'I don't understand,' Seymour said. 'The cloud lies below us. So where is the sun?'
***
For half an hour we circled high in that sombre sky. Its profoundly muted redness gave forth little light.
I glanced along the metal wings of the plane. Above the clouds in daytime sparkling sunlight would usually dance along its length from root to tip. Now the light turned the once silvery surface to the colour of rust.
'So, it can't be ordinary cloud that's responsible for the darkness,' I ventured at length. 'At least, not thunderclouds.'
'No,' Seymour agreed. 'They've exacerbated it, there's no doubt about that. But there must be another cloud layer even higher up that's obscuring the sun.'
'But you said the cloud would probably be no higher than twenty-five thousand feet?'
'Yes, that is true. But fly higher if you can.'
I did take the plane up higher. In fact, right to its maximum ceiling of fifty-five thousand feet where no audible engine noise reached the cockpit through the rarefied atmosphere. Here the sky should have been near-black rather than blue. But there was only that gloomy red.
Even if we'd somehow mistaken the time and flown after sunset we would have seen a brilliant display of diamond-bright stars. It was as if the gods themselves had grown weary of the Earth and drawn a red shroud across its face.
For some moments I talked to HQ; I half fancied I could hear the Old Man in the background, growling instructions to the ground controller. Every so often a splash of static sounded in my ear as lightning played merry hell in the heavens above the aerodrome. Behind me, Seymour made his notes and took his photographs.
I glanced at the fuel gauges. The needles indicated the tanks were a quarter full.
Our time was up. I told Seymour to stow the camera. We were going home.
I eased back on the power and allowed the plane to descend. Until the very last moments of approach I would be landing blind. The control tower would have to talk me in until I could see the strip's landing lights.
Already in my mind's eye I could see the radar controller poring over his screen, watching the fat blip of light that was our signal.
Behind me, Seymour was a little livelier and, although I imagine he was thinking aloud rather than talking to me, he was speculating about the cause of the loss of sunlight. 'Volcanic eruptions can fling out debris into the higher atmosphere, resulting in some sunlight blockage. But never to this degree - at least, not in living memory. The eruption of Krakatoa significantly reduced the amount of sunlight reaching the surface of the Earth: this in turn resulted in lower temperatures globally and that meant a succession of fearful winters and cool summers. But
this
is unprecedented. To go further, we might speculate that-'
In my earpiece I heard ground control. 'Reduce altitude to fifteen thousand feet, continue your speed of four hundred knots, maintain course setting of-'
Again there was a rush of static in my ear that sounded like a wave breaking against a sea wall.
I waited for the return of the ground controller's steady voice.
Static still hissed.
'…Therefore,' Seymour was saying, 'clearly neither water nor ice particles are responsible for this acute diminution of sunlight. If volcanic eruptions aren't responsible then we're forced to-'
'Ground control,' I said quickly. 'Am no longer receiving. Over.'
A rush of static. But no voice.
'Ground control. Do you read me? Over.'
'The quantity of debris in the upper atmosphere must be phenomenal. One could-'
'Seymour,' I said sharply.
'Uhm?'
'We've a problem.'
'What kind of problem?' He spoke almost dreamily, obviously still running through his own mental calculations.
'I've lost contact with ground control.'
'Is that serious?'
'Yes. Very.'
'Try again.'
'I have. They're not responding.'
I opened the throttle and the sharp cone of the fighter's nose lifted. The altimeter reversed its downward progress as we regained height.
'We're climbing,' Seymour said unnecessarily. 'We need to land, don't we?'
'We do. But preferably on the runway - not in someone's cabbage patch.'
'You mean we can't land until we re-establish radio contact?'
'Something like that,' I said tightly. 'I'm going to circle for a few moments while they - I hope - cure their technical hiccup.'
And so we circled for ten minutes…
Twelve minutes.
Fifteen, sixteen.
The fuel gauges crept towards that ominous red zone.
Still no radio contact.
And still no light beyond the canopy. Not even that dreary red sky. It lay high above the cloud we now swam through. The Javelin was like an eel slithering through the silt bed of a particularly mucky river.
After seventeen minutes I told Seymour, 'If we stay up here much longer we'll have to get out and walk.'
'Pardon?'
'Don't worry, an old flyer's joke.' I eased the stick forward and the plane descended. I was going to add something about how to use the ejector seat if the fuel ran out. But in this murk, and bearing in mind that Seymour was a complete novice at flying, it might have been kinder simply to put a pistol to his head.
With radio contact lost I'd have to rely on some dead reckoning to get me within eyeball contact of the runway lights. Before take-off I'd seen a couple of rocket flares fired that showed the clearance between ground and cloud was about a thousand feet.
If I took this crate down carefully I could skate in on the underside of the cloud without any real danger of flying into the side of a hill or anything. While an altimeter at that height is no longer a precise instrument, the Gloster Javelin did have a brace of extremely powerful landing lights. Even at a thousand feet I'd be able to see if we were over dry land or water.
Steadily, I took the plane down to the thousand-feet mark.
I had perhaps seven minutes' fuel left.
Any kind of landing in those circumstances would, inevitably, be a rough one.
I had worked out that I'd flown in a large circle in my climb above the clouds. In the centre of that circle, along a line of radius of some fifteen or so miles, lay the Isle of Wight. It seemed to me that if I headed along that line at an altitude of around a thousand feet I would see the runway lights, and if not those at any rate the lights of towns and villages.
But I hadn't counted on the weather being even filthier than before.
Raindrops rattled against the perspex canopy like machine-gun bullets. The aircraft's own landing lights only revealed swathes of yet more rain that twisted and curled like smoke.
It
seemed
that I had three options - at least, when it came to flying.
Option one: to fly through the swirling rain and turmoil of winds that buffeted the plane.
Option two: to fly in the utter darkness of the clouds.
Option three: to eschew the clouds and darkness altogether for the dull red heavens above. (I use the word 'heaven' in the sense of a realm high above your head - if anything, that region above the clouds was more reminiscent of hell: a chillingly gloomy hell, at that.)
But, in fact, my airborne options were rapidly decreasing. With my fuel indicators nearing zero and still no resumption of contact with ground control I actually had no choice but to continue skimming the underside of the storm clouds. I flew for a good thirty seconds or so at around three hundred knots, the turbulence buffeting the plane like a breeze would a feather. The sheeting rain dazzlingly reflected the plane's lights. Slipstream howled mournfully over the wings.
My heartbeat increased; perspiration slid unpleasantly down my chest.
I now abandoned options two and three. I descended. Still I could see no ground below. And yet at this height (the altimeter was at all but zero) I could easily bury this thirty-year-old aircraft into the side of one of the Isle of Wight's gently rolling hills.
'David… David, can you see the runway yet?'
'No.' But then, I could see damn-all anyway.
I throttled back again, taking the airspeed down to two-fifty. The plane's nose dropped a little, and we were a few feet closer to terra firma.
'Good grief,' I gasped.
'What's wrong?' Seymour called.
'Sea,' I said tersely. Just feet below us I had suddenly seen waves.
They were white-flecked; the sudden gusts of wind had stirred up the sea into a boiling mass.
I had to keep a steady nerve. There was no point in taking the plane higher. Our fuel was all but gone in any case. Besides, if I lost sight of the sea I wouldn't know when we did reach land. I banked left, the plane's port wing-tip almost top-slicing the waves. A moment later the nose was pointing north. Now I must reach land. Either our island or the mainland. Not that it mattered now.
I'd have to land the plane in the next sixty seconds or we risked getting more than our feet wet.
'David, I think…'
'Please, not now, Seymour. I'm going to have to do some concentrating for the next minute.'
He clammed up.
In the lights beneath me, the sea raged. I fancied I could even see individual spray droplets flying up towards the aircraft.
A red light winked on the control panel beneath the fuel gauge. You didn't have to be an aviation expert to know what that meant. I eased the throttle back, trying to conserve the precious splash of fuel that by now could barely have wetted the bottom of the tank.
Nice and easy does it…
Ahead. A darker mass. One that didn't reflect the lights.
I told myself that if it wasn't land I'd eat my hat, with my plimsolls for pudding.
I could see no outcrops of rock, no trees or houses. It looked like flat pasture down there. There was no chance of going in with the undercarriage lowered. If the nose wheel hit so much as a rut or a rabbit hole we'd cartwheel. We'd have to slide in on the plane's smooth belly.
'Hold on tight,' I said. 'We're going in.'
***
The landing made me lose interest for a while in pretty much everything this big, wide world had to offer.
Eventually, I opened my eyes and thought I was waking in bed.
But I could hear rattling sounds against my skull. Gingerly, I probed my head with my fingers. It was numb - no sensation whatsoever. My fingers were numb, too.
Then, in a sudden moment of clear awareness, I realized that I was still sitting in the aircraft. The rattling sounds were rain drops falling on my aluminum flying helmet. Someone had raised the cockpit canopy.
My neck ached. And the way pains were shooting up my shins didn't bode well, either. I released the harness and groaned.
'David,' a voice shouted above the sound of the tapping rain. 'Are you all right?'
I nodded. That made my neck ache, but at least everything moved as it should have. 'Seymour?' I called back.
'Yes?'
'Are you still in the plane?'
'Yes. I thought I'd wait here until you came round.'
'Good God. How long have you been sitting there?'
'About half an hour.'
'You idiot. There might, still be enough fuel in the tanks to blow us sky-high. Why didn't you get out?'
'I didn't realize. Sorry.'
Now that my senses were returning to normal I saw that although it was still as black as Hades outside the plane the rain was easing. I reckoned we had much to thank it for. It had damped down any fires and cooled hot metal that might otherwise have ignited what fuel remained, burning us to cinders.
I went through the motions of checking the radio, but my pessimistic suspicions were soon confirmed. It had been well and truly busted by the crash landing. I told Seymour to climb out of the plane. Still in our helmets we slithered over the metal surfaces and onto the ground, every movement making me wince and groan.
Not only was that ground soggy, it squelched softly underfoot. Evidently I'd put us down in a marsh. But where we were on the island - or, indeed, the mainland - was anyone's guess. Normally, I'd have suggested that we should wait until first light. But since first or any other light might not come we had little choice but to slog on by foot to the nearest farmhouse or cottage and get word to the airbase from there.
For a moment I carefully tested my legs. Although my shins ached like fury they certainly weren't broken; I was pretty sure that when I came to get undressed I'd find an attractive marbling of bruises in eye-catching shades of blue and green.
I glanced back at the Javelin. The cockpit light was still on so there was enough light to see that the plane was more or less intact. Admittedly, one wing did lie back flush with the fuselage and greenery bearded the pointed nose. But it hadn't been a
catastrophic
landing, considering. Seymour and I were intact, at least.
'There are torches in the emergency kit,' I told Seymour. 'I'll get those, then we'll start walking.'
'In which direction?' He pulled off his helmet and stood there, looking lost in the light thrown from the cockpit. 'We don't know which way to go.'
'Due south. If we're on the mainland that will take us to the coast. If we're on the island, there's still no harm done. We'll probably find an inhabited house
en route
.'