James Long - Sixth Column

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.

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.