Sam 7, p.20
SAM 7, page 20
The Ambassador frowned. He was a new arrival. Horovitz had far longer experience of the United Nations.
‘I suppose we should be refused if we asked for an adjournment ourselves.’
‘We should, Ambassador. We can expect the vote in the Security Council to go against introducing this resolution into the General Assembly. Only the Americans could obtain a postponement.’
Of the five Permanent Members of the UN Security Council, two – the United Kingdom and the United States – could be expected to vote against the resolution. France would probably abstain. The Soviet Union and China would vote in favour. No resolution could be passed if a single Permanent Member were against it. Horovitz was well versed in the mechanics of Security Council meetings.
‘Would the British help us?’ queried the Ambassador.
‘By voting, yes. With seeking an adjournment, possibly not.’
‘And which other countries have asked to speak?’
‘Both the Saudi Arabian and Mauritanian delegates have declared an interest. It will be the usual charade.’
Horovitz was a realist. Speeches at Security Council meetings were set-piece affairs, often abusive, always predetermined. What really influenced voting were the preliminary discussions in the corridors and offices of the huge building. Immense effort went into the canvassing of votes.
‘I shall visit the American Delegation immediately,’ said the Ambassador. ‘One other thing worries me.’ He pressed his stubby fingertips together, showing the strong calloused fingers of a soldier who had risen through the ranks to general before he became a diplomat. ‘About the copies I am less happy.’
‘The photocopies made at the Hakirya will be perfect. We should have to circulate copies to the fifteen Security Council members in any case.’
‘Their authenticity will be challenged. Inevitably. The Arabs would claim the originals were a forgery. But there is always a feel about genuine documents. You, Saul, you are a man of culture, a man of the city and civilization. You would know if a porcelain cup or a painting had the quality of its period. Me, I have the instinct for the scraps of paper captured in a battle, markings on maps, the notes for briefings, and the way a fighting man folds these things to thrust them in his pocket. The guerrilla plans will ring true in that way. We must be able to show the originals.’
The Ambassador, reverting as he often did to his army ways, crashed his thick fist down on the desk.
‘Tell London they must be recovered. And we must secure an adjournment of the debate. Now, while I arrange to visit the American Ambassador, you go and break the news to Ben Maier’s wife.’
‘I am waiting to hear from London if there are any survivors.’
An idea occurred to the Ambassador.
‘Saul,’ he said, ‘I am a brutal, unfeeling soldier . . .’ Saul Horovitz waited, his expression displaying suitably attentive interest. ‘Suppose we sent Connie Maier to London. Could a bereaved and tearful widow extract Ben’s belongings from the British more easily than the Embassy?’
Saul blinked and hesitated, for once embarrassed.
‘Ambassador, I had the same thought. I have since dismissed it. The couple were married only two years ago. Connie’s one stay in Israel was to meet her parents-in-law. She herself is only half Jewish and wholly American. Her loyalties are to Ben, not to us. Furthermore she is a clearheaded, determined, wealthy girl. If she decides to see how and where he died she will. Maybe in London they can enlist her help. But my advice to her as a friend would be not to go. Only anguish can result. It will be like tearing the nerves out of living flesh. I could not ask her to do that.’
‘She’s a doctor, a pathologist. Doesn’t she spend her working life examining corpses that have been fished out of the East river?’
‘It would be a grave mistake.’
The Ambassador capitulated. ‘Handle it your way, Saul. You are the diplomat.’
If it was a jibe, Horovitz disregarded the implication. Back in his own office he read a telex from London that there were two survivors, both from the economy class, neither identified. Forty minutes later a Delegation chauffeur deposited him at Bellevue’s bleak entrance driveway. The hospital was doing good business, Saul reflected. There was a queue at the reception desk and the main hall was thronged. He decided to find his own way along the coldly efficient grey-green painted passages to the Pathology Department and was almost there when he recognized something familiar about a white-coated doctor standing conferring with two others ahead of him.
‘Connie,’ he called.
‘Why, Saul. Whatever are you doing here?’
‘Don’t tell me we have a voluntary patient,’ cracked one of the others, a man. But the joke died as he saw Connie’s expression change.
‘Saul, has something happened?’
Horovitz glanced meaningfully at the two doctors, who discreetly moved away, and against the background of the hospital’s continual movement, of patients being wheeled past on stretchers and nurses hurrying with heels tapping on the floor in staccato urgency, he outlined the little he knew. To his relief, and slight surprise, she listened almost as calmly as if a total stranger were under discussion. Only a tiny quivering around the mouth revealed her agony.
‘You said there were two survivors?’
‘So far that is all we know of. We do not know their names.’
‘Out of maybe three hundred?’
‘Thereabouts. If the plane was full, I suppose so.’
‘That’s a one in one hundred and fifty chance. Saul, I have to go there, go to London. If it was a one in ten thousand chance I’d go. He might not live very long.’ Her voice trembled.
Saul stepped forward, arms outstretched, but she pushed him gently away, shook back the tears and held his hand.
‘Take me home, will you, so I can pack. Hold on while I tell the department.’
She let his hand fall and hurried off. Not until they were in the limousine’s back seat did she cry.
‘I’ve had this premonition, Saul. Ever since Ben phoned me on Tuesday, and even more since you called me about the further delay yesterday.’
Saul Horovitz’s body stayed slouched exactly as it was, one arm protectively around Connie Maier’s shoulder, but his brain reacted as though a shot had been fired.
‘Ben phoned?’
‘Of course,’ She was indignant. ‘To say he would be coming on El Al from London Thursday. Today. Ben always phoned me if he was going to be late, even half an hour. This was the longest we’ve been apart since we married.’
It was a rule that Israeli diplomats never spoke of their travel plans on an open telephone line. Some rules were made to be disregarded. Not that one. The difficulty, Saul reflected, was that whereas Israel was at war, America was not and Connie was not. You had to be an Israeli to comprehend the nature of the struggle for the nation’s existence. He could not expect Connie to understand fully, not when the last outright military conflict had been back in 1973. But Ben . . .!
‘He’s a good husband,’ he managed to say.
‘The best I have.’
It was a brave attempt at humour and it nearly made her cry again. So she turned to practicalities. ‘Keep busy on the small things and you’ll forget the big problems.’ That used to be her advice to patients before she specialized. Now it was time to adopt her own motto. Activity would restore her self-confidence.
‘While I throw some clothes into a case, would you book me on the first flight for England?’
When they reached her apartment in Tudor City he did so. The first flight she could hope to catch was Pan Am’s Flight 2.
‘Economy is full,’ he reported to her. ‘Can you afford first?’
‘No, but my credit card can.’
By the time Saul drove her out to Kennedy Airport, Connie was dry eyed and motivated by the driving aim of finding the man she loved. After he left her, Saul returned to his office and drafted a short telegram to Tel Aviv and London for encoding. It said simply that he suspected a security leak over Ben Maier’s airline booking and would be investigating the New York end.
Afternoon in New York coincides with evening in London. As Connie Maier, Hugh Johnson, and a stream of officials, journalists, insurance men and technicians were inundating the airlines with last-minute transatlantic bookings, Jim Donaldson was forty feet up in the Victoria Station roof. The Fire Brigade’s hydraulic lift had not been easy to manoeuvre into position. But now its base was firmly jacked up. Even so its six-by-four-foot platform swayed slightly. And there were too many obstructions for it to be raised right into the roof. Melville had to support himself on a sagging roof catwalk as he cut into the hull of the plane. The problem was that hitting the roof had squashed the underside. Comparatively speaking, the frame around the rear cargo door was solid, and on one side of it was a huge circular alloy frame which gave the fuselage its shape and strength. But the stresses of flight are very different from those of a crash. The frame had collapsed as the fuselage broke apart forward of it, leaving the heavy cargo door hanging on a single hinge from the fractured top of the frame. The door was buckled and to work on the side frame meant removing it. Detaching the hinge would have allowed the door to fall. It took Melville, Donaldson and another fireman half an hour to secure ropes to the curved hatch, cut it free and lower it to the ground.
When this was done, Melville surveyed the frame.
‘You did say these boxes of yours are inside here, sir?’ he queried.
Donaldson consulted the diagram and craned his head up to look at Melville, sitting straddled on a girder, his head and shoulders inside the wreckage.
‘Should be,’ he said.
‘There’s a disgusting stench in here,’ commented Melville. His eyes were streaming and he felt as though he was going to choke.
Donaldson examined the diagram again. ‘The chemical tank for the rear toilets must have burst. It was located in the back of the hold.’
‘Trust my luck,’ shouted Melville. A moment later he called down, ‘Hey, would the boxes be inside a panel?’
‘Possibly,’ said Donaldson. ‘There’s probably a sign in red. They’d be fixed to a spar or a bulkhead with metal straps.’
Melville was using the shaft of his axe to hammer at a section of bent metal behind the frame.
‘I think I’ve found them,’ he said excitedly. ‘Painted red themselves, are they?’
‘Red or orange.’
‘I’ll have to cut the panel away. Pass up the saw, will you?’
As the other fireman held out the compressed-air-driven tool, Donaldson hauled himself up on to the catwalk and edged his way along to see what Melville was doing. Deprived of the comforting floor of the hydraulic platform, he suddenly realized how precarious Melville’s perch on the girder was. The damaged catwalk felt insecure enough. Far below he saw railwaymen winching out one of the last carriages. He shuffled along closer to Melville. The smell of the toilet chemical was rank and foul. His eyes began to water. Half choking, he said: ‘Be careful. Remember they’re both wired up; but the leads unplug.’
Grasping the girder he tried to get alongside Melville, who was using the saw, its blade screeching on the metal.
‘Let me get them out,’ he shouted above the noise. He was instinctively frightened of the recorders being damaged, even though he knew their outer cases were made to withstand immense heat and impact.
Melville switched the saw off for a second, and half turned. ‘Better if I finish the job, sir,’ he said curtly. ‘I’ll hand them out to you.’
Five minutes later he released the first rectangular box and passed it back. Donaldson examined it. The ‘dayglo’ paint was streaked with muck. The leads hung loose. But it appeared to be all right.
‘Thank Christ for that,’ he exclaimed, noticing that it was made by Sundstrand.
‘I’ll have the other one out in a tick,’ said Melville.
While he was waiting Donaldson made an effort to survey the elevator surfaces of the tailplane. To his annoyance his view was more obstructed than it had been from directly underneath at ground level. Nonetheless he could confirm his general impression that the tailplane might have been damaged before the crash. To check this in detail would mean climbing among the girders strewn with smaller lengths of metal and pieces of glass – a time-consuming business. He decided to leave that to his airframe assistant. Obtaining a readout of the recorders was more important.
Ten minutes later he was safely back on the ground, clutching one box while Melville carried the other.
‘So that’s what the famous black box is like,’ said Melville ‘I’ve often read about it.’
‘The best witness we’ll ever have to what happened,’ Donaldson replied. ‘Thanks to your efforts.’ He hesitated. ‘When do you come off duty?’
Melville glanced at his watch and grinned. ‘Two hours ago,’ he said. ‘Six o’clock. We do two days and then two nights. This was my second day. I come on again at 6 p.m. tomorrow.’
Donaldson remembered Plowden’s order about rest periods. ‘What happens now?’ he asked.
‘I go back to Greycoat Place, write a report on the actions my watch carried out, and try to find a train home.’ He jerked his head towards the platforms and added. ‘Something tells me it won’t be running from here tonight.’
‘If you can help me again tomorrow evening I’d be grateful. The Chief Fire Officer has agreed.’
‘See you at six, then,’ said Melville cheerfully.
Donaldson thanked him again and hurried off, cradling the two recorders, towards the mobile police station to ask for a car. He had staff standing by at the Data Centre to transcribe the tapes, but had been worried in case the flight recorder was of the type that used a wire and took days to calibrate. Mercifully the Sundstrand did not. Furthermore, although it might have to be sent to the United States for its final analysis, the Data Centre had recently acquired the equipment to make a readout from the Sundstrand’s kind of tape. Within twelve hours he would have reasonably accurate information on a host of parameters: all the changes that had taken place throughout the DC-10’s flight from Paris and their times, its speed, height, headings, the G forces exerted on it, the angles at which its wings had banked, the degrees its nose had pitched up and down, the thrust the engines were developing, even the operation of the autopilot. From these, given patience and hours of painstaking examination, they could build a diagrammatic picture of the flight. Finally the cockpit voice recorder would reveal what the crew had said to each other at the critical moments. Tie these in with conclusions from eyewitnesses’ accounts, and he would have a fair idea of where to search for the causes of the crash. And he would know whether McPherson’s theory about the number two engine was likely to be right or wrong.
In fact, Donaldson reflected as he walked, all he would lack was time. His Department normally insisted on being allowed nine months to prepare for the kind of public inquiry the Home Secretary had announced. But if the Minister’s remarks to the press were anything to go by, that politician would be demanding answers this very weekend. So would the journalists. So would Atlantic Airlines. Unless the whole business was amazingly clear cut, he was going to be forced into a lot of stonewalling against intensive outside pressure. As he reached the police trailer, he was pounced on by Colin Sturgess.
‘There’s a very persistent young lady waiting. She says she saw the aircraft as it came down.’
‘Has she made a statement?’
Usually the police took statements and he sifted through them to see which would be worth following up.
‘Not yet.’
‘I’ll see her shortly. What’s more urgent is for a car to run these two boxes out to the CI Data Centre at Farnborough. As fast as possible.’
‘We’ve a patrol car standing by,’ said Sturgess, pleased to have anticipated this request. ‘One of your staff arrived a moment ago too, a Mr Hearn. He’s waiting at the corner with the car.’
This was excellent news. Dick Hearn was the Department’s flight recorder expert. Donaldson soon found him.
‘That was quick work,’ remarked Hearn appreciatively. Flight recorders were not always located so promptly after an accident.
‘Take care of them,’ said Donaldson. ‘Phone me if they yield anything spectacular.’
As the car pulled away, he regretted saying that. He had forgotten about his promise to Jane. Damn. Dick Hearn was bound to ring when he had gone. Dismissing it from his mind, he returned to the trailer. There was a more substantial favour that he wanted from the police.
‘Listen,’ he said. ‘We have a major problem over evidence. I am fairly certain that some parts of the aircraft became detached before it crashed. I’ve already asked Chief Superintendent Chisholm to search the area of the station. Unfortunately bits could have fallen some way back along its flight path.’
‘Let’s have a look at the map, sir.’ Sturgess stood up and pointed to the big illuminated map of London. ‘Whereabouts do you think?’
‘I’m going to ask Heathrow Air Traffic Control for as exact a plot of the aircraft’s track over London as they can manage.’
Donaldson replied, ‘They have the courses they ordered the DC-10 to steer. They’ll probably gauge its track accurately to within a quarter of a mile either side. There could be debris three to four miles back along it.’
