Altitude (Power Reads Book 1)

by Dean Crawford

  ‘Phoenix three seven five, pass message.’

  ‘Do we know how much fuel there is at Keflavik, and whether their fire services section had oxygen supplies that might have allowed them to survive the gas cloud?’

  There was a long pause as Jason turned and listened intently, suddenly captivated by the captain’s question.

  ‘Negative three seven five, but likely there is ample fuel and the fire services department is located at the end of runway two niner.’

  ‘Copy that.’

  Reed stared out of the windshield for a moment and Jason figured out quickly what he had in mind.

  ‘You want to land and refuel, then get the hell out again.’

  Reed nodded. Then he keyed the transmit button.

  ‘Can you get in touch with the fire department either at Keflavik Airport or any local civilian departments? Any one of them might have had access to breathing apparatus and been able to get it on before they suffocated. If we can reach them, we might be able to meet them at the airport and hot refuel.’

  ‘Wilco, stand by.’

  Jason felt the tiniest flame of hope spring to life inside him as he considered what Captain Reed had in mind. “Hot refuelling” was a procedure whereby the airplane’s main engines were shut down after landing but the Auxillary Power Unit, or APU, was kept running. Essentially a small jet engine located in the rear of the fuselage, it powered the airplane prior to main engine start up and was also capable of powering the air conditioning and the carbon dioxide scrubbers.

  ‘You think the plane’s internal air will hold up long enough to refuel and get out again?’ Jason asked above the frenzied banging on the cockpit door.

  ‘We can pop the oxygen emergency system before we land,’ Reed replied. ‘That will keep the passengers safe, for as long as the supply lasts. It’s not perfect, but if we can get enough fuel in the tanks to bring us home or even to the Faroe Islands, we’ll be clear of the danger.’

  Jason felt excitement energise him as he strapped into his seat again. It wouldn’t be easy, but if they could manage to refuel then they could be clear of Iceland within the hour and heading for safety. He glanced out of the cockpit windows and saw the sun hovering now just above the horizon, the vast cloud cover glowing with a soft blue hue as the shadows crept across them. Seven miles below, he knew that Keflavik would already be in half–darkness.

  The radio crackled once more.

  ‘Phoenix three seven five, the fire department at Keflavik Airport are not responding.’

  Jason felt his heart sink, but the radio crackled again.

  ‘But we’ve made contact by telephone with the civilian fire department in Reykjavik. They have six survivors who would very much like a ride out of there.’

  ‘Can they get to the airport?’ Reed asked, tense with excitement now.

  ‘They’re already on their way,’ came the reply. ‘They were expecting to die alone so they’re a bit excited now. They’re going to head to the airport fire department and grab whatever extra breathing apparatus they can find.’

  ‘Copy that,’ Reed replied. ‘We’re turning back to begin our descent. Have them meet us with whatever fuel bowsers they can drive that carry enough aviation fuel to get us out of there and back home.’

  ‘Wilco.’

  Captain Reed clipped his harness into place and began scanning the instruments, gauging how much fuel they had remaining and how far away from the field they were. Jason was already on the case and had calculated their remaining endurance.

  ‘We’ve got just under five thousand pounds remaining. A descent at idle on both engines will leave us with enough for a couple of go–arounds to find the right weather,’ he said to Reed.

  ‘Then let’s make the first landing count, shall we?’

  ‘What about the passengers?’ Jason asked, and jabbed his thumb over his shoulder.

  Reed glanced behind them at the cockpit door still vibrating with hammering fists. ‘Stand by and start the pre–descent checks, I’ll deal with them. They’re already out of control and wouldn’t know Keflavik from Kabul anyway.’

  Jason grabbed the checklists and began going through the routine, as Reed followed his commands and prepared the Airbus for the descent into Keflavik. From their current position, they would have to circle to the south while descending and then turn through north to line up for a final heading and ILS approach to runway two niner. Given the proximity of the high ground to the east of the field and the brisk westerly gales, they were not going to be able to make many passes before the fuel ran out.

  Captain Reed hit the switch that turned on the seatbelt signs in the passenger cabin, and then he activated the intercom switch before he glanced at Jason.

  ‘You ready for this?’ he asked.

  Jason nodded. ‘Damn right.’

  *

  Becca backed up against the wall of the fuselage near the cockpit door as the passengers turned their wrath from the captain to her. The two burly men who had once threatened Grant now loomed before her.

  ‘Get that door open.’

  Becca shook her head. ‘The door’s locked, you can’t get in there.’

  ‘That’s rubbish!’ snapped the woman with the poorly child. ‘There’s a keypad on the wall they use to open the door!’

  Chloe rushed to Becca’s aid, fighting her way past the two men and putting herself betweent the door and the passengers.

  ‘That won’t work! The captain will have locked the door from the inside and he won’t ever open it if he thinks that the passengers are threatening the flight. Your friend Grant here made sure of that!’

  The burly men turned and glowered down at Grant, whose bluster vanished again as he saw them looking at him.

  ‘I’m on your side!’ Grant wailed, his voice thin and pleading. ‘I want them to land too!’

  The bigger of the two men turned to look Becca up and down.

  ‘If we’re going to die up here, why wouldn’t you be doing everything you can to get that coward out of the cockpit and make him land this plane?’

  Becca held her nerve, despite her terrible fear that Captain Reed had buckled under the threat of an open attack and sealed himself and Jason in the cockpit, abandoning the stewardesses to their fate.

  ‘Because our best chance of surviving this flight is Captain Reed,’ she replied.

  The burly man was about to reply when the intercom broadcast system burst into life.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen this is your captain speaking, you’re going to get what you wanted. Please return to your seats and fasten your seatbelts for landing.’

  ***

  XXIV

  Jason checked his harness one last time as Reed set the autopilot and the Airbus turned gradually through one hundred eighty degrees to head back east. As they turned so the monstrous ash cloud hove into view before them, filling the sky now. The towering pillar of smoke and lightning soared into the stratosphere and glowed in the vivid light from the setting sun behind them as though it were aflame.

  Both Jason and the captain were both mesmerised by the hellish sight of it for several seconds, and then Reed shook himself out of his torpor and set the descent rate on the autopilot. The airplane’s nose lowered in response and they began diving gently toward the clouds.

  ‘Re–start procedure on engine two,’ Reed said.

  Jason responded instantly, going through the procedure by memory. A combination of their airspeed and the power supplied by the functioning engine provided the necessary energy for the dormant engine to relight and moments later they watched the instruments as it spooled into life. Jason checked the temperature and pressure gauges registering the engine running at normal power and then adjusted the rudder trim back to its centre position.

  Captain Reed turned in his seat and looked up at the video feed from the main cabin to see that the passengers had retaken their seats, as had the flight attendants. Satisfied that, for now at least, the airplane’s passengers were safe and secure
, he turned back to the instruments. The clouds below them loomed ever closer and then the first banks and wisps rocketed past the windshield as the light began to fade.

  ‘Here we go,’ Reed said as the clouds suddenly rushed upon them and the brilliant, colourful sunset and terrifying pillar of ash and lightning vanished behind a grey netherworld.

  The Airbus’s wings rocked as it hit the first of the turbulence, and as the aircraft descended so the cockpit grew darker. Jason found himself watching the altimeter closely as the airplane flew along its downwind leg, over the ocean to the south of Keflavik.

  The airplane shuddered as though her fuselage was being battered by giant hammers and the wings rocked and flexed on the powerful updrafts, downdrafts and windshears as the airplane lurched from one pocket of disturbed air to the next.

  ‘Twenty–five thousand feet,’ Jason reported.

  The captain acknowledged their altitude on his own instruments, the airplane descending under idle power and riding out most of the turbulence to conserve fuel. Reed had switched the autothrottle off and was holding the throttles in the idle position, forcing the autopilot to instead use the airplane’s attitude to control its airspeed and rate of descent. The nose rose and fell with the blows of the weather systems as it descended, and the cockpit fell into near complete darkness, the only light coming from the green glow of countless switches and instruments.

  ‘Twenty thousand feet,’ Reed said. ‘We’ll come in deliberately high to conserve fuel, and join the ILS glideslope with a thousand feet extra altitude. We can give it up again once we know we’re going to make the runway safely.’

  Jason nodded in agreement, the plan sound and safe. They were now heading into the worst of the weather and Jason heard loud thumps and bangs as pockets of turbulence slammed into the airplane. His stomach plunged inside him as the airplane lifted up in an updraft blasting her from below, and then his guts surged up into his chest as the updraft was replaced by an equally powerful downdraft and plummeted five hundred feet in a matter of seconds.

  From behind him in the passenger cabin he heard the first cries of alarm and genuine fear as the passengers endured the disorientating roller coaster ride down through the atmosphere.

  ‘Keep an eye open for ash and ice build ups!’ Reed warned.

  Jason craned his neck and looked out of his side window to see the right wing stretching out into the darkness behind him, the green navigation light glowing against the cloud vapour rushing by. He could see that the leading edges of the wings were free of ice or any other debris build up, and he could also see the upturned corners of the wings flexing and trembling under the blows racing past them.

  ‘We’re good, so far.’

  The Airbus suddenly plummeted out of the sky and Jason was thrown against his harnesses, the restraints the only thing preventing his skull from slamming against the roof of the cockpit. The altimeter spun crazily downward and Reed slammed the throttles open to catch the airplane’s freefall as the nose lifted and strained against the pressure forcing it down.

  ‘Jeez...’

  The Airbus hit another updraft, taking it under the left wing and the airliner flipped up into a steep right bank. The autopilot struggled to retain control as the airplane banked hard over and the cries of alarm from behind them turned to a cacophony of terrified shrieks.

  The autopilot slammed the ailerons hard to the left and Reed stamped down a full boot of left rudder. The Airbus strained and twisted in the air and then she suddenly heeled over to the left and levelled out again, plunging through the inky darkness as a squall of torrential rain slammed into the windshield with enough force to cause Jason to flinch.

  ‘This is getting too close to minimals!’ he uttered.

  Every airplane had its limits, and although airliners were designed to cope with almost anything the atmosphere could throw at them, even they reached a point where they simply could not operate safely. Jason switched on the weather radar and they both stared in horror at the vividly glowing miasma of red and yellow hazard warnings lighting up the entire display ahead of them.

  The darkened atmosphere over southern Iceland was enshrouded in violent cumulonimbus formations, horrendous downpours and vivid electrical activity. Even as Jason saw the storms so the darkness outside was split by a tremendous flash of white light that seemed to burst into existence just inches from the windsheild. He jerked back in his seat and heard the deafening crash of thunder even above the straining engines as the thunderbolt scorched the very air around them and spilled like liquid fire across the wings and fuselage.

  The lights inside the cockpit flickered and then regained their vibrance again as the charge passed back into the atmosphere.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ Reed uttered to nobody in particular, ‘anything else?’

  Jason opened his mouth to reply when suddenly another deafening noise filled the cockpit as the Airbus smashed into a cloud of hail that drowned his voice out. The noise was so incredibly loud that for a moment Jason feared that they had flown directly into rocky debris being tossed into the atmosphere by the erupting volcano. The countless blows reverberated throughout the airplane like thousands of rocks falling on a tin roof.

  ‘We’re at ten thousand feet, hit the lights!’ Reed snapped.

  Jason switched on the Airbus’s powerful landing lights and instantly he saw clouds of massive hailstones racing toward them, the storm’s updrafts so powerful that they could lift fist–sized balls of ice four miles up into the air.

  ‘We’ll hold course,’ Reed said, ‘they’ll get smaller as we descend.’

  Even as Reed spoke, the cloud of ice grew denser and suddenly the wipers were smashed off the windshield and the barrage intensified as gigantic hailstones rushed out of the gloom and slammed into the windshield. Jason reeled back in his seat and threw his arms up uselessly as the deafening drumming on the glass seemed to reach into the cockpit and the glass splintered and cracked before his very eyes.

  ‘Pull up out of it!’ Jason yelled.

  Captain Reed moved instinctively, and did precisely the opposite.

  He hauled the throttles back to idle and increased the descent rate on the autopilot, and the Airbus plunged even deeper into the storm. Jason almost cried out in terror, but then he recovered himself as the barrage of icy rocks suddenly vanished and the relative silence of the rain returned to hiss and splatter across the windshield.

  But now a new terror enveloped them as they looked out into the storm.

  The immensely strong windshield had been battered by thousands of blows and was now fogged with splinters and cracks, a spider’s web of damage that smothered them from top to bottom.

  Jason leaned forward and stared in horror at the shattered screens, unable to see anything through them.

  ‘We’re blind.’

  ***

  XXV

  Becca flinched and gripped the base of her seat with both hands as the interior of the airplane grew dark and the Airbus was hurled this way and that. The roar of the storm outside the airplane competed with the cacophony of shrieks coming from inside as the passengers held on for dear life.

  ‘This is insane!’ Chloe gasped. ‘The storms are getting worse!’

  Becca did not reply as vivid flashes of lighting burst all around the Airbus and she heard blasts of thunder overpowering the roaring engines.

  The Airbus heaved upward and then plunged down again, rising and falling erratically as the crew fought for control on the flight deck, and from the corner of her eye she saw vivid webs of bright white lightning writhe and coil across the airplane’s wings like neon snakes.

  Before she could point them out to Chloe they vanished as a deluge of fast–moving objects obscured the view, and she heard a pounding crescendo shudder down the length of the airplane like boulders rolling down a steel chute. The entire Airbus seemed to vibrate as it was hammered with countless blows and Becca knew that they were being pelted with hailstones, the airplane rocketing through the fall
ing ice at three hundred miles per hour.

  ‘We’re going to crash!’ somebody yelled from further back in the airplane.

  Screams and cries of distress competed with the deafening roar of the hailstones and then Becca heard the whining note of the engines suddenly fade away and the airplane plummeted out of the sky. She felt her heart leap into her throat and her stomach tingled as it seemed to break free of its moorings and sailed up toward her lungs. Her belly strained against her seatbelt as she was lifted almost out of her seat and then suddenly the hailstorm vanished, the hammering on the fuselage falling into silence as the engines whined up again and the airplane levelled out amid the dense clouds.

  Becca thumped back down onto her seat and felt air escape from her lungs in a rush as she realised that she’d been holding her breath. She looked across at Chloe and saw her eyes filled with terror, her breathing coming in short, sharp gasps and her knuckles white from where she too had been gripping her seat.

  The Airbus engines whined and the airplane began climbing again. Becca sat motionless for a moment, and then a voice shouted above the chaotic weather scorching the skies around them.

  ‘We’re not landing, we’re going up again!’

  More shouts erupted among the passengers, some of them angry that they had again been ignored. Becca knew that they might simply be going around for another pass due to the extreme weather, but the passengers were clearly in no mood to wait. Suddenly Grant exploded out of his seat and rushed the cockpit door, screaming something unintelligible as he pounded his fists against it once more. Two more passengers staggered out of their seats and rushed Grant, both of them reaching out for him to tackle him to the ground.

  ‘They’ll kill us all!’ Grant screamed. ‘Make them land the plane!’

  Becca leaped out of her seat to assist them as they hauled Grant back from the cockpit door, the airplane twisting and heaving in the rough weather and flashes of lightning from outside flickering through the darkened passenger cabin. The three men were hurled back and forth in the turbulence, struggling with each other in the apocalyptic flashes of lightning blazing into the passenger cabin.