The Higher They Fly

by Christopher Hodder-Williams

  ‘Ah, my girl! How about another of my favourites?’

  Susan felt perplexed but didn’t show it. She was trying to remember what his ‘favourites’ were, when she got a blast from his breath. Whisky—and, even at this stage in the journey, a good deal of it.

  He nodded, and crooked his fingers. ‘Just a dash of water. Only show it the bottle.’

  Valentine stood his cigarette on end, with flamboyant precision. It remained planted in the ashtray in this position. Valentine gazed at it approvingly, as if it testified to something important regarding the stability of the aeroplane. Then he smoked it and turned to Truman. ‘Of course, this is not the airline I generally travel with.’

  ‘I hope it meets with your approval.’

  Valentine raised his eyebrows tolerantly. ‘Y’know, you get used to one airline, and I’ve travelled with Link Lines on the Atlantic run for more years than I care to remember.’

  Truman didn’t comment on the fact that transatlantic services had only been in operation since 1945. It didn’t seem to him that anyone had an excuse to drag the approach of senility into the conversation. So he bent the conversation and said: ‘Do you cross often, sir?’

  Before Valentine could answer, Susan came up with his drink. To Truman she said: ‘You’re needed up front.’

  There was nothing conspicuously off-key in the way she said this. No significant glance went with the brief sentence. Yet it rang the remotest of alarm bells in Truman’s mind and when he strolled, easily enough, toward the cockpit there was that slight sense of excitement which always goes with the unexpected development. However trivial, an abnormality at thirty thousand feet has an unmistakable effect on people. It shows itself in different ways in different individuals.

  With Crooke, the bearded four-ringer in the dominant left-hand flying seat, it merely heightened his personal sense of dramatisation. He immensely enjoyed being captain, and played at it for the benefit of the crew, as well as for himself. He found that egotism was a successful device, both to alleviate boredom and to encourage obedience. At the same time he was generous with the controls—never hogging them where conditions allowed for a younger man to execute a landing or take-off.

  ‘Bloody idiots,’ he growled over his shoulder, ‘want to know if we still have an undercarriage. What do you think, Jimmy? Any wheels down there, do you think?’

  Truman said: ‘Seemed all right on take-off.’

  There were two other occupants of the cockpit: Geoff Simmonds, flight engineer; and the slender young navigator, Perkins, who sat on the opposite side. These two men sat approximately back to back; Geoff at his instrument panel on the starboard side, and Roger Perkins at the navigation table across from him. Truman’s place was in the right-hand flying seat. He made his way to it now.

  At Captain Crooke’s remarks, Geoff looked around from the panel before him, seemed about to say something, then returned to the study of his instruments. Geoff was the oldest member of the crew.

  Perkins, navigator, paused with a pair of dividers in one hand and a banana in the other. Taking no notice of the dialogue around him—for wheels did not concern him—he called out ‘Five degrees right’—and took a good bite out of the banana.

  Crooke said: ‘Where are we going, then?—the Tate Gallery?’

  Perkins smiled politely and explained: ‘Beam wind is picking up all the time.’

  Crooke adjusted the auto-pilot for the necessary right turn, as Truman climbed into his seat and checked the instruments without even knowing he did so. Such checking is first nature to a pilot. You scan the dials quite quickly: their proper readings do not register on the brain at all if you are in level flight. But if anything is awry it sticks out like a Picasso incongruously displayed in an exhibition of Rembrandts.

  But now, the instruments, glowing dim-red, showed by their stability that all was as it should be. There was nothing, however, to indicate how many wheels there might happen to be on the undercarriage bogies.

  David Crooke, veteran fighter pilot of World War II and traditionally the ‘real character’ of Statelines, snorted ostentatiously at the radio and said: ‘Oh well, I suppose we’ll have to humour them.’ As he spoke, he was watching the flight engineer. Although he had not flown with Geoff Simmonds for more than a few trips he had grown used to his ways. Crooke knew what to expect from a crew; on the whole their reactions, were remarkably consistent; hence, if Geoff fell silent, it was just as indicative of something as it was when he himself became effusive.

  On the whole, Crooke felt he had a good bunch. Co-Pilot: Jimmy Truman—a little inexperienced, vain, elaborately flirtatious with the stewardesses in a way that was sometimes irritating; but none the less keen, bold, conscientious in his flying. He was quick to decide on a course of action but did not attempt immature dare-devilry. Once or twice he had given a little cause for concern, but Crooke put this down to arrogance born of youth, impatience for promotion, and his exceptionally good looks.

  Navigator: Roger Perkins (often known as ‘Perk’). He was the youngest and also one of the best navigators Crooke had flown with. He made a terrible mess of the navigation table with banana skins, but was obsessive on the subject of absolute accuracy.

  Perkins was an intellectual; he could quote poetry by the ream and nobody minded because he never got anyone lost. Actually, Crooke rather liked poetry; but scoffed loudest of all because he thought that this was in character and anyway it made Perkins blush, which was an interesting phenomenon—especially if he did it flamboyantly enough to show up even in the dimmed cockpit at night, as it was now. Moreover, Roger Perkins had just returned from his honeymoon, which rendered all the jokes about his poetic ways even more merciless because he was nauseously in love (according to Crooke) and was now inclined to write the stuff himself, which he insisted on reading with great feeling and which Crooke dismissed as ‘a bloody sex substitute’.

  ‘You’ll get over all that lust,’ Crooke had said insensitively. ‘I did—after the third bawling infant. Procreation is damned expensive—you wait till you have to pay for the bugger’s education.’

  Perkins continued to eat the banana.

  Flight Engineer: Geoff Simmonds.

  At this moment, Geoff glared at the panel of dials with unnecessary concentration. In fact, you could skim its instruments, switch-in the fuel temperatures of the four turbines, calculate fuel burn-up, log the readings—and compose a symphony in the course of one transatlantic flight.

  Not that Geoff was blessed with musical talent. He was more interested in the sweet, steady whine of the jets, the muted chorus of ticking flowmeters and the response of electrical relays to those banks of switches on the ceiling which controlled the many systems.

  Even his hobby involved the use of a well-equipped little workshop that was housed in the garage at Camberley. In there, he would spend hours training his adopted son Robin in the use of the lathe or the callipers, or the principles of the internal combustion engine, illustrated by the training diagrams, pinned on the wall, which had once belonged to an RAF station near Sevenoaks Weald.

  Nothing ever really made up for the fact that Geoff and Mary Simmonds could not have children of their own. Life was an eternal check-list whose items were not the 247 actions which Simmonds carried out before each flight to ensure the aircraft was airworthy down to the last detail but the dedicational and willing enslavement to substitution.

  As a flight engineer he was not ideal. In a sense the task had assumed too much importance; he was still there with Robin in his little workshop, demonstrating the ideal way of doing a job. Consequently his dealings with the aircraft’s metabolism were too perfect; and like all perfectionists he found it hard to adapt. Only under pressure could he deviate from rigorous procedures that tied him; but once the break was enforced upon him—invariably by a human being and never by a machine—he was at his best. But at the end of a crisis, large or small, he would again be swallowed by his own obsessions, as if he were the obedient First Se
cretary to the equipment racks rather than their master.

  For all that he was, of course, intensely reliable; even if his customary loquaciousness could be dull.

  But he had been very silent, so far, during this trip. He volunteered little information in addition to the figures he handed across the cockpit either to Perkins (to whom the fuel position was essential) or to the pilots.

  Till now, Crooke had only noticed this as a subconscious warning light that had been flickering in the back of his mind. It had given him, since take-off, an unaccountable urge to look over his shoulder at Geoff without knowing its cause. Silence is not noticeable as a stimulant unless its reason has become clear; moreover, many is the warning light that flickers because the light itself has run amok and not the equipment it is intended to report.

  But now, after the radio message had come through, asking an apparently ludicrous question about missing undercarriages, Crooke found Geoff’s silence that much more interesting. David Crooke knew the value of intuition, though he had felt none on this occasion. But despite a blustering attitude which he adopted largely to defeat the boredom which smooth flight can induce, he was not a conceited man. He accepted the fact that his crew was there for a purpose; each member of it had his own sum of experiences from which to draw, his own sense of feel, his own hypersensitive inner ear whose mechanism, if properly interpreted, was more sensitive than the assortment of instruments which in theory were there to be believed in defiance of human senses out of their natural element. The balance between whom you believed and what you believed was achieved only through experience. Like every other pilot, Crooke had had it drummed into him, from his very first lessons, ‘Always believe your instruments; they are right, you are wrong.’ It was a sound principle, but like every other rule it was made in order to be broken. The trick was to know when to break it.

  An assessment in flight is commensurate with the speed of the aeroplane. From the moment that Jimmy had strolled, but so casually, into the cockpit to the moment when Crooke decided to cross-check his hunch about Geoff’s unnatural silence, the luminous centre second hand of the navigator’s clock only travelled twice around the dial.

  That was as long as a decision could be allowed to take when, in the event of positive diagnosis, the revolving finger of time might become the deciding factor in the lives of the passengers and crew.

  Crooke glanced once more at the indicator which signified ‘undercarriage up and locked’ and let drop his tautened expression. He coaxed his face into the subtlest of smiles. He knew he couldn’t bully Geoff into confessing a vague suspicion; a flight engineer is by nature instrument-bound and this especially applied in Geoff’s case.

  When Crooke turned to him it was as if Geoff had been waiting for the moment. For he also turned around in his swivel seat to meet Crooke’s eyes as they smiled at him, with carefully judged reassurance, across the flight deck.

  ‘Well, Geoff?’

  ‘I should have mentioned it,’ said Simmonds. ‘I could be wrong.’ While Crooke waited, Geoff had to search for the words. Intuition, being abstract, was not easily translatable into case-hardened sentences.

  Crooke helped him. ‘You noticed something?—on take-off?’

  ‘Yes, but I can’t understand why I didn’t mention it.’

  ‘You’ve been chewing it over. These things don’t always hit you straightaway.’

  ‘Something hit us, that’s just it.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘At the end of the take-off run. There was a sort of thump. I felt it rather than heard it.’

  Crooke said to Truman: ‘Call up Airways and tell them we’re taking a look.’

  ‘Any change of course?’

  Crooke thought for a moment. ‘No, not yet. We’ll bash on. I’ll decide later whether or not to turn back. If we really are in trouble it’s not going to make the blindest bit of difference where we land, except we’ll need the best possible weather conditions.’

  ‘Okay.’ Truman pulled his earphones down into place and started talking on the radio.

  Geoff was still looking very uneasy. ‘I ought to have mentioned it at once.’

  ‘Forget it,’ said Crooke, ‘it wouldn’t have made any difference anyway.’

  ‘What are we going to do now?’

  ‘Geoff, do you think you can get your great body through a very small hole?’

  Geoff knew what he meant by the question.

  Running almost the entire length of the hull, beneath the floor, ran a shallow, boat-shaped passage. It wasn’t intended for use during flight, since it was outside the pressurised bulkheads of the aeroplane. Its purpose was to permit rapid servicing on the ground. For through this duct ran the control cables, hydraulic lines, and electrical wiring.

  The duct was the spinal cord of the aircraft, and along its length were three main nerve-centres, one of which was the Number Three Systems Bay. In this hollow cube was grouped machinery which had to be easily accessible for maintenance on the ground.

  Geoff said: ‘It’ll be a tight squeeze, but I’ll try. The trouble is I don’t think I’ll see very much.’

  ‘You might. If we hit anything—or anything hit us—it could have made a dent in the hull. In the number three bay you’ll be right above the retracted wheels. If that’s where the trouble is there may be some damage visible from the inside.’

  Geoff grinned despite the situation. ‘I wish I hadn’t put on so much weight.’

  ‘We’ll all push. Meanwhile we must depressurise . . . Jimmy, ask Airways to clear us down to ten thousand feet.’

  Truman thumbed-up his acknowledgement. ‘Ten.’

  Crooke tensed himself for what he regarded as the most hazardous part of the job.

  You have to tell the passengers something, and they usually think there is more in it than meets the eye. Well, there might be! But anxious passengers were dangerous cargo, and this was where you had to be able to lie.

  Crooke picked up the microphone and switched to ‘passenger address’.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, this is the captain speaking . . .’

  Hubb looked up at the speaker over his head. Having tired of the unsuccessful stabs at available allure, he was glad of the digression. Usually a word from the captain at such times means that an ocean liner has come into view . . . ‘Below you, on the starboard side—that’s the right-hand side of the aircraft, ladies and gentlemen—you will see a distant glow of lights. That is the Queen Elizabeth, and she has just called us with an aldis lamp to say a big hallo . . .’

  The message didn’t turn out to be one of those.

  Mr Valentine, sitting in the almost deserted first class, felt a quiver go through his body as the voice suddenly interrupted his thoughts.

  The thoughts were not comfortable ones; if he couldn’t pull off the Zweitz deal within ten days he wouldn’t be flying anywhere—first class or otherwise. The cheque with which he had paid for this passage was already on its way to a bank account whose assets were even more subject to the law of gravity than was this swiftly sedate aircraft in the event of calamity. The threat of impending bankruptcy and the lurking possibility of a prosecution for fraud could be contained with the help of alcohol. But the prospect of a mid-atlantic ditching operation in an airliner which would have to hit concrete water at over one hundred knots was something which no amount of whisky could rectify.

  His body flexed into a rigid, brittle sculpt as the captain’s calm announcement oozed from the loudspeakers:

  ‘. . . You will no doubt notice that we are now descending; and in fact we will be going down to an altitude of ten thousand feet. At that point I shall depressurise the aircraft. You will probably find no difficulty whatsoever in breathing, when I let the wind out, so to speak; but if you do you have only to press the red button above your heads and an oxygen mask will drop down. For what it’s worth, I have flown for hours at sixteen thousand feet without a mask and I don’t think you’ll even notice the change in pressure.

 
; ‘One of my crew will be making an inspection of certain ancillary equipment which may have come slightly unstuck. There is no cause for alarm; but I am simply telling you because in a short time a hatch—which is visible to some of you—will be open and one of my officers will be disappearing through it. He is not going to make a parachute jump and I assure you we will end up with the same number of people aboard as we began. It is quite in order to smoke and to move around as you please. I shall be making a further announcement later. Thank you.’

  Dulcie looked across at Hubb. For the first time she had the opportunity to observe his response to something other than vital statistics. But she detected no change in disposition. Yale had evidently taught him the basic requirements of heroism, as well as those of a rather surface charm. Thou shalt not show fear . . .

  Either that, thought Dulcie, or else he was just plain stupid. She herself found no difficulty in interpreting the jovial understatements that had pursued each other in a latticework of lies from the loudspeaker above her head. Losing twenty thousand feet in order to depressurise did not imply to her that the captain’s cigar lighter wasn’t functioning properly.

  Jack Hubb was thinking: What was it? Flaps? Undercarriage? How does it retract?—inwards or outwards? I wish I knew more about airplanes. Or maybe I’m glad I do not. This one has a bug in it. No doubt about that. The captain is acting. If this were really all that trivial, he wouldn’t have tried so elaborately to make it sound so.

  The stewardesses had suddenly become excessively bright. They smiled feverishly and exhorted enquiring passengers to enjoy their cellophane-wrapped sandwiches. ‘I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about . . . the captain will keep you informed, sir . . . Yes, Captain Crooke is one of our most experienced pilots; rather than leave you in the dark he prefers to let his passengers know what is happening . . . Good heavens, no! The last time we had any sort of trouble on a Jet-Four the matter was rectified in a few minutes . . . er, no, actually we didn’t have to depressurise on that occasion. But there’s nothing to that—we do it every time we come in to land anyway.’