TV in America, images of Gant and Vance and the plane, the initial explanations of a rogue chip in the fuel computer system, Vance's lawsuit against the manufacturer… none of it seemed to have borne them along. He decided, before he finally fell asleep beside an anxiously wakeful Charley, that his exhilaration, fed by champagne and a few necessary pills, had failed to convince them.
"Burton."
Tim-!" It was Stuart, his MD.
"Christ, Tim, it's happened again!"
"What?" He struggled upright in the suddenly heavy bedclothes, the entwining sheets and duvet.
"Fifty miles from Helsinki, no more. It went down, Tim it went down!"
"One of our—?" He could not, could not, ask.
"Oslo to Helsinki, early-morning flight. She was fucking serviced last fucking night, Tim—"
"How—?"
"Nothing on that yet. Oh, Jesus Christ, Tim we're done for!"
"How how many died?"
"Everyone. Seven crew, forty-four passengers. She was running almost empty…"
"Yes… there's that, at least," Burton replied, watching himself in a cheval mirror in one corner of the bedroom as carefully as if studying his performance on a television monitor. He would be doing that endlessly, later… "Forty-four passengers, you said?"
"Yes."
"God, it's awful. I mean it's really appalling." He felt shaken, made nauseous, by the sense of lives lost. It overpowered all other sensations, even those that already dragged at him concerning the immediate future. Forty-four. And the crew. And the plane had been almost empty… God, it was dreadful.
"What do you want me to do immediately, Tim?"
"What—? Oh, yes. A bland press release but emphasise the tragedy, our sorrow.
We know nothing more at the moment. Get us both on a flight to
Helsinki early tomorrow. I'll have to be here to field all the interviews today. God—" he breathed as the nausea and shock gripped him once more.
"It's not possible not another…"
An immediate future of hysterical accusations, tirades that damned himself, Vance and the plane. Experts dragged into studios all over the world to pronounce judgement. The fall of the share price, the panic of the lenders… Forty-four people. And the crew. It was.
She threw aside the telephone and rushed from the bed towards the bathroom, the nausea overwhelming him, already bitter in his throat.
PART TWO
A DARK PHILANTHROPY
My politics are the politics of honest folks…
I'm grateful to the government when business is prosperous, when I can eat my meals in peace and comfort, and can sleep at nights without being awakened by the firing of guns… Now that we have got the Empire, everything prospers. We sell our goods readily enough. You can't deny it. Well, what is it that you want? How will you be better off when you have shot everybody?
CHAPTER SIX
Summer Lightning The lights from the town of Tammisaari glowed as fitfully and hopelessly as distress maroons through the summer thunderstorm that enraged the Gulf of Finland around the tiny islet on which they hunched against the howling wind.
Burton felt his whole body numbed by the aftershock of the accident, as if he had been hurried to this place by plane, limousine, motorboat only to collide with the debris of his airliner his entire airline.
Below the small, naked promontory on which he was standing, men scurried like crabs across sharp rocks and around the wreckage of the 494. Somewhere down there was Gant, authorised by himself and Alan Vance, who stood mutely stunned beside him, his daughter clinging to him as to an uncertain rock. The behaviour of the inspectors, the floating crane, the other vessels, bobbing and jolting in the waves, all seemed not only insignificant but desperate the activity of a team of surgeons around an operating table when all the monitors showed flat, unvarying lines; no heartbeat, no brain activity, no pulse or breath. Forty-odd people had died, together with the crew, in that mockery of wreckage. Newspapers from Europe and the States he had seen in the arrivals lounge while waiting for Vance to fly in from Phoenix in his private jet showed another wreck. Headlines crying killer airplane, deadly airliner and the like… and stock market reports, graphs and indicators describing the terminal decline of Vance Aircraft and Artemis Airways.
The storm tugged at his long hair like a vindictive housemaster confronting him with wrongdoing… Look at it, Burton, look at it, this is your doing. He wanted Vance to say something, to assist by sharing the responsibility… but Vance, with Barbara clutched against his side like a spar, was contained within an iron maiden of failure. The FAA had immediately ordered all 494s grounded and a greatest urgency enquiry into the safety of the aircraft. The banks and the DOW had responded by ditching Vance Aircraft. The company died that morning, in the press and on TV… and the creditors would distance themselves, call in the loans, pick among the rags of the few small subsidiary businesses for something to salvage. Vance and his company were finished.
Which made the activity down there on the shoreline, where the whale-like bulk of the main fuselage ground and screamed against rocks and one wing half-saluted from the rough water and the tailplane wearing Diana the Huntress stuck up to taunt him… futile, all of it.
He could see men in diving gear, others in orange waistcoats, yellow waterproofs, all as small and pointlessly active as insects.
He had asked begged Vance to bring Gant, the pilot who had appeared to save them, like a phantom bugle-call now so obviously unreal. He had suffered a round of television and radio interviews and phone calls, newspaper assaults, with a weary and defiant determination, a black time in which Gant had appeared to be some kind of distant, but real, beacon. Confronted now with the wreckage, the body-count they had already recovered at least two dozen bodies, including that of the pilot and the howling, light-flashing storm, he knew that he had clung to the illusion of rescue.
It was a pathetic irony that Gant had been able to come, collected by Vance at Dulles airport in Washington, because he had resigned from the NTSB and was available for freelance work. The force of the wind made Burton's eyes water.
The floating crane, rolling awkwardly, lowered one of the big Pratt & Whitney engines on to its flat deck, and men secured it as gently as they might have fussed around a stretcher, tucking in a red blanket that covered a body. He glanced away from the scene, but Vance appeared still to inhabit another world, some inner nightmare.
Gant, glancing up at the low headland of the islet where the 494 had come down, saw two figures Burton and the composite individual that was Vance and Barbara clinging to his side like an infant monkey. The sea roared around the rocks along the shore, sending another wave over him.
Water ran off him, leaving his face and hands icily chilled, his waterproofs streaming. The noises of the airliner grinding against the rocks were deafening. The airplane had come down steeply, like the 494 towards the runway at Vance Aircraft, and tried to level too late to make a landing on the water. It had broken up on the shore of the tiny island off the Finnish coast, two miles out from the town of Tammisaari. The island was a nature reserve for wildfowl. He imagined their panic in the early morning as the plane had crashed and disintegrated.
Vance's private jet had gotten into Helsinki's Vantaa airport just ahead of the summer storm coming down from the Gulf of Bothnia. The sky had been luridly discoloured and threatening as they had driven west. He had been walking the pebbled, narrow beach studying the line of impact of the 494 when the storm broke, lightning all along the horizon and the waves rearing like grey cloud only fifty yards from him. The local investigation team seemed not to resent his presence.