Killer

Kate dragged herself away from the window and went towards the cockpit. At the head of the aisle there was a blue curtain over a narrow doorway opening into the tiny entrance foyer. On her left was the door of the aircraft. On her right the toilet. In front, the cockpit door. She knocked, slid the door open, and entered. The little room was full of smoke. The pilot had a cigarette hanging from the left side of his mouth, and his eyes were slitted as he controlled the descent, one hand on the control lever, the other on the throttles. The co-pilot was talking to Barrow field and preparing to lower the flaps and landing gear.

“Excuse me,” said Kate, utterly at a loss: so much seemed to be going on. The cockpit canted slightly. The pack, magnificently visible through the windscreen, angled and began to slide away.

“Can we help you?” asked the co-pilot.

“Yes. Can we have a closer look at the pack, please?”

The pilot’s eyes flicked up from the instruments for a second, seeing what Kate saw as if for the first time. Without hesitation he said, “OK. Tell Barrow, Hiram. Would you like to stay up here Miss Warren? You’ll get a much better view.”

“Thank you very much. Yes, I would love to.”

She leaned lightly against the bulkhead. The pack swung back until it was an acceptable horizon and began to draw nearer as the quiet jets thrust forward.

The aeroplane sped through the lower sky at a speed in excess of four hundred knots, its passage aided by a warm, humid wind blowing steadily from the south.

Kate watched the green-blue fire as it drew nearer. After a while it began to fade, and the ice was revealed like great blobs of cottonwool half-floating in the sea, and the pack itself, its surface a wild jumble of ice blocks thrust hundreds of feet into the air. But she was not deterred. She was gripped by an excitement which reached right back to her schooldays. An excitement she had first felt in a vague and distant geography lesson when her imagination had suddenly made the dry facts about arctic climates take life. Deep within her the romance of the ice still lingered; not the hurried, tiring life she knew from her field trips to Norway and Iceland, but life in tents and igloos, hunting seal and polar bear, fishing from kayaks or leaping from floe to floe. The Eskimo: the flat-faced, cheerful, stoical people her imagination had conjured from her text books. The sea lion, the walrus, the whale.

All this was contained in the pack as it swept majestically towards them. Suddenly, away to the right, at the very edge of the pack, rose a glittering cloud of spray.

“There she blows,” cried Ross in the cabin behind her.

“Can we follow it?” Kate asked the pilot.

“OK,” he said, “Hiram, you take her down.” The plane angled, the horizon vanished for a moment and the sea drew nearer, golden and black, suddenly thrust churning aside by the monstrous back of the whale, slate-blue and streaming.

“That’s the biggest blue whale I’ve ever seen!” cried Ross.

“Over a hundred feet, over a hundred tons,” said Job.

Disaster struck just at that moment, but none of them noticed.

The co-pilot felt a slight change in the handling of the plane. Ice crystals brushed over the perspex at the front of the cockpit. The pilot was turned towards Kate, speaking. They had overflown the whale. The co-pilot began to turn.

The airspeed indicator swung up unaccountably. The co-pilot glancing at it, and seeing it high but steady, lowered the landing gear and put the flaps in full landing attitude. The plane slowed to just above stalling speed as it flew low over the blue whale for the second time. As the throttles were eased back the flow of fuel to the engines was cut. Less fuel flowed through the filter systems between the throttle valves and the jets.

Disaster was a fierce north wind blowing down off the pack, laden with ice crystals many degrees below freezing.

The pilot looked away from Kate and down at the whale, suddenly aware of some niggling doubt eating at the back of his mind. Although he had had no hesitation in telling Hiram to take them down in the seemingly safe manoeuvre, something in the attitude of the aircraft now unconsciously set his palms to tingling, telling him to take control back from the boy at once. It was not until he looked out of the cockpit window that he realised how deep they had slipped into trouble.

In the seconds – not more than thirty – between now and the last time he had looked out through it, the window had become starred with ice crystals.

“Christ! We’re icing up.” He slewed round and looked back down the outside of the fuselage. The leading-edges of the wings were already heavy with ice, the engine intakes fat and slick.

“Hiram. Take her up . . .” The pilot was not in a panic. Ice here was hardly unexpected. It was dangerous, but not fatal. “Go and sit down now please,” he said. “There’s nothing to worry about. Hiram, the flaps in, please. Undercarriage up . . .”