It was a big ship, fully laden with containers almost up to its bridge level. Johnny switched his gaze away and studied the sea. My God, he thought, those waves are big. Into the wind and across the waves, that was how they told you to land. These waves were going the same way as the wind. As he studied the waves he realized with complete and sickening certainty that there was absolutely no hope of pulling off a controlled textbook ditching in that heaving sea and that even if he got out, the chances of getting Jo and Heather, trapped in the back by the wheelchair, safely into the life-raft were very low indeed.
Sir Michael, who’d been staring down at the sea, shot him a worried look. Johnny grimaced. A thousand feet. Another minute, that’s all they had.
‘Not long now, get into position,’ he said. ‘I’m… I’m very sorry about this.’
‘Good luck, Johnny,’ said Heather.
‘Yeah, go for it,’ said Jo.
He started to turn into wind, taking a good look at the ship’s position, hammering towards them, down to the east, straight into the teeth of the wind.
On a calm sea it might be possible, bringing it in just over stalling speed, levelling off to flop into the water. In this sea, the chances of staying upright were zero. It was fifty-fifty for the two of them in the front seat. For Heather and Jo, survival was a long shot. He’d left the throttle wide open and the windmilling propeller, turning the engine slowly over, was – had he but known it – sucking the water slowly through the system. One pint out of the six pints queuing up in the pipes had already gone. If they’d had thirty thousand feet of height to play with the engine might in the end have laboured its way through the water back to petrol again, but they didn’t have thirty thousand feet. They had little more than five hundred feet left.
It was the reduction in their height that allowed Johnny to see what he hadn’t seen before. Glancing diagonally back at the freighter, where he could now clearly see someone on the wing of the bridge staring in their direction, he also noticed how clean cut the profile of the ship looked from this height. Every last available space had been used in the stack of containers which rose high off the deck. It looked like an aircraft carrier.
It was one wild chance. Should he take it? He glanced back at Jo and Heather and knew it was their only chance. Simple choice, evens for his father and himself only if they ditched against what? Maybe one chance in three for all four of them if he could do it.
He looked at Sir Michael. ‘I’m going to try putting it down on the ship. Are you game?’
There was a short silence then he said. ‘I’m happy with whatever you decide. If you think there’s a better chance that way, take it.’
Every foot of height was precious now. He banked cautiously, paralleled the ship going the opposite way, sinking all the time. When he was behind it he banked again, levelled out in line with the stern, sinking, sinking. He was into wind now, the stern of the ship dead ahead, staring down at what looked a very, very short space from this angle.
He reached over in front of his father and tapped the flap control down to the first detent position for ten degrees and felt the plane lift a little, slowing. They seemed barely to be gaining on the ship and he feared suddenly that he might not have enough height to reach it. He did frantic sums. The ship was doing maybe fifteen knots into a head wind of something like twenty-five knots. If he was doing sixty-five, he was closing on it at only twenty-five knots.
If he could just get there, they were in with a chance.
They were committed now. He switched everything off except the electrical master switch – knowing he’d still need that for the flaps.
The ship’s bridge stuck up ahead, in his way though it was only maybe ten feet higher than the top surface of the containers beyond it. He’d have to come down hard once he was over it.
Then he saw the derricks.
Closer up, the top surface of the containers wasn’t so even. There were small gaps between them. More worryingly, two thick loading derricks protruded half way down the ship, side by side maybe fifteen feet apart.
The stern of the ship was just a hundred feet ahead now and men were pouring out of the bridge, out of hatches, everywhere, staring back towards him.
Time slowed right down for him. There seemed an age to make every tiny correction. He pushed the nose down for a fraction more speed until he was almost on the ship, below the level of the top of the bridge then pulled the nose up, just cleared the bridge in an ungainly hurdle and in the same moment selected full flap. The plane slowed abruptly. Its nose lifted sharply into the air and he fought it, seeing only sky ahead. Then it dropped hard so that the windscreen was full of containers rushing up at him, and he put both hands on the yoke and pulled for his life. The nose was starting to lift, the plane squashing down in the air as they hit, then it was all in the lap of the gods. The landing gear disintegrated in a rattling, tearing screech of metal and an impact that rocked the belly of the plane down, knocking the breath out of him.
He could see forwards now.
They were sliding, crabwise, bumping diagonally across their precarious landing-strip at what felt a terrifying speed towards the edge.
The noise, that was the startling thing – the noise you get when you tear up an aeroplane. Rending metal filled Johnny’s ears and stopped him thinking anything except for one, dominant thought – they were going over the edge and there was nothing he could do to stop them, going over the edge to plunge down the side of the ship and be minced up by its propellers. His foot was trying to press the rudder pedal through the bulkhead in a futile attempt to swing the sliding, bucking plane back towards the centre line. It was to no avail.
In the last second before the nose had lifted and he lost sight of the deck he had tried to keep the plane straight. The pair of loading derricks stuck out halfway down the container runway. If you had to land in trees, you aimed the nose between two, so they’d take the wings off and slow you down. That was what the textbook said and Johnny had tried to apply the same theory now but that’s where the textbook stopped. The ship was rising on a wave when they hit, the undercarriage buckled unevenly and a line of ring bolts on the top of one container, ripping into the Cessna’s belly, served to skew them further to the left. The makeshift runway looked very narrow.
Bouncing and skidding, their oblique course was set for the edge and the edge, Johnny knew, offered only death.
It was, after all, a derrick that stopped them, but not as Johnny had intended by serving as one of the goalposts for their shot into the net. The left hand derrick of the pair, sticking up between the containers, sliced into the right wing a couple of feet out from the wing root while the plane was still sliding fast, a mass of metal, skidding along at the speed of an Olympic sprinter. Each derrick had two legs, one in front of the other. As the wing folded up around the rear leg, the impact swung the plane hard right, away from the drop. The derrick’s second leg, built massively out of steel, bit brutally into the fuselage right by the wing root, into the front passenger area.
The windscreen popped out and Johnny, on the opposite side, jackknifed forward against his straps, and as the instrument panel seemed to jump to meet him there was a loud grunt from his father.
After that nothing seemed to make sense. He was trying to fly the plane but it was rising and falling, rising and falling. He wanted to control the motion with his arms and legs but they didn’t respond properly. As the plane moved up and down it seemed to shift slightly sideways to small sounds of stressed metal. There were voices, voices behind him and voices outside the plane. How could there be voices outside when they were flying? He kept thinking his eyes were open but he knew they were shut and the clouds through which he was swooping in this uncomfortable slow switchback were just dream vision.