A Different War Page 4

  Michael was a senior researcher and aide to the EC Commissioner for Transport, a Frenchman but then he spoke four languages fluently and had once been one of her more dazzling undergraduates during her time as a junior Fellow at Oxford. And he was her conduit into the Byzantine politics, gossip and machinations of the European Commission.

  "Hi, Marian," she heard.

  "Hi, Michael what news?"

  He sounded slightly breathless, but it was often his amusement to make much of little, act the role of a conspirator or double agent.

  Probably, he would have been recruited by dear Kenneth during the Cold War. Now he was her man in Brussels, an alliance that had sprung as much from mutual amusement at the EC and its bureaucratic labyrinths as from any other motive.

  '… whether it's significant, I can't say, Marian but I know my Commissioner has a very big meeting arranged for tomorrow… with, among others, the CEOs of Aero UK and Balzac-Stendhal, and your friend David Winterborne. It's not taking place at the Commission, but one of the big hotels. I'll try to find out more — might be interesting, you never know… It was arranged at the last minute, and my Commissioner looks a little put out, to say the least. Like someone who's had his breakfast stolen from under his nose." The young man laughed. Marian pictured his long fair hair, easy charm, stereotypical good looks. Her mother would have characterised him as perfect for modelling knitting patterns. He had employed all that considerable and effective charm for the purpose of seducing his tutor in modern history — she had been able to resist it, she remembered, smiling at herself in mockery as she continued to watch the streaming sunlight working like fingers among the planted rows of the Physic Garden. Just resist. Michael had forgiven her, with as easy a charm as he had employed in his seduction, and become instead her friend and ideological acolyte.

  "I still can't put my finger on anything that suggests the slightest impropriety regarding funding I think, my darling woman, you're barking up the wrong tree there. Even in this hall of mirrors it would be very difficult to hide wholehearted subversion of EU funds and subsidies…

  Sorry about that. I'll ring off now talk to you soon."

  She finished her drink as the tape rewound in the answer-phone. Working day at an end. Idly, she flicked the remote control for the hi-fi, and the music began. At once, the intense, swelling drama, the celebration of human joy, the rhythmic intoxication of Beethoven. Her lips moved, her fingers tapped around her tumbler, in time to the music.

  She was disappointed but, then, the idea had always seemed too brilliant; too unlikely therefore to have any foundation in reality.

  She had asked Michael whether there was any evidence of continuing, secret and illegal funding from the Commission to the plane makers the partners in England and France engaged in building the monumentally expensive Skyliner. She knew that the Commissioner for Transport was engaged as deeply as a major shareholder in lobbying the national airlines to buy the plane but she had wondered whether there was more than influence, more than lobbying and arm-wrenching and seduction involved… whether, in fact, money had changed hands. Taxpayers' money going into the pockets of private industry without the knowledge of the Council of Ministers and the House of Commons.

  Kenneth Aubrey had somehow encouraged her suspicions… but it wasn't, after all, like one of his Cold War be devilments There was no truth in the suspicion. Aero UK was bleeding from the wound of the Skyliner's costs, its banks were nervous even the sale of its car division to the Germans hadn't made its books much healthier.

  However, by her father's best guess, they should be in pole position to acquire the contract for the army's new attack helicopter, which they'd developed in cooperation with the Germans and Italians. It would certainly be less controversial to buy third-British than wholly

  American. Anyway, apparently Aero UK was not being kept afloat by secret subsidy.

  Too much to hope for, she acknowledged, smiling at her disappointment; it was as if she had lost the matches that would have lit a fierce blaze under the pro Europeans in her own party and the government. It would have been so nice to have been right about large-scale corruption… Gradually, she let herself move into the music, into the hypnotic, intensifying dance of the symphony's allegretto, moving like a dancer around the lounge of the flat in her cream silk robe, her fair hair drying un regarded Then, as the music reached a further height of intoxication and purpose, she caught sight of her flushed, angular features in the mirror behind the French clock. Her hair was making every effort to become a fright-wig, her cheekbones were livid, her full mouth opening in realisation.

  Michael had sounded frightened… no, nervous rather, like someone trapped in a small, fragile car, hearing the unavoidable approach of a juggernaut. She switched off the music and hurried to the answer phone accelerating the tape through the mundane in a rush of incomprehensible, birdlike calls, until she heard his voice.

  '… taking place at the Commission, but one of the big hotels… it would be very difficult to hide… I'll ring off now talk to you soon."

  He was frightened like someone who had woken to a strange noise in the night and remained awake, hardly breathing, waiting to hear it again.

  The layers of pleasant assurance were penetrated by a sudden doubt, as if the implications of what he had said had only just struck him, so that the farewell faltered in his throat. Michael had had some insight regarding that meeting in Brussels which had unnerved him.

  She replayed his words twice more. It was, she thought, almost as if he were not alone in the room…

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Needle and the Damage Done The telephone brought Marian quickly awake. The radio alarm showed some minutes after six-thirty, and she groaned with irritation. Light was promisingly bright beyond the heavy, closed curtains.

  "Marian Pyott." She cleared her throat.

  "Marian it's Bob here." The breathless voice of the young, ambitious

  MP with whom she shared an office in the Commons. Formerly in advertising, currently in self-advertisement in the hope of a junior ministerial post.

  "What is it, Bob?" She made no attempt to disguise her irritation.

  "I thought you'd like to know' he was strangely, childishly disappointed at her apparent indifference 'the papers are full of an

  MoD leak about the new helicopter contract. The army's going to award it to the Yanks. The Mamba, or whatever the machine's called."

  "What?" she breathed, feeling winded, and weirdly guilty, as if she had committed some obscure betrayal.

  "It's still at the level of a rumour, this leak?"

  "Looks pretty deliberate to me you know.

  "Don't let me catch you leaking this to the press, but here's the editor of The Times' number, just in case you've forgotten it."

  "Oh, shit! Aerospace UK will- God, this could absolutely finish the company.

  The banks will be circling like sharks. Where's the leak?"

  "Fraud the Telegraph but it's already on the radio and TV."

  Then it's the minister who's leaking. And the PM's caved in to the Treasury and the Chancellor on the grounds of cost. He said he wouldn't…" She had had a private meeting with the PM — briefed by her father and his group of lobbyists in favour of the Eurocopter only the previous week. And had been assured, really assured, that it would be a decision based solely on quality, not cost.

  Into her silence, Bob offered:

  "I just thought you'd like to know well, not like, but…"

  "Yes. Yes, thanks, Bob."

  She put down the telephone loudly, with abstracted clumsiness. Dear God there were thousands of jobs suddenly at risk, hundreds of them in her own constituency. And in all the component and avionic companies who were involved in the helicopter project in the UK, France and Germany. David Winterborne would take a battering, too. David was up to his ears so many of his companies were committed to the project… why did she feel guilty?

  She remembered. She had pummelled Bryan Coulthard over Skylin
er in the

  Select Committee. Now, it seemed she had been kicking someone who was already down. Bloody silly feeling — but real, nevertheless.

  She scrabbled for her cigarettes and lit one. Heaved herself out of bed and drew back the curtains. Morning sun gleamed like paint on the Physic Garden. She tapped her fingernail against her teeth as she stood at the window.

  Her father had been lobbying hard, together with a group of senior, mostly retired military figures and dozens of MPs like herself who had companies in their constituencies whose future depended on the army buying the British helicopter… Two hundred and fifty million sterling was a conservative estimate of the size of the business. But the Treasury had persuaded MoD that the Mamba, an old airframe with shiny new bolt-on goodies, was good enough. And cheap. And the Chancellor had persuaded the PM, obviously.

  What a bloody mess! She puffed furiously at her cigarette. She'd fought for the helicopter just as she'd fought against Sky-liner and its hideous costs. Now, however, there was no good news for Aero UK.

  Skyliner was un saleable and the helicopter was grounded. Who'd buy it if the British army wouldn't, for crying out loud?

  She flung herself away from the window and out of the bedroom. The newspapers lay on the doormat like lOUs come home to roost. She snatched up the Telegraph and scanned the front page. Yes, there it was… The report estimated the worldwide, total business to be derived from the helicopter it had been chosen by the army — at more than a billion pounds. Later in the piece, sombre rumblings with regard to the future of Aero UK and the even more dire future of the whole British aerospace industry. Angrily, she threw the newspaper along the hall. Its separated pages fluttered like wounded grey birds.

  Giles would be apoplectic as she was. The government was getting the decision unpopular as it was bound to be out of the way now just in case the PM called an autumn election. People would have forgotten by October. It was outrageous… hundreds of her constituents faced redundancy. Oh, bugger!

  The hangar was the garishly lit stomach of a great marine mammal, ribbed and sparred to support its own size. The scorched wreckage of the aircraft lay on the stomach's floor like a half-digested meal. Gant felt the surge of sadness that was now a part of his professional self for the people who had died as an aircraft changed into this mockery of a machine partially reassembled. The machines which he had always loved and to which he had always felt closest killed people occasionally — sometimes in their hundreds.

  Vance was waiting for him, surrounded by his own people and the investigators from the south-west NTSB office. He detached himself from the group with evident reluctance, moving uncertainly towards Gant, who put down his sports bag on the "stained concrete floor, aware of the desert dawn behind him, beyond the open hangar doors. Barbara thankfully was not there.

  Vance held out his hand. But his habitual, enveloping charm, his energy, failed to ignite like a cold, sullen engine. He was weary and defeated, baffled for so long and so completely that even the anger at his own impotence had drained away. His blue eyes, bleared with lack of sleep, revealed nothing more than a worn cunning; all the challenging confidence was gone. Yes, he resented Gant's presence, his need for him.

  "Mitchell." One big hand gripped at Gant as at a life belt the other was on his shoulder at once. Vance loomed over him, his stature pressing Gant back towards his hated beginnings and his childhood.

  Barbara had happened because he had wanted to be an adult, not the perpetually half-formed thing his flying skills had made of him, and which Vance had exploited. His hold over him had never been Barbara, but the fact that he created beautiful flying machines. As such, he had always been the gifted adult, Gant the dazzled child.

  "Alan." He returned the man's grip.

  "Good flight?"

  "OK."

  There was an aftershock through his hand of the anger Vance must have felt when Barbara had told him she had called. Then that, too, was gone. He was forced by circumstance to invest Gant with magical, visionary powers.

  "What you need to rest up?"

  Gant shook his head.

  "No."

  Vance's relief was audible.

  "What do you want to look at? Most of the airplane is here, the flight recorders have been computer-analysed… instrument check is completed, the engines have been…" And he wound down like a child's toy made to talk by a battery which was now spent. Offering that inventory had exhausted not only him but his options, his optimism. The accident investigators had no answer, there were no clues in the flight recorder, the wreckage, the engines.

  "I don't know what else…" he faltered, then dried again like a terrified actor.

  Gant disliked the empathy he felt for the man. Vance was a chained and beaten dog, that was all, and still capable of savagery.

  "Let me look at the fuselage… just look. On my own."

  Vance nodded.

  "Sure but go easy, OK? These people just handle them right. My people, the team—?"

  "Sure. I learned the trick," he added.

  "I can work with people just like a grown-up."

  As if affording proof, he brusquely greeted others. People he already knew from Vance Aircraft, others whose names or voices he knew from the Accident Inquiry Office in Tucson. They were suspicious of him either because they knew him, or because they knew of him the former fly-guy hero… or because he was Washington and his being there was an implicit criticism. He was free of them in moments, leaving vague reassurances, instructions, and walking towards the wreckage. Their murmuring behind him was a chorus of Vance's own need of him.

  He'd talk to them later-walking towards the wreckage as urgently as if there was some faint hope that someone was still alive within the cracked, skeletal fuselage. He passed trestle tables and long benches on which smaller pieces of wreckage lay, and gutted instruments, scattered bolts and fixings; all of it like tumours already excised from a diseased body. There were computer terminals and their leads like those of a life-support system. The flight recorders lay opened and empty, their tapes already futilely analysed. He would come to all of that later.

  He stopped close to the cracked tailplane, its markings those of Artemis Airways scorched like a house wall after an explosion. He clambered into the rear section of the fuselage.

  The central aisle, down which duty-free perfumes and drink would have been troll eyed and meals delivered, was broken like a road dug up for new conduits.

  Wiring dangled, together with oxygen masks and torn fabric. Everything smelt of smoke, scorching, extinguisher foam. The overhead lights of the hangar glared through a gap in the fuselage like sunlight between buildings. The fuselage had snapped in three on impact with the desert. The wings had broken off. Seat after seat as he moved lay torn away, crushed, drunkenly tilted. He shied from them as if a passenger had died in each one.

  He glanced through one of the gaps in the fuselage at a huge engine.

  Pratt & Whitney people were among the crowd that had gathered again around Vance like uncertain children. That engine hadn't restarted though the pilot's last words, the TV had said over and again, claimed that the instruments were telling him that nothing was wrong.

  He jumped across the gap of concrete to the flight deck, aligned like a broken neck with the rest of the fuselage. Fiercer scorching here. The overhead switch panels had dropped to hand like surprised jaws. The control columns were distorted like trees sprouting in a gale, the throttle levers were bent. The instrument displays of all three crew positions were disrupted by damage and removal, so that eye sockets and blank panels looked back at him. There was blackness on the crew seats, of dried blood perhaps. Some plastic had melted on the flight deck in what seemed to have been an intense but very brief fire.

  He stored the impression against comparison with other cockpit fires.

  How much fuel had there been? There should have been more damage. This fire would only have helped kill Pat Hollis and his co-pilot and flight engineer, if they had even
been alive after the impact. He wondered who they had been Lowell, maybe, Hollis' shadow and idolater… and the flight engineer had probably been Paluzzi. Which meant that three women had been widowed, nine no, ten children orphaned. He shuddered, remembering cockpit fires in other places, other times. This crew hadn't had the option to eject as he had done twice in his life with the airplane on fire. They'd had to sit in their seats and burn… like the Vietnamese girl who now, so many years later, hardly ever intruded on his dreams.

  Almost every instrument from the pilot's centre panel, which had housed the engine instruments, was missing. What remained was labelled or tagged. Name tapes, neatly computer-typed, fluttered from the overhead panels, from the flight engineer's panel. Each one, he knew from their colour, offered a negative no explanation of the cause of the crash. He turned his head and stared through the flight deck's shattered side window.

  Through the cobweb pattern reminiscent of bullet damage, he glowered at the engine that was beached some yards from the broken fragments and spars of the port wing. Its position, in a kind of ominous isolation, suggested guilt. Fuel, fuel computer, booster pumps, fuel flow monitoring, the tanks, the lines, the compressors… Check, check, check, check, the team would tell him, again and again. The Tucson NTSB Inquiry Office had as good a reputation as any other.

  He heard a noise behind him and half-turned at once surprised and unsurprised to see Vance heaving his bulk into the cramped, crushed tin can of the flight deck. His breathing was that of an old, asthmatic man as if the accident had aged him, cleaned the dye from his hair and given him instead dark stains beneath the blue eyes.

  "Well you cosied up enough to your wreckage?" Vance was impatient. No one interrupted a senior investigator in his or her meditative first exploration of a crash site, or of a reconstructed wreck, or of a single piece of wreckage. They left you alone until you wanted to talk… but Vance was hurting and Vance was an egoist and a bully and Gant had once been his son-in-law. He assumed he still had rights of demand, of appropriation.