Mr Wong Goes West (28 page)

She wandered through the clusters of seats and eventually found him, wide awake, looking at the inflight magazine.

‘Hey, Dilip, how’s things?’

‘Fine, fine,’ he said. ‘Considering.’

‘Considering what?’

‘That we’re all going to die momentarily.’

‘Oh. Army said something about the plane being about to crash. Is it really going to crash? I thought he was just being confused.’

‘Army?’

‘A friend of mine. He’s a royal. Possible King of England one of these days, if he plays his cards right.’

‘The plane may well crash and we may all die, I’m sad to say. If that is what your friend Army told you, then he is probably right. The pilot made an announcement which has got me rather worried. It was quite difficult to read between the lines, but the gist of it seems to be that the undercarriage has failed. That means we cannot land and there is no sea nearby on which we can make a water landing, so crashing appears to be our only option—and it is not an attractive one.’

‘Oh.’ Joyce took a minute or so to take this all in. Perhaps she hadn’t woken up at all, and this was all part of a dream? It seemed too strange to be real. ‘If the plane is going to crash, why are you reading the inflight magazine?’

Sinha turned and pointed to what he was looking at: a map of China. ‘Look, I reckon we are about here. I know a fair bit about the geography of this area. I have travelled through much of Asia. I am merely trying to remind myself of the basic facts so that I might be able to go and offer some help to the pilots. I’ll see you later,’ he said as he headed off to the front of the plane.

‘That’s good,’ said Joyce, who now felt that she ought to panic, but simply did not have the energy to do so.

Army arrived with a cup of coffee. ‘Apparently they can’t do cappuccinos here, because of the pressurised cabin, but they make a pretty decent flat white or double espresso. I got you one of each.’

‘That’s fine, thanks. I’ll take the espresso. And I’m gonna need
loads
of sugar.’

Sinha appeared at the pilot’s cabin, where a senior flight attendant stood guard.

‘I’m afraid you can’t speak to the pilots, sir. They’re dealing with the undercarriage problems. May I ask you to go back to your seat, sir?’

‘I will be most happy to do so. However, I just want to plant an idea in their minds. There is a lake I think about five hundred and seventy kilometres from here. It’s a reasonably big body of water. It sometimes appears on maps, but often doesn’t—it’s a poorly mapped area of China, just north of the border with Sikkim. It doesn’t appear on this map in the inflight magazine, and may or may not appear on the maps the pilot is using, but I imagine knowledge of bodies of water might help in this situation? Given that the problem, if I heard correctly, is to do with malfunctioning undercarriage?’

The attendant pondered. ‘They probably have all the information they need, sir, thank you very much, and I have strict orders not to…damn it, I’ll tell him. Just in case.’ She swung the cockpit door open. ‘There’s an Indian guy here who knows the geography. Says there’s a lake to the southeast. Big one.’

Sinha heard one of the pilots bark: ‘Get him in here.’

His brow wet with sweat, Captain Malachy stared at Sinha. ‘We’ve got everything in here, conventional maps, radar detectors, satellite maps, a ground link and so on, but I must admit I’m not personally familiar with this area. Tell me about the lake you mention. Is it this one?’ He pointed to a C-shaped body of water on the display in front of him.

‘No. I know that one—it’s a houseboat lake. It’s shallow and rather crowded with houses on stilts. It would be difficult and dangerous to land on. Besides, there are rocks sticking out of the middle of it—we call them the summer islands,
because they only poke their heads out of the water during dry summers.’

‘Where else can we go, then? What’s the lake you are thinking of?’

‘It’s a lake called Nittin Sagra. Quite big and open—not that I have visited it for twenty years.’

On the other side of the cockpit, Enrico Balapit said, ‘Let me find it. Southeast, you say?’ He tracked the display over until he found a small town at the foot of a mountain.

‘It’s just south of that town,’ Sinha said.

The co-pilot brought the computer mouse towards him and located a body of water on the image. ‘I’m going to switch it to satellite view,’ he said. ‘There we go. Damn.’

The exclamation was triggered by the fact that while the lake looked large and open on the map, the satellite view revealed that it had been eaten away at the edges, and a large dam or bridge appeared to have been built across the centre of it.

‘Dam is right,’ Sinha said. ‘Most unfortunate.’

The radio crackled. ‘This is ground control A98/11. I’m afraid the news is not good from our end. The nearest suitable bodies of water are quite some distance away.’

While Malachy talked to the control tower, Sinha quietly asked the attendant: ‘I thought aircraft were required to fly in routes that kept them within flying distances of water?’

‘That’s true,’ she said. ‘This aircraft has a very long range indeed, and we are within the required range of a body of water, the nearest big one being less than two hours’ flying time away. But unfortunately, we have other problems which suggest that we may not be able to stay in the air for two hours.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because, ah, there are other technical difficulties, which, uh…’

‘Because the bloody plane’s on fire,’ Malachy snapped.

‘I see,’ said Sinha. ‘That does put a worrying complexion on it.’

‘What are we going to do?’ Balapit asked, a nervous tremor in his voice.

‘Given that we don’t know how long we are going to stay aloft, we’ve got two choices,’ the Captain growled. ‘We can fly south to one of the smallish lakes down there. There’s water there, but just puddles. We can fly northwest—there’s a big body of water there, but it’s a long way away. What we can’t do is stay on the track we’re going. We’ll be heading straight into the mountains, and I don’t know how long we can stay this high.’

This grim announcement was greeted by silence. Balapit could be heard breathing hard.

Captain Malachy turned and snapped at the senior flight attendant. ‘Get everyone sitting down and strapped up tight. I’m turning north. Then I’m going to try some Red Arrow manoeuvres to see if I can get the fire out of the tailplane. It’s gonna be a long shot, but long shots are all we have left.’

Wong had one of those uncomfortable dreams in which he felt as if he was falling a long distance. The reason for this was that he was in fact falling a long distance.

The pilots had turned several times in a bid to put out the fire—sudden movements, in theory, could blow the flames out and a steep drop could create a temporary vacuum effect, which would deprive the fire of oxygen. But from Wong’s point of view, it was an unpleasant experiment. He slept fitfully
through the first three such manoeuvres, but the fourth one involved a fall so dramatic that he’d actually left the surface of the bed—not having heard the announcement to fasten his seatbelt.

He opened his eyes, startled to find himself levitating, with the room seeming to fall and his body and the duvet moving upwards off the bed. Was he dreaming? Apparently not. There was a chorus of clattering noises as things on the tables rolled off, some of them flying upwards and hitting the walls or the ceiling.

‘Oh. Oh. Oh,’ he squealled.

At first he had no idea where he was—his gaze filled with the gently rippling floral-patterned silk that surrounded the four-poster bed. Either he was floating up to it, or it was floating down to him. What was going on? Earthquake? Cataclysm? War? Death? End of the world? All of the above?

When Captain Malachy levelled off, Wong found himself descending equally suddenly on to the super-soft mattress, which was so spongy it seemed to absorb him completely for a second before he emerged and found himself bouncing, jelly-like, on the surface again.

He looked around. Where was he? Some kind of hotel? The notion ‘aeroplane’ flashed in his mind and everything came back to him. So why was he floating upwards like a weightless astronaut? Was this some function that had been built into the bed—some strange, Western, sexual perversion, like waterbeds and ceiling mirrors? Was this how Queen Windsor and the Duke of Greece got their kicks? Or was it the pilot misbehaving?

After gravity had returned, and been maintained for what seemed like several minutes, Wong decided that it might well be the last of these: the pilot was showing off. This was his
privilege, as captain of the plane, but surely he should consider the wishes of his important passengers, especially those in VIP bedding. If the up-and-down movement continued, Wong decided he might take it on himself to complain—not that he had any desire to tell the pilot how to do his work. We all have separate tasks to do. The geomancer saw his own job at the moment as to thoroughly enjoy the fruits of his labours. He loved the huge, soft bed. He would probably sleep a couple more hours, if the pilot could hold the thing steady. But his throat was dry—curse the air-conditioning on airplanes.

There was a ‘ding’ sound and a little light with a picture of a seatbelt stopped shining. The pilot’s voice came over the speaker system. ‘Thank you for your patience, ladies and gentlemen. This is Captain Malachy again. That little patch of turbulence is over now, and you may use the washrooms again or move about as you wish. However, we would advise that while you are in your seat, please keep your seatbelt fastened. As for the technical challenges I mentioned earlier, I shall keep you informed of any changes in the situation.’

Wong pressed the button to summon a flight attendant, who appeared within a minute, accompanied by Dilip Sinha. The uniformed young woman took his order for a drink—actually three drinks, water, Chinese tea and pomegranate juice—and left to fetch them. Sinha sat down on the edge of the bed and admired the room.

‘This is all very
Star Trek
,’ he said. ‘It’s like a hotel room in the sky. Like Bones McCoy’s sick bay.’

‘This plane very good,’ said Wong. ‘I think I will use it again.’

‘If you can get someone else to pay for the tickets.’

‘Of course. Must be
ho gwai
.’

‘
Ho ho gwai
indeed, I’m sure.’ Sinha composed his features into a look of serious concern. ‘Now. On to more
serious matters. Have you given any thought to the current predicament? There appears to be a lack of ideas downstairs, which is where we may be of use—you in particular.’

Wong looked at him blankly.

‘Oh. Perhaps you have not been listening closely to the announcements?’

‘I don’t listen to announcements. There should be no announcements when VIPs are trying to sleep.’

‘Be that as it may, you should know that this aircraft has a problem—a rather serious one. There was a series of bangs, possibly small explosions, and the undercarriage no longer works. We cannot land.’

‘What you mean we cannot land? We cannot stay in the sky. Of course we must land.’

‘This is true. What goes up… And therein lies the conundrum. The wheels are not working, so we cannot land conventionally. But we cannot stay up here in the sky for very long. Not only will the lack of fuel prevent us from being here indefinitely, but there’s a more urgent problem. The plane appears to be on fire.’

‘The plane is on fire.’

‘Yes. It’s not really good news, however one should choose to look at it.’

‘
Aiyeeah
. Why not the pilot just stop here in China and we do rest of journey in train? Or better still, stay here in China. Very nice place, very safe.’

‘I’m sure the pilot would be delighted to stop in China if he could—but he cannot. There are a number of airports here, but few of them have the facility to land an aircraft of this size and none could cope with a giant aircraft that is missing its wheels. It’s a very real problem, I’m afraid, and not an easy one to solve.’

‘So what will happen?’

‘The tail will eventually be burned off the plane, the fuselage will lose pressure and break up, and all the bits will plummet to the ground and we will all die.’