‘Understood, the air is still toxic. We will attempt to refuel and leave as soon as we can.’
‘Roger that, call when ready for departure. We have fighter escorts in–bound to guide you out.’
‘Wilco, three seven five.’
Jason looked out of his side window and his frustration melted away as he saw multiple vehicles turning onto the dispersal, their headlamps flashing and reflecting off the drenched asphalt. Their hazard lights provided a blaze of vivid colour in the darkness as they raced toward the airplane.
‘Here comes the cavalry.’
Behind the fire trucks Jason could see a bright yellow fuel bowser following, and he felt a rush of gratitude toward the men manning the trucks for their initiative. The vehicles rushed toward them and Jason whirled out of his seat and unlocked the cockpit door.
‘Stay here and man the radios,’ Jason said to Penrose. ‘If they need me, I’ll be organising the refuel.’
‘Will do.’
Jason stepped out of the cockpit and into the darkness of the passenger cabin and was instantly hit by a wall of sound that for a moment he feared was volcanic debris hammering the exterior of the fuselage.
Then, in the emergency lighting, he realised that the passengers were clapping.
Rounds of crackling applause rattled back and forth as he saw rows of faces beaming from behind yellow oxygen masks. The faces were lit only by the blazing hazard beacons sweeping like strobe lights through the windows as the support vehicles pulled in alongside the airplane, giving the otherwise dark interior the appearance of a cramped nightclub. Jason gave the passengers a thumbs–up as he moved to the exit door, and saw Becca and Chloe watching him from their seats nearby. Chloe smiled at him, while Becca stuck two fingers up at him in a derogatory “V” sign, but he could see her smiling as she did so.
Jason briefly lifted his mask and spoke loudly so that all of the passengers could hear him.
‘Stay seated, keep your masks on. When I open this door, the atmosphere inside the plane will quickly become unbreathable. We’ll refuel as quickly as we can and then we’re out of here, complete with a US Air Force escort of fighter planes.’
Jason saw the look of wonderment on the faces of several children, and he knew that the promise of protection from armed warplanes willing to come out here would provide comfort for the adults.
He peered out of the exit door window and immediately he saw firemen with masks and oxygen tanks hurrying to the side of the plane, two of them pushing mobile boarding ladders that they must have collected from closer to the airport terminal. They shoved the steps into place and Jason unlocked the exit, checked that all of the passengers were wearing their oxygen masks, then heaved down on the mechanism.
The door swung open and he felt a puff of frigid air blast into the cabin, felt spots of moisture on his skin from sleet gusting past the aircraft from the low, dark clouds scudding by overhead. The worst of the storm had blown through already, the ground below filled with broad puddles and the air thick with sleet that flared in the headlight beams as it fell. The fireman nearest the foot of the stairs hurried up to him and shouted to be heard above the wind.
‘You guys okay?’ The fireman glanced at Jason’s mask and instantly grabbed another that was hanging from his belt, this one fitted with two chunky filters at its base. ‘Put this on or you’ll be dead in less than a minute!’
Jason quickly switched masks, pulling two straps over the back of his head to secure it in place. His voice sounded muted and alien as he replied. ‘We’ve got one fatality and several minor injuries. We just want fuel and we’re out of here, you and everyone else down there included.’
‘That suits us! Get down here and help us out, we know what a bowser looks like but none of us know how to use the damned thing!’
***
XXXIV
Jason hurried down the ladder behind the fireman, and at the bottom one of the other men handed him a thick, fluorescent yellow coat that he threw on to protect him from the bitter cold. As he squinted into the sleet gusting down from the gloomy evening sky he could see the brightly illuminated airport terminal, rows of aircraft and vehicles all parked in their normal places. It looked like a perfectly operational airport, except for the fact that it was utterly silent but for the bitter winds rumbling in from the Atlantic. It was only when he looked more closely that he could see what had happened to the people who had once worked here.
In the distance, near an airplane that had been in the process of being loaded with luggage, he could see bodies lying motionless on the cold asphalt. Closer still, he could see birds and small animals lying dead in the grass or on the dispersal. Near the terminal a baggage truck had careered into a storage shed, suitcases strewn across the ground and a couple of loaders’ bodies lying nearby, their distant fluorescent jackets flickering faintly in the glow of the hazard lights.
‘Over here!’
Jason shook himself into motion and dashed to the fuel bowser, its engine running as the fire team worked around it. The team had unlatched the fuel hoses, but they were at a loss for what to do next. Jason, as part of his type rating, was trained to be familiar with the fuelling process on the Airbus A318, and he directed them quickly as soon as he had checked the signage confirming that the bowser carried A1 Jet Fuel.
‘It’s just like fuelling a car,’ he shouted, to be heard through his mask above the truck’s engine and the wind, ‘the caps are under the wings, the hose fits into them and is secured with these clasps. The bowser’s engine provides the pressure to drive the fuel up into the tanks. We’ll need an equal amount in each side of the airplane to maintain balance, and the counters in the side of the truck will record the flow in pounds and kilograms. I’ve opened the fuel transfer valves inside the aircraft, just plug her in and fill her up!’
The firemen dashed to follow his orders as their chief came to stand alongside him, a thick brown moustache beneath eyes of grey visible behind his mask.
‘How many people do you have?’ Jason asked.
‘Twelve,’ came the reply in heavily accented English. ‘Is there going to be enough room for us all?’
‘We’ll make room. How bad is it here?’
The fire chief’s shoulders sagged and he shook his head. ‘As bad as it gets. Most of the town is gone, Reykjavik too. The roads are clogged with crashed vehicles. There might be survivors here and there but we didn’t see any on our way. Most folks died where they were standing, including family members.’
Jason scanned the airport once again and beyond, to where he could see the distant twinkling lights of towns and villages. All of them seemed so normal and yet most of them were likely devoid of any life at all, victims of a silent killer that nobody could have seen coming.
‘Any danger that it could spread across the rest of the island?’ Jason asked.
‘Mercifully no,’ came the reply, ‘and anybody living on high ground around here will have escaped the carbon dioxide. The winds will disperse it eventually, and anything more than a few miles downwind it’ll be diluted enough that it won’t be able to take any more lives.’
Jason nodded, feeling somewhat relieved to know that, despite the terrible loss in this south–western corner of the island, the rest of Iceland would hopefully escape unharmed.
The fire chief grabbed his arm.
‘I know how this sounds, but when people who have survived the event learn that there’s an airplane here at Keflavik and it’s about to leave…’
Jason knew what the fire chief meant. The Airbus A318, like all aircraft, had a maximum take off weight that could not be exceeded under any circumstances. They could not take on too many new passengers, and although Jason would be willing to dump the baggage in the fuselage to allow a few more people on board, they still could not exceed their maximum limit.
‘I know,’ he said simply.
The chief squeezed his arm in gratitude, and then he returned to help his men complete the fuelling process. Th
e fuel bowser’s engine note picked up and Jason saw the fuel flowing now into the Airbus’s starboard wing as the fire crews stood back from the attached hose and began monitoring the flow.
He turned away and spent a few moments walking around checking the Airbus’s undercarriage, seeing a lot of mud and grass cluttering the wheels and cables but no permanent damage. He was about to assist the firecrews once more when he saw new headlights appear in the distance, racing toward them across the dispersal. Two four–by–four vehicles, laden with equipment, rushed to the airplane and screeched to a halt on the asphalt.
Jason walked toward them as the occupants hurled themselves out of the vehicles. They dragged a multitude of sensors with them that they immediately erected on the dispersal. There were six people in all, each wearing personal respirators much like those of the fire crews, that shielded their faces and their lungs from the poisoned air.
Jason slowed as he watched them working with feverish haste, saw them holding small devices that he guessed were for measuring the air quality. Two of them were wearing bizzare silver suits, some kind of thermal protection he presumed, and he figured them for the USGS survey team that Narsarsuaq had been in contact with.
He was about to tap one of them on the shoulder when the person whirled, reached up and hauled off their mask as they shouted across the dispersal.
‘The air’s clear!’
The person was an American woman in her forties with black hair and spectacles, her features taut with an anxiety that made Jason hesitate in case she suddenly collapsed and asphyxiated in front of him. The woman did not collapse however, so Jason reached up and gently removed his mask, sniffing at the cold air.
‘Who’s in charge here?’ the woman demanded.
‘That would be me,’ Jason said, ‘First Officer Harper, Phoenix Air.’
The woman did not introduce herself. In fact, she barely even bothered to look at him as she turned and tossed the device in her hand away.
‘All of you, get on board as fast as you can!’ she roared to her team.
Jason saw the other five members of the USGS team make a mad dash for the airplane as they tore off their masks and tanks and thundered up the boarding ladder. Jason frowned as he turned to the woman.
‘They need to clear that rubbish up,’ he snapped, ‘we can’t afford to get foreign object damage in our engines when they start up again.’
‘When are we leaving?’ she demanded as she hauled off her silvery thermal suit, apparently ignoring his concerns.
‘The air’s clear and we’re refuelling now,’ Jason said with a shrug. ‘What’s the rush?’
The woman stared at him as though he was some kind of imbecile. She pointed to the east as she shouted her response above the gale, her hair flying like black snakes behind her.
‘Pyroclastic flow!’
For a moment, the words didn’t register with him even though he knew full well what such a flow was. He frowned as he looked into the darkness in the indicated direction, the distant hills and mountains shrouded in gloom and barely discernible from the darkened sky, the lights of villages and towns twinkling at their base.
‘The ash cloud was still up there when we began our descent,’ he protested.
The woman grabbed his shoulders in her small but strong hands, and for a moment Jason thought that she might drive a knee into a most valuable part of his anatomy. Instead, she spun him around and almost screamed in his ear as she pushed him toward the airplane.
‘Pyroclastic flow! We have to leave, now!’
Jason’s heart almost leaped out of his throat as he looked again to the east, and then he realised that the distant hills were not hills at all and that they were moving. A vast wall of tumbling cloud was tearing toward them across mainland Iceland at phenomenal speed, and the twinkling lights of towns and villages were blinking on and off at random. He realised that they were not the interior lights of houses but buildings bursting into flame and then vanishing as they were consumed by the searing cloud of debris.
Billowing, boiling and flattening everything in its path, the pyroclastic flow was blazing toward them as it tore away from the slopes of the nearby volcano, driven by the unspeakable weight of miles of ash cloud collapsing down under gravity above it.
***
XXXV
‘Go, now!’
Jason saw the firefighters still refuelling the Airbus’s port wing and he sprinted beneath the airplane’s fuselage and yelled at the top of his voice.
‘Unplug the bowser and get on board, now! We’ve got to leave!’
His voice reached them above the gales and they looked at him in confusion, and then in the direction he was pointing. All at once they shut down the pumps and yanked the hose from the wing. Jason dashed from left to right, grabbing discarded jackets and respirator tanks and hurling them aft of the engine intakes so that they could not be ingested into the spinning turbofan blades. He then checked that the fuel caps had been secured correctly before he dashed for the boarding ladder.
He was about to climb up it when he saw a figure rush down the boarding ladder and sprint away from the airplane, his hands manacled in tie wraps.
‘Grant, get back aboard!’
Grant glanced back at Becca at the top of the ladder but he didn’t stop running, his gait awkward as he staggered away into the freezing darkness. Jason cursed and was about to give chase when he saw the faces of countless passengers watching him from the airplane windows, and he knew that he had no choice. He kicked the boarding ladder’s wheel locking mechanisms loose and then sprinted up into the aircraft, the ladder shaking unstably as he did so.
Becca and Chloe were on their feet at the door, shivering in the cold, their masks off and concern on their faces as they looked at him for direction. Jason leaped on board, turned and then grabbed the boarding ladder and shoved it as hard as he could away from the airplane, toward the nose. The ladder keeled over and crashed onto its side on the asphalt.
‘Shut the door and strap in, we’re taking off!’
He didn’t wait for a response from Becca as he opened the cockpit door and hurled himself into his seat. Penrose watched as he began frantically activating the aircraft’s systems once again.
‘What’s going on?’ Penrose asked. ‘Have we refuelled already?’
Jason smiled through gritted teeth as he replied.
‘Our luck continues. If we’re not airborne in about two minutes we’re going to be turned into charcoal, and now we’re half full of fuel too.’
Penrose didn’t ask for details, quickly doing what he could in terms of good airmanship as Jason struggled to do in sixty seconds what usually took several minutes. He tossed the checklists aside and did everything from memory, performing the tasks by rote. Cockpit instruments flickered back into life around him as he activated the avionics. His fingers flew across switches and overhead panels as he re–routed the fuel and activated hydraulic pumps.
‘APU is still running,’ Jason said as he opened the fuel valves, ‘keep an eye on it.’
‘I’ve got revolutions,’ Penrose confirmed as he checked the APU and glanced at other instruments. ‘Voltages look good.’
The cockpit lights flickered on again and Jason saw the glow from the passenger cabin brighten as the main lights came on inside. He checked out of his side window and saw nobody around the starboard engine as he quickly opened the fuel valves and checked the power load before he checked the throttles were at idle and hit the starter switch for the engine. Almost immediately he heard the distinctive whine of the turbofan as it started up, a faint vibration rattling through the fuselage as the engine came on line.
‘We have an uneven fuel loading,’ Penrose noted as he became more used to the instrument layout. ‘The port wing is light.’
‘I’ll use the pumps to move the fuel about,’ Jason replied as he watched the temperatures and pressures rising in the starboard engine. ‘Check our port wing for debris.’
Penrose leaned
forward and looked out at the left wing. He was about to reply when Jason heard the exit door slam shut behind them and Becca yelled to him from the passenger cabin.
‘We’re all aboard, hatches secured!’
‘Port wing’s clear,’ Penrose confirmed.
Jason released the Airbus’s parking brake and eased the throttles forward, and the Airbus began to move under the power from a single engine as Jason used the nosewheel lever to turn right and swing the airliner tightly around on the asphalt. The port wingtip passed over the discarded boarding ladder as the Airbus turned, the engine exhaust blowing fluorescent jackets away into the darkness behind it.
Jason looked out of his side window and saw the immense pyroclastic flow billowing toward them, saw trees and buildings flattened in its path in clouds of smoke and rippling lines of glowing orange flame. Amid the tumbling, fearsome deluge bolts of white lightning flickered back and forth in a hellish display of nature’s might unleashed.
‘Dear God,’ Penrose uttered.
‘Engines!’ Jason snapped.
Penrose shifted his gaze to the instruments as Jason transferred the power supply from the APU to the starboard engine, then shut down the APU while starting the port engine. His fingers flew across the switches as Penrose replied.
‘Engine two is turning, fuel flowing, Ts and Ps coming up.’
‘Two stages of flap, set trim for take off.’
Penrose responded to Jason’s commands, knowing well where the respective levers were located and setting them accordingly. He spun the trim wheel to the takeoff setting as Jason hit the landing lights, aware that other aircraft could be in the air now as he keyed the transmit button.
‘Narsarsuaq we’re departing Keflavik, be advised all escorting aircraft to stay clear due to volcanic activity. Do not land!’
‘Roger Phoenix, wilco!’
Jason glanced out of his side window and followed the darkened verge of the runway to the right of the airplane, the Airbus taxiing quickly back down toward the threshold of runway two niner as he ran the take off checks through his mind. The high winds and proximity of the pyroclastic flow meant that he did not dare to take off with a tail wind. Instead, the Airbus had to taxi back to the runway threshold upon which it had originally landed, and that meant heading straight toward the very pyroclastic flow that might soon kill them all. Worse, they had landed without power and thus without reverse thrust, increasing the Airbus’s landing roll and the distance they now had to cover.
Altitude (Power Reads Book 1) Page 17
