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The countless hours spent in a 747 simulator combined with years of actual flying experience counted for nothing in preparing the pilots for the physical shock of the blast. Sweitzer’s coffee cup flew free of his grasp and shattered on the instruments in front of him. Cooke’s seat-belt was not properly fastened and he was hurled into the back of Sweitzer’s seat. He heard his collar-bone snap.
Instantly, the flight deck was filled with mist as the howl of decompression began. Captain Lewis Marriot reacted first. Attaching an oxygen mask to his face, he began to absorb the terrifying information that surrounded him. ‘Rapid depressurization drill!’ He turned to his co-pilot. ‘Elliot, are you all right?’
Sweitzer was fumbling with his mask. ‘Okay … I’m okay …’
‘You fly it,’ Marriot commanded him, before turning to check on Cooke. ‘Larry?’
There was blood on Cooke’s forehead. His left arm was entirely numb. He could feel the break in the collar-bone against his shirt. Gingerly, he hauled himself back into his seat and attached his own oxygen mask. ‘I’ll be … fine …’
‘Then talk to me.’
On the panel in front of Cooke the loss of cabin pressure was indicated by a red flashing light. A siren began to wail. Cooke pressed the light to silence it. ‘I got a master warning for loss of cabin pressure.’
Sweitzer said, ‘We need to get to a lower altitude.’
Marriot nodded. ‘Set flight level change. Close thrust. Activate speed brake.’
A yellow light began to flash in front of Cooke. ‘I’ve got a hydraulics master caution.’ He pressed the light to reset it. Two seconds later, it went off again. ‘We’ve lost one set of hydraulics.’ The 747–200 was fitted with three different hydraulics systems. ‘I also got a fuel imbalance warning.’ A red master warning light came on, accompanied by the ringing of a bell. ‘Fire!’
Sweitzer said, ‘The auto-pilot’s in trouble. I’m getting a vibration.’
Marriot looked at Cooke. ‘Engine fire check list. What’s it on?’
‘Two.’
Under Cooke’s supervision, Marriot closed the number two engine, shut off the fuel control switch, and then pulled the number two fire handle to close the hydraulics and fuel valves. Then he twisted the handle to activate the fire extinguishers.
‘We’re losing the auto-pilot. The second set of hydraulics is going.’
‘Deactivate the auto-pilot, Elliot.’
Sweitzer nodded. ‘We’re going to have to slow her down. There’s too much vibration.’
‘Just keep her steady and make the turn. We’re heading for Gander.’
Gander, in Newfoundland, was the closest runway to them.
Sweitzer was struggling with the control column. ‘God, she’s sluggish!’
The fire bell sounded again in conjunction with a master warning light. Cooke said, ‘We need the second shot with the fire extinguisher. It’s still burning.’
‘I think we’ve got a rudder problem and maybe a jammed stabilizer. The trim’s shot to hell.’
Marriot turned the radio to VHF 1215, the emergency frequency. ‘Mayday, Mayday, Mayday! This is North Eastern Zero Two Seven. We are in emergency descent. We have structural damage. We have an engine fire, not extinguished.’
The violent deceleration hurled everyone forwards. Those whose seat-belts were unfastened were ejected from their seats. Martin Douglas was lifted from his but the belt cut across the top of his thighs and restrained him. His head hit the seat in front. The blow knocked him senseless and his body was immediately snapped back against his own seat.
He was only unconscious for three seconds. Despite being dazed, Douglas knew that his nose was broken. The back of the seat in front had crushed it and ripped the skin in several directions. Blood was seeping from the star-shaped gash but it was not slithering down his face. It was not staining his shirt or splattering his lap. Instead, it was being sucked off his skin. A sticky stream of crimson drops was hurtling forwards, flying over the seats in front, borne on the rushing air.
Further forward, part of the cabin floor had collapsed. Broken seats were wrenched from their moorings and sucked into the night. A tornado tore through the fuselage, ripping clothes from bodies, bodies from seats, hand-luggage from floors and overhead lockers. All of this debris was inhaled by some enormous invisible force towards the front of the 747. The majority of those who could were screaming, but their pitiful shrieks were lost in the roar of decompression. Others were unconscious. Or already dead.
The pain in his ears was agonizing, a consequence of the colossal percussive clap and the violent change in air pressure. But compared to the fear, his pain was a minor irritation. The terror constricted his throat, his stomach, his chest. As the aircraft began to descend, Douglas instinctively pushed against the arm-rests, raising himself upwards, stretching himself, as if to counteract, in whatever minuscule way possible, the 747’s descent. The entire aircraft was vibrating uncontrollably. To Douglas, it seemed that this was Hell and that whatever was to follow could be no worse.
The boy who had been asleep in seat 49B was no longer there. His belt had been fastened but not securely enough. The girl by the window was either unconscious or dead. Her hair was drawn forwards, masking her face, but there was a thick smudge of her blood on the window’s blind. It looked black.
Oxygen masks fell from the ceiling and were drawn towards the source of depressurization. Douglas reached for one, retrieved it by the plastic tube and yanked it towards him, placing it over his nose and mouth. Breathing through the mask proved to be harder than fixing it to his face; his lungs seemed to be shutting down, each breath becoming shallower than the one before, the time between them shrinking. Small white stars were exploding in his eyes.
He allowed himself to look around. It was dark in the cabin but of those he could see, he was one of the few who was still conscious. Even as a nervous flyer, he had never imagined that any fear could be so acute, that his worst nightmare made real would be quite so surgical in the way that it sliced him apart.
The fire bell sounded again. Cooke didn’t know where to start. Every light was ablaze. He guessed – because he didn’t want to admit to himself that he knew – that the fire, which was still raging, was burning through the third and last of their hydraulics systems. The aircraft’s descent was transforming into a plunge.
He gripped Marriot’s shoulder. ‘The fire’s spreading. You better make the call.’
Marriot checked the 1215 frequency. ‘Mayday, Mayday, Mayday! This is North Eastern Zero Two Seven. We are in emergency descent. We are going down. We have an uncontrolled fire on board. We have a complete hydraulics failure. We cannot complete our turn for Gander. This is our last call. Our position is fifty-four north, forty west. We will try to –’
Martin Douglas was on the verge of hyperventilating, a condition that would have been welcome. To pass out would have been a merciful relief. There was smoke in the cabin.
He had been in a car crash once. Travelling at over seventy miles an hour on a road that cut through a forest in Vermont, he had hit a patch of black ice. His car had skidded sideways and veered on to the wrong side of the road. Fortunately, there had been no oncoming traffic. Unfortunately, there had been pine trees lining the road. He’d had time to think, then – a few moments to anticipate the collision, to feel fear, to contemplate death as a serious possibility. This was different. Death was not a serious possibility. It was an inevitability. The aircraft was falling like a rock. Essentially, he knew that he was already dead.
When his breathing could become no shallower or quicker, he stopped. For a second. And then took a deep breath. With it, the accumulated tension flooded out of him. He felt it drain from his head, through his chest and stomach, down his legs and out through the soles of his feet and into the frame of the disintegrating 747.
And for one moment in his life, Martin Douglas was at peace inside an aircraft.
1 LISA’S WORLD (#ulink_f4d3177c-0d1c-5dc5-92c4-fd3ae652bd34)
1 (#ulink_c075e252-8fa0-5c7f-b065-94f48ee4b428)
She’s a chemical blonde.
The carder was a stout skinhead in a Reebok track-suit who carried a canvas satchel stuffed with prostitutes’ advertising cards. Along Baker Street, he moved from phone-box to phone-box, sticking the cards to the glass with Blu-Tack. Keith Proctor watched him from a distance before approaching him. He showed him the scrap of card he’d been given by one of her friends and asked the man if he knew who she was. It cost fifty pounds to persuade the carder to talk. Yes, he knew who she was. No, she wasn’t one of his. He’d heard a rumour she was working in Soho.
On the fragment of dirty yellow card there was a photograph of a woman offering her breasts, plumping them between her hands. The bottom half of the card – the half with the phone number – was missing.
An hour later, Proctor hurried along Shaftesbury Avenue. The falling drizzle was so fine it hung in the air like mist but its wetness penetrated everything. Those who were heading across Cambridge Circus towards the Palace Theatre for the evening’s performance of Les Misérables looked suitably miserable, shoulders curved and heads bowed against the damp chill. The traffic on the Charing Cross Road was solid. Red tail lights shivered in puddles.
There was a cluster of four old-fashioned phone-boxes on Cambridge Circus. Proctor waited for five minutes for one of them to become free. As the heavy door swung behind him, muting the sound outside, he realized someone had been smoking in the phone-box. The smell of stale cigarettes was unpleasant but Proctor found himself grudgingly grateful for it since it mostly masked the underlying stench of urine.
Three sides of the phone-box were covered by prostitutes’ advertising cards. Proctor let his eyes roam over the selection. Some were photos, in colour or black and white, others were drawings. Some merely contained text, usually printed although, in a few cases, they had been scrawled by hand. They offered straight sex, oral sex, anal sex. They were redheads, blondes and brunettes. They were older women and they were teenagers. To the top of the phone-box, they were stacked like goods on a supermarket shelf. Black, Asian, Oriental, Scandinavian, Proctor saw specific nationalities singled out; ‘busty Dutch girl – only 21’, ‘Brazilian transsexual – new in town’, ‘Aussie babe for fun and games’, ‘German nymphomaniac, 19 – nothing refused’. One card proclaimed: ‘Mature woman – and proud of it! Forty-four’s not just my chest size – it’s my age!’
Proctor took the torn yellow card out of his pocket and scanned those in the phone-box. He made a match high to his left. The one on the wall was complete, the phone number running along the bottom half. He forced a twenty-pence piece into the slot and dialled.
A woman answered, her voice more weary than seductive.
‘I … I’m in a phone-box,’ Proctor stammered. ‘On … on Cambridge Circus.’
‘We’re in Brewer Street. Do you know it?’
‘Yes.’
‘The girl we’ve got on today is a real stunner. She’s called Lisa and she’s a blonde with a gorgeous figure and lovely long legs. She’s a genuine eighteen-year-old and her measurements are …’
Proctor felt deadened by the pitch.
‘It’s thirty pounds for a massage with hand-relief and her prices go up to eighty pounds for the full personal service. What was it you were looking for, darling?’
He had no answer at the ready. ‘I … I’m not sure …’
‘Well, why don’t you discuss it with the young lady in person?’
‘What?’
‘You can decide when you get here. When were you thinking of coming round?’
‘I don’t know. When would be …?’
‘She’s free now.’ Like a door-to-door salesman, she gave Proctor no time to think. ‘It’ll only take you five minutes to get here. Do you want the address?’
There were Christmas decorations draped across the roads and hanging from street lamps. They filled the windows of pubs and restaurants. Their crass brightness matched the gaudy lights of the sex shops. Proctor passed a young homeless couple, who were huddling in a shallow doorway, trying to keep dry, if not warm. They were sharing a can of Special Brew.
The address was opposite the Raymond Revuebar, between an Asian mini-market and a store peddling pornographic videos. The woman answered the intercom. ‘Top of the stairs.’
The hall was cramped and poorly lit. Broken bicycles and discarded furniture had been stored beneath the fragile staircase. Proctor felt a tightness in his stomach as he started to climb the stairs. On each landing there were either two or three front doors. None of them matched. Most were dilapidated, their hinges barely clinging to their rotting frames, rendering their locks redundant. On the third floor, though, he passed a new door. It was painted black and it was clear that a whole section of wall had been removed and rebuilt to accommodate it. It had three, gleaming, heavy-duty steel locks.
The door at the top of the staircase was held open by an obese woman in her fifties with tinted glasses. She wore Nike trainers, a pair of stretched grey leggings and a violet jersey, sleeves rolled up to the elbows. The flat was a converted attic. In a small sitting room, a large television dominated. On a broken beige sofa there was an open pizza carton; half the pizza was still in it. The woman steered Proctor into the room at the end.
‘You want something to drink, darling?’
‘No.’
‘All right, then. You wait here. She’ll be with you in a minute.’
She closed the door and Proctor was alone. There was a king-sized mattress on a low wooden frame. The bed-cover was dark green. On the mantelpiece, on the table in the far corner and on the two boxes that passed for bedside tables, there were old bottles of wine with candles protruding from their necks. On top of a chest of drawers there was a blue glass bowl with several dozen condoms in it. The room was hot and reeked of baby oil and cigarettes. Proctor walked over to the window, the naked floorboards creaking beneath his feet. Pulsing lights from the street tinted curtains so flimsy that he could almost see through them. He parted them and looked down upon the congested road below.
‘Looking for someone?’
He hadn’t heard her open the door. He turned round. She wore a crimson satin gown and when she turned to close the door, Proctor noticed a large dragon running down the back of it. The gown was open and beneath it, she wore black underwear, a suspender-belt and a pair of high-heeled shoes. Her hair was blonde – chemically blonde – but her dark roots were showing. It was shoulder-length and, even in the relative gloom, looked as though it could have been cleaner.
No trick of the light, however, could disguise her paleness, her thinness or her weariness. She had a frame for a fuller figure but she didn’t have the flesh for it. When she moved, her open gown parted further and, from across the room, Proctor could see her ribs corrugating her skin. Her face was made-up – peach cheeks, bloody lips and heavy eye-liner – but the rest of her body was utterly white, and when she smiled she only succeeded in looking tired. ‘My name’s Lisa. What’s yours?’
He ignored the question. ‘You don’t look like you do on the card.’
She shrugged. ‘I don’t want to be walking down the street seeing myself in every phone-box I pass. And I don’t want people pointing at me because they’ve recognized me from my picture, do I?’
‘I guess not.’
She kept her distance and put a hand on her hip, revealing a little more of herself. ‘So, what do you want?’
Proctor’s hand was in his coat pocket. He felt the torn yellow card. ‘I just want to talk.’
Her cheap smile faded. ‘I don’t charge less than thirty for anything. And for that, you get a massage and hand-relief.’
‘What’s your name?’
‘I told you. Lisa.’
‘Is that your real name?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Is that a yes or a no?’
‘What’s it to you?’
‘I’d just like to know, that’s all.’
She paused for a moment. ‘Tell you what, why don’t you tell me? Who do you think I am? Lisa, or someone else?’
‘I think you’re someone else.’
‘Really?’ She smiled again but it failed to soften the hardness in her gaze. ‘Who?’
‘I think your real name might be … Stephanie.’ Not even a flinch. Proctor was disappointed. ‘Are you Stephanie?’
‘That depends.’
‘On what?’
‘On your money. If I don’t see some, I’m nobody. If you just want to talk, that’s fine but it’ll still cost you thirty. I don’t do anything for free.’
Proctor reached for his wallet. ‘Thirty?’
She nodded. ‘Thirty. And for thirty, I’ll be Stephanie, or Lisa, or whoever you want.’
Proctor held three tens just out of her grasp. ‘Will you be yourself?’
She said nothing until he handed her the notes. And then, as she was folding them in half, she asked, ‘What are you doing here? What do you really want?’
‘The truth.’
‘I’m a prostitute, not a priest. There’s no truth here. Not from me, not from you.’ When Proctor frowned at this, she added: ‘When you get home this evening, are you going to tell your wife you went to see a hooker? That you paid her money?’
‘I’m not married.’
‘Your girlfriend, then. Anyone …’ Proctor didn’t need to say anything. ‘I thought not. So don’t come here and talk to me about the truth.’
Not only was her tone changing, so was her accent; south London was being displaced by something less readily identifiable. Just as her opening remarks had been laced with a dose of sleazy tease, now she was cold and direct.
Proctor was equally blunt. ‘I think your real name is Stephanie Patrick.’
