There hadn’t been much in the way of flak on the run in to Turin, the Italian ack-ack guns always seemed half-hearted. They bombed the target from sixteen thousand feet, on the red markers. The weather had started to close in on the approach. The Alps were no longer beautiful—no longer visible, in fact—and as they turned for home they found themselves confronted by a huge dark tower of cumulus, looming high above them. Inside this monster there were flashes and sparks as if small explosions were going off and at first they thought it must be something to do with the bombing—or even some new kind of weapon that was being tried out on them—and it took a few moments before they understood that they were flying into an enormous, sinister thunderhead.
The turbulence was atrocious, rocking J-Jig around as if it were a toy aircraft. As flies to wanton boys. Or wanton gods. Zeus throwing his thunderbolts, Thor wielding his hammer. The fairies moving their furniture, Bridget used to say, a less vengeful interpretation for a kinder time. Some fairies, Teddy thought. On the intercom he could hear the curses ranging from Norman’s terrified Christian restraint—“Oh, dear Lord”—to Keith’s bitter “Fuck, fuck, fuck, get us the fuck out of this, skip.”
They were all agreed afterwards that it was worse than any flak they had ever encountered. Flak they understood, but this was something more primeval. Occasionally the lightning illuminated malevolent fissures and caverns within the dark mass. The turbulent air currents were random—bucking and bucketing them up and down or sideways—and Teddy wondered if the aircraft might simply break up from stress.
The outside temperature dropped dramatically and ice started to form on the wings. Ice was a fierce enemy, it could appear rapidly and sometimes without warning—several tons of it, freezing the engines and the controls and covering the wings in thick white slabs. It could make an aircraft so heavy that it simply fell out of the sky or broke into pieces in the air.
The intercom was alive now with involuntary “Jesus”s and “Christ”s and “Fuck”s as they were thrown around and, too, the murmur of Psalm 23, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,” which was interrupted by several gasps of astonishment as J-Jig was abruptly ejected from the thunderhead only to find herself possessed by a phantom.
Touched everywhere by St. Elmo’s fire, bright blue and unearthly—an eerie luminescence that flared along the edges of the wings and even whirled round with the propellers, spinning off them and making strange feathery trails in the darkness, like ghostly Catherine wheels. It was “dancing” between the tips of his guns, Kenny reported from the rear. “Up here too,” from the mid-upper.
The strange phenomenon made Teddy think of the Willis in Giselle. He had seen a performance of the ballet when he was at school, a trip to the Royal Opera House organized by the music master. The dancers had been lit by the same rather sinister and otherworldly blue light that was now attracted to J-Jig. Looking back, it had been an odd choice for a class of boisterous thirteen-year-old public-school boys. His father, when told, had raised an eyebrow and asked the master’s name (“An admirer of Wilde, I expect”) and even Sylvie, with her love of Art, had questioned them being exposed to this rather “fey” choice, as she put it, when usually the only time they left the school grounds was to go to an away rugby match. Afterwards Teddy had nightmares, dreaming that the spectral women had their hands on him and were trying to drag him down into some dark, unknown place.
The blue fire finally flickered and died and the starboard outer engine began to start and stutter with vibration before running wild. Teddy had just feathered it when the troublesome port inner also began to vibrate. It sounded as if it was going to shake itself free from the aircraft altogether. They would probably be better off without it.
Teddy told Mac to draw up a new flight plan that would take them the quickest way home. The storm had left their magnetic instruments useless and Mac had to use dead reckoning to plot a new course, but not before the port inner decided to catch fire. Give me a break, Teddy thought, pushing the throttles forward to take them into a steep dive (“Hang on, everyone!”) that had the welcome effect of not only extinguishing the flames but also dislodging the ice on the wings. Every cloud had a silver lining, he thought. Conversely, every silver lining was in a cloud.
The starboard outer was now smoking and a few minutes later Keith reported seeing flames and then without warning the engine exploded, the force almost flipping the aircraft over. A spate of “Jesus Christ”s and “Fucking hell”s on the intercom and Teddy said, “It’s OK.” What a ridiculous thing to say, he thought. They were flying on two engines, fighting a headwind, still icing up, with no wireless and only dead reckoning to get them home. They were not OK at all.