The Higher They Fly

by Christopher Hodder-Williams

  What had these men over him? Why did he feel inferior even to Scrivens, a complete upstart? Why had Fleming’s stature increased, so that his voice sounded firm and positive instead of hesitant and ashamed? Why did Gregg’s eyes seem so accusing, when before they had been the eyes of one gentleman assessing another?

  Dawlish felt a frantic need to produce some significant factor which would turn the argument dramatically in his favour. He wanted to show these people, once and for all, whom they were dealing with. He wanted . . .

  Intruding upon his wounded ego came a vivid mental picture. It seemed so sharply defined in his mind’s eye that he braced himself and drew in a breath as if he had been struck.

  He saw a giant airliner descending. Its wheels did not protrude. Its smooth stomach remained bare for what was to come. In Dawlish’s mind-picture there was neither runway nor sea on which the aircraft could alight. There was only a vast, flat piece of desert.

  The airliner was travelling fast. She levelled off and prepared herself for the terrible pain.

  And then she touched.

  At once, the plane rebounded into the air. The nose pointed high . . . too high. With a thud it slammed down on to the desert flats, and the nose embedded itself in the sand and scooped out a trench with a brittle, self-blunting crowbar action like a gigantic chalk squeaking across a blackboard. Until the chalk broke, and the backbone cracked apart.

  The aircraft grabbed at the sand with wings flailing in agony, ripping ruts in the sand and scarring it for hundreds of yards, till the death-throes were obliterated by a barricade of dust.

  Then he seemed to be within, hearing screams and seeing rows of seats torn out of their mountings and stacked one against the other as if there were no occupants to separate them. And for a split second he seemed to be looking out of a small oval window at a wing that suddenly and catastrophically changed its shape, then erupted in a cauldron of flame as the tanks burst. And he heard a woman crying and a child whimpering and saw bodies lying prone and broken along a stretch of sand a quarter of a mile long.

  And with this image came the thought that his own hurt pride was a thing of such unimportance that it cost him nothing to reject utterly the outraged speech which had been forming in his mind.

  So he said, just as if he were in the board room, just as if this were a decision which rested on the shoulders of his pinstriped colleagues and on his own: ‘We have decided, gentlemen, on the right course. I am, after due consideration, in full agreement.’

  *

  When they told Crooke on the radio, a few minutes later, the captain of Flight Forty-Six replied: ‘It’s crazy—but then flying is crazy. And as a matter of fact I am crazy. We’ll do it.’

  Chapter Fourteen

  Susan came into the forward galley with a tray of empty cups she had brought back from the cockpit. She found Jill in there, crying.

  Susan slapped the tray down and said: ‘Now come on, Jill. You’ve got nothing to cry about.’

  ‘It’s so awful . . . to see him, just sitting there. Like a child. I’ve tried to comfort him. It’s no use. I don’t think he even knows who I am any more. He’s in a sort of trance.’

  ‘I do understand. But there’s nothing you can do for him.’

  ‘That’s the worst part.’

  Susan put an edge on her voice which she didn’t feel. But it was necessary. ‘Now, look. Pity isn’t going to do him any good. It isn’t fair on you, and it certainly isn’t fair on the passengers you’re supposed to be looking after. Is it?’

  ‘No. Of course not.’

  Susan put an arm round her. ‘There’s a very good doctor to look after him. You trust her. And you think about your own job. We’re going to try a wheels-down landing and that’ll mean anything up to four more hours’ flying. During that time they’ll be working on the undercarriage and the passengers are going to get increasingly tense. We’re going to have our work cut out trying to keep them reasonably happy.’

  ‘Four hours!’

  ‘Yes. Don’t look now, Jill, but our charming Mr Valentine is already horribly drunk. He’s been pestering Jane Tyne. He shifted himself back and sat beside her, until Miss Tyne complained that she was trying to learn a part. I must say she was very polite about it, considering. Anyway, I succeeded in persuading the wretched man to go back to his own seat. But Jill, I don’t like the way he’s acting up and people like that can go berserk in a crisis. I’ve seen it happen before. So help me keep an eye on him.’

  ‘Yes. Sorry I broke down.’

  ‘That’s all right. I expected it. You’ll be all right now. Just keep yourself busy.’

  ‘What’s happening up front?

  ‘You know that fresh Romeo I told you about?’

  ‘The one who promised you a date, out of the kindness of his heart?’

  ‘That’s the one. Well, he’s go: another date now . . . with the undercarriage. Apparently he’s a bit of an engineer and by all accounts he needs to be.’

  ‘He volunteered? Bully for him!’

  ‘Oh, he’s got guts as well as gall.’

  ‘What’s he got to do? Do you know?’

  ‘All I know is that they’re fixing up a long lead to the radio, so that he can talk to someone at London Airport from where he will be working. Crookey-Boy and Geoff both thought it would be too complicated for him to work it out second-hand, so to speak, so he’s going to get a personal lecture, all to himself. By radio.’ She added drily: ‘This do-it-yourself business seems to have come into its own with a vengeance.’

  ‘I would rather not have known that! If our life depends on an amateur mechanic, burrowing inside the innards of this aeroplane, while in friendly conversation with a man on the ground . . .! By the way, who is the man on the ground?’

  Susan hadn’t meant to say. But Jill saw her expression and it all seemed to fit. Susan didn’t have to mention any names.

  ‘Robert Fleming!’ said Jill, turning away. ‘Isn’t it weird? Life is always playing tricks like that . . . so that’s why they had me up front!’

  Susan watched her face, and said: ‘What is it? What are you thinking?’

  Jill’s eyes seemed enlarged. When she spoke her voice was oddly muted. ‘. . . for therein lies the source of your own triumphs!—Jimmy had better be right, that’s all.’

  Susan stared at her blankly. ‘What on earth do you mean?’

  ‘It’s happened in reverse.’

  ‘Jill, what has?’

  Before Susan could disentangle her colleague’s cryptic comments, the loudspeaker crackled into life . . .

  Eddie was standing at the rear of the tourist section.

  He looked along the interior of the plane, and could see right up as far as the door of the cockpit, because the sliding bulkhead that divided the two classes was open.

  He could see Susan and Jill, as they conversed just outside the forward galley. The alcove bar, where First Officer Truman was sitting, was just out of sight. But Eddie noticed Susan glancing across at the alcove, once or twice. To Eddie, who was what Dulcie would have described as an ‘open book’—though taken from a very different shelf than was Jack Hubb—people like Truman were frightening monsters whose horrific value arose from not belonging anywhere. Eddie, whose private life was just as predictable as Hubb’s, had a sense of humour which compensated for the fact that his choice of mate could not be announced as openly. He liked women, but they always reduced him to helpless giggles and no more.

  He depended on them, though, in other ways. It had been Susan who had reassured him, earlier in the flight, when he had become obviously afraid. Something about her softness and understanding made him feel protected; and in a crisis it was to a woman he turned. But in her he sought the maternal succour she could offer, as opposed to her share of the equal and opposite forces with which male and female fortify each other. In Eddie, the small content which punched-out his half of the revitalising message expressed itself in the practical jokes he indulged at the stewardess�
� expense and the double entendres he managed to weave into the conversation. For such things, an airliner provided endless opportunities.

  The playground of an aeroplane had, however, been converted by the tint of danger into a more sober environment. The way in which individuals integrated with one another became far less important than the fact of their doing so. Eddie was a member of a team; just as much depended on him now as would have applied to anyone else in his uniform. He was no more enfeebled by his own particular needs in life than was Susan by hers or Roger Perkins by his. In the context it was irrelevant.

  Eddie, the epitome of sanity, looked along the cabin and knew he did not want to die. He looked at the expensive upholstery, its pale, cleverly contrived tonal concord. He looked at the rows of comfortable seats and the trusting human beings who occupied them. He hearkened to the sweet sound of unimpaired slipstream, as air flowed swiftly along the fish-like hull and over the leading edges of the stabilisers at the tail, a few yards behind him.

  You could fly in no better aeroplane than this one. Flight Forty-Six, and the eleven other identical planes in the Statelines fleet, comprised a home in the sky for Eddie and his colleagues. He liked the plush surroundings, especially forward in the first class, and he found the task of attending to important-looking people an agreeable one. With the less important he was just as attentive but more informal; exchanging frivolities so that he could giggle about them afterwards and plan a piece of repartee while he fetched the order. He enjoyed the cold indifference of the mascara’d film-stars, who seldom chatted with him but always made him renew his resolve to be the ultimate in stewards—prompt to come back with an order, professional in the way he served it, courteous (out not servile) in his demeanour. He knew his job; and though he realised that there was an unseen barrier between his own special world and the one that the operational crew held in hands meatier than his own, he knew that within his own limits he contributed as much of his ability and experience as they did.

  Eddie had been dawdling, as much as possible, in the fetching of Mr Valentine’s new intake of alcohol. He was perceptive as Susan in his evaluation of passengers, and in some ways more so. Susan knew how to handle the Jack Hubbs of this world, but was too forgiving, Eddie thought, to appreciate to the full the menace of the Valentines. In some ways Jill, whom Eddie considered to be less of an innocent than Susan, had more intuition when it came to the really dangerous freight that sometimes wore a suit and sat slumped in a first-class seat. But Jill’s eyeline had become clouded by her concern over First Officer Truman (now, there was something he couldn’t understand!) and her alertness at the outset of the flight to the potential threat of this thing Valentine had become dulled.

  But Eddie knew! Oh yes, Eddie had met this type before! Give them enough to drink and you’re in dead trouble. If you stop them upsetting the passengers they’ll have a go at the crew. If they’re prevented from causing problems in that direction then you’ve really got to watch them.

  Eddie, who had never met a psychiatrist, suddenly had an idea. Why not have a psychiatrist on duty at the ticket office? While the baggage was being weighed, the specialist could decide whether or not the human cargo was safe to carry. Then he rejected the scheme, because he thought there might not be enough psychiatrists to go round. It was a pity though, because that would mean these odd doctors would have something important to do, instead of sitting in Harley Street and examining the heads of people who refused to examine their own. Eddie pulled a rude face at an imaginary psychiatrist and proceeded toward the first class with the tray.

  ‘This is the captain speaking . . .’

  Eddie paused where he was. He felt that the message about to be broadcast over the passenger address system was going to be just as important to him as to anyone else aboard. So he stood still, with the drink tray in his hands, and listened very carefully.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I want you to listen rather carefully to what I’m going to say; because you will all know by now that there is a bit of a snag with this aircraft, and I don’t want you to get the idea that things are worse than they really are. That is why I am going to tell you the facts.

  ‘As a flying machine, I want to assure you that there is nothing whatsoever wrong with this aeroplane. She is in excellent form, and if we didn’t have to land somewhere sometime there wouldn’t be any problem. However, it gets monotonous if you don’t come down sooner or later and we prefer not to run out of fuel before we arrive somewhere.’

  Ha-bloody-ha, thought the young man in the tourist class who had been bragging about his flying experience. He had landed once with a coughing engine and emptied tanks—and hands slipping off the controls with the sweat of panic. He had vivid memories of the interview which followed. Stew, his instructor, could curd e milk with his tongue from a range of a hundred yards.

  Stew stood there for quite a long time, watching the propeller jerk to a stop, then looking at Keith’s face as if it were something obscene from a horror picture.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘I ran out of fuel.’

  ‘Really?’ Stew ambled up to the cockpit, tapped the skin of the aeroplane thoughtfully with his knuckles, then said:

  ‘Get down.’

  ‘I haven’t switched off,’ said the young man.

  ‘I hardly think that will be necessary.’

  Keith undid his straps and climbed out of the cockpit.

  Stew looked at him silently for a long time. ‘I was in the Tower when your radio-call came through. You sounded like a frightened rabbit. What’s happened to your radio procedure?’

  ‘Wasn’t it correct?’

  Stew’s face indicated that it was not. ‘I thought I told you to calculate your fuel burn-up at all times.’ He pointed to a dial inset in the wing. ‘What’s his?’

  ‘A fuel gauge.’

  ‘What’s it for?’

  ‘Looking at.’

  ‘Why didn’t you?’

  Keith said nothing.

  Stew swung his arm and body round slowly and rested his hand on the wing. It was an act of fury, but arrested by slow motion. His voice was still quiet when he spoke. ‘Where were you when you realised you were low on fuel?’

  ‘Welwyn.’

  ‘And the nearest airfield is——?’

  ‘Panshanger.’

  ‘Why didn’t you land there?’

  ‘I thought I could make it to here.’

  ‘You thought you could make it to here. How dare you say a thing like that? I don’t give a damn if you insist on killing yourself; but supposing you had run out of fuel a few seconds earlier?’ Stew pointed back in the direction whence Keith had made his approach. ‘You see that road? People in it. You could have killed them all.’

  ‘Yes. Sorry.’

  ‘Go and get your tanks filled. Then start up, and wait for me. We’ll go right through the curriculum. And, so help me!—if you get up to any more lousy tricks I’ll have you marked down as unfit for solo . . .’

  Keith had a wry smile on his face as he remembered the incident.

  But it was the very last time he had ever come near to running out of fuel. Stew had said, when they landed an hour and a half later, on the completion of a marathon revision lesson: ‘You’re pretty good. Keith. I always knew that. But it’s the other chap that gets the jar. If you undershot an airfield with no fuel in your tanks you’re not committing suicide; it’s plain bloody murder. Feel like some tea? I know I could use some . . .’

  Keith returned his attention to the loudspeaker above his head.

  ‘. . . But when we took off from London Airport, one of those rare faults occurred—to do with the undercarriage wheels—which now means that we are faced with some difficulty in landing the normal way. I can now tell you that myself and the rest of the crew, together with expert engineers on the ground, have worked out a means whereby the undercarriage can be repaired in flight.

  ‘I’m afraid this will try your patience considerably, because the repair work
will take quite a long time and rather obviously we can’t go home until it’s completed. Still, we didn’t do all this on purpose; and I hope you’ll forgive us for the inconvenience caused to you. Meanwhile the cabin staff will make you as comfortable as possible; and arrangements have already been made at London to put you aboard another plane immediately, or provide hotel accommodation should you wish to rest before resuming your journey.

  ‘We are now going to descend to an altitude suitable for the work that has to be done or the undercarriage. It may be a bit bumpy. So if you see the “fasten seat belts” sign come on it will be for this reason and no other. Lastly, if any of you find the air a little rarefied for comfort when we depressurise at ten thousand feet, you can (as I told you before) obtain oxygen simply by pressing the red button overhead. The mask will drop down automatically, so have a sniff if you feel like it—it’s all free! Thank you for listening. I shall be saying a few words later, when the work has been completed. That’s all for now.’

  Crooke hung up the mike and switched off. Then he turned to Geoff with a fiendish grin. ‘Little do they know!’ he said.

  Geoff was wiring-in an extension for Hubb’s microphone and headset. He looked up a second. ‘I thought you were going to end up by telling them to take their partners for the next dance.’

  ‘Oh God. Did I overdo it?’

  Perkins said: ‘It might be an idea to play some music over the speakers.’

  Crooke looked round and frowned at him. ‘Perk, if you walked into your bank to ask for an outrageous overdraft, would you put on a brand new suit? . . . You must never gild the lily, old boy. It makes people wonder why it’s suddenly got so necessary.’