He flashed a quick smile, stared at the nearly complete telescope in front of him, rolled in the last screw, stood up, and began.
CHAPTER 7
Descending
The cockpit door opened and Ali Fitzgerald walked into the cabin. Both men were busy: Seabright, who'd failed to raise Air Force One on the radio, was now peering through the screen; Mulligan was hunched nervously over the panels. Seabright thought he'd detected the shadow of the big 747 with the crest on its side somewhere over to their right. Then it had disappeared.
Finally, he broke away from staring at the bright, featureless horizon and asked Ali, 'How is it?'
'The German died,' she said softly. 'There was nothing I could do.'
Seabright looked at his first officer. Mulligan knew what his responsibilities were: Watch the lights flicker and glimmer on the panel, follow every movement of the digital dials on the one working engine. But his preoccupation didn't stop the news from affecting him. In another set of circumstances, he would have stood up and embraced her, tried to share some strength, but this was not the time or place.
'Ali'
It was Seabright who spoke, and as he did he noticed some fire in his colleague's eyes, some blame aimed — where? At himself? Or at Seabright, for taking this initiative, which was surely the right thing, the proper thing here, in this flying tin tube, just struggling through the air at 8,000 feet above the hot, inhospitable land, limping along at close to 150 miles per hour below its normal cruise, with thirty miles still to run to the field and the possibility of safety?
"They need you back there,' Seabright said, not looking at her, though there was precious little to occupy his attention outside the window now. The aircraft was flying straight and level, as if it knew the way to go.
'No, they don't,' she said abruptly, knowing he was wrong, knowing he just wanted her out of there. People are not stupid. They knew what was happening. They were strapped into their seats, trying not to anticipate this unknown thing called the future, feeling powerless, feeling weak. There was nothing she could do for them, nothing she could do for anyone, even herself.
She pulled down the jump seat from the back of the door, let herself slump into it. There was so much pain in the back of her legs, in her shoulders, it felt as if she'd been carrying around some huge weight on her back for hours. She was twenty-eight years old, and she felt more tired, more weary than she'd ever felt in her life.
The radio barked out of nowhere, so loud and sudden it startled them all.
'Dragon 92. We have you on track for a straight-in approach. Twenty-three miles to run. How are things?'
The man had a Russian accent. He sounded worried, maybe a little scared.
'We have one fatality on board,' Seabright said into the mike. 'Some sick people too. Cardiac cases, possibly. Can you cover that?'
There was a pause.
'We'll see what we can do,' the voice said after a while. 'Other traffic in your vicinity. No height, no precise position. Transponder not working. You see it?'
'Shit,' Seabright muttered, frantically scanning the sky. 'Negative.'
The radio went quiet.
'Captain?'
Ali's voice seemed to come from a long way away. Seabright's head hurt; there was pressure getting hard and painful somewhere behind his face. It wouldn't surprise him if he joined the nosebleed club soon, though he'd hardly ever had one in his life outside the rugby field.
'Not now, Ali. We need to deal with this… situation.' He wished she'd go away. If it came to it, he'd order her to get out of the cabin, pick her up bodily and put her back behind the bulkhead, out of sight.
She blinked back the tears, and they weren't just because of the way he spoke, which was so unlike him.
'Captain,' she said again, slowly and deliberately. 'There is something on the aircraft. On it.'
These were all familiar words but both Seabright and Jimmy Mulligan never thought, in their lives, that they'd hear them in this particular order. Or would have believed how cold they might feel when they were spoken, so quietly, in a voice one of them was slowly coming to regard as something essential, something vital in his life.
'There is something on the roof of the plane,' she said. Seabright looked at Mulligan, tried to read his expression, was ready to force her out of there himself, any way he could. Then both men turned round and whatever words were forming in their throats just died there, dry on their lips. There was something on the plane, clinging to its upper skin. And it was getting bigger all the time.
Ali was the first to see it for an obvious reason. She was sitting in the jump seat, behind Seabright and Mulligan, and this gave her an uninterrupted view of the entire cockpit area, right to the top of the big deep windows that ran past the pilots' heads, beyond the normal range of their upper vision.
From here, it appeared as a thin blue electric line, not quite transparent, like a brush stroke of vivid paint an inch or two thick along the top of the screen. It looked, for all the world, as if someone had poured some bright blue screen wash onto the roof of the airliner, then let it spread slowly, gently down the sides, running over the fuselage, then down to the cockpit windows.
The blue light had been almost stationary for a few seconds, though within its body there was movement: some of it rapid, like the coursing of sparking currents through some viscous medium… some slower, more liquid, like the gentle undulation of a tidal water flow.
'It looks like lightning,' Mulligan said, his head arched back to see the thin line of light.
Then it moved again, visibly, drew forward, fell a good four inches down the window, well within their line of vision now, no need to stretch their necks.
'You can hear it,' she said, and didn't even want to think about what this meant.
There was a sound, low but distinct, coming through the skin of the aircraft. It was like the fizzing of some chemical preparation or a power line that had been shorn through, and was now snaking and spitting wildly at anything it saw.
Seabright pressed the mike and said, 'Dragon 92, immediate forced landing, we have some form of electrical discharge on the aircraft.'
Then listened, not wanting to hear the response, just needing to know. The radio was dead. The antenna was on the roof. It would be one of the first things to go.
He stared out of the left-side window and thought his heart might stop beating. Moving in a parallel path slightly above them, a mere four hundred yards away, was the familiar white shape of a 747, looking equally stricken. Its entire hull was covered in a bright, shifting veil of blue electricity. The crest on the main door and the tail was only just recognizable through the flimsy, unearthly veil of energy.
'Gentle glide, Jimmy,' Seabright said. 'I don't want to see any more than eight hundred feet per minute all the way down unless I say so.'
They would not collide, he told himself, not if they kept their present course.
'Sir…'
Mulligan wanted to get this thing out of the sky as quickly and as efficiently as possible, and Seabright read his thoughts, had been there, gone through that point before his first officer had even reached it.