The Clouds Beneath the Sun (57 page)

“Two changes of plan,” said Jack. “I’ve got to go back to this committee meeting. The news out of London is more interesting than we thought, but complicated. They started with education and science, so this committee I’m on has to consider the Kenya response to the British proposals. It may even affect us in paleontology—I’ll give you the details in the gorge when I know more. But it means I have to stay.” He turned. “Max, can you take my place and fly my mother and the others to the gorge? The trial’s ended early, so you can’t have a lot planned. You can fly yourself back tomorrow.”

Max looked flustered. “Well, yes, I suppose I can. It’s important to get Natalie out of Nairobi. The demonstrators might turn on the hotel if they find out where she is.”

“Good, that’s settled then.” Jack handed Max some keys. “All the instruments are working fine, Christopher has a lesson at the airport and will have filled the tanks.” He turned to Natalie. “Max flies higher than me, don’t forget, so your father won’t get much of a view this time. But you’ll get to the gorge quicker.”

“How long will your committee last?” Eleanor finished her water. “Perhaps we should wait?”

“No, no.” Jack shook his head. “It could go on for hours—the conference in London has turned a touch acrimonious, there are a lot of demonstrations, and we have a lot to get through. You need to get to Kihara well before dark—go with Max.”

He ushered them out of Natalie’s room. “You’ll all have to check out, and that will take time, so get moving. Max, is your car handy?”

“Right outside. We can stop off at my house on the way to the airport, and I can pick up one or two bits and pieces.”

Natalie was emptying the one drawer in her room, where she had placed some underwear. She looked at Jack as he came back in. “Shall I stay here with you? In Nairobi, I mean?”

He shook his head.

“Don’t you want me to stay?” She smiled and touched his cheek with her fingers.

“You heard what Max said, it’s best for you to leave. And there would be no point, anyway—the committee might go on and on, late. And the British proposals are interesting, a real chance for us all to have an effect on the future.” He kissed her cheek. “You and I will have all the time in the world in the gorge, now the ordeal is over. At least we will until Marongo does his worst.”

He lifted her hand to his lips and kissed it. “In any case, I want you to have a clear head tonight, so you can make up your mind, one way or the other, about the big question I asked you the other day. Now is the time to bite the bullet, Dr. Nelson. Has Marongo and his brand of politics put you off Africa forever, or …?” He smiled. “Or …?” He raised his own hand. “Don’t tell me now. Tell me tomorrow.” He turned to the door, but swiveled back. “You must get to the airport as soon as possible, but I’ll have time tomorrow morning to buy some whiskey. You must need it after what you’ve been through.”

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

13
FIRE

N
atalie 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.

She pushed Daniel again. Still no response.

The smell of airplane fuel was everywhere and she realized that that’s what the sound of dripping was, fuel leaking from the tanks, which, she knew, were located in the aircraft wings.

But, where she was, she couldn’t see the wings.

As she went to push Daniel off her a third time, she noticed that his legs were trapped, pinned under the bracket of what remained of the seat in front of him. She would have to crawl round him.

She made a start and unfastened her own belt. It wasn’t easy. He was a big man. But somehow she managed to crawl out from under him. The small area behind the backseats was choked with luggage, four or five bags. She pushed two of them behind her, to occupy the space she herself had been sitting in, and she reached upwards. The way the aircraft had fallen meant that the side of its fuselage was uppermost, so that the emergency rear door opened upwards, to the sky.

Except that when Natalie turned the handle it wouldn’t budge. The shape of the fuselage had been distended and the action of the inside handle was jammed.

She was sweating now. The sound of dripping could still be heard. Did that mean there was the threat of fire?

“Hello? Hello?” Where was her father? Where was Eleanor? What had happened to Max?

No reply.

She was sweating. All over.

How was she going to get the emergency door open? There was no other way out. Even if she smashed the Comanche’s rear windows they were too small for her to crawl through.

The windows. Could she smash one, reach through, and open the emergency door from the outside handle?

Would that work?

She had no choice.

But what was she going to smash the window
with?
Her shoe? It was just a soft moccasin that had in any case come off. She had nothing else hard except the buckle of her belt and that wouldn’t do it.

“Hello? Hello?”

No reply.

She heard the yatter of some baboons. So long as it was just baboons.

Then she noticed that the window nearest the emergency exit had a sort of clip that enabled it to be opened an inch or two at its trailing edge, to let air in when the plane was taxiing in hot weather. Jack had opened the one next to it in Ngorongoro. She reached up. It too was jammed. Or perhaps it was rusty.

She tried again.

It wouldn’t budge.

She noticed it was fastened to the body of the plane by screws. If she could unwind those screws she could take off the clip and maybe reach through and turn the outside handle.

But she had no screwdriver. She pulled her belt off and tried the buckle, to see if it would fit in the groove at the top of the screws—there were three of them.

The buckle was too thick. She needed something finer.

More noise from the baboons, closer now.

She looked at the pieces of luggage. One or two had plastic name tags. She tore one off.

The first one was too thick.

So was the other one.

She had a pen in her pocket but that was no good.

Suddenly, there was a deep
whoosh!
sound and the baboons barked in chorus.

She heard the flapping of flames.

The airplane fuel had ignited.

The smell of fuel intensified but she still couldn’t see the flames.

But she knew she had to hurry. No one had come for her. She had to reach her father.

She had some coins in her pocket. They were too thick.

She looked at her watch. It was still working. It had gone five and would be dark before long.

As she looked down at her watch, she noticed the buckle on the strap. It was thin and it was metal. She took off her watch and reached up to the window.

As she did so she felt a searing pain around her middle and she swore. She was sweating all over again now and though she still couldn’t see the flames, she could hear them and she was beginning to feel the heat they were radiating.

She held the watch buckle to the head of the screw. It slid into the groove. Yes! The screw itself was maybe a quarter of an inch across at its head. The buckle was closer to an inch wide. Holding her fingers near the screw, she swiveled the buckle in a counterclockwise direction.

It wouldn’t budge.

She tried again. No luck.

And then suddenly the screw head budged. It had been rusted to the surrounding metal but she had broken the crust. The screw turned easily now and soon came away.

Sweating still, she tackled the second screw. It wouldn’t budge. She moved her fingers further away from the head of the screw, to give herself more leverage.

The sound of burning filled her ears. The front half of the aircraft was alight. What had happened to the people inside? There was no other sound. In her state, she didn’t want to think about it.

She strained at the screw.

The buckle broke but at the same time she felt the screw give way.

When the buckle broke, she dropped it and it fell down into the depths of the aircraft, and out of reach.

The second screw was loose enough for her to be able to unwind it with her fingers.

But how would she unwind the last screw?

She felt the bracket. It was loose. She took off her belt and pushed its buckle under the bracket, and yanked. The pain around her middle intensified. She yanked again.

The bracket came away from the wall of the airplane. She then threw the bracket away, took a deep breath, reached up, and pushed at the window.

It was stuck.

She pushed again, and again.

Each time she pushed, the pain at her middle worsened. But she had no choice.

She pushed again. Her eyes watered from the pain.

The window swung open. Only a few inches but enough for her to reach up again and put her hand and then her arm through the gap.

She reached round and gripped the outside handle of the emergency door. She pulled—and felt the bolt slide across.

She swore again, tears caking her cheeks.

Inside the plane she maneuvered two more pieces of luggage so that she could kneel on them. The pain around her middle slowed her down, made her sweat, made her cry, made her cry out. She bent her head and placed her shoulders next to the door. Slowly, she straightened her knees. Her back was on fire. She forced her shoulders against the door.

It was stuck.

She pushed again.

It remained stuck.

She pushed again, the sweat falling from her face in globules onto the luggage.