Becca moved to his side and took one arm in hers.
‘Jason, Captain Reed wanted us to land at Keflavik and take on some fuel.’
Jason nodded vaguely as though he had barely heard her. She tugged his arm and he looked down at her, and then as though awakening from a nightmare the light of life returned to his eyes and he snapped out of his torpor as his training took over.
‘Right,’ he said. ‘First aid?’
‘In hand.’
‘We need to move the captain out of sight and strap him in,’ Jason said.
‘I’ll help.’
Feeling like they were in a disaster movie with no end, Jason helped her drag the captain’s body into a sitting position. As with all deceased people, the body had voided itself immediately after death and Becca had to strain to avoid gagging as they manoeuvred the captain’s corpse into place and then fastened the seatbelt around his waist. Reed’s head flopped down and his chin thumped against his chest. Jason grabbed a blanket from under the seat and unravelled it, then gently draped it over Reed’s body.
‘What happened?’ Jason asked her as they stood back from their grisly task.
‘He got thrown,’ Becca explained. ‘Another passenger collided with him, and when he fell he broke his neck across the arm of the seat.’
Jason closed his eyes for a moment and then sucked in a deep breath of air. ‘Is the other guy okay?’
Becca nodded and gestured behind them.
‘He’s the one who threatened to break into the cockpit. He got pretty beat up by some of the other passengers but he’s still in one piece.’
She turned and gestured to the cockpit, to where Grant had been sprawled on the floor, but Grant was no longer there. She heard the sound of running boots and looked up.
Becca felt her blood turn to ice as she saw Grant’s enraged, battered face vanish from view as the cockpit door slammed shut behind him and they heard the locks thrust into place.
***
XXVIII
Jason stared at the cockpit door, mortified as it was locked before his eyes with him on the outside and the captain dead. For a moment he was paralysed, unable to comprehend the sheer volume of misfortune that had been sent his way. This, to be unable to reach the controls of his own airplane, was without a doubt the worst nightmare that any pilot could experience short of the wings falling off.
Jason bolted to the cockpit door and hammered on it with one fist.
‘Open the door, right now!’
There was no sound from within the cockpit. He pressed his ear to it and listened, but he could hear nothing.
‘What the hell does this guy want from us?’
Becca appeared so horrified that she could barely speak.
‘I think that he’s suffering from a terminal illness,’ she uttered, ‘he’s the cause of all the trouble back here. If Grant hadn’t tried to threaten me or open the cabin exit, the captain wouldn’t be lying dead now. He’s not in his right state of mind, Jason. I think he was flying to Iceland to die.’
Jason leaned against the cockpit door and sighed. For the most part, the crews of airlines never got to know their passengers. Manifests presented names, the people in the seats presented their faces, but they were all just one among millions travelling everyday on airliners around the globe. Their problems, fears, hopes, families, jobs and futures were all irrelevancies to the cabin crews, whose only job was to get them from one airport terminal to another as safely and swiftly as possible and then turn the plane around ready for the next flight.
Jason had received training in how to deal with troublesome passengers, as had Becca and Chloe, but this was something entirely different. The passenger was terminally ill aboard a plane with no apparent hope of landing safely, and the most experienced of the two pilots was now lying dead in a seat in the passenger cabin. Worse, a similar event had occurred just a few years’ previously in another Airbus over the French Alps.
There could not have been a pilot alive on earth who had not read the report on Germanwings Flight 9525, a scheduled service out of Barcelona to Dusseldorf on March 24th 2015. The airplane had crashed after the first officer, a man previously treated for suicidal tendencies and declared “unfit for work” by a doctor, had kept the doctor’s report from his employers and instead reported for duty as normal. While his captain was momentarily out of the cockpit en route at cruise altitude, the first officer had locked the cockpit door and deliberately flown the airplane into the French Alps. All one hundred and fifty people on board were killed.
The incident, recorded entirely by the aircraft’s cockpit recorders, resulted in yet further changes to the rules of cockpit management and the way in which the mental health of commercial pilots was monitored and treated by their employers.
This was something entirely different though. This was a suicidal civilian inside the cockpit, with presumably no knowledge of aviation. Jason figured he knew what else was on the man’s mind, and that something was that his death should be as quick and painless as possible. Maybe he had family in Iceland who had agreed to help him? Or perhaps a doctor there sympathetic to euthanasia, although Jason was pretty sure that euthanasia was illegal in Iceland. Maybe he had decided to travel to a freezing wasteland and just wander off into the darkness, or was on a connecting flight to some other part of the world where he could die in peace? Jason realised that he didn’t damned well care right now, and he glanced to his right at the entrance keypad outside the cockpit door.
The security requirements of modern aviation meant that it was going to be incredibly hard to force his way back into the cockpit of the Airbus A318 unless the man inside unlocked the door. The whole point of the security was to prevent unlawful access to the cockpit in flight, after the terrible incident of 9/11 and many, many others that had preceded it.
‘You’ve got to get him out of there,’ Becca said.
‘Thanks for the tip, real glad you’re here!’
Becca backed up a pace and Jason closed his eyes and tried to control his anger. He knew that by now the fuel remaining in the tanks would be incredibly low, that they probably only had enough to get back to Keflavik and make a single, difficult landing attempt. The fact that he was unable to see a damned thing out of the cockpit windshield made little difference in terms of landing the plane, as in low visibility he wouldn’t have seen a horizon or runway until the last moment anyway. But the psychological effect was immense, as was the stress of attempting an Instrument Flight Rules ILS landing in heavy weather, in darkness, without any reference to the ground or a horizon at all. The sunlight streaming through the cabin was shimmering gold now as the sun began to set, and far below he knew that the twilight would be rapidly deepening.
The only option lay in the entrance keypad beside the door. There was an emergency over ride code that would allow him to access the cockpit once again, but it also would sound an alarm that lasted thirty seconds. If there was no response to the alarm inside of thirty seconds, the cockpit door would unlock for five seconds, allowing aircrew back inside the cockpit. The only way to prevent this was if the person inside the cockpit knew how to operate the “lock toggle”, which would then prevent access for at least twenty minutes by rendering the emergency access code inoperative.
The question was, would Grant be able to figure out how to use the lock toggle to keep Jason out permanently before the alarm ended and the door unlocked?
A voice broke into his reverie.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking.’
Jason opened his eyes and an icy chill stiffened his spine as he heard the opening line of the announcement. He stood back from the door and looked up at the camera pointing down at him, and then he heard the voice again.
‘It’s wonderful how they write little indications of what every switch and button does up here in the cockpit. There’s one here that says fuel dump.’
A rush of terrified cries swept through the passenger cabin and threatened to overwhe
lm Jason. He turned to see endless rows of horrified faces staring back at him as the passengers realised that there was no longer a pilot in the cockpit, only a deranged lunatic who seemed intent on dying as quickly as possible.
Jason grabbed the intercom microphone and spoke calmly into it, mastering his fear and revulsion.
‘You don’t know what you’re doing.’
To his surprise he heard his own voice across the public address system, and realised that in his ineptitude the intruder had activated it.
‘I know what I want to do,’ Grant replied, his voice cracking with emotion, ‘and by the state of this cockpit it doesn’t look as though you’re going to be able to save us anyway.’
Jason made sure he did not shout as he replied, sensing the self–justification now poisoning Grant’s voice. ‘Now you can see what we’re up against.’
‘Might as well give up now, seeing as we can’t land. The windows are all shattered.’
More gasps of terror erupted from behind Jason and he turned to see the passengers straring at him with stricken expressions. One of the teenagers called out to him.
‘Maybe we should just let him fly us straight into the bloody ocean, the amount of good you’ve done us!’
Becca stared in horror at Jason but he ignored the taunting. He didn’t have time to explain to them that the plane was still able to land perfectly well, albeit with a rather increased level of anxiety. He kept his voice calm as he replied to the man in the cockpit.
‘Why is it that you want to die so much?’
The question was met with a moments’ silence. ‘That’s none of your business.’
‘You haven’t washed in days, your hair stinks and it looks like you’ve been wearing the same clothes since last week. There’s got to be a reason for that, right?’
No reply came from inside the cockpit so Jason went on, hoping against hope that he wasn’t about to provoke the man into sending the airplane crashing at supersonic speed into the ocean seven miles below them.
‘You’re terminally ill, right Grant?’
The entire compliment of passengers could hear the exchange and all of them were focussed entirely on Jason’s voice.
‘Shut up!’
The voice shrieked from the cockpit and seemed to echo down the passenger cabin and all the way back up again. Jason did not shut up, nor did he back down.
‘You’re terminally ill, so you’ve decided that you just don’t care who you’re going to hurt. You’re already the proximal cause of the captain’s loss of life. Why face a long and lingering death from some horrible disease when you can just blow yourself into oblivion and take a hundred or so innocent people with you?’
The man’s voice cried out from the cockpit. ‘Those innocent people beat me! They smashed my face!’
‘Only after you caused the death of a good man,’ Jason countered. ‘You came here to die for some reason and you want it to be fast, don’t you?’
There was a long silence. Jason let it build for a few moments before he spoke again.
‘You don’t want to suffer, right?’
‘I don’t want to die like that.’ Jason could hear the anguish in the man’s voice, the cry for surcease and for sympathy that resided somewhere deep inside even the most reprehensible individuals. He couldn’t know what sickness it was that was tearing Grant’s body and mind apart from the inside, but he realised that given the option he too would have preferred a quick end to a long and agonising battle. Grant’s voice echoed solemnly through the airplane once again. ‘I don’t want to die down there.’
‘And we don’t want to die up here,’ Jason replied. ‘Either way, we’re all going to die one day. The question is, how do you want to go? As a mass murderer or with your head held high?’
A long silence followed as Jason held on to the microphone, hoping against hope that he had gotten through to whatever remained of the man that the tortured and embittered individual inside the cockpit had once been.
‘I can’t do that,’ Grant replied, his voice a tortured whisper. ‘I just can’t do that. We’re all going to die anyway, why not make it so fast that nobody feels a thing?’
Jason’s finger tightened as he pressed harder on the speaker button.
‘There are children on board,’ he hissed. ‘You might want to end it quickly, but they want to survive this.’
Across the broadcast system he could hear Grant’s muffled sobs, his reply broken and ragged as though his vocal chords were being twisted.
‘This life, there’s too much pain,’ he gasped. ‘It’s better this way. I won’t even know when we hit the ground, any more than you will.’
Jason knew that Grant was no longer listening to reason, perhaps was no longer able to understand reason, his mind too far gone into the throes of terminal despair and grief. He gritted his teeth and with one hand he tapped in the emergency access code into the keypad. Instantly he heard an alarm sound inside the cockpit that was now broadcast across the entire passenger cabin.
‘What’s that?’ Grant yelped, his voice ragged with tears.
‘That’s the aircrew proximity alarm,’ Jason lied. ‘If I don’t get back into that cockpit in the next sixty seconds, the airplane will turn and land automatically at the nearest available airfield. The computers know that the pilots are not in the cockpit.’
Jason waited but he heard nothing, and he knew that Grant was searching for the source of the alarm and trying to work out how to send the airplane into its terminal descent toward the ocean or the ground. If the former happened they would all die, for the lock toggle would prevent access to the cockpit for longer than they had fuel remaining aboard and the aircraft would plummet to destruction whether Grant initiated it or not.
Jason heard movement inside the cockpit, the sound of Grant desperately hunting for the source of the alarm. The lock toggle switch was for good reason concealed and did not illuminate or flash in any way that made it conspicuous.
Jason counted down the alarm in his mind. He had told Grant that he had sixty seconds, but in fact they were already down to ten. Jason steeled himself, pressed one hand against the door and crouched slightly as he prepared to throw his entire weight into it.
Five, four, three, two, one…
Jason hurled himself into the cockpit door with every ounce of his strength as the lock clicked open. The door flew back and he saw Grant’s eyes widen in horror as he turned in surprise. Jason slammed into the smaller man and he was hurled backwards into the cockpit as they both crashed down onto the centre console.
***
XXIX
Grant’s back smashed into the throttle banks and threw them forwards, and the Airbus engines screamed into full power as Jason swung a punch with all of his might into Grant’s already bloodied face.
The blow caught the pale man across the right eye and his head smacked across the controls. Grant screeched in pain and he kicked out, his boot landing deep in Jason’s belly and folding him over as the breath rushed from his lungs and he saw whorls and stars of light flash before him.
Grant scrambled off the control panel and tried to push Jason out of the cockpit, but Jason reached out and wrapped his arms tightly about Grant’s emaciated frame. Jason sucked in a full breath, filled his lungs with it and then squeezed with all of his might as he lifted the smaller man off his feet. Grant cried out as Jason turned around and then rushed out of the cockpit and threw Grant to one side.
The sick man slammed into the cabin wall outside the cockpit and Jason pivoted on one heel and drove a knee up into Grant’s belly as the weaker man spun around. The blow landed with a dull thump and Grant folded over his stomach and sagged to his knees, his enraged cries mutating into grotesque wails of pain and desolation as what fight he had left went out of him.
Jason staggered to one side, his heart hammering in his chest and his legs rubbery as adrenaline surged through his veins. He reached down and grabbed Grant beneath one shoulder as he turned to Becca, who
had watched everything from nearby.
‘Grab his other arm!’ Jason snapped. ‘Let’s get him locked down!’
Becca did as she was told, and with Jason quickly dragged Grant’s unresisting frame to one side and slammed him down into a seat next to the dead captain. Becca fastened his seatbelt, his feeble protests and resistance crumbling into the sobs of a man whose mind had become as broken as his body.
Jason grabbed a set of plastic cable tie restraints, several of which were kept upon all airliners to detain and incapacitate troublesome passengers. Becca fitted them to Grant’s wrists, and he sat weeping as she fastened the ties and then looked at the passengers sitting closest to the weeping man.
‘If he moves, you can do anything you want to keep him pinned in place, understood?’
The three men sitting nearby nodded in unison, all of them casting dark glances at Grant.
Jason stood and looked down the passenger cabin, his breathing coming in gasps as he surveyed them and saw them all looking back at him expectantly. They had seen little of Jason since the flight had begun four hours earlier in the United Kingdom, and now they were uncertain of what to expect.
‘I think that losing one pilot is enough for today, don’t you agree?’ he demanded, ignoring the microphone and instead deepening his voice and shouting down the length of the passenger cabin. ‘Is there anyone else aboard with any stupid ideas about interfering further in the flying of this airplane?’
The passengers stared back at him but nobody moved, everyone watching and waiting expectantly.
‘I’m going back into that cockpit. I’m going to take this plane back down to Keflavik. I’m going to land it there, and I’m going to contact fire services and local geographic survey teams that are on their way to the airport. Together, we’re going to refuel this airplane and get the hell back home to England. Is there anybody who has a problem with that?’
Again, the only thing that met his statement was silence. He tempered his voice in response.
Altitude (Power Reads Book 1) Page 14
