There were more shouts and a lurch and then cold air poured over him as the door beside him was torn off. Hands took him, unstrapped him, lifted him out and laid him on a wet, hard surface that was still lifting and falling under him. The air was thick with the smell of petrol. Time to wake up now, he thought. Time to get those eyes open. There was a hand on his face and a voice calling.
‘Johnny? Johnny? Can you hear me?’
He got his eyes open with a huge effort for just a moment. Bright sky seared the back of them. A face, dark against the sky, blotted out part of it. He knew from the voice that it was Heather.
‘You’re all right?’ he said.
‘I’m all right. So’s Jo. How about you?’
‘Banged my head.’
‘I know. Can you see all right?’ Jo, he thought. Why had she only mentioned Jo?
‘Where’s my father?’
‘They’re just getting him out now.’
He lurched up, got to his feet then found himself somehow, painfully, down on his knees, vomiting violently. The sight that greeted him was a shock. They were up on top of the containers. The Cessna was on its belly ahead of him, leaning over so the tip of its intact left wing hung down over the edge. The right wing was reared up in the air, buckled and waving in the wind and half a dozen men were swarming in and around the cockpit. Ropes were roughly lashed around the fuselage, tied to the derrick, making sure the remains of the plane didn’t slide over the side in the motion of the sea.
Johnny tried to stand again, fighting off her restraining arm and made it upright, his head swinging dizzily. He lurched across to the plane, pushed a seaman aside to look in. His father was in the crumpled mess that had been the right hand side of the Cessna’s cockpit. His eyes were closed and his face was white. The derrick that had saved them had turned him into the padding for that last split second of deceleration.
Johnny felt a terrible fear.
‘Is he breathing?’ he said.
The nearest seaman was Asian, Korean maybe, and looked at him uncomprehendingly.
‘Yes,’ came a voice beside him, ‘he is breathing. You go down below. We get him out.’ It was an officer, big, fair haired, with an accent that sounded Dutch. Johnny’s legs gave way again and the man caught him as he fell.
He didn’t resist then as they strapped him to a stretcher, lowered him down to the deck and took him below to a sickbay. Heather came with him. Jo was already there, looking pale but unhurt.
‘Heather,’ she said, ‘can you tell this guy there’s nothing wrong with me? I can’t make him understand.’
‘She not all right.’ The sickbay attendant was small, elderly, also Asian. ‘She shocky. Legs not working.’
‘No,’ said Heather, ‘her legs didn’t work before.’ He frowned. ‘Wheelchair,’ said Heather, ‘she uses a wheelchair.’
The door opened and the room was suddenly filled with bustling men, lifting Sir Michael, inert on a stretcher, carefully in.
Heather and the attendant bent over him. Johnny levered himself up. He felt less dizzy now. The attendant was cutting his father’s jacket off him, probing his right side with what seemed to Johnny to be rough fingers.
‘Ribs’ he said, ‘ribs bust. Maybe pelvis too.’
Johnny felt numb panic crawling up him. His father looked frail and broken. Where would skilled help come from? A few minutes earlier he had been facing the high chance that all of them would soon be dead. Now there were three people safe on the ship but contained in the motionless form of the fourth was a shadow large enough to eclipse any joy he might have been able to feel at that achievement.
The door opened again and a big man came in. He had a pot belly, a fleshy, damp face with a purple network of broken veins across his nose and cheeks and very little hair except for a grey spade beard.
He looked around him. ‘What’s the news, Sammy?’ he said to the attendant and his voice was a guttural growl.
‘Broke bones,’ said Sammy, ‘ribs, maybe pelvis, maybe leg. Life signs so-so. Maybe bleeding inside. He need hospital, Captain.’
‘Do you have a doctor?’ Johnny demanded.
‘Course we don’t. We’ll call a chopper.’ He didn’t look too friendly. ‘Are the rest of you all right?’ he said.
‘We seem to be, thanks,’ said Johnny.
‘You sure?’ said the Captain. ‘Looks like your head put a dent in my ship.’
They made him sit down until Sammy had done what he could with Sir Michael and had time to peer into Johnny’s eyes and ears.
‘He’ll do,’ said Sammy cursorily and went back to Sir Michael.
‘I’m Captain Lammers. Your names are?’
‘Johnny Kay, Heather Weston, Jo er…’ Johnny’s mind went blank.
‘Howitt,’ said Jo.
‘And the injured man?’ asked the Captain, writing it all down.
‘Sir Michael Parry.’
‘Oh yes?’ said the Captain and stopped writing to look at him in surprise. ‘That one? The famous Sir Parry?’
‘You know about him?.’
‘Even in Holland, yes.’ A little drop of sweat splashed off the Captain’s nose.
‘Get your breath. I go to call up the chopper,’ he said. ‘There’s tea coming. Then I wish to talk to you on the bridge.’
‘He’s not too pleased,’ said Heather when he’d gone.
‘Nor would I be if someone had just dropped an aeroplane on my ship. He probably thinks I’ve been highly irresponsible.’
‘But you haven’t been.’
‘No,’ said Johnny, ‘I really haven’t.’ He catalogued it, as much for his own sake as for hers. ‘I had Frankie check the plane over. He’s brilliant, Frankie, used to be in the Czech Air Force. He’s the best aircraft mechanic I know. I did the pre-flight properly. Well, you saw. He did most of it with me. There just wasn’t anything wrong. Then the engine and the radio, I mean to say.’
‘There is another possibility.’
‘What?’
‘That it was done on purpose.’
‘Someone fixed the plane, you mean?’
‘Is that possible?’
His face took on a grim aspect as he considered it. A steward brought tea and they swallowed it down, thick with sugar.
‘Who?’ he said.
‘The Americans, the Ramsgill Stray lot.’
‘Surely they wouldn’t do that. What have we got that’s so important to them?’
Jo chipped in. ‘They’d love to have Heather out of the way. Her case is a big embarrassment to them. So’s mine, and your father’s their biggest problem with their planning applications.’
Johnny was shaking his head.
‘No, of course,’ Heather said, ‘stupid of me. It’s not that at all, is it? That’s all old hat. It’s something new. It has to be. They know we’ve got the cable diagram for the link into BT. The Raven Stones tower link. You said yourself it was the smoking gun.’
He looked at her hard, then he shook his head again but this time it was different. It was a gesture of hopelessness rather than denial.
‘You want to come with me to face the Captain?’ he said.
There was no change in Sir Michael’s condition so they left Jo there with Sammy to call them if necessary.
The door from the sickbay led to a covered passage with a companionway at the far end leading to the bridge. Heather took Johnny’s arm, steered him away from it out on to the side deck where the wind took his breath away. She led him to a sheltered corner.
‘I just want to know something,’ she said. ‘Why did you decide not to land in the sea?’
‘We might have got out,’ he said, ‘you wouldn’t have – probably not you and certainly not Jo, wedged in by the wheelchair, with only one door.’
‘Thank you,’ she said, ‘I thought that was it. Thank you from both of us. You did brilliantly.’
‘No I didn’t,’ he said miserably, ‘look what I’ve done to my father.’
She put her arms round him and held him tight. ‘Not what you’ve done to him. He’s alive, Johnny. There’ll be a helicopter coming as fast as it can. Four people are still alive thanks to you.’
‘I simply couldn’t bear it if he died now.’
She was silent.
‘Heather,’ he said, ‘all the way down in the plane I thought you were going to die too. I couldn’t see any way of being sure I could get you out if we tipped over. When I decided to land on the ship I did it because of you.’
‘Me and Jo.’
‘No. You.’
She sighed. ‘Come on. Let’s go and see the Captain.’
On the bridge a plate proclaimed the name of the ship, the Waspik Trader. The Captain nodded at them and gestured ahead through the glass to where the plane lay, crooked in their line of vision.
‘Chopper’s coming,’ he said, ‘half an hour they say. I tell them who it was and they say they hurry.’
‘Oh good,’ said Johnny, ‘that’s a relief.’
‘I thought you had gone crazy,’ said the Captain. ‘We were watching you come down. We thought maybe you wanted to see the ship, then you came in so low and slow behind us. My first mate, he said your engine was stopped so I send him to get a boat ready then bang.’
‘My engine stopped at four thousand feet,’ said Johnny.
‘You know why?’
‘I haven’t a clue.’
‘You don’t take care of it maybe?’
‘Oh yes I do.’
‘You have a radio?’
‘Yes.’
‘But you didn’t call?’
‘We were calling. It stopped working some time after we left England too.’
The Captain snorted in a way that suggested he wouldn’t like to have Johnny as an engineer on his ship.
‘Do you know what could have happened? You could have hit the bridge. You could have gone over the side. You could have gone over the bow and we would have run you down. You could have set my ship on fire. Your petrol has gone everywhere. All down into the containers. It is very lucky it didn’t blow.’
‘Captain Lammers, I am very sorry if you feel I put your ship in any kind of danger. It was our only hope of saving lives, particularly with a disabled passenger in the back.’
‘Your lives against my ship? That makes it OK, you think?’
‘There wasn’t much time to think. I suppose I didn’t think we could do much damage to the containers.’
The Captain snorted.
‘Look, Captain, we think there’s just a possibility that someone might have interfered with the plane.’
‘Oh, I see. That is a good excuse.’
‘We took good care, I promise. Anyway at some point the authorities will want to inspect it. Can it stay there until you get to port?’
‘Is there a choice? What can I do, push it over the side?’
‘Where is your next stop.’
‘Mobile.’
‘Mobile, Alabama?’
‘That’s right.’
Oh shit, thought Johnny, couldn’t it have been Ireland or France or somewhere simple? Mundane complications began to multiply in front of him, telling the insurers, telling his co-owners. Having the plane sail off to America was not an easy way to start the process.
‘That’s a long way,’ he said. ‘Our Civil Aviation Authority will want to look at it.’
‘You want my engineer looks now. Sees if you’re trying to get out of the blaming?’
The CAA might not like it, Johnny thought. On the other hand who’s to say whether there’d be anything left to find if or when the Cessna reached Alabama?
‘Thank you. That would be very helpful.’
That was when the radio operator butted in.