by T. E. Cruise
She might overshoot the runway. Harrison realized as around him spectators began flitting away off the terrace. She might hit the—
“Everybody get out!” Harrison turned and shouted. “She’s going to hit the hospitality suite!”
Pandemonium erupted. The terrace was quickly deserted. Within the hospitality suite proper chairs and tables were overturned by the mad crush of shouting people who were battling their way to the exits. The place was emptying out fast.
But’s there’s no way. Harrison thought. No way we’re all going to get out in time. “Everybody down!” he yelled. “Find cover! Get behind those tables! As far from the windows as possible!”
Miraculously the people clustered towards the rear of the logjams at the doors did as they were told. Harrison, looking wildly around for Susan, saw her standing near the bar, looking distraught: She’d been searching for him.
“Susan!” He ran to her across the food-littered, champagne-sodden carpet, past the tumbled tables and chairs and the toppled cutaway model of the GC-600. Susan tried to hug him when he reached her but he shook her roughly, commanding, “Quick! Get over the bar!”
“What?” Susan shook her head, dazed and confused.
“I said—” He stopped abruptly, realizing that she couldn’t hear him. The engine wail of the fast-approaching jetliner was now deafening.
Harrison picked Susan up, set her on the bar countertop, and pushed. She went over sprawling on all fours. Harrison glanced toward the terrace, caught a glimpse of the GC-600 filling the windows as it cartwheeled toward the tarmac, and hurled himself over the bar.
He landed hard on his hip but ignored the pain as he moved quickly to crouch protectively over Susan. He heard the crash: the initial, ear-shattering ring of the plane’s impact, and then the prolonged screech of tormented metal scraping against airfield pavement, sounding like the world’s biggest automobile accident. He braced for the secondary blasts as the fuel touched off, and they came, a thunderous series of explosions that grew abruptly louder as the terrace windows imploded in a wall of flying glass that tinkled like wind chimes against the draperies and carpet. The explosions faded, replaced by the sound of crackling, wind-blown flames, shouting, and the rising, mournful two-note song of the European sirens on the emergency vehicles racing toward the scene.
“You all right?” Harrison asked Susan, still huddled beneath him. She nodded, whimpering. Inside the hospitality suite, now filled with the acrid stench of burning kerojet fuel, there began to rise scattered moans and cries.
“Got to help. See who’s been hurt,” Harrison muttered, rising up. “What?” he demanded of Susan as he helped her to her feet. “What was that?” She’d said something, but his ears were still ringing from the explosions.
“I said Steve and Linda were down there!” Linda repeated.
“Oh, Christ,” Harrison felt sick. In his own fear, he’d momentarily forgotten they’d been outside. Steve and Linda.
(Two)
Steve Gold and Linda Forrest had been outdoors at the flight-viewing area for the hour leading up to the GC-600’s demo flight. The large, level, concrete space extended like an apron in front of the set-back hospitality-suite complex. The viewing area was landscaped with shrubs and flowers in concrete planters. It had wooden benches, and was fronted by a steel balustrade that kept spectators a safe distance from the runway aircraft access ramps. The area’s rear portion was graced by a large fountain with a ten-foot-diameter concrete basin and a geyserlike spray that shot up twenty feet, creating a dramatic curtain of water. Walkways flanking the fountain led to the hospitality suite complex and the pavilions housing the show’s trade displays.
There were shouts and applause, and a burst of activity over where the press people had their cameras set up as the GC-600 raced down the runway and into the sky. Linda was standing near the railing. Gold caught his wife’s eye and waved to her. Linda smiled back, raising her clasped fists above her head to signal her congratulations. Rightly so, Gold thought. It had been a long haul to get to this point. He hadn’t believed that Don Harrison could get his engineering people to pull it off, but Don had, and Gold was ready to give him full credit for the achievement.
Linda was dressed in slacks and a cotton sweater, a light raincoat over her shoulders against the threat of rain. She’d come along on this trip at Gold’s request strictly as a tourist, to keep him company. She’d been a good sport keeping herself busy nosing around Paris while Gold was occupied with business, so tomorrow he’d promised to steal the day to spend with her taking a drive to Versailles.
But that was tomorrow. Today Gold was working hard, pressing flesh as he maneuvered through the crowd in his suit and regimental-striped turquoise and scarlet tie, the same GAT colors that decorated the GC-600 just now soaring overhead. Don Harrison had been apologetic about asking Gold to hang around out here, but Gold had been quite willing to skip the hospitality-suite news conference concerning the advance GC-600 sales. Don Harrison loved doing that kind of shit, and Gold was content to leave it to his partner. He himself had received his share of the limelight back during the Korean War, when the Air Force had paraded him around the country as an ace hero in order to drum up support for the war effort.
And anyway, Gold felt that somebody from the top level of the company should be out here. There were GAT sales people around, but what if some of the airline reps who’d chosen to witness the demo flight outdoors in order to prove to themselves how quiet the 600 was wanted to talk major business?
Gold was chatting with some Arab airline purchasing agents looking to spend their oil money on new equipment when he glanced up at the GC-600. It was bat-turning its way back over the airfield. He thought, That plane can’t do that. What the hell is Ken up to?
Ken Cole was captain of the two-man crew on board the the GC-600. Gold had known him in the Air Force, and considered him one of the best test pilots in the business. Gold also knew from personal experience that the guys in the cockpit counted for a lot, but every airplane had performance parameters, its envelope within which it had to stay for safety’s sake. For some damn reason, it appeared to Gold that Ken Cole was just now straying way beyond the envelope of the GC-600.
Maybe I’m just being paranoid. Gold thought. After all, I’ve been uptight about this whole idea of rushing the 600’s debut since last year. Gold looked around at the other guests in the crowded flight viewing area. Nobody else seemed perturbed, and a lot of these people were knowledgeable aviation experts. Yeah, I guess I’m just being paranoid. Gold decided. But then he saw Linda approaching, her expression troubled. He excused himself, stepping away from the Arabs, to meet her.
“I think there’s something wrong with that plane,” she whispered to Gold.
He looked back at the plane and saw it flip over on its back and begin a swan dive toward the ground. But just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean somebody isn’t chasing you.
“You’re right,” Gold whispered, his heart beginning to pound. “It’s going to crash.”
“That’s not funny,” Linda scolded.
“I know.”
Around them, others who had come to the same conclusion as Gold were already hurrying toward the viewing area’s exits. Knots of people were crowded around the narrow entrances to the twisting walkways flanking the fountain. Others had vaulted over the steel baulustrade to put as much distance as possible between themselves and where they thought the stricken bird was coming down.
“Come on!” Gold said, grabbing Linda’s arm and joining the frenzied exodus.
“Which way?” Linda cried out above the growing banshee wail of the dying jetliner darkening the sky above them.
Damn good question, Gold thought distractedly, looking around. They were close to the balustrade, but it was too late to try to escape by going over the railing and onto the airfield, toward the likely crash point. And the walkways flanking the fountain were packed.
The fountain.
Gold looked at it, and then up
at the falling jetliner. He guessed about thirty seconds to impact. He’d seen plenty of emergency landings and crashes in his Air Force career; he’d been in the driver’s seat during a few of them. He now used that experience to judge the falling 600’s angle of approach, calculating that the bird would hit the runway about a hundred yards from the viewing area.
“The fountain’s our only chance!” he yelled to Linda over the engines’ growing racket, pulling her along as they began the hundred-foot dash to the concrete basin. Halfway there Gold, looked over his shoulder and saw the GC-600 hit.
The 120-foot-long jetliner impacted approximately where he’d guessed it would. It hit with its nose angled toward the viewing area, its wings perpendicular to the ground. There was a horrific sound like pealing thunder as the plane hit and bounced, and then there was the sound of fingernails clawing at a blackboard amplified thousands of times over as the jetliner cartwheeled, shedding debris in a cloud of smoke and fire. Both wings sheared off, to glide like scythes along the now oil-fire-splattered tarmac. Gold saw the 600’s fuselage crumple like a beer can. Ken, he thought, and Dave Wentworth, the copilot…. But there was no way anybody or anything could have lived through that crash.
They’d reached the fountain. Without a word Gold flipped Linda into the eighteen-inch-deep water. She submerged and came up sputtering, glaring at him, her drenched hair a tight helmet around her skull.
“Are you c-crazy?” she demanded, shivering, her skin constricted to goose bumps from the frigid water. “I’m f-freezing! W-why’d you d-do that. The c-crash is over!”
“Like hell it is!” He fearfully glanced upward at the dark cloud of debris from the wrecked aircraft that would soon be falling upon them.
Linda tried to say something more, but her words were lost in the fountain’s curtain of falling spray.
Then Gold heard the first earthshaking crump! as one of the jetliner’s fuel tanks caught, the blast billowing upward in an orange ball of flame and oily black smoke. There was another fuel tank explosion. Then another. The rapid concussions rocked Gold. He threw himself into the frigid fountain beneath the curtain of spray one step ahead of the heat blasts. The cold water shocked him; his balls constricted tight against his groin. Let’s hope it’s cold enough.
“Deep breath and hold it!” he ordered Linda, shoving her head down into the water and submerging himself at the same time. He had his eyes open underwater, and saw the oil-and-fuel-soaked fragments of debris pelting the fountain’s surface like shrapnel, hissing and trailing bubbles through the clear water. A couple of pieces of something or other stung his back through his clothing, but thankfully the debris was small and had been sufficiently slowed and cooled by its trip through the air, through the curtain of spray, and then the basin water to do too much damage. Gold put his arm around Linda, tucking her in beneath him as best he could in the buoyant water to try and spare her being hit. Meanwhile, he prayed that no large pieces were at the moment falling toward them.
Within seconds the rain of debris hitting the fountain slowed, then vanished. Gold warily lifted his head from the water. The wailing of sirens instantly accosted him. There were a few isolated puddles of fire floating in the fountain, but otherwise it was clear. He hauled Linda to the surface and heard her exhale noisily, gasping for air. They quickly climbed out of the fountain, streaming water from their drenched clothing.
One of the paramedics now on the scene came over to ask if they were all right. Linda and Gold nodded, and the paramedic offered the blanket from his stretcher. Gold wrapped the blanket around Linda, who was shivering. He then looked around.
The concrete ramp was littered with smallish, smoldering debris, some of it still sadly wearing a singed, blistered coat of scarlet and turquoise paint. There had been some injuries to those who had been last into the walkways flanking the fountain, but nobody looked seriously hurt. Gold turned toward the hospitality suite complex and saw that every window facing the airfield had been cracked or broken by the shock waves or the debris generated by the fuel blasts.
Gold looked at the fountain. He had no doubt that it had saved himself and Linda from serious injury, maybe even saved their lives. He hoped the architect who’d designed the fountain was a woman, because he fully intended to kiss that individual should they ever meet up.
Out on the tarmac, the charred remains of the GC-600 sat enveloped in.wafting black smoke. The emergency fire vehicles had soaked down the wreck with foam, extinguishing the fires.
Linda came over to Gold. Her hair was still soaked, and she was wrapped like an Indian in her blanket. Gold put his arm around her, brushing her wet hair out of her eyes. “You look like a drowned rat,” he said tenderly.
“Oh, thank you.” She fingered his sodden jacket lapel. “And didn’t I tell you you couldn’t wash linen?”
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s go find Don and Linda. They’ll be worried about us.”
(Three)
Duvalle Hotel
Paris
16 June, 1978
In Paris, Don Harrison always preferred to stay at the Duvalle. It was smaller and more personal than either the Ritz or the Crillon, but every bit as luxurious.
Harrison always reserved the same suite. It had two bedrooms, one of which he used as an office, two baths, and an adjoining parlor furnished with comfortable armchairs and sofas upholstered in striped satin. This hotel suite with its ornate mirrors, Boilly portraits and luminous still lifes decorating its walls had always served as Harrison’s sanctuary from the rigors of travel and conducting international business.
Until now, Harrison thought, sighing. On this trip the lovely suite had become less a restful oasis and more a beleaguered bunker from which GAT was conducting what amounted to a desperate defense to rescue its reputation and future.
Harrison was seated in the parlor, sipping cognac. His tie was loosened and his shoes were off. Surrounding his chair were thick folders and scattered papers, the results so far of the preliminary investigation into the cause of the GC-600’s crash. It was Friday night, a little before six, four days after the awful accident. Since the GC-600 had fallen out of the sky last Monday, Harrison and Steve Gold had endured a gauntlet of official inquiries and news conferences during which they’d been grilled by an increasingly hostile French press about what GAT might have done to prevent the crash.
From the start of this fiasco, Harrison had been pretty much out of his depth public relations-wise. It was one thing to appear at a news conference in order to pat oneself on the back over some achievement and then pose for pictures. It was quite something else to face a public inquisition—especially when the public was too ignorant to understand the answers to their shouted questions. Harrison was first and foremost an engineer who was more comfortable talking the specific technical language of his profession. At the press conferences and at the preliminary hearings called by the French authorities (who were more interested in grandstanding than getting to the facts), Harrison had suffered a hard time keeping himself from lapsing into jargon concerning his confidence in the overall design of the GC-600 and its fly-by-wire control technology, which it shared with the Stiletto fighter and which allowed the jetliner to be safely piloted by just a two-man crew. Harrison’s long-winded technical explanations had been miscomprehended by the French press as attempts at obfuscation. Meanwhile, the press kept hammering away, demanding to know GAT’s position on the leaks now that they had been proved right?
Of course, the fact that the GC-600 had crashed didn’t necessarily mean that the jetliner’s design or technology was flawed. Trouble was, the emotions of the moment were running hot. Harrison had concluded that some of the French overreaction toward GAT concerning the crash was due to the residue of bad feeling in some of the French aviation industry over the fact that Aérosens and Skytrain Industry had come out second best to GAT in that contretemps surrounding the Pont airliner back in 1974.
Harrison looked bleakly at Susan who was sitting on a sofa, pre
tending to be leafing through a magazine. His wife was wearing a silk robe. She had on no makeup, and her silver-blond hair was pulled back into a tight bun. But there was no point in her getting dolled up, Harrison thought. It was an ordeal to leave the hotel. As soon as they stepped out of the lobby, the reporters were on them like a pack of beggars.
“You know,” Harrison told her softly. “If I haven’t said it before, I’m awfully sorry I’m dragging you through this.”
She looked up from her magazine to smile at him. “My mother went through much worse with my father. It comes with the territory.”
“I love you very much,” Harrison said.
Susan blushed. “Don’t look at me! I look awful.”
“You look beautiful.”
Susan said, “Keep talking like that and I’ll follow you anywhere.”
Harrison was contemplating asking her to follow him into the bedroom when the telephone rang. “Would you answer that?” he pleaded. “I can’t bear to talk to any more reporters today.”
Susan reached for the telephone on the end table. She listened a moment and then hung up. “It was Steve. He and Linda are coming down.”
Harrison nodded. Steve and Linda had a suite on another floor of the hotel. Thank God for Steve, Harrison thought. Steve had turned out to be as good at this public-relations damage-control stuff as Harrison was bad. For one thing, the cameras seemed to like Steve. He came across well over the airwaves. And Steve had the knack of being able to communicate with the reporters and officials on their own level, and through them, directly to the public. Harrison supposed that Steve’s war-hero background helped somewhat in all that. And then, of course, there was the fact that Steve was not very well formally educated and didn’t care a rat’s ass who knew it.
Right from the start of this mess, Steve had cleverly stressed his credibility as an experienced veteran in the cockpit in order to claim that it had been pilot’s error that had caused the crash. That opinion had initially seemed to prevail among the experts after they’d weighed the testimony of those who had witnessed the aircraft’s severe maneuvering just before the crash. On Wednesday the French Minister of Transportation had issued a statement saying that while the investigation was still only in its beginning stages, there was so far no evidence allowing the authorities to call into question the proper functioning of the aircraft. Things had looked good, or at least as good as possible, but then yesterday the European Pilots Association had issued a statement alleging that the accident had been caused by technical problems arising from the fact that the GC-600 was designed to be flown by only two crew members while most jetliners called for a three-man crew.
