Darkness, then a belch of light as an armada of roaring flames ripped under the flooring, igniting broken bricks of plastic that had dropped out from the bottom of the steel cabinets.
Then more light. White light. A beam of white light …
“That’s him … Catch his arms. Quick. Yank like hell. I think he’s alive … I think —”
Blackness.
Ambulance bells. A thudding, bumping sensation underneath me. Movement. Fast movement. Taking corners. But a mask over my face. Air.
Air! Unbelievable air! Pure oxygen! Happiness is Oxygen.
Happiness is also a voice.
“You’re going to be okay.”
I tried to speak into the mask. I knew the voice. Feminine. Greatly beautiful. But who?
“Don’t try and speak, Roger. You’re okay.”
Another voice: “Pulse is better. He’ll make it. There’ll be some shock. He’s getting plenty of air, now.”
“Thank God.” — Nesta’s voice.
Nesta, there with me in the ambulance.
I opened my eyes. They focused, I saw the vision. To my surprise, she had clothes on, this time. Lovely face, close to mine. Close to my mask.
“Go to sleep, Roger.” Then some humour in her voice. “For Christ sake! At a time like this!”
Another voice, also some humour in it. “He’ll live.”
Nesta said, “You randy fraud. You can get rid of that before we see the doctor …”
… Well that Nesta didn’t know a frightening medical fact.
Frequently, the occurrence of a spontaneous erection is a symptom of a dying man.
The opposite applied only because Nesta herself had provided the compelling incentive to live at the time when I’d most needed it. But the argument must have still been raging within my body during that ambulance ride. A doctor would have known it at once.
*
“My father tried to have you killed.”
“I very much doubt it. He has little or no control over those mosaics. Nor could he have known that we were going to use Richter’s magnetic card … One thing beyond dispute: the mosaics are bloody quick on the uptake. And beyond getting confirmation that LIA are somehow involved I learned nothing. Except perhaps that the degree to which the mosaics are in control is even greater than we thought. And whatever contamination you and I have picked up, Nesta … Well, how the hell can there be any sort of cure? … If it can incinerate an entire computer centre who are we to put up any sort of resistance?”
“But Dr. Richter —”
“Richter had been extremely careful not to commit himself on the subject of a cure. We both know there may not be one.”
“You don’t exactly mince your words.”
“No. The mincer seems to be fully occupied already.”
We had driven back to my flat. The hospital up north had released me after a very thorough examination and the doctor there had given me a clean bill of health with certain reservations. It’s not hard to remember his words … “Not entirely satisfied with the state of your inner ear, Mr. Kepter. You should get it looked at by your own doctor.”
“Which ear?”
“Your right ear.”
The one I always used for the telephone.
After hesitating, he’d gone on, “You don’t have difficulty in hearing?”
“No.”
“Headaches?”
“Not the sort you mean.”
“How do you know which sort I mean?”
I said, “My mother had a tumour, one time. They found it before it was too late.”
He’d got up, very puzzled. “Okay. If you’ve got a tumour it’s a very odd one.”
“How odd?”
“I can hear noises in my stethoscope.” He had a modern, electronic one.
I said, “I would throw it out, if I were you.”
“You’re … serious. Aren’t you?”
“Yes. I am.”
“Well, have yourself X-rayed when you get back to London.
… Nesta and I didn’t get much sleep. The phone rang all too soon and it was her brother Mike. To me he said, “Got a weird message from LI A, soon as I got here.”
“Where’s here?”
“Elstree. But London International Airlines want you urgently at Heathrow. I asked the caller why but he wouldn’t say. The man’s name is Richard Hitchcock.”
I knew of him. Hitch was Senior Training Captain for the Line. And my heart was pounding … ‘USE LIA PHASE FOUR’. That didn’t sound nice. Mike wanted to talk to Nesta. I didn’t listen in, beyond noting that I would be expected to leave for Heathrow immediately. So I made coffee while they talked.
Nesta hung up and told me, “It’s urgent. Let me drive you.”
“You’ve had enough. You need rest.”
“Do you really think I can rest? … What type of aircraft do LIA fly mostly?”
“Boeing 747s.”
She said, “Jumbos. Well, elephants fly, all right. But why are you suddenly being invited to the zoo?”
As in nearly all walks of life, the best of airline pilots strike the attitude that you could perfectly well do their job as ably as they can.
Richard Hitchcock was one of this breed. Fitted-out with a natural but unobtrusive sense of authority he found it unnecessary either to throw his weight about or patronize an amateur pilot on the marvels of commanding a jumbo jet. Actually he was in charge of a fleet of them. The impression he managed to convey was that, if anything, it was more difficult to persuade a tiny Grumman to behave in the sky than it was to deal with the immense complexities of the huge Boeing. At the same time there was clearly something troubling him. He kept this well damped down but it was there — a puzzle on his mind that demanded concentrated attention until such time as it was properly resolved.
Hitch was short and broad without looking stocky. His eyes, disconcertingly penetrating at times, took in a great deal at each glance — as you might expect from a man who was well used to checking the instruments before him and seeing them not so much individually but as a total pattern that either made sense as a whole or did not. The face was narrow, like a painter’s. For a senior captain of a Line he was rather younger than I’d expected.
To Nesta he conveyed the impression that he was as much of a connoisseur of attractive young women as he was of excellent aeroplanes. He liked her but did not feel it necessary to prove the point by spurious gestures of flirtation. He’d got one of his own. He said, “I’m going to ask Mr. Kepter to sit in with me on one of our 747s. Before that he and I will spend a couple of hours on the simulator. I understand from your brother that you are a pilot but this assignment only involves two of us.” He belied the apparent Chauvinism with some act of communication with Nesta on an optical level that seemed to work.
Nesta said, “Until they build an airliner with three control yokes I see no point in crowding the flight deck. Don’t let him try any aerobatics! This is my chance to get some sleep. So Roger can play aeroplanes to his heart’s content. Don’t let him borrow it, though. I have a feeling you might not get it back.” I gave her the keys of the flat and Hitch and I watched her as she drove off in the MG.
Hitch said, “Whoever started the rumour that beautiful girls have no brains?”
“An ugly man, I should think.”
We worked hard in the simulator, though during the session in this delicious plaything — they sell at over three and a half million dollars each and you don’t get a discount — Hitch mentioned not one word about what was on his mind.
After a couple of hours of a crash course in how to become the co-pilot on the largest commercial aircraft in the world he said, “You’ll do. Now let’s go for one of the real jobs.”
He drove me thoughtfully and in silence around the Perimeter Road to Heathrow Central. It was no surprise to me that my heart was pounding though I wasn’t afraid of the Boeing. Unless I wanted to, I thought, there was very little I would have to do from the right hand seat
other than call out airspeeds and announce ‘V-l’ and ‘Rotate’ and keep an eye on the throttle settings for take-off.
I couldn’t stand the silence so I asked him, “What made you call Mike Crabtree?”
I thought he considered his answer to this very carefully, as if sifting what he knew and being deliberately selective about how much he actually told me.
We’d stopped at the traffic lights where a section of taxitrack crossed the road. There a British Airways 747 was being inched across toward the engineering bays. I hadn’t realized before how gigantic the thing was … three hundred tons of Boeing’s best — handsome and practical-looking rather than elegant and beautiful. The long lines of windows seemed endless; the tailplane structure enormously high.
Not until after the lights had changed to green at the taxitrack did he give me his answer. When he did he kept his eyes on the road and talked expressionlessly. Displayed in lights I could see before my eyes the unnerving inscription:
USE LIA PHASE FOUR
For what? …
At last Hitch said, “Several things came to light. We had an interesting advisory from Bristol Air Traffic Control concerning a flight of yours — strictly speaking an illicit one as you know — that for some reason did not show on their screens.”
I said, “Clutter suppression.”
“Certainly. But a moving blip marking the position of an aircraft cannot be suppressed unless you switch out that particular altitude as indicated by the illuminated label relating to a specific group of air traffic being handled by another controller.”
“Even if an aircraft at that altitude ‘squawks’ his ident code and height?”
“Absolutely. If he squawks, a label will appear against his echo on the screen of the controller handling that batch of traffic … but none of this applies because your Grumman isn’t fitted with a transponder anyway. Moreover the blip marking your position didn’t appear on any screen.”
“Then how did anyone at Airways know about my flight at all?”
“They knew afterwards from the record tapes — ‘dumps’ in your language — which were interrogated after the event because the system married Miss Crabtree’s weather enquiry with the identification number of your aircraft.” He pulled the car into a reserved space by Queen’s Building. “I’ll tell you the rest in the briefing room.”
— I understood about the radar, sure. But how and why did this man know that much? Why would the Senior Captain of a commercial airline know intricate flight details of interest only to the executive officers of Air Traffic Control? They themselves would have had no motive to circulate airlines because I hadn’t flown Airways, nor had I even come within sight of any other aeroplane on my route.
My interest in London International Airlines went up by leaps and bounds. Hitch seemed okay; he’d been skilled enough in showing me over the complexities of the 747 instrumentation in the flight simulator. But a series of questions, especially about his sources of information, were queuing up agitatedly in the back of my mind as we crossed in front of the passenger buildings and made for the Apron where one of the Line’s jumbos was parked ready.
I found myself curiously bewildered by the hectic activities of sweating passengers heaving their bulging valises out of taxis and scurrying about looking for their kids and searching their belongings frantically for passports and tickets then arguing with each other and then suddenly finding the tickets where they should have been all the time and laughing at each other and their own panic. The whole charade was a movie that I’d seen often enough before and had grown worn in the projector — while unopened cans of horror film menaced an unsuspecting public from the rack.
What I was seeing was a mirage rehashed from normal times which, however recent, were as dated as last year’s top selling single. Catastrophies, however muted, are discontinuous. They materialize out of several elements which, though in themselves gradually evolving along a predictable path, combine at flashpoint and change the world with appalling impact unawares.
So I wondered, as we boarded the silver-blue hulk of the big Boeing, just what it was that had added a new dimension to an already indigestible cocktail for which there were no known enzymes for absorbing its bewildering ingredients.
Hitch took the left hand seat and switched on the intercom. Through the earpieces of my headset I heard his cool voice giving me a brief that did nothing to settle my stomach. “This aircraft,” he said, “has been taken out of passenger service and you are in a very hot seat. If you’re sensible you’ll call it a day long before we start taxying and get back to your girl. Most men would.” He started clicking switches and began the preliminary drills. For an instant his eyes studied mine. I trusted them still, but noticed a difference: they were frightened eyes, begging companionship for the duration of some bizarre contest that could no longer be evaded. It is significant that the word ‘contest’ yelled at me in quadraphonic even then.
Hitch started Number Four engine and watched the key instruments relating to it — power ratio, intake compressor revolutions, EGT (exhaust gas temperature) — hardly registering yet — fuel flow. These were arranged vertically for each of the four turbines, centre panel. To either side were the flight instruments most of which I was used to, though in a different form. New to me was the Flight Director — a pair of crossed verniers superimposed on the ADI (Altitude Director Indicator) itself — and radio altimeters. VOR I knew; but this was switchable on one instrument which could respond also to ADF.
As he talked on, Hitch entered the coordinates of our present position — the latitude and longitude of Heathrow — for the benefit of the computers — three, no less — which controlled the Inertial Navigation System’s gyroscopes and hooked them up to the integrated nervous system of the aircraft’s highly elaborate automata. Hitch’s voice took on a staccato edge as he continued, “This test flight has been authorized at the highest level. Though it is mandatory for us to carry a flight engineer you must have noticed that his seat remains vacant.” I had. “That may give you some idea of the risks we shall be taking in an almost brand-new 747 of a type which, in my opinion at any rate, is the safest aeroplane in the world, bar none.”
He started the next engine in the sequence and deftly adjusted the milled markers on the airspeed indicator which would give us the cues for Vee-One, Rotate, and other critical speeds.
“When I say that there is nothing wrong with this aircraft that any engineer could conceivably detect I am telling you nothing less than the truth.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
“If you agree to the flight you’ll very soon see.” He managed a thin smile. “Staying aboard?”
Pride — that ridiculous form of external imagery which masks the cowardice within — dictated my next fatuous statement … word for word the same as the inevitable utterance of any other human being. “What the hell are we waiting for, Hitch? Kick the brakes off and let’s stop talking before we run out of fuel.”
We called the tower and we taxied behind a big fat Tristar for 28 Left.
We got all sorts of Airways clearances and details about weather and a few edgy twinges of humour from the Tower.
It was clear, if only as an almost indiscernible subtext to the short, sharp exchanges on the radio, that we were crewing some kind of maverick.
Hitch did the final checks, chose the appropriate power-settings for the start of the take-off roll, placed one hand on the nosewheel steering and gave a final glance at the instruments.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said. Then he shot me a tiny smile. “Your nosewheel steering handle works just as well as mine. Get us off!” — and he let his hands drop to his lap.
I was astonished at his faith in a total novice and thrown into a state of consternation mingled with excitement.
*
For flying, the weather conditions might have been supplied to order. A warm breeze was coming up from the West and contrived to sweep itself precisely along the run
way centre-line toward us, giving us Fifteen knots for free. We were, of course, very light anyway — no passengers aboard and sufficient fuel for about two and a half hour’s cruising. Although inexpert and overawed by the array of instruments before me I wasn’t basically scared of the Boeing though I certainly couldn’t have handled it without Hitch’s constant, concise tuition from his royal position in the left-hand seat.
With his right hand now on the throttle levers he glanced at me and said, “Nice, steady take-off roll, please. Don’t weave about on the nosewheel. Use gentle movements until we’ve got our speed up for rudder control. When I give you ‘Rotate’ don’t be afraid to ease well back on the yoke. You won’t stall her; but you won’t get maximum lift if you suddenly lose faith in the theory of flight. This thing is Fitted with wings. We have clearance and the Tristar is out of the way. On V2, climb out left as if you mean it. I’ll pull the gear up for you and let you know when I start taking up some flap. Right. Let’s have fun.”
I kicked off the toe brakes and started the roll. At first I was too harsh on the nosewheel steering and felt like a dodgem-car addict driving a Rolls without anything between. Straighten up and fly right! That was better. I got respectably near the centre line and enjoyed myself.
“V-One.”
You don’t do anything when someone gives that signal. Its significance is simply that you are committed to take-off, shit or bust. It also meant I was doing all right. There was joy to be had and I wasn’t going to waste a second of it.
“Rotate.”
I hauled back on the column and felt sort of amazed at it all. The nosewheel parted company with the concrete and London Airport was falling away beneath us deliciously.
“I’m raising the gear. Fly as you are.”
I heard the faint thump as the gluttonous appetite of the undercarriage-housing was sated on receiving the giant bogies beneath us. The undercarriage doors folded around them and we were clean.
“V-Two.”
I glanced at the Altitude Director Indicator and steepened the climb, banking slightly left and starting the turn early. I was in seventh heaven and grinning like a schoolboy.
The Thinktank That Leaked Page 15