Chapter 41
Chapter 41
G ertie sat in the first row of the little cabin and she pulled back the curtain. She couldn’t understand what Morag and Ranald were doing. She was slightly frightened, but they seemed very calm and capable, so she was trying to follow their lead.
Also she couldn’t get out of her mind how funny and joyous the kids had been the day before. How ready for an adventure. The idea of them being up there all by themselves... her nerves paled by comparison. She held the bags tightly. They had wrapped the bottles and firelighters carefully in the woolens. The hand warmers were the most useful; you broke them open and they heated you up. Then everything was wrapped in plastic and tied with twine, as carefully and well as she could do, which was actually pretty well, given her experience with knots. Morag had picked it up and glanced at it, nodding briefly, which to Gertie was the highest praise.
“Nah, you do it,” said Ranald finally to Morag at the controls. Morag looked at him. “Your eyes are a lot younger than mine,” he said finally. “I’m fine, I’m fine. But we want perfect. Not fine.”
“You also have thirty-five years more experience than me,” said Morag, but nonetheless she took left seat, checked, and rechecked the instruments.
“Okay,” said Morag, as Ranald filed the flight plan.
“We’re going straight to Archland full northbound. We’re going to circle the Mermaid’s Spyglass, then bring it down to forty meters, open the rear hatch, and hopefully gently drop onto the ridge...”
Morag grinned again. “This is proper Mission: Impossible !”
“Don’t think you’re up to it?”
“Speak for yourself, Gramps.”
It comforted Gertie immeasurably to hear them talk like this when she herself was scared rigid. She was terrified all right, but she was going to do it.
“... then Skellan is on his way down to base to hopefully sort out the runway. If it’s clearing, we can wait to land. If it isn’t, we’ll have to come back. There’s no hangar of course: if Dolly gets iced up we’re just adding to the problem.”
Ranald nodded. “We’ll make the decision at the time.”
“It’ll be short.”
“We’ve plenty of fuel. Don’t worry about it. Knowing we’re here will give them a shot of adrenaline too. Get them scampering down. They’re like mountain goats—children.”
Morag nodded.
“Okay,” she said. “Throttle back.”
S KELLAN STARED AT the cliff in consternation. Not only was it a full sheet of ice from the snow that had landed there and then frozen over; the fixed ropes had also been torn out by the wind. He cursed. They were solid; they had to be. It was wild up here; the rocks had cracked around it. But now it was a flat blank slope of nothing, an eighteen-foot drop of sheer ice.
G ERTIE WASN’T AN experienced enough traveler to know, thank God, how difficult that flight was. Even though Morag had once flown without instruments on the little plane, she had done it in full and perfect visibility. This was the opposite of that. Outside was just a maelstrom of flakes and the wind buffeting them every which way. Ranald had his head bent over the flight plan, calculat ing their speed, as well as checking the instruments every two seconds to make sure they weren’t actually plummeting downward into an invisible sea.
“We all right?” said Morag, holding the juddering yoke. Ranald indicated ahead.
What had to be the Larbh lighthouse was sending out its beam, much bent and twisted through the heavy snow, but visible. They both nodded.
The plane bumped and shook as it jiggled in the air. This was more or less how Gertie had always expected flying to be, like being on the back of a horse, so it didn’t bother her much. She looked out of the cockpit window ahead; they had propped open the cockpit door so she could see straight into the whirling flakes. She saw the faint lighthouses of Larbh, Inchborn, and Cairn for the first time from above; saw how their lights intertwined when they swung into sync with one another.
“Wow,” she said, and Morag glanced at her, pleasantly surprised.
After twenty-five minutes, where they flew by instruments alone, Morag turned around again and was even more surprised when she saw Gertie sitting, knitting away calmly, as if they weren’t on a tiny bouncing prop plane in the middle of an unpredictable snowstorm.
“What are you...?”
“It’s very calming,” said Gertie, somewhat defensively.
“Ha,” said Morag warmly. Then: “I approve.”
Then two seconds later: “Did we not have the discussion about whether you could have knitting needles in an airline cabin?”
Ranald snorted loudly.
“What?”
“Oh, the KCs had us on that one way before you came.”
“All this time Nalitha’s been letting knitting needles in the cabin?!”
The plane dropped 12 meters through an air pocket and everyone’s stomachs rose. Morag fought harder with the yoke.
“This is what’s known as running a local service, Morag.”
“Breaking international aviation law?”
Gertie looked up, the clicking stopping temporarily.
“No, you’re fine,” said Morag, fixing the nose carefully according to Ranald’s calculations. They were beyond the reach of the lighthouses now. “Keep knitting. It can be our Very Exciting Scarf. Something to remember today by.”
The radio crackled, but nothing new came through. Morag and Ranald glanced at one another. There was nothing lit down on the ground. There was no one at the landing strip. They were flying by sheer experience and instruments alone. Which meant they had no idea whether they could land or not. They didn’t even know, beyond scribbles on a piece of paper, that there was land there at all.
S KELLAN DIDN’T HAVE time to answer his radio; he was scrambling down to the runway as fast as he could; running now. He had abandoned his pack. He could hear, just about, or so he kept imagining, the drone of the plane’s engines above the noise of the howling wind. He sprinted on down, desperately hoping he would be in time.
“D OESN’T LOOK LIKE they’ve got anyone down there,” grunted Ranald.
Morag nodded. “Well, we can make the drop and go back.”
She looked out into the furious winds. The last thing she wanted to do was go back. They had no idea when the helicopter might make it. Going back to the safety of the mainland was against everything Morag wanted.
But the fact was, there could be ice built up on the runway; they could skid, or miss it, or get stuck fast, or it might simply be completely impassable. There was no clear way of knowing.
“Let’s do the drop now then,” she said, and, craning her face to see it, made a very wide bank around the Mermaid’s Spyglass.
D OWN BELOW, THE children heard the plane’s engines above and their eyes lit up.
“Someone’s coming to rescue us!” shouted Khalid.
“Now, now,” said Denise. “Let’s not get overexcited. I need you all to stay inside the shelter of the cave.”
Morag spiraled the plane down, slower and slower and closer and closer to the needle of the mountain, making sure all the while they were never going to stall; but even so the twin otter always impressed her. It wasn’t a complicated piece of machinery—or rather, no more complicated than any aeroplane needed to be—but it was light and responsive in her hands and she knew it better than any plane in the world.
The radio crackled again.
“We have visual.”
It was Denise.
“That’s great,” Morag said. “We have nothing down in the landing zone. Over.”
There was a pause.
“Ah,” said Denise. “Skellan is on his way...”
She didn’t finish the sentence. What if he hadn’t made it? What if he had slipped and fallen? What if...
“We’ll deal with that as and when,” said Morag. “Is everyone out of the way?”
“Roger.”
It was easy to see a plane-shaped shadow looming across the snowy sky; much more difficult to make out a person on a snowy ledge down on the ground. Ranald had the binoculars but even so.
“I’ll send up a flare,” said Denise. Instantly the side of the mountain exploded in pink light.
“Got you,” said Morag.
She and Ranald looked at one another.
“Okay,” she said. “I’m going down to 220 meters. Dropping to 220.”
Ranald nodded. He didn’t really think in metric. This was 700 feet above sea level. It was 50-odd feet off the ledge. It was a very close pass. And they had two seconds to drop the parcel properly.
Ranald unbuckled and motioned for Gertie to do the same. Then they pulled up a section of the carpeted flooring toward the back of the aircraft, behind the hold. There was a tiny section inside, with a bolted hatch. With the carpet up the air was suddenly much colder and the rattling a lot louder. Ranald and Morag needed to speak through the radio, even across the small area of the plane, which was still descending, weaving choppily from side to side.
The dying lights of the flare twinkled down, sinisterly pretty in the falling snow, and another one came up. Gertie grabbed the huge soft wrapped parcel, dragging it over. Ranald looked at her and nodded, shouted, “HOLD ON,” to her, pointing to one of the plane’s struts that came up through the space, then wrenched open the hatch.
The world changed. The noise and terror were immense, blinding. Immediately the snow whooshed up inside the plane. The wind was so loud you couldn’t hear another thing, the tug of the gales incredibly strong.
The radio crackled and still they were going down, down.
Gertie glanced out. Now you could see the rock through the snow. It was so terrifyingly close, and whipping past so terrifyingly fast she felt she could reach out and touch it. She swallowed hard. Her heart was pounding in her chest; she mustn’t panic. She wouldn’t. Those kids needed her.
Morag came in as smooth as she could, but she could still not prevent the plane being rocked from side to side. She could see the landing spot clearly now and counted it down to Ranald. “5... 4... 3... 2...”
“GERTIE!”
Ranald was pulling on her sleeve and Gertie came back from her blind panic, and handed him one corner of the parcel. Together they stretched their hands out into the open air, freezing cold on her fingers, until she heard, “NOW,” through the radio and they both let go at the same time, and watched it tumble down to earth, clip the side of the cliff, then, to their utter dismay, bounce slowly over the edge, and crash all the way out of sight down the mountain, far down to the water below.
Gertie closed her eyes.
“Bugger,” she said.
“Don’t worry,” said Morag on the radio, sounding as calm as ever. “That’s why we brought two. We’ll go around.”
Bouncing around the mountain again, this time with the hatch open, was incredibly unpleasant. Ranald didn’t strap himself in again and it didn’t occur to Gertie to do it either, despite being so much less experienced, so she was hanging on to the struts for dear life. Everything in her was shaking and trembling with the motion of this tiny little fragile piece of metal that felt like absolutely no opponent to the mighty elements.
Ranald glanced at her, and patted her frozen fingers.
“We’ll get it this time.”
Morag made her tour of the mountain and they reached the passing spot again. They had to be right this time. Gertie crawled over to get the second parcel.
This time Morag did her countdown and banked very slightly to the left, closer to the side of the mountain—extremely close, in fact; a mere three meters separated their port side wing, and the children who saw it nearly fainted in fear that the plane was going to hit the mountain.
This time, when they counted down, Gertie and Ranald let the parcel go as gently as they were able, and were rewarded, just before Morag pulled full back and took the plane straight up into the sky, by seeing it bounce once, twice... then come to land, not far at all from the edge. But on the ridge. Safe. Hours bought.
S KELLAN TIED THE new rope on as best he could with frozen fingers. It would hold him; he couldn’t for the life of him imagine how they would get the children down it. Well. They would worry about that later. But if they had to spend another night like last night...
He couldn’t think about it.
Carefully, freezing, he edged himself over the side of the rock. It was a straight drop. The wall was covered in ice. Nevertheless he was trained for this. He tied the rope around his waist and started to feed it out.
The rope wobbled, but just about held, but the wind buffeted him back and forth across the wall, and he had to fight hard to keep his footing. His radio was bleating but he had absolutely no way of getting to it. The rope was nowhere near as secure as a harness or as what he would have liked, if he’d had time to fix up the proper ropes. Skellan was genuinely fighting concern as he battled again and again to stay close to the rock wall. He let a little rope out, then more, faster, his lungs dragging in the cold air, his fingers trembling uncontrollably, his mind, which knew he had to go slowly, fighting his body, which demanded he get down onto terra firma as quickly as it possibly could.
He was closer... closer... now more than halfway. The knot slipped, and barely realizing what he was doing, he panicked a little, and pulled it free of the rope, loosening himself. Skellan tried to lightly drop onto the rocky ground below...