by M. R. Hall
‘I see it,’ Michael said. ‘Five degrees right. Six miles to go—’
Finlay was flying blind, relying solely on Michael’s visual cues. Without him, ditching on water would have been the only viable option, but with this little control he was sure they wouldn’t have stood a chance.
‘You can see the M5 motorway going from left to right,’ Michael said. He pointed dead ahead. ‘There’s Filton.’
Finlay’s eyes finally picked out the thin strip of concrete he was aiming for. He eased to the right, then back a touch to the left. He estimated they were at 1,500 feet with four miles to go. All he had to do was hold a steady course and bring her gently in.
‘Gear down.’
Cambourne operated the lever that would bring the 380’s landing gear down by force of gravity alone. There was no display to tell them it was engaged. It would have to be an act of faith.
The three men in the cockpit exchanged apprehensive glances. They could all see the runway dead ahead, there was nothing more to be said. The only one who could get them on the ground was Finlay. He gave a thumbs-up and adjusted the trim for the final approach. For the first time in twenty years he was flying in the raw. He pretended he was back in the little two-seater Cessna in which he had first taken to the air.
The helicopter reached the eastern fringes of Bristol in time for Jenny and Ransome to see the 380 gliding like a distant eagle towards the far side of the city, the sun glinting off its starboard wing. Even five miles away it looked huge and graceful. There was no smoke trailing, no outward sign of distress as it continued its slow descent. Jenny closed her eyes and said a silent prayer.
With two miles to touch-down Finlay realized he had brought the 380 in a little low for comfort, but better to strike at a shallow angle than come in too steeply. They couldn’t have been at more than 500 feet. Cambourne shot him an anxious glance. Finlay eased the throttle lever forward; the engines flared but the nose skewed ten degrees to the right.
He wrestled the controls, pumping the pedal rudder with left foot. ‘What’s wrong with the right engines?’
‘Must be the fuel pumps,’ Cambourne said.
Finlay had the nose lined up again, but they were falling quickly. Leaning on the rudder, he touched the throttle, but this time the sheer to the right was matched with a sudden flick-up of the nose as they met a pocket of warmer air. Suddenly the runway was at ten o’clock and coming up fast.
Finlay fought the rudder and started to bring the nose round once more, but it refused to come fully square. They were heading for the ground at an angle that would see them career across the grass and into the hangars. He had run out of options. He pushed the joystick hard left. The plane tilted. Back right. The starboard wing started down, but not in time. The tip of the port-side wing clipped the airport’s perimeter fence. Dragged suddenly to the left, the plane thumped hard onto the ground with the sound of splintering metal. Finlay jammed on the brakes, but the aircraft was already leaning over onto its left side. The forward landing gear gave way under the strain, sending the nose plunging towards the tarmac. Michael threw his hands over his face as shattered glass and a hail of sparks flew through the cockpit window. He heard Finlay cry out in pain. Then all was peace.
The plane was tilted sideways, supported by the remains of its port-side wing. The smoking wreckage of two engines was scattered over the runway for several hundred yards behind it. The tip of the nose cone had been ripped away and the cockpit was staved in. Smoke was still curling upwards from the foam-smothered fuselage. Jenny absorbed every detail as the helicopter circled, then came in to land on the grass.
Ignoring the protests of the fire crew, she jumped out and followed Ransome as he strode towards the wreckage. Two escape slides had been activated and traumatized passengers were sliding down, some with bloody wounds on their foreheads where they had struck the seats in front.
A pair of fire-fighters were in the forward doorway at the top of a ladder. Others were clambering over the broken wing to reach the door at the mid-section. There were hands at the cabin windows, and at one the battered features of an unconscious man. She scanned the faces of the walking wounded looking for Michael, but didn’t see him; neither was there any sign of Dalton or Patterson. The only person who caught her eye was a straight-backed figure of about sixty who was shouting instructions to a bemused policeman. Ransome had noticed him, too, and was hurrying towards him calling his name: ‘Sanders. Sanders, you bastard!’ The man turned with a startled expression as the airline boss threw a punch directly into his face which sent him sprawling to the ground. The bewildered policeman ran over and after a brief tussle Ransome found himself laid out on the ground; a knee was forced into his back and his wrists tethered in plastic restraints.
He called out to her to intervene. ‘Tell them who he is, tell them,’ Ransome yelled, but her attention had been caught by a bloodied figure who had been helped to the forward door and was now standing at the top of the ladder. As if prompted by some sixth sense, he turned his head. It was him. It was Michael.
TWENTY-EIGHT
WHEN THE CELL DOOR OPENED, Moreton was smiling. ‘To the best of my knowledge, Jenny, you have the proud distinction of being the only British coroner ever to have been arrested twice in two days. I suppose congratulations are in order.’
Too weary to pick a fight, she held back from making the caustic remark that his sarcasm deserved and levered her aching body off the concrete shelf in the all-too-familiar cell beneath New Bridewell police station.
‘You would have thought the police had better things to do,’ she said.
‘The rule of law has to be upheld, even in extremis,’ Moreton answered, ‘though you’ll be glad to know that no charges will be laid against you.’
‘Who do I have to thank for that?’
Moreton smiled. ‘Consider it a gesture of goodwill.’
She had been arrested by a sharp-eyed constable even before she had had a chance to meet Michael off the plane, and had spent a long eight hours locked up without communication or explanation. The fact that Detective Sergeant Fuller hadn’t come down to gloat suggested that her fate remained the subject of debate, but Jenny was taking nothing for granted. Stepping out of the cell and into the corridor, she realized she felt the giddy rush of liberation – she had begun to convince herself that this time she really would be cast into the outer darkness. Perhaps Moreton wasn’t so unprincipled after all.
She followed him along the corridor past locked cell doors with the names of the noisy, unhappy occupants scribbled on wipe-clean boards screwed to the dull green walls. He seemed in a hurry to escape, as if frightened that he might become contaminated by his unsavoury surroundings.
As they stepped into the welcome fresh air, Moreton said, ‘I trust the experience has discouraged you from straying again.’
This time Jenny couldn’t hold her tongue. ‘Would you have preferred an aircraft with six hundred people aboard to have gone down in the Irish Sea?’
‘Fair point, Jenny, I won’t deny it, but let’s not squabble – we’ve a meeting to attend. I hope you don’t mind coming as you are.’
‘What meeting? Where?’
‘Not far – but do try to be sensible. This really is for the best.’
During the short journey to the city council building on College Green, Moreton updated her on the details of the crash landing. Thankfully there had been only three fatalities, but unfortunately one of them had been Captain Patrick Finlay, who had been struck on the head by debris from the nose cone flying through the broken cockpit window. Miraculously, First Officer Cambourne had escaped with minor wounds, as had most of the cabin crew. Over half the surviving passengers had suffered broken limbs and minor head injuries, but none was in a life-threatening condition. Of the two who had died, one had suffered a coronary and the other a fatal blow to the head caused by failing to wear a seat belt. The quick action of the fire crews had prevented an engine fire, which had ignited on landing, b
ecoming an inferno that would have engulfed the entire plane. The full picture was still being formed, but in the words of the emotional rescue worker whose impromptu interview was being continually played on the rolling news, the angels that had failed to arrive for Flight 189 had certainly turned up for work today.
The Aircraft Disaster Management Committee had uprooted itself from London and set up a temporary HQ in a large second-floor meeting room at Bristol City Hall, only a five-minute walk from Jenny’s office and a stone’s throw from the Marriott. In her makeshift office on the opposite side of College Green, Mrs Patterson would doubtless be convening a committee of her own, unaware that her husband was currently sitting less than a hundred yards away with many of the answers she craved. But Greg Patterson was in no mood to show Jenny even a hint of gratitude, and barely lifted his eyes to acknowledge her presence as Moreton introduced her to the other seven men and one woman arranged around the large table. To Patterson’s right sat Guy Ransome, who greeted her with a wan smile; to his left, Wing Commander Tommy Sanders – the man whom Jenny had seen next to the plane at Filton issuing orders. The woman, who reminded Jenny of a particularly fierce judge she had once known, was Eleanor Hammond from the Secret Intelligence Service. The five remaining men were Assistant Chief Constable Raymond Butler of the Avon and Somerset Police, Amrit Singh, a senior civil servant who sat on the government’s Joint Intelligence Committee, Air Chief Marshal Colin Talbot, Senior Investigating Officer Edward Marsham from the Air Accident Investigation Branch, and Sir James Kendall.
Singh, a genial, round-faced man in his mid-fifties, acted as chairman.
‘Pleased to meet you, Mrs Cooper. Please accept my apologies for the manner of your delay.’
‘Apology accepted,’ Jenny said in a tone dry enough to draw an anxious glance from Moreton. ‘Before we begin, can I ask what’s happened to Michael Sherman and Mick Dalton? I believe they were travelling with the two gentlemen sitting opposite me.’ She nodded towards Patterson and Sanders.
‘They’re being debriefed, Mrs Cooper,’ Eleanor Hammond interjected, ‘as these gentlemen will be in due course, and you also – if you would be so kind as to cooperate. Mr Patterson and Mr Sanders have been asked to assist us this evening as their connection to events is of a slightly different order from the others.’
‘Thank you,’ Singh said, eager to maintain a brisk pace. He addressed himself to Jenny. ‘Mr Ransome has been good enough to explain to us the circumstances of your meeting with him earlier today.’ And without a trace of irony he added: ‘We are most grateful for your contribution to the return of Flight 199. It’s quite possible that without your intervention the tragic event of a fortnight ago would have been repeated.’
Jenny wanted to shout out in protest that those now nodding in congratulation had done everything in their collective power to silence her, but somehow the words seemed to stop in her throat.
Acknowledging her unspoken thoughts, the urbane Singh deftly piled on more praise. ‘Mrs Cooper, a robust system of justice requires determined and independent judges and coroners, and your embodiment of these qualities is to be applauded. Your suspicions have indeed been wholly vindicated.’
Jenny waited for the ‘but’.
Singh didn’t let her down. ‘That said, we do have something to offer in mitigation. Until we spoke to these three gentlemen this afternoon –’ he waved a hand in the direction of Ransome, Patterson and Sanders – ‘we genuinely had no idea that maliciously corrupted avionics were the most likely cause of 189’s problems.’
Jenny glanced at Sir James Kendall. He was keeping his eyes fixed firmly on his notebook.
‘There was no doubt that something had struck the aircraft, but we remained at a loss to explain precisely what.’
‘You didn’t know about the Apaches?’
Singh’s eyes flicked uneasily to Air Chief Marshal Talbot, who seemed to place the ball back in the civil servant’s court. A wise man, Jenny thought.
‘Or about Mr Sanders’s role in trying to suppress evidence of their existence? People have died. I suggest that your debriefing includes questions about the death of an innocent photographer named Jon Whitestone, and whether Mr Sanders had a hand in Captain Farraday’s fatal accident.’
Sanders remained impassive. Singh considered his response with extreme care, exchanging glances with Eleanor Hammond to be sure of her approval before continuing. ‘Your comments have been noted. You have my word that all relevant matters will be dealt with. But you must appreciate, Mrs Cooper, that nothing of what we have discussed in this room must be repeated once you have left it.’
It was more than a polite request, Jenny sensed. Her answer and the faithfulness with which her actions reflected it would determine her entire professional future. She had no doubt that to step outside the rules of this inner circle would place her permanently beyond the pale. The question was: did she want to be taken to the Establishment’s heart, or was this the moment for a new departure?
‘Mrs Cooper—?’
‘The families of the dead deserve to know what happened – and I include Whitestone’s and Farraday’s among them.’
‘They do indeed, but they can’t know everything, I’m afraid, not even Mrs Patterson. They will be given certain information, of course, but by Sir James, not by you.’
Air Chief Marshal Talbot interjected: ‘We can’t ground the world’s airliners, Mrs Cooper, and nor do we have to. With the help of Mr Patterson and, we hope, his company, this threat will be dealt with.’
Jenny shot Patterson a look.
‘I will be happy to fill you in on the details once I have your assurance,’ Singh said. ‘You must understand that some things are simply too delicate and important to be subjected to all the rumour and conflation that would occur in the public arena.’
‘What about my inquest?’ Jenny asked.
Singh passed the question to Assistant Chief Constable Butler. ‘We’re hoping you can bring it to a sensible conclusion, Mrs Cooper. My force has been as mystified by the circumstances of Brogan’s death as I know you have been. We’ve been making inquiries and we’re fairly certain that he had been engaged as an informer for Customs and Excise in a joint operation with the Irish Garda’s Drug Squad. We believe the Garda tempted him back from the Caribbean with the offer of immunity in exchange for helping them to penetrate the criminal activities of the Real IRA. He had a mixed cargo of cannabis and cocaine on board, which he was en route to delivering to his accomplices further up the Severn. There is some suggestion that he was concerned that his cover might have been blown – the Garda has never quite managed to purge itself of officers sympathetic to Republican terrorists – hence the gun, one suspects.’
‘And I’ll be receiving a statement to this effect?’
‘You will,’ Butler replied.
‘But it wasn’t the plane that caused his death, it was what happened in the water.’
‘I can only repeat my earlier request, Mrs Cooper,’ Singh said. ‘It goes without saying that all of us only want what’s in the public interest.’
She had made up her mind to get up from the table and leave the room when Patterson broke his silence. He spoke in a feeble, faltering voice. ‘Mrs Cooper, I thank you for all that you tried to do for my family. Your task would have been so much easier if I had had the courage to tell you what I knew . . . I understand you were responsible for turning the plane around so quickly this morning. I probably owe my life to you . . . You have my word that I will be dedicating my efforts to making sure a disaster of this sort is never allowed to happen again.’
She could see in his eyes that he meant it. He was no longer the buttoned-up corporate man she had first met in the mortuary a fortnight ago. He had the look of a penitent now.
‘Mrs Cooper?’ Singh asked again.
‘All right. Agreed.’
‘Thank you.’
Looks of relief spread across the committee members’ faces. Moreton let out an audible sigh. At
last he had delivered.
Singh spoke for no more than ten minutes, succinctly placing all the facts as he knew them in chronological order. Much of it Jenny already knew or had surmised: she had deduced that malware had been remotely inserted into the A380’s flight computers, possibly before the components were even installed in the aircraft, and she had also known that Ransome Airways’ booking system had been manipulated by the same unseen hands into grouping Han, Patterson, Towers, Duffy and Nuala Casey on the same flight. What she hadn’t fully grasped was the sheer enormity of the electronic war in which the downing of 189 was the first bloody skirmish, or the precise intention behind Kennedy’s Washington summit.
The battle had been escalating for at least ten years, Singh explained. China saw the advent of global electronic communications as the number one threat to its internal stability, and to defend against this had erected what had become known as the Great Firewall, through which only approved internet traffic could flow. The US had then set about finding means of bypassing it in the hope of igniting the sparks of a mass democracy movement in the Communist superpower. In retaliation, the Chinese government sponsored efforts to use the internet as a means of threatening vital infrastructures in Western countries: power, water, telecommunications, electronic banking, stock markets and aviation. Controlling and disrupting such systems remotely was every bit as effective as other means of warfare, and China possessed vastly superior manpower with which to wage it. As the balance of power slowly tilted towards the East, it became increasingly apparent that this was a Cold War the West was in danger of losing.
Doug Kennedy was put in charge of a team fighting the war on the aviation front. A series of suspicious mishaps in air traffic control systems, coupled with an unexplained spate of errors in previously dependable fly-by-wire aircraft, pointed to outside interference. His task was to isolate the problem and gather together the personnel to fix it. The summit set for 10 January was the result of many months of careful persuasion. Aided by Sanders in the UK, Kennedy had sweet-talked, cajoled and ultimately threatened his way into persuading some big players to come to Washington. Captain Nuala Casey was on the guest list because of her unique overview of the latest reported malfunctions on commercial aircraft. Cobalt, represented by Greg Patterson, was targeted for its singular expertise in both preventing and orchestrating viral attacks on complex computer systems. Alan Towers and his associate Dr Ian Duffy were well ahead of the competition in developing hardware with the potential to be immune from outside interference. Kennedy wanted them prised out of the purely commercial sphere and under the watchful supervision of the US government. Jimmy Han was already a loyal friend of the US and needed little persuasion to offer his manufacturing muscle as one of the world’s largest manufacturers of computer hardware. Already exiled from his homeland, he was in the front line of the struggle for Chinese democracy, a cause he felt would ultimately triumph only when information flowed freely amongst his billion and more compatriots.
