Silence flooded into the room. The grim understanding that death was imminent had been under the surface for some minutes; now it had been brought up, a hard, black diamond of horror, dazzling everyone, and making arguments superfluous.
The silence was broken by Drexler: ‘Can’t they ditch the plane in the sea?’
‘We could,’ said Sir Nicholas Handey. ‘If there was one around here. But there isn’t. We’re almost three thousand kilometres from the Pacific Ocean, and probably the same distance from the Mediterranean. Even the smaller seas, like the Caspian, are a long way away. The pilots are yet to identify one near us.’
‘Jesus.’
‘Jesus is right,’ said Jackson.
Manks started shaking. ‘If…if…if this plane is going to crash, you have to untie us, like the girl says. We’d have no chance of surviving if we’re handcuffed inside an aircraft burning on the ground or sinking into a lake. Come on. Please. Show an ounce of humanity for God’s sake. Let us die like men.’
Jackson stood up and walked over to the prisoners. ‘Maybe Ms MacKenzie is right. At least if we untie you, you can put your hands together and pray. That’s the only thing that’s going to help us now.’
While he unlocked the shackles, several of the people in the room burst into tears.
‘We should all confess our sins,’ advised Ms Moore. ‘Is there a priest on board?’
‘On an inaugural flight?’ Army said. ‘This is strictly business, ma’am. Well-connected rich people only.’
‘And it would take way more time than we got,’ Jackson said.
Manks rubbed his wrists. ‘I don’t know how we got into this situation,’ he said. ‘The only thing I have ever done is try to make the world a better place.’
Jackson gave a bitter laugh. ‘By cosying up to the royal family and using your connections to secretly do dirty work for the oil giants for big bucks? That is making the world a better place?’
‘I know it’s fashionable to sneer at the energy companies. But we all use electricity, we all use fossil fuel. I’m doing more to make the world a better place than all your do-goody activists put together.’
Joyce was outraged at this statement. ‘Excuse me! We don’t all go out of our way to make money at the expense of the world’s environment.’
Sinha raised his hand. ‘I wonder if I may ask a question or two? If we really do only have a few minutes left before we go to meet our maker, I’m curious to know the answers to a few questions: such as who placed bombs on this plane and who is ultimately responsible for our deaths? Although whether that question needs one answer or two answers, I can’t say.’
‘I reckon BM Dutch Petroleum is responsible for our deaths,’ said Joyce. ‘All that fake stuff about green fuels and so on—no wonder it made the activist groups furious. It’s no wonder the crazy people at Earth Agents decided to blow up the plane.’
‘That’s a fair argument,’ said Jackson. ‘The production of this plane and its accompanying fuel did raise the ante on the whole debate about fossil fuels and depletion of carbon. It made it a focus for the arguments.’
Sir Nicholas Handey raised a long, elegant finger. ‘If I may just defend my little project, here? We do, very genuinely, see this plane as an improvement on previous aircraft when it comes to the effect on the environment. There are numerous environmental improvements on this plane—we have a whole booklet just on that topic.’
Army raised his hand. ‘Yeah, Sir Nicholas, I read that booklet. It’s all very nice, but it’s rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic, isn’t it? So this plane is not quite as bad in destroying the environment compared to rival planes. So what? On the big scale of things, there’s hardly any difference. It farts out one smidgen less pollution than the previous ones—big deal.’
‘But that’s how change happens, Mr Armstong-Phillips. In incremental stages. We haven’t yet developed a plane that does no harm whatsoever to the environment, but if we do, this plane will be seen as having taken a major step in that direction.’
Several people started to speak at once, but Jackson raised his arm and bellowed: ‘Enough.’ The room became silent again. The big American let his gaze travel from face to face. ‘Somehow, I don’t feel that a debate on carbon emissions is the best way to spend our last minutes. I’m going to go away and write a letter. I suggest other people may wish to do the same.’
Several people nodded and picked up the note pads.
‘I’m going to write to my mother,’ said Army.
‘Of course, we don’t know if our letters will survive or not. If anyone in this room survives this, please tell anyone who asks that J Oscar Jackson Jnr spent his last minutes thinking about two little girls—Martha and Marianne.’
This unexpectedly personal note from Jackson caused the weepers in the room to start wailing.
Robbie Manks pointed an angry finger at Jackson. ‘Before this meeting ends, one thing I would like to say is that I am not responsible for our deaths in any way. I have spent my life fighting against lunatic activists and I have not had the help and support I have deserved. I am a man of principle and honour and decency. The reason we are going to die is that some lunatic activists have bombed this plane. If people had helped me fight these people, get them locked up, instead of placing stumbling blocks in my path, we’d have rid the world of extremist greenies years ago.’
Kaitlyn MacKenzie pointed her finger at him in return. ‘Shut up, Robbie. You disgust me. How can you talk about having principles and being honourable? What a load of crap. You hired me to seduce Paul Barker and get him onto the plane on Wednesday. So you could frame him for a murder. You used hard cash and a promise of a fancy job in London to get me to do your bidding. You used me to frame a guy who really does devote himself to trying to stop the suits flushing the world down the toilet. Decency, my arse. And talking of my arse, you can’t keep your bloody hands off it, which totally disgusts me.’
This outburst left Manks speechless with fury. ‘That is pure slander,’ he said. ‘You cannot prove a word of it.’
‘Sue me.’
‘I am not responsible for the bombs on this plane, in any way, shape or form,’ growled Manks.
Joyce said: ‘How about you telling us what you are responsible for, creep?’
Manks breathed slowly and deeply, like a wounded bull. ‘You will no doubt see me as being responsible for the death of Mr Seferis, but the fact is, he was a turncoat. He was responsible for his own death. The energy firms had given him huge responsibility and he had become a traitor to the cause. He allied himself with the sort of people who want to stop common, decent people from having electricity for their schools and hospitals, fuel for their ambulances, power for their kindergartens, for their maternity wards. I’m proud to be a member of Darkheart. We were set up to combat turncoats like Seferis and terrorists like the Earth Agents. People who have put bombs on this plane and are directly responsible for our deaths.’
Jackson sat on the table. ‘So tell us, Manks, how did you kill Seferis? Was Mr Wong’s theory right?’
‘I’m not owning up to anything,’ he responded. Then he sighed, and his eyes dropped. ‘When the leaders of Darkheart wanted “something done” about Seferis, I argued against having him, er, taken out completely. I suggested he just be sacked, so that he could run off and join the sickly do-gooders, where he belonged. But I was overruled by others. They wanted a, er, cleaner solution. They wanted to kill two birds with one stone—him and Pals of the Planet.’
Joyce said angrily: ‘So you framed Paul Barker.’
The public relations man gave her a cold smile. ‘It was not my idea.’
‘Whose was it?’
‘I’m not saying.’
Kaitlyn MacKenzie rose to her feet. ‘If these are the last minutes of our lives, I’m not going to spend them talking. There are much better things I can think of doing.’
She turned and pointed to Max. ‘You,’ she snapped. ‘Come with me. See the rest of you
later. Or not, as the case may be.’
The sultry, black-suited young man looked shellshocked, but he obediently rose and followed her. Many of the men in the room watched Kaitlyn’s tight hips as she strode powerfully out of the room, the young man following child-like in her wake.
Joyce turned to Army and spoke quietly. ‘You know, for once, I think Kaitlyn has the right idea. Come on.’ She grabbed his hand.
Army Armstrong-Phillips turned a bright shade of crimson as Joyce dragged him out of the conference room.
Jackson sighed. ‘What it is to be young and carefree,’ he said.
‘Who needs to be young?’ said Ms Moore, giving him a strange, leering smile.
‘I gotta go see the pilots,’ Jackson said hurriedly. ‘See where we’re up to. They may need my help.’
Oscar Jackson found a quiet space in the front lounge and starting writing on a page in his notebook. He wanted to leave a letter for his children, who lived in New York with his estranged wife.
‘Dear Martha and Marianne,’ he wrote. ‘This is just a little note to say that your Daddy loves you. Perhaps you two will be the only thing that I have successfully achieved in my life. If that’s so, that’s fine: it will all have been worth it.
‘Your Daddy has learned that the purpose of a person’s life is to learn what it is to love someone, and learn what it is to be loved in return. You helped me learn those things, so I’m thankful to you. I love you both as much as a person can love another person. There’s no greater achievement a person can hope to achieve than that. Maybe you won’t really understand this letter until you are much older, but that doesn’t matter either. I just wrote it to say thank you. And to say I love you. And to say remember me, just occasionally, as you grow up and learn about love and life. That’s all I ask. Your loving Daddy. PS. Look after your mom. She’s a great lady.’
He looked at the letter and wondered what to add to it. But he found his vision becoming blurry. Once he’d blinked his eyes clear enough to re-read what he had written, he realised that there wasn’t anything else to add.
Battling against mounting odds in the back of the plane, first officer Ubami Sekoto radioed through to Captain Turlough Malachy. ‘Captain? We haven’t got the fire down completely, but we seem to have got it cornered for the moment, at least. As far as I can see, which is not very far at all, the bulk of the blaze has been extinguished. But there’s a lot of smouldering going on, and we can see little licks of flame in various corners. The trouble is—it might explode back into a conflagration at any moment.’
‘Can you swamp the thing in foam?’
‘We’re trying. The main area we can access is well-flooded, but the fire is probably still burning behind the panelling. The stews’ lower cabin went up like a fireball. We’ve got that under control—well, semi—but no promises. The thing is still groaning and creaking. The structural damage is really bad. And there’s another thing that’s got me worried: the ground under my feet is getting hot.’
‘Shit.’
‘I don’t know what to do. If we fill it with more foam, it may just get so heavy it will snap off.’
‘There’s smoke coming out of that luggage rack above your head,’ yelled a flight attendant.
‘Jesus—open it gently.’
A ball of flame erupted from the luggage rack. They stepped back hurriedly. At the same time, the carpet below their feet started steaming.
Sekoto closed his eyes. ‘Shit. It’s in the luggage hold. That’s it.’ He grabbed his walkie-talkie and shouted into it. ‘The fire is eating into the luggage below us. It’ll go up like an Australian bush fire. We’re finished, Cap’n Malachy. This is the end game. We’ve no more than a few minutes left. If you are going to land, it’s now or never.’
The burning plane screamed onwards, still hundreds of kilometres from the nearest lake.
Just fifty metres further up the body of the aircraft, peace and contemplation were the order of the day. ‘Impotence is a strange thing,’ Sinha mused, sitting in a purple spotted chair in the Leopard Lounge, gazing idly out of the windows.
‘Do I want to be listening to this conversation?’ asked Ms Moore. ‘Is this not what is meant by the phrase “too much information”?’
Sinha turned to her with a smile. ‘Let me assure you, I am not talking about sexual dysfunction, madam, but about something quite different—the horror of being in a state of total futility when immediate action is essential for the continuation of life.’
‘Oh. I see.’ Her eyes dropped to her hands, which were idly clasped in her lap. ‘But do we really just have to sit here? Isn’t there anything we can do?’
Sinha raised a long and elegant finger. ‘Indeed, there are several options from which to choose. I’ve made my choice.’
‘Which is?’
‘I’m going to have another cup of tea.’
‘Good idea. I’ll join you.’
‘Jesus,’ Malachy said, Sekoto’s words echoing in his ears. ‘We’re out of time. We’re landing. I don’t know where or how, but this big bird is coming down.’
The feng shui master returned to the door of the cockpit, holding his map and his feng shui compass in the other. ‘South,’ he said.
‘Don’t say it, Mr Wong.’
‘Is better than landing in Tianting West Lake.’
‘We are not going to land in Tianting West Lake.’
‘We are not?’
‘It’s too far away. We’re losing the tailplane. The plane’s about to break up.’
‘So what are we going to do?’
‘I don’t know… I don’t know. For the first time in my whole, goddamn, brilliant, heroic, self-righteous life, this Hero Captain Pilot doesn’t know what to do.’
Wong started to leave the room.
‘Wait.’
He turned around.
‘Come here. Sit there. Tell me again about your Uncle Rinchang’s favourite walk.’
Wong unrolled his map.
Seconds later, the plane yawed steeply to the left.
The scene was white, cold, hard, unyielding, rocky and massive in scale. The mountains were not of the earth. Nor were they of the sky. They seemed to stand between the two. The Chinese legends of the mountains as the pillars between heaven and earth made perfect sense—indeed, it was difficult to see this area as anything other than a region of transition between the land of the humans and the vault of the stars: the land of the gods.
The peaks cut through the clouds, reaching for the moon. Below them, no ground was visible: only layers of shifting mists, like wraiths. Captain Malachy sensed that here Skyparc, ‘your office in the sky’, had turned into something tiny and delicate: a butterfly in the Grand Canyon, a daisy in a hurricane, a flying ant threading its way between skyscrapers. They headed directly towards a mountain.
Co-pilot Enrico Balapit was apoplectic. ‘This is madness. We have no chance. No chance. We are going to be blown to bits. This plan is suicidal.’
‘Yes. As were all the others.’
‘Captain Malachy?’ There was ice in Balapit’s voice. He stood up, his eyes blazing, nostrils flaring and teeth grinding together.
‘Yes, Captain Balapit?’
‘If you do not come to your senses, I will have no option but to relieve you of command.’
‘Come on. Sometimes you have to put the rule book away, Enrico, and just go with your gut.’
‘Oh that’s what this is, is it? Feel the force, Luke? I want to live.’
‘You think you’re the only one?’ Malachy spoke with quiet dignity. ‘We’re not going to crash into a mountain. We’re looking for a flat, snowy plain—the Fire Dragon’s Back. Stop whining and help me find it.’
Balapit spat his words between his teeth: ‘Do you realise, if there is one rock sticking up from that ridge, one boulder, one bloody stone, we’re going to flip over and fall upside down into the nearest gully?’
‘There are no stones,’ Wong said. ‘Wind has polish the plain for a lo
ng time. A million years or more. Then there is thick layer of ice on top. Then thick snow on top of that.’
Malachy said: ‘Balapit, the one thing that will do most to make sure we don’t flip over and fall upside down off a mountain is if you sit down and do your bloody job.’
The co-pilot stood unmoving for several seconds. And then he slid back into his seat.
‘Atta boy.’ Malachy turned to Wong: ‘This plateau: how long, exactly, is it?’
‘It is two-three li, which is about three kilometre.’
‘Long enough—just.’
Wong crossed his fingers behind his back. He hoped he was remembering the scene correctly. It had been a long time since he had been twelve years old.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, there’s an old Irish saying which says: “May the road rise up to meet you.” Apparently, that’s also a Chinese saying, too, which makes me feel better.’
He paused, and took a deep breath, anxious to sound as calm as possible. ‘I’m pleased to inform you that we’ve found a spot, with the help of a passenger, where the road actually does rise up to meet us. On the mountain range in front of us there is a flat area, a road of a sort. Who knows why someone would build a road in the air like that? I can’t answer that. You could ask Mr CF Wong, a passenger whose uncle was one of the people who built that road, or discovered it, at any rate. Perhaps it was designed for this moment. I don’t know. Only divine providence knows. Anyway, I am deeply grateful to whoever decided to put it there, because we are going to test it out. Nevertheless, this is almost definitely going to be a bumpy landing, so you will need to get into brace position.’
In the Presidential Suite, Army Armstrong-Phillips and Joyce McQuinnie emerged from under the duvet, where they had been energetically doing what she liked to call ‘making out’.
‘Brace brace,’ they barked to each other.
Mr Wong Goes West Page 22