Sam 7, p.17
SAM 7, page 17
Even Thompson’s wide experience did not prepare him for the interior of the station. He had seen fires before and he knew the kind of inferno that a carpet factory or a timber store can become. He had seen dead and wounded before too – more of them on the beat in the East End of London when he was a constable in fact, than during his time as a commando. Nonetheless, when a railway police constable let him through the gates on to the Chatham side concourse, the scene took his breath away. Ranged across the black tarmac were rows of injured, some lying on stretchers, some on the ground: four rows altogether, with a medical team working its way along each in the gloom of the unlit interior. Drifting smoke obscured the roof, keeping out the daylight; presumably the fire risk precluded using electric lights. Everything was smutted and dirty, while the makeshift nature of the whole arrangement reminded him of an old print he had once seen of Florence Nightingale toiling among lines of wounded at Scutari in the Crimean War. As Thompson watched, a young doctor, realizing that one casualty had died, briefly felt for a pulse in the wrist and, gently examined the eyes. Then he drew a blanket over the corpse’s head and quickly wrote out a death certificate which he tied to the body. A moment later two ambulancemen bore the stretcher away. Thompson saw that the corpse’s feet, protruding from beneath the blanket, were burnt. He stepped across and asked where the Senior Medical Officer was.
‘I thought we’d saved that one,’ the doctor murmured. ‘I really thought we had.’
‘The SMO,’ Thompson repeated quietly.
‘Oh. . . . In the buffet place, I expect. He’s set up an office there.’
Thompson walked round to the buffet, with its plastic counter and stools, where less than two hours ago travellers had been drinking tea and coffee. The Senior Medical Officer, dressed in a white coat, was with another ambulance officer. Over to one side a constable sat at one of the small tables, a casualty logbook in front of him, in which he had been recording details of people, given immediate first aid and then discharged. The doctor glanced up as Thompson entered.
‘How’s it going?’ Thompson asked.
‘Not much for your man to do, unhappily. Nearly all the injuries were treating now are serious, a lot of skull fractures. Some die before we can get them to an ambulance.’
‘I saw one,’ said Thompson. ‘By the way, the Home Secretary is due in a few minutes.’
‘It’s his colleague the Health Minister I’d like a few quiet words with,’ said the senior doctor vehemently. ‘The ambulance service is magnificent, simply magnificent. But we just do not have the hospital facilities in central London to cope with this scale of disaster. The Health Service is too overloaded, permanently overloaded. Not to mention overworked and underpaid.’
‘It’s true,’ added the ambulance officer. ‘We’ve just heard the control at Waterloo arranging transfers of patients to Crawley in order to clear beds in London hospitals. Crawley in Sussex! Thirty odd miles away.’
‘And meanwhile,’ said the doctor, ‘cases needing immediate surgery are lying out there on the ground, waiting. You know something, Commander, I was a registrar at the Westminster during the Blitz. We used to accept eighty to a hundred major casualties a night then, every night, night after night. As soon as they’d been patched up, we discharged them. And it was all done without any fuss . . .’
A young doctor appeared in the doorway, interrupting him.
‘Excuse me, sir. We’ve had a bad one brought out. Ruptured spleen, I think. Could you come and have a look?’
The Senior Medical Officer rose and hurried out, throwing a parting sally back over his shoulder.
‘Give my apologies to the Home Secretary. Tell him we’re a trifle busy.’
Thompson reflected that the hospital consultants showed little sign of losing their long-standing antipathy to the government. He reckoned that if he bothered to make the calculations, which he never did, he would find himself working equally long hours and probably for less pay. Certainly, the coming weekend was going to be yet another duty one, without much sleep either. He shrugged his shoulders and then strode out to visit the mortuary, leaving the documentation constable, who had been watching him, wondering what exactly went on inside the boss’s head.
The temporary mortuary, hidden by screens bearing cheerful posters advertising ‘Goldenrail Holidays’ and seaside resorts, was curiously less gruesome than the casualty clearing area. The corpses lay on stretchers, covered in a variety of blankets, which Thompson guessed had come from as wide a variety of organizations as their colours. Two WRVS girls were setting down another bundle as he reached the trestle table where a sergeant and a constable were writing up a casualty book. The sergeant stood up.
‘Were trying to label each body sir, but there are only fifty labels in these incident boxes.’ He pointed to a black plywood container, full of an assortment of notebooks, pads of forms, cards, pens, pencils, string and maps.
‘You name it and it’s in the box, but not enough, sir. We’re on the last of the labels now.’
Thompson picked up one. It was simple enough. The front had spaces for the date, time, place found, name and address of the casualty and a signature, while the back was ruled in lines for a list of property found on the person.
‘Nip across to Inspector Sturgess in the caravan. If he hasn’t any more, then get railway luggage labels and use them.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘There’s a firm of undertakers who specialize in air crashes setting up a full-scale mortuary. They should be moving this lot out during the night with luck, before the rest of the world wakes up in the morning.’
The sergeant saluted and then, as Thompson moved off, murmured morbidly to the constable, ‘Only hope I’m never a passenger who ends up as a railway parcel.’
‘Express freight to heaven,’ said the constable with a show of cynicism. In fact his mouth was still bitter from the vomit that had welled up inside him as he had checked the possessions on a badly mutilated corpse.
‘More like hell in here,’ replied the sergeant, who liked to have the last word.
Finally Thompson passed through the arch between the two parts of the station. He found Chisholm deep in discussion with Plowden, the Chief Fire Officer. A dozen or so railway police were cordoning off an area near the arch with portable barriers and white tape. Beyond them the wreck was so totally changed by the fire that Thompson simply stood and stared at it for a full half-minute. Where before objects had been recognizable, if twisted and torn, as girders, or pieces of fuselage, now there was a charred mass of molten metal, all collapsed inwards on itself at what had obviously been the centre of the blaze. Over to the left, on the platforms where the tail end of the aircraft had fallen, the destruction was less. Swathes of foam lying over it, slowly dissipating, testified to the effectiveness of this method of firefighting. From what he could see, the forward end of the plane, up against the hotel and the side of the station, was also little affected.
‘That centre section’s where most of the fuel lay. Nothing could have saved it,’ commented Plowden, reading his thoughts, ‘Nor my men.’ His voice was savage. ‘I lost two dead and three badly burned in the eighteen minutes the fire lasted. If there’s a devil in creation, that’s the kind of work he gets up to.’
He pushed his big white helmet back on his head and wiped the sweat off his face.
‘It’s going to be a foul job bringing the bodies out too,’ he said. ‘There’s hardly enough left of some of them to put on a stretcher.’
‘That firm Hanson’s have brought two thousand polyurethane bags down. Do you want some of my men to help?’ asked Thompson.
‘I’d appreciate that.’
At this moment Donaldson came up to them and spoke to Plowden. ‘I have a fair idea where the flight recorder must be. Can you spare the men to hack it out yet?’
‘There may still be a few people trapped in the carriages who are alive, ones who were away from the fire.’ Plowden thought for a second. ‘All right. I’ve enough men. You can have Melville and his two crews again.’
‘Have you any clues as to why the aircraft came down yet?’ Thompson asked, mindful of the inevitable reporters’ questions that he would be facing soon.
‘Not really,’ said Donaldson, ‘and in any case I shall be extremely reluctant to commit myself until we have the readout from the flight recorder and, of course, the cockpit voice recorder. Incidentally, I suppose you do know that some radio news bulletins are claiming the pilot reported an explosion on board?’
‘Christ alive,’ exclaimed Thompson, shaken out of his normal self-control, ‘I did not. Thank the Lord you told me.’
‘Hold hard, Commander. Don’t start jumping to the same conclusions as the press. A turbine blade fracture followed by disintegration of the engine could feel like an explosion to the pilot. Remember he’s a full hundred and fifty feet in front of that rear engine. He can’t hear it. What happens is that he feels the shock in the controls and sees violent indications of trouble on the engine instruments.’
As Donaldson was talking McPherson, the engineering inspector, joined them and said quietly, ‘Could I have a word with you in private, Jim?’
Donaldson excused himself, giving a parting caution to Thompson. ‘No matter what pressure is put on us, we have to keep a completely open mind as to causes until we have firm evidence. That’s one reason why I try to avoid speaking to pressmen myself.’
Donaldson followed McPherson a short distance away and stopped. ‘Well, Mac, what have you found?’
All the canny Scot in McPherson’s nature had come to the surface. He whispered to Donaldson like a conspirator, despite the clamorous noise all round.
‘Jim,’ he said, ‘I think you should have a wee look at that number two engine with me. It’s had a blade fracture all right. And it’s been on fire. But when it broke free most of the jetpipe went with it, and there are some very strange holes in it indeed. If it weren’t an impossibility, I’d have said that there’d been an explosion outside the engine as well as inside.’
6
News of the crash reached America in a matter of minutes. From Shellmex House in London the Chief Inspector of Accidents telexed brief details to the National Transportation Safety Board in Federal Office Building 10 on Independence Avenue in Washington. He did so as the air traffic controllers at Heathrow had confirmed that the aircraft concerned was Atlantic Airlines Flight 260. Simultaneously the Deputy Inspector telephoned the Federal Aviation Authority’s representative in London, Colonel Harrison Daly, US Air Force (Retd), at the American Embassy. Thus it was barely midday in Washington when Daly’s call came through to the FAA building where copies of the telex message were already being circulated. Daly was told that accident investigators from both the FAA and the Safety Board were to leave that evening on the Pan Am flight direct to London from Dulles Airport. Under the terms of the Chicago Convention representatives from both the State of registry and the crashed aircraft and the State of manufacture are always invited to participate in the inquiry, though its overall direction rests with the authorities of the country where the accident occurs. In other words, the British would run the show. But Daly’s final words to his Washington office were prophetic. ‘Send the best guys you can. There’s going to be one helluva sensitive situation here, particularly with Atlantic’s safety record.’
At the same time cables and telex messages were landing in other parts of the United States. At the McDonnell Douglas plant near Los Angeles, where the intensive publicity given by the British press to the DC-10 disaster outside Paris in 1974 still rankled, technicians were ordered to fly to Britain. On Wall Street all airline shares dropped, and Atlantic Airlines’ own stock plummeted ten points in as many minutes and continued to slide until the close of business. Meanwhile, airline insurance brokers hastily checked to see what proportion of the DC-10’s value was re-insured with the London market – the hull alone carried a $20 million tag. Under the Montreal Agreement, passenger liability compensation was limited to $75,000 per person, including legal fees. But should negligence by the airline be proven in court, individual litigation could easily jack the insurance payout to the $100 million level – or beyond. By mid-afternoon the New York brokers realized that with British Rail claims for property and passenger deaths thrown in, they could be facing the highest claims in airline history.
Hugh Johnson had just stepped out of the elevator and pushed open the glass doors of his outer office when a secretary ran up to him.
‘Mr Johnson, Mr Johnson, something terrible has happened, just terrible. The “Blue Riband’s” crashed . . .’
Johnson hadn’t been through the mill from pilot to president for nothing.
‘Okay, honey,’ he said. In times of crisis he called all women that. ‘Calm down. Let’s have the facts.’
She handed him the telex with its brief details.
‘We’ve been keeping a line to London open, Mr Johnson.’
‘Let’s have it then.’
For a while Johnson merely listened as the London manager, speaking from the city centre office in Regent Street to which he had returned at Donaldson’s insistence, explained what was known, concluding with the dismal news that the wreck was on fire. At this point Johnson interrupted.
‘I’ll be on Pan Am 2 tonight. Book a suite at the Connaught. For five, six days. And a couple of other rooms, too. Yeah, I’ll have at least one engineer and one airframe man along. Meet us at Heathrow. Have all the data with you, right. And the local papers. No. Times, Telegraph, those ones, plus the International Herald Tribune. No, sir,’ Johnson’s tone was emphatic, ‘the best public relations man in the goddamn universe is no good at a time like this. And don’t you make any statements whatsoever to anyone till I come. Understood?’
Johnson slammed the phone down, saying to himself, ‘Crazy bum, trying to tell me those aren’t local papers.’
Then he called his personal secretary on the intercom.
‘Honey. Book three seats on Pan Am’s Flight 2 tonight. Tell Walker to roust out the two best engine and airframe technicians we have. Call my wife and ask her to pack me enough clothes for a week.’ He had a sudden thought. After this he was going to need that guy Donaldson more than ever. Donaldson had a wife who might need persuading. His own wife could help. ‘Tell her she ought to come too. If she agrees, fix her a fourth seat. And before you do any of that, call Bill Curtis’s wife and see if she’s going to be home this afternoon. Don’t tell her anything. Say I’ll be out round her way and will drop in.’
Bill Curtis had been his co-pilot and chief pilot. Above all he had been his friend. A man didn’t have many such close associates in a lifetime. The least he could do was break the terrible news to Bill Curtis’s widow himself. Pan Am 2 took off at 7.00 p.m. There was just time to visit her, collect his wife and baggage, and catch the flight.
In London, in the residential districts near Victoria, it seemed as though the seesaw wailing of the two-tone horns on ambulances and police cars would never stop. Thursday evening was the most intensely social one of the week in a city which, for all the nation’s problems, had by no means lost the art of enjoying itself. But this Thursday was different. Westminster, Pimlico and Belgravia were totally cordoned off, the streets clear of all traffic except emergency vehicles. Buses as well as cars were banned: at Victoria and St James’s Park underground stations the trains were running through without stopping. Thousands of city workers were walking home.
The British Cabinet Minister ultimately responsible for such a catastrophe was the Home Secretary, one of the most senior members of the Cabinet. However, news of the aircraft crash and its disruptive effects had reached him more than an hour after it happened. The afternoon and evening’s speaking time in the House of Commons was scheduled for a debate on penal reform in which he was the government’s leading speaker and when word of the crash reached his staff, he had barely started. They dared not interrupt. Only after he had finished and sat down again on the worn green leather of the front bench, his fellow Ministers applauding his oration, did one of the House of Commons celebrated Badge Messengers, dignified in a black tailcoat with the thick gold chain and badge of his office heavy against his starched white shirt front, walk quickly down between the crowded rows of benches to hand him a folded note. A moment later, a worried look on his normally benign face, the Home Secretary rose to leave, whispering to the Leader of the House. ‘A bad crash at Victoria. I shall have to go. I can make a personal report to the House when I return.’
At the door to the Chamber he found his Private Secretary waiting.
‘There’s a police car outside, sir. The Commissioner will meet us at Scotland Yard.’
They hurried through the high-ceilinged Gothic corridors with their statues of statesmen in heroic attitudes, and reached New Scotland Yard in two and a half minutes.
‘That was quick,’ commented the Home Secretary to the driver. He made a point of always saying something friendly to underlings. Every man had a vote.
‘You should see the rest of London, sir. It’s chocka. Worse than New Year’s Eve in Piccadilly Circus.’
It was not long before the Home Secretary understood why. He was taken up in the lift to the first floor, then hurried along a bare passage to the Operations Room, adjacent to the Information Room where the first news of the crash had been received. The Operations Room was activated only for major emergencies. It had been constructed after a riot outside the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square in 1968 had come close to overwhelming the police force’s capabilities.
The room reminded the Home Secretary of a scene from a film, in which some mastermind sat on a raised crescent-shaped platform giving orders to subordinates while watching the world outside on a bank of television screens, In practice the ‘mastermind’ was the Deputy Assistant Commissioner Operations, who was standing explaining something to the Commissioner when the Home Secretary entered. Both men moved down to greet him.
