The Thai kickers throughout had maintained an impeccable inattention, like waiters during an ugly scene in a restaurant involving valued customers. Murray meanwhile decided on a discreet withdrawal, making his way again towards the pilots’ cabin, the floor rocking downwards this time, as the one engine struggled bravely to hold them out of that final, fatal spin. He found Ryderbeit working frantically at the controls, exchanging gestures with No-Entry Jones who was still bent over charts, checking dials — a wordless exchange of hand signals that was meaningless to Murray, yet wonderfully calm. He stood propped against the back of Ryderbeit’s seat, watching the finger of one of the altimeters creep back round the dial, anticlockwise, the 1,000 feet digits recorded in decades — 80, 70, 60 — falling fast, while the second dial, recording the hundreds of feet, was now beginning to spin. The view through the windshield was still of dull blind cloud. He waited — ten, fifteen, thirty seconds. Then suddenly Ryderbeit relaxed: ‘How are the passengers, soldier?’
‘The girl’s been sick. She could do with some brandy.’
‘You scheming bastard!’ He laughed as he handed up the flask: ‘But no smoking back there, right?’
‘Right. Where are we?’
‘Where are we?’ Ryderbeit yelled at No-Entry who called back, ‘To my estimation, we’re down to five thousand, on a zero Gee-Bee, which would indicate we’re down through it, and that the Lord has been pretty damned generous!’ He sounded like the popular idea of how brave emancipated Negroes in the American Armed Forces are supposed to sound.
Ryderbeit nodded grimly. ‘This boy Jones is what we in the flying business call a navigator. There is no navigator in the world like Jones. He has just got us through the pass, blind. But then of course, he has the advantage of voodoo.’
The joke was obviously stale on the Negro, who merely shouted at Murray: ‘I advise you, Mr Wilde, to get back and strap yourself in.’
Ryderbeit added: ‘We’re going to try and land on a strip that was not built for any kind of aircraft like this. Send my compliments to the lady, and don’t both o’ you drink all the brandy. I’m goin’ to want some myself, if we get down.’
They came down on what Murray had come to think of as a sentimental cliché — ‘On a wing and a prayer’. The port wing with its dead engine went down over a field that looked like a layer of rusted corrugated iron. Everyone in the back — Murray, Mrs Conquest, the six Thais — were strapped in, parachutes cast off, hunched forward with knees and elbows gripped close to their bodies, waiting for the bone-crushing impact. The rollers on the empty rails began to turn on their own momentum.
Then a sudden, awful quiet.
The second engine had cut out. There was a rattling of loose gadgets and rice-rollers, the soft roar of the slip-stream that had fallen to less than forty knots. The floor sank lower, to meet some uncertain surface of mud and water and half-grown rice shoots that could scarcely bear the weight of a big greedy insect.
Wild thoughts careered through Murray’s mind: Were things prearranged? The meeting with Sergeant Wace in the Bangkok bar; accepting a drink from the fat friendly Pol in the little restaurant in Phnom Penh? There was a truth somewhere — not God necessarily, but a kind of rhythm of reason. Or of non-reason. If there was any God — or perhaps two of them — they were up front bringing down this great hunk of metal, slowing her down with a sudden scream from the starboard engine, then a whirring roar as they touched the ground, lifting and hitting again much harder this time, with a thick sloughing sound as the port wing went down and cut deep into the ground so that the whole weight of the plane began to turn as though on a wide pivot — a plough biting into the earth, grinding and bumping and biting still deeper, its wing tip snapped off, its engine gone too, the whole wing crumpling like silver paper, torn from the body of the plane as the machine seemed to settle for a moment, solid and perplexed but still in control — then started to bounce with a beating of the head, limbs numb but feet shocked and thudding against the steel floor, the whole world going round and round and people and metal all screaming round; then stillness.
They hung in their safety belts at an odd angle, and there was blood on one of the Thais’ faces. Jackie Conquest sat upright, quiet and gentle and very beautiful, Murray thought, hanging in her seat like a doll with her uniform bulging under the arms with the newspapers he’d given her, and the heavy camera swinging from her neck.
The plane had stopped. He found he was sneezing violently, his whole body shaken, eyes watering and nose blubbering like a baby. Afterwards they told him it was because of some cornmeal that had been spilt in the back of the plane during a previous flight and that on the sudden dive and impact of landing, it had blown back up the plane. Murray suffered from mild hay fever, but he was not entirely happy with this explanation. As had happened several times before, he was terrified of being seen to be terrified. Was this one sign of courage, or just the hangover from a comfortable over-educated background?
He was still wondering and muttering to himself when Jones dragged him out of the plane. They walked side by side, unplugging their boots from the mud, and he kept looking back at the cracked silver tail of the plane, while the Negro jogged his arm and said, ‘C’mon, man, it’s O.K., it’s O.K.’
He had no idea where
