by Nevil Shute
He drove down to the aerodrome and warned the crew for a day-long inspection of the aircraft on Sunday. That day they worked from morning till evening, Christmas Eve, and found nothing wrong. They left the Ceres all night guarded by the sailors, and on Christmas morning they returned for the work of emptying the fuel, analyzing it, and refuelling.
At midday the Shell employees drove away in their empty tank waggons to a belated Christmas Day, and David assembled his crew in the fuselage of the aircraft, with the door shut. “We’re going home this evening, boys,” he said. “Take off at six o’clock, with the Queen on board, via Ratmalana.” He told them of the arrangements he had made for them to collect their gear. “I want the truck back here by a quarter to three, and after that nobody’s to leave the hangar.”
Flight Sergeant Syme said, “Can we listen to the Queen speaking, Cap?”
He nodded. “There’s a radio in the office. We’ll listen to it all together there.”
That afternoon they assembled in the bare, utilitarian little office in the hangar, seven young men and one girl, in the dark blue uniforms of the Royal Australian Air Force. Outside the office, the silver bulk of the Ceres loomed immensely, fuelled and ready for flight. The young men stood or sat upon the edge of tables, grave and serious, aware that they were to hear something very important, not knowing what it was.
The radio boomed out the striking of Big Ben, the announcement was made, and the familiar voice began to speak to them, stumbling a little now and then from sheer fatigue.
By the time she had finished, Gillian Foster was in tears.
9
AT FIVE O’CLOCK they pulled the Ceres out of the hangar with the tractor, swung her round, and ran the engines. They shut down after a short trial satisfied that everything was in order, and David sat on in the pilot’s seat for a time, his mind running over the machine searching for anything that might have been neglected, any inspection that had been left undone. Below upon the tarmac the Australian sailors had been thrown round the machine in a cordon, to prevent anybody from approaching it in the darkness.
An airline bus from B.O.A.C. came to the hangar presently, a device adopted by Frank Cox to avoid notice. He was travelling in it himself with all the passengers except the Queen and the Consort, and with all the luggage. David went down to meet them, and watched Ryder as he superintended the loading of the suitcases into the aircraft. He said a word or two to Dr. Mitchison and to Macmahon, and suggested that they get into the aircraft out of the cold wind. Then he turned to Rosemary.
“You’d better get in, too,” he said. “You’re looking very tired.”
She said, “I’d like to stay out here for a few minutes. It’s fresh here. I’ve been cooped up in the office for so long.” She paused, and then she said, “You heard the broadcast?”
“We heard it all together in the hangar here,” he said. “It was very moving.”
“Was it a surprise to you?” she asked.
He shook his head. “I knew more or less what was coming. I don’t think any of the boys did, though.”
“How did they take it?”
“You mean, about Tom Forrest? They thought it was a grand idea. But they’re Australians, you see, and we’re used to having a Governor General. I don’t think it matters how they took it. It’s how the British are going to take it that’s the important thing.”
“I know.” She stood for a minute bareheaded, letting the clean, cold air blow through her hair, refreshing her. “I believe the people of England are adult enough now to realize that it’s necessary,” she said. “They certainly weren’t when she came to the throne, thirty years ago. Daddy says they’ve changed a great deal in her reign, since he was a young man.”
“It was a marvellous speech,” he said. “Who wrote it for her?”
She sighed. “Everybody,” she replied wearily. “Lord Marlow wrote one and the Consort wrote another. And then Tom Forrest had a talk to Daddy, and he sent in one that was practically pure Daddy — every word of it. Major Macmahon had a go at putting them all together for her, and then old Sir Robert Menzies wrote her about three thousand words from Melbourne, some of it quite good. We’ve been working at it for a fortnight, Nigger. I must have typed it fifteen or twenty times. I’ve woken up in the middle of the night, over and over again, and found myself repeating bits of it.”
He pressed her hand in the darkness, and she smiled up at him. “It’s over now,” he said. “It’s a marvel that such a fine speech could be made up out of so many bits and pieces.”
“It wasn’t,” she replied. “She scrapped the whole lot on Sunday morning, and sat down, and wrote it in her own words, in her own handwriting. After that, she wouldn’t let anybody change a thing. I typed it out from what she wrote on eleven quarto sheets of notepaper, and there wasn’t an alteration or an erasure in the whole of it.”
They stood there in the darkness, hand in hand. “You were right about Tharwa,” he said presently. “Right about it being kept open, I mean. She’ll only have been away about three weeks.”
“I know. It’s better for her to be out of England now, and see what boils up under Tom Forrest. Some of the Labour back-benchers will be furious.”
“With her?”
She looked up quickly. “Oh — no. With the Government. With Iorwerth Jones.” She paused. “A good bit of it leaked out yesterday, and there was a lot going on behind the scenes. But it was too late then.”
“I see . . .” He knew too little of the British political scene to venture any comment. All he said was, “Tom Forrest’ll have quite a bit to do.”
She nodded. “He won’t care. He’s speaking on the radio on Wednesday night.”
“Do you know what he’s going to say?”
She shook her head. “If he says all that he put into her draft speech, he’ll start something. And he’s quite capable of doing it. He’s a fan of Daddy’s.”
A chilly December wind blew in a sharp gust round about them, and she drew a little closer to him. “You ought to get inside,” he said gently. “You’re very tired, and you’ll catch a cold if you stay out in this. When you get out of the machine it will be warm and sunny, with all the flowers out. Remember the courtyard of the Canberra Hotel?”
She nodded. “I hate leaving England,” she said in a low tone, and he bent to catch her words. “But this is an end to all the backward glances and irresolutions. This is the end of something that began in 1867, when a lot of generous idealists gave one vote to every man.”
He led her to the aircraft and up the steps into the cabin, and Gillian Foster took charge of her and took her to her seat. David went down again on to the tarmac and glanced at his watch; ten minutes to go before the Royal car was due. He walked underneath the engines, vaguely uneasy, and stood looking up at each of them in turn. It was quite unusual for him to have the needle before a flight; he had flown so often and so far that he was long past that. Everything had been inspected and everything was right, but he was troubled by an anticipation of danger. The tyres, perhaps. He walked over to the great wheels and passed his hand over the treads, from the ground in front to the ground behind, standing upon tip toe to reach the topmost point. The tyres were perfect, as with his intellect he had known they were. And still he had the sense of danger strong upon him.
He walked over to the gangway where Frank Cox was waiting for the Queen, and stood with him. Exactly at six o’clock the lights of the big Daimler appeared upon the road outside. It stopped at the sentry post where the naval officers were waiting for it, and then came on, and drew up by the aircraft. The two officers stood at the salute as the Queen and the Consort stepped out.
The Queen said good evening to them, and walked to the gangway; Frank Cox escorted her up into the aircraft. The Consort stopped for a moment and spoke to David. “Where did all these naval officers and ratings come from?” he enquired.
“They’re from H.M.A.S. GONA, sir. She’s in Portsmouth now.”
“Did yo
u produce them?”
“I asked Vice Admiral O’Keefe for them. They’ve been here a fortnight.”
“They’re all Australians, are they?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I see. Perhaps that was wise. Thank you, Wing Commander.”
He went up the steps into the machine, and David followed him. Jim Hansen, the steward, closed the door behind them, and David went forward to the cockpit to join Ryder. Frank Cox came forward in a minute. “Take off in your own time, Captain.” David nodded, and started the inboard engines.
Ten minutes later they were on the climb, heading rather to the east of south upon a course for Cyprus. They flew through layer after layer of cloud in the darkness, till finally they broke out into moonlight and clear skies at about twenty-two thousand feet over northern France. The pilot sat motionless at the controls as the machine climbed higher, still troubled and uneasy in his mind, with the sense of danger strong upon him still. He was one quarter Aboriginal, not wholly of a European stock, and in some directions his perceptions and his sensibilities were stronger than in ordinary men, which possibly accounted for his excellence in flying and for his safety record. That evening he sat at the controls with the unease growing stronger in him every minute, and when at last they reached their operating height and levelled off to cruise, somewhere in the vicinity of Lake Constance, he handed over the control to Ryder, and went aft.
In the flight deck everything was normal. He stopped by the flight engineer’s table and peered at the instruments himself, and read the flight log carefully. There was nothing there. He sat down by the radio operator and looked through his log, and peered at the green traces on the cathode tubes, and checked a position on the Decca apparatus. There was nothing there. He passed into the cabin and walked slowly down the length of it, looking for a cracked window perhaps that would release the pressure, or for some danger of fire, but everything was in order. The steward and the stewardess were serving dinner; the Queen was in her cabin with the door closed. He stopped Gillian Foster and nodded to the door. “Everything all right in there?”
The girl said, “Quite all right, sir.”
“Had her dinner?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Eat it?”
“Oh yes, she ate it nearly all. She had a glass of claret, too.”
He passed on down the gangway between the seats. Rosemary looked up at him and smiled, but he hardly saw her. There was something, somewhere, something very wrong. His eyes searched everywhere, the ventilators for some issue of smoke, the door latches, the carpets on the floor. He stopped and sniffed keenly for a trace of kerosene, but only smelt good cooking.
Jim Hansen was in the galley. He said, “Everything all right here?”
“We could do with a bigger stove, Cap,” said the man. “It’s not so easy serving a hot dinner with just the one hot plate and the oven. Think we could get a bigger stove put in?”
He said something absent-minded, and went on. Both toilets were vacant, and he looked into each of them, but there was nothing there. He went aft again into the luggage compartment and stood looking at the piled suitcases in the bins, strapped down with webbing straps. Everything seemed in order, but there was something very, very wrong.
The luggage was one thing he had not checked, and nobody had checked of his own crew. He would not rest, he knew, until he had satisfied himself that that was all in order. He pulled a notebook and a pencil from his inner breast pocket, and went forward to the cockpit again, to Ryder at the controls. “How many ports have you got on board, Harry?”
“Two suitcases and a haversack. What’s this about?”
“Just making a check up. Are they labelled with your name?”
“The suitcases are. The haversack is in the top bunk there.”
He passed on down the aircraft from bow to stern, listing the names of everyone on board with their luggage. He did not disturb the Queen or the Consort, but he got the list of their luggage from the maid and the valet. When he came to Frank Cox, the Group Captain asked, “What’s this for, Nigger?”
“I want to count it all up,” the pilot said. “I’m not comfortable about this flight. I’ve got the heebie-geebies.”
Frank Cox glanced quickly up at him, and got out of his seat. There only remained the steward and the stewardess to question, and the pilot turned again to the luggage compartment. “Give me a hand,” he said to the steward. “I want to check the cases off against this list.”
The Group Captain followed them into the luggage compartment and the three of them began to unlash and to sort out the luggage.
A quarter of an hour later they came on a discrepancy. There were four cases labelled E. C. Mitchison, as against three on the list.
“Doctor’s made a mistake,” said Jim Hansen cheerfully. “He’s got four instead of three.”
The pilot said, “Slip up and ask him to come down here, and identify them.”
When the doctor came, David asked, “Are those your four cases?”
“That’s not mine,” said Mitchison. “Not the green one. The other three are mine.”
“It’s got your name on it.” They showed him the label.
“I’m sure it’s not mine,” he said. “I only brought the three. I’ve never seen that before.”
David picked it up, laid it on the floor of the gangway, and stooped to undo it. He found it locked. He thought for a moment, and then went forward into the cabin. Over the entrance door there hung a steel bar with flattened ends, the sort of thing used to open packing cases. It was painted red, and it was there for the purpose of opening the door from the inside if it should be jammed tight in its frame by the distortion of the fuselage in a crash.
He pulled this out of its clips, and went back to the suitcase. With two vigorous heaves he broke the hasp, and lifted back the lid. Inside he saw a bundle of sacking. He felt a hard object wrapped up in it. Gently he unwrapped this object, moving it as little as possible, and took it very carefully in his hands, while the others crowded near to see.
It was a metal box, apparently of heavy gauge brass with soldered joints. It was about twelve inches long, eight or nine wide, and about five inches deep. It weighed twelve or fifteen pounds.
Very carefully he lifted it above his head, and looked beneath it. There was no apparent opening, no lid. It seemed to have been soldered solidly together, and not designed to be opened at all.
Very carefully he put it down upon the sacking in the open suitcase.
Frank Cox said quietly, “We’ll have to get rid of that, Nigger.”
The pilot stood silent for an instant. “We’ll have to go down,” he replied. “We can’t jettison out of the pressure shell. We’ll have to go down to seven or eight thousand feet. The Queen.” He could not risk giving the Queen the diver’s bends by opening the pressure hull at any greater altitude than that.
“How long will it take you to get down?”
“Seventeen or eighteen minutes.” The pilot turned, and went forward swiftly to the flight deck, and spoke quickly to the startled engineer and to Ryder at the controls. The inboard engines died, but the outer engines were kept going at reduced revs to maintain the cabin pressure. The airbrakes on the top surface of the wing crept out, the nose went down a little, and the Ceres steadied at a rate of descent of three thousand feet a minute.
David went quickly to the navigator’s table and looked at the map, and while he did so the radio operator gave him a new fix by Decca. They were about a hundred miles southwest of Belgrade, and over the Jugoslav mountain ranges with peaks up to ten thousand feet. He laid off a quick course towards the Adriatic and the Ionian Sea, passing over Brindisi in Italy. He said to Ryder, “Steer two hundred true,” and watched to see the aircraft steady on that course. He turned, and Frank Cox was beside him.
David put a finger on the chart between the toe of Italy and Greece. “We’ll drop it somewhere here, if the bloody thing doesn’t go off first.”
The Grou
p Captain said, “It’s not making any noise, so it’s not a time clock. I can’t see any breathing holes in it, so it’s probably not a barometric fuse. I think it’s probably an acid fuse, acid eating through a strip of metal of some sort. If that’s so, it’ll be pretty far gone, and we’ll want to be careful how we move it. Think we’d better land at Brindisi or Bari?”
The pilot hesitated. “I’ve moved it once, and it’s not gone off,” he said. “I’m quite game to put it out of the machine myself.”
“Where would you put it out?”
“Put down the undercarriage and take off the inspection cover for the forward oleo leg,” he said. “It’ll fall clear of the machine from there, behind the front wheel.” He paused. “We can land at Brindisi,” he said. “I’ve been there before. There’s a long runway roughly east and west. I think it’s lit.”
Frank Cox bit his lip. “There’s the publicity . . .”
“I know. We’ll have to make our minds up pretty quick.” It would be in the newspapers all around the world, that the Queen of England had had to land in Italy to remove a bomb from her aircraft. “I’m quite prepared to drop it out myself,” he said again.
“I can’t decide this,” said the Group Captain. “I’ll have to ask the Consort. I think we ought to land.”
He hurried aft, and David turned quickly to his list of aerodromes along the route. Brindisi was lit upon request for night landings, and was habitually used by the Italian Air Force. He called the second engineer, who was already out of his bunk, and went down with him to the forward luggage hold, now empty, to the inspection plate above the undercarriage leg. “Loosen up these studs,” he said. “Be ready to open up this pretty quick when I tell you, after I’ve put the undercarriage down. I may want to drop something out.”
He went back to the flight deck; they were now down to about twenty thousand feet in clear air; ahead of them a little starry cluster of lights showed upon the land, which must be Brindisi. He turned to meet Frank Cox. “She won’t have it,” the Group Captain said. “She won’t land. We’ve got to put it out of the machine over the sea.”