Rogue Element

by David Rollins

  The aisles were blocked by the contents of the overhead lockers that had burst open. Two rows in front of Joe, a heavy briefcase fell from an overhead locker and clubbed a woman senseless.

  Unidentifiable lumps were tumbling down the aisles. It dawned on Joe’s slow, oxygen-starved brain that the objects were people whose seatbelts probably hadn’t been buckled. The bodies accumulated at the forward bulkhead. Joe noted that most of the faces he could see in the growing pile of rags were blue. He stared at them as an observer removed from reality, in shock, disbelieving. Perhaps they’re dead, he thought, and then he realised that they were.

  The thin air provided little in the way of resistance and the 747’s descent rate built frighteningly. ‘Two-zero-zero!’ shouted Granger. ‘One-five-zero!’ The aircraft shook and trembled. The speed increased. The air protested as the monster tore a hole through it. The cockpit filled with the shriek. The numbers winding backwards on the altimeter transfixed the three pilots. The 747 nudged its speed of maximum operation, 0.92 Mach. And then its rate of descent began to slow as the air thickened, just as the manual said it would.

  Flemming pulled back on the control wheel and the aircraft’s nose began to rise slowly.

  ‘Three thousand feet to altitude.’ Granger continued the countdown.

  The g-forces built, driving the pilots and passengers into their seats.

  ‘Two thousand feet to altitude.’

  The aircraft rumbled and shook, angrily protesting against the loads acting on it.

  ‘One thousand feet to altitude.’

  The captain eased the control forward to the neutral position as the jumbo levelled out.

  ‘At altitude!’ announced Granger, sweating profusely.

  The 747 sat on 10 000 feet, just above a blanket of stratus cloud.

  ‘The Lowest Safe Altitude in these parts is around eight thousand feet!’ Rivers said, yelling the information as she juggled a bunch of maps and charts. ‘We’ve got Mount Kambuno with a spot height of around eight thousand nine hundred feet, but I think it’s to the north of our position!’ She checked the aircraft’s FMC. She noticed for the first time that both the flight navigation and directional instrumentation were dead. Shit! There was no way of knowing for certain exactly where they were. Nevertheless, she was still reasonably sure of their position.

  ‘LSA, eight thousand,’ confirmed Granger. He checked the altimeter. They were at 10 000 feet. That meant just 2000 feet of air between them and the end of Qantas’s perfect fatality-free record.

  The hydraulics pressure warning light flashed. Granger and Flemming checked the pressure gauge. It was falling. Hydraulics – oil – was the aircraft’s blood. The 747 had four redundant hydraulics systems. Something had taken them all out of operation. The aircraft only needed one of those systems to operate the flaps, ailerons, elevator and undercarriage. Without those control surfaces, the plane was not flyable. Or landable.

  Flemming took his foot off the left rudder pedal. The 747 yawed to the right with the asymmetrical thrust provided by the two good engines on the left wing. The effect on the dropping hydraulics pressure was slight but significant. Mercifully, it decreased.

  The 747 was capable of maintaining altitude on two engines, even climbing slowly, but with falling hydraulics pressure they were merely forestalling the inevitable.

  The three pilots on the flight deck knew that their lives hung by the barest of threads. If they turned the plane around using the ailerons, elevator and rudder, the drain on the hydraulics system could mean there wouldn’t be enough pressure left to lower the flaps or undercarriage for landing. And with both engines on one side of the plane inoperable, attempting to steer it with the throttles wasn’t an option.

  ‘The news gets worse,’ said Rivers, ripping off her oxygen mask along with Granger and Flemming. They were now in a breathable atmosphere.

  Thick, crimson blood slopped from the captain’s mask. ‘It’s okay,’ he assured them, waving his hand dismissively before wiping his nose with the sleeve of his white shirt.

  Rivers checked the FMC. ‘We’ve got no radios, no transponders, nothing.’

  ‘Yeah, saw that,’ nodded Granger.

  All three of them looked at the displays, which were usually filled with numbers. Blank. The 747 carried two VHF (line-of-sight) radios, an HF (long distance) radio and two transponders, transmitters that painted their 747 on air traffic control screens on the ground. Surely they couldn’t all be stuffed?

  The 747 began to sink slowly through 10 000 feet, the LSA. Now that it was yawing due to unequal thrust provided by the two remaining engines on the left wing, the aircraft was presenting more of its surface area to the airflow. That meant more friction, and therefore more power was needed to overcome it if they were to continue flying level. Flemming goosed the throttles slightly. The added thrust stabilised the aircraft again at 10 000 feet. Soon, however, there would be no hydraulic pressure at all. The weight of the control surfaces themselves would force them to sag, and the 747 would begin an accelerating spiral into the ground.

  A decision needed to be made. And fast.

  ‘Opinions?’ asked Flemming.

  ‘Force land somewhere here,’ said Granger. ‘I don’t know how much time we’ve got. At least if we put her down now, we’ll be able to manoeuvre a little, and maybe get our flaps and gear lowered.’

  ‘Agreed,’ said Rivers, her voice tight. With no hydraulics, they had ceased to become pilots. They were now merely passengers at near-useless controls, riding in a 250 000 kilogram missile loaded with tonnes of fuel.

  ‘Agreed,’ echoed the captain. ‘Dump as much gas as we can. And get off a Mayday call.’

  Rivers looked blank. Their radios were dead. ‘But captain, the –’

  Flemming answered her expression. ‘You never know.’

  The nose of the 747 fell towards the soft, silver lake of stratus cloud spread out below them. But was a mountain hidden somewhere within it? Or did the cloud extend all the way to the ground? In either case they would simply drill a large hole in the earth and never see it coming. All three pilots on the flight deck held their breath as the first wisps of silver slid over their windows. In an instant, the stars were obliterated.

  Raptor couldn’t believe his eyes when the seven-four pulled out of its dive, seemingly in control, above the cloud. What do I have to do to score a kill? he asked himself.

  His fuel pressure and contents were still okay so he decided to wait. There was plenty of smoke trailing from the 747. The drama was not over yet. He smiled with satisfaction when the 747 began to nose under the cloud. There was rugged country beneath. Lots of immovable things to fly into. No 747 pilot would dip below 10 000 around here. Unless there was no choice.

  Raptor watched as the 747 slipped below the surface of the cloud like a torpedoed ship ploughing under a ghost sea. This was getting interesting. He beamed the jumbo with active radar and followed it down from a safe distance.

  When the plane levelled out of the dive, Joe couldn’t believe he was still alive and that the plane hadn’t crashed. The stench of vomit filled his nostrils. Much of the vibration had stopped but there was still a fair amount of noise. His mind was starting to grapple successfully with reality. He tried to place the noise and decided it was both wind and engine roar. Most of the passengers were calm now, as if resigned to their fate, whatever it would be. That was certainly Joe’s outlook. He reflected on the fact that death by plane crash was an awful, protracted way to die. It had been going on now for, he checked his watch, more than ten minutes. At least it gave you some time to say goodbye. ‘Goodbye,’ he said aloud, testing the realisation. No one said anything back.

  Bali, 2036 Zulu, Tuesday, 28 April

  Abe Niko, a Japanese traffic controller on contract at Denpasar Airport, blinked with surprise. At this hour of the morning the skies were pretty quiet. There were only four aircraft on his screen: a KLM 747 out of Melbourne, Australia, bound for Amsterdam via Singapore, a Garuda
767 en-route to Jakarta, a weather delayed Qantas 747 headed for London, and a private Beech Baron on an intra-island flight, inbound, sixteen miles from the Denpasar runway.

  The Qantas plane was on the screen and then it wasn’t. It had gone, vanished! The suddenness of the disappearance made him blink, as if he wasn’t sure what he’d just seen. Qantas Flight 1. Abe’s brain worked hard to lift itself out of the torpor induced by a combination of boredom and the early morning hour. Shit, that could mean only one of two things. The first was that the aircraft’s transponders had become unserviceable. That was highly improbable. The second more likely possibility? Well, that was too ghastly to even contemplate. He noted the time – 4.36 am local time. Abe picked up the phone and hurriedly found a line out.

  The radio clicks exchanged between the Indonesian pilot and his controller joined the traffic on Ruth Styles’ desktop at NSA Hawaii. There was a lot of activity going on there, she thought, given the time of day, or rather, night. She tagged it with an asterisk and sent it on.

  QF-1 shot out of the cloud base, stratus swirling in a vortex behind it. The high country of central Sulawesi that filled the pilots’ windshields was the antithesis of the friendly winking threshold strobe lights of a commercial runway.

  Flemming, Granger and Rivers gaped at the rugged ridge lines below them, and the occasional mountain face that rose above them: they knew they only had a few minutes to live.

  What was now uppermost in their minds was giving everyone as much chance as possible to survive the landing. Flemming and Granger trimmed the aircraft for a descent rate of 500 feet per minute. The aircraft shook and bucked in protest but obeyed the pilots’ commands.

  Flemming flicked the intercom switch and addressed his passengers and flight crew. ‘This is Captain Flemming. Both the engines on the right-hand wing have failed. Without them, this aircraft cannot maintain level flight.’ This was not strictly true but it wasn’t the right time to give an aircraft systems lecture. ‘We will be making a forced landing shortly.

  ‘If you are not in the crash position with your head forward between your knees, adopt it now. Make sure your seatbelts are fastened tightly and that any children are also restrained in their seats.

  ‘There is enough oxygen at this altitude so you no longer need the masks. Your flight attendants will assist you if you have problems.

  ‘We have broadcast our difficulties and our position to the local authorities. Help is no doubt already on the way,’ he lied.

  Who was it that said, ‘You don’t find atheists in foxholes’? Flemming couldn’t remember but at that moment, even though he never considered himself a religious man, he could see the truth in it. He concluded the announcement. ‘If any of you pray to God, now is the time to do it.’

  There was no point doing the laconic pilot routine. He had just brought four hundred people through a gut-wrenching dive from 35 000 to 10 000 feet in a handful of minutes. Perhaps a word about rescue – even if it wasn’t true – and the reassurance that they were in God’s hands, would do some good. He didn’t know and he had run out of time to think about it. The moonlit jungle was rising up to kill them. It was time to land.

  The mist that had caked Joe’s window had melted. He wiped away the remaining droplets with the palm of his hand and looked outside. He was sickened by what he saw. The plane was flying in a large bowl ringed by mountains and lit by the moon. The peaks topped out above the aircraft’s altitude. There was only one possible outcome. He’d listened to the captain’s address and decided that the people at the front of the aircraft had reached the same conclusion about their fate. There were no lights below. There was no runway waiting for them. This was it. He peered out the window harder, trying to see exactly what they would be landing on. They were going to land weren’t they? The captain had just said so. They weren’t going to crash, surely? The window didn’t allow him a view downwards. He was frightened, but he realised he had no control over anything that happened in his near future. A part of Joe’s brain found that oddly comforting. It calmed him. There was absolutely nothing he could do to alter the situation. He just had to sit there and wait. He bent his head between his legs and breathed the warm sickly air rising from the vomit-soiled carpet under his feet – the kiss your arse goodbye position, he thought. A pain swelled in his chest as if an invisible hand was squeezing his heart. ‘For Christ’s sake, just get it over with,’ he said to the god he rarely spoke with.

  ‘I’m going to go for that ridge over in our ten o’clock,’ shouted Flemming. Granger and Rivers agreed. From their angle, it appeared to present more of a plateau, although it was night and appearances could be deceptive. Putting the plane down on a ridge would be a better option than a valley. Rescuers would more easily spot the wreckage, for one thing. And for another, a valley would inevitably end with a mountain, and slamming into a solid rock wall would be utterly catastrophic.

  There was no argument. ‘Luke, you’ve got the flaps and the undercarriage. Jenny, read off our airspeed. We’re only going to get one go at this so let’s do it by the numbers.’ Flemming wanted to say he thought they’d been a good crew, but the best he could manage was a crooked smile.

  It was possibly the most forbidding landscape Luke Granger had ever seen. The fact that he was about to set down a fully loaded 747 on it didn’t improve his impression any.

  The flight deck was hot and humid. It didn’t take much to figure out that they probably had a large hole blown in the side of the aircraft. The engine must have exploded and taken part of the fuselage with it. It was possible that shrapnel from that explosion had wrecked their E&E Bay, taking out their communications and hydraulics in the process. Then Granger remembered what he thought was a fighter’s deadly pass down the side of the 747. No, surely not . . . Was it possible? Part of Granger’s mind knew they’d been attacked and shot down. Another part refused to believe it. Knowing the answer wouldn’t help the situation any. He couldn’t even radio anyone with his suspicions. The disquiet evaporated almost the instant it formed. There was too much demanding his attention.

  Despite the tropical heat, the sweat on Luke’s body was cold, and he realised grimly that he’d pissed himself. Moonlight washed through a break in the clouds, revealing a lumpy tree canopy. Jungle. They were almost on top of the equator, so it wouldn’t be anything else. Not a single reassuring light winked through the expanse below them.

  The ridge Captain Flemming had pointed out was now lined up in plain view. Granger scanned the instruments and tried to focus on anything other than his impending death. Their hydraulics pressure was virtually nonexistent. At least the flaps were fully extended and the undercarriage had locked. That was something. With luck, they’d slide along gently after the gear tore off, eating up much of the plane’s energy, coming to rest peacefully with no lives lost, held aloft by the waving arms of friendly palm trees.

  Who was he kidding? thought Granger. Murderously steep gorges ran off from either side, beckoning. There was only one possible outcome.

  Joe couldn’t help himself. He’d heard the familiar whirr and bump of the undercarriage coming down and locking in place, and he managed to convince himself, briefly, that they were about to settle on a smooth runway. Then there was the sickening screech of grinding metal as the flaps lowered and the hope evaporated. The big 747 was flying with its nose high in the air. Joe had tested all the top flight sims; he knew the pilots were trying to slow the aircraft down so that it would arrive at its point of impact with the ground just as the lift under its wings gave out. The desire to know what they were about to land on gripped him again. He realised it might be the last thing he ever saw. He looked out and down and saw the tops of trees flashing by at alarming speed. ‘Shiiiiiiit,’ he said, throwing himself forward again into the crash position.

  QF-1 slammed onto the ridge. The force of the impact fractured the fuselage behind the wings’ trailing edge. The huge fin and tail section, split from the main body of the aircraft, was thrown high in t
he air. It began to spin like a child’s toy as it fell, flinging chairs, people and luggage into the trees. It whirled down into a steep gorge where it shredded itself against volcanic rock like cheese against a grater.

  The main body of the aircraft, now engulfed in a fireball, continued to plough through the jungle. A rock outcrop caught the leading edge of the port wing. The violence of the impact carved off the centre section of the fuselage. The remaining fuel in one of the wing tanks exploded, turning the centre section of the aircraft into burning shards of aluminium that rained down over the jungle.

  The forward section of the fuselage spun into a small depression. Its mass combined with its speed, telescoping the nose in on itself. Flemming, Granger and Rivers were turned into paste.

  Burning fuel caused small fires for a thousand metres around.

  The savagery of the crash silenced the jungle. Smoke from the burning fires hung like a mist of death in the moist, pre-dawn air.

  Raptor watched the 747 hit the ground. It didn’t appear to be going very fast at all but it was difficult to make out any detail until the fireball lit the scene. The sight of the aircraft breaking up was gratifying and he congratulated himself on a job well done. He thumbed the Send button on his control column several times, broadcasting the agreed code for a successful mission. Raptor noted the lat and long coordinates on his thigh-pad from the GPS. He lit his afterburners and set a course for Hasanuddin AFB.

  NSA Pacific HQ, Helemanu, Oahu, Hawaii, 2050 Zulu, Tuesday, 28 April

  The NSA is the world’s most sophisticated eavesdropper. It keeps the airwaves safe for Uncle Sam, gathering information any way that it can, mostly through an extensive battery of antennae dishes scattered around the world. The dishes harvest the low frequency signals, the frequency range generally preferred by the world’s military. If atmospheric conditions are right, these can bounce off the biggest dish of all, the earth’s ionosphere. The higher frequency transmissions are trickier, the line-of-sight comms. To patrol this frequency range, the NSA deploys all manner of assets, including a flotilla of spy ships masquerading as ocean survey vessels and, of course, spy planes.