Helga said good night and left them at St. Laurent du Var, half-way between Cagnes and the airport. She refused Solo's offer of a late meal in Nice on the grounds that she had to get back to her own apartment and see to various things. "Where do you have to get to, Helga?" he asked.
"St. Paul-de-Vence. It's not far—and look, there's a taxi stand on the other side of the road. That's why I asked you to stop here."
"But Helga—we were halfway there at Haut-des-Cagnes! Why didn't you let me take you there? Let me turn around and take you now..."
The wide mouth gleamed in a smile. "My dear," she said softly, leaning in at the window and laying a hand on his arm, "I wouldn't dream of it. You two boys get back to your hotel. I'll see you tomorrow. Promise..."
Before they reached the entrance to the airport another ambulance passed them, followed a moment later by two more.
"They're in a hurry!" Illya commented. "There must be a big pile-up on the Promenade des Anglais or something."
But he was wrong. The ambulances turned right at the airport. Beyond the spiky palms and the low, rectangular, blue-lit bulk of the terminal building, a crimson glare pulsed in the night sky. Across the dark field vehicles and people on foot swarmed towards an incandescent tangle of wreckage on the main runway.
And above them, piercing the clouds of smoke, rose a shattered tailplane bearing the three-letter monogram of Transcontinental Airways.
Chapter 9 — The silent witness
In the confusion among the frantic comings and goings of firemen, nurses, policemen, airport officials, gendarmerie and salvage corps, it was almost impossible to find out what had happened. In the excess of zeal which always afflicts officialdom on the occasion of disaster, the airport police were moving people on so fast that Solo wasn't even able to explain who they were. Eventually, they had to leave the Peugeot in one of the public parking area some distance away from the buildings and make their way out onto the apron by dodging the patrols.
It seemed—from what they were able to glean—that T.C.A.'s evening flight from Paris had crashed on arrival; that the aircraft had hit the ground and burst into flames with the loss of many lives; and that the accident had happened ten minutes or a quarter of an hour before they had arrived—probably while they were driving down from Haut-des-Cagnes, which would explain why they had not heard the impact or the explosion.
Ultimately, it was the Technical Director who supplied the details. He was hurrying back to the T.C.A. block from the scene of the crash when he saw them and paused.
"Hello, you chaps!" he called, actually taking his pipe from his mouth as he spoke. "What about this, eh? Carbon copy. Absolute carbon copy of the others, you know...This time I happened to be out on the terrace, watching the crate come in—and he flew it right straight into the ground again. No doubt about it. He flew it right down onto the deck." He shook his head uncomprehendingly.
"And everything was working perfectly, of course?" Solo asked.
"Well, we can't say until we've examined the pieces, can we? But judging from the dialogue between the captain and the bods up there"—he jerked his thumb towards the green windows of the control tower behind them—"everything seemed to be. Looks as though it's what you chaps call a dead ringer, what?"
"Survivors?" Illya queried.
The Director held up a single finger. "Only one. Again," he said. "Forty-two passengers and the rest of the crew gone west—the survivor's a steward, for a change."
"Where is he?"
"Hospital, naturally. Don't know which one they took him to—probably the Anglo-American between here and Villefranche—but I'll find out for you in a jiff."
"Is he badly hurt?"
"Apart from shock and shakings, not really—and that's a change too. He was dead lucky, that one. Dead lucky. In the baggage compartment, you know. Near the tail—so when that broke off..." he shrugged, smiled and added: "He made it."
"Which way was the plane landing?" Solo asked.
"Coming in from the Cannes direction. I told you, didn't I? I saw him take it right down onto—I was going to say into—the deck. Must have been a muckup on the altitude stage of the Murchison-Spears gear. Must have been...And there's another thing. Just occurred to me, as a matter of fact. Had you noticed—all three...no; four! All four of the crashes here have been landing? None taking off, no wrong trims, no stalling or any of that nonsense. Which again supports the idea of it being altitude evaluation at fault, doesn't it?"
"Yes," Solo said slowly. "You have a point there. I guess it does, at that."
"Oh, most definitely, old chap. No doubt about it."
"Any V.I.P.'s aboard, by the way?"
"All holidaymakers or businessmen—fortunately."
Illya smiled a crooked smile. " 'There's Less to Pay With T.C.A., Because of the Care they give you There,' " he quoted softly.
The Technical Director looked flustered. "Oh, no, old chap. I mean, really," he protested, puffing great clouds of smoke from the pipe. "Of course any passenger's death is a tragedy. Naturally. Perhaps I didn't express myself too well...But it's just that if V.I.P.'s are involved, so many bods kick up such a stink that one simply cannot get down to one's job...which is, after all, to find out what happened and why."
Solo clapped him on the shoulder. "Never mind," he said with a grin. "Don't take us too seriously...old chap!...nobody else seems to."
A smoke-grimed fire engine, the words Sapeurs-Pompiers and Ville de Nice blistered in its scarlet sides, passed them on its way to the exit gates in convoy with three closed ambulances. A young fireman dropped from the truck, wrenched off his metal helmet, and was quietly sick into a clump of bushes.
Dang—Dong—Dinggg...the three-chime call sign of the airport announcing system shouldered its incongruous way through the confusion. "Lufthansa regrets to announce the cancellation of their Flight number..." The amplified words echoing from the P.A. speakers sounded oddly thin out of doors. Solo and Illya Kuryakin walked around to the T.C.A. maintenance unit and waited for the Technical Director to find them the name of the hospital to which the plane's only survivor had been transported. Helga Grossbreitner was in the main office, lovely as ever if a little harassed, coping with a flood of calls on three different phones. She had heard the news on the radio as soon as she got home, and had hurried to the airport at once to offer what help she could to the airline's staff.
The hospital was a small one, lying somewhere back behind the harbor. The two agents drove past rows of small shops—still brightly lit even at this late hour—a couple of sidewalk cafés thronged with people, a terrace of old houses. Beyond the mellowed ochre fa�ades with their delicate iron balconies, an apartment block reared towards the sky. Between the two, an archway spanned the entrance to the hospital driveway.
They drove through and found themselves among trees. A double row of plane trees bordered each side of the drive and carried the eye on to the hospital itself. It was an elegant building in the style of the old houses at one side of the entrance—tall, narrow, weathered shutters leading onto the balconies and a shallow roof of sheltering painted friezes.
Halfway along the avenue, the Peugeot's motor coughed to a halt. "That's funny," Illya murmured as the car stopped. "Why should the thing suddenly..." He turned the ignition key and stabbed at the pedals experimentally, operated the switch again. The starter spun...but there was no sign of life from under the hood. The acrid tang of gasoline drifted through the car.