Night Over Water - Ken Follett [87]
Jack said: “Actually, it’s a bubble octant.”
“What’s that?” Percy asked.
Jack showed him the instrument. “The bubble is just to tell you when the octant is level. You identify a star, then look at it through the mirror, and adjust the angle of the mirror until the star appears to be on the horizon. You read off the angle of the mirror here, and look it up in the book of tables, and that gives you your position on the earth’s surface.”
“It sounds simple,” Percy said.
“It is in theory,” Jack said with a laugh. “One of the problems on this route is that we can be flying through cloud for the whole journey, so I never get to see a star.”
“But surely, if you know where you started, and you keep heading in the same direction, you can’t go wrong.”
“That’s called dead reckoning. But you can go wrong, because the wind blows you sideways.”
“Can’t you guess how much?”
“We can do better than guess. There’s a little trapdoor in the wing, and I drop a flare in the water and watch it carefully as we fly away from it. If it stays in line with the tail of the plane, we’re not drifting; but if it seems to move to one side or the other, that shows me our drift.”
“It sounds a bit rough-and-ready.”
Jack laughed again. “It is. If I’m unlucky, and I don’t get a look at the stars all the way across the ocean, and I make a wrong estimate of our drift, we can end up a hundred miles or more off course.”
“And then what happens?”
“We find out about it as soon as we come within range of a beacon, or a radio station, and we set about correcting our course.”
Eddie watched as curiosity and understanding showed on the boyish, intelligent face. One day, he thought, I’ll explain things to my own child. That made him think of Carol-Ann, and the reminder hurt like a pain in his heart. If only the faceless Mr. Luther would make himself known Eddie would feel better. When he knew what was wanted of him he would at least understand why this awful thing was happening to him.
Percy said: “May I see inside the wing?”
Eddie said: “Sure.” He opened the hatch to the starboard wing. The roar of the huge engines immediately sounded much louder, and there was a smell of hot oil. Inside the wing was a low passage with a crawlway like a narrow plank. Behind each of the two engines was a mechanic’s station with room for a man to stand upright, just about. Pan American’s interior decorators had not got into this space, and it was a utilitarian world of struts and rivets, cables and pipes. “That’s what most flight decks are like,” Eddie shouted.
“May I go inside?”
Eddie shook his head and closed the door. “No passengers beyond this point. I’m sorry.”
Jack said: “I’ll show you my observation dome.” He took Percy through the door at the back of the flight deck, and Eddie checked the dials he had been ignoring for the past few minutes. All was well.
The radioman, Ben Thompson, sang out the conditions at Foynes: “Westerly wind, twenty-two knots, choppy sea.”
A moment later, on Eddie’s board, the light over the word CRUISING winked out and the light over LANDING came on. He scanned his temperature dials and reported: “Engines okay for landing.” The check was necessary because the high-compression motors could be damaged by too abrupt throttling back.
Eddie opened the door to the rear of the plane. There was a narrow passage with cargo holds on either side, and a dome, above the passage, reached by a ladder. Percy was standing on the ladder looking through the octant. Beyond the cargo holds was a space that was supposed to be for crew beds, but it had never been furnished: off-duty crew used number 1 compartment. At the back of that area was a hatch