Текст книги "Аэропорт / Аirport"

5

As Mel drove out of the terminal, wind and whirling snow slammed savagely against the car’s windshield.

Mel snapped his mike button down. “Ground control from mobile one. I’m at gate sixty-five, proceeding to runway three zero, site of the stuck 707.”

It took a quarter of an hour to reach the intersection where runway three zero was blocked by the Aéreo-Mexican 707. He stopped the car and got out.

Mel identified himself, then asked a man nearby, “Who are you?”

“Ingram, sir. Aéreo-Mexican maintenance foreman.”

In the past two hours, old-fashioned boarding ramps had been trundled from the terminal and passengers guided down them. The captain and first officer remained.

“Had the engines running twice. But she won’t come free. Just seems to dig herself in deeper. Now we’re taking off more weight, hoping that’ll help.”

Mel shivered. What was it? It was true, wasn’t it?—for the briefest instant he had had a premonition. He should ignore it, of course. Except that once, long ago, he had had the same feeling…

Back in his car Mel held the transmit button down. “This is mobile one, Danny. I’m going to the Conga Line.”

The Conga Line, prime mover of the airport snow-fighting system, was on runway one seven, left. In a few minutes, Mel thought grimly, he would find out for himself if there was truth, or merely malice, in the critical report of Captain Demerest’s Airlines Snow Committee.

6

Captain Vernon Demerest of Trans America had had a succession of affairs with beautiful and intelligent young women. One of them was a vivacious, attractive, English-born brunette, Gwen Meighen, to whose apartment Vernon Demerest was headed now. Later tonight, the two of them would leave for Rome on Trans America Flight Two. At the Rome end of the journey, there would be a three-day layover for the crew, which they could spend together. The idea excited him.

Another thing which had pleased him this evening was the Airlines Snow Committee report. The critical report had been solely Demerest’s idea. He made certain that the widely circulated report would cause a maximum of embarrassment and irritation to Mel Bakersfeld.

Captain Demerest stopped the car smoothly and got out. He was a little early.

Today’s flight to Rome would be an easy one. The reason was that he was flying as a line check captain. Anson Harris, almost as senior as Demerest himself, had been assigned to the flight and would occupy the command pilot’s left seat. Demerest would use the right seat—normally the first officer’s position—from where he would observe and report on Captain Harris’s performance.

Despite the fact that captains checked each other, the tests, both regular and special, were usually serious, exacting sessions. The pilots wanted them that way. Too much was at stake—public safety and high professional standards—for any mutual back-scratching, or for weaknesses to be overlooked.

Yet, Demerest treated any pilot he was assigned to test, junior or senior to himself, in precisely the same way—like a schoolboy summoned to the headmaster’s presence. When Demerest’s own time came they would give him the meanest, toughest check ride he had ever had, but Vernon Demerest turned in a flawless performance which could not be faulted.

This afternoon Demerest prefaced his check session by telephoning Captain Anson Harris at home. “It’ll be a bad night for driving. I like my crew to be punctual, so I suggest you allow plenty of time to get to the airport.”

Anson Harris, who in twenty-two unblemished years with Trans America had never been late for a single flight, was so outraged, he almost choked.

He arrived at the airport almost three hours ahead of flight time instead of the usual one hour.

“Hi, Anson.” Vernon Demerest dropped into an adjoining seat at the counter. “I see you took my good advice.”

“Good evening, Vern.”

“We’ll start the pre-flight briefing twenty minutes earlier than usual,” Demerest said. “I want to check your flight manuals.”

Thank God, Harris thought, his wife had gone through his manuals only yesterday, inserting the very latest amendments.

“You’re not wearing a regulation shirt.”

For a moment, Captain Harris could not believe his colleague was serious. Most pilots bought the unofficial shirts and wore them. Vernon Demerest did too.

“It’s all right. I won’t report on your wearing a non-reg shirt here. As long as you change it before you come on my flight.”

All right, he would change his unofficial shirt for a regulation one. He would probably have to borrow one. When he told them why, they would hardly believe him.

Demerest’s thoughts returned to the present.

Gwen was in the shower. When he went to her bedroom door, she called out, “Vernon, is that you?” Even competing with the shower, her voice—with its flawless English accent, which he liked so much—sounded exciting.

“I’m glad you came early,” she called again. “I want to have a talk. You can make tea, if you like.”

7

Inside his car, Mel Bakersfeld shivered. Was the shivering the reminder from the old injury of his foot?

The injury had happened sixteen years ago off the coast of Korea when Mel had been a Navy pilot flying fighter missions from the carrier Essex. He had a kind of instinct… In a dogfight with a MIG-15, Mel’s Navy F9F-5 had been shot down into the sea.

He managed a controlled ditching, but his left foot was trapped by a jammed rudder pedal. Somehow, underwater, his foot came free. In intense pain, half-drowned, he surfaced. Later he learned he had severed the ligaments in front of his ankle, so that the foot extended from his leg in an almost straight line.

He had the same kind of instinct now.

Mel was nearing runway one seven, left. Without ceasing, since the storm began, the miles of runways had been plowed, vacuumed, brushed, and sanded by a group called a Conga Line. He saw it now.

His arrival was noticed. He heard the convoy leader notified by radio, “Mr. Bakersfeld just joined us.” He had come out to inspect the snow clearance as a result of the adverse report by Vernon Demerest’s Airlines Snow Committee. Clearly, everything was going well.

8

Less than five years ago, the airport was considered among the world’s finest and most modern. Now travelers and visitors at Lincoln International saw principally the main passenger terminal—a brightly lighted, air-conditioned Taj Mahal and still admired it. Where the deficiencies lay were in operating areas – runways and taxiways. They were dangerously over-taxed. Only last week Keith Bakersfeld, Mel’s brother, had predicted grimly, “Someday there’ll be a second’s inattention, and one of us will bring two airplanes together at that intersection.”

Mel had pointed out the hazard frequently to the Board of Airport Commissioners and to members of City Council, who controlled airport financing. As well as immediate construction of more runways and taxiways, Mel had urged purchase of additional land around the airport for long term development. There had been plenty of discussion, and sometimes angry argument, as a result.

As well as the airport’s future, Mel’s personal future was at stake.

Only a short time ago, Mel Bakersfeld had been a national spokesman for ground logistics of aviation, a rising young genius in aviation management. Then, abruptly, a single event had wrought a change, and the future was no longer clear.

That event was the John F. Kennedy assassination.

It had been four years ago. Four years since the gray November afternoon when, he had pulled the microphone across his desk toward him and had announced the shattering news which seconds earlier had flashed from Dallas.

His eyes, as he spoke then, had been on the photograph whose inscription read: To my friend Mel Bakersfeld—John F. Kennedy.

The photograph still remained, as did many memories.

The memories began, for Mel, with his speech in Washington, D.C.

At the time, as well as airport general manager, he had been president of the Airport Operators Council – the youngest leader, ever, of that small but influential body linking major airports of the world. AOC headquarters was in Washington, and Mel flew there frequently.

His speech was to a national planning congress.

Aviation, Mel Bakersfeld had pointed out, was the only truly successful international undertaking. It was a means of intermingling diverse populations at ever-diminishing cost. Even more significant was aerial commerce. Movement of freight by air, already mammoth in extent, was destined to be greater still. Yet, airports, runway systems, terminals, were geared to yesterday, with scant—if any—provision for tomorrow; what was lost sight of, or ignored, was the speed of aviation’s progress. Usually, too much was spent on showplace terminals, too little on operating areas.

“We have broken the sound barrier,” Mel declared, “but not the ground barrier.”

The speech was accorded a standing ovation and was widely reported.

The day after the speech, Mel was invited to the White House. J.F.K., Mel found, shared many of his own ideas.

Subsequently, there were other sessions. After several such occasions, Mel was at home in the White House. As time went on, he drifted into one of those easygoing relationships which J.F.K. encouraged among those with expertise to offer him.

Soon Mel was “in”—a dues-paid member of the inner circle. His prestige, high before, went higher still. The Airport Operators Council re-elected him president, barely in his late thirties.

Six months later, John F. Kennedy made his fateful Texas journey.

Like others, Mel was first stunned, then later wept. Only later still, did it dawn on him that the assassin’s bullets had ricocheted onto the lives of others, his own among them. He discovered he was no longer “in” in Washington.

Mel’s trips to Washington ceased. His public appearances became limited to local ones. Even though there was plenty to think about, including troubles at home, there was a sense that time and opportunity had passed him by.

Mel eased his car into the terminal basement parking area.

Near his parking stall was a locked box with an airport telephone. He dialed the Snow Desk and asked about the jet, but there was no news.

Mel hesitated. There was no reason, he supposed, why he need remain at the airport any longer tonight. Yet again, unaccountably, he had the same premonition.

Mel dialed another number and asked for Cindy. After a brief wait, he heard her voice say sharply, “Mel, why aren’t you here?”

“I’m sorry. It’s a pretty big storm…”

“Get down here fast!”

From the fact that his wife’s voice was low, Mel deduced there were others within hearing. Just the same, she managed to convey a surprising amount of venom.

Mel sometimes tried to associate the voice of Cindy nowadays with the Cindy he remembered before their marriage fifteen years ago, when they first met in San Francisco, he on leave from the Navy and Korea. She had been a gentler person then, it seemed to him. She had been an actress at the time, though she had had a succession of diminishingly small parts in summer stock and television, and afterward, in a moment of frankness, admitted that marriage had been a welcome release from the whole thing. Years later that story changed a little, and it became a favorite gambit of Cindy’s to declare that she had sacrificed her career and probable stardom because of Mel.

“You knew perfectly well that tonight was important to me, and a week ago you made a definite promise.”

“A week ago I didn’t know we were going to have the biggest storm in six years…”

“You’ve people working for you, haven’t you? Or are the ones you’ve chosen so incompetent they can’t be left alone?”

Mel said irritably, “They’re highly competent. But I get paid to take some responsibility, too.”

“It’s a pity you can’t act responsibly to me.”

Mel sensed that Cindy was getting close to boiling point. Without any effort, he could visualize her now, clear blue eyes flashing, and her blonde coiffed head tilted back in that damnably attractive way she had when she was angry. In their early years of marriage, his wife’s temper outbursts seldom dismayed him. In the past, when his eyes had made their appreciative assessment, some two-way physical communion sprang into being, prompting each to reach out, to touch one another, impulsively, hungrily. The result was predictable. The origin of Cindy’s anger was forgotten in a wave of sensuality.

It was, of course, not a way of resolving differences which were fundamental. As the years passed, and passion lessened, accumulated differences became more sharply accented.

Eventually, they ceased entirely to use sex as a panacea and, in the past year or so physical intimacy of any kind had become more and more occasional.

“Most of the time I go along with what you want, even though I don’t think the things we go to are all that important. What I would enjoy are a few more evenings at home with the children.”

“That’s a lot of crap,” Cindy said.

Perhaps she was right, to an extent. Earlier this evening he had been reminded of the times he had stayed at the airport when he could have gone home—merely because he wanted to avoid another fight with Cindy.

But apart from that, tonight was different. He ought to stay on at the airport.

“I do know you’re my wife, which is why I intend to get down there just as soon as I can.” A thought struck him. “Incidentally, what’s the occasion tonight?”

“It’s a publicity party to promote the costume ball which is being given next month for the Archidona Children’s Fund. The press is here. They’ll be taking photographs.”

Now Mel knew why Cindy wanted him to hurry. With him there, she stood a better chance of being in the photographs—and on tomorrow’s newspaper social pages.

“Did you say the Archidona Fund? Which Archidona? There are two. One’s in Ecuador, the other in Spain.”

For the first time, Cindy hesitated. “What does it matter?”

Mel wanted to laugh out loud. Cindy didn’t know. As usual, she had chosen to work for a charity because of who was involved, rather than what.

“How many letters do you expect to get from this one?”

To be considered for listing in The Social Register, a new aspirant needed eight sponsoring letters from people whose names already appeared there. At the last count Mel had heard, Cindy had collected four.

Cindy asserted, savagely, “Listen to me! You’d better get here tonight, and soon. If you don’t come, or if you do come and embarrass me by saying anything of what you did just now, it’ll be the end.”

She hung up.

When seated at his desk, Mel shivered as earlier. Then, abruptly in the silent office, a telephone bell jangled. For a moment he ignored it. It rang again, and he realized it was the red alarm system telephone on a stand beside the desk.

“Bakersfeld here.”

He heard clicks and more acknowledgments as others came on the line.

“This is Air Traffic Control,” the tower chief’s voice announced. “We have an airborne emergency, category three.

9

Keith Bakersfeld, Mel’s brother, was a third of the way through his eight-hour duty watch in the air traffic control radar room.

In radar control, tonight’s storm was having a profound effect, though not a directly physical one. To a spectator, Keith thought, it might have seemed that the storm, raging immediately outside, was a thousand miles away. The radar room had no windows. Day and night, at Lincoln International, ten radar controllers and supervisors labored in perpetual semidarkness under dim moonglow lights. Around them, tightly packed equipment—radarscopes, controls, radio communications panels—lined all four walls.

The pervading tone in the radar room was calm. However, beneath the calmness, at all times, was a constant nervous strain. Cause of the added tension today was a signal on a radarscope which, in turn, had triggered a flashing red light and alarm buzzer in the control room. It denoted an aircraft in distress. In this case, the aircraft was a U.S. Air Force KC-135, high above the airport in the storm, and seeking an immediate emergency landing.

The tower watch chief on the floor above had been promptly informed of the distress signal. He, in turn, had declared a category three emergency, alerting airport ground facilities.

The flatface scope, at the moment the center of attention, was a horizontal glass circle set into a tabletop console. Its surface was dark green, with brilliant green points of light showing all aircraft in the air within a forty-mile radius. As the aircraft moved, so did the points of light. Beside each light point was a small plastic marker, identifying it. Controllers moved them by hand as aircraft progressed and their positions on the screen changed. As more aircraft appeared, they were identified by voice radio and similarly tagged. Tonight there was an extraordinary number of aircraft on the screen.

Keith was seated closest to the flatface. His body was tense, he was concentrating, his face strained, as it had been for months. The green reflection of the scope accentuated deep hollows beneath his eyes. Anyone who knew Keith well, but had not seen him for a year or so, would have been shocked both by his appearance and his change in manner. Keith was six years younger than his brother, Mel, but nowadays appeared a good deal older.

The radar supervisor, Wayne Tevis, was observing Keith covertly at this moment, watching the signs of increasing strain. Tevis was ready, if necessary, to relieve Keith from radar watch, a decision which instinct told him might have to be made at any time.

His eyes on Keith’s flatface scope, Tevis drawled, “Keith, that Braniff flight is closing on Eastern. If you turn Braniff right, you can keep Eastern going on the same course.” It was something which Keith should have seen himself, but hadn’t.

The problem, which most of the radar room crew was working at feverishly, was to clear a path for the Air Force KC-135, which had already started down on an instrument landing approach from ten thousand feet. The difficulty was—below the big Air Force jet were five airline flights, stacked at intervals of a thousand feet, and orbiting a limited airspace. All were awaiting their turn to land. A few miles on either side were other columns of aircraft, similarly stacked and, lower still, were three more airliners, already on landing approaches. In between them all were busy departure corridors. Somehow, the military flight had to be threaded down through the stacked civilian airplanes without a collision occurring. The situation was complicated by radio failure in the KC135, so that voice contact with the Air Force pilot had been lost.

Keith Bakersfeld thumbed his microphone. “Braniff eight twenty-nine, make an immediate right turn, heading zero-nine-zero.” At moments like this voices should stay calm. Keith’s voice was high-pitched and betrayed his nervousness. The Braniff captain obeyed instructions. When a controller gave the order “immediate,” pilots obeyed instantly and argued later.

In another minute or so the Braniff flight would have to be turned again, and so would Eastern, which was at the same level. As part of the game, pieces had to be raised or lowered while they still moved forward, yet none must come closer than three miles laterally or a thousand feet vertically from another, and none must go over the edge of the board. And while all of it happened, the thousands of passengers, anxious for their journeys to end, had to sit in their airborne seats—and wait.

Behind him Keith could hear Wayne Tevis trying to raise the Air Force KC-135 on radio again. Still no response. The position on the blip showed the pilot was doing the right thing—following exactly the instructions he had been given before the radio failure happened.

The Air Force flight, Keith knew, had originated in Hawaii and come non-stop after mid-air refueling over the West Coast, its destination near Washington. But west of the Continental Divide there had been an engine failure, and afterward electrical trouble, causing the airplane commander to elect an unscheduled landing at Smoky Hill, Kansas. At Smoky Hill, however, the KC-135 was diverted to Lincoln International. It was soon afterward that radio failure had been added to the pilot’s other troubles.

Most times military aircraft stayed clear of civil airports. But in a storm like tonight’s help was asked and given without question.

Keith Bakersfeld was trying hard to maintain his concentration, to retain a mental picture of his sector and every aircraft in it. It required instant memorizing—identifications, positions, types of aircraft, speeds, altitudes, sequence of landing…a configuration which was never still. A controller’s nightmare was to “lose the picture,” a situation where an overtaxed brain rebelled and everything went blank. It happened occasionally, even to the best.

Keith had been the best. Until a year ago, he was one whom colleagues turned to when pressures built to unreason.

Now, colleagues shielded him as best they could, though there was a limit to how much any man could help another and do his own job, too.

Keith was on his own; Tevis, the supervisor, had propelled himself and his high stool across the room to check another controller. Keith’s mind clicked out decisions. Turn Braniff left, Air Canada right, Eastern through a hundred and eighty degrees. It was done; on the radar screen, blips were changing direction. He would not lose the picture; not tonight, not now.

There was a reason for not doing so; a secret he had shared with no one, not even Natalie, his wife. Only Keith Bakersfeld, and Keith alone, knew that this was the last time he would ever face a radarscope or stand a watch. Today was his last day with air traffic control. It would be over soon.

It was also the last day of his life.

“Take a break, Keith.” It was the tower watch chief’s voice. Keith had not seen him come in.

Keith knew at once why he was being relieved. There was still a crisis, and they didn’t trust him.

Wayne Tevis leaned forward. “Lee will take over, Keith.” He motioned to another controller who had just returned from his own work break—a scheduled one.

Keith nodded, though he remained in place and continued to give radio instructions to aircraft while the new man got the picture. It usually took several minutes for one controller to hand over to another. The man coming in had to study the radar display, letting the over-all situation build in his mind.

Coupled with tense mental sharpness was another requirement—a controlled, studied calmness at all times on duty. The two requirements—contradictory in terms of human nature—were exhausting mentally.

“Okay,” the new man said, “I have the picture.”

Keith slid out from his seat, disconnecting his headset as the controller took his place.

The tower chief told Keith, “Your brother said he might drop around later,”

Keith nodded as he left the radar room.

Air traffic emergencies of one kind or another occurred several times a day at Lincoln International, as they did at any major airport. Category one was the most serious, but was rarely invoked, since it signaled an actual crash. Category two was notification of imminent danger to life, or physical damage. Category three, as now, was a general warning to airport emergency facilities to stand by; they might be needed, or they might not. For controllers, however, any type of emergency involved additional pressures and aftereffects.

Keith entered the controllers’ locker room which adjoined the radar control room. The small cubicle with a single window had three walls of metal lockers, and a wooden bench down the center. No one else was in the locker room, and Keith reached for the light switch and turned it off. Enough light came in through the window for him to see.

Then, opening his locker, he took out the lunch which Natalie had packed before his departure from home this afternoon. As he poured coffee from a Thermos, he wondered if Natalie had put a note in with his meal, or, if not a note, some item she had clipped from a newspaper or a magazine. She often did one of both, hoping, he supposed, that it might cheer him. She had worked hard at doing that, right from the beginning of his trouble.

More recently, however, there had been fewer notes and clippings. Perhaps Natalie, too, had finally lost heart.

A picture of Natalie was taped to the inside of his locker door. He had brought it here three years ago. The picture showed Natalie in a bikini. She was seated on a rock, laughing, one slim hand held above her eyes to shield them from the sun. Her light brown hair streamed behind; her small face showed the freckles which always appeared in summer. They had been on a motoring holiday in Canada, and for once their children, Brian and Theo, had been left behind in Illinois, with Mel and Cindy. The holiday proved to be one of the happier times that Keith and Natalie had ever known.

Perhaps, Keith thought, it wasn’t a bad thing to be remembering it tonight.

Pushed in behind the photo was a folded paper. It was one of the notes he had been thinking about, which Natalie put occasionally in his lunch pail. This clipping was about continuing experiments, by U.S. geneticists. Human sperm, it reported, could now be fast frozen and stored indefinitely. When thawed, it could be used for fertilization of women at any time.

Natalie had written:

It appears you can have babies merely by opening a refrigerator door.

I’m glad we had our ration

With love and passion.

She had been trying then; still trying desperately to return their lives… the two of them; and as a family… to the way they had been before.

Mel had joined forces, too, attempting with Natalie, to induce his brother to fight free from the depression which engulfed him totally.

Even then a part of Keith had wanted to respond, to respond to love with love himself. But the effort failed, because there was no feeling or emotion left within himself, only remorse and despair.

Keith wondered again if Natalie had put in a note with his meal tonight, hoping that she had. There were ham and sandwiches, a container of cottage cheese, a pear, and wrapping paper. Nothing more.

It was his own fault; there had been no time. Today, because of the preparations he needed to make, he had left home earlier than usual. She had not asked why he wanted to leave early. If there had been questions, he would have had to invent something, and he would not have wanted the last words between them to have been a lie.

He had driven to the airport business area and registered at the O’Hagan Inn where, earlier in the day, he had made a reservation by telephone. In a few hours from now, when Keith’s duty watch was ended, he could go there quickly. The room key was in his pocket.