‘No wonder they say the Irish are mad.’
‘Not mad. I prefer to think of us as lateral thinkers. And I think a bit of lateral thinking is what we need at the moment.’
‘What are we going to do?’
‘Find a body of water and ditch the plane.’
‘I’ve been looking.’
‘Found one?’
The only response to this was a sigh. After thirty seconds, Balapit added: ‘I need more time.’
‘That’s the one thing we don’t have, Captain Mary, the one thing we don’t have.’
The doomed plane was dead calm. The senior staff, with unspoken agreement, had left all the major decisions to be made to Captain Malachy. In the event of approaching disasters, human beings instinctively gravitate towards natural leaders. In this instance, the obvious choice was happily also the one with the most stripes on his jacket sleeves.
Pilots are, of course, provided with detailed instructions about what to say to passengers in the event of any conceivable type of emergency—and inevitable mass death was included in the list of situations with recommended liturgical pronouncements. The underlying principles that guided airline announcements were actually rather carefully worked out by intelligent and caring people, although one would never credit it, given the sneering lack of attention that frequent fliers gave to airline safety broadcasts. This was the basic shape of it. If the bad thing that had happened was minor, as it was in nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine out of ten thousand cases (loss of power in one engine, air-conditioner system on the blink, technical problem in one of the electrical grids), then don’t say anything that might remotely cause panic. Instead, say what needs to be said that (a) fulfils the need to have shown you have kept passengers informed (b) gives a sanitised-as-possible version of the truth and (c) is fundamentally a message of reassurance. A tiny chilli hot dog wrapped up in an enormous bun of soft white bread.
However, if the bad thing that had happened was something serious and life-threatening and might not be recovered from (all engines gone, plane with no undercarriage set on fire three and a half kilometres in the air over mountains in China, et cetera), then one had to tell the passengers the plain truth. This was so they could make their final peace with God or Allah or The Divine Cow or whatever they believed in. But again, it should be done in a way that did not induce panic. It was a matter of overriding importance for elegance and order to be maintained, even if everyone was minutes away from being smashed to tiny pieces.
Clearly the authorities who wrote these manuals were British. How does one say, ‘We’re all gonna die’, in a way that does not induce panic? That’s the tricky one that airline staff manuals don’t really answer. Instead, they just give general advice. They suggest, sensibly, that the pilot sticks to the facts, and sandwiches his comments between softly delivered exhortations to maintain an atmosphere of calm: ‘Your tone of voice is as important as the words you choose.’
Malachy had been in the game long enough to know exactly the right tone to take without reading from the manual: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, this is your pilot speaking. I have an important announcement to make. I would ask that all passengers listen to this announcement. It is not optional. I am turning off the entertainment system so that you will not be distracted. I will make the announcement in two minutes’ time. Please use this time to fully wake up, and to make sure other passengers are awake. If there are older children on board, parents may choose whether or not they wish to wake them. Thank you.’
Leaving a two-minute gap was a calculated risk. What Malachy had done had veered away from the written philosophy of announcements, which emphasised that you delivered the facts cleanly and quickly. But the pilot decided that two minutes was long enough to make it clear to the passengers that this was no normal aircrew chatter of the frequent flier loyalty club/duty free shop/spare change in UNICEF envelope/enjoyed having you/fly with us again variety. But it was not such a long period of time that the average passenger would have had time to conjure up nightmare scenarios which could send him screaming up and down the aisles.
When one hundred and twenty seconds had passed, Malachy was back on the speaker system: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention please? I am sorry to have switched on most of the lights and woken you up, but this is, as I said, an important announcement. A problem has occurred. Let me say first of all, that there is no need to panic. Problems do occur from time to time on aircraft, and the vast majority of problems are resolved without incident. However, at the same time, I want you to know that we are experiencing some technical difficulties. These concern the undercarriage of the aircraft, and we are continuing to work on this, to see what is the best way of dealing with the problem. There is also a problem, not fully identified, at the back of the aircraft. Passengers seated there who have not already been asked to move forwards please do so. This area is now off-limits to all passengers. You are free to move about other areas of the aircraft but you may be more comfortable if you are seated with your seatbelts fastened. We are working very hard on resolving both these matters, and will keep you informed on our progress. The flight attendants do not have the technical background to answer your questions, but if you have some that you would like to write down and send them to my cabin, via the flight attendants, please feel free to do so. I will answer them as I have time. In the meantime, I, or one of my co-pilots, will make an announcement every ten or fifteen minutes to keep you informed of the situation. There is one very, very important thing that I must ask of all of you. We are working hard at solving the problems, but you all also have a job to do in this situation, and your job is every bit as important as our jobs. Your job is to keep calm, to help others keep calm, to listen carefully to announcements, and to be prepared to do whatever the flight attendants ask you to do. You may wish to use this time to reacquaint yourselves with the information on the flight safety card in front of you and watch the flight safety video which will be replayed now. After that, we will resume the full flight entertainment system, so that you can relax with music or a movie if you so wish. Thank you.’
Wong slept through the whole thing.
Joyce had woken up for the first announcement but had fallen asleep again before the second. She was eventually roused by Army, who had taken to padding around her without straying far, like a devoted labrador.
‘I think you should wake up now. I think the plane’s crashing or something. We have to get ready for it.’
‘Uh,’ said Joyce. ‘Thanks. Can I get some coffee?’ She could not help staring at the pimple on his chin, which had turned whitish since she had last seen him. It was not a pretty thing to see when waking up.
‘I guess so. I’ll ask the stewardess.’
‘Flight attendant.’
‘Yes, her.’
‘Did I miss any meals? Not that I’m hungry. I need a coffee though. I’m parched.’
‘Okay. By the way, did you hear what I said? I think the plane’s crashing.’
‘What?’ Joyce looked around. No one seemed to be running around screaming. Everyone was sitting quietly. The only surprise was that most people had their entertainment systems off. ‘Crashing? You sure? Doesn’t seem like it.’
‘Maybe I got it wrong. But the pilot made an announcement, all very low-key and polite—you know how they do it—but that’s what it sounded like to me. He was trying to be very calm and all that, but I think it was serious. I wonder if we should do something.’
‘Like what?’
‘Get in that sort of position, you know, where you put your head between your knees and say, “Brace brace”.’
‘Why would you do that?’
‘That’s what it says you have to do on the video.’
‘I don’t think you have to say, “Brace brace.” I think the pilot says “Brace brace”.’
‘Maybe everyone says “Brace brace” together. What does “Brace brace” mean, anyway?’
‘I have no idea. I real
ly need that coffee now, if you don’t mind. I’m like, dying.’
‘Of course, hang on, I’ll get it for you.’
He raced off, leaving Joyce feeling confused and guilty. She was swinging, pendulum-like, in and out of love. Army was skinny and spotty and ill-dressed and a bit of an immature twit, but he was a likeable twit, and might not be bad looking, if he could be persuaded to have a haircut, a shave, and change his image, his wardrobe, the way he spoke, his mannerisms, his personality, and, well, pretty much everything else. She normally did not like young men who were delicate and winsome and confused, but he was a real live royal, and he had saved her life, so it was the least she could do to be nice to him. What on earth was he on about, saying that the plane was about to crash? Surely there would be massive panic if that were the case? No one had their heads between their knees saying ‘Brace brace’.
She stood up and looked around again, and was surprised to see a couple in front of her in tears. And then there was a lady to her left with her hands together, feverishly murmuring prayers of some sort. Perhaps something was wrong. She’d better ask Wong—no, he had gone to sleep in the Queen’s bed and had given strict orders not to be disturbed. But if the plane was crashing…? She decided she should ask Dilip Sinha, whom she vaguely remembered was sitting in the lounge ahead.
She wandered through the clusters of seats and eventually found him, wide awake, looking at the inflight magazine.
‘Hey, Dilip, how’s things?’
‘Fine, fine,’ he said. ‘Considering.’
‘Considering what?’
‘That we’re all going to die momentarily.’
‘Oh. Army said something about the plane being about to crash. Is it really going to crash? I thought he was just being confused.’
‘Army?’
‘A friend of mine. He’s a royal. Possible King of England one of these days, if he plays his cards right.’
‘The plane may well crash and we may all die, I’m sad to say. If that is what your friend Army told you, then he is probably right. The pilot made an announcement which has got me rather worried. It was quite difficult to read between the lines, but the gist of it seems to be that the undercarriage has failed. That means we cannot land and there is no sea nearby on which we can make a water landing, so crashing appears to be our only option—and it is not an attractive one.’
‘Oh.’ Joyce took a minute or so to take this all in. Perhaps she hadn’t woken up at all, and this was all part of a dream? It seemed too strange to be real. ‘If the plane is going to crash, why are you reading the inflight magazine?’
Sinha turned and pointed to what he was looking at: a map of China. ‘Look, I reckon we are about here. I know a fair bit about the geography of this area. I have travelled through much of Asia. I am merely trying to remind myself of the basic facts so that I might be able to go and offer some help to the pilots. I’ll see you later,’ he said as he headed off to the front of the plane.
‘That’s good,’ said Joyce, who now felt that she ought to panic, but simply did not have the energy to do so.
Army arrived with a cup of coffee. ‘Apparently they can’t do cappuccinos here, because of the pressurised cabin, but they make a pretty decent flat white or double espresso. I got you one of each.’
‘That’s fine, thanks. I’ll take the espresso. And I’m gonna need loads of sugar.’
Sinha appeared at the pilot’s cabin, where a senior flight attendant stood guard.
‘I’m afraid you can’t speak to the pilots, sir. They’re dealing with the undercarriage problems. May I ask you to go back to your seat, sir?’
‘I will be most happy to do so. However, I just want to plant an idea in their minds. There is a lake I think about five hundred and seventy kilometres from here. It’s a reasonably big body of water. It sometimes appears on maps, but often doesn’t—it’s a poorly mapped area of China, just north of the border with Sikkim. It doesn’t appear on this map in the inflight magazine, and may or may not appear on the maps the pilot is using, but I imagine knowledge of bodies of water might help in this situation? Given that the problem, if I heard correctly, is to do with malfunctioning undercarriage?’
The attendant pondered. ‘They probably have all the information they need, sir, thank you very much, and I have strict orders not to…damn it, I’ll tell him. Just in case.’ She swung the cockpit door open. ‘There’s an Indian guy here who knows the geography. Says there’s a lake to the southeast. Big one.’
Sinha heard one of the pilots bark: ‘Get him in here.’
His brow wet with sweat, Captain Malachy stared at Sinha. ‘We’ve got everything in here, conventional maps, radar detectors, satellite maps, a ground link and so on, but I must admit I’m not personally familiar with this area. Tell me about the lake you mention. Is it this one?’ He pointed to a C-shaped body of water on the display in front of him.
‘No. I know that one—it’s a houseboat lake. It’s shallow and rather crowded with houses on stilts. It would be difficult and dangerous to land on. Besides, there are rocks sticking out of the middle of it—we call them the summer islands, because they only poke their heads out of the water during dry summers.’
‘Where else can we go, then? What’s the lake you are thinking of?’
‘It’s a lake called Nittin Sagra. Quite big and open—not that I have visited it for twenty years.’
On the other side of the cockpit, Enrico Balapit said, ‘Let me find it. Southeast, you say?’ He tracked the display over until he found a small town at the foot of a mountain.
‘It’s just south of that town,’ Sinha said.
The co-pilot brought the computer mouse towards him and located a body of water on the image. ‘I’m going to switch it to satellite view,’ he said. ‘There we go. Damn.’
The exclamation was triggered by the fact that while the lake looked large and open on the map, the satellite view revealed that it had been eaten away at the edges, and a large dam or bridge appeared to have been built across the centre of it.
‘Dam is right,’ Sinha said. ‘Most unfortunate.’
The radio crackled. ‘This is ground control A98/11. I’m afraid the news is not good from our end. The nearest suitable bodies of water are quite some distance away.’
While Malachy talked to the control tower, Sinha quietly asked the attendant: ‘I thought aircraft were required to fly in routes that kept them within flying distances of water?’
‘That’s true,’ she said. ‘This aircraft has a very long range indeed, and we are within the required range of a body of water, the nearest big one being less than two hours’ flying time away. But unfortunately, we have other problems which suggest that we may not be able to stay in the air for two hours.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because, ah, there are other technical difficulties, which, uh…’
‘Because the bloody plane’s on fire,’ Malachy snapped.
‘I see,’ said Sinha. ‘That does put a worrying complexion on it.’
‘What are we going to do?’ Balapit asked, a nervous tremor in his voice.
‘Given that we don’t know how long we are going to stay aloft, we’ve got two choices,’ the Captain growled. ‘We can fly south to one of the smallish lakes down there. There’s water there, but just puddles. We can fly northwest—there’s a big body of water there, but it’s a long way away. What we can’t do is stay on the track we’re going. We’ll be heading straight into the mountains, and I don’t know how long we can stay this high.’
This grim announcement was greeted by silence. Balapit could be heard breathing hard.
Captain Malachy turned and snapped at the senior flight attendant. ‘Get everyone sitting down and strapped up tight. I’m turning north. Then I’m going to try some Red Arrow manoeuvres to see if I can get the fire out of the tailplane. It’s gonna be a long shot, but long shots are all we have left.’
Wong had one of those uncomfortable dreams in which he felt as if h
e was falling a long distance. The reason for this was that he was in fact falling a long distance.
The pilots had turned several times in a bid to put out the fire—sudden movements, in theory, could blow the flames out and a steep drop could create a temporary vacuum effect, which would deprive the fire of oxygen. But from Wong’s point of view, it was an unpleasant experiment. He slept fitfully through the first three such manoeuvres, but the fourth one involved a fall so dramatic that he’d actually left the surface of the bed—not having heard the announcement to fasten his seatbelt.
He opened his eyes, startled to find himself levitating, with the room seeming to fall and his body and the duvet moving upwards off the bed. Was he dreaming? Apparently not. There was a chorus of clattering noises as things on the tables rolled off, some of them flying upwards and hitting the walls or the ceiling.
‘Oh. Oh. Oh,’ he squealled.
At first he had no idea where he was—his gaze filled with the gently rippling floral-patterned silk that surrounded the four-poster bed. Either he was floating up to it, or it was floating down to him. What was going on? Earthquake? Cataclysm? War? Death? End of the world? All of the above?
When Captain Malachy levelled off, Wong found himself descending equally suddenly on to the super-soft mattress, which was so spongy it seemed to absorb him completely for a second before he emerged and found himself bouncing, jelly-like, on the surface again.
He looked around. Where was he? Some kind of hotel? The notion ‘aeroplane’ flashed in his mind and everything came back to him. So why was he floating upwards like a weightless astronaut? Was this some function that had been built into the bed—some strange, Western, sexual perversion, like waterbeds and ceiling mirrors? Was this how Queen Windsor and the Duke of Greece got their kicks? Or was it the pilot misbehaving?
After gravity had returned, and been maintained for what seemed like several minutes, Wong decided that it might well be the last of these: the pilot was showing off. This was his privilege, as captain of the plane, but surely he should consider the wishes of his important passengers, especially those in VIP bedding. If the up-and-down movement continued, Wong decided he might take it on himself to complain—not that he had any desire to tell the pilot how to do his work. We all have separate tasks to do. The geomancer saw his own job at the moment as to thoroughly enjoy the fruits of his labours. He loved the huge, soft bed. He would probably sleep a couple more hours, if the pilot could hold the thing steady. But his throat was dry—curse the air-conditioning on airplanes.
Mr Wong Goes West Page 20