The Angels Weep b-3

by Wilbur Smith

  Then there was a little flick of liquid silver that distorted the perfect cruciform of the aircraft's wing profile. It popped open like a ripe cotton pod, and the Viscount seemed to lurch and yaw, then steady again. Seconds later they heard the crack of the strike to confirm what they had seen, and a hoarse roar of triumph burst up out of Tungata Zebiwe's throat.

  As he watched, the Viscount banked into a gentle turn, then abruptly something large and black detached itself from the port wing, and fell away towards the earth. The aircraft dropped its nose sharply, and the engine noise rose into a shrill wild whine.

  Standing in the control tower, staring out through the floor-to-ceiling non-reflective glass window into the mellow evening sky, and listening to the rapid tense exchanges between the flight controller and the Viscount pilot, Roland Ballantyne was held in a paralysing-vice of helplessness and rage.

  "Mayday! Mayday! Mayday! This is Viscount 782, do you copy, tower?" "Viscount 782, what is the nature of your emergency?" "We have taken a missile strike on our port engine housing. We are engine out."

  "Viscount 782, I query your assessment." The pilot's tension and stress flared. "Damn you, tower, I was in "Nam. It's a SAM hit, I tell you.

  I have activated -the fire-extinguishers and we still have control. I am initiating a one hundred and eighty-degree turn!" "We will have all emergency standby here, Viscount 782. What is your position?" "We are eighty nautical miles outbound." The pilot's voice cracked. "Oh God!

  The port engine has gone. It's fallen clean out of her." There was a long silence. They knew the pilot was fighting for control of the crippled machine, fighting the asymmetrical thrust of the remaining engine which was trying to flip the Viscount over into a graveyard spiral, fighting the enormous weight transfer caused by the loss of the port engine. In the cOntrol tower they were all frozen in silent agony, and then the radio speaker crackled and croaked. "Rate of descent three thousand feet a minute. Too fast. I can't hold her. We are going in. Trees, too fast. Too many trees. This is it! Oh mother, this is it!" Then there was no more.

  In the control tower Roland sprang back to the flight planning desk, and snapped at the assistant controller. "Rescue helicopters!"

  "There's only one helicopter within three hundred miles. That's your one coming in from Wankie." "The only one, are you sure?" "They have all been pulled out for a special op. in the Vumba mountains, yours is the only one in this zone." "Get me in touch with it," he ordered, and took the microphone from the controller as soon as contact was established.

  "This is Ballantyne, we have lost a Viscount with forty-six crew and passengers, "he said.

  "I copied the transmissions," the helicopter pilot answered.

  "You are the only rescue vehicle, what is your ETA?" "I'm fifty minutes out." "What personnel do you have aboard?" "I have Sergeant-Major Gondele and ten troopers." Roland had planned to rehearse night jump-landings during the return to Wankie. Gondele and his Scouts would be in full combat gear, and they would have Roland's personal pack and weapons aboard.

  "I'll be waiting on the tarmac for your pick-up. We will have a doctor with us, , he said. "This is Cheetah One standing by." Janine Ballantyne had the aisle seat, in the second last row on the port side of the Viscount. In the window seat was a teenage girl with braces on her teeth and her hair in pigtails. The girl's parents were in the seats directly in front of her.

  "Did you go to the crocodile farm?" she demanded of Janine.

  "We didn't get around to it,"Janine admitted.

  "They have got a huge big croc there, he's five metres long. They call him Big Daddy," the girl bur bled

  The Viscount had stabilized in its climb attitude, and the seatbelt lights went out. From the seat behind Janine the blue-uniformed hostess stood up and went forward along the aisle.

  Janine glanced across the aisle, across the two empty seats, through the Perspex porthole. The lowering sun was a big sullen red ball, wearing a moustache of purple cloud. The forest roof was a sea of dark green that spread away in all directions below them, its monotony broken by an occasional pimple of higher ground.

  "My daddy bought me a T-shirt with Big Daddy on it, but it's in my case-" There was a shattering crash, a great swirling silver cloud obscured the portholes, and the Viscount lurched so wildly that Janine was hurled painfully against her safety-belt. The air hostess was flung upwards against the roof of the cabin, and she fell back like a broken doll and lay twisted across the back of one of the empty seats.

  There was a cacophony of shrieks and screams from the passengers and the girl clung desperately to Janine's arm, shrilling incoherently.

  The cabin tilted sharply but smoothly as the aircraft banked, and then suddenly the Viscount plunged forward and swung viciously from side to side.

  The safety-belt held Janine in her seat, but it felt like an insane roller-coaster ride down the sky. Janine leaned over and hugged the child to try and still her piercing screams. Although her head was being whipped from side to side, Janine got a glimpse out of the porthole, and saw the horizon turning like the spokes of a spinning-wheel, and it made her feel giddy and nauseated. Then abruptly she focused on the silver wing of the aircraft below her.

  Where the streamlined engine-nacelle had been was a ragged hole.

  Through it she could see the fluffy roof of the forest. The torn wing was flexing and twisting, she could see the wrinkles appearing in the smooth metal skin. Her ears were popping and creaking with the violent pressure-change, and the trees were rushing towards her in a sombre green blur.

  She tore the child's arms from around her neck and forced her head down into her own lap. "Hold your knees," she shouted. "Keep your face down." And she did herself what she had ordered.

  Then they hit, and there was a deafening rending, roaring, crashing tumult. She was flung mercilessly about in her seat, tumbled and battered, blinded and stunned and hammered by flying pieces of debris.

  It seemed to go on for ever. She saw the roof above her clawed away and blinding sunlight struck her for an instant. Then it was gone, and something hit her across one shin. Clearly, above all the other sounds, she heard her own bone break, and the pain shot up her spine into her skull. End over end she was hurled, and then another blow in the back of the neck and her vision exploded into shooting sparks of light through a black singing void.

  When she recovered consciousness, she was still in her seat, but hanging upside down from her safety-strap. Her face felt engorged with the blood that had flowed into it, and her vision wavered and swam like a heat mirage. Her head ached. It felt as though a red-hot nail was being driven into the centre of her forehead with a sledgehammer.

  She twisted slowly, and saw that her broken leg was hanging down in front of her face, the toe pointing where the heel should have been.

  "I will never walk again," she thought, and the horror of it braced her. She reached for the release on the buckle of her safety-belt, and then remembered how many necks are broken from a release in the upside-down position. She hooked her elbow through the arm of her seat, and then lifted the release. Her hold on the seat flipped her as she fell and she landed on her hip with her broken leg twisted under her. The pain was too much and she lost consciousness again.

  It must have been hours later that she woke again for it was almost dark. The silence was frightening. It took her many groggy seconds to realize where she was, for she was looking at grass and tree trunks and sandy earth.

  Then she realized that the fuselage of the Viscount had been severed just in front of her seat, as though by a guillotine, the tail section was all that was left around her. Over Janine's head the body of the child who had been her seating partner still hung by its strap.

  Her arms dangled below her head, and her blonde pigtails pointed at the earth. Her eyes were wide open, and her face contorted with the terror in which she had died.

  Janine used her elbows to crawl out of the shattered fuselage, dragging her leg behind her and she felt the coldn
ess and nausea of shock sweep over her. Still on her stomach, she retched and vomited until she was too weak to do anything else but let herself sink back into the darkness in her head. Then she heard a sound in the silence, faint at first, but growing swiftly in volume.

  It was the wackety-wackety-wack of a helicopter's rotors. She looked up at the sky, but it was shrouded by the roof of the forest overhead, and she realized that the last rays of daylight had gone and the swift African night was rushing down upon the earth.

  "Oh please!" she screamed. "Here I am. Please help me!" But the sound of the helicopter grew no louder, it seemed to pass only a few hundred metres from where she lay under the concealing trees, and then the sound of its rotors receded as swiftly as the darkness came on, and at last there was silence.

  "A fire," she thought. "I must start a signal fire." She looked a-round her wildly, and almost within reach of where she lay was the crumpled body of the blonde girl's father who had been in the seat in front of her. She crawled to him, and touched his face, running her finger lightly over his eyelids. There was no flicker of response.

  She sobbed and drew back, and then steeled herself and returned once more to search the dead man's pockets. The disposable Bic plastic cigarette-lighter was in the side pocket of his jacket. At the first flick it gave her a pretty yellow flame, and she sobbed again this time with relief.

  Roland Ballantyne sat in the co-pilot's seat of the Super Frelon helicopter and peered down at the tree-tops only two hundred feet below him. It was so dark that the occasional clearing in the forest was a mere pale leprous patch. There was no definition in the tree-tops, they were a dark amorphous mattress. Even when the light had been stronger, the chances of spotting the wreckage below the tree-tops had been remote. Of course there was the possibility that part of a wing or tail-section had torn off and been left hanging high up, and in easy view. However, they could not trust to that.

  At first they were looking for damage to the tree-tops, a blaze of lopped branches or the telltale white splotches of torn bark and raw wet wood. They were looking for a signal flare, or for smoke or the chance reflection of the late sun off bare metal, but then the light started to go. Now they were flying in desperation, waiting for, but not really believing, they would see a signal flare or a torch or even a fire. Roland turned to the pilot and shouted in the rackety cabin.

  "Landing lights. Switch them on!" They will overheat and burn out in five minutes," the pilot bellowed back. "No good!" "One minute on, and one minute off to cool again," Roland told him. "Try it." The pilot reached for the switch and below them the forest was lit with the cruel bluish white glare of the phosphorous lamps. The pilot dropped even closer to the earth.

  The shadows below the trees were stark and black. In one clearing they trapped a small herd of elephant. The animals were monstrous and unearthly in the flood of light, with their tentlike ears extended in alarm. Then the helicopter bore on and plunged them back into utter darkness.

  Back and forth they flew, covering the corridor which the Viscount must have followed on her outward track, but that was one hundred nautical miles long and ten wide, one thousand square miles. It was full night now, and Roland glanced at the luminous dial of his wristwatch. It was nine o'clock, almost four hours since the Viscount had gone in. If there were survivors, they would be dying now, from the cold and shock, from loss of blood and internal injuries, while here in the main cabin of the Super Frelon there was a doctor, with twenty quarts of plasma, with blankets with the chance of life.

  Grimly Roland stared down into the brilliant circle of white light as it danced over the tree-tops like the spotlight over a theatrical stage, and there was a cold and desolate despair in him that seemed slowly to numb his limbs and paralyse his resolve. He knew she was down there, so close, so very close, and yet he was helpless.

  Suddenly he bunched his right fist and slammed it into the metal partition at his side. The skin smeared from his knuckles and the pain shot up his arm to the shoulder, but the pain was a stimulant, and in it he found his anger again. He cupped the anger to him, the way a man shelters a candle-flame in a high wind.

  In the seat beside him the pilot checked the time-lapse on his stopwatch and then switched off the landing lights to cool them. The blackness that followed was more intense for the brilliance that had preceded it. Roland's night-sight was destroyed, his vision filled with wriggling insects of starred light, and he was forced to cover his eyes with his hands for a few seconds to rest them and let them re-adjust.

  So he did not see the tiny dull red spark down below him that showed through the forest tops for the smallest part of a second, and then was left behind as the Super Frelon roared back on the next leg of its search pattern.

  Janine had gathered a pile of dried grass and twigs, and built them up into a cone ready for the flame of the lighter. It had been difficult work. She had dragged iherself slowly backwards on her buttocks and hands, with her broken leg sliding along after her as she gathered the kindling from the nearest bushes. Each time her leg caught or twisted over an irregularity of the torn earth, she almost fainted again with the pain.

  Once she had the fire ready, she had laid the plastic lighter beside it, and fallen back to rest. Almost immediately the night cold struck through her thin clothing and she began to shiver uncontrollably. It required an enormous effort of will to force herself to move again, but she started back towards the shattered tail-section of the Viscount. It was still just light enough to make out the trail of devastation that the main forward-section of the aircraft had smashed through the forest.

  There were pieces of metal and burst luggage and bodies littered down this dreadful pathway, although the main wreckage, carried on by its own weight, was not in sight from where she lay.

  Once again Janine called, "Is anybody there, is anybody else alive?" But the night was silent. She dragged herself on. The lighter tail-section in which Janine had been seated must have struck one of the larger trees as the fuselage broadsided, and it had been sheered off neatly. The whiplash of impact had broken the necks of the passengers around her only the fact that Janine had been leaning forward with her face pressed into her lap had saved her.

  Janine reached the severed tail end, and raised herself to peer in, avoiding looking at the body of the teenage girl which still hung upside-down from her inverted seat. The storage cupboards forward of the aircraft's galley had broken open and in the gloom she could make out a treasure-house of blankets and canned food and drink. She dragged herself inchingly towards it. The feel of a woollen blanket around her shoulders was a blessed boon, and then thirstily she drank two cans of bitter lemon before searching further through the spilled and jumbled contents of the storage cupboard.

  She found the first-aid kit and splinted and strapped her leg as best she could. The relief was immediate. There were disposable syringes and a dozen ampoules of morphine in the kit. The prospect of a surcease from agony was an acute temptation, but she knew it would dull her and inactivity or the inability to respond swiftly would be mortally dangerous in the long hours of darkness that lay ahead. She was still playing with the temptation when she heard the helicopter again.

  It was coming swiftly towards her. she dropped the syringe and lunged clumsily towards the gaping hole in the fuselage. She tumbled out onto the dusty earth, a fall of almost three feet, and the pain of her leg anchored her for seconds. Then, through it, she heard the whistle and throbbing beat of the helicopter coming towards her.

  She clawed her fingers into the earth, and bit into her bottom lip until she tasted blood in her mouth to subdue the pain as she dragged herself towards the pile of kindling. By the time she reached it, the helicopter engine was a vast roaring in her head, and the sky above the forest was lightening with a bluish-white glow. She flicked the plastic lighter, and held the tiny flame to the dried grass. It flared up swiftly. She lifted her face to the sky and in the light of the fire and the growing glare of the landing-lights, her cheeks wer
e smeared with dust and dried blood from the cut in her scalp, and wet with the new tears of mingled agony and hope that slid from under her swollen eyelids.

  "Please," she prayed. "Oh sweet merciful God, please let them see me." The landing-lights grew stronger, dazzling, blinding and then suddenly went out. Darkness struck her like a club. The sound of the helicopter passed over her, and she felt the buffeting down-draught of air from the rotors. For a brief instant she saw the black shark-like shape of it silhouetted against the stars and then it was gone, and the sound of the spinning rotors sank swiftly into silence. in that silence she heard her own wild shrieks of despair. "Come back! You can't leave me! Please come back!" She recognized the hysteria in her own voice, and thrust her fist into her mouth to gag it, but still the savage uncontrollable sobs racked her whole body, and the coldness Of the night was made unbearable by the icy grip that despair had upon her.