He cancelled the autopilot. Immediately, the 494 banked violently to the left and the nose reared like a wild horse's head. Vance slid into the co-pilot's seat and slowly Gant felt his supporting effort on the control column. Gant was able to reach for the elevator trim and adjust the nose of the aircraft… In moments, before he and Vance had regained control of the 494, it had turned almost three hundred and sixty degrees and climbed two thousand feet. Sweat ran from his forehead down his cheeks.
Slowly, as if coaxing a fierce and unpredictable animal into a cage, he brought the aircraft round on to its previous course. Phoenix glinted like fragments of a broken window ahead of them. The grey and brown flanks of mountains were unsoftened by heat haze or distance.
He called Albuquerque.
"Centre 494. We're just coming round on to one-eight-six radial. This is part of the distraction notified earlier."
"Roger, 494. We will clear a block of airspace, flight levels two-five-zero to three-two-zero in case you have further problems."
"It has to be more than a spurious cross feed right? More than just fuel transferring from one of the fuller tanks to the port wing tanks.
We're losing maybe most of all our fuel from the starboard wing tanks—"
"It feels like that?"
"I can't tell, dammit! The port wing's getting heavy, that's all feel tells me. Your fucking airplane has gotten a mind of its own from somewhere, Vance. You built it, you tell me what's wrong!"
"You want to die telling me I'm an asshole?" Vance snapped.
"Is that the extent of your ambition, Gant?"
"OK, OK!" Gant snarled. Tell me how we can cut the engines off from the fuel management computer."
"It's in the computer?"
"It's the computer that's lying to us, Vance the computer, your baby, that's dumping our fuel! Now, tell me how I can override it, cut it out before the tanks are drained!"
Vance's features adopted a strain of concentration, his eyes expressionlessly focused inward. Then he said:
The only way is to close down the electrical systems." Vance hesitated for a moment, then added: "You have to shut down all the non-essential electrics and fly her—"
"Manually? On hydraulics and air pressure?
Then glide home — right?"
There's no other way. I can't isolate the fuel management system from the rest of the electrics. It has to be this way…"
"And when we get to where we've glided, I'll have to make a dead-stick landing," Gant responded. Vance merely nodded.
"You sure know how to show a girl a good time, Vance you really, really do!"
Non-essential electrics… It sounded simple, almost innocuous.
Nothing dangerous in being without all the electronic displays and readouts and relying only on the air-driven primary instruments All the radio and navcom ms except the VHP box, would also be out… the radar, the VORs, the ADFs… He'd be dropping in altitude with every second, navigating by means of features on the ground, sliding across the landscape, looking for the Vance Aircraft runway, a sliver of grey concrete in the dazzling miles of desert. Non-essential electrics…
The 494 would go from a state-of-the-art airliner to a primitive glider in seconds once he took the decision. He had no need to climb any higher in altitude to allow him to reach Phoenix, he already had enough height to trade off against distance in the glide.
He must make the decision now. Airliner to glider. Gant shivered… there wasn't a choice, just as there was no time-out for a debate with himself.
There was only the one play he could make.
He contacted Albuquerque Centre. When he had finished informing them of the problem and his proposed course of action, the machine-like voice, still remotely calm, said:
"Roger, 494 we understand your problem. Do you want to declare a Mayday?
We'll patch through to Phoenix Approach meanwhile, clear conflicting traffic. We have you positively identified over the Verde River, range forty nautical miles due north of Phoenix."
"Roger, AlbuK. We don't wish to declare a Mayday at this time. Out."
The 494 was holding its altitude at thirty thousand feet. Airspeed, one hundred and ninety knots. His glide range when the engines stopped at that height was fifty nautical miles. He had ten to spare before the airplane ploughed into the Arizona desert.
He glanced at Vance, who seemed to be studying him.
"You ready?" he asked.
"You?" Gant replied.
The mountains ringed the city like huge, impenetrable ramparts. Phoenix gleamed like a spilt droplet of water in the brown desert. The Verde River twisted beneath them like a blue cord someone had dropped and forgotten. The control column strained against his fierce grip and Vance's supporting strength. Behind him, he sensed the empty plane like an assailant.
The airframe lurched in the air, weary and unpredictable as a drunk unable to support his own weight.
"Go for it!" Vance snapped."
Tim Burton and David Winterborne surprised each other in the grand foyer of the Club and were immediately affable, shaking hands firmly and without apparent reserve. Burton, taller than Winterborne, stooped habitually to the stature of other men, and did so now, even though
Winterborne's Eurasian features always seemed at odds with his height.
There was little else except the narrow eyes and sallow complexion of his Chinese mother in him. His slimness was maintained without recourse to athletic exercise of any kind. Burton played squash and indulged in desultory bouts with shining bars and suspended weights. He brushed a hand through his long hair, summoning a cautious, uncertain grin.
"I — um, heard about your problems, but didn't gloat," Winterborne offered. He and Aero UK had tried to press Sky-liner on Burton and Artemis Airways, with great force.
Thanks for that, anyway." Burton's grin seemed again to have difficulty in precisely displaying itself, then at once it was entirely genuine.
"I don't mind telling you "You wish you'd offered for some other aircraft?" The jibe was sharp.
They were standing before the grey marble fireplace, their images reflected in the Italian mirror above it. A Joseph Knibb bracket clock of ebonised wood and much gilding occupied the mantelpiece. Above them, the ceiling of the vestibule and foyer was wreathed with plaster vines and hanging bunches of pale fruit against an eggshell blue.
Burton shook his head ruefully.
"I still can't afford your monster, David I told you and Coulthard that a year ago, when you were holding me down in my chair and practically forcing me to sign.
No way, Jose—"
"And yet you can't afford to wait for the new Boeing, either,"
She'd been able to carry it off like a model on a catwalk. He, however, quailed at the atmosphere of the Club at that moment. It was as if he still only aspired to the world of power, influence and success that it symbolised, rather than truly belonged. David's father and Pyott had been members for perhaps forty years apiece. He felt like a parvenu.
A youngish barrister with political ambitions and the ability to trim like a racing yacht passed him with a confident nod in the company of an advertising executive.
They mounted the steps like schoolboys… David in school, he remembered again.
Carrying his hurt, his ruthlessness, his ambition inside a carapace of ingratiation and acquiescence. He'd paltered and shifted, tried to be inconspicuous and, like a chrysalis, had turned into the iron butterfly he now was.
A judge and a Cabinet minister, a group of City people, a novelist past his sell-by date in company with a publisher. He felt them all as an admonishing, even mocking parade as they passed into the Club.