‘What’s he doing now?’ said Edgar uneasily.
‘He’s going into a loop,’ said Madeleine. ‘Never seen a loop before?’
The plane’s nose pulled up and the frail fuselage fought its way upwards, the engine screaming a protest.
It was her gasp that alerted him. At the moment of maximum effort, half-way into the loop, the plane had suddenly stopped rising. Its nose dropped and the plane flattened out. At the same moment, the engine appeared to stop.
‘Now why the hell would he do that?’ she said to herself. ‘That’s not in the script!’
To Joe’s horror the plane began to drop out of the sky. This was no lazy, calculated, gliding descent.
‘He’s going to crash!’ he blurted out and wished he’d kept silent.
Madeleine’s face was anxious but she replied confidently enough. ‘Not this plane. Not this pilot. This’ll be some new stunt he’s been working on for our benefit. He’s supposed to scare us! That’s what he does! Oh, come on, Stu! Pull out now!’
‘But the engine’s cut out,’ said Edgar. ‘How can he pull out? Idiot’s leaving it too late!’
Madeleine rounded on him. ‘Well, you sure know a lot about planes! These crates can have the whole engine drop off and you can still land them. Done it myself!’
But Joe noticed that she was climbing out of the car and beginning to run towards her brother’s plane. In a few strides he had caught up with her and grasped her by the shoulders. ‘It won’t help to have us cluttering up his landing space!’ he shouted. ‘Come on, Maddy, let’s get back!’ But they stayed, frozen together, unable to run in any direction as, inexorably, the plane continued its uncontrolled descent. Joe thought he saw the pilot struggling with the controls a second or two before it crashed on to its belly in the dust about fifty yards ahead of them.
The fuselage fell apart, the wings crumpled in on themselves, the tail section broke off and dropped away, trailing steel cables. The machine Joe had admired dancing like a dragonfly only minutes before was a pile of matchwood.
Edgar lumbered past them. ‘God’s sake, Joe! Shift your arse, man! He may be alive still! Madeleine — stay back!’
They set off to sprint the short distance to the plane, one thought in both their minds. ‘Fuel tank! Can we get him out before it blows?’
Joe reached the plane first. He went straight for the pilot, who was slumped sideways in the open cockpit, blood pouring from him and down the side of the fuselage. Joe grasped him under the armpits and pulled. He was aware that manhandling of this kind was likely to do further damage to a battered and broken body but every pilot he had ever known had had the same fear of being trapped in a burning plane. Any man would rather be hauled away from a wreck at the risk of leaving limbs behind, Joe reasoned, and he gave another desperate tug.
The body moved an inch or two. Good, there were no obstructions in the cockpit. But a splintered wing had come to rest just above the pilot’s head and there was no way Joe could complete the manoeuvre. Just as Joe emitted a curse, the wing creaked up into the air and he turned briefly to see Edgar, purple in the face and muscles cracking, heaving the heavy wooden wing out of the way. Joe eased the body out, avoiding loose cables and torn fabric covering, and with Edgar grasping the feet, they scrambled to what they judged to be a safe distance from the wreckage.
‘Is he dead?’ Edgar asked.
‘Hard to know with all this gear on him,’ muttered Joe. ‘Let’s get his helmet and goggles off.’ He looked keenly at the young face, dust-covered, blood streaming from his nose and mouth but apparently lifeless.
They were hurled aside by the arrival of Madeleine, screaming her brother’s name. Gasping and distraught, she elbowed them out of the way and began with expert fingers to unbuckle the helmet and goggles.
‘Gently! Gently!’ Joe warned. ‘He could have head injuries.’
She threw down the leather gear and stared at the body in silence. Rigid with shock, she sank to her knees, gazing down at the dirty face. Gently she stroked his cheek. Joe watched, aghast, as the eyes fluttered open slightly and he did not imagine that one hand reached out and moved an inch towards Madeleine before flopping back lifeless. Still Madeleine did not move or speak. Joe sensed that, even in these horrific circumstances, there was something off-key about her behaviour. Had she gone into shock? What should he do? He looked at her uncertainly, waiting for a lead.
Finally, Madeleine said one word. ‘Prithvi.’ Then she threw back her head and howled in grief and rage.
Chapter Five
Her shriek was obliterated by the whoosh of the exploding fuel tank. With a roar that thumped on Joe’s eardrums the fabric covering, doped with cellulose, caught fire and went up in a sheet of flame. In seconds it had been consumed, leaving behind a scorched skeleton. So swift had been the conflagration, the spruce ribs, the broken wooden limbs, remained for a moment standing in blackened and stark outline against the sand before they too began to burn. To Joe’s consternation, Madeleine started running towards the smoking plane. For an agonizing moment his mind was filled with the image of Rajput women throwing themselves on to their husbands’ funeral pyres and he hurled himself after her, catching her by the arm. She turned on him, shouting desperately, ‘The tail plane, Joe!’ She pointed to the wreck. ‘The tail plane! Can you pull it away? It mustn’t burn!’
Instant understanding and the surge of outrage it brought with it sent Joe recklessly on towards the plane. Through clouds of black smoke he spotted the tail lying several yards behind the main body and still intact. He tore off his jacket as he ran and using it as protection from the heat and thick fumes he grabbed the nearest section of the tail, already almost too hot to hold, and dragged it away, trailing steel cables with it.
At a safe distance, he straightened, gasping and choking, the super-heated air burning his lungs. He turned to look back at Madeleine. She was standing, a tragic figure, the last remnants of the festive tinsel mingling with black smuts from the burned canvas and swirling down on to her head, a surreal confetti, Joe thought grimly, not for a bride but for a widow.
Madeleine joined him, white-faced and staring but gaining a measure of control. With a supreme effort to keep her voice calm she said, ‘Examine this with me, will you, Commander?’
It was the use of his rank which confirmed Joe’s suspicions that the scene they had just witnessed was not an accident. He had little experience of aeroplanes but had listened for hours with interest and pleasure to the stories of Squadron Leader Fred Moore-Simpson in the time they spent together as guests of the fort at Gor Khatri on the North-West Frontier, had even gone up with him once or twice, and he remembered his terror when Fred had demonstrated with mischievous relish a stall at five thousand feet over the Khyber Pass.
He thought he knew what to look for. Kneeling in the sand he hauled in the lengths of twisted steel cable that had linked the controls in the cockpit with the elevators. He picked up the two ends, brushed away the sand and looked at them closely.
In a formal tone he replied to Madeleine’s request. ‘I observe that the control cables are both broken. To the naked eye — and I will need to have a magnification of this, of course, to verify my observation — it appears that several strands of the wire have been cut through. The cut is clean and straight, the section recently severed. Two. . no, three, strands were left intact. These subsequently snapped, I presume, when placed under the stress of the final manoeuvre — a loop — before the plane crashed. These strands are stretched and ragged at the break point.’
Tight-lipped, Madeleine listened and looked carefully at the cable ends.
‘What are the chances of damage like this happening accidentally?’ asked Joe.
‘Accidentally?’ said Madeleine. ‘No chance! No chance at all!’
She fixed him with desperate brown eyes, ‘Commander, my husband was murdered.’