James Long - Sixth Column

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.’