Rogue Element

The Qantas plane was on the screen and then it wasn’t. It had gone, vanished! The suddenness of the disappearance made him blink, as if he wasn’t sure what he’d just seen. Qantas Flight 1. Abe’s brain worked hard to lift itself out of the torpor induced by a combination of boredom and the early morning hour. Shit, that could mean only one of two things. The first was that the aircraft’s transponders had become unserviceable. That was highly improbable. The second more likely possibility? Well, that was too ghastly to even contemplate. He noted the time — 4.36 am local time. Abe picked up the phone and hurriedly found a line out.

* * *

The radio clicks exchanged between the Indonesian pilot and his controller joined the traffic on Ruth Styles’ desktop at NSA Hawaii. There was a lot of activity going on there, she thought, given the time of day, or rather, night. She tagged it with an asterisk and sent it on.

* * *

QF-1 shot out of the cloud base, stratus swirling in a vortex behind it. The high country of central Sulawesi that filled the pilots’ windshields was the antithesis of the friendly winking threshold strobe lights of a commercial runway.

Flemming, Granger and Rivers gaped at the rugged ridge lines below them, and the occasional mountain face that rose above them: they knew they only had a few minutes to live.

What was now uppermost in their minds was giving everyone as much chance as possible to survive the landing. Flemming and Granger trimmed the aircraft for a descent rate of 500 feet per minute. The aircraft shook and bucked in protest but obeyed the pilots’ commands.

Flemming flicked the intercom switch and addressed his passengers and flight crew. ‘This is Captain Flemming. Both the engines on the right-hand wing have failed. Without them, this aircraft cannot maintain level flight.’ This was not strictly true but it wasn’t the right time to give an aircraft systems lecture. ‘We will be making a forced landing shortly.

‘If you are not in the crash position with your head forward between your knees, adopt it now. Make sure your seatbelts are fastened tightly and that any children are also restrained in their seats.

‘There is enough oxygen at this altitude so you no longer need the masks. Your flight attendants will assist you if you have problems.

‘We have broadcast our difficulties and our position to the local authorities. Help is no doubt already on the way,’ he lied.

Who was it that said, ‘You don’t find atheists in foxholes’? Flemming couldn’t remember but at that moment, even though he never considered himself a religious man, he could see the truth in it. He concluded the announcement. ‘If any of you pray to God, now is the time to do it.’

There was no point doing the laconic pilot routine. He had just brought four hundred people through a gut-wrenching dive from 35 000 to 10 000 feet in a handful of minutes. Perhaps a word about rescue — even if it wasn’t true — and the reassurance that they were in God’s hands, would do some good. He didn’t know and he had run out of time to think about it. The moonlit jungle was rising up to kill them. It was time to land.

The mist that had caked Joe’s window had melted. He wiped away the remaining droplets with the palm of his hand and looked outside. He was sickened by what he saw. The plane was flying in a large bowl ringed by mountains and lit by the moon. The peaks topped out above the aircraft’s altitude. There was only one possible outcome. He’d listened to the captain’s address and decided that the people at the front of the aircraft had reached the same conclusion about their fate. There were no lights below. There was no runway waiting for them. This was it. He peered out the window harder, trying to see exactly what they would be landing on. They were going to land weren’t they? The captain had just said so. They weren’t going to crash, surely? The window didn’t allow him a view downwards. He was frightened, but he realised he had no control over anything that happened in his near future. A part of Joe’s brain found that oddly comforting. It calmed him. There was absolutely nothing he could do to alter the situation. He just had to sit there and wait. He bent his head between his legs and breathed the warm sickly air rising from the vomit-soiled carpet under his feet — the kiss your arse goodbye position, he thought. A pain swelled in his chest as if an invisible hand was squeezing his heart. ‘For Christ’s sake, just get it over with,’ he said to the god he rarely spoke with.

‘I’m going to go for that ridge over in our ten o’clock,’ shouted Flemming. Granger and Rivers agreed. From their angle, it appeared to present more of a plateau, although it was night and appearances could be deceptive. Putting the plane down on a ridge would be a better option than a valley. Rescuers would more easily spot the wreckage, for one thing. And for another, a valley would inevitably end with a mountain, and slamming into a solid rock wall would be utterly catastrophic.