by David Beaty
top!’
‘What we want!’ Harker yelled back. ‘Only thing we’ve got!’
‘Forty knots beyond limits!’
In answer, Harker strained the control column even further
forward, as though to break it with his bare hands.
Speed, good speed, God speed. They said if you went fast enough,
time stood still. You touched eternity and infinity.
Just for a second he felt himself poised on some breathless dizzy
point of time and space.
‘Wing’ll come off in a moment,’ he heard Griffiths croak.
The aircraft was in a paroxysm, a last palsy before disintegrating. A split second too long, and it would break up. The whole world for so many of them spun on the axis of his timing. It was as if all his life had been lived just for this moment, for this decision.
‘Pull back! Now!’
Both pilots heaved. Sweat poured down their faces. Harker felt himself wrestling the aircraft like a man with a deadly yellow snake wound round him. The aircraft seemed to bend under the opposing pressures. But still the flames wouldn’t be blown out.
Then there was a sound like thunder. The blazing engine toppled out of its mounting, disappeared below and behind them.
The flames flattened. Less of them too, darkened with smoke, the flickering yellow veined with red, but still there.
‘Engine’s gone, sir.’ There was hope in Adams’ voice.
‘Fire’s still there,’ Griffiths countered. ‘Temperature’s off the clock. And the wing, Skipper … the wing!’
It was creaking like the timbers of an old ship. The Astrojet was juddering and dancing in heavy cloud and rain, its surface polished a damp tawny colour by the reviving fire.
‘Now! This time!’ Harker shouted to Adams. ‘Stick right forward.’ Abruptly the nose dropped again. The high screaming started up. Out of the corner of his eye he could see the snake had swelled, had sprouted spurting wings of flame, an evil dragon head. It was now or never. Those bloody flames or all the souls he carried on board! Into the nightmare, all their nightmares – or fighting free!
Suddenly the flames were everything he feared and hated. They were Harriet’s illness, Harriet’s death, the foul fiend of Harriet’s funeral hymn. They were Archie’s ghosts and Archie’s suicide, his own inadequacy and the inadequacy of all men.
He felt himself fighting like a madman. Down they plunged through heavy cloud, bouncing and juddering, the flames falling back, the flames coming forward. The screaming of the engines rose to a crescendo.
But Harker was beyond caring. He was concentrating every bit of strength and willpower he had into his hands and praying that Harriet was right.
‘Skipper —’ He felt his sleeve pulled. He turned his head. The Engineer’s panel had steadied. In the slight phosphorescent light, he saw a face.
Whose face?
The face looked immensely, clumsily, oafishly, relieved. ‘The fire!’ Griffiths was telling him. ‘You’ve done it! You’ve blown the damned thing out!’
‘We’ve got a radar position on you, X-Ray November. Twenty miles west of Strumble Head. Over the Irish Sea.’
They must have carried out their corkscrew contortions over the hills of Somerset and the mountains of Wales.
Harker spoke into his microphone. ‘Thank you, London Control.’
‘Steer one one six degrees.’
‘Turning onto one one six.’
‘How are things now?’
‘Not too bad.’
The Chief Cabin Services Officer was up on the flight deck with them. He had reported the passengers scared out of their wits, but quiet. No injuries. Everyone had remained strapped to their seats.
‘And we’ll keep them that way,’ Harker said.
Griffiths had his torch trained on the black gaping hole where Number Four engine had been.
‘Wing tip looks wobbly, Skipper. Drooping a bit. Fire’s weakened it.’
‘Will it hold?’ Adams asked.
‘It’ll have to,’ Harker said shortly.
At least the mystery of why the fire extinguishers had been so ineffective had been cleared up. In the cleaning up operation after the emergency, Harker had discovered the Fire Shut Off Lever on Number Four still up. Kerosene pouring in at the rate of thirty gallons a minute had been feeding the fire all the time. No wonder the fire extinguishers had failed to put it out. Adams swore he’d pulled it, that it must have come up again.
‘It’s all right,’ Harker said. ‘I’m not blaming you. More likely you jumped one too far when you changed from the Engine Failure to the Engine Fire Check List. Easily done, and anyway, I hurried you.’
That was the probable explanation. A simple interruption, as with Archie. But it had worked out all right on X-Ray November.
Remembering Archie, Harker’s face clouded.
There were lights down below them, whole strings of orange neons.
‘Swansea,’ Adams said.
Pale but still smiling, Margaret came up then with coffee for them.
‘Sorry about the roller coaster, Margaret,’ he said. ‘How are the passengers?’
‘Sick and shaken. They keep asking … are we going to make it?’
‘We’ve still to get down at London,’ Adams reminded everybody. ‘And I don’t like the look of that wing. It’s flapping.’
‘I’ve told the passengers we are going to make it.’
‘Don’t worry, Margaret,’ Harker said. ‘We won’t let you down.’
Harker reported over Bristol.
‘About to dump fuel,’ he told Control. Over his shoulder he called to Griffiths, ‘Open fuel dumping valves!’
Seconds later, he heard the clunk of the levers. Holding the aircraft straight and level, he was aware all the time of it lightening, as kerosene flowed out of the huge tanks at six hundred gallons a minute.
‘Dumped three thousand gallons, Skipper,’ Griffiths was calling up to him. ‘We’re below maximum landing weight now.’
‘Close the dump valves.’
Five minutes later, still on the Airway, London Radar brought them round onto Runway 28 Left. Harker told the cabin crew to stand by the doors and emergency exits.
‘Everything else has been cleared. No aircraft within fifty miles of you,’ Control told them. ‘Steer one three five.’
‘Turning onto one three five.’
‘Cloud base is down to three hundred feet. Raining. Wind westerly, gusting twenty-five knots.’ There was a pause. ‘How’s the wing?’
Harker craned his neck and took a look. There was clear damage right through to the trailing edge.
‘Still holding,’ he said cheerfully.
‘Steer zero one zero zero. We’re bringing you downwind now …’
Still in cloud, Harker turned carefully, inching the wing up. Hitting a patch of turbulence, he saw the tip trembling. After the fire, now came the tightrope act.
‘Turn onto two seven eight.’
‘We’re having to turn it carefully, London.’
‘I understand.’
‘We’ve already lost an engine. To lose a wing as well would be too careless to contemplate.’
The Controller laughed sympathetically. ‘Your course of two seven eight is good. Your height of fifteen hundred feet is quite OK.’
‘We’re on the ILS glide path.’
‘I’ll monitor you all the same.’
Wavering a little in the uneven air, X-Ray November gently descended. At five hundred feet, they were still in cloud. Rain rattled on the windscreens. Not till two hundred feet, with all Checks complete, was there a sudden burst of white and green lights.
And there was the runway threshold in front of them.
‘Full flap!’
The Astrojet slowed. Harker pulled back for the flare out. Then very softly the wheels touched.
‘Reverse thrust!’
‘We appear to have an escort,’ Harker said, nodding his head at the column
of ambulances and fire engines with blue lights blipping racing along beside them on either side of the runway.
‘Unload your passengers on the runway,’ Control told him. ‘A strong smell of kerosene’s been reported. We don’t want to take any chances.’
Immediately the aircraft stopped, the fire engines clustered all round. The doors were opened, the long yellow tongues of the fire escape chutes were extended. One after the other, the passengers slid down to the ground and boarded the waiting buses, followed by the crew.
Harker was the last to leave. He collected his briefcase, reached over his seat for the stick. Then holding them, briefcase in his left hand, stick in his right, he came back to earth and got in the nearest bus.
He was surprised at his reception. Men stretched out to shake his hand, women threw their arms round his neck and hugged him. They all looked white-faced and strained. Some had been crying. But now there were smiles. Even laughter. He was introduced to his youngest passenger, a baby girl in her carrycot.
Harker looked down into the carrycot.
‘I have a granddaughter,’ he said to her father.
‘She didn’t bat an eyelid,’ the man told him proudly. ‘ Slept right through it.’
If the reception in the bus surprised him, it was nothing to what happened in the VIP reception lounge which had been specially opened by Woodhouse. Harker was immediately surrounded by reporters and TV cameras.
‘You’ve been the major attraction of the country,’ they told him. ‘People have rung up the police. Called out fire brigades. Spacemen from Mars. Flying saucer. Eyewitness on BBC Radio said you were a comet!’
His passengers pushed through the newsmen to congratulate and thank him. Woodhouse was beaming. An initial fear that this was bad publicity for the airline had disappeared when he realised the excellent publicity. He was going on and on about the marvellous job Harker had done, certainly a commendation from the company, probably the Queen’s Medal for Valuable Services in the Air.
It was Harker himself who put a stop to it all.
‘I’m no hero,’ he said. ‘Just earning my pay. We were lucky the aircraft was so strong. In the confusion the Fire Shut Off hadn’t been pulled. Easily done.’
But they refused to let him go. There were tearful farewells as though of a long lasting friendship. Finally he had almost to fight his way out to Operations to check in and write his report.
Then he shook hands with Griffiths and Adams and thanked them. Neither made any remark this time when they followed him, stick in his right hand, briefcase in his left, along the corridor and down the stairs, out of Operations and into the car park.
He climbed into the Citroën and started up. He drove mechanically. Something, delayed shock perhaps, had stripped him of the power of thought. He felt completely detached from his surroundings, though he was dimly aware of the weather for he switched on the windscreen wipers. His tired mind fixed no refrain to their rhythmic squeak. For some reason he drove with his foot down hard on the accelerator most of the way, as if he was eager to get home.
The gates to Elmtrees were open, and he saw with distant irritation that there was a car with Evening Echo on the side and two men with cameras waiting in the shrubbery. He got out of the car, and walked straight to the front door, ignoring them.
‘No,’ he shook his head, ‘ I’ve nothing more to say.’
He waved them away. He stepped inside Elmtrees, shut the door on them and leaned with immense relief against the polished oak. He felt a wave of exhaustion wash over him, then surprisingly a wave of homecoming and of a long vanished peace.
He was still holding Harriet’s stick. He walked over and laid it carefully in the alcove. Then he stood in the hall, drawing in the special mixture of perfumes that was Elmtrees. Very faintly, but sufficiently perceptible beneath Mrs Webb’s lavender wax, the old oak and the flowers, he recognised Harriet’s Alliage. He walked into the sitting room, feeling the house settling companionably around him again, feeling enclosed in a world of private but profound happiness.
Then the telephone shrilled. He lifted the receiver reluctantly, fearing it would be Belinda’s voice to break the spell.
‘Is that you, Daddy?’ Jane’s voice came over the wire hysterically high. ‘Are you all right? Are you hurt? I heard it on the radio. I was so worried. Then I was terribly proud, Daddy. Then Madge phoned … listen, Daddy …’
He listened, a slow smile spreading over his face till she finished. ‘What I mean is, Daddy, wouldn’t you like to see your granddaughter … and would you like me to come home and look after you, now Belinda’s gone and you’re alone?’
‘The answer is yes, Jane, of course I want to see you and my granddaughter. But …’ He moved Harriet’s stick to the correct angle in the niche. ‘I’ve never felt less in need of looking after. I’ve never felt less alone.’
Copyright
First published in 1984 by Secker & Warburg
This edition published 2013 by Bello
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Copyright © David Beaty, 1984
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