Apocalypse

3

‘Bimini this is November two-seven-six-four-charlie, airborne and turning two-seven-zero in the climb.’

Captain James MacDonald clicked off the transmit button on his control column as he pulled back on the Grumman Mallard’s controls. The foamy white spray blasting past the windshield and the rumble of water thundering beneath the fuselage gave way to smooth and subtle gyrations as the aircraft lifted off from the sparkling azure waters of the Florida Straits.

MacDonald turned and looked out of the cockpit windshield at the distant horizon, where the sun was sinking between soaring cumulonimbus clouds that glowed like the wings of giant angels.

‘Always looks good, doesn’t it?’

The voice of MacDonald’s First Officer, Sarah Gleeson, was followed by a bright smile as she gestured with a nod to the sunset as the Grumman climbed upward, its turboprop engines hauling the vintage airframe ever higher.

‘Sure does,’ MacDonald agreed. He scanned the horizon for other aircraft, then checked his instruments and turned onto a new heading, locking his VOR radio-navigation frequency onto Miami International Airport. ‘You’ll never get tired of this job.’

Sarah Gleeson had joined Bimini Wings just six months before, fresh out of getting her Commercial Pilot’s License and her water-plane qualification on the Grumman Mallard. MacDonald had been tasked with seeing her through her first year of flying with the company, a task that he had undertaken happily. After thirty-four years of service he enjoyed seeing the next generation of pilots coming up through the ranks.

He settled back into his seat, placed his flight notes in his lap and let Sarah handle the climb out and cruise. Miami was just sixty nautical miles away across the Florida Straits on their westerly heading. Sitting behind them in the passenger cabin were a dozen scientists returning home after some kind of fieldwork exercise out on the coral reefs near Bimini, probably conservationists or some such.

‘Last chartered trip of the afternoon,’ Sarah said. ‘You got anything planned?’

MacDonald shook his head. ‘Back home and a long shower.’

Sarah leveled the Grumman Mallard off at six thousand feet, MacDonald taking quiet pride in the fact that she ignored the autopilot and flew the aircraft by hand. A real pilot, not some overpaid geek trained to press buttons. He ensured that she trimmed the aircraft perfectly, then looked out over the ocean to watch the scattered clouds floating serenely past below, casting blue shadows on the crystalline ocean. Even after so many years flying in the Bahamas he still reveled in the unparalleled purity of the environment, especially on a day like today, with perfect conditions: CAVU, as they called it. Clear Air, Visibility Unlimited. Damn, even the thermal currents rising off the warm water were gentle, just swaying the wings in a—

The aircraft lurched to the right with a violent shudder as though something had slammed into the tail. Sarah instinctively kicked hard at the left rudder as MacDonald grabbed the throttles in anticipation of a sudden updraft or downdraft.

‘The hell was that?’ Sarah uttered as the aircraft settled again.

MacDonald scanned the instruments with practiced eyes, but saw nothing amiss.

‘Damned if I know.’

They both looked instinctively out of the windows. With Bimini far behind and Miami just over the horizon in the glowing golden haze ahead, they may as well have been a thousand miles from anywhere.

MacDonald held the controls with a light touch and felt the tension slip from his body as he relaxed again.

‘Probably just a hole in the air, happens from time to time.’

MacDonald knew that aircraft had been known to plummet hundreds or even thousands of feet without warning when the lift beneath their wings was snatched away by invisible pockets of low pressure. Even the giant Boeing 747s weren’t immune to such volatile events…

MacDonald’s train of thought slowed as he glanced at the magnetic compass on the instrument panel before him. Moments before it had been pointing rock steady at two-seven-zero degrees, dead west. Now, it was swinging gently between two-five-zero and three-zero-zero, as though unsure of itself.

‘You got a heading?’ he asked Sarah.

She glanced at her own instruments and shook her head. ‘Damn, no. Gyro’s out.’

‘Mine too.’

MacDonald glanced at the GPS screen used by pilots as a backup to traditional compasses, useful when dealing with multiple issues and in need of a quick position fix. But this time there was nothing to see. The screen was blank but for the No Signal message blinking urgently at them.

‘The hell’s going on?’ Sarah muttered, tapping the screen and pressing the reset button. The screen remained blank.

MacDonald keyed his radio-transmit button.

‘Bimini, November two-seven-six-four-charlie, radio check.’

A dull hiss of static hummed in their earphones as they exchanged a glance.

‘Switch to Miami Approach,’ MacDonald instructed Sarah, who dialed in the international airport’s radio frequency.

MacDonald tried again, twice, but heard only static in response.

‘This isn’t good,’ Sarah murmured, looking at her instruments.

‘We’re not in trouble yet,’ MacDonald soothed her. He gestured ahead out of the windscreen toward the sun hovering low over the horizon. ‘Keep the sun on the nose. That way we’ll still be heading due west and should pick up the coast soon enough.’

Sarah offered him an embarrassed smile.

‘Good idea,’ she said. ‘I should have thought of that.’

MacDonald didn’t reply, instead watching as his magnetic compass began spinning ever more wildly. The secondary instruments were also beginning to lose cohesion as though tugged by unseen forces. A dread began to settle on his shoulders.

‘What was our last known position fix?’ he asked.

Sarah thought for a moment. MacDonald waited for her to figure the math in her head, and tried to be patient.

‘Twenty-six nautical miles due east of Bimini South.’ MacDonald was making rapid mental calculations when Sarah spoke again. ‘Oh hell, we’re headed into cloud.’

MacDonald looked up out of the windshield to see a mass of cloud ahead of them, materializing as though out of thin air. His brain struggled to resolve what he was seeing, and he realized that the towering cumulonimbus clouds on the horizon must have concealed the cloud bank directly in their flight path.

‘Altitude!’ he snapped as he reached down to slam the throttles wide open. ‘Get above the clouds and keep the sun in sight!’

Sarah eased back on the control column and the Grumman Mallard climbed upward again. MacDonald looked back at his instruments and saw that the artificial horizon was now spinning crazily. The most vital of all instruments. Without it they would be doomed if they flew into the cloud.

He stared out of the windshield as a swirling vortex of dense cloud raced past the aircraft, the sunlight that had beamed into the cockpit beginning to flicker and fade.

‘Keep climbing!’ he shouted at Sarah. ‘Keep the sun in front of us!’

‘Maybe we should turn back!’

MacDonald hesitated for a brief moment before shaking his head.

‘We’re more likely to find the Florida coast than Bimini, even though the island’s closer. Keep climbing!’

MacDonald peered forward to search for the orb of the sun and felt his bowels clench as he realized that he could no longer see it. He searched desperately for the horizon as the cloud thickened around them, tinged with a weird green glow like nothing he’d ever seen before. A blue haze enveloped the wingtips and the nose of the aircraft, shimmering like an electrified sparkler. St Elmo’s Fire. He recognized the bizarre effect once feared by sailors in storms — electromagnetic fields hovering around the aircraft — and a sickening fear lurched through his guts as he realized that he had absolutely no idea what was happening.

A surge of G-force crushed him into his seat and he heard Sarah cry out as the Mallard plunged from the sky as though being dragged by a giant fist down through the clouds. MacDonald grabbed the control column and struggled to pull the nose of the aircraft up again.

Then, all at once, he saw the flight notes in his lap shoot upward past his face to land on the cockpit ceiling above his head. For a moment his brain could not understand what he had witnessed, and then it hit him in a moment of pure terror. They were inverted and already out of control.

‘Altitude! Altitude!’ he shouted to Sarah.

He heard shouts of alarm from their passengers as people and equipment were hurled around the fuselage as the aircraft spiraled down through the sky.

‘I’ve got nothing!’ Sarah screamed back, holding the throttles to the firewall. ‘All primary instruments have failed!’

The turboprop engines wailed as the Grumman Mallard plummeted out of control, the instruments whirling uselessly and the horizon lost in a thick swirling fog that enveloped the entire aircraft in an electrically charged halo.

MacDonald reached out, his arm fighting against G-forces far greater than the aged aircraft was designed to take, and flipped an intercom switch to hear his own voice trembling in his earphones as he cried out.

‘This is your captain speaking! Brace for impact! Brace for imp—’

A flare of golden sunlight burst through the cockpit as it reflected off a perfect blue sea, and for a brief instant James MacDonald believed that they had a chance. Then he saw that they were barely a hundred feet above the rolling waves. The glittering surface of the ocean raced toward his screen at two hundred miles per hour and then smashed through the thick glass to greet him.