reached during flight via this crawlway, and Eddie could do simple maintenance or repairs, such as fixing an oil leak, without the plane having to come down.
On the starboard, right-hand side, immediately behind the copilot’s seat was the staircase that led down to the passenger deck. Then came the radio operator’s station, where Ben Thompson sat facing forward. Behind Ben sat Eddie. He faced sideways, looking at a wall of dials and a bank of levers. A little to his right was the oval hatch leading to the starboard wing crawlway. At the back of the flight deck, a doorway led to the cargo holds.
The whole thing was twenty-one feet long and nine feet wide, with full headroom throughout. Carpeted, soundproofed and decorated with soft green wall fabric and brown leather seats, it was the most unbelievably luxurious flight deck ever made: when Eddie first saw it he thought it was some kind of joke.
Now, however, he saw only the bent backs and concentrated frowns of his crewmates, and judged, with relief, that they had not noticed that he was beside himself with fear.
Desperate to understand why this nightmare was happening to him, he wanted to give the unknown Mr. Luther an early opportunity to make himself known. After takeoff Eddie hunted around for an excuse to pass through the passenger cabin. He could not think of a good reason, so he made do with a bad one. He stood up, mumbled to the navigator, “Just going to check the rudder trim control cables,” and went quickly down the stairs. If anyone should ask him why he took it into his head to perform that check at that moment he would just say: “Hunch.”
He walked slowly through the passenger cabin. Nicky and Davy were serving cocktails and snacks. The passengers were relaxing and conversing in several languages. There was already a card game in progress in the main lounge. Eddie saw some familiar faces, but he was too distracted to figure out who the famous people were. He made eye contact with several passengers, hoping that one would reveal himself to be Tom Luther, but no one spoke to him.
He reached the back of the plane and climbed a wall-mounted ladder beside the door to the ladies’ powder room. This led to a hatch in the ceiling that gave access to the empty space in the tail. He could have reached the same place by remaining on the upper deck and going back through the baggage holds.
He checked the rudder control cables in a perfunctory way then closed the hatch and descended the ladder. A boy of fourteen or fifteen was standing there watching him with lively curiosity. Eddie forced himself to smile. Encouraged, the boy said: “Can I see the flight deck?”
“Sure you can,” Eddie said automatically. He did not want to be bothered right now, but on this of all planes the crew had to be charming to the passengers, and anyway the distraction might take his mind off Carol-Ann briefly.
“Super. Thanks!”
“Honk back to your seat for a minute and I’ll pick you up.”
A puzzled look passed briefly over the boy’s face; then he nodded and hurried away. “Honk back” was a New England expression, Eddie realized: it was not familiar to New Yorkers, let alone Europeans.
Eddie walked even more slowly back along the aisle, waiting for someone to approach him; but no one did, and he had to assume the man would wait for a more discreet opportunity. He could have just asked the stewards where Mr. Luther was seated, but they would naturally wonder why he wanted to know, and he was reluctant to arouse their curiosity.
The boy was in number 2 compartment, near the front, with his family. Eddie said, “Okay, kid, come on up,” and smiled at the parents. They nodded rather frostily at him. A girl with long red hair—the boy’s sister, maybe— gave him a grateful smile, and his heart missed a beat: she was beautiful when she smiled.
“What’s your name?” he asked the boy as they went up the spiral staircase.
“Percy Oxenford.”
“I’m Eddie Deakin, the flight engineer.”
They reached the top of the stairs. “Most flight decks ain’t as nice as this,” Eddie said, forcing himself to be cheerful.
“What are they like usually?”
“Bare and cold and noisy. And they have sharp projections that stick into you every time you turn around.”
“What does an engineer do?”
“I take care of the engines—keep them drivin’ all the way to America.”
“What are all those levers and dials for?”
“Let’s see.... These levers here control the propeller speed, the engine temperature and the fuel mixture. There’s one complete set for each of the four engines.” This was all a bit vague, he realized, and the boy was quite bright. He made an effort to be more informative. “Here, sit in my chair,” he said. Percy sat down eagerly. “Look at this dial. It shows that the temperature of number two engine, at its head, is two hundred five degrees centigrade. That’s a little too close to the maximum permissible, which is two hundred thirty-two degrees while cruising. So we’ll cool it down.”
“How do you do that?”
“Take that lever in your hand and pull it down a fraction.... That’s just enough. Now you’ve opened the cowl flap an inch more to let in extra cold air, and in a few moments you’ll see that temperature drop. Have you studied much physics?”
“I go to an old-fashioned school,” Percy said. “We do a lot of Latin and Greek, but they’re not very keen on science.”
It seemed to Eddie that Latin and Greek were not going to help Britain win the war, but he kept the thought to himself.
Percy said: “What do the rest of them do?”
“Well, now, the most important person is the navigator: that’s Jack Ashford, standing at the chart table.” Jack, a dark-haired, blue-chinned man with regular features, looked up and gave a friendly smile. Eddie went on. “He has to figure out where we are, which can be difficult in the middle of the Atlantic. He has an observation dome, back there between the cargo holds, and he takes sightings on the stars with his sextant.”
Jack said: “Actually, it’s a bubble octant.”
“What’s that?” Percy asked.
Jack showed him the instrument. “The bubble is just to tell you when the octant is level. You identify a star, then look at it through the mirror, and adjust the angle of the mirror until the star appears to be on the horizon. You read off the angle of the mirror here, and look it up in the book of tables, and that gives you your position on the earth’s surface.”
“It sounds simple,” Percy said.
“It is in theory,” Jack said with a laugh. “One of the problems on this route is that we can be flying through cloud for the whole journey, so I never get to see a star.”
“But surely, if you know where you started, and you keep heading in the same direction, you can’t go wrong.”
“That’s called dead reckoning. But you
“Can’t you guess how much?”
“We can do better than guess. There’s a little trapdoor in the wing, and I drop a flare in the water and watch it carefully as we fly away from it. If it stays in line with the tail of the plane, we’re not drifting; but if it seems to move to one side or the other, that shows me our drift.”
“It sounds a bit rough-and-ready.”
Jack laughed again. “It is. If I’m unlucky, and I don’t get a look at the stars all the way across the ocean, and I make a wrong estimate of our drift, we can end up a hundred miles or more off course.”
“And then what happens?”
“We find out about it as soon as we come within range of a beacon, or a radio station, and we set about correcting our course.”
Eddie watched as curiosity and understanding showed on the boyish, intelligent face. One day, he thought, I’ll explain things to my own child. That made him think of Carol-Ann, and the reminder hurt like a pain in his heart. If only the faceless Mr. Luther would make himself known Eddie would feel better. When he knew what was wanted of him he would at least understand why this awful thing was happening to him.
Percy said: “May I see inside the wing?”
