“Tasukete!” she croaked, and grabbed my shoulders to support her own weight. She seemed like she was choking.
There was no more time to lose. I grabbed her by arm and began pulling her towards the signs that indicated the Cargo Terminal. She whimpered quietly as I dragged her along, still trying to catch her breath, trying to stave off another attack. It occurred to me to try and find a first aid booth, or medical station of some sort, but I knew that it would do no good. Time had caught up with Akari, and its relentless passage now planned to claim her unless I could achieve the extraordinary and get her off the island before.
The adage ‘time waits for no man’ passed through my mind as we wove through a maze of small corridors designed for passport control and emerged into the dusky twilight of the early evening and onto the main concourse of the airport. I felt as though I was up against an immovable force, trying to stop the march of time.
Even the air seemed to have taken on a thicker note. The wind had picked up, and it almost felt like it had back on the beach in Playa Blanca before the storm that produced the purple tendrils. I felt like something big was in the air; that the island somehow knew what we were planning and was about to send every soldier in its arsenal to prevent it.
Akari was still rasping, but her airway seemed clearer and she was better able to breathe than a few minutes ago. She was still barely able to walk, and it was imperative that we made haste whilst any storm was still in its infancy. Thunderheads were gathering over the mountains in the distance, and I somehow felt that not only was Akari’s life in the balance but my own was as well. If we failed in this mission, I realised it could mean the end of both of our existences on the island and not just hers. I still had a good level of percentage to go, but what was to say that if I foundered with Akari that the island itself would take a bigger gulp and swallow me too?
The concourse was vast and totally empty. Hollow husks of airliners stood in mocking salute on the bare concrete, almost daring us to approach and try them out for size.
Akari suddenly coughed violently and a stream of blood shot out of her mouth and landed on the ground in front of us. She looked at me with undisguised panic in her eyes and grabbed her throat, desperately struggling for breath. Then she stopped dead, and her whole body jerked upright in rigid protest. Her eyes, already stretched as wide as they could, seemed to take over her whole face as she grasped to hold on to life.
“Akari!” I screamed, not knowing what to say or do, and on hearing my voice her body seemed to relax somewhat, as if she had finally taken that longed-for breath that was so needed. She sucked in a huge laboured gulp of air and grabbed hold of my arms, stumbling and desperate for support. Her mouth was still covered in blood and she reached up with her sleeve to wipe some of it away trying to compose herself as she did so.
She stopped dead still for about 10 seconds, then slowly raised her head up and looked at me with a small smile. She knew it was futile to try and communicate with me in Japanese at that precise moment so she simply held up her small thumbs in a gesture of ‘okayness’. It was probably the most relief I had ever felt in my life at a single hand gesture.
I had no idea how long her seeming recovery had bought us, so I grabbed her by the arm again and we began looking around frantically for some sort of inspiration. Outside now on the concourse we could see the two terminals clearly. They weren’t huge buildings, unlike many airports I had been to. I guessed from a row of six larger planes sitting idle on the tarmac outside Terminal 1 that it was used for longer-haul international flights, whereas Terminal 2 was smaller and from the few scattered smaller hangars was probably the one used for charters and inter-island flights. I decided that was where we should head if were to find a craft that we could operate. There was a vast expanse of concrete to the right of this terminal, almost totally empty except for one small airplane centred inside it. It looked completely out of place, being the only vehicle in such a large and deserted space.
Pulling Akari along was starting to become more of an effort as she was barely able to keep pace with my excited gait at this stage. We pattered over the empty ground, our feet hardly making any sound as the bare concrete absorbed it. Large yellow painted signs divided the area up into individual plots, and occasionally one would indicate the maximum wingspan of a particular aircraft. As we got nearer to the plane these decreased from 25m to 15m to 10m, which I took as a good sign. The smaller the aircraft the better was my philosophy, somewhat naively I supposed as the principles of flight were most probably exactly the same for a 10 metre plane as they were for a 50 metre one. Something in my head told me that psychologically I would be more comfortable behind the controls of a smaller plane though. A larger part of me thought it wasn’t even worth trying one of those, but as we reached it and the fuselage glistened in the last of the evening sunset I felt a strange surge of hope run through me.
It lasted as long as it took to do a once-round the plane. Even as a much smaller aircraft than the ones sitting on the apron at Terminal one it was huge, probably 15 metres long and in wingspan. It towered over Akari and myself as I ran around it, searching for some way to board. I realised how stupid the idea of hijacking a plane was when I realised that we couldn’t even board the thing. The main door was wedged shut and without some sort of crowbar mechanism there would be no boarding this particular jet. I felt useless, as if the life was being slowly sucked out of me with the dropping of the sun behind the horizon.
Which of course it was.
I glanced at Akari who seemed to have regained a slight colour in her cheeks. She was no longer as ashen grey as she had been in the terminal, but she looked at me sadly and shrugged her petite shoulders in a gesture of defeat. I shook my head. No, I thought, we are not going be defeated so easily.
I looked around again, searching for some inspiration, some small ray of hope within the dying light. Beyond the end of this particular concourse I saw a row of buildings, what looked like hangars, around a further 300 metres away. I hadn’t seen them before as they had been obscured by the absurd plane we had just come across, and my mind had been so focused on getting this one in the air that what I now saw in the distance hadn’t even registered.
Behind the row of hangars I was able to make out the nose of what looked to be a much smaller aircraft. It could have been a biplane for all I knew… a modern version of the pioneering craft that took the Wright Brothers on their first legendary journey! The nose had a propeller, which instantly I thought could mean that it was manually startable by giving it a good push in rotation as I’d seen in old war movies. But what the hell was an old biplane doing at Lanzarote airport? Surely there hadn’t been any made since the end of the Second World War?
My mind cast itself back to being nine years old and taking a pleasure flight in an old Sopwith Camel with my dad at a country fair somewhere in Dorset. It had been one of the most exhilarating experiences of my young life, up there where the air was clear, just a pair of goggles and a seatbelt separating me from a thousand foot drop. The pilot had been an old RAF man who had been a war buddy of my grandfather, and had insisted he take us out on a brief overhead pass of the fair below. Almost 30 years later I could still remember him telling me about the history of the plane, and how it had the best roll-rate of any aircraft he’d ever flown. I had asked my dad what ‘roll-rate’ meant, and he said the engine never stalled and could fly on and on while using virtually no fuel. At the time the old boiler had astounded me by revealing that whilst in the air we’d been travelling at over 140mph, far faster than our car could have travelled on land. But it was there that my knowledge of biplanes ceased, and I doubted that even if that was what was behind the hangar in the distance that I’d ever be able to get it off the ground, much less land the damnable thing wherever we managed to get with it.