sympathetic to censorious before hurrying on.
Time passed. More bells. Leila raised her head. She could not stay here on the pavement outside Nat West forever. She stood up, aware now, painfully aware, of the stares of others. She began to drift down the High. There was no one she could turn to, nowhere she could go. This, then, was desolation. The outer darkness. Hell.
Numbers jostled for attention inside her head. After she had walked a long way, they coalesced into recent memory: sixty-two. And there was a one also, to be fitted in. Number 62 on the High, first floor. Colin’s place.
Perhaps she could talk to Colin about the way her life had just ended.
For a long time she stood on the pavement by the junction with Longwall Street, gazing up at the frontages opposite. The house, one of a pinched terrace, did not look like much. Its windows obviously hadn’t been cleaned for ages. Did she really want to go in there?
At home the old women used to shake their heads in token wisdom and mutter, “Do not trust a man and a woman alone together for any longer than it takes for water to run out of a jar…. ”
Well. She was climbing the stairs. She was knocking on someone’s door. Nobody in. But when she tried another one it opened to reveal Colin standing there, so tall and straight. His face looked honest. It concealed nothing.
She was going in. Accepting tea. Listening to music that brought a kind of solace.
She was lying across his knees on a sofa while he stroked her hair, and the soft mauve light of an Oxford evening leached away to silence and peace.
20 JULY: 1530:
BAHRAIN
D URING the one-hour refueling stop, Simon Thorneycroft yielded command of NQ 033 to his replacement, Roger Morgan. The new captain ordered eighty tons of fuel for the flight to Kuala Lumpur, giving him a global takeoff weight of approximately two hundred and fifteen tons all told: a heavy mass to bring to takeoff speed in the gulf heat. He set his flaps to 10 degrees and elected to use the full length of runway thirty. He was two thirds of the way along it before they reached the critical V-one speed beyond which the takeoff could not be aborted. As Second Officer Adrian Ross called “Rotate” and Morgan palmed the yoke backward, a huge flock of gulls rose out of nowhere, circled, and flew straight toward the plane at an angle of 20 degrees.
Morgan swore. The copilot and flight engineer held their breaths. Black shapes thudded against the windshield, and the crew ducked, cowering in the face of a potential disaster they were powerless to prevent. Just when they thought they were out of it, the port engine, engine number one, coughed and surged.
“Airspeed?”
“One-ninety, building…. Jesus!”
Suddenly power drained away from engine one and the plane lurched sideways. Morgan wrestled with the yoke, pulling her up and out of trouble, desperate to do only one thing: increase his speed to the point where the loss of his port engine would not cause them to crash.
“Peter, what have we got?”
Flight Engineer Peter Hudson cast a swift eye down the bank of dials in front of him. “Power on one rising through seventy percent, increasing; two and three both at one hundred percent.”
“Radio tower and report; we’ll climb while we work out a course of action. Get permission to stack.”
While copilot Adrian Ross obeyed this order, Morgan allowed the TriStar to talk to him through the yoke in his hands. He knew the hideous devastation a bird strike could cause. A single animal, sucked into the front of one of the big jets, could break any number of fan blades before being minced into a porridge of blood, feather, and bone. Not all the damage occurred at once, not always. There was a real danger that they might climb to cruising altitude before a critical number of damaged fan blades finally gave way, causing the engine to fail. Then he would be forced either to continue on two-thirds power or seek an emergency landing. But if he
Time passed. More bells. Leila raised her head. She could not stay here on the pavement outside Nat West forever. She stood up, aware now, painfully aware, of the stares of others. She began to drift down the High. There was no one she could turn to, nowhere she could go. This, then, was desolation. The outer darkness. Hell.
Numbers jostled for attention inside her head. After she had walked a long way, they coalesced into recent memory: sixty-two. And there was a one also, to be fitted in. Number 62 on the High, first floor. Colin’s place.
Perhaps she could talk to Colin about the way her life had just ended.
For a long time she stood on the pavement by the junction with Longwall Street, gazing up at the frontages opposite. The house, one of a pinched terrace, did not look like much. Its windows obviously hadn’t been cleaned for ages. Did she really want to go in there?
At home the old women used to shake their heads in token wisdom and mutter, “Do not trust a man and a woman alone together for any longer than it takes for water to run out of a jar…. ”
Well. She was climbing the stairs. She was knocking on someone’s door. Nobody in. But when she tried another one it opened to reveal Colin standing there, so tall and straight. His face looked honest. It concealed nothing.
She was going in. Accepting tea. Listening to music that brought a kind of solace.
She was lying across his knees on a sofa while he stroked her hair, and the soft mauve light of an Oxford evening leached away to silence and peace.
20 JULY: 1530:
BAHRAIN
D URING the one-hour refueling stop, Simon Thorneycroft yielded command of NQ 033 to his replacement, Roger Morgan. The new captain ordered eighty tons of fuel for the flight to Kuala Lumpur, giving him a global takeoff weight of approximately two hundred and fifteen tons all told: a heavy mass to bring to takeoff speed in the gulf heat. He set his flaps to 10 degrees and elected to use the full length of runway thirty. He was two thirds of the way along it before they reached the critical V-one speed beyond which the takeoff could not be aborted. As Second Officer Adrian Ross called “Rotate” and Morgan palmed the yoke backward, a huge flock of gulls rose out of nowhere, circled, and flew straight toward the plane at an angle of 20 degrees.
Morgan swore. The copilot and flight engineer held their breaths. Black shapes thudded against the windshield, and the crew ducked, cowering in the face of a potential disaster they were powerless to prevent. Just when they thought they were out of it, the port engine, engine number one, coughed and surged.
“Airspeed?”
“One-ninety, building…. Jesus!”
Suddenly power drained away from engine one and the plane lurched sideways. Morgan wrestled with the yoke, pulling her up and out of trouble, desperate to do only one thing: increase his speed to the point where the loss of his port engine would not cause them to crash.
“Peter, what have we got?”
Flight Engineer Peter Hudson cast a swift eye down the bank of dials in front of him. “Power on one rising through seventy percent, increasing; two and three both at one hundred percent.”
“Radio tower and report; we’ll climb while we work out a course of action. Get permission to stack.”
While copilot Adrian Ross obeyed this order, Morgan allowed the TriStar to talk to him through the yoke in his hands. He knew the hideous devastation a bird strike could cause. A single animal, sucked into the front of one of the big jets, could break any number of fan blades before being minced into a porridge of blood, feather, and bone. Not all the damage occurred at once, not always. There was a real danger that they might climb to cruising altitude before a critical number of damaged fan blades finally gave way, causing the engine to fail. Then he would be forced either to continue on two-thirds power or seek an emergency landing. But if he
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