didn’t ask for the lights to be switched up again. -
‘Because of all this, the Soviets really needed at this stage to consult everybody’s “spy” on board the Trident—the flight recorder. Or the “black box” as the newspapers tend to call it. They dug it out from the wreckage, all right, but it was a Plessey-Duval, you see. Now, that’s a common enough flight recorder in Western aircraft but to their dismay the Soviets found they couldn’t make head nor tail of the ruddy thing.’
Stillman took out his cigarette packet again and lit a further cigarette from the stub of the old one, lie walked across to the lectern and dropped the old stub into the ash tray. ‘Now this has happened before of course. Several times in Eastern Europe, airliners built in the west have crashed and the men who put the first sputnik in space have been embarrassed to find they didn’t have the technical equipment to do the black box read-outs. They couldn’t, for instance, develop and print your Kodak colour films in Moscow either for the same reasons—but that’s neither here nor there. A couple of times in the past they saved their faces by returning the black boxes to their capitalist makers and asking them to send them back with the data in readable form. They always covered up their incompetence by saying they were anxious to demonstrate their desire to co-operate in international air accident prevention. But you can see without my telling you that they couldn’t risk returning this particular Trident’s black box to the makers.’ Stillman laughed suddenly, a short, shrill bark of laughter. ‘That’s where I came in—or rather, looked at from your point of view, gentlemen—that’s where I went out.’
Stillman turned his back suddenly on his audience and stood staring pointlessly at the brightness of the blank screen. He took an audi
ble deep breath in the darkness and this brought on a sudden fit of coughing. When he had recovered he spoke more quietly than before, still without turning round. ‘To cut a long story short gentlemen, I was subjected to a considerable degree of physical coercion and taken forcibly to the scene of the crash. I arrived there on the fourth day after it happened, September seventeenth.’
He swung round suddenly and paced with new resolution to the end of the dais where Scholefield was seated. He snapped his fingers and a new slide appeared on the screen showing a sheet of photographic paper covered with a graph grid. Four parallel lines were traced evenly across it. Stillman turned to face his audience again and cleared his throat. ‘This, gentlemen,’ be said softly, ‘is the read-out from the Trident’s black box.’
The Group members stared in uncomprehending silence at the screen.
‘It’s great, just great, Doctor Stillman.’ Harvey Ketterman’s voice carried cheerfully from the back of the room. ‘The trouble is that all of us here may well be staring at the most vital piece of evidence since they took Cain’s fingerprints off that asses’ jaw-bone east of Eden—but it might just as well be an extract from my granny’s pearl and plain knitting book for all I can tell.’
The American’s lightness broke the tension and there was a rattle of relieved laughter from around the darkened room. Stillman picked up a long pointer and moved briskly to the side of the screen. ‘These four lines are traces from the four channels of the flight recorder.’ He pointed quickly to each line in turn. ‘The first records the aircraft’s heading, whether it’s flying north, south, east or west. The second shows its altitude, the third shows when the machine was yawing or pitching—that’s backwards and forwards and from side to side, like this.’ He stuck out his arms stiffly to make aeroplane wings and swung his body to illustrate the movements. ‘And the fourth records negative G. That shows if the plane suddenly drops or goes up in turbulence.’
He turned and looked round over his shoulder at his audience. ‘The, time scale is along the bottom and the box operates, remember, all the while the aircraft is flying. If these lines all run smoothly you can say with certainty the plane, was travelling in a normal way. If it starts to do anything strange these lines will tell you exactly what it was and help you work out afterwards why it happened.’
‘These four lines of yours all look pretty steady to me, Doctor Stillman,’ said Ketterman slowly from the back of the room, ‘for an aircraft that’s supposed to have come to a violent end.’
‘Precisely.’ Stillman turned back to the screen and raised his pointer again. ‘You can see that the top line is the only one that gives us variable information. It indicates that there was a steady 1800 change of heading from north-west to south-east not long before the lines cease. That proves conclusively the pilot turned and was flying back the way he’d come. But other lines show the altitude didn’t change, there was no rising or falling from turbulence and no pitching or yawing.’ Stillman slid his pointer back and forth across the screen, illustrating his points by tracing each line in turn. ‘All four lines stop dead here abruptly—with the plane in a normal posture.’ He pointed to the ends of the lines again. ‘There’s just these little tick—like kicks.’
He remained silent and continued to hold the pointer against the screen for several seconds, as though anticipating that somebody would prompt him with an obvious question. When nobody spoke he laid the pointer aside and turned round slowly like a schoolmaster exasperated by dull pupils. ‘If the Trident, as Chou En-lai claimed, had come in to land relatively successfully, at least as far as getting onto the ground was concerned, we would have expected, wouldn’t we, gentlemen, to have found that altitude line descending gradually ,to zero? And the other lines would have gone on recording the changing postures of the aircraft during the descent, until the very moment it broke up on the ground. Wouldn’t they?’
When nobody offered a response, he stopped and signalled for the light to be switched on. He blinked in the sudden glare from the neon tubes and looked round the room. ‘Does nobody know then what these straight lines prove?’ He brushed perfunctorily at the grey ash that had gathered on the front of his jacket. Still nobody responded. He looked up slowly and stared out above their heads again. ‘Well, I’ll tell you. It proves that the black box stopped operating suddenly and unexpectedly when the Trident was flying perfectly level at four hundred feet. That means all its electrics were destroyed in a single instant during normal flight.’ He paused and spoke very slowly for effect. ‘Only one thing is capable of causing that.’
He turned and walked across the dais to where the discoloured lump of foamed plastic was lying in front of Yang. He picked it up and held it out at arm’s length. ‘And that’s where this fellow comes in. This shapeless and rather ugly modem artifact, gentlemen, contains conclusive proof of the crime.’ Still holding it he walked back to his chair and bent down and opened the battered leather briefcase that lay on the floor. When he stood up he was holding a thick bunch of long steel knitting needles in his other fist.
‘Though I say this myself gentlemen, not everybody would have appreciated the significance of this innocent-looking object. But our “friends” in the KGB’—he stopped and waved the needles in the air stressing the word heavily—’our “friends” were luckier than they knew when they chose to take me on their special Mongolian package tour. In my youth I developed a special knowledge of cushions in my work at the forensic laboratories of the Royal Armament Research and Development Establishment. Some of you probably know that’s a section of the Ministry of Defence that provides certain special services to other government departments. I became a specialist there, gentlemen, in the study of ordinary house cushions that certain citizens were in the habit of wrapping round safes before opening them violently and illegally without keys..’ He lifted his head and his discoloured teeth appeared suddenly in another brief smile towards the ceiling. ‘Life is full of strange coincidences, isn’t it? Out there on the steppes of Mongolia I nipped over this object and saw the same kind of marks I’d first seen forty years ago in cushions taken from a broken bank vault in the Mile End Road.’
He placed the slab of foamed plastic on the lectern in front of him and began inserting the long steel knitting needles one by one into holes in its surface. ‘This was a back-rest cushion in the Trident. I picked it up a good half mile from the site of the main wreckage. It wasn’t burned like everything else.’ He bent closer peering shortsightedly at the plastic to find the entry points for the needles. ‘The first thing I noticed were these holes. The human hairs I mentioned earlier showed up in another cushion from a facing seat when I got all the stuff back to the laboratory they’d set up for me in the Academy of Sciences in Moscow.’
The two dozen or so steel needles jutting out from the surface bad begun to form a funnel-shaped cluster tapering to a point like the bare poles of an Indian wigwam. ‘But as soon as I stuck these ordinary Russian knitting needles into the holes, I knew.’ He picked up the cushion, turned it over and held it out towards his audience in both hands. The cluster of needles now hung down from its underside, converging towards a common point beneath the cushion. ‘The seat-back you see was reclined to its maximum. These holes were clearly made by tiny objects passing upwards through the cushion. You only have to trace their trajectories to see that all the little objects, whatever they were, radiated from a common source underneath the seat-back.’ He paused and peered triumphantly round the room. ‘Are you beginning to get a glimmer, gentlemen, of what that common source might have been?’
He was still holding the cushion and its hanging cone of needles in front of him, when there was a quiet knock on the door. Because Stillman’s demonstration had engaged the rapt attention of everybody in the room, nobody moved at first. The knock was repeated and Nina, after a questioning glance towards Scholefield, got up and opened it.
The aged porter from the Institute’s front reception desk upstairs stood in the doorway holding a
n expensive—looking brown leather document case. He peered round the room until his eyes lighted on Scholefield. ‘Pardon me, Sir, but a Chinese gentlemen asked me to deliver this immediately to a Mr. Yang. Some reports for distribution to the meeting, apparently.’
Scholefield motioned him in and he hobbled across to where Yang was sitting. He set the document case down by his chair and they heard the Chinese man’s quiet ‘Hsieh hsieh’ as he thanked him. Then the old man turned and left, closing the door noiselessly behind him. Yang nodded apologetically towards Scholefield and gestured with his hand for Stillman to continue. Outside in Pall Mall Razduhev’s black Mini slowed and stopped to pick up the Mongolian diplomat in a black Chinese cadre’s uniform as he emerged from the Institute’s front door. Once he was inside, the car edged out from the kerb once more, and merged inconspicuously into the rush hour stream of traffic flowing down towards St. James’s Palace.
Inside the basement lecture room, Stillman, who had held the foamed plastic cushion pointedly in front of him throughout the entire interruption to emphasise his displeasure, lowered it with exaggerated slowness onto the lectern again. He lit another cigarette and lodged it in the corner of his mouth, screwing up his eyes against the smoke. ‘To prove beyond doubt what that mysterious “common source” was, gentlemen, I X-rayed this cushion from all angles and found literally hundreds of tiny fragments of metal still inside it. About the size of specks of dust, they were, that’s all. They didn’t weigh much more than a milligram.. Some of ‘em in fact weighed much less. Just like the hairs driven into that other cushion on the facing seat, they’d been forced in to a depth of two or three inches by a very high velocity indeed. Many of these specks of metal when we put ‘em under a stereoscan electron microscope were found to have fused with the plastic when they came to a standstill. This proved they were hot when they went in. What’s more, most of the little jiggers, turned out to be made of a mild type of steel which hadn’t been used at all by the British Aircraft Corporation in the construction of the aircraft.’