Майкл Ридпат - Fatal Error

If I hadn’t turned the aircraft round we would have ploughed straight into it. For sure.

Guy gasped. ‘Oh, my God.’ He went pale and his lips began to tremble. ‘Oh, my God.’

We were still climbing. The air was bumpy but I could see clear sky between the storm and the mountains. I pointed the aircraft towards it. I wasn’t sure I had the engine settings completely right, but the aeroplane was moving steadily and powerfully upwards and that was all that mattered.

The Isle of Skye was engulfed in cloud, but I was able to follow the coastline back to Mallaig in clear skies.

‘God,’ said Guy. ‘I’m sorry, Davo. Christ, I can’t believe it.’

I glanced at him. He was pale, in shock. I realized I would have to fly the aeroplane. I only had twelve hours in my logbook, and I had never flown anything as powerful as the Cessna before, but I could steer it and the throttle seemed to work in more or less the same way as the AA-5. I could have called up Scottish Information on the radio, but I wasn’t sure my radio-telephony skills were up to it. Fly to Oban and get Guy to land it was all I intended to do.

I turned the rear intercom on again and heard Mel sobbing. Ingrid was trying to comfort her.

‘Is it over?’ she asked.

‘I think so,’ I said.

But it wasn’t quite. I kept the coast on my left until I reached the white Ardnamurchan lighthouse, and then I followed the Sound of Mull towards where I hoped Oban would be. But what I saw was another towering thundercloud. There was no way we were going anywhere near one of those again. I remembered we had passed a grass airstrip on the north coast of Mull on our way up and I soon found it, just a couple of miles ahead.

I turned to Guy. He was hunched up, staring out of the window.

‘Can you land it now, Guy?’ I asked.

‘You do it,’ Guy said.

‘But I’ve never landed this aeroplane before. And I don’t know how to land on grass. You have to do it.’

‘OK,’ said Guy weakly. He took the controls and began to fiddle with the throttle and the propeller settings. Then he pushed them away. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I can’t do it. You do it.’

‘Guy!’

He didn’t answer and just looked away.

So I pointed the aeroplane towards the tiny grass strip. It was right by the sea with a bloody great hill in the direction I was supposed to land from. I had done a few landings, some of them without even bouncing, but each time on a familiar tarmac runway with an instructor next to me for when I cocked it up, which at that stage was quite often.

This time, if I cocked it up there might not be another chance.

I pulled out the throttle and let down two stages of flap. The aircraft began to slow and lose height. I flew towards the hill and at the last minute turned to face the runway. In the Cessna the perspective was totally different from what I was used to and everything was happening very quickly. I was too high and too fast. Desperately I pulled the throttle all the way out, pushed the nose down and lowered the last stage of flap. Still too high, still too fast. The runway seemed to rush up at us, and before I had time to raise the nose, we had hit the ground hard. The aircraft reared back into the air in an enormous bounce. I hung on, and two bounces later we were on firm ground, speeding towards a hedge at the far end of the runway. I braked as hard as I could and waited. We shot past the runway threshold into long grass. That slowed us down more effectively than my braking and we came to rest a couple of yards from the hedge.

I killed the engine and the four of us sat there in the silence, unable to believe that we were actually on the ground.

August 1999, Clerkenwell, London

‘So, how are we doing, Guy?’

‘We’re live, we’re on the web and we’re getting forty thousand hits a week.’ Guy grinned at his father, brimming with the excitement of the previous few days.

It was ninetyminutes.com’s first formal board meeting, although of the four directors only Patrick Hoyle was wearing a suit, a huge baggy thing that flapped around his enormous body. Our new chairman was dressed all in black, the same as his son. He was in a great mood: he clearly liked the internet lifestyle.

Tony had invested two million pounds of capital for eighty per cent of Ninetyminutes, leaving the rest of us to split the remaining twenty per cent amongst us, with Guy rightly receiving the lion’s share. It was a bad deal for us, but we had had no choice. Mel had helped us in the negotiations, behaving totally professionally towards Tony throughout. But it made little difference. Tony had us by the balls and he squeezed. The worst thing was, he seemed to enjoy it. All in all a very different experience from my own father’s investment.

‘No problems at all?’ he asked.

‘Oh, there were problems. But we fixed them. The site hasn’t fallen over once since we launched ten days ago. Which is more than I can say for some of the staff. We pushed them pretty hard.’

‘So, if I type www.ninetyminutes.com into my computer, what happens?’

‘I didn’t know you could type, Dad.’

‘Of course I can bloody type!’ But Tony allowed himself a quick smile, caught up in Guy’s enthusiasm.

‘Sorry. Try it,’ said Guy, pushing his own laptop towards his father. Tony laboriously pecked out the letters and the by-now familiar Ninetyminutes logo floated to the surface. Guy guided Tony around the site, while Hoyle watched over their shoulders.

‘You know, this is really good,’ Tony said.

‘I know,’ said Guy. ‘And it’s going to get better.’

‘Has anyone out there noticed us?’ he asked, still clicking away at the laptop.

‘There’s been some excellent press coverage.’ Guy handed round a sheaf of articles for everyone to look at. ‘And we’ve had some outstanding reviews of our site on-line. We expect more of those over the next few weeks.’

Tony scanned the reviews. ‘ “The best soccer site on the web by miles.” That’s not bad for your first week.’

‘There’s still a lot to do,’ Guy said. ‘We’re talking to one of the offshore bookmakers for on-line betting. That should be a money-spinner. And we’re recruiting. New writers, a couple of programmers to help Owen and Sanjay, and some admin people. We’ve also had interest from our advertising agency about selling space on the site. Remember, that’s something we wanted to hold off doing until we could show people what we’ve got.’

‘It would be nice to see some revenues,’ said Tony.

‘Absolutely. And we’re making progress on the retailing side.’

Tony pushed the reviews and Guy’s laptop away and picked up the financial attachments to the board papers. He frowned.

‘Amy has a team of designers working on a range of sports-casual clothing,’ Guy went on. ‘She’s lined up suppliers in the UK and Portugal.’

‘Wouldn’t the Far East be cheaper?’

‘We need the flexibility of rapid turnaround times for orders and new designs. Whatever happens when we start selling our own-label stuff, it’s going to happen quickly, and we’ll need to respond quickly. She’s also negotiating deals with the suppliers of club and national strips and memorabilia.’

‘It’s a bit early for that, isn’t it?’

‘There are long lead-times. We need to be ready.’

‘It all sounds exciting,’ Tony said. ‘Tell us how we’re going to pay for it, David.’

I ran through the numbers, which were set out amongst the board papers. I’d worked hard on them, and I was pleased with the result.

When I finished, there was silence. Tony was staring at me, absentmindedly tapping a pen against his chin. I tried to catch his eye and smile. His expression remained stony. Hoyle was watching his client closely. He knew him better than me, and he knew something was up.