The Angels Weep - Smith Wilbur - Страница 162

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"My daddy bought me a T-shirt with Big Daddy on it, but it's in my case-" There was a shattering crash, a great swirling silver cloud obscured the portholes, and the Viscount lurched so wildly that Janine was hurled painfully against her safety-belt. The air hostess was flung upwards against the roof of the cabin, and she fell back like a broken doll and lay twisted across the back of one of the empty seats.

There was a cacophony of shrieks and screams from the passengers and the girl clung desperately to Janine's arm, shrilling incoherently.

The cabin tilted sharply but smoothly as the aircraft banked, and then suddenly the Viscount plunged forward and swung viciously from side to side.

The safety-belt held Janine in her seat, but it felt like an insane roller-coaster ride down the sky. Janine leaned over and hugged the child to try and still her piercing screams. Although her head was being whipped from side to side, Janine got a glimpse out of the porthole, and saw the horizon turning like the spokes of a spinning-wheel, and it made her feel giddy and nauseated. Then abruptly she focused on the silver wing of the aircraft below her.

Where the streamlined engine-nacelle had been was a ragged hole.

Through it she could see the fluffy roof of the forest. The torn wing was flexing and twisting, she could see the wrinkles appearing in the smooth metal skin. Her ears were popping and creaking with the violent pressure-change, and the trees were rushing towards her in a sombre green blur.

She tore the child's arms from around her neck and forced her head down into her own lap. "Hold your knees," she shouted. "Keep your face down." And she did herself what she had ordered.

Then they hit, and there was a deafening rending, roaring, crashing tumult. She was flung mercilessly about in her seat, tumbled and battered, blinded and stunned and hammered by flying pieces of debris.

It seemed to go on for ever. She saw the roof above her clawed away and blinding sunlight struck her for an instant. Then it was gone, and something hit her across one shin. Clearly, above all the other sounds, she heard her own bone break, and the pain shot up her spine into her skull. End over end she was hurled, and then another blow in the back of the neck and her vision exploded into shooting sparks of light through a black singing void.

When she recovered consciousness, she was still in her seat, but hanging upside down from her safety-strap. Her face felt engorged with the blood that had flowed into it, and her vision wavered and swam like a heat mirage. Her head ached. It felt as though a red-hot nail was being driven into the centre of her forehead with a sledgehammer.

She twisted slowly, and saw that her broken leg was hanging down in front of her face, the toe pointing where the heel should have been.

"I will never walk again," she thought, and the horror of it braced her. She reached for the release on the buckle of her safety-belt, and then remembered how many necks are broken from a release in the upside-down position. She hooked her elbow through the arm of her seat, and then lifted the release. Her hold on the seat flipped her as she fell and she landed on her hip with her broken leg twisted under her. The pain was too much and she lost consciousness again.

It must have been hours later that she woke again for it was almost dark. The silence was frightening. It took her many groggy seconds to realize where she was, for she was looking at grass and tree trunks and sandy earth.

Then she realized that the fuselage of the Viscount had been severed just in front of her seat, as though by a guillotine, the tail section was all that was left around her. Over Janine's head the body of the child who had been her seating partner still hung by its strap.

Her arms dangled below her head, and her blonde pigtails pointed at the earth. Her eyes were wide open, and her face contorted with the terror in which she had died.

Janine used her elbows to crawl out of the shattered fuselage, dragging her leg behind her and she felt the coldness and nausea of shock sweep over her. Still on her stomach, she retched and vomited until she was too weak to do anything else but let herself sink back into the darkness in her head. Then she heard a sound in the silence, faint at first, but growing swiftly in volume.

It was the wackety-wackety-wack of a helicopter's rotors. She looked up at the sky, but it was shrouded by the roof of the forest overhead, and she realized that the last rays of daylight had gone and the swift African night was rushing down upon the earth.

"Oh please!" she screamed. "Here I am. Please help me!" But the sound of the helicopter grew no louder, it seemed to pass only a few hundred metres from where she lay under the concealing trees, and then the sound of its rotors receded as swiftly as the darkness came on, and at last there was silence.

"A fire," she thought. "I must start a signal fire." She looked a-round her wildly, and almost within reach of where she lay was the crumpled body of the blonde girl's father who had been in the seat in front of her. She crawled to him, and touched his face, running her finger lightly over his eyelids. There was no flicker of response.

She sobbed and drew back, and then steeled herself and returned once more to search the dead man's pockets. The disposable Bic plastic cigarette-lighter was in the side pocket of his jacket. At the first flick it gave her a pretty yellow flame, and she sobbed again this time with relief.

Roland Ballantyne sat in the co-pilot's seat of the Super Frelon helicopter and peered down at the tree-tops only two hundred feet below him. It was so dark that the occasional clearing in the forest was a mere pale leprous patch. There was no definition in the tree-tops, they were a dark amorphous mattress. Even when the light had been stronger, the chances of spotting the wreckage below the tree-tops had been remote. Of course there was the possibility that part of a wing or tail-section had torn off and been left hanging high up, and in easy view. However, they could not trust to that.

At first they were looking for damage to the tree-tops, a blaze of lopped branches or the telltale white splotches of torn bark and raw wet wood. They were looking for a signal flare, or for smoke or the chance reflection of the late sun off bare metal, but then the light started to go. Now they were flying in desperation, waiting for, but not really believing, they would see a signal flare or a torch or even a fire. Roland turned to the pilot and shouted in the rackety cabin.

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