The Higher They Fly

by Christopher Hodder-Williams

  Crooke said: ‘Right! This is what we do. Plan A: Ditch her in Southampton Water if it’s not too choppy. It’ll break her back but there’s a sporting chance she won’t pitch over. Factors affecting: must have a calm sea. We await a further report from the weather boys. Plan B; If the sea is rough or we have second thoughts for some reason, belly her at London. Nasty bang, plenty of sparks and, well . . . you never bloody well know, do you! Anyway, they’ll give us lots of foam, and it should be very impressive, even if we do bend the wings back a bit further than they ought to be. We might even get mentioned in the newspapers.’

  Geoff said: ‘There’s one column I’d rather not be in.’

  ‘It isn’t any worse than the one Perk’s just been in. Is it. Perk?’

  Perkins smiled and said: ‘Five degrees left.’

  ‘No other comment?’ Crooke turned around and grinned broadly at the young man.

  Perkins said: ‘If you don’t shut up, sir, I’ll write a poem. And read it.’

  Crooke turned back and altered course. ‘I wouldn’t mind if they stuck to the point, old boy. Why can’t we have a nice salacious one, without all the trimmings?’

  ‘It would go against all my aesthetic instincts.’

  ‘I see. And how much time did you spend on your honeymoon writing poetry to satisfy your aesthetic instincts, Perk?’

  ‘I satisfied my aesthetic instincts without recourse to poetry.’

  ‘A very proper course of action, Perk, and in my opinion the sooner we get you back to Jeannie the better. So we’ll see what we can do . . . Anyway, Plan C, Geoff—you and I evaluate this chap Fleming and give ourselves a deadline. If we’re going to do any mid-air engineering at all, I say we need a minimum of four hours. Agreed?’

  Geoff said: ‘Well, if there is more than four hours’ work to do down there it’s probably a washout anyway. But who’s going to do it? With all due respect, Perk is no engineer——’

  ‘—I’m afraid you’re right,’ said the navigator.

  ‘—I can’t squeeze my fat body down there——’

  ‘—And,’ said the captain, ‘I can’t leave the cockpit as things are. We’ll have to find a volunteer with some engineering experience . . . which puts another mark against that course of action which is already third choice as it is.’

  Geoff said: ‘I should have thought it ruled it out altogether.’

  ‘Not entirely. We’ll keep an open mind. These are odds which have to be weighed very carefully indeed. To get down with a serviceable undercarriage but without a co-pilot is a piece of Fuller’s walnut chocolate cake. For me to do a belly landing alone—or ditch it—isn’t even a bit of my old woman’s quick-mix jobs, which never rise anyway. No, the thing to do is to give the man more time to work the thing out in detail on the ground. Let’s give him—say—an hour from now. In the meantime I’ll talk to my company rep—when he gets there—and anyone else who seems interested in us. You are certain, are you, that there is no book answer to this?’

  Geoff said immediately: ‘As far as I can see there’s no answer at all. But I’ll keep an open mind until I hear exactly what Fleming has to suggest.’ He looked at Crooke with unveiled grimness. ‘It had better be good—that’s all I can say.’

  ‘On that I agree . . . isn’t it damn silly? Here she is, flying as sweet as a migrating bird (hey, how about that, Perk?) and all that’s wrong is something that hasn’t got anything to do with flying at all . . .’

  They flew on in silence, till Geoff said: ‘If it does come to trying to patch up that gear, is Jimmy Truman going to be any use?—In any capacity?’

  ‘Out of the question, Geoff. And I’m certainly not letting him into the cockpit—of that I assure you! Not after that last performance.’

  ‘I don’t understand it. I would have sworn—up till today—that he was sound as a bell.’

  Crooke shrugged. ‘Me too. Perfectly good pilot. I wasn’t far off recommending him for promotion, as a matter of fact. How does a bloke like that get past the psychiatrists?’

  ‘I dunno,’ said Geoff. ‘But most things show up in flying; if it didn’t show then, how would it show on the ground?’

  ‘I’m beginning to wonder, now, what really happened on that test flight—the one that grounded Fleming. Funny that Truman suggested we should contact him about this. One of them must have been lying. I wish I could remember the story better. One of these days I’ll look into it.’

  ‘Yes.’ Geoff was thinking, one of these days, if there ever would be another of these days.

  A few minutes earlier, Jimmy Truman had almost decided that issue for them all.

  *

  Crooke’s RT conversation with Fleming had been brief. His reaction—by no means final—was to make his use of Fleming’s experience fall third and last in the possible courses open to him. This was firstly because, once committed, he would be stuck with a futile undercarriage which once lowered could not be retracted (therefore this was a one-time-only plan) and secondly there could be no doubt that Fleming himself was suspect, and would remain so until proven otherwise.

  Prior to this conversation Crooke had raised the airspeed to three hundred knots and switched in the automatic pilot. He did not trust Truman to fly her—even then—and wanted to concentrate on the radio as much as possible. Even so, he watched Truman carefully most of the time, taking quick looks at the windscreen which, due to the blackness of the sky behind it, acted as quite an efficient mirror.

  Crooke did not know, at this time, why he was all that much concerned about Truman. After the outburst, the man had fallen into a state of peculiar calm and was in fact merely a passive occupant of the right-hand seat.

  But passivity in a man, in a situation where positive action is not only expected but virtually inevitable, conveys a feeling of uneasiness.

  You look across the cockpit at the man you’ve flown with often enough before, and you have a clear impression of what he would normally be doing. Without even knowing it, he will scan the instruments with eyes alert to change, though his voice may be raised in hot political discussion or ribald laughter or boastful self-acclaim. He is alert; watching for things, glancing back at the navigator, passing sheets of figures back and forth, checking the compass heading and the green glimmer of the storm radar.

  You do not expect to see him sitting so still, so inert. You have never seen his eyes so dulled, nor his shoulders so rigid, nor his hand stroking his plastered cheek one moment and planted loosely between his legs the next, as if ashamed of his genitals.

  Yet this was the picture of Truman now; and Crooke assembled it in his mind as he spoke on the HF radio with the man whom this fugitive from the nursery had smashed. Crooke tried to gauge from Fleming’s voice—distorted as it was by the crackling radio—a clue which might make sudden sense out of a dangerous enigma. He needed to know the capacities of both men within the same crisis.

  Crooke, a robust throwback who in another age might have been at the wheel of a three-master, delivering tea across the Pacific and swearing at excellent crewmen for the sheer hell of letting himself rip, did not profess to understand the odd-balls. He was aware that there were people called psychiatrists and in tragic circumstances he had come upon their field of work—on the ground. But in the air other rules applied, and even the most gifted consultant could not, from some carpeted castle in Harley Street, be held responsible for the actions of a man behind a control yoke thirty thousand feet in the sky. If a man is not true unto himself, if a part of him remains in a filing cabinet to be studied by the mechanics of the human mind, he is the equivalent of a control system, bits of which have been left on the ground, leaving the remainder unpredictably prone to metal fatigue.

  If the Captain of Statelines Flight Forty-Six was not one who understood the processes which could jam the switchboards of the human mind, he did not reject the ordinary, every-day principles by which they were kept working. Four men working at close quarters in an airliner’s cockpit must have minds
capable of interlocking so that the crew could work as a unit. Perkins’ poetry and bananas, Geoff’s absolute dedication equally dispensed toward an instrument panel and an adopted child, Crooke’s own bawdy releases and self-characterisation . . . all these things and many others unseen or unrecognised contributed to the flow of thought, the anticipation of one man’s actions by another, and the smooth running of the ship.

  You didn’t need to be a psychiatrist to use human judgement, a lot of experience, and sometimes sheer intuition by which to arrive, sometimes much more rapidly, at the answer to the riddle in a face.

  You have met many men, during your flying experience. In the intimate confines of a flight deck you have observed each one of them, and learned their habits. Some of them have fought you, alert to your perception. Some have been always anxious to please, complex to deal with, hesitant or confused in a crisis. Others, apparently as insecure on the surface, have betrayed all these traits until the test came—at which time they snapped into shape, like an unfolding bridge table whose legs are secured by positive locks, and coped superlatively. Somehow it wasn’t difficult to tell the difference between the two species. Many men are frightened because they have not yet discovered their true capacity, and are relieved and high-spirited when they discover, at the point they feared most, that they revel in challenge.

  But occasionally you get a riddle. You get a man who does not fall into the broad spectrum of your experience. Reluctant to admit that he makes no sense of your methods of assessment, and therefore wilfully obliterating from the screen evidence which can be scanned and evaluated, you accept a human crossword-puzzle whose longest word is not only missing but is incompatible with the squares allotted. There are too many vowels or not enough syllables; so you throw the dictionary out of the window and trust in the ingenuity of its inventor, until you see the fake.

  So Crooke switched on his mental viewing screen and studied the impulses for the first time. The pattern was confused indeed and in diametrical conflict with Truman’s present behaviour. And Crooke realised at once that this man’s brain had been signalling these frantic messages ever since Truman had joined the crew.

  Behind vanity there raged a war. Each of Truman’s conquests were battles won, not for themselves, but each as part of an advance toward an objective. Every skirmish had to be reported to available allies; and after each victory Truman reviewed his own fighting power. Like an army possessed with an insane appetite for smart appearance, no tank went unpainted, no soldier wore an unpolished belt, no gun could be permitted the merest scratch on the outside of its barrel.

  If the perfection of the outer paintwork should ever become more important than the true fighting power of its weapons, then such an army must be defeated in ridicule. Surrounded by an enemy with a better sense of proportion, the preening troops would be overrun and taken prisoner, still clinging to their paintbrushes.

  In the catastrophe of defeat, a rebel soldier, dissatisfied with the humiliating terms of the armistice, awaits his chance to reach the only loaded gun; and in Truman there lurked an element still burning for tardy self-proof.

  Crooke could see this in the man’s unnatural stillness. A sixth sense kept him briefed while he used his other five to command the aircraft and assess Fleming as well as the tricks of radio permitted him.

  Fleming—at least—was no great enigma. You could hear the tension in the man’s voice; he was inclined also to interpret a question as an accusation, and reacted accordingly. Crooke wondered how he would feel if Fleming were in the co-pilot’s seat now. A man who continually leapt to his own defence was not always any great problem to deal with in the air. This type of pilot has to be kept busy, and you never put yourself out to reassure him. If you do, he will become self-conscious and introverted, and will search for double meanings within simple statements. Such a man, in short, must not be given time to think; and therefore reacts well to a crisis, when events follow one another rapidly and there is no time for conflict to develop in his mind.

  It was this facet of the man, as betrayed in his voice, which led Crooke to question in his mind whether the account of his cowardly conduct—as reported somewhat deviously—could be right; especially since such a personality would be an ideal victim for the Truman-type, who essentially require an over-sensitive person on whom to project deficiencies. Truman, in line with his feminine trait, would always seek to dominate but should never be allowed it. Therefore it was reasonable to assume that Truman’s inner bug would show itself much sooner in the company of Fleming than with a less insecure person.

  Going on experience, Crooke felt that though Fleming had probably been an inadequate captain in his flying days—because certain types of men could so easily defeat him—he would be a good second pilot if fit.

  However, he was far from fit now; and to trust his judgement to the extent required in this situation would be to risk capital indeed. He seemed to have a grip on the technicalities but did not have a grip on himself. The only thing to do was to give those on the ground more time to evaluate him. Meanwhile Crooke kept an open mind but still placed Fleming’s usefulness third and last when it came to a choice of plan. On that note the RT conversation ended.

  For a while nobody spoke in the cockpit of Flight 46. There was an acute feeling of unease but only Crooke had got as far as to attribute it to a numbed kind of war within the co-pilot’s mind in which the treaty had not finally been signed. To Geoff, the man looked utterly beaten. To Perkins he was only a source of embarrassment in that it was unpleasant to see someone degrade himself and disquieting when you couldn’t see why he’d done it.

  Crooke continued to take glances into the mirroring windscreen; but when it happened he wasn’t ready for it.

  Without any sort of warning Truman knocked the auto-pilot into neutral and grabbed his control yoke, pulling it harshly toward his body.

  You can stall a Jet-Four in five seconds. You can point its nose helplessly toward the stars and feel the wings faltering in their grip on the air which should support them. You can feel it shudder, ready to plunge a wing down and rip the engines off it.

  ‘Get that man off the controls!’ yelled Crooke, and used all his strength to force his own control wheel against the athletic strength of a man trying to hurl his last discus.

  Geoff could not wrench Truman’s hands from the wheel so he crooked his elbow beneath the man’s chin and applied full pressure.

  Truman’s face went the colour of the instrument lights and a vein bulged like a protrusion on a relief map.

  Against Truman’s fanatical strength Crooke found it impossible to get the yoke further forward then the central position. This checked the angle of climb from developing further, but the airspeed dropped so rapidly that even with full power applied the aeroplane seemed to hang in space, momentarily not flying at all but poised between living and dying.

  Perkins did it.

  He leapt forward and disengaged the lever which held Truman’s seat in position. With the shock of the sudden movement, Truman’s hands broke free.

  The seat rammed back against the rear end of its tracks, knocking Geoff on to the floor with a thud they must have felt in the first class.

  Back there, trays and glasses went flying.

  Mr Valentine couldn’t scream. He remained rooted to his seat, looking stupidly at the cigarette he still held in his hand. With a swish of steam it was extinguished as his scotch and soda leapt up from the folding table before him and emptied its contents.

  Jane Tyne got a shower of liquor over her but strove most of all to protect her script.

  Not that she was immune from fear any longer. She had never had a better reason to live than that which the script symbolised. A plum part on Broadway had been her ambition from a child; yet suddenly, after all her patience and hard work and planning, it seemed threatened by a kind of reality she had never had much time to think about . . . an air accident.

  Most of her friends were in the acting profession; an
d to them it was a matter almost of day to day routine to fly the Atlantic, until an aeroplane had become as much of a rehearsal room as it was a means of transport. Although Michael sometimes dramatised about near-shaves in the air she’d never really paid attention. Michael could make a big scene out of anything, and she tolerated it because he was one of those actors who could not confine his talents to the place where they belonged.

  She absorbed the shock of the sudden near-disaster by imagining how Michael would have described it . . . ‘Well of course it’s the last time I shall fly anywhere, Darling. I’ve often heard there’s something funny about the Jet-Four—as a matter of fact I was only talking about it the other day to Kurkwall. You remember Kurkwall? . . . He’s the chap that goes about trying to look like James Robertson Justice, only his beard won’t grow properly and somehow it looks vulgar . . . anyway, we were flying along apparently quite normally . . .’ at this point he would have taken a dramatic pull at his cigarette—‘when suddenly this thing happened. I tell you I was scared absolutely out of my wits. You know it takes quite a lot to shake me—well, don’t look at me like that.’

  ‘Go on, dear,’ would have been the way of coping with that.

  ‘I would remind you, my sweet, pretty Jane, that I was a submarine commander.’

  ‘You’re spoiling the story.’

  ‘Anybody would think I was making it up.’

  ‘Well, are you?’

  ‘Jane, you exasperate me!’

  ‘Michael, what happened?’

  ‘Well, suddenly the thing just pointed vertically upwards. You think I’m exaggerating, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You would! All I can say is, you would have thought differently if you had been there. The thing stood on its tail and you can imagine what it was like. I mean, the chaos! Luggage all over the place, drinks and food all over the floor. It’s a wonder we got away with it. I must say, whatever happened the pilot must have acted pretty fast. Phew! I wouldn’t go through that again . . .!’