by Craig Thomas
He heard a noise behind him and half-turned at once surprised and unsurprised to see Vance heaving his bulk into the cramped, crushed tin can of the flight deck. His breathing was that of an old, asthmatic man as if the accident had aged him, cleaned the dye from his hair and given him instead dark stains beneath the blue eyes.
"Well you cosied up enough to your wreckage?" Vance was impatient. No one interrupted a senior investigator in his or her meditative first exploration of a crash site, or of a reconstructed wreck, or of a single piece of wreckage. They left you alone until you wanted to talk… but Vance was hurting and Vance was an egoist and a bully and Gant had once been his son-in-law. He assumed he still had rights of demand, of appropriation.
"Any feelings?"
"Cold. Melancholy."
"You know what I—" Vance choked the words off.
"Sure. I know," Gant snarled.
"You're hurting in your billfold, Alan, and you need an answer quick!
Don't crowd me, Alan — don't push…" His own words faded. It was obscene, the continuation of their guerrilla war in that confined, damaged space where people they had both known and respected had burned to death.
"Just take it easy," he forced out.
"OK sure. I apologise. What can I tell you? Is there any—?"
The engine. Before I talk to the Pratt & Whitney guy who is going to fire off in defence of his baby."
"The engine was perfect. So far. Your people are almost through with it with both engines."
"Which one stopped first?"
"Port-that one."
"Seconds later, the starboard engine suffered flame-out. Right?"
Vance nodded in a sullen, aggrieved way.
"Right."
"Hollis didn't make a mistake and cut the other engine?" Vance shook his head.
From the pocket of his jacket he produced a small tape recorder.
"You want to hear it? It's on here the fragments that were left of the cockpit voice recorder after the cabin fire." He proffered the machine but Gant shook his head.
"Later," he murmured, as if he had been offered the portfolio of an atrocity.
Vance must have been carrying his copy around, listening to it constantly, tormenting himself with it… or maybe just hoping that Hollis or Lowell or whoever else was on the flight deck had screwed up and he, like everyone else hustling for a buck in the airplane business, could cry pilot error.
"Later," he repeated.
Something…?
"How much of the cockpit record tape survived?"
"Not much. The fire was pretty intense in here…" First to arrive at the scene of an accident was how pilots tried to laugh the prospect of a crash into un importance Intense… IF ire-!
His mind wandered back down the twisted, scorched passenger compartment, between the leaning or lurching seats and the dangling wires and masks… not much fire, not that much. Not as badly damaged as here-glanced to one side, through the starred window, to where the broken wing lay like smashed planking beside the huge engine. Other crashes, other scenes, had a lot of fire damage, but the images on the TV news of the 494 taken from a helicopter… dulled metal, untarnished flaps… didn't show much fire damage not enough fire damage?
He concentrated on the flight deck.
"What else was there?" he asked.
"Before flame-out in both engines?"
"What—? It's hard to tell. Hollis was a tight-ass. You knew him. He was above keeping in radio contact with the ground on a routine flight.
He reported the failure of both engines but nothing before that…"
There was something, though.
"What else, Alan?" His voice was icily calm.
"Instability. There's some exchange about the ship becoming unstable—"
Vance threw up his hands, as if he had been made to admit to minor fraud.
"Look, Gant—"
"Suddenly, I'm Gant what happened to Mitchell?" His eyes held no amusement.
"What happened!"
"OK, so there was some instability difficulty handling the plane, and controlling the trim—" Not enough fire damage. His stare hardened, as if he were dredging Vance's recollection by means of hypnotism, willing the answer.
"It's impossible to say how bad, for how long… The computer realisation of the pilot's instruments shows it must have been pretty violent. I don't know what caused it."
"Fuel?"
"Uh?"
"Fuel flow, fuel management?"
Vance shook his head vehemently.
"All the readings for the fuel flow, the booster pumps, the lines, the management system, the fuel computer they're all normal.
Nothing was happening to the fuel to make the ship unstable. And the weather didn't do it, either. Look we're agreed, all of us, that the instability problem isn't linked to the flame-out in both engines!"
"OK. For now." He had no insight. Hollis may, or may not, have exacerbated the instability by over-correction, by distraction. He'd have to study the computer realisation and judge for himself, as a pilot. He owed that and a great deal more to Hollis, who had listened to him too often, as they had gotten drunk together, on the subjects of Vance and Vance's daughter and the bitter taste of his life after the airforce and the combat and the heroics with the MiG-31 and the operation they had code named Winter Hawk. It wasn't going to be pilot error except as the coldest of cold facts. He owed Hollis' patience with his own self-pity that much at least.
"Did you find anything wrong with the engines?"
"Not with either one. They just didn't restart. There was cactus and sagebrush ground to dust in each one, so they were rotating. But there was nothing burnt so, no flame. Neither engine relit. They tried—"
"Flight engineer's panel?"
"Everything was reading normal and on the central panel. You can hear
Lowell—" It was Lowell, then, who had died in the seat on which Gant's hand rested as he remained squatting on his haunches. Bright-eyed and hero worshipping He had been cruel to Lowell often because the boy had loaded him with his old identity and asked him to relive it, day after day. What had initially flattered had rubbed like salt on raw flesh after a while.
"He and Hollis repeat all the read-outs after the port engine failed, and Paluzzi confirms every call. That's the most un spoilt part of the cockpit tape… There was nothing wrong," he ground out finally, his big hands clenching again and again, as if tearing at something or strangling it.
There was. They died."
'I know that-!"
The airplane killed them, Alan. Either the airframe you designed or the fuel management system you boasted about or the Pratt & Whitney engines you helped modify…" His eyes were glacial and he sensed Vance's anger and confidence quelled, momentarily.
"One way or another, Alan, you let Hollis down."
"He could have made a mistake! He could have un stabilised the ship—"
The instability isn't linked to the flame-out. Your words. You tested other engines on the ground?"
"Of course." The anger was snuffed out like a flickering candle. Gant and Vance faced each other like crouching animals within the crushed metal box of the flight deck. The desert breeze shouldered its way from the hangar doors into the confined, hot space. Vance shrugged his much bigger frame.
"We ran all the checks. Look, I know that engine, the fuel flow monitors, the computer…" He spread his large hands. The fingers were stained with oil. Leaning back against the seat in which Hollis had burned, he said: "Sol Zeissman over at Albuquerque Airways has grounded the two planes he's leasing from me. He'll be asking for a refund before the weekend-! They're libelling my ship in the newspapers, on TV, every day and night! Scare stories. No one is going to buy unless I can prove she's safe." The appeal became more evident as he burst out:
"You were around the early stages of development, Mitchell you know she's a good ship!"
Gant was forced to concede a brief nod. Then he looked away from Vance, from the ageing p
rocess of his bewilderment and profound, impotent frustration, through the starred windows of the flight deck.
Like a storyboard for some projected movie, huge blow-up photographs of a desert landscape and the stranded 494 formed a semicircle at one end of the hangar. They were the wall against which Vance's energy and remaining youth had spent itself. It would be a horror movie, about the destruction of dreams. The computers, the group of men, the pieces of the plane were the accoutrements of a funeral scene.
"No bird ingestion, no fuel line blockage, no fuel computer failure
…" he murmured to himself, as if reciting charms that would ward off what he sensed in Vance what the man really wanted from him. Vance shook his head at each item and instrument.
"Fuel starvation…?" Even with the economy forced on the adapted Pratt & Whitney engines to meet Vance's specifications, the calculations for the pre-delivery flight wouldn't have been wrong.
"Were the fuel calculations wrong?" he asked mechanically.
"No: Gant felt suddenly hot, despite the sensation of the breeze on his face and bare forearms. He knew now why Barbara had called, and he knew it had to have been at Vance's instruction. Vance didn't want his current expertise. He wanted the hero to make a comeback, the flyer.
"You're out of your skull, Alan."
"What—?" Gant turned to look at Vance and saw the admission plainly in Vance's face.
"I—"
"You got Barbara to call me, knowing I'd just love to come down here and make some cheap shots at your expense. Fool around with the team from Tucson, then ground the 494 for a while. You took that chance, just to—" Vance clenched his fists.
"I need you to fly that plane—"
"Other people said much the same, a long time ago. The priorities seemed bigger, back then."
"All that out there it could take weeks, even months. You know that. I don't have days and neither does Tim Burton, who has ordered six six.
He's run into his own brick wall. You have to help."
'I don't."
"Christ, Gant-!"
Vance stared at him in challenge, even hatred. He was trying to goad him into acting like a crazy man. Pretending there was no way out for Gant without losing face, running scared. He'd known he would come.
Now he thought he could force him to fly another 494, duplicate the flight plan Hollis had been flying, prove that the accident was a freak, a once-only. It would make the TV news on NEC, CBS, ABC, CNN.
National coverage of the hero giving Vance Aircraft his backing.
Giving the airlines and the public a guarantee of safety… Gant, formerly of the USAF and well connected with the CIA, now of the
National Transportation Safety Board what more could Vance ask or the public receive? It would be like a basketball player like Michael Jordan endorsing sports gear a surefire winner.
"You'll pay me millions for the endorsement, right?" he murmured.
"What—?"
He was expected to underwrite the plane's safety.
"It won't work out. If another airplane goes down, you'll never get out from under.
And I'll be dead "You can't refuse."
"Until we know what went wrong, it could happen again."
"We're not going to find out, down here."
"Not quickly, maybe, but we will find out."
They'll foreclose on me like I was a share-cropper. But maybe that's what you want." Gant shook his head, resting on his haunches, his eyes fixed on the empty eye sockets in the pilot's instrument display. The twisted control column was like a broken catapult.
"All right," Vance announced heavily, his breathing ragged and loud.
"I'm begging you. Isn't that what you want? Save my company. Save the airplane." Gant looked up at him. Alan's eyes remained flinty but his voice was uncertain and aged, that of a very old man waking in a strange and dark place. Yet he knew Gant's answer before he replied.
His features claimed, with utter certainty, that Gant would seize the opportunity to recapture something of his past, that he would risk his life to help a man who despised him, just for the sake of discovering a former self staring back at him from his shaving mirror. Vance knew that he would do anything just for one more fix, because his whole existence was continuous cold turkey and withdrawal symptoms.
The anonymity of his days stretched before him in an unending succession; and Vance, like the devil, now offered him his own version of the kingdoms of the earth his former identity, his sense of himself as the best, as unique.
Eventually, he said: "I can't ask the Tucson team to fly with me. I can't risk that."
"I — er, I can fly as engineer. You need a co-pilot?"
Gant shook his head.
"Kou'll fly?"
"See? You don't have any choice."
Gant rubbed his cheeks.
"Is the simulator available?"
"All set up."
"You're an asshole, Alan a real, made-in-America asshole."
"Sure. Just save my plane, uh? And my ass."
At first for perhaps as much as an hour he was unaware and then uncertain that he was himself under surveillance. Now he was sure of it. Sitting under the sodden, garish umbrella over his table outside the cafe, Michael Lloyd had gradually felt his confidence subside into a fidgety, bemused, unnerved sense of himself.
He thought there were two of them, one in a parked car whose wipers flicked occasionally to give the driver a clear glimpse of him, and a second man inside the cafe, at a steamy window seat, a face half-hidden in fog. There might be others, near him or around the Grand' Place, moving or still among the hurrying flocks of umbrellas and raincoats.
The patience and immobility of the two he was aware of their very lack of distinct or direct threat was more intimidating than action would have been. The summer storm splashed from the umbrella over the table as well as from the awning on to the cobbles.
He could leave now, of course go back to his office in the Commission casually, indifferently, as if he had never noticed the two men. After all, he couldn't barge into whichever conference suite they were using in the Hotel Amigo for their meeting. He'd seen them all arrive, including his own Commissioner, Etienne Rogier, whom he'd followed through the Brussels rush hour. Bryan Coulthard and David Winterborne from Aero UK, their equivalents from the French plane maker Balzac-Stendhal, various functionaries, the Commissioner for Urban Development he was something of a surprise but it probably meant nothing except more lobbying and assorted minions, hurrying under black umbrellas, the skirts of their trench coats or crinoline-full raincoats flapping and flying around their legs.
There had been no secrecy about their arrival… so why was he being watched? He tried to laugh off his mounting nerves as childish pique at the unfairness of it. It had been stupid to come — he'd thought it witty at the time, something to amuse Marian Pyott and to photograph them going into the hotel. That must have been how he had drawn their attention to himself.
The rain drummed on the sodden canvas over his head. A wet raincoat brushed his cheek as someone blundered past into the interior of the cafe, a look of surprise on his face as he saw Lloyd sitting outside in a rainstorm. He tried not to look at the parked car, or towards the windows of the cafe. Caught in the crossfire, he tried to joke. He thought the man in the car was using a mobile phone. He felt frightened, lost in a dark wood. Dante. Why Dante now, for God's sake? The wipers flicked again. Yes, he was using a phone. Summoning others?
And what had he seen, anyway? There was no hidden message, no secret pattern to be discerned. What had been worth attracting the attention of these people, whoever they were? They were not Commission security people, he was certain.
All he'd discovered was that EU Commissioners and a Euro MP for an
English constituency were meeting prominent businessmen. Great! They did it every day feathering their nests, aligning their post-Commission futures on the boards of major companies, creating their grand designs, dreaming their unrealisable
dreams… Snouts in the trough or heads in the air, it was all so usual and expected.
His suspicions of the previous day, his sense of his Commissioner's nervous attempts at secrecy and deflection, now seemed ridiculous.
The man in the car, still on the phone, worried him to an unexpected and unnatural extent… '… about to piss himself, poor little sod."
There was a hard, barking laugh in Jessop's ear more like a dismissive cough than amusement.
"What's he up to, anyway?"
He flicked the wipers again and glimpsed Lloyd's slumped, tense figure through the rain. Fraser, talking to him now, was warm and dry in the hotel, unlike that poor pillock who thought he was playing detective or something… What was he taking pictures for? For whom? It hadn't done him much good, he was practically crapping himself with worry now, ever since Fraser had told him and Cobb to show themselves and their interest. Declaring their surveillance had frightened this bloke but not driven him off. So, what was he doing, and who was he doing it for?
The papers? Fraser wouldn't like that.
"What does the great white chief say?" Jessop asked.
"He's thinking."
"He's always doing that."
"Unlike you, Jessop." Fraser was a deeply unpleasant person. But he paid handsomely. At least, his boss did. Mind you, the stupidity of holding a very secret meeting in one of the best hotels in Brussels… not clever. But it was typical of Brussels bureaucrats if they were going to be seduced, they wanted the roses and the candlelit dinner and the best wine before they got into bed with you. They couldn't pass up a free lunch in the plushest surroundings for the life of them.
"Do you want us just to sit here, then?"
"If he moves, you move. Otherwise, sit tight. When he does go, find out who he is and who he represents. And don't bother me again until he does move."
Jessop put down the phone. He'd always disliked Fraser. Most people in the service had done. He was dangerous to be around because he didn't look after you.
In the private sector, Fraser was, if possible, even more dismissive and contemptuous of his subordinates. On the other hand, there was a certain new and definite ruthlessness attached to work in the private sector, after the restraints of the intelligence service. You didn't have prissy old farts like Aubrey running the show, forever worrying about the moral dimension and the weight of one death or more. A facility in the arrangement of untraceable, unsuspicious accidents was much more recognised and rewarded even if the game plan remained as mysterious and remote as ever. Fraser bullshit ted with the best, but he didn't know much, either.