Mr Wong Goes West (31 page)

Battling against mounting odds in the back of the plane, first officer Ubami Sekoto radioed through to Captain Turlough Malachy. ‘Captain? We haven’t got the fire down completely, but we seem to have got it cornered for the moment, at least. As far as I can see, which is not very far at all, the bulk of the blaze has been extinguished. But there’s a lot of smouldering going on, and we can see little licks of flame in various corners. The trouble is—it might explode back into a conflagration at any moment.’

‘Can you swamp the thing in foam?’

‘We’re trying. The main area we can access is well-flooded, but the fire is probably still burning behind the panelling. The stews’ lower cabin went up like a fireball. We’ve got that under control—well, semi—but no promises. The thing is still groaning and creaking. The structural damage is really bad. And there’s another thing that’s got me worried: the ground under my feet is getting hot.’

‘Shit.’

‘I don’t know what to do. If we fill it with more foam, it may just get so heavy it will snap off.’

‘There’s smoke coming out of that luggage rack above your head,’ yelled a flight attendant.

‘Jesus—open it gently.’

A ball of flame erupted from the luggage rack. They stepped back hurriedly. At the same time, the carpet below their feet started steaming.

Sekoto closed his eyes. ‘Shit. It’s in the luggage hold. That’s it.’ He grabbed his walkie-talkie and shouted into it. ‘The fire is eating into the luggage below us. It’ll go up like an Australian bush fire. We’re finished, Cap’n Malachy. This is the end game. We’ve no more than a few minutes left. If you are going to land, it’s now or never.’

The burning plane screamed onwards, still hundreds of kilometres from the nearest lake.

Just fifty metres further up the body of the aircraft, peace and contemplation were the order of the day. ‘Impotence is a strange thing,’ Sinha mused, sitting in a purple spotted chair in the Leopard Lounge, gazing idly out of the windows.

‘Do I want to be listening to this conversation?’ asked Ms Moore. ‘Is this not what is meant by the phrase “too much information”?’

Sinha turned to her with a smile. ‘Let me assure you, I am not talking about sexual dysfunction, madam, but about something quite different—the horror of being in a state of total futility when immediate action is essential for the continuation of life.’

‘Oh. I see.’ Her eyes dropped to her hands, which were idly clasped in her lap. ‘But do we really just have to sit here? Isn’t there anything we can do?’

Sinha raised a long and elegant finger. ‘Indeed, there are several options from which to choose. I’ve made my choice.’

‘Which is?’

‘I’m going to have another cup of tea.’

‘Good idea. I’ll join you.’

‘Jesus,’ Malachy said, Sekoto’s words echoing in his ears. ‘We’re out of time. We’re landing. I don’t know where or how, but this big bird is coming down.’

The feng shui master returned to the door of the cockpit, holding his map and his feng shui compass in the other. ‘South,’ he said.

‘Don’t say it, Mr Wong.’

‘Is better than landing in Tianting West Lake.’

‘We are not going to land in Tianting West Lake.’

‘We are not?’

‘It’s too far away. We’re losing the tailplane. The plane’s about to break up.’

‘So what are we going to do?’

‘I don’t know… I don’t know. For the first time in my whole, goddamn, brilliant, heroic, self-righteous life, this Hero Captain Pilot doesn’t know what to do.’

Wong started to leave the room.

‘Wait.’

He turned around.

‘Come here. Sit there. Tell me again about your Uncle Rinchang’s favourite walk.’

Wong unrolled his map.

Seconds later, the plane yawed steeply to the left.

The scene was white, cold, hard, unyielding, rocky and massive in scale. The mountains were not of the earth. Nor were they of the sky. They seemed to stand between the two. The Chinese legends of the mountains as the pillars between heaven and earth made perfect sense—indeed, it was difficult to see this area as anything other than a region of transition between the land of the humans and the vault of the stars: the land of the gods.

The peaks cut through the clouds, reaching for the moon. Below them, no ground was visible: only layers of shifting mists, like wraiths. Captain Malachy sensed that here Skyparc, ‘your office in the sky’, had turned into something tiny and delicate: a butterfly in the Grand Canyon, a daisy in a hurricane, a flying ant threading its way between skyscrapers. They headed directly towards a mountain.

Co-pilot Enrico Balapit was apoplectic. ‘This is madness. We have no chance.
No
chance. We are going to be blown to bits. This plan is suicidal.’

‘Yes. As were all the others.’

‘Captain Malachy?’ There was ice in Balapit’s voice. He stood up, his eyes blazing, nostrils flaring and teeth grinding together.

‘Yes, Captain Balapit?’

‘If you do not come to your senses, I will have no option but to relieve you of command.’

‘Come
on
. Sometimes you have to put the rule book away, Enrico, and just go with your gut.’

‘Oh that’s what this is, is it? Feel the force, Luke?
I
want to live.’

‘You think you’re the only one?’ Malachy spoke with quiet dignity. ‘We’re not going to crash into a mountain. We’re looking for a flat, snowy plain—the Fire Dragon’s Back. Stop whining and help me find it.’

Balapit spat his words between his teeth: ‘Do you realise, if there is one rock sticking up from that ridge, one boulder, one bloody stone, we’re going to flip over and fall upside down into the nearest gully?’

‘There are no stones,’ Wong said. ‘Wind has polish the plain for a long time. A million years or more. Then there is thick layer of ice on top. Then thick snow on top of that.’

Malachy said: ‘Balapit, the one thing that will do most to make sure we don’t flip over and fall upside down off a mountain is if you sit down and do your bloody job.’

The co-pilot stood unmoving for several seconds. And then he slid back into his seat.

‘Atta boy.’ Malachy turned to Wong: ‘This plateau: how long, exactly, is it?’

‘It is two-three
li
, which is about three kilometre.’

‘Long enough—just.’

Wong crossed his fingers behind his back. He hoped he was remembering the scene correctly. It had been a long time since he had been twelve years old.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, there’s an old Irish saying which says: “May the road rise up to meet you.” Apparently, that’s also a Chinese saying, too, which makes me feel better.’

He paused, and took a deep breath, anxious to sound as calm as possible. ‘I’m pleased to inform you that we’ve found a spot, with the help of a passenger, where the road actually does rise up to meet us. On the mountain range in front of us there is a flat area, a road of a sort. Who knows why someone would build a road in the air like that? I can’t answer that. You
could ask Mr CF Wong, a passenger whose uncle was one of the people who built that road, or discovered it, at any rate. Perhaps it was designed for this moment. I don’t know. Only divine providence knows. Anyway, I am deeply grateful to whoever decided to put it there, because we are going to test it out. Nevertheless, this is almost definitely going to be a bumpy landing, so you will need to get into brace position.’

In the Presidential Suite, Army Armstrong-Phillips and Joyce McQuinnie emerged from under the duvet, where they had been energetically doing what she liked to call ‘making out’.

‘Brace brace,’ they barked to each other.

And then they dived back under the bedclothes.

The plateau was covered in thick cloud. The plane would have to land blind. Captain Malachy used radar and sonar devices to detect the hard surface of the ground and create coordinates on which the flight computers could lock. He controlled the descent by hand, with Enrico Balapit working beside him. They threaded through cliffs of grey and white, glimpsed through breaks in the cloud, they passed the Arka Tagh on their way to Uncle Rinchang’s Walk.

‘One hundred and fifty metres,’ breathed Malachy.

And then their windows were filled with nothing but blind white cloud.

‘Brace, brace,’ Balapit barked into the microphone.

The passengers shrieked.

Skyparc hit the ground. There was a loud ‘whump’ noise as it made contact with the snow and sent several tons of it into
the air. The airframe shuddered, bounced ten metres upwards, and then descended again, hitting the snow at a less steep angle the second time. This time it stayed on the surface.

The plane skidded forwards on its belly. The metal screamed.

The passengers screamed. The pilots screamed.

The overhead compartments were shaken open, showering bags, coats and spare blankets on the heads of passengers. A food trolley that had been accidentally left unlatched shot out of its hatch, flew into the air and bounced off the galley ceiling. One of the toilets exploded from the pressure beneath it.

The massive aircraft moved forwards, much too fast, at a nose-forward angle, completely out of control, for a full kilometre. And then it veered to one side, looking as if it was going to careen to the left and fall off the ridge—but it somehow righted itself and ended up moving forwards on the centre of the plateau once more.