She put down the telephone loudly, with abstracted clumsiness. Dear God there were thousands of jobs suddenly at risk, hundreds of them in her own constituency. And in all the component and avionic companies who were involved in the helicopter project in the UK, France and Germany. David Winterborne would take a battering, too. David was up to his ears so many of his companies were committed to the project… why did she feel guilty?
She remembered. She had pummelled Bryan Coulthard over Skyliner in the
Select Committee. Now, it seemed she had been kicking someone who was already down. Bloody silly feeling — but real, nevertheless.
She scrabbled for her cigarettes and lit one. Heaved herself out of bed and drew back the curtains. Morning sun gleamed like paint on the Physic Garden. She tapped her fingernail against her teeth as she stood at the window.
Her father had been lobbying hard, together with a group of senior, mostly retired military figures and dozens of MPs like herself who had companies in their constituencies whose future depended on the army buying the British helicopter… Two hundred and fifty million sterling was a conservative estimate of the size of the business. But the Treasury had persuaded MoD that the Mamba, an old airframe with shiny new bolt-on goodies, was good enough. And cheap. And the Chancellor had persuaded the PM, obviously.
What a bloody mess! She puffed furiously at her cigarette. She'd fought for the helicopter just as she'd fought against Sky-liner and its hideous costs. Now, however, there was no good news for Aero UK.
Skyliner was un saleable and the helicopter was grounded. Who'd buy it if the British army wouldn't, for crying out loud?
She flung herself away from the window and out of the bedroom. The newspapers lay on the doormat like lOUs come home to roost. She snatched up the Telegraph and scanned the front page. Yes, there it was… The report estimated the worldwide, total business to be derived from the helicopter it had been chosen by the army — at more than a billion pounds. Later in the piece, sombre rumblings with regard to the future of Aero UK and the even more dire future of the whole British aerospace industry. Angrily, she threw the newspaper along the hall. Its separated pages fluttered like wounded grey birds.
Giles would be apoplectic as she was. The government was getting the decision unpopular as it was bound to be out of the way now just in case the PM called an autumn election. People would have forgotten by October. It was outrageous… hundreds of her constituents faced redundancy. Oh, bugger!
The hangar was the garishly lit stomach of a great marine mammal, ribbed and sparred to support its own size. The scorched wreckage of the aircraft lay on the stomach's floor like a half-digested meal. Gant felt the surge of sadness that was now a part of his professional self for the people who had died as an aircraft changed into this mockery of a machine partially reassembled. The machines which he had always loved and to which he had always felt closest killed people occasionally — sometimes in their hundreds.
Vance was waiting for him, surrounded by his own people and the investigators from the south-west NTSB office. He detached himself from the group with evident reluctance, moving uncertainly towards Gant, who put down his sports bag on the "stained concrete floor, aware of the desert dawn behind him, beyond the open hangar doors. Barbara thankfully was not there.
Vance held out his hand. But his habitual, enveloping charm, his energy, failed to ignite like a cold, sullen engine. He was weary and defeated, baffled for so long and so completely that even the anger at his own impotence had drained away. His blue eyes, bleared with lack of sleep, revealed nothing more than a worn cunning; all the challenging confidence was gone. Yes, he resented Gant's presence, his need for him.
"Mitchell." One big hand gripped at Gant as at a life belt the other was on his shoulder at once. Vance loomed over him, his stature pressing Gant back towards his hated beginnings and his childhood.
Barbara had happened because he had wanted to be an adult, not the perpetually half-formed thing his flying skills had made of him, and which Vance had exploited. His hold over him had never been Barbara, but the fact that he created beautiful flying machines. As such, he had always been the gifted adult, Gant the dazzled child.
"Alan." He returned the man's grip.
"Good flight?"
"OK."
There was an aftershock through his hand of the anger Vance must have felt when Barbara had told him she had called. Then that, too, was gone. He was forced by circumstance to invest Gant with magical, visionary powers.
"What you need to rest up?"
Gant shook his head.
"No."
Vance's relief was audible.
"What do you want to look at? Most of the airplane is here, the flight recorders have been computer-analysed… instrument check is completed, the engines have been…" And he wound down like a child's toy made to talk by a battery which was now spent. Offering that inventory had exhausted not only him but his options, his optimism. The accident investigators had no answer, there were no clues in the flight recorder, the wreckage, the engines.
"I don't know what else…" he faltered, then dried again like a terrified actor.
Gant disliked the empathy he felt for the man. Vance was a chained and beaten dog, that was all, and still capable of savagery.
"Let me look at the fuselage… just look. On my own."
Vance nodded.
"Sure but go easy, OK? These people just handle them right. My people, the team—?"
"Sure. I learned the trick," he added.
"I can work with people just like a grown-up."
As if affording proof, he brusquely greeted others. People he already knew from Vance Aircraft, others whose names or voices he knew from the Accident Inquiry Office in Tucson. They were suspicious of him either because they knew him, or because they knew of him the former fly-guy hero… or because he was Washington and his being there was an implicit criticism. He was free of them in moments, leaving vague reassurances, instructions, and walking towards the wreckage. Their murmuring behind him was a chorus of Vance's own need of him.
He'd talk to them later-walking towards the wreckage as urgently as if there was some faint hope that someone was still alive within the cracked, skeletal fuselage. He passed trestle tables and long benches on which smaller pieces of wreckage lay, and gutted instruments, scattered bolts and fixings; all of it like tumours already excised from a diseased body. There were computer terminals and their leads like those of a life-support system. The flight recorders lay opened and empty, their tapes already futilely analysed. He would come to all of that later.
He stopped close to the cracked tailplane, its markings those of Artemis Airways scorched like a house wall after an explosion. He clambered into the rear section of the fuselage.
The central aisle, down which duty-free perfumes and drink would have been troll eyed and meals delivered, was broken like a road dug up for new conduits.
Wiring dangled, together with oxygen masks and torn fabric. Everything smelt of smoke, scorching, extinguisher foam. The overhead lights of the hangar glared through a gap in the fuselage like sunlight between buildings. The fuselage had snapped in three on impact with the desert. The wings had broken off. Seat after seat as he moved lay torn away, crushed, drunkenly tilted. He shied from them as if a passenger had died in each one.
He glanced through one of the gaps in the fuselage at a huge engine.
Pratt & Whitney people were among the crowd that had gathered again around Vance like uncertain children. That engine hadn't restarted though the pilot's last words, the TV had said over and again, claimed that the instruments were telling him that nothing was wrong.
He jumped across the gap of concrete to the flight deck, aligned like a broken neck with the rest of the fuselage. Fiercer scorching here. The overhead switch panels had dropped to hand like surprised jaws. The control columns were distorted like trees sprouting in a gale, the throttle levers were bent. The instrument displays of all three crew positions were disrupted by damage and removal, so that eye sockets and blank panels looked back at him. There was blackness on the crew seats, of dried blood perhaps. Some plastic had melted on the flight deck in what seemed to have been an intense but very brief fire.