Rogue Element (4 page)

Instantly the pitch of the vibration changed. It stopped almost completely, along with the loud rumble that sounded like a freight train running over points just beside his head.

Flight attendants were working the aisles, moving back and forth in an attempt to calm the inconsolable. But any reassurances they gave were at odds with the reality of the moment. Screams continued to fill the cabin. Some people, Joe saw, had already assumed the crash position. His stomach convulsed and he vomited onto the floor between his feet.

Raptor was vaguely disappointed. He had hoped a second missile wouldn’t be needed. That was wasteful.

The F-16’s fire control system was still activated. He toggled through the missile’s target acquisition options, shifting the little red diamond presented on the HUD from one engine to another. He considered which engine to take out next. He let the diamond settle on the right-hand inboard turbine.

His F-16 was only carrying two AIM-9 sidewinders, so this one had to finish the job. He wondered if the 747 had self-sealing fuel cells. If not, a hot sliver of metal – perhaps a burning fan blade – puncturing a wing tank would do the job nicely. Tone sounded in his headphones and he depressed the firing button on the control column operated by his right hand. Raptor gave a mental shrug as the missile flew on its way. The animal was wounded. All he was doing was putting it out of its misery.

Flying at greater than Mach three, the AIM-9 closed the distance in an instant. The warhead smashed into the Rolls-Royce’s exhaust. The explosion blew a large section of the engine’s secondary compression rotor into the adjacent fuselage, ripping a hole more than a metre wide in the side of the plane. The 747’s cabin instantly depressurised.

The titanium blades torn from the engine became shrapnel. The deadly cloud of spikes speared the fuselage in the
economy section, shredding three friends sitting together, all of whom were so drunk that, thankfully, they had no idea what was going on. The three, still strapped in their row of seats, were blown out of the hole in the side of the 747 and into the freezing vacuum of the upper atmosphere.

There was an explosion followed by a shockwave that rippled down the skin of the plane, and the air turned instantly milky white with mist. Frost glazed the window beside Joe’s face. He was startled, and frightened, but he felt removed from the scene at the same time, as if watching a movie. A roaring sound filled his ears, along with intense pain in his eardrums. The screams were all around him and the loudest of all, he realised, rose from his own throat.

Raptor saw what appeared to be a group of seats tumble out of the hole in the fuselage, but he wasn’t sure. The jumbo’s wounds now appeared mortal. It was falling away to the right. Slowly at first, then faster. The fall became a plunge. Raptor followed the 747 into the accelerating dive. The two aircraft picked up speed, engine thrust and gravity combining with frightening exuberance.

The F-16’s altimeter wound down, counting back through the thousands of feet in a matter of seconds.

Granger and Flemming were checking their instruments, and Rivers was setting up the coordinates of Hasanuddin in the Flight Management Computer, when the second missile hit. The 747 yawed violently with the blow.

The flight deck instantly filled with mist as the rapid pressure change condensed all the water vapour out of the air. ‘Jesus Christ!’ shouted Granger as warning lights illuminated and flashed, lighting up the panel in front of him like a city after sunset. His ears popped viciously with the
sudden change in pressure. The cabin rate-of-climb indicator was racing. A warning horn sounded. Granger hit the Alt Horn Cutout switch to silence it. The air pressure inside the 747 was rapidly equalising with the air pressure outside – at around 30 000 feet, an environment lethal to humans.

The flight crew immediately fitted their oxygen masks. Granger checked that the breathing system for the flight crew was correctly pressurised, and that the Pass. Oxygen On light was illuminated, indicating that the passengers were also getting theirs. The captain hit the switch that instructed the passengers to fasten their seatbelts. It was an odd thing to do in the circumstances, thought Granger, as if the passengers were all standing around in the aisles, unperturbed and unaware of the current critical situation. But it was procedure and couldn’t be argued with.

‘Emergency descent,’ said Flemming loudly, his voice muffled by the oxygen mask. He selected the PA and announced as calmly as he could, ‘This is the captain. Emergency descent.’

Granger immediately dialled up the frequency for Air Traffic Control to advise them of QF-1’s intention to descend to 3000 metres, and obtain the QNH for the area – the correct local air pressure at sea level that would allow them to rescale their altimeters for an accurate altitude reading.

He made the call and listened. Nothing. He tried again. Nothing. He checked the communications panel quickly. Jesus! It was completely dead, not even receiving power. They had no communications. They were completely cut off. Adrift. He couldn’t let that distract them so he kept the knowledge to himself.

Flemming relentlessly continued the checklist for an emergency descent. ‘Engine start switches.’

The number three engine now had a fire. They shut it down and fired both bottles. Granger, Flemming and Rivers had punishing earaches and stomach cramps from the gases expanding inside them. They were in excruciating pain, as was everyone in the aircraft. At this altitude, their blood was almost at boiling point and there was intense pressure building up in the cavities in their heads. Blood flowed freely from Flemming’s nostrils into his oxygen mask. Start switches for engines one and two were selected to the On position.

‘Thrust levers.’ Flemming pulled the levers to the closed position and announced it.

‘Closed!’ yelled Granger into his mask.

The captain and first officer were themselves operating on a kind of autopilot with routines ingrained through hours of simulator time. They continued through the checklist, setting up the aircraft for the emergency descent.

The 747 began to pick up speed as it dived steeply towards the earth. The numbers on the altimeter rolled off backwards.

The seatbelt across Joe’s lap was done up so tightly that he was getting pins and needles in his feet. The mask dropped down in front of his face and he looked at it dumbly, not immediately knowing what it was for. Then he felt as if he was plunging over a waterfall. He grabbed the seat in front of him, reaching out to it in an attempt to stop the fall. The engine pitch increased to a wail. Joe believed the end was near.

Granger called out their altitude in increments of 5000 feet as the aircraft accelerated. ‘Flight Level three-zero-zero!’

Their rate of descent increased to the near vertical and the big aircraft shook frighteningly. ‘Two-five-zero!’

Raptor watched his prey lurch viciously in its dive. He had expected the aircraft to explode in a ball of flame and was disappointed that it hadn’t.

Still, the fighter pilot had seen enough file footage from gun cameras to know a kill when he saw one. There was only one possible outcome for the stricken 747. He retarded the throttle and slipped back a safe distance behind the giant. If the 747 did explode and his F-16 was too close, he risked bits of the disintegrating Boeing being inhaled into his engine, with disastrous results.

Joe strained against his seatbelt as the 747 screamed in its dive. He sucked oxygen from the yellow cup, the tangle of masks hanging like jellyfish tentacles in front of his face. He blinked through the frigid mist. His window was glazed with frost. The pain in his ears was searing. His stomach cramped in agony.

Across the aisle a middle-aged man’s face had turned blue, white froth bubbling from purple lips. Joe stretched over and tried to pull an oxygen mask over his nose and mouth, but his arm felt heavy, like it was strapped with weights. It took him several attempts to get the mask on. Every time he almost managed to secure the cup over the man’s face, the aircraft’s pitching jolted his hands, spoiling the attempt.

Joe could see people screaming, but he couldn’t hear the sounds they made. He wondered whether he was experiencing some kind of sensory overload, then realised it was because the roar coming from somewhere inside the aircraft was deafening, obliterating everything else.

Some people weren’t yelling, having retreated into a semiconscious, almost primal state. They cried or whimpered, rocking in their seats. Some were just clutching each
other, even people who had been complete strangers only minutes before.

The aisles were blocked by the contents of the overhead lockers that had burst open. Two rows in front of Joe, a heavy briefcase fell from an overhead locker and clubbed a woman senseless.

Unidentifiable lumps were tumbling down the aisles. It dawned on Joe’s slow, oxygen-starved brain that the objects were people whose seatbelts probably hadn’t been buckled. The bodies accumulated at the forward bulkhead. Joe noted that most of the faces he could see in the growing pile of rags were blue. He stared at them as an observer removed from reality, in shock, disbelieving. Perhaps they’re dead, he thought, and then he realised that they were.

The thin air provided little in the way of resistance and the 747’s descent rate built frighteningly. ‘Two-zero-zero!’ shouted Granger. ‘One-five-zero!’ The aircraft shook and trembled. The speed increased. The air protested as the monster tore a hole through it. The cockpit filled with the shriek. The numbers winding backwards on the altimeter transfixed the three pilots. The 747 nudged its speed of maximum operation, 0.92 Mach. And then its rate of descent began to slow as the air thickened, just as the manual said it would.

Flemming pulled back on the control wheel and the aircraft’s nose began to rise slowly.

‘Three thousand feet to altitude.’ Granger continued the countdown.

The g-forces built, driving the pilots and passengers into their seats.

‘Two thousand feet to altitude.’

The aircraft rumbled and shook, angrily protesting against the loads acting on it.

‘One thousand feet to altitude.’

The captain eased the control forward to the neutral position as the jumbo levelled out.

‘At altitude!’ announced Granger, sweating profusely.

The 747 sat on 10 000 feet, just above a blanket of stratus cloud.

‘The Lowest Safe Altitude in these parts is around eight thousand feet!’ Rivers said, yelling the information as she juggled a bunch of maps and charts. ‘We’ve got Mount Kambuno with a spot height of around eight thousand nine hundred feet, but I think it’s to the north of our position!’ She checked the aircraft’s FMC. She noticed for the first time that both the flight navigation and directional instrumentation were dead. Shit! There was no way of knowing for certain exactly where they were. Nevertheless, she was still reasonably sure of their position.

‘LSA, eight thousand,’ confirmed Granger. He checked the altimeter. They were at 10 000 feet. That meant just 2000 feet of air between them and the end of Qantas’s perfect fatality-free record.

The hydraulics pressure warning light flashed. Granger and Flemming checked the pressure gauge. It was falling. Hydraulics – oil – was the aircraft’s blood. The 747 had four redundant hydraulics systems. Something had taken them all out of operation. The aircraft only needed one of those systems to operate the flaps, ailerons, elevator and undercarriage. Without those control surfaces, the plane was not flyable. Or landable.

Flemming took his foot off the left rudder pedal. The 747 yawed to the right with the asymmetrical thrust provided by the two good engines on the left wing. The effect
on the dropping hydraulics pressure was slight but significant. Mercifully, it decreased.

The 747 was capable of maintaining altitude on two engines, even climbing slowly, but with falling hydraulics pressure they were merely forestalling the inevitable.

The three pilots on the flight deck knew that their lives hung by the barest of threads. If they turned the plane around using the ailerons, elevator and rudder, the drain on the hydraulics system could mean there wouldn’t be enough pressure left to lower the flaps or undercarriage for landing. And with both engines on one side of the plane inoperable, attempting to steer it with the throttles wasn’t an option.

‘The news gets worse,’ said Rivers, ripping off her oxygen mask along with Granger and Flemming. They were now in a breathable atmosphere.

Thick, crimson blood slopped from the captain’s mask. ‘It’s okay,’ he assured them, waving his hand dismissively before wiping his nose with the sleeve of his white shirt.

Rivers checked the FMC. ‘We’ve got no radios, no transponders, nothing.’

‘Yeah, saw that,’ nodded Granger.

All three of them looked at the displays, which were usually filled with numbers. Blank. The 747 carried two VHF (line-of-sight) radios, an HF (long distance) radio and two transponders, transmitters that painted their 747 on air traffic control screens on the ground. Surely they couldn’t all be stuffed?

The 747 began to sink slowly through 10 000 feet, the LSA. Now that it was yawing due to unequal thrust provided by the two remaining engines on the left wing, the aircraft was presenting more of its surface area to the airflow. That meant more friction, and therefore more power was needed
to overcome it if they were to continue flying level. Flemming goosed the throttles slightly. The added thrust stabilised the aircraft again at 10 000 feet. Soon, however, there would be no hydraulic pressure at all. The weight of the control surfaces themselves would force them to sag, and the 747 would begin an accelerating spiral into the ground.

A decision needed to be made. And fast.

‘Opinions?’ asked Flemming.

‘Force land somewhere here,’ said Granger. ‘I don’t know how much time we’ve got. At least if we put her down now, we’ll be able to manoeuvre a little, and maybe get our flaps and gear lowered.’

‘Agreed,’ said Rivers, her voice tight. With no hydraulics, they had ceased to become pilots. They were now merely passengers at near-useless controls, riding in a 250 000 kilogram missile loaded with tonnes of fuel.