Killer

The word echoed dully through the quiet cabin. It brought home to each one of them, as even the cessation of the engine-noise had not, the danger they were now in. Up until that moment this movement down at an increasingly steep angle had seemed to be among the fairly normal, unexciting procedures of flying, and much less frightening, for example, than the sudden wrenching tumble into an air pocket. Only the pilot and the co-pilot, both torn between the advisability of looking at their instruments and the absolute necessity of looking at the speed-blurred rush of green-gold sea and green-white ice which was rearing in front of them, were truly aware of what was happening. As calm as though the aircraft were still flying instead of falling, the pilot adjusted its attitude in the air, his brown eyes flicking over the rushing ocean for somewhere to set them down.

Kate was terrified now. She felt as though she was going to faint, but the position of her body, head on knees, would not let her. She silently raged at the tears in her eyes, at the chain of chances which had put her in this terrible position, at Jon Thompson, at Professor Brownlow, at her father, at herself. She would very much like to have screamed, but she would not let herself. She pressed her forehead against her arms until it really hurt, and recited to herself in the suddenly empty cave of her mind all the swear words she knew.

Simon Quick was sobbing with terror. Had anyone been sitting beside him they would have heard, but Simon didn’t care. He was certain he was going to die, and the certainty bore in him an uncontrollably poignant well of self-pity. It was not fair, he thought, why him? God, he prayed, save me. Please. PLEASE. He was running with sweat. He was going to be sick. He wondered whether it would get him in better with God if he offered the others. Take them all, God, but spare me.

Job’s prayers were very different. Suddenly, in this moment which was probably his last, the years of Methodist education vanished, and he found himself praying to the old gods, the gods of the high arctic. To Kaila, god of the sky, to hold them up, to Torgasoak, the great spirit who guarded his people to protect them, to Aipalookvik the Destroyer to have mercy.

Warren felt nothing. He could not believe this was happening. Basically he was a mundane and eminently practical man, made totally selfish by the drive of his genius. He had found early that if he camouflaged both his genius and his clear awareness of how to get on in the world behind the carefully assumed character of an absent-minded professor, he could rise quickly and naturally to the positions of responsibility and power he coveted. But now no characterisation could protect him. Or, as an afterthought, his daughter.

Ross felt frustration more than fear. He had faced death before, and faced it down; but he had been in control then where now he was helpless. In many ways it was a cruel test of his courage just to sit here and leave all the responsibility in hands other than his own. He chewed his lips, crushed his head to his right forearm, eased his left arm down beside his left thigh, tensed himself and waited.

Preston might as well have been carved of wax. He had retracted the flaps and undercarriage and now sat, eyes fixed on the spinning needle of the altimeter while the pilot tried to save them. There was nothing else he could do. Even if they had not passed far beyond the ends of his experience and ability, he still would have been too scared to do anything. He just sat, hypnotised as the altimeter clock face with its functional white numbers told him the plane was less than one hundred feet above the sea while the similar gauge beside it told him the aircraft was still moving at more than one hundred knots.

For the pilot in many ways this was the climax of his life, the moment for which talent, inclination and fate had perfectly tailored him. He had first crash-landed in a Douglas DC3 at Gander during the war and he had force-landed one or two turbo-prop aircraft since, but never a jet. Never on water. And yet he knew well enough what he was doing. With back, neck, shoulders, arms, wrists, hands under rigid control, he was flying a plane which could no longer fly; he was keeping aloft a falling object until he could find somewhere to put it down. In his early days, long before he had become a captain, flying had seemingly been the performance of one impossibility after another. He was jerked back through thirty-five years now by this final impossibility and he smiled. They had been good days, those, and this was the last of them, coming out of nowhere in the ice of a north wind. The last of the good days.