Night Over Water - Ken Follett [144]
Luther was scared. “But you told us you would turn back before the point of no return!”
Eddie was more worried than Luther, but he took grim satisfaction in the other man’s distress. “We should have turned back, but I faked the figures. I have a special reason for wanting to complete this flight on schedule, remember?”
“You crazy bastard!” Luther said despairingly. “Are you trying to kill us all?”
“I’d rather take the chance of killing you than leave my wife with your friends.”
“But if we all die, that won’t help your wife!”
“I know.” Eddie realized he was taking a dreadful risk, but he could not bear the thought of leaving Carol-Ann with the kidnappers for another day. “Maybe I am crazy,” he said to Luther.
Luther looked ill. “But this plane can land on the sea, right?”
“Wrong. We can only splash down on calm water. If we went down in the mid-Atlantic in a storm like this, the plane would break up in seconds.”
“Oh, God,” Luther moaned. “I should never have got on this plane.”
“You should never have messed with my wife, you bastard,” Eddie said through his teeth.
The plane lurched crazily, and Luther turned and staggered back into the bathroom.
Eddie stepped through number 2 compartment and into the lounge. The cardplayers were strapped into their seats and hanging on tight. Glasses, cards and a bottle rolled around the carpet as the aircraft swayed and shuddered. Eddie looked along the aisle. After the initial panic the passengers were calming down. Most had returned to their bunks and strapped themselves in, realizing that was the best way to ride the bumps. They lay with their curtains open, some looking cheerfully resigned to the discomfort, others clearly scared to death. Everything that was not tied down had fallen to the floor, and the carpet was a litter of books, spectacles, dressing gowns, false teeth, change, cuff links, and all the other things people kept beside their beds at night. The rich and the glamorous of the world suddenly looked very human, and Eddie suffered an agonizing stab of guilty conscience: were all these people going to die because of him?
He returned to his seat and strapped himself in. There was nothing he could do now about the fuel consumption, and the only way he could help Carol-Ann was make sure the emergency splashdown went according to plan.
As the plane shuddered on through the night, he tried to suppress his seething anger and run over his scenario.
He would be on duty when they took off from Shediac, the last port before New York. He would immediately begin to jettison fuel. The gauges would show this, of course. Mickey Finn might notice the loss, if he should come up to the flight deck for any reason; but by that time, twenty-four hours after leaving Southampton, off-duty crew were not interested in anything but sleep. And it was not likely that any other crew member would look at the fuel gauges, especially on the short leg of the flight, when fuel consumption was no longer critical. He loathed the thought of deceiving his colleagues, and for a moment his rage boiled up again. He balled his fists, but there was nothing to hit. He tried to concentrate on his plan.
As the plane approached the place where Luther wanted to splash down, Eddie would jettison more fuel, judging it finely so they would almost have run out when they reached the right area. At that point he would tell the captain that they were out of fuel and had to come down.
He would have to monitor their route carefully. They did not follow exactly the same course every time: navigation was not that precise. But Luther had selected his rendezvous cleverly. It was clearly the best place within a wide radius for a flying boat to splash down, so even if they were some miles off course, the captain was sure to head there in an emergency.
If there was time, the captain would ask—angrily—how come Eddie had not noticed the dramatic loss of fuel before it became critical. Eddie would have to answer that all the gauges must have got stuck, a wildly unlikely notion. He ground his teeth. His colleagues