Night Over Water - Ken Follett [193]
At last she found the words to express what she felt in her heart.
“You’ve sentenced me to death,” she said.
Mother started to cry quietly.
Suddenly the engine note changed. Everyone heard it and all conversation stopped. There was a lurch, and the plane began to go down.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
When both port engines cut out at the same time, Eddie’s fate was sealed.
Until that moment he could have changed his mind. The plane would have flown on, no one knowing what he had planned. But now, whatever happened, it would all come out. He would never fly again, except maybe as a passenger: his career was over. He fought down the rage that threatened to possess him. He had to stay cool and get this job done. Then he would think about the bastards who had ruined his life.
The plane had to make an emergency splashdown now. The kidnappers would come aboard and rescue Frankie Gordino. After that anything could happen. Would Carol-Ann be safe and unhurt? Would the navy ambush the gangsters as they headed for shore? Would Eddie go to jail for his part in the whole thing? He was a prisoner of fate. But if he could just hold Carol-Ann in his arms, alive and well, nothing else would matter.
A moment after the engines cut out he heard the voice of Captain Baker in his headphones. “What the hell is going on?”
Eddie’s mouth was dry with tension and he had to swallow twice before he could speak. “I don’t know yet,” he replied; but he did. The engines had stopped because they were getting no fuel: he had cut the supply.
The Clipper had six fuel tanks. The engines were supplied by two small feeder tanks in the wings. Most of the fuel was kept in four large reserve tanks located in the hydrostabilizers, the stubby sea-wings that the passengers stepped on as they got on and off the plane.
Fuel could be dumped from the reserve tanks, but not by Eddie, because the control was at the second pilot’s station. However, Eddie could pump fuel from the reserve tanks up to the wings and back down again. Such transfers were controlled by two large handwheels to the right of the engineer’s instrument panel. The plane was now over the Bay of Fundy, about five miles from the rendezvous, and in the last few minutes he had drained both the wing tanks. The starboard tank had fuel for a few more miles. The port tank had now run dry, and the port engines had stopped.
It would be a simple matter to pump fuel back up from the reserves, of course. However, while the plane was in Shediac, Eddie had come aboard on his own and tampered with the handwheels, moving the dials so that when they said PUMP they were in fact off, and when they said OFF they were pumping. Now the dials indicated that he was trying to fill the wing tanks when in fact nothing was happening.
He had been using the pumps with the wrong settings for the first part of the flight, of course; and another engineer might have noticed that and wondered what the hell was going on. Eddie had worried every second that the off-duty assistant engineer, Mickey Finn, would come upstairs; but he stayed fast asleep in number 1 compartment, as Eddie had expected: at this stage of the long flight, off-duty crew always slept.
There had been two nasty moments in Shediac. The first had come when the police announced they had learned the name of Frankie Gordino’s accomplice aboard the plane. Eddie assumed they were talking about Luther, and for a while he thought the game was up, and racked his brains for some other way of rescuing Carol-Ann. Then they had named Harry Vandenpost, and Eddie almost jumped for joy. He had no idea why Vandenpost, who appeared to be an amiable young American from a wealthy family, should be traveling with a false passport; but he was grateful to the man for deflecting attention from Luther. The police looked no farther; Luther escaped notice and the plan could go ahead.
But all this had been too much for Captain Baker. Even while Eddie was still recovering from the scare, Baker had dropped a bombshell. The fact