Bolt Action (30 page)

On board PK412

T
he three members of Ward 13 have been getting an unasked-for crash course in Urdu and Punjabi swear words.
Choot
and
kuthi
and
bhenchoud
. Logic says these are the nasty words, because things are not going well.

This cockpit door is getting to be a pain in the arse . . .

On the flight there’s a team of wrestlers from Gujranwala City. Remarkable physical specimens. Small men, bulging with layers of muscle, like Oddjob. Totally hairless. They’re travelling to the US to compete in a collegiate series, and hopeful of snagging a scholarship or two.

According to Captain Salahuddin, their group leader had been delighted to find out that all the problems could be solved by simply busting down a door. He had twirled his fine sergeant-major moustache, very confident.
One door only, you sure? . . . Is no problem for me.
He’d clapped his hands like a maître d’, and his sturdiest guy had trotted forward. Shaped like a human brick. Bracing himself at one end of the twelve-foot-long tight corridor leading to the cockpit entrance. The captain, Tristie, Button and Whiffler squeezed into the little recessed area in front of the forward left passenger door to watch. She couldn’t see any good coming of this . . .

There was a sharp military command from the wrestling leader, and the first guy, grinning madly, hurled himself forward. No doubt thinking this was a great honour, to be first . . . she couldn’t watch as he thundered towards the door. Three paces only.
Thud-thud-thud.

The
yeeeooowwll
that followed told its own story. Button the medic went to help. The wrestler’s arm was weirdly lengthened and there was an awful elongation to his shoulder that looked all wrong. ‘Popped it,’ muttered Button, as he walked the guy off to give him some painkiller shots.

Like robots, another nine wrestlers tried. And failed. No doubt their willingness was partly old-fashioned pride. But she can see fear in their eyes, a little bit of panic too.
I have to do this, or our plane will be shot down
. They went at the door with their shoulders, their knees, kicking with their feet. Even with the serving trolleys. The results were the same.

Salahuddin waves Tristie forward to the cockpit door and, as she passes him, she commiserates with the crestfallen boss of the wrestlers. He looks deeply ashamed. This was not the first attempt by the plane’s passengers to bust through the cockpit door . . . everybody on the flight knows (or has been told today) about the story of United 93, how passengers thwarted the 9/11 hijackers by storming the cockpit. Others aboard PK412 had tried in ones and twos. Young and old, fiercely determined and braced by a terrible fear. Not the danger they would face once inside the cockpit, but what lay slung underneath the wings of those Super Hornets. No way is Ward 13 discouraging any of this. The more the merrier. So now the wrestlers understand the reality, like everybody else who had tried and failed, and they stumble back to their seats very frightened.

Whiffler pushes open the forward left toilet, stands in the doorway, so there’s enough room for the three of them to look closely at this undefeatable cockpit entrance.

Salahuddin places his palms against the fascia, pushes slightly, before shaking his head and turning to look at them both. He appears to be biting his lip to hide a reproachful nod. ‘As we are the national airline of Pakistan, the country which is well-known as the Home of the Terrorist, it was in fact the Americans who made us accept these tough specifications for all our security fittings. Very much framed by what they’d suffered with
al-Qaeda. If PIA want to get permission to fly to New York or Chicago, this is what you must fit . . .’

He goes on . . . ‘Problem one. The access panel has been depowered. I don’t know by whom, or how, but you see when I try to enter the codes, nothing happens. No numbers appear on the LED screen. Unfortunately for us, post-9/11, all these doors are required to have locking assemblies that include a component, in this case a latch and four different bolt-action claws, that remains locked whether or not the door is energised.

‘Problem Two. The door’s centre, hinges and latch have to withstand repeated jolts of two hundred joules of energy, roughly the same as a three-hundred-pound man travelling at ten feet a second, running straight at it. As you saw . . .’ he waves airily towards the wreckage of ailing wrestlers being treated in the first-class cabin ‘. . . this door has passed with flying colours.’

From the side, a grim-faced Whiffler adds his twopence worth. ‘And the captain’s already told me there’s thirty-five pounds of armour layered into the door structure to stop a bullet or a grenade . . . a skin of metallic mesh to stop an axe attack or anybody puncturing or sawing through . . . and fibre-glass face-sheets made of a material with even more stopping power than Kevlar . . .’

Salahuddin butts back in. ‘
And
the door frame is machined out of aluminium so you can’t cut it out . . . the whole structure is anchored with steel bolts. You can’t pound it down . . . the design specs called for no more than ten millimetres’ deformation n any hinge, latch or lock under three thousand Newtons of force. That’s equivalent to six hundred and seventy-five pounds travelling at twenty-four miles an hour. There’s no way to punch through.’

Salahuddin, strangely, smiles an enigmatic smile.

Tristie ducks inside the toilet. ‘Is there no way here?’ She taps the waist-high mirror fastened to the shared wall with the cockpit. Both of them shake their heads. Whiffler speaks. ‘Basically the same strength as the doorway, but without any
of the supposed weak points, like hinges. And in a toilet, you can’t even take a run at the thing.’

He points across the small corridor. ‘On the other flank of the plane, you have the cockpit shielded by the fittings of the first-class galley, all fixed fittings, like the ovens and heating elements. They take up most of the width. What’s left is enough for one small crew wardrobe and a slightly bigger closet, just behind you, where they hang the coats. But still that big thick bastard of a reinforced wall. You can’t get through.’

Tristie feels, at least, an obligation to go through the obvious. ‘Down below?’

Salahuddin tugs at the point of his beard, that damned twinkle in his eye. ‘Despite what you see in the movies, there’s no access from up here to down there, inside. Beneath us is the forward cargo compartment and the only way in is through the forward cargo door. It opens outwards, about fourteen feet aft of the front passenger door and below us.’ He holds up an index finger. ‘There is a room immediately underneath the cockpit, where the main hardware for the avionics is housed and maintained, but access for that is through an exterior panel door immediately behind the nose-wheel housing. You have to go outside, to get inside.’

‘Hang on a second . . .’ A piece of some stupid movie rings a bell in her mind. ‘Are we missing something here? Acid or something . . . isn’t there something on this plane we can degrade that lock with, or the hinges?’

Whiffler throws up his arms in mock desperation. ‘Tristie, are you mad? Acid? You can’t even get toothpaste on to a flight now. Somebody’s going to bring a jug of acid on board?’

Fair point.

Keep going, Tristie. Never let a problem beat you down. Time to think aloud. ‘How about mercury? That’s a corrosive. Somebody got a thermometer on board, a bunch of thermometers. We could pool the mercury.’

‘Not allowed to bring those kind of thermometers on board for that same reason.’ Salahuddin’s turn to shake his head.
‘Anyway, not fast enough, too slow. And you couldn’t hold it in place. It would slide off the joints.’

She can feel a giant-sized pain needling into her head. Think, Tristie. Think. You must be missing something. ‘I don’t suppose any of your countrymen on this flight, Captain, look like the type who might have sneaked some weapons on board? Something useful.’

‘Sorry not to be able to play to the national stereotype. But no, they look blissful and peace-loving. Like all Pakistanis.’

Tristie can’t tell whether he sees the humour. They’re on a plane that’s been hijacked by one of his people. ‘I know it’s late in the day to be asking, but are there any air marshals on board, off duty maybe, anybody licensed to carry a gun?’

Salahuddin leans back against the cockpit door. His eyes piercing now and angry. ‘Do you think the Americans would allow us to bring armed men on a plane to New York carrying one hundred thousand pounds of aviation fuel?’

‘I see your point.’

Salahuddin sizes her up carefully. ‘All our flights have an axe on board, an air-crash axe, as part of an emergency pack, with flares and shovels, that sort of thing. In case we crash somewhere remote.’

Whiffler’s eyes light up. ‘Where?’

‘Safest place on the plane.’ He jerks his thumb behind him. ‘Stored in the cockpit . . .’ Another flash of amusement.

‘Fuck me . . .’ Whiffler bangs hard on the toilet wall. Frustrated. ‘I sure would like to meet the guy who thought up these damned stupid rules. Stick a ruddy axe up his cockpit door. Sideways.’

Tristie feels Salahuddin’s been playing them like a fish. ‘Truth time, Captain . . .’ He’s certainly got well under Whiffler’s young skin. ‘You’re enjoying this a little too much. Why the impish smile?’

Salahuddin takes a pace or two away from them, turns and braces a shoulder against the cockpit corridor. His eyes are smiling gently.

‘Can I just say, Ms Merritt, you look at me now just how my beloved wife does. Such a pretty face you have, don’t spoil it with angry thoughts. Please.’ And Salahuddin uncrosses his arms, opening himself up. ‘When she and I have arguments it is always the same thing. I tell her that wisdom consists of fully understanding the consequences of one’s action . . . all the consequences, not just the obvious ones. I love her very much, but she will not think things through. Perhaps this is a female condition. Certainly she finds what I have to say on matters very tedious. Carping, I think you call it.’

Tristie’s immediate reaction is that this discussion is heading towards danger. She doesn’t want the captain getting maudlin. ‘As a female, I can say that Mrs Salahuddin has my commiserations . . .’ Let’s not be thinking about loved ones. Not now. ‘Please focus, Captain, we’re trying to get into this cockpit . . .’

The pilot looks down at his highly polished shoes, wistfully searching the floor for the right words. When he’s finally ready to speak, he looks between the pair of them and Tristie is startled to see him fall to pieces in front of her, shoulders heaving, his eyes full of tears. ‘I wrote an internal memo five, maybe six, years ago, to the chief pilot 777 fleet. Copied all across the airline, to my brother officers as well, outlining the consequences we now face, building this wall of steel between the flight crew and the rest of the aircraft.’ He sobs softly for a moment or two, before wiping his eyes gently. Pulling himself back from the edge. ‘OK, so we’re fighting terrorism and that is a good thing, but has anybody thought about the unintended consequences of how we chose to protect ourselves?’

Whiffler sounds a bit brusque. ‘And?’

The pilot looks at him squarely, voice still unsteady. ‘And nothing . . .’ His fists clench by his side. ‘. . . nobody listened. I sent the same memo again in 2005 after a Cypriot 737 crashed in Greece. There was a problem with the settings for the air conditioning, and the pilots and passengers were overcome with hypoxia. Oxygen starvation. One steward managed to claw his
way towards the cockpit with an oxygen bottle, but must have wasted too much time trying to get the access code off the chief purser, who was probably delirious. As he got into the flight deck, the plane ran out of fuel. Crashed. One hundred and twenty-one dead.

‘Less than a third of the number on this flight . . .’ For Salahuddin and Whiffler, the finger is almost out of the dyke, the emotions between the two men suddenly running very strong. On the edge of full-blown despair. Having totally immersed themselves in technical detail, they’re ready to quit, convinced there is no logical solution.

‘Fuck . . . these stupid, stupid, idiot people.’ Whiffler spits out his words. Not good. His face is reddening and tension comes off him in waves. Tristie puts her hand on his shoulder, squeezes hard. ‘Tristie . . . so help me God, if we get out of this, I will never go anywhere without a couple of charges of high explosive. Bit of CL-20 maybe, and some detonator cord. Never ever. Not happening again . . .’

Salahuddin is leaning against the door, now clutching his head. ‘It’s funny that you should say that.’ ‘Why?’ she asks, still kneading Whiffler’s neck. Trying to keep him upright and productive. She can feel his shoulders tremble, starting to shake.

‘In my memo, I hypothesised that the only way to get into the cockpit would be to trigger a massive decompression event from within the cabin. Deliberately. Like blowing open a window. How you would do that, I don’t know, but the cockpit and cabin are fitted with a range of pressure sensors. Who would be able to get into the cockpit . . . I have no idea; anything not fastened down would be sucked straight to the pressure breach. But the theory stands. If the differential in pressure rises too high, the door is designed to pop open, to equalise, like a relief valve. Perhaps we could . . .’ But Salahuddin groans, slaps his forehead a stinging blow with the heel of his hand. ‘. . . but, of course,
you idiot . . .
’

‘
What?
’ Whiffler and Tristie speak as one.

Never did a man look so completely miserable before. ‘The
actuation system to pop the door latch is electronically controlled. The door locks open and close through the action of steel armatures. They’re moved backwards and forwards by solenoids. Electromechanical solenoids, which need current to magnetise. But
there is no
current in the door. The whole door system has been depowered. See . . .’ and he turns back to the LED access pad. Blank. Dead.

‘Could we at least think about trying, Captain? Something along those lines . . .’