Point of Impact

by Point of Impact (retail) (epub)

  As if in confirmation, the jet jerked and dipped.

  Drew pulled himself together. ‘Yeah, you’re right, I should…’

  His mind racing, he broke off as the jet twitched again. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I said…’

  But Drew had already stopped listening and was staring at his hand wrapped around the stick. ‘I think you’ve got it, Ali. Christ, you’ve got it. You said I was flying like a nervous novice or like DJ under stress.’ He paused as he thought it through again.

  ‘So?’

  ‘So it’s not the computer at all – or not the whole system anyway – and it’s not a sequence of commands.’

  ‘So what the hell is it then?’

  ‘It’s the way that you fly it. You can overload the fly-by-wire.’

  ‘And how do you do that?’

  ‘By moving the stick.’ Drew had already begun making tiny movements to the stick, rocking it from side to side.

  Ali waited patiently for the rest of the explanation and then exploded. ‘Oh come on, Drew, don’t talk bollocks. Moving the stick is how you fly the bloody plane.’

  ‘No, Ali, you don’t understand. This is the cause of it all.’ He rattled the stick faster, willing his theory to be right.

  ‘What the hell are you doing?’ Ali said as the jet began to lurch violently. ‘Drew!’

  As Ali spoke, the jet suddenly plummeted from the sky, the alarms shrieking and the warning lights flashing red as the altimeter unwound like a ball of string.

  Drew fought against the slack controls, trying desperately to will some response into them, but the flaps continued to wave ineffectually as the jet plunged out of control, a thirty-ton deadweight.

  The airframe vibrated like a pneumatic drill, setting Drew’s teeth rattling in his head. He was close to blacking out but he fought with the controls again as Ali’s increasingly terrified voice came over the intercom. ‘Twenty-five thousand feet… Twenty thousand… Fifteen thousand… Prepare to eject… Drew!’

  The lights of ships that had been pinpricks in the vastness of the sea seconds before seemed to swell as the Tempest barrelled down towards them.

  Drew heard the controller in the tower add his voice to Ali’s entreaties, yelling into the radio, ‘Eject, Drew. For Christ’s sake eject.’

  The response was neither a voice nor the explosion of the ejector rockets blasting Drew and Ali up into the air, but a terrible groaning and juddering from the airframe as Drew at last felt a slight response from the controls.

  He hauled at the stick, struggling to pull the aircraft out of its breakneck dive, but, though he tried desperately to level the wings, the jet kept yawing savagely from side to side. As he pushed the stick left, the jet dropped away to the right. Each pressure on it seemed to produce the reverse of what he intended and, the more he tried to correct it, the wilder the oscillations became.

  ‘Ten thousand.’

  The jet continued to drop. The sea below zoomed into frighteningly sharp focus, the white hull of a speedboat starkly outlined against the dark, midnight blue of the water.

  ‘Eight thousand.’

  For a microsecond Drew was paralysed by indecision. Then he heard Ali yelling into the intercom, ‘Let go of the stick. It’s what DJ did. Let go of the stick.’

  For another fraction of a second he hesitated. Releasing the stick went against every instinct and every second of pilot training he had ever had.

  ‘Six thousand. Drew!’ Ali’s cry jolted him out of his indecision. He let go of the stick. Almost instantly the wild yawing stopped and the jet came back under control. Drew grabbed it again, levelled the wings and began hauling on it with both hands. The G-force still plastering him to his seat, he dragged it slowly, painfully back, until it was jammed hard into his stomach.

  ‘Four thousand.’

  They were already past the point of no return. If Drew could drag enough response from the jet, it might yet bottom out of its dive; if not…

  They were dropping too fast to eject. ‘We should make it,’ Drew said. ‘We’re staying in.’

  ‘Should?’ Ali shrieked.

  The needle of the altimeter continued to wind down, but more steadily now as the jet slowed its breakneck plunge, easing the vibrations of the airframe.

  Ali broke in again, his voice cracking. ‘Two thousand feet.’

  Drew could see thin white streaks in the blackness below them.

  ‘One thousand.’

  The streaks became the white crests of waves.

  ‘Five hundred.’

  * * *

  There was a sudden burst of static, and then nothing. In the tower, Michelle froze as she heard the radio go dead. She was surrounded by people in the packed control room. As news of Drew’s suicide mission had spread around the base, more and more of the squadron made their way to the tower to listen in.

  There was a stunned silence and then a flurry of action.

  ‘Radio check. Tiger Three, this is Gióia Controller. Are you receiving? Over… Tiger Three, do you read me? Come in, for God’s sake.’

  There was nothing.

  Then the flight controller grabbed the red crash phone. As soon as he lifted it, the alarm sounded and the doors of the emergency vehicle sheds rolled upwards. ‘Scramble Search and Rescue.’ For the second time that night, the emergency crews went sprinting for their vehicles.

  Through the window, Michelle could see the rotors of the yellow Sea King begin to turn and then accelerate to a blur. The helicopter rose from the concrete and swung away into the night.

  ‘Rescue 2–1, departing the airfield, request position update.’

  As Michelle heard the call from the Sea King, there was another burst of static, followed by Drew’s shaky voice.

  ‘Sorry about that, tower, must have knocked the radio off in all the excitement. We’re okay. We’ve bottomed out and are climbing to height. I’m not sure if we’ve broken this aircraft, but we’ve definitely bent it a bit… And Michelle and anyone else who’s listening, hang on for two more minutes while we get these checks done. Then we’ll talk you through what’s been going wrong with these buggers.’

  Drew took the jet back to height, forcing himself to keep his euphoria under control. He called out the checks on the jet’s systems. Ali’s voice was almost back in neutral as he responded.

  ‘Damage report?’ Drew said.

  ‘Hydraulics leak. We’re losing pressure.’

  ‘How serious?’

  ‘It’s falling steadily, but it’s not at danger level yet.’ Ali paused. ‘We may have a fuel leak as well.’

  ‘Anything else?’ Drew asked as he put the Tempest into the long descent towards Gióia.

  ‘Well, I can’t see it on the panel, but I’d say there’s a severely overstressed airframe as well.’

  Ali tried to laugh, but his voice caught at the memory of what they had just been through. ‘You’ve got strong arms as well as big balls, Drew,’ he said. ‘This thing’s tested to nine G, but it must have pulled close to fifteen as you hauled it out of that dive.

  ‘In the few minutes left before you try and kill us again, can you talk me through that bit back there once more? I know I told you to let go of the stick, but it wasn’t logic – it was sheer blind panic.’

  ‘I was right about too many inputs in rapid succession being the problem,’ Drew said, ‘but I was looking in the wrong place. The fault isn’t in the computer itself: it’s in the fly-by-wire. If I’d used my brain a bit more and really looked hard at what all the incidents had in common, I might have seen it a lot sooner.’ Drew was lost in thought.

  ‘So what is the link?’ Ali asked, as patiently as he could.

  ‘The one thing that links all those incidents isn’t a particular sequence of commands: it’s the fact that every one of us was moving the stick very rapidly just before the system crashed.

  ‘The first time I lost it I was trying to stay on the tail of Michelle’s Puma, which was zigzagging like a hyperactive
crab. DJ had been hunting down that Serb Hind and then waggled his wings like a lunatic before he went into his victory roll. The guy who crashed in Swaledale was a novice on his first flight in a Tempest. I’ll bet you all the paperclips on Russell’s desk that the pilot was as nervous as a learner driver taking his test and making constant adjustments.’

  ‘What about Alastair Strang?’ Ali said. ‘He was one of the best pilots on his squadron.’

  ‘He was such a perfectionist that, if he was meant to be at twenty thousand feet, twenty thousand and one wasn’t good enough. He’d nudge it down until he got it bang on the mark.

  ‘He’d also been a pilot in the Red Arrows before he transferred to Tempests. Those guys are used to flying in ultra-close formation, making minute adjustments of the stick every second. If you do that on one of these, you give the fly-by-wire more inputs than it can cope with. It’s still trying to process the previous command when you input another. Eventually it becomes saturated and the system crashes.

  ‘Even if you manage to regain partial control, the computer is still lagging behind the inputs to the fly-by-wire. You move the stick to the left but the jet goes right, because it’s still responding to the previous command. You then start to panic and force the stick even further to the left, but when the jet does begin to come left it now has two or three commands taking it that way. As a result, it drops left like a stone.

  ‘DJ told me the answer at Aalborg and I was too dumb to realise it. He said he was panicking so much when you went out of control over the North Sea that he let go of the stick and it righted itself, but I was too busy giving him a bollocking to listen. If I’d shouted less and listened more, both he and Nick might be alive today.

  ‘The only way to correct it is to let go of the stick altogether, which doesn’t exactly come naturally. If you hadn’t told me to, we’d be on our way to the bottom of the Adriatic.’

  He addressed his audience in the tower at Gióia directly. ‘Here endeth the lesson, everyone. Right, Ali, let’s get this aircraft down before we ruin a perfect day by running out of fuel.’

  ‘Fuel’s not the most immediate problem. We’ve got an amber warning now on the hydraulic fluid.’

  ‘Then the sooner we get this on the deck, the better.’

  The lights of Gióia emerged out of the darkness. ‘Gear coming down,’ Drew said.

  He paused, then swore. There were two green lights showing that the front and left landing gear was safely down and locked, but there was also a red warning light on the right-hand gear.

  ‘Recycling the landing gear.’

  Drew raised and then lowered the gear again. The red light continued to glow.

  He thought for a moment, then thumbed the radio button. ‘Tower, we have a problem. We’re not sure if the right landing gear is down and locked. I’m going to fly past you. Can you give us a visual check?’

  As the Tempest flashed over the inspection lights by the control tower, Drew glimpsed a row of white faces at the blue-glass windows.

  ‘The gear is down,’ the controller said, ‘but we can’t tell if it’s locked.’

  ‘All right, Ali,’ Drew said. ‘I’m going for the emergency system.’

  He pulled a black-and-yellow lever. A blast of nitrogen flooded the system, locking the gear down permanently. The red light remained.

  He flew past the tower once more, but the controller could only offer the same inconclusive message.

  ‘Fuel’s low,’ Ali said. ‘We can’t delay any longer.’ Then there was new urgency in his voice. ‘Red warning on the hydraulics.’

  As he spoke, the attention-getters began sounding and the same message flashed on Drew’s warning panel.

  He was silent for a moment, running through the emergency drills in his mind and weighing up the chances of a safe landing.

  ‘We’ve pushed our luck enough, Drew,’ Ali said. ‘Let’s take it back out over the sea and bang out.’

  Drew did not reply. He scanned his instruments once more. ‘No. We’ve lost enough Tempests. We’re going to get this one home.’

  He heard Ali’s dry swallow over the intercom. ‘It’s all right, Ali. I haven’t come through all this just to fall at the last hurdle.’

  ‘Are we going to take the cable?’

  ‘I can’t risk it. If the gear collapses, we could go underneath the cable. It’d cut through us like a cheese wire. We’ll do a flat approach and land beyond it. Be ready to bang out if anything goes wrong.’

  As he began the turn back towards the airfield, he saw the runway lights converging to a single point and the tower glowing an eerie blue, like a floodlit block of ice. He knew that somewhere in there Michelle was watching and waiting.

  * * *

  There was an unnatural stillness in the tower. Michelle looked up, seeking reassurance in the faces around her. A pilot tried to answer the question in her eyes with a confident smile, but then looked quickly away. The controller avoided her gaze altogether. Already drained, she braced herself again, but there was a cold, dull feeling in her chest.

  The black shape of the Tempest was faintly outlined against the night sky as it banked to make its final approach. She heard the clamour of revving engines as the emergency vehicles prepared to track the Tempest along the runway. Their revolving blue lights picked out stray details in the darkness of the airfield perimeter: a patch of barbed wire, a speed-limit sign and a pile of twisted scrap metal – all that was left of the arrester cable that DJ and Ali had destroyed – bulldozed clear of the runway and then left to rust.

  She stared out into the night, watching the Tempest drop steadily towards the grey concrete runway, and heard Drew’s and Ali’s voices, taut with tension, as they counted down their height and airspeed.

  The Tempest scarcely seemed to be moving, hovering like a hawk out beyond the perimeter. Then she heard the growl of the engines, faint at first, but growing steadily in volume as it swept in over the sea. It crossed the faint white surf line and skimmed the stanchions of the perimeter lights, the jet wash stirring dust devils of sand from the dunes.

  The jet yawed, then steadied again as a gust of crosswind shook it. Straining her eyes into the darkness, she watched the shrinking gap between the black shape of the landing gear, hanging like talons beneath the sweep of the wing, and the grey, faintly luminous surface of the runway.

  The flashing blue lights sent reflections dancing along the sleek flanks of the Tempest as it swept over the apron. Out of the corner of her eye, Michelle saw the fire tenders and ambulances begin to move, but her gaze remained locked onto the right landing gear, silently willing it to be safe.

  As the wheels touched the concrete, there were twin smudges of blue smoke from the tyres. The smoke hung suspended for an instant and then was blasted away in the jet wash. Michelle had no eyes for that. She had spotted another puff of smoke from the landing gear itself as the jet touched down.

  She held her breath, her body rigid, as she stared unblinkingly at the gear. For a moment the jet roared on, straight and level down the runway. Then she sensed as much as saw it begin to develop a slight list to the right. It grew more pronounced as she watched.

  She saw the outline of a dark figure in the cockpit, wrestling the stick to the left as he fought to compensate. The thrust-buckets deployed and she heard the engine note rise to a scream as reverse thrust was applied. The airframe began to judder and shake under the savage braking.

  She switched her gaze back to the landing gear. Suddenly the wing dropped a few inches, then halted.

  A fresh gout of black smoke spilled from the gear. Then it belched out in a constant, thickening stream.

  ‘Eject, Drew. Eject.’ Her voice sounded in her ears like a stranger’s.

  The landing gear held for another split second, then shattered. She saw a glistening shard of metal burst out of the middle of the smoke like an arrow. The wing toppled and smashed into the concrete, sending out an avalanche of sparks.

  There was an awful grindin
g, rending noise, audible even above the howl of the engines and the bedlam breaking out in the control tower. The controller shouted to make himself heard.

  The aircrew clustered by the windows fell silent as he rattled out orders to the emergency crews.

  Like a claw, the wing gouged a scar across the surface of the runway, slicing into the concrete as if it were flesh. The torrent of sparks disappeared for a moment inside a dense cloud of smoke and dust. Then Michelle saw flames licking around the edge of the wing.

  She sat like stone, her fingernails carving white crescents in her palms, as the flames flashed across the wing and writhed like serpents around the tailplane. The trail of spilled fuel laid along the runway suddenly ignited into a curtain of fire, as if a sugar-cane farmer had torched his crop.

  A fire tender speeding down the runway in the track of the jet was instantly surrounded by flame. It swerved violently, teetered on two burning wheels, then crashed onto its side. Fire crew leapt from the wreck and scattered as the flames began to devour it.

  The wall of fire stretching along the runway made the night glow red, making the shadows an even deeper black. The tears trickling down Michelle’s cheeks were the colour of blood.

  ‘Eject, Drew. Eject.’ She repeated it like a mantra, unable to tear her eyes from the aircraft. As the wing bit deeper into the concrete, the jet slewed to one side. Then there was a huge explosion as it was torn from the fuselage. Part of it disintegrated. The rest was catapulted into the air, still blazing. It slammed down again, burying itself like an axe in the earth alongside the runway.

  Freed of the spike nailing it to the ground, the Tempest spun on its axis, then careered off the runway, bulldozing its way towards the tower, engines still bellowing.

  ‘Eject. Please. Please. Please,’ Michelle mouthed the words, her voice a dead monotone.

  Fire travelled the length of the fuselage, engulfing the cockpit and hiding the two stick figures from view.

  There was a pause, then a whipcrack as the canopy blew away. A white flash like a lightning bolt lit the night sky as ejector rockets erupted out of the heart of the red and orange flames.