Web of Fire Bind-up

by Steve Voake

  ‘Oh, well,’ said Zip with a half-smile that seemed to suggest he was not unduly worried about his friend. ‘Bring on the divers, I say.’

  Up on the tower, Mump put his thumbs up.

  There was a sharp, warning blast on a horn, the hiss of an air brake being released and then a loud clattering and clunking as the cockpit gathered speed and descended the rails towards the calm blue surface of the pool. With a tremendous smack, it hit the water and Sam just had time to see Mump’s eyebrows raised in surprise before the entire cockpit plunged beneath the surface and turned upside down. The force of the impact sent a wave racing towards the poolside, where it splashed over the edge and slapped onto the cold tiles around Sam’s feet. As it receded, he stepped forward to get a better view and noticed that everyone else was doing the same.

  The surface of the water remained choppy for a while, but as it began to settle Sam could clearly see the cockpit lying upside down at the bottom of the pool. There did not appear to be any movement under the water.

  ‘Shouldn’t he be up by now?’ asked Sam. He imagined Mump’s pale, surprised face hanging upside down, shouting for help in the blue and watery silence.

  ‘Yeah, he probably should,’ said Zip. ‘But then he’s late for everything. Look – here come the divers.’

  Sam watched the rubber-suited figures push smoothly away from the side of the pool and flipper their way down towards the sunken craft, trailing lines of silver bubbles behind them.

  Zip patted Sam’s shoulder reassuringly. ‘Don’t worry about Mump,’ he said. ‘He’ll be calmly sitting there, scratching his head and trying to figure out whether he’s having a horse ride or a haircut. It’ll only be when they pull him out that he’ll remember what he was supposed to do.’

  Right on cue, Mump’s head broke spluttering through the surface of the water and the divers pulled him struggling and coughing to the side of the pool.

  ‘I don’t mean to be rude,’ said Sam, ‘but isn’t he a bit of a liability?’

  ‘Oh absolutely,’ agreed Zip. ‘The guy’s a walking disaster. But,’ he added, ‘you put him in a wasp and that boy’ll fly like an angel with a new set of wings.’

  Zip leant forward and extended his hand to Mump, who grabbed it and pulled himself dripping from the pool. He stood in front of them both, bedraggled and gasping for air.

  ‘So how was it, Mump?’ grinned Zip. ‘How does it feel to be a shining example to us all?’

  Mump smiled weakly. ‘It feels great,’ he said. ‘Piece of cake.’ Then he burped up several pints of chlorinated water and fainted.

  ‘OK, son. Is that tight enough for you?’

  Sam nodded as the safety officer gave a final pull on the seat restraints.

  ‘All right. Good. Now, remember the drill: deep breath as you hit the pool, then wait until the capsule inverts and fills with water. When everything stops moving, release the buckle and swim up to the surface. OK, now you. Talk me through it.’

  Sam narrowed his eyes and squinted through dark lashes at the blue rectangle far below. It felt as though a million butterflies had suddenly hatched in his stomach and were flitting madly into his fingers and toes.

  ‘Right. I take a deep breath as I hit the water, I wait until I’m upside down, then I release the buckle and swim out.’

  ‘Excellent.’ The safety officer had a kindly face and Sam guessed he wasn’t used to watching a young boy ditch an aircraft, even if it was only a drill. He put a thumb up. ‘Show ’em how it’s done, lad.’

  Sam raised his own thumb briefly and then quickly dropped it again, gripping the metal bar in front of him as the man moved towards the brake-release mechanism at the rear of the tower.

  ‘Prepare to ditch,’ called the safety officer.

  There was a loud blast from the horn, a hiss from the brake and then Sam’s stomach flipped and headed north as he dropped like a stone towards the pool. It was like the moment when a rollercoaster reaches the very highest point of its track and then tumbles over the edge, but worse – like stepping off a cliff and falling into an abyss. It was terrifying, but Sam only whimpered quietly as he hurtled towards the pool at a speed that seemed to him quite unbelievable.

  He took a deep breath and closed his eyes.

  With a smack and a roar, the capsule plunged below the surface and a whirlwind of water tore into the open cockpit, flooding everything with its cold, wet light and pulling Sam down into a churning chaos of sound and confusion.

  Sam listened to the shriek of bubbles and the eerie creak of straining metal. He held his breath close to his heart and counted – one, two, three. There was a final clunk as the chains and the gears of the machinery slotted into place and then the capsule came to rest upside down.

  The flurry of bubbles subsided and Sam felt his lungs straining, crying out for air. He opened his eyes and, looking down through the haze of blue, saw the silver buckle gleaming in the centre of his chest. He pulled at the clasp and felt the tension in the straps disappear as they fell away. Rolling forward towards his knees, he pushed away from the seat with his feet and found his hands were on the edge of the doorway. Water filled his nostrils and stung his eyes. Pulling hard, he kicked his legs and swam up towards the surface. With a last desperate pull of his hands he broke through and suddenly he was splashing to safety, gulping down lungfuls of fresh air and staring up at the pools of light that bounced and shimmered around the walls of the building.

  ‘You know,’ said Mump as they towelled themselves dry and prepared to change back into their uniforms, ‘if they’d only waited a few more seconds, I’d have been out of there no problem.’

  Sam and Zip exchanged knowing smiles.

  ‘Of course you would,’ said Zip.

  ‘I would!’ Mump protested indignantly. ‘I quite like it on the bottom.’

  There was a slight pause, followed by a loud crack as Singer, another of the trainees, scored a direct hit on Mump’s backside with a well-aimed flick from his towel. ‘Happy to oblige,’ he said, and the changing room erupted into raucous cheers as Singer ran off around the corner with Mump in hot pursuit.

  Twenty-five

  Jack Palmer reversed his car into an empty parking space and turned off the ignition. The sound of the engine died away, to be replaced by the moan of the wind and the heavy splatter of rain against glass.

  August: the great British summer, he thought. Already the windscreen was misting up, and rubbing a clear patch with the sleeve of his raincoat, he peered through at the mass of grey concrete and glass that rose up against the dark sky. Did they deliberately build hospitals to look so depressing, he wondered, or was it just a combination of dust, grime and the despair of the people who came to visit?

  High up in one of the lighted windows, he saw a small figure looking out across the city.

  Sam? Could it be?

  His heart skipped a beat.

  But as quickly as the thought came he pushed it away again, ashamed of himself for daring to think such nonsense. He knew it couldn’t be Sam. Sam was on the other side of the hospital, surrounded by tubes and machines, and smiling nurses who were always professional, efficient and cheerful.

  ‘Hello,’ they would say. ‘How are we today?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ he would say. ‘How are you?’

  They didn’t know how, with every fragile breath, Sam broke his father’s heart a little more.

  The rain was a torrent against the windscreen now and Jack turned the wipers back on. As they whirred rhythmically back and forth he watched anonymous silhouettes run across the rain-lashed car park and wondered sadly if his share of life’s happiness had all been used up. Could there be an extra parcel for him, hidden around a bend somewhere?

  It seemed unlikely. All he could picture now was a featureless grey road, leading away from all that he had loved.

  Of course, it hadn’t always been so.

  He remembered a winter evening long ago when the fields were silver with frost and the moon hung low
in the trees; how he had stumbled hand in hand with Sally through the bright doors of the small cottage hospital, their breathless laughter turning to smoke on the cold night air.

  As the nurses bustled around her, he had glanced out of the window and seen the orange glow from the streetlamps. They reminded him of the lights on a runway, waiting to guide the planes safely home in the darkness. Then Sally was gasping, calling for him, and their baby was here at last, coming in to land on the brightly lit table, all the way from eternity.

  They called him Sam.

  Before he met Sally, Jack had never found it easy to say the things he felt. He had been brought up to believe that shows of affection were a sign of weakness. If you hugged people, or kissed them, or told them that you loved them, then you were a feeble sort of person lacking in strength or character. People would take advantage of you and that was a bad thing. His mother and father had been big on teaching him the values of strength and independence, and they rarely cuddled him or held him close. They wanted him to be able to look after himself in the world.

  Jack’s parents were not bad people, but nobody had ever taught them that love makes you strong on the inside. Without it, you can be as strong as you like on the outside, but one day something, somehow, will find its way through and then you’re done for. But Jack didn’t know about that, because no one had ever told him.

  So he had joined the army to try to be just as strong and tough as he possibly could. He became very fit and he learned how to fight and how to kill and how not to let anyone get too close to him.

  But then one day he had found Sally on her knees by the side of a busy road, trying to change the wheel on her little green Mini.

  ‘I’m perfectly capable of doing it myself, thank you,’ she had said, politely but firmly.

  And so she was. But she had smiled at him with her eyes and all of a sudden he hadn’t wanted to go.

  So he had sat on the verge instead, handing her the spanners and, when she was finally done, pouring hot coffee from his flask. She told him all about her work as a garden designer, about how she painted pictures with plants and went to sleep dreaming of dandelions and daisies.

  ‘Why do you love me?’ he asked on their wedding night, looking up at the square of stars through the skylight above their bed.

  ‘Because you’re not who you think you are,’ she had whispered mysteriously in the darkness.

  ‘Who am I then?’ he asked.

  But she had just smiled and held him close.

  And although he hadn’t fully understood, he knew that he loved her more than anything in the world.

  Soon afterwards, he left the army to help her with her gardens, and it was like stumbling out into sunshine after a long winter, the feel of earth between his fingers and the green shoots of new seedlings touching something deep within him that had lain buried all his life. He had never known such happiness.

  The business did well, and when Sam was born it seemed as though his life was complete. Sam was an unlooked-for gift and as he grew and held his arms out for Jack, the last of Jack’s defences had crumbled away and his heart had fallen open.

  Sally was right. He wasn’t who he thought he was at all.

  Jack turned off the wipers and stared at the blurred wall of water that sluiced down the windscreen.

  So he had learned how to love. He had stepped into the world and held it gently in his arms. And now, little by little, it was falling apart.

  He remembered the words of advice his father had once given him. ‘Don’t be taken in by this world, son,’ he told him. ‘You’ll only get hurt.’

  Jack screwed up his eyes and quietly, wearily rested his head against the steering wheel.

  ‘I’m sorry, Dad,’ he said. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  Sally Palmer stroked her son’s pale cheek and gently squeezed his hand. The only other movement came from the ventilator by his bed as it puffed endlessly up and down, keeping him alive with its mechanical exertions. Next to it, a heart monitor bleeped quietly to itself.

  ‘I bought you a new CD for your computer today,’ she told him. ‘It tells you all about the stars and planets and everything. I know how you love to look at them. The man in the shop said it’s brilliant. He said you just have to put in where you live and then it shows you the whole sky above your house, tells you the names of all the stars and what the constellations are called.’

  A nurse popped her head around the door, smiled at Sally and then disappeared back into the corridor again.

  ‘Dad will be here in a minute. He’s been busy putting up a new trellis so that we can grow roses round the door – you know, the red ones we saw on holiday last summer. I always said I wanted roses round the door, didn’t I?’

  Sam’s chest rose and fell in time with the ventilator. Apart from the blue and green bruising around his eyes, his face was undamaged. He looked as though he was asleep.

  ‘Did I tell you we’ve finished the baby’s room now? You’d love it, Sam. Dad went and bought a mobile with little teddies on it and we’ve put up some nice yellow wallpaper all covered in daisies. It’s really bright and summery.’

  Sally smiled, trying desperately to think of something else to say. But it wasn’t easy trying to talk to someone when they couldn’t answer you, when you didn’t know if they could hear you, didn’t know if they were even there any more. She reached into her bag, took out a small pink teddy bear and placed it on the bedside table.

  ‘You didn’t tell me, did you, love?’ Sally’s smile wavered and her bottom lip began to quiver. ‘Dad says you won it for me, that day at the arcade. But you never told me, did you? And so I never said thank you…’ Her voice trailed off as she lifted Sam’s hand and held it tightly against her chest. The tears were running down her cheeks now. They dripped off the end of her chin and made tiny damp circles on the pale blue hospital blanket.

  ‘The thing is,’ she said, ‘we just want you to come home, Sam. That’s all. We just want you home.’

  Sally pulled a tissue from her bag to try to stem the tears and as she did so she felt a hand on her shoulder. Jack stood beside her and she buried her face in his sleeve.

  ‘Oh, Jack,’ she whispered when her sobs had subsided a little, ‘tell me it will be all right.’

  Jack stroked her hair as she wept and looked across at his only son, his gift from heaven that had been so brutally snatched away.

  ‘Of course it will,’ he told her. ‘We’ll get him back, you’ll see. Remember what you used to say to me? Everything is for the best in the end.’

  He tenderly kissed the top of her head, shut his eyes tight and wished more than anything that what he said was true.

  But the truth was, he didn’t believe it any more.

  Twenty-six

  Skipper dropped through the hatch into the seat next to Sam and the CRB flashed blue as she closed the hole up again.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ she said.

  ‘I’m fine, thank you,’ said Sam. ‘And, I am pleased to inform you, fully trained for water-related disasters.’

  ‘Explain?’ said Skipper.

  ‘Cockpit-evacuation drill,’ said Sam. ‘Did it this morning. If we were to crash into a lake this afternoon, I would coolly unclip my safety harness, flip calmly out of the emergency hatch and swim up to the surface with the speed and grace of a dolphin.’

  Skipper smiled and nodded. ‘Yeah, I heard you did pretty well.’

  Sam raised an eyebrow. ‘Who told you?’

  ‘Brindle. He reckons you’re a natural.’

  ‘Brindle said that?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Skipper flicked a switch and the instrument panel glowed deep red. ‘Textbook evacuation, he called it. Brindle may be a bit of a hard nose, but he’s a pretty good judge of character. You must have done really well, Sam.’

  Sam blushed. ‘I think it was more to do with the lack of competition actually,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ said Skipper, ‘let me guess. You didn’t have Mump
on the team there, did you?’

  ‘We did,’ said Sam. ‘Why, do you know him?’

  ‘Only by reputation. Apparently he’s a promising pilot but as soon as he gets out of his aircraft he turns into an almighty accident just waiting to happen.’

  Sam frowned. ‘He can’t be that bad, can he?’

  ‘Don’t you believe it. Last week on the infantry course he picked up a drill bomb instead of a hand grenade and threw it onto the practice range. When there was no explosion, the weapons officer climbed out of the trench to have a look. Instead of an unexploded grenade he found a neat little hole in the ground with smoke coming out of it. Just had time to dive for cover before the whole ground erupted and the air was filled with flying cookers.’

  ‘Eh?’ said Sam, confused. ‘What do you mean, flying cookers?’

  ‘The drill bomb had burrowed its way down into the underground kitchens and blown ’em all to bits. Terrible business it was.’

  ‘Sounds it,’ said Sam. ‘Did anyone get killed?’

  ‘Luckily not,’ replied Skipper. ‘Although no thanks to Mump. It just so happened that everyone was changing shift at the time and the only casualty was a chef who had his teeth knocked out by a ninety-mile-an-hour onion.’

  Sam tried not to laugh. ‘That must have been a shock for him,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll say. Apparently he has to suck his food up through a straw and gets nightmares about being attacked by vegetables.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘I thought they were supposed to be good for you,’ said Sam.

  Skipper giggled but then the intercom crackled into life and there was a hiss of static followed by a clear, calm voice from the control tower: ‘Hunter 437, this is control, do you read me?’

  Skipper cleared her throat with a final chuckle, clicked her safety harness into place and said: ‘Control, this is Hunter 437 reading you loud and clear.’

  ‘Hunter 437, you are cleared for take-off. Proceed when ready.’

  ‘OK, control. Please be advised that pilot training is now under way, so anticipate slight take-off delay, over.’