The radio man is a puppet. Watch his eyebrows gather. See his lips purse. It is an illusion worked by a grim operator. Each string leads to a bony finger. Say! Doesn’t the puppet look angry?
‘Was it worth it?’ Harmer shouted bitterly. He struggled to look at Cory. ‘All this,’ he gasped, ‘to send some bloody code-word?’
Cory looked at his own hand, holding the neck. Puppet? A better metaphor was the ventriloquist’s dummy. Cory let go.
Denis Harmer leaned around the bank of radio equipment.
Or was Harmer more like an animated cartoon? With motion comes the illusion of life. But each still frame betrays the lifelessness of the character.
Time did not keep pace with the acceleration of his thoughts. For Cory, time was an absolute whose minutes moved no faster than his Ramsey IV caesium oscillator. He killed Denis Harmer in 73,541,054,160 beam cycles. Eight seconds his murder. Then Cory rested the axe against the fuselage and pulled his white handkerchief from his pocket. He stilled the tremors in his fingers by twisting them through its fabric.
Though Harmer’s question needed no answer, he said, ‘Probably not.’
He considered the canopy. The air was opaque and depthless. There was an escape hatch directly above him, but it was not designed to be used during flight. The slipstream would toss him to the rudder fins. His only chance was through the door at the rear of the fuselage and, to get to it, he would need to deal with the passengers.
He touched his injured shoulder. The wound was deep and his left arm was weakening. Jack Gooderham, Peter Simpson and Harald Pagh were able men.
With a sigh, he took the oxygen pipe from Commander Cook’s mask and used the axe to cut a length from it. He made a V-shaped split in both ends and attached one to the spout of the fire extinguisher. He paused, reconsidered his plan, and detached it from the extinguisher. He licked his finger and pushed some spit into the canister. Then he reattached the assembly. His infallible chronometer marked fourteen seconds.
He leaned across Commander Cook and turned the cock for the passenger oxygen supply. With the flow stopped, he tore the main hose from the fuselage and pushed it into the other end of the pipe he had split with the axe. The oxygen supply was now connected to the fire extinguisher.
The toxic chemical within the extinguisher was carbon tetrachloride. The ichor in his spit would break the bonds of this molecule to release chlorine. His first option was a pair of chlorine atoms: chlorine gas. The lungs of the passengers would fill with bloody froth for a prolonged and excruciating death. No. He would not do that. His second option was chloroform: an anaesthetic. Carbon, hydrogen and chlorine. Where would he get the hydrogen? He reached behind the pilot and took the navigator’s tea flask. The lid sang as he opened it. Holding the canister between his legs, he unscrewed the base of the fire extinguisher. Then he mixed some tea with the tetrachloride and twisted the extinguisher shut.
He put his hand around the head of the extinguisher, where his spit had collected. He felt the ichor mobilise. The metal grew warm. Then hot. If he let go, the seal would pop under pressure and release the chloroform onto the flight deck. On the nano scale, I-Core particles marched to the drum of his caesium-beam oscillator and formed catalytic surfaces and micro chemical factories.
The odour of cooked tissue reached his nostrils. He released the canister and fell against the fuselage. There he gasped and frowned. He tugged a black glove from Commander Cook and slid it over his raw, burned hand.
Cory checked his pocket watch. It had passed 5:45 p.m. They were above Santiago. He recalled the conversation between Commander Cook and his boss, Don Bennett, back in Buenos Aires, when Cook had requested extra fuel. The Lancastrian should remain airborne for some time and ditch in the Pacific, never to be found.
Cory lifted the parachute. It was packed tightly as a flag and the straps were tangled. Seconds passed in confusion until Cory understood that the lemon-yellow hoop at the base was an inflatable collar. He put this over his head. The main chute hung low at his back and the reserve chute was a hard cylinder that bounced against his midriff. He fastened every buckle he could find.
Soon he would slip the bones of this legend—no more Colonel Wittenbacher—and sublimate to anonymity.
He shifted his attention to the gap between the shoulder of Commander Cook and the boxy compass atop the instrument panel. He knew that, at this elevation, the ocean should be visible. But the greyness outside was uniform. This might have been some form of limbo, infinite in all directions. Snow gathered at the corners of the panes.
Don’t spook yourself. Leave this aircraft. Let the dead die.
Cory stepped back, ready to turn, but there was a split in the cloud: a black vein. He frowned. The distant vein did not reappear. He switched his vision to the microwave band.
The clouds glassed. He saw patches of rock and steep snowfields dead ahead. The details grew from the centre like the deepest folds of a white rose: shadowed ridges and slashes of white. The flanks of the mountain expanded like widening arms.
Quietly: ‘No.’
As Cory blazed with chemicals that added power to his muscles, other processes enhanced his cognition. He parsed the engine sound down to individual pistons, extracted their echoes from the mountain, determined the time difference, and thus the distance
0.76 miles
between the Lancastrian and its grave.
He remembered the conversation between Cook and Bennett, where Cook had mentioned the
‘whisker off fifty-one thousand’
take-off weight. He looked at the cockpit instruments and saw the current fuel load and engine revolutions. He guessed the materials from which the Lancastrian was constructed. All these thoughts, and more, combined in an equation whose result was the sure knowledge that the Lancastrian would crash in fifteen seconds. It was possible to steer the aircraft, with feet to spare, over the southern shoulder of the mountain, but the required force on the yoke would snap the control rods.
Cory burst through the curtain that led to the alcove. His elbow struck the dishes and they tumbled to the floor, but the sound, as he entered the passenger compartment, was already behind him.
Ten seconds.
There was no time to snatch his cane, which still lay against the window. No time for anything. Cory ran through ribbons of a sweet-smelling odour. Chloroform. He fought to plant each footfall; a trip would cost him everything.
The hand of Peter Simpson rested upon his canvas sack; Sisyphus pardoned. Slumped Casis Said Atalah, his face swollen around his mask, held a rosary. Its crucifix swung against his knee. The forms of Jack Gooderham, Frau Limpert, and Peter Young were rigid and aloof. Chloroform had shut their eyes. Harald Pagh could no longer make jolly. He had fallen sideways, his head held upright by a taut oxygen tube. His time at the piano was over.
Wait, the passengers seemed to say. Fly with the stars.
Five seconds.
Cory grunted as he threw the door lever. The hatch opened onto mist and a ramp of mountainside, surging up to meet the airliner. He took a last breath and leapt into the cold. The rudder swished above his head and, for the first time since Buenos Aires, the engine sound faded. He saw the silk of his parachute spew upwards and fill with air. The harness bit his groin and armpits.
Beneath his shoes, the serrations of the mountain wrinkled. The irregular snowfields were marked with flecks of exposed rock, brown and rugged. They expanded like waiting mouths. Cory missed one outcrop and angled his legs for a bluff. Then a fresh wind swirled. It brought snow and reinvigorated his parachute. Cory banked like a child on a schoolyard swing. His course was reset and the mountain fell away from his feet. He wafted east, downward, into the darkness of a glacial valley.