Authors: Wilbur Smith
Then there was a little flick of liquid silver that distorted
the perfect cruciform of the aircraft’s wing profile. It
popped open like a ripe cotton pod, and the Viscount seemed to
lurch and yaw, then steady again. Seconds later they heard the
crack of the strike to confirm what they had seen, and a hoarse
roar of triumph burst up out of Tungata Zebiwe’s
throat.
As he watched, the Viscount banked into a gentle turn, then
abruptly something large and black detached itself from the port
wing, and fell away towards the earth. The aircraft dropped its
nose sharply, and the engine noise rose into a shrill wild
whine.
S
tanding in the
control tower, staring out through the floor-to-ceiling
non-reflective glass window into the mellow evening sky, and
listening to the rapid tense exchanges between the flight
controller and the Viscount pilot, Roland Ballantyne was held in
a paralysing vice of helplessness and rage.
‘Mayday! Mayday! Mayday! This is Viscount 782, do you
copy, tower?’
‘Viscount 782, what is the nature of your
emergency?’
‘We have taken a missile strike on our port engine
housing. We are engine out.’
‘Viscount 782, I query your assessment.’
The pilot’s tension and stress flared. ‘Damn you,
tower, I was in ‘Nam. It’s a SAM hit, I tell you. I
have activated the fire-extinguishers and we still have control.
I am initiating a one hundred and eighty-degree turn!’
‘We will have all emergency standby here, Viscount 782.
What is your position?’
‘We are eighty nautical miles outbound.’ The
pilot’s voice cracked. ‘Oh God! The port engine has
gone. It’s fallen clean out of her.’
There was a long silence. They knew the pilot was fighting for
control of the crippled machine, fighting the asymmetrical thrust
of the remaining engine which was trying to flip the Viscount
over into a graveyard spiral, fighting the enormous weight
transfer caused by the loss of the port engine. In the control
tower they were all frozen in silent agony, and then the radio
speaker crackled and croaked. ‘Rate of descent three
thousand feet a minute. Too fast. I can’t hold her. We are
going in. Trees, too fast. Too many trees. This is it! Oh mother,
this is it!’
Then there was no more.
I
n the control
tower Roland sprang back to the flight planning desk, and snapped
at the assistant controller.
‘Rescue helicopters!’
‘There’s only one helicopter within three hundred
miles. That’s your one coming in from Wankie.’
‘The only one, are you sure?’
‘They have all been pulled out for a special op. in the
Vumba mountains, yours is the only one in this zone.’
‘Get me in touch with it,’ he ordered, and took
the microphone from the controller as soon as contact was
established.
‘This is Ballantyne, we have lost a Viscount with
forty-six crew and passengers,’ he said.
‘I copied the transmissions,’ the helicopter pilot
answered.
‘You are the only rescue vehicle, what is your
ETA?’
‘I’m fifty minutes out.’
‘What personnel do you have aboard?’
‘I have Sergeant-Major Gondele and ten
troopers.’
Roland had planned to rehearse night jump-landings during the
return to Wankie. Gondele and his Scouts would be in full combat
gear, and they would have Roland’s personal pack and
weapons aboard.
‘I’ll be waiting on the tarmac for your pick-up.
We will have a doctor with us,’ he said. ‘This is
Cheetah One standing by.’
J
anine
Ballantyne had the aisle seat, in the second last row on the port
side of the Viscount. In the window seat was a teenage girl with
braces on her teeth and her hair in pigtails. The girl’s
parents were in the seats directly in front of her.
‘Did you go to the crocodile farm?’ she demanded
of Janine.
‘We didn’t get around to it,’ Janine
admitted.
‘They have got a huge big croc there, he’s five
metres long. They call him Big Daddy,’ the girl
burbled.
The Viscount had stabilized in its climb attitude, and the
seatbelt lights went out. From the seat behind Janine the
blue-uniformed hostess stood up and went forward along the
aisle.
Janine glanced across the aisle, across the two empty seats,
through the Perspex porthole. The lowering sun was a big sullen
red ball, wearing a moustache of purple cloud. The forest roof
was a sea of dark green that spread away in all directions below
them, its monotony broken by an occasional pimple of higher
ground.
‘My daddy bought me a T-shirt with Big Daddy on it, but
it’s in my case—’
There was a shattering crash, a great swirling silver cloud
obscured the portholes, and the Viscount lurched so wildly that
Janine was hurled painfully against her safety-belt. The air
hostess was flung upwards against the roof of the cabin, and she
fell back like a broken doll and lay twisted across the back of
one of the empty seats. There was a cacophony of shrieks and
screams from the passengers and the girl clung desperately to
Janine’s arm, shrilling incoherently. The cabin tilted
sharply but smoothly as the aircraft banked, and then suddenly
the Viscount plunged forward and swung viciously from side to
side.
The safety-belt held Janine in her seat, but it felt like an
insane roller-coaster ride down the sky. Janine leaned over and
hugged the child to try and still her piercing screams. Although
her head was being whipped from side to side, Janine got a
glimpse out of the porthole, and saw the horizon turning like the
spokes of a spinning-wheel, and it made her feel giddy and
nauseated. Then abruptly she focused on the silver wing of the
aircraft below her. Where the streamlined engine-nacelle had been
was a ragged hole. Through it she could see the fluffy roof of
the forest. The torn wing was flexing and twisting, she could see
the wrinkles appearing in the smooth metal skin. Her ears were
popping and creaking with the violent pressure-change, and the
trees were rushing towards her in a sombre green blur.
She tore the child’s arms from around her neck and
forced her head down into her own lap. ‘Hold your
knees,’ she shouted. ‘Keep your face down.’ And
she did herself what she had ordered.
Then they hit, and there was a deafening rending, roaring,
crashing tumult. She was flung mercilessly about in her seat,
tumbled and battered, blinded and stunned and hammered by flying
pieces of debris.
It seemed to go on for ever. She saw the roof above her clawed
away and blinding sunlight struck her for an instant. Then it was
gone, and something hit her across one shin. Clearly, above all
the other sounds, she heard her own bone break, and the pain shot
up her spine into her skull. End over end she was hurled, and
then another blow in the back of the neck and her vision exploded
into shooting sparks of light through a black singing void.
When she recovered consciousness, she was still in her seat,
but hanging upside down from her safety-strap. Her face felt
engorged with the blood that had flowed into it, and her vision
wavered and swam like a heat mirage. Her head ached. It felt as
though a red-hot nail was being driven into the centre of her
forehead with a sledgehammer.
She twisted slowly, and saw that her broken leg was hanging
down in front of her face, the toe pointing where the heel should
have been.
‘I will never walk again,’ she thought, and the
horror of it braced her. She reached for the release on the
buckle of her safety-belt, and then remembered how many necks are
broken from a release in the upside-down position. She hooked her
elbow through the arm of her seat, and then lifted the release.
Her hold on the seat flipped her as she fell and she landed on
her hip with her broken leg twisted under her. The pain was too
much and she lost consciousness again.
It must have been hours later that she woke again for it was
almost dark. The silence was frightening. It took her many groggy
seconds to realize where she was, for she was looking at grass
and treetrunks and sandy earth.
Then she realized that the fuselage of the Viscount had been
severed just in front of her seat, as though by a guillotine; the
tail section was all that was left around her. Over
Janine’s head the body of the child who had been her
seating partner still hung by its strap. Her arms dangled below
her head, and her blonde pigtails pointed at the earth. Her eyes
were wide open, and her face contorted with the terror in which
she had died.
Janine used her elbows to crawl out of the shattered fuselage,
dragging her leg behind her and she felt the coldness and nausea
of shock sweep over her. Still on her stomach, she retched and
vomited until she was too weak to do anything else but let
herself sink back into the darkness in her head. Then she heard a
sound in the silence, faint at first, but growing swiftly in
volume.
It was the wackety-wackety-wack of a helicopter’s
rotors. She looked up at the sky, but it was shrouded by the roof
of the forest overhead, and she realized that the last rays of
daylight had gone and the swift African night was rushing down
upon the earth.
‘Oh please!’ she screamed. ‘Here I am.
Please help me!’ But the sound of the helicopter grew no
louder, it seemed to pass only a few hundred metres from where
she lay under the concealing trees, and then the sound of its
rotors receded as swiftly as the darkness came on, and at last
there was silence.
‘A fire,’ she thought. ‘I must start a
signal fire.’
She looked around her wildly, and almost within reach of where
she lay was the crumpled body of the blonde girl’s father
who had been in the seat in front of her. She crawled to him, and
touched his face, running her finger lightly over his eyelids.
There was no flicker of response. She sobbed and drew back, and
then steeled herself and returned once more to search the dead
man’s pockets. The disposable Bic plastic cigarette-lighter
was in the side pocket of his jacket. At the first flick it gave
her a pretty yellow flame, and she sobbed again – this time
with relief.
R
oland
Ballantyne sat in the co-pilot’s seat of the Super Frelon
helicopter and peered down at the tree-tops only two hundred feet
below him. It was so dark that the occasional clearing in the
forest was a mere pale leprous patch. There was no definition in
the tree-tops, they were a dark amorphous mattress. Even when the
light had been stronger, the chances of spotting the wreckage
below the tree-tops had been remote. Of course there was the
possibility that part of a wing or tail-section had torn off and
been left hanging high up, and in easy view. However, they could
not trust to that.
At first they were looking for damage to the tree-tops, a
blaze of lopped branches or the tell-tale white splotches of torn
bark and raw wet wood. They were looking for a signal flare, or
for smoke or the chance reflection of the late sun off bare
metal, but then the light started to go. Now they were flying in
desperation, waiting for, but not really believing, they would
see a signal flare or a torch or even a fire.
Roland turned to the pilot and shouted in the rackety
cabin.
‘Landing lights. Switch them on!’
‘They will overheat and burn out in five minutes,’
the pilot bellowed back. ‘No good!’
‘One minute on, and one minute off to cool again,’
Roland told him. ‘Try it.’ The pilot reached for the
switch and below them the forest was lit with the cruel
bluish-white glare of the phosphorous lamps. The pilot dropped
even closer to the earth.
The shadows below the trees were stark and black. In one
clearing they trapped a small herd of elephant. The animals were
monstrous and unearthly in the flood of light, with their
tentlike ears extended in alarm. Then the helicopter bore on and
plunged them back into utter darkness.
Back and forth they flew, covering the corridor which the
Viscount must have followed on her outward track, but that was
one hundred nautical miles long and ten wide, one thousand square
miles. It was full night now, and Roland glanced at the luminous
dial of his wristwatch. It was nine o’clock, almost four
hours since the Viscount had gone in. If there were survivors,
they would be dying now, from the cold and shock, from loss of
blood and internal injuries, while here in the main cabin of the
Super Frelon there was a doctor, with twenty quarts of plasma,
with blankets – with the chance of life.
Grimly Roland stared down into the brilliant circle of white
light as it danced over the tree-tops like the spotlight over a
theatrical stage, and there was a cold and desolate despair in
him that seemed slowly to numb his limbs and paralyse his
resolve. He knew she was down there, so close, so very close, and
yet he was helpless.
Suddenly he bunched his right fist and slammed it into the
metal partition at his side. The skin smeared from his knuckles
and the pain shot up his arm to the shoulder, but the pain was a
stimulant, and in it he found his anger again. He cupped the
anger to him, the way a man shelters a candle-flame in a high
wind.
In the seat beside him the pilot checked the time-lapse on his
stopwatch and then switched off the landing lights to cool them.
The blackness that followed was more intense for the brilliance
that had preceded it. Roland’s night-sight was destroyed,
his vision filled with wriggling insects of starred light, and he
was forced to cover his eyes with his hands for a few seconds to
rest them and let them re-adjust.
So he did not see the tiny dull red spark down below him that
showed through the forest tops for the smallest part of a second,
and then was left behind as the Super Frelon roared back on the
next leg of its search pattern.
J
anine had
gathered a pile of dried grass and twigs, and built them up into
a cone ready for the flame of the lighter. It had been difficult
work. She had dragged herself slowly backwards on her buttocks
and hands, with her broken leg sliding along after her as she
gathered the kindling from the nearest bushes. Each time her leg
caught or twisted over an irregularity of the torn earth, she
almost fainted again with the pain.