‘GOOD EVENING, CAPTAIN Baines.’
F/O Don Tapps. Good. Greg Baines liked his co-pilot to get to work ahead of him. ‘Evening, Flight Officer.’ He’d flown this route twice with Tapps and had been reasonably impressed. University degree as well as air force background – and most reassuring of all, his hobby was rifle shooting. It was nice to know you had a crack-shot next to you on the lunatic visual descent into Hong Kong.
He signed on.
‘There’s a Notam, Captain,’ said Tabbs;
Baines moved quickly to the noticeboard – notices to airmen are extremely important.
‘It seems we’re going fishing,’ said Tabbs behind him, taking some of the importance out of the note.
A fish! A 700-pound tuna. On the main deck! That’d be the damn day!
‘No way. We need maximum fuel on this flight and I’m not having my plane skidding across the sky because of rogue cabin weight!’
Rogue cabin weight was a phrase Baines used often. He’d come by it from a friend flying jets out of America. One day, Cyrus Taite had said, he’d found acceleration along the runway was slow, the take-off was sluggish and the plane needed frightening amounts of gas to keep it at cruise height and speed. He’d landed with well under a safe amount of fuel remaining. At customs many of the passengers were found to have hand luggage filled with coins. They were numismatists, off to a coin convention. A ton and a half of unreported weight.
‘We are not taking that damn fish.’
‘There shouldn’t actually be a problem, Captain – we’re only three-quarters full so the payload on the operating empty weight should give us an AUW well within safety range.’
‘You sound a little – supplicatory, Tabbs. Is there something I don’t know?’
‘There was an item on local TV news, Captain. Earlier tonight. The CEO promised a boy he could take his fish in the cabin. He made the promise on air.’
‘Great.’ He knew Tabbs was smiling behind his back. Baines looked around the room to ensure there was no one else present. ‘So, old Benjamin’s talked himself back into the shit, has he? Hmm. Well, if this damn fish is coming with us, it’s coming under my strict supervision.’
He walked from the operations room, down the stairs and corridors and into the coolish night. Across the tarmac to the floodlit hissing hulk of NZ 207.
He was early, of course; there was still an hour to scheduled take-off. The fuel tankers still awaited his calculations before beginning to fill the wings; the hold was empty and the Honeycart was still at work servicing the toilets.
The refueller had seen him arrive and was hurrying across the tarmac.
‘It’s okay, Terry, no rush. I just wanted to check on something before I did the figures. I’ll be with you shortly.’
The refueller returned at a run to the depot – and probably his card game.
The ground engineer had also been bamboozled by Greg’s early arrival.
‘I’m not on my walk-round yet, Dick – just checking on a bit of cargo.’
The first wagon train of LD-3 containers was snaking towards the front cargo door. ‘Where’s this fish?’ called Baines into the headlights.
‘Yeah, on its way, Captain Baines,’ said Bo Unasa. ‘We reckon to get it on first. Bring it in through the fore cargo door, down to the service lift, upstairs to the cabin.’
‘Wouldn’t it be easier to load it straight through the back door into the galley, Bo?’
‘Never get it around the bloody corner, Captain.’
‘Holy mackerel, how big is this thing?’
‘Holy mackerel, yeah, good one, Captain. Well, I reckon this coffin could hold the King of Tonga.’
‘Coffin!’
Right on cue an orange cargo loader whined across the tarmac into range of the floodlights drenching the DC-10. On its low deck was a massive golden coffin. Greg Baines clenched his lips. Okay, this thing was travelling with the blessings of the company, but it may well not have the blessings of the passengers if they saw it! It would have to be curtained off.
It was nudged onto the platform of the loader. ‘I’ll go up with it,’ said Baines to the operator. He leapt on the deck and crouched beside the silver-handled box as it was hydraulically elevated the short distance to the cargo door. Silver handles – for a fish!
Baines helped to heave it forward on the lateral traverse assembly, then handlers trundled it off down the forty yards of the hold, on Track No. 2 roller conveyor.
Bo was right: it was bigger than the galley trolleys – which only just got around the aft corner themselves. This thing would have got stuck in the doorway. It just fitted, crosswise, in the service lift; Baines insinuated himself into the wedge of remaining space.
Seats are easily moved in a DC-10 because the craft was designed for conversion from passenger to full cargo in less than six hours. The engineers had already adjusted some seats and hearty Polynesians were lifting the coffin into place. Even for them, it wasn’t easy.
‘Jeez, tunas made of lead these days?’
Handlers were fitting straps to the tie-down points. Baines stopped them. ‘May as well see what we’ve caught,’ he said briskly.
They were keen. They were connoisseurs of fish. They lifted the lid.
There was a momentary glow, as if luminescence was escaping. The thing was a study of magnificence writ large – it smacked of Michelangelo. It somehow made him smile – with a pride at being on the same planet.
‘By gee, a few feeds in there, eh, Captain?’ Good old Bo Unasa brought the moment back to earth with a thump.
‘A thing of beauty is a joy for ever, Bo.’
‘Yeah? Don’t think it’d last for ever without that ice, Captain.’
They lidded the thing of beauty and Greg Baines knew he would think of it with joy for ever.
ROYCE WAS IN his element.
Hey, spooky! You go down this tunnel with hundreds of other people and you come out the other end on an aeroplane. There’s these really nice-looking air hostesses in blue and white blouses and skirts and silly plop-on hats, being friendly at the door, and smiling so much you can see their gums. Aeroplanes wobble a bit under the influence of 200 people, and that makes you think a bit. And there’s the odd creak that gets to you, too.
Anyway, you go in through the big wide door, and wham, straight away there’s your seat – 38C – because the door was down the back, and so’s your seat. You’re in an aisle seat and on the other side is this curtained-off area that goes for three rows of seats. You have a moment’s panic cos you can’t see the fish – which they’d said was going to go on early – and then you realise it’s probably behind those curtains. You can’t get to check this out, though, because there’s a stream of people bumping down the aisle between you.
An aeroplane, eh? His first aeroplane, and it turned out to be the second-biggest in the world. Jumbos were bigger, but not by much and no faster. And these DC-10s were supposed to have more bits of electronics. So that square-faced berk in the TV studio had told him, anyway.
People stuffing bags into overhead racks – which looked a bit like plastic breadbins – made him think about his domestic situation. He had yesterday’s socks and undies on, a shirt he’d been in for three days, and jeans that … well, jeans were immortal. There’d been toothpaste with the soap in the shower on the ship and he’d swilled with that, but hadn’t actually scrubbed his teeth for days. He’d need to do an intimate commodity buy-up when he got to Toyko. First thing he’d do with the $200,000 cheque for the fish was buy a toothbrush. And a razor – state of his bumfluff, he was gonna need a razor any day now. Then he remembered he had $US200 in his pocket. Hey, he was flush. He was as flush as Frank O’Higgins on the second day of the Westport Trots!
There’d been a bit of celebrity stuff when he first came on. The best-looking air hostess, with a name-badge called Sandra, had looked at his boarding pass and said, ‘Oh, so you’re the Young-Man-and-the-Sea guy!’ And two other air hostesses – both nice as well – had brightened up and widened their smiles even beyond their gums. He wondered if he should tell them that ringbolts on ships were also called ‘coastal hostesses’. And decided not – their smiles were so wide and friendly there wasn’t an ounce of sex in them at all.
‘Well, we’ll come and see you when you’re settled in, Mr Rowland,’ said Sandra. ‘We’re all dying to know all about what you’re trying to do.’ That’s how he’d known the fish was on here somewhere.
His plane trundled out in the dark, bumping over uneven surfaces on the tarmac, which made him think – what happens if we hit a pothole when we’re trying to get lift-off? The lights were low and eerie and the ‘Chief Purser’ and his ‘staff’ – the air hostesses – showed all about what to do when you crash, and pulled at bits of demonstration string and blew into demonstration nozzles and whistles. From the drawing in the pamphlet it all looked like a doddle – everyone goes politely down this inflatable slide, holding their shoes and smiling like drains. Where were the skid marks on the bottom of the slide was what Royce wanted to know.
HE COULD FEEL the urgency, the desperation, of the thing to get up into the air. There were cymbal crashes of wing-stress from the poor, labouring plane while he was blatted back in his seat by big sheets of impassable gravity. Hunchings, lurchings, swervings – hell, it was just a maxi version of hooning down Fairdown Strait to dry the washing!
Then it was gone … The earth, that is.
Eeha! They’d left the bumpy, pitted surface of the world and were up amidst the peerless fluidity of the sky. Within a minute he realised the sodding sky was as lumpy as a frayed cardigan. Jesus! Royce hung onto his seat – and his bowels – for the five minutes of the ascent, after which the plane levelled out and he heaved the same sigh as Bob Dodds gave when he was over the bar.