by Liz Grzyb
He turned around and looked me up and down with a smile. He had a tanned face, but it wasn’t due to a salon; he looked pretty outdoorsy and rugged. There were deep lines in his face as he smiled at me. “You’re Dave Clark,” he said, and I admitted I was. “Come on in and take a squiz.” He had a broad Australian accent, and he shook hands with me as he ushered me inside.
If my cabin was luxurious, this was decadent. Easily ten metres wide and with doors that, presumably, led off to bedrooms and a bathroom. It had a bar and a couple of leather lounges and chairs, a dining table and a couple of occasional tables, a huge screen and half a dozen windows, draped with expensive-looking curtains.
“Bugger me!” I said.
The man chuckled. “Yeah, it took me a bit like that the first time I saw it. It’s bigger than my first house. Fancy a drink?”
I normally don’t drink at all when I’m on assignment, but this time I said, “Yes, please,” as I walked toward the windows.
He moved to the bar. “What do you fancy?”
“Anything.” Out the window, I could see the marching cliffs of the coast, and the long rollers coming in the batter against them, the sea shading from a deep green to the darkest of blues to the south. I didn’t quite press my nose against the window, but it was close.
He thrust a glass into my hand. “Here. Get that into you.” A very smoky and smooth single malt scotch, with a drop of water in it. The man stood beside me and we watched the view in silence for a while. “Y’know,” he said eventually, “DaVinci reckoned that if we could fly, there’d be no more wars. He turned out to be wrong, but I reckon it was this sort of flying he was thinking about. Effortless gliding through the sky, seeing everything below at a peaceful pace.” He held out his hand again. “Sorry, I didn’t introduce myself the first time. Joe Buswell.”
I nearly dropped my drink. “The Bashful Billionaire?”
He laughed. “You media blokes call me that. Me, I just don’t like to have my picture in the paper all that much. I’m not one for parties and social occasions, I just like to stay at home on the farm and maybe play a bit of golf every now and then, or go to the cricket when it’s on.”
He didn’t mention that ‘the farm’ covered 20,000 hectares up in the Kimberleys, that playing golf meant going to a course that he owned or that watching the cricket was easy when you were a member of the MCC and all the major cricket clubs in Australia.
“Pull up a chair. We can take it easy and watch the view.”
I did that, amazed by how light the chair felt. I commented on the fact.
“Yeah, you’ve got to save weight, even on this boat.”
“You’ve come out of your shell for this inaugural flight, then?” I asked.
“Yeah, it was expected.” He grinned at me. “This is the owner’s suite you’re in, mate.”
I gaped a little, and then got out my recorder. “You don’t mind me asking you a few questions?”
“I guess not. They’re going to be asked anyway, and you may as well be the first.”
I thought rapidly. “Why did you do it?”
“Well, we’ve always been pretty poorly served by airlines, and successive governments haven’t made the situation any better. We’ve still got piss-poor airports, and the flight timetables are bloody awful. And there was one more thing.” He took a drink and looked out the window, brooding for a minute. “You look out there and it’s nice and clear and pretty. I visited China a few years ago, negotiating a deal, high up in a skyscraper, and I looked out the window. I couldn’t see the ground for smog. I could hardly see the other buildings. I looked up, and I couldn’t see the bloody sun, just a yellow blob in the sky like a broken fried egg. I didn’t want the world to end up like that all over. I did a bit of research, and found out that airlines are major polluters.”
Listening to him, I thought of his career, moving from beef cattle into mining and then into manufacturing when no-one else would. He’d explored for rare minerals, and found them, just in time for the price to go through the roof. He’d single-handedly created a major town in the north-west—Brougham, named after his cattle station—and moved into gas exploration. He had a reputation for dealing fairly with employees, he spent money to keep his businesses carbon-neutral and he still had majority shareholdings in all his companies.
He went on. “I decided to start up my own airline, and they wouldn’t let me. The airlines didn’t like it, the truckies didn’t like it—and they’ve got so many fingers in government that they practically own it. Oh, I could start one that ran up and down the state, but not interstate, and certainly not internationally. But I’m an impatient bugger. I employed a few smart fellas who found a loophole in the regulations; that they didn’t apply to airships. What topped that off was that they’d found helium in one of my offshore gas wells, so I didn’t have to buy it in. Then I lobbied in parliament to get a new set of rules drawn up for these hybrid air vehicles. That was a bloody expensive job, but I got it through when they weren’t looking.” He glanced around the room. “And then I went and bought a few. I got eight for the price of two airliners. They turned out alright, eh?”
I allowed that this one certainly had. “Any other problems, apart from the licensing?”
“Airlines and heavy haulage don’t want this to work. Half those sightseers at the river were company stooges. Bastards. The truck companies want to keep transport costs up and the airlines can’t see that this is an alternative to fast travel, not a replacement.” He waved at the ship around him again. “If I want to get from Perth to Sydney for a meeting and come back the same day with some signed papers, or go up to Singapore for a shopping weekend, I don’t want to spend two days getting there and back. But for most travellers it doesn’t matter. You spend a day getting to Singapore and get a good night’s rest on the way, wake up and you’re ready to go. Same thing Perth to Sydney. And cargo! I can pick up a thousand tons of cargo direct from a ship in Fremantle and get it into Sydney at Blackwattle Bay or Darling Harbour, or even the old flying-boat harbour in Rose Bay in a day, at a tenth the price they’re charging.” He shook his head. “I asked them if they wanted to come in with me, phase out trucking and replace it with heavy lift vehicles, and they laughed at me, said it would never work. The airlines did the same. Well, now we’re on our way to Sydney, and they’re looking like dickheads. The stupid thing is that they’ve convinced the unions to get on side with them. They can’t see that this will create a whole new bloody industry.” He leaned back in his chair and finished his drink. I’ve had a few death threats and a couple of fires out on the station. They tried to convince my drivers to quit, but I pay too much over scale for that to happen. The drivers told them to get fucked.” He laughed. “I sometimes have a bloody hard time getting an airline ticket, though. Well, that’s not going to last; this is how I’ll travel from now on.” He looked back out the window. “By Christ, I’d do it just for the view.”
I started to write the article when I got back to my room. I could get the header, the good old inverse pyramidal lead, but after that the words wouldn’t come. It was all so huge. Not just the Skylark, but the implications. To call it a revolution in travel seemed piss-weak. And all due to one man with vision. Finally, I settled on getting down some impressions that I could tie together later, and when that was finished I just lay down and slept away the brain overload.
Denise woke me in the evening, telling me to get ready for dinner and the ball. She was ready and waiting when I stumbled into restaurant, dressed in a burgundy confection of lace, net and silk and a hat with peacock feathers. Mike sat with her, trying to read his menu. I slipped into a chair and read mine while Denise babbled about who was on the Skylark and what they were wearing. A limited menu, but not as limited as in a plane, and the food was excellent. Julia came up while we were eating and asked us how we enjoyed it. Instead of a uniform, she wore a slinky grey silk dress that hung off one shoulder. “As soon as I can shut down the restaurant,” she said, “
I’m coming to the ball. This is really a once in a lifetime opportunity, and I’m not going to miss it.” She waved an arm at the crowd. “This is all part of the plan, you know. Think about what it’s like in an airliner, even a big one, even in first class; this has got it beaten all hollow. It’s class, it’s space, it’s making travel fun again.” She looked over at me. “And it’s romantic.” She winked.
The doors to the ballroom were opened after true darkness had fallen, and I pictured us as an island of light, moving gracefully through the sky. Maybe Joe was right: this is what DaVinci had imagined. It certainly made me a little more relaxed. Relaxed enough that I accepted Julia’s invitation to dance.
This wasn’t a ball where a DJ played the latest monstrosities, remixed to incoherence. A small jazz band played classics, backing a woman singer who I’d heard around the clubs in town. It suited the ambience, and I found that Julia did, too. In between dances we chatted about where we’d been, how she’d started out as a waitress in a tapas bar in Madrid on her gap year, and just plain liked it. “I’d graduated from Warwick with a mediocre English degree, and I could see myself headed to a life of teaching or the public service. I discovered I liked restaurants, and worked my way up from Madrid to managing a pub restaurant in Coventry, then on to bigger and better, and wound up here.”
I told her I’d started out as a cadet with a country paper after a degree in journalism and had wound up as a general reporter, then been tapped for a few travel assignments and ended up scoring second string on the travel desk. She complimented me on my tango, and I told her I’d had to learn it for the school ball at the very snobby boarding school I’d gone to. Then she asked me if I’d seen the crew quarters yet, and invited me up to have a look. At least it wasn’t her etchings.
It was all terribly romantic and passionate for about five minutes, pashing in a corridor and fumbling to find the right grip, when Julia raised her head and said, “Someone’s opened a bloody external door. Shit!”
I looked around in a befuddled way. “What?”
“I felt a pressure change a second ago. Like when you drop in an elevator.”
I’d been too occupied to notice, but Julia was so sure she tapped her little intercom brooch and said into it, “There’s been a pressure drop on the crew deck. I think someone’s opened an external door.”
I could hear the reply this time, because she wasn’t wearing her ear receiver. A tinny voice said, “It’s one of the small cargo doors not far from you. Can you go down and find out what idiot opened it and get it closed? We’ll send a couple of crew down.”
Julia said, “Sorry, duty calls,” and we gave up our embraces, although I hoped we could resume them once we’d sorted this out. We moved off down the corridor. The lights had been dimmed and when we turned a corner we could just make out the dark rectangle of the cargo door against the dim interior. We could also see a man struggling with some sort of contraption.
“Hey!” Julia yelled. “What the fuck is going on here? Get that door closed!”
The man replied by pulling a gun from his belt and snapping off a shot that ploughed into the wall behind us. I opened the nearest door, grabbed Julia and pulled us both inside. We were in a broom closet, and for a minute we were more intimate than we had been in the clutches of passion. Julia hit her brooch and said, “Some bastard just shot at us!”
“There are two crew a couple of minutes away. Keep your head down.”
“Yeah, and what are they going to do against a gun?”
The brooch was silent.
I risked a peek around the door and saw that the gunman had finished assembling the contraption, which looked a lot like a hang glider, jet black and skinny. He had his head turned away, trying to get the thing headed into the door, and I did something stupid. The gun was back in his belt and both his hands were occupied with the hang glider, so I tackled him.
I’m not a big man, but I played a lot of Rugby at university, and I remembered how to tackle. Hit hard and hit low, get the man down. Unfortunately, the gunman had studied martial arts at some different university, because he flicked out a foot and caught me in the stomach. I went down like a bag filled with porridge. He pulled out the gun. There was an expression of regret on his face as he said “Sorry,” and then Julia threw a broom at him, pointy end first. It caught him right in the balls, and he sagged against the wall. I had the presence of mind to bat the gun out of his hand before he could regain his senses, and it dropped out into the void below us.
Julia erupted into the corridor, beating at him with a mop, and he put up a hand to fend it off, then grabbed the end and used it to push Julia sprawling. He got in the doorway and buckled a harness around himself. I just had time to grab at him before he launched out the door and into the night. I heard a flat snap as his hang glider opened, and then there was silence, apart from my groans. But I’d grabbed his belt and something had come away in my hand as he wrenched free.
The two crewmen arrived as Julia shook me and asked, “Are you alright?”
I was having difficulty catching my breath. I just nodded and held up the thing I’d grabbed. She tapped her brooch and said, “Somebody has just jumped out using a hang glider, and no, I’m not drunk.”
“This is O’Halloran. Hold on, I’ll come down myself.”
She was as good as her word, and in a couple of minutes she joined us. “Get that bloody door closed,” she snapped.
We’d spilled out the contents of the small sack I’d grabbed onto the floor. She reached down and picked up a flat, black packet and flipped its cover open. “Jesus Christ,” she said. “This is a bomb.”
I stared. It looked innocuous, just a black packet with what looked like a timer set into it. The timer had just over sixteen minutes left on it.
“Why would anyone jump out of a ship at 1,500 metres with a bomb on their back?” I asked.
“Because it was a leftover and he was going to dump it in the sea. It’s only about fifty kilometres to Coffin Point; he could get there easily if he knows what he’s doing. What he’s done is leave bloody bombs in this ship!” she turned to the crewmen. “Get everyone on the crew up here and start searching. You two,” she indicated Julia and me, “come up to the bridge.”
We raced after her and skidded into the control room right behind her. “Tom!” she bellowed. “Get the security cameras up on the forward screen—find cargo door A14 and run it backwards from there. Find out where the bastard came from.” Tom did just that in seconds, catching my ignoble charge and the jump. Running it backward down linked cameras showed the man dragging his hang glider up from the passenger level, and before that coming down a staircase that led up into the bag itself.
“Christ,” O’Halloran swore, “He’s put bombs on the gasbags.” She turned to me. “Remember me telling you that the only thing that could make us crash is all the bags going at once? Well, that’s what he’s tried to do.” She shook her head. “We’d never make it to land in time. Tom, bring the ship down to sea level and hold it steady, and get all the crew searching the bags. If they find a bomb, don’t fuss with it; just toss it into the sea. Come on you two, let’s get up there.”
We scurried up the staircase into a forest of spindly struts and looming bags. A host of crew soon poured up after us. “But how can such a small thing do so much damage?” I asked.
“It doesn’t have to be big, it just has to blow a hole in the bag,” O’Halloran said. “And we’ve got thirteen minutes to find them all and toss them. Let’s just pray we find them all.”
The crew swarmed like monkeys over the struts and bags, and almost immediately one shouted she’d found one. A port was opened and it was tossed out. Through the port I could see that the ocean was a lot closer. More discoveries followed in rapid succession, but there were two bombs to every bag, stuck in wherever they weren’t obvious. We grabbed them and threw them out as they were tossed down. Finally, we were down to less than a minute left, and we still couldn’t find the second d
evice on one of the bags. All the others, including the one from the backpack, had been tossed. We searched feverishly, all the while counting down in our heads. Thirty seconds; fifteen; ten; five and then the surface of the sea erupted in a pattern of explosions. Inside the ship, nothing happened.
O’Halloran breathed a sigh of relief. “Sloppy,” she said. “That one on his belt wasn’t a leftover, it was supposed to go onto one of the bags.”
Myself, I was just glad of a sloppy bomber.
The passengers were told that the descent to the ocean and the explosions had been a special treat to celebrate the end of the ball, and they were bid goodnight. I collared Buswell before he could get away. He knew everything, and I asked him who he thought might be responsible. “Don’t know,” he said. “Could have been the heavy haulage people, could have been the airlines. One of the two. They were thinking of things like the Hindenburg, or the Titanic I’ll bet. One big, showy disaster and it put a stop to bloody zeppelins for sixty years. And I’ll just bet that they’ve shorted stocks in this company and all my companies. Bloody idiot’s romantic gasbag goes down on its first flight and so do his companies. That’s what they were hoping. This isn’t just about transport; it’s a bloody take-over bid.”
He was right; I could just see the headlines tomorrow about horror crashes and unreliable new forms of transport. Some of the media was owned by those very same companies that ran trucks and aeroplanes. The share price in Buswell’s companies would have gone through the floor.
“I’ll find out, you bet,” Buswell said. “They can’t keep something like this under cover for long. And when I find out what bastards did this, I’ll take them out to the parking lot and teach them how to dance, outback fashion.” He bade me goodnight, saying he was off to a date with a bottle of Lagavulin. I looked for Julia, and caught sight of her as she headed back down to the crew section. She gave me a regretful smile and blew me a kiss.
