Authors: Nevil Shute
In the flight deck everything was normal. He stopped by the flight engineer’s table and peered at the instruments himself, and read the flight log carefully. There was nothing there. He sat down by the radio operator and
looked through his log, and peered at the green traces on the cathode tubes, and checked a position on the Decca apparatus. There was nothing there. He passed into the cabin and walked slowly down the length of it, looking for a cracked window perhaps that would release the pressure, or for some danger of fire, but everything was in order. The steward and the stewardess were serving dinner; the Queen was in her cabin with the door closed. He stopped Gillian Foster and nodded to the door. “Everything all right in there?”
The girl said, “Quite all right, sir.”
“Had her dinner?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Eat it?”
“Oh yes, she ate it nearly all. She had a glass of claret, too.”
He passed on down the gangway between the seats. Rosemary looked up at him and smiled, but he hardly saw her. There was something, somewhere, something very wrong. His eyes searched everywhere, the ventilators for some issue of smoke, the door latches, the carpets on the floor. He stopped and sniffed keenly for a trace of kerosene, but only smelt good cooking.
Jim Hansen was in the galley. He said, “Everything all right here?”
“We could do with a bigger stove, Cap,” said the man. “It’s not so easy serving a hot dinner with just the one hot plate and the oven. Think we could get a bigger stove put in?”
He said something absent minded, and went on. Both toilets were vacant, and he looked into each of them, but there was nothing there. He went aft again into the luggage compartment and stood looking at the piled suitcases in the bins, strapped down with webbing straps. Everything
seemed in order, but there was something very, very wrong.
The luggage was one thing he had not checked, and nobody had checked of his own crew. He would not rest, he knew, until he had satisfied himself that that was all in order. He pulled a notebook and a pencil from his inner breast pocket, and went forward to the cockpit again, to Ryder at the controls. “How many ports have you got on board, Harry?”
“Two suitcases and a haversack. What’s this about?”
“Just making a check up. Are they labelled with your name?”
“The suitcases are. The haversack is in the top bunk there.”
He passed on down the aircraft from bow to stern, listing the names of everyone on board with their luggage. He did not disturb the Queen or the Consort, but he got the list of their luggage from the maid and the valet. When he came to Frank Cox, the Group Captain asked, “What’s this for, Nigger?”
“I want to count it all up,” the pilot said. “I’m not comfortable about this flight. I’ve got the heebie-geebies.”
Frank Cox glanced quickly up at him, and got out of his seat. There only remained the steward and the stewardess to question, and the pilot turned again to the luggage compartment. “Give me a hand,” he said to the steward. “I want to check the cases off against this list.”
The Group Captain followed them into the luggage compartment and the three of them began to unlash and to sort out the luggage.
A quarter of an hour later they came on a discrepancy. There were four cases labelled E. C. Mitchison, as against three on the list.
“Doctor’s made a mistake,” said Jim Hansen cheerfully. “He’s got four instead of three.”
The pilot said, “Slip up and ask him to come down here and identify them.”
When the doctor came, David asked, “Are those your four cases?”
“That’s not mine,” said Mitchison. “Not the green one. The other three are mine.”
“It’s got your name on it.” They showed him the label.
“I’m sure it’s not mine,” he said. “I only brought the three. I’ve never seen that before.”
David picked it up, laid it on the floor of the gangway, and stooped to undo it. He found it locked. He thought for a moment, and then went forward into the cabin. Over the entrance door there hung a steel bar with flattened ends; the sort of thing used to open packing cases. It was painted red, and it was there for the purpose of opening the door from the inside if it should be jammed tight in its frame by the distortion of the fuselage in a crash.
He pulled this out of its clips, and went back to the suitcase. With two vigorous heaves he broke the hasp, and lifted back the lid. Inside he saw a bundle of sacking. He felt a hard object wrapped up in it. Gently he unwrapped this object, moving it as little as possible, and took it very carefully in his hands, while the others crowded near to see.
It was a metal box, apparently of heavy gauge brass with soldered joints. It was about twelve inches long, eight or nine wide, and about five inches deep. It weighed twelve or fifteen pounds.
Very carefully he lifted it above his head, and looked beneath it. There was no apparent opening, no lid. It seemed to have been soldered solidly together, and not designed to be opened at all.
Very carefully he put it down upon the sacking in the open suitcase.
Frank Cox said quietly, “We’ll have to get rid of that, Nigger.”
The pilot stood silent for an instant. “We’ll have to go down,” he replied. “We can’t jettison out of the pressure shell. We’ll have to go down to seven or eight thousand feet. The Queen.” He could not risk giving the Queen the diver’s bends by opening the pressure hull at any greater altitude than that.
“How long will it take you to get down?”
“Seventeen or eighteen minutes.” The pilot turned, and went forward swiftly to the flight deck, and spoke quickly to the startled engineer and to Ryder at the controls. The inboard engines died, but the outer engines were kept going at reduced revs to maintain the cabin pressure. The airbrakes on the top surface of the wing crept out, the nose went down a little, and the Ceres steadied at a rate of descent of three thousand feet a minute.
David went quickly to the navigator’s table and looked at the map, and while he did so the radio operator gave him a new fix by Decca. They were about a hundred miles south west of Belgrade, and over the Jugoslav mountain ranges with peaks up to ten thousand feet. He laid off a quick course towards the Adriatic and the Ionian Sea, passing over Brindisi in Italy. He said to Ryder, “Steer two hundred true,” and watched to see the aircraft steady on that course. He turned, and Frank Cox was beside him.
David put a finger on the chart between the toe of Italy and Greece. “We’ll drop it somewhere here, if the bloody thing doesn’t go off first.”
The Group Captain said, “It’s not making any noise, so it’s not a time clock. I can’t see any breathing holes in it, so it’s probably not a barometric fuse. I think it’s probably an
acid fuse, acid eating through a strip of metal of some sort. If that’s so, it’ll be pretty far gone, and we’ll want to be careful how we move it. Think we’d better land at Brindisi or Bari?”
The pilot hesitated. “I’ve moved it once, and it’s not gone off,” he said. “I’m quite game to put it out of the machine myself.”
“Where would you put it out?”
“Put down the undercarriage and take off the inspection cover for the forward oleo leg,” he said. “It’ll fall clear of the machine from there, behind the front wheel.” He paused. “We can land at Brindisi,” he said. “I’ve been there before. There’s a long runway roughly east and west. I think it’s lit.”
Frank Cox bit his lip. “There’s the publicity …”
“I know. We’ll have to make our minds up pretty quick.” It would be in the newspapers all around the world, that the Queen of England had had to land in Italy to remove a bomb from her aircraft. “I’m quite prepared to drop it out myself,” he said again.
“I can’t decide this,” said the Group Captain. “I’ll have to ask the Consort. I think we ought to land.”
He hurried aft, and David turned quickly to his list of aerodromes along the route. Brindisi was lit upon request for night landings, and was habitually used by the Italian Air Force. He called the second engineer, who was already out of his bunk, and went down with him to the forward luggage hold, now empty, to the inspection plate above the undercarriage leg. “Loosen up these studs,” he said. “Be ready to open up this pretty quick when I tell you, after I’ve put the undercarriage down. I may want to drop something out.”
He went back to the flight deck; they were now down to about twenty thousand feet in clear air; ahead of them a
little starry cluster of lights showed upon the land, which must be Brindisi. He turned to meet Frank Cox. “She won’t have it,” the Group Captain said. “She won’t land. We’ve got to put it out of the machine over the sea.”
David nodded. “I’ve got Cummings ready to take off the plate, down in the forward hold,” he said. “If you’ll go down there, I’ll go aft and fetch it along.” He grinned. “Keep our fingers crossed.”
He turned to Ryder. “Steer south now, one eight zero true. You’ll come out over sea again in a couple of minutes. Go on down like this, and level out at seven thousand feet. Then decompress. Then reduce speed to two hundred knots and flaps half down. Then lower the undercarriage. Carry on like that until I tell you.”
The second pilot repeated the instructions, and David went quickly aft through the saloon to the luggage bay. Jim Hansen was still there standing guard over the suitcase. He was very white, and David grinned at him. “We’ll get rid of this thing pretty soon, now,” he said.
“I’ve been saying me prayers, sir,” the lad remarked.
“Well, keep on saying them for about five minutes longer.” The pilot stopped, and took the metal case in both his hands, wondering if this was the end of it for all of them. He raised it to the level of his waist, and turned, and walked forward into the saloon, and up between the lines of seats. As he passed Rosemary, he heard her say softly, “Good luck, Nigger.”
He came to the cabins, and the Queen was standing at her door with the Consort at her side; she was in a white, flowered dressing gown. She said, “Is that it, Commander?”
He paused for a moment. “That’s it, madam. We’ll be rid of it in a few minutes now.”
She said quietly, “I am so very sorry for you all. This
wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t been on board.”
He left her, and went forward walking very carefully; although if it went off in any part of the machine it would mean certain death for all of them, it seemed to him to be important to remove it from the Queen as far as possible. The forward hold was reached by a hatch in the flight deck under the engineer’s seat covered by a hinged duralumin flap, now open. Below were two ladder rungs on the side of the aircraft and then the floor of the hold, with not more than four foot six of headroom. The radio officer came forward and offered to hold the thing for him as he went down. David made him sit upon the floor and put it in his hands, and went down through the hole, and standing on the floor below reached up and took it from him. The boy went back to his desk, streaming with sweat.
Crouched down by the inspection plate were the Group Captain and the engineer, Cummings. David moved very cautiously towards them in the dim light, stooping almost double, terrified of stumbling or hitting his head against some unseen beam and dropping the box. He knelt down beside them with it still unshaken in his hands, and said, “Well, here we are. What’s the betting the bloody thing goes off before we get it out?”
“Five to one on,” said Cummings.
The Group Captain said, “What’s our altitude now?”
“I don’t know,” said David. “We must be pretty well down. I didn’t stop to ask.”
They waited, tense and motionless as the minutes crept by. It would be bad luck, thought David, if the thing went off now … His wrists ached with holding it. When suddenly the attitude of the machine began to alter and a change in the whisper of the air told that she was slowing down, it came almost as a surprise. He glanced at Cox, and met his eyes.
“Levelling out,” said the Group Captain.
The pilot nodded. He knelt by the inspection plate noting the phases of the manoeuvre, the hydraulic whistle as the airbrakes went in, and then the groaning of the flap motor as the flaps went down. Finally came the action they were waiting for, the clank and hiss immediately beneath their feet as the undercarriage fell, and the shock as it was locked in place. In the semi-darkness David said to Cummings, “Get that plate off now.”
The engineer worked methodically, removing the studs one by one and putting them with the washers into the breast pocket of his overall. He hummed a little tune about love as he worked. Finally the last stud was removed, and he freed the plate.
A great rush of air came upwards through the hole, as solid as a wall. It beat about them in the narrow space, insensate; David was forced backwards, still holding the metal case desperately horizontal. In the roar of the entering air he signed to Cummings to put the cover back. The engineer laid the plate beside the hole and slid it forward with the weight of his body on it and, half sitting and half lying on the plate with Frank Cox helping him, he got half a dozen of the studs back into place. The bay seemed strangely quiet after that blast of air.
The Group Captain said, “We’ll never get it out through that, Nigger. It wouldn’t fall.”
The pilot knelt in thought. “I wonder where the hell that air was going to?” he said. And then it came to him that after decompressing perhaps Ryder had opened the cockpit window at his side, because air coming into the machine must be going out somewhere. He mentioned this to Cox, and then he said, “If I shut this hatch above us, and see everything battened down, and stall her—could you get it out then, sir?” In stalling, the machine would be poised
momentarily at barely a hundred knots, before she fell into a dive and the speed rose again.
“Are you happy about stalling her at night, at only seven thousand, Nigger?”
David nodded. “I’ve stalled her on instruments several times. She comes out in about three thousand feet.”
The Group Captain bit his lip.
The pilot said, “Would you like to ask her if she’d rather change her mind and land?”
“She wouldn’t do it. She’d say, go ahead and stall it. She won’t land anywhere outside the Commonwealth.”