Mackenzie Ford - The Clouds Beneath the Sun

He went out the door and she heard him run down the stairs to the lobby.

Natalie stared down at the landscape hundreds of feet below. The plane was at four thousand feet and still climbing. The ugly outskirts of Nairobi were just beginning to give way to farmland and areas of bush.

Max was still talking over the radio, she presumed to air-traffic control, and she could see why. A large commercial jet was off to their left, on final approach to the airport they had just taken off from. Max, she had been reassured to note, was every bit as punctilious as Jack in making his preflight checks and had been commendably businesslike in taxiing out to the main runway—massive by Kihara standards—and lifting the Comanche into the air. As they had sped along the runway, she had caught sight of Christopher. He was running out of the departures building and waving energetically. She had waved back.

Eleanor was up front with Max, her father was alone in the second row with some bags, and she was in the back with Daniel. There were more bags behind them.

She looked down again. There was more open bush now, dried riverbeds, clumps of acacia trees. She saw a line of elephants and a series of low hills, the edge of a lake. Beyond that, they passed two other dried riverbeds and, on a plain with savannah grass, there was a herd of zebra, running at full tilt.

They must have been close to five thousand feet now. She realized why Max flew so high but she preferred Jack’s habit of flying lower. The zebra seemed very far away.

She tapped Daniel’s knee and pointed down. “Why are those zebra running? Is it a form of play, or are they running away from something?”

He smiled. “No, it’s definitely not play. They are probably running away from wild dogs. Wild dogs seem to have a taste for zebra flesh—if they can smell zebra nearby they will ignore impala or hartebeest and seek out the zebra. It’s always an interesting contest. Zebra fight back more than most animals—they kick, oh how they kick, and they bite too.”

Natalie looked down. She couldn’t see any dogs. “You don’t think of wild dogs as being part of the African scene, not like lions and elephants and leopards.”

“Maybe not,” said Daniel. “They are not very noble-looking animals, I agree, but they can’t be ignored. They can hunt in packs of as many as a hundred and they kill eighty percent of the time—twice as much as lions. Weight for weight, their biting force is the strongest of any carnivore and they work in teams—one dog will grab the animal’s lip, a second the tail, and then the others will start to eat whatever it is while it is still alive.” He smiled grimly. “Apart from elephants in a bad mood, they are the only animals who will attack a vehicle. I’ve known them bite the tires of a Land Rover—”

He broke off as the plane lurched.

Natalie, looking down, felt the plane judder and looked across to Daniel.

The plane juddered again and sank, as if it were a boat that had slid down a wave.

Natalie’s heart was thumping in her chest, she gripped her seat tightly, she began to sweat.

The plane juddered again and the starboard engine stopped.

Max was talking—shouting—on the radio, frantically maneuvering the controls but above the noise of the port engine, Natalie couldn’t hear what he was staying.

The plane stabilized but Max lost height anyway.

Then the plane juddered again, and again. The port engine stopped.

The Comanche immediately began to sink. Max tried to restart the engines, but each time one or the other coughed into action and, before the propeller could complete a full turn, died.

No one else spoke as the plane began to lose height rapidly.

Natalie reached forward and gripped her father’s shoulder. He put his hand on her arm.

Max fought with the aircraft controls to keep the nose pointing forward and down, using what height they had, and speed, to glide the plane as well as he could.

The Comanche was picking up velocity, bucking in the air. The angle of descent was deepening and the noise of the wind going by was rising to a whistle.

Natalie was rigid with fear. Her knuckles were drained of blood, it hurt to swallow, it hurt to breathe.

Ahead of them was a patch of savannah, with trees beyond.

The plane lost more height. Its noise was no longer a whistle but a scream. Everyone looked forward as Max wrestled with the controls. He tried again to restart the engines. He failed.

There was a jolting and Natalie realized they must have lost part of the undercarriage, sheered off in the wind generated by their descent. They were now no more than two hundred feet above the landscape. Max tried one more time to start the engines. They coughed and died.

The angle of descent deepened still more. They had been gliding, now they were falling. Max fought to keep the attitude of the plane upright. One of the dead propellers on the starboard engine buckled under the pressure of air, snapped off, and slapped against the side windows next to where Owen Nelson was sitting. Then it was gone.

Her father. His first time in Kenya.

Oil streamed across the wing where the propeller had broken away. It was flecked on the Comanche’s windows.

At about fifty feet Max hauled back on the control stick. The flaps at the trailing edge of the wings lifted and the nose of the aircraft rose, so that it was the aircraft’s wheels and belly that slammed into the ground first.

The sound of metal on rock—the screech of twisted, mangled, deformed, distended metal on stone—made a hammering noise, a booming, as if the massive gates of hell were clanging closed, a final, deadly, dead bolt, as the aircraft bounced into the air again and began to turn over.

Natalie’s seat belt cut into her right thigh, her left thigh, and her stomach all in rapid succession. The heads of the people in front of her jerked one way, then the other, then back again. At the same time a tide of pain exploded up Natalie’s spine, spread round her lower back like a hot ring.

She heard a loud crack, snapping bone, and Eleanor’s head fell to one side, nodding insanely.

The fuselage rose into the air but then the port wing scraped the ground—and sent the plane in the opposite direction, causing it to drop, diagonally, on to some rocks, baking in the sun. Another hammering of metal on stone, another screeching, another mangling, yet more shards of twisted aircraft pieces. The Comanche broke almost in two and skidded down the rocks, showering sparks, turning and rolling, keening and growling, pummeled out of shape and thudding to a stop against a line of trees, when Natalie hit her head—hard—against the already misshapen metal skin of the plane, and passed out.

The first thing she heard, however long afterwards, when she regained consciousness, was a cracking and a dripping sound. In the baking sun, and following the crash, the metal of the aircraft was giving off mysterious cracks and snaps like those the Land Rovers’ engines gave off after they had been in use. Only much louder. She couldn’t see where the dripping sound was coming from.

She was aware of the hot ring around her middle. She passed her hands over herself. No blood but she was very tender all round her hips and stomach.

Looking around her again, she still couldn’t see much. Only Daniel, unconscious or dead, almost on top of her, but held in place by his seat belt. Those in the front half of the plane—Eleanor, Max, her dear father—were out of sight, where the plane had broken and jackknifed on hitting the rocks. She pushed Daniel. He didn’t respond.

She called out. “Hello? Hello?” It was more a croak and no one replied.