Authors: Nevil Shute
“There’s Malta,” David said. “We could make Malta in about fifty minutes, at low altitude.”
The Group Captain was silent, and David was sorry for him in the decision that he had to make. At last he said, “We’ll try stalling it, Nigger. Do it yourself, and send Ryder aft first to tell them to hold on to something. If I can’t get it out safely I shan’t try. In that case, we’ll go on to Malta.”
The pilot said, “Okay, sir. I shan’t be able to give you much of a signal. I shall pull up pretty sharply, about thirty degrees nose up. I think you’ll be able to get it out then, at the top. But if you have to hang on to it, get yourself wedged tight. She’ll go sixty or seventy degrees nose down before she starts coming up. She’ll probably spin a bit.”
He went up into the cockpit, and put down the hatch under the engineer’s seat to check the rush of air in when they took the plate off again, battening down Frank Cox with the engineer in the forward hold. He went to Ryder at the controls, and glanced at the window, but it was shut. He discussed the position briefly with the younger man. “The air was going backwards through the ventilation system,” the younger man said. “It was going in here,
instead of coming out.” He pointed to the punkah louvre in front of him.
David spoke to the engineer, who shut off the ventilation trunk at the main. Then he sent Ryder aft through the machine to tell the passengers to fasten their safety belts, and to explain personally to the Consort and the Queen what he was going to do. He sat at the controls settling comfortably into his seat and fastening his own belt, and turned out the flight deck lights, and adjusted the dim instrument lights. Then he put on a little power and climbed to about nine thousand feet.
Ryder came back and slipped into the seat beside him.
“Everything all right aft? All ready for it?”
“Quite all right, sir.”
“Okay. Don’t touch your controls unless I tell you.”
The pilots sat together in the dim light, peering forward into the darkness. They were flying between two layers of cloud; there was a very faint light from the setting moon away on their right hand, but there was no horizon and no means of judging the attitude of the machine except by the instruments. David set the gyro to zero, checked the flap setting, throttled the outer engines, put the nose up a little, and slowed the machine to about a hundred and eighty knots. He held her so for a whole minute, to give Frank Cox and Cummings notice that the stall was imminent, and to give them time to take the plate off.
As he sat there in semi-darkness concentrating on the small illuminated horizon bar before him and the aero figure on the gyro, he suffered an experience that he had had before in difficult test flying, and that he welcomed. He saw the instruments with only a small portion of his mind. Only a small portion of his being was seated in the cockpit beside Ryder, holding the controls. The rest of him seemed to be seated in mid-air forty or fifty feet above and behind the
rear fin and rudder of the machine. From there he could see the whole aeroplane spread out before him, from wing tip to wing tip. He could see the four engines, the elevons, the flaps, the long line of the fuselage tapering to the nose, the fin and rudder itself. All this was clearly visible to him in every detail; it was blueish grey in colour, slightly luminous. Beyond the aeroplane he could see the horizon clearly defined in two shades of grey, a light grey above that was the sky and a darker grey below that was the ground. With the small portion of his mind he knew that the horizon bar had tilted very slightly; from his heavenly seat he saw the left wing drop a little. He moved his hand a little and saw the elevons move a fraction under his control, and he levelled the wing up upon the grey horizon.
Then with the small portion of his mind he saw the second hand of the clock upon the panel creep to the end of the minute he was giving Frank Cox to prepare. In his heavenly seat he moved his hand and throttled both the inner engines, and he saw the glow from the exhaust tubes on the wing deepen in tone, and die. He pulled back gently with both hands and saw the luminous blue nose of the machine rise to the horizon, and then he pulled back firmly and lifted it right up into the air. It was all so easy when you could see the whole aeroplane spread out in front of you, in this way.
For a second the Ceres hung poised nose up at a steep angle, virtually standing on her tail. It was incredible to see a blue aeroplane stand up like a fish rising to a fly. Then the nose dropped violently and a wing dropped; with the small portion of his mind the pilot saw the horizon bar rise and tilt quickly, and the gyro move around. From his heavenly seat David saw the wing drop and the spin commence, and he was amazed at the rapidity and violence of the rotation. Seated behind the aeroplane, however, and with everything
in view, it was easy to correct. His hand and foot moved gently and he saw the tail pipe of the port outboard engine glow and rise in colour till a long streak of blue flame came from it, and he saw the rudder move a few degrees to bring the wing up. She was nearly vertically nose down now, but let her go. Poor old thing, she needed her speed. The spin was nearly checked, a trifle more from the port inner engine … so. He pulled the throttles back and the glow from the tail pipes died, and now she was diving straight for the dark ground, and the turn had stopped. From his seat up in the air behind her he could see the flaps half out, and he noticed that they were bending slightly with the pressure of the air at the increasing speed; he put his hand to the flap control, and saw them sink back into the wing. He could sense the relief in the machine and feel a gladness in the structure, and now he eased back very gently on the wheel again, watching the line of the blue wings as they rose up towards the grey horizon, and correcting now and then gently to keep them level. The dark ground slipped backwards underneath them a long way below, and now she was nearly horizontal again. He pressed forward slowly on the throttle levers of the inner engines as the blue wings met the light grey of the sky, and moved his hand upon the trimming wheel to keep them so.
Gradually his being came back to the cockpit, the vision faded, and he was trimming the machine to fly steadily at five thousand feet. He turned to Ryder by his side. “Keep her at about two hundred and thirty,” he said. “I’m going to see what’s happened down below.”
He slipped out of his seat, and went to the hatch and opened it. Group Captain Cox stood up in the hole, and heaved himself out on to the floor.
“Get rid of it, sir?”
The other nodded. “It fell away quite clear,” he said
standing up. “If anything the air was blowing out this time, instead of coming in. I got it out before you actually stalled her, before she got to the top.” He grinned. “I got the wind up that you’d catch it up in your dive.”
“You didn’t see what happened when it hit the ground?”
Frank Cox looked at him, astonished. “We were in thick cloud!”
“Yes,” said the pilot. “Yes, of course we were,”
Frank Cox dusted his uniform a little, and straightened his tie. “I’ll go back and tell them it’s all over and done with. Cummings is putting back the studs.”
“Get up to operating height again, and set a new course for Ratmalana?” said the pilot. “We use a lot of fuel down here.”
Frank Cox nodded. “Get on up. I’ll come and check the fuel reserve with you when I’ve had a drink.”
“I think we’ll be all right,” the pilot said.
“Have you had any dinner?”
“Not yet. You might ask Gillian to bring me a tray here.”
He went back to his seat, but handed over to Ryder, and sat resting, tired with the strain of the last hour. He sat watching the second pilot and the engineer get the aircraft into climbing trim and take her up, and presently they broke out above the clouds again to the glory of the setting moon upon their right hand side. Then Gillian brought him a tray of dinner with a cup of hot coffee, and he ate it, and felt better.
They came to operating height somewhere over Rhodes at ten minutes past nine, and put the machine into the cruising trim. David checked the fuel with Frank Cox, with Bahrein in mind for possible refuelling, but they came to the conclusion that they would still have adequate reserves to reach Colombo in spite of the two climbs, favoured as they
were with general tail winds when flying east. Frank Cox volunteered for a watch at the controls, and Ryder went to lie down, and David strolled aft down the saloon for another cup of coffee.
The doors of the Queen’s cabin and the Consort’s cabin were both shut. He found Rosemary awake, and paused by her. “Fun and games,” he said. “We do see life in this job.”
She cleared the seat beside her. “Sit down a bit, Nigger,” she said. “Or have you got to go back?”
He motioned to the stewardess to bring him the coffee there, and sat down by Rosemary. “What was it like back here, when she stalled?” he asked. “Did anyone fall over, or get hurt?”
She shook her head. “Ryder and Jim Hansen came along and saw that we were all strapped in, and collected all the loose cases,” she said. “I think Fethers was sick.” Miss Fethers was the Queen’s maid.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ll have a word with her as I go back. It was the only way we could get rid of the damn thing. I think I’ll suggest we have a hatch made right aft somewhere, by the tail, in case we ever have another one.” He sipped the coffee. “You were all right?”
She nodded. “Did she swing round when she went down? Something funny happened, didn’t it?”
“She got in a bit of a spin,” he replied. “They do that very easily, these things. They’re quite all right when you understand them.”
He sat with her a little, and pressed her hand discreetly between the seats. “Try and get some sleep now,” he said. “It’ll be dawn in a few hours. You’ve had enough excitements for one day.” She smiled at him, and he got up and went back to the flight deck, pausing to talk a little to Miss Fethers.
In the blackness of the night they passed over Nicosia and Beirut and Basra, and went on down the Persian Gulf past Bandar Abbas. As they cleared the Gulf of Oman the sky lightened ahead of them, and forty minutes later the sun rose over the Arabian Sea. Soon after that, David put the Ceres on the long let down that would bring them to Colombo at a moderate height, and had another cup of coffee and a few biscuits.
He was sitting eating these in the pilot’s seat when Frank Cox came to him. “The Queen’s coming in here,” he said. “She’s been talking to the passengers and the stewards in the saloon. She wants to talk to the rest of you here, on the flight deck. I’ll take over. Get that chap out of bed and get them all lined up. She’s coming in here in five minutes time.”
David got out of the pilot’s seat and Frank Cox got in; they exchanged a few words about the course and rate of descent. There were a few minutes of hurried putting on tunics and straightening ties, and then the door opened, and the Consort and the Queen were there. The flight deck of the Ceres was not very spacious, and with eight people standing in it it was definitely crowded. The Queen stood close against David, for all the room he tried to give her, and her head came hardly to the level of his shoulder.
She said in the clear voice he knew so well, “First of all, I want to thank you all for what you did a few hours ago. When the Federal Government first suggested that they should give this aeroplane for the use of my Flight and that they should man it with an Australian crew, I knew that I should fly very safely. Now I have seen it proved. I do not think I can say very much more than that, except that I thank you with all my heart.”
She paused. “And now I have a command for you, and it is this. You are not to talk about this bomb that was put
into the aeroplane. You are not to say a word about it to your wives, or to your sweethearts, or to anybody at all. You are not to talk about it even between yourselves. It is to be forgotten. This is a royal command from myself to you, and if anybody should break it I shall be very severe. The world outside this aeroplane is not to know that this has happened.”
She smiled at them. “But since we are friends, and since you boys have saved my life, I will tell you why this is. There have been two attempts upon my life since I came to the throne thirty years ago, and this is the third. It is one of the occupational hazards of the throne of England, or of any other throne, that poor, distraught, unbalanced people think that their troubles will be rectified if they can kill their Monarch.” She paused. “In the previous two instances of my own experience I could feel nothing but pity for the people who tried to kill me, when their cases were investigated and disclosed. It has always been the same, because political murder has never been a fashion in our Commonwealth.”
She looked around the faces of the young men. “I am convinced that this attempt upon my life, and yours, will prove to be the work of some unhappy person who deserves our sympathy. Unfortunately, it has come at a troubled time in England, when feelings are running high. It would not assist England to regain her balance if it should become known that my life has been attempted. Rather, the schisms which may heal in a few days might well become deeper, to the damage of England, to the damage of the Commonwealth. And so, it is my royal command to you that this thing is to be kept secret, absolutely. And this secrecy is to endure until I die.” She smiled faintly. “After that, you can talk all you want to.”
She looked at David. “Do you understand that, Captain?”
“Yes, madam,” he said. “I shan’t talk.”
She looked at Ryder. “And you, Mr. Ryder?” And so she went to every member of the crew with the direct question, and David was surprised to see that she knew all their names.
In the end she smiled at them, and said, “That is all, except, thank you again.” She looked up at David, “Captain, will you please come to my cabin.”
He followed her out of the flight deck and to her tiny cabin, and the Consort entered it with her, and David followed, and the Consort closed the door. And then she said, “Of all the people in the aeroplane I feel that you deserve our special thanks, Captain, for the care and the intuition that led you to discover our danger and for the skill with which you handled it. I have been thinking over what is the best way for me to recognise your services. Normally, I should have liked to bestow on you the Air Force Cross, for acts of gallantry and devotion to duty not in face of the enemy.” She smiled. “But I see you already have it, and a bar to the Air Force Cross would be so unusual, I think, that it might lead to enquiry.”