Читать книгу Аэропорт / Аirport - Артур Хейли - Страница 10

Keith Bakersfeld, Mel’s brother, was a third of the way through his eight-hour duty watch in the air traffic control radar room.

In radar control, tonight’s storm was having a profound effect, though not a directly physical one. To a spectator, Keith thought, it might have seemed that the storm, raging immediately outside, was a thousand miles away. The radar room had no windows. Day and night, at Lincoln International, ten radar controllers and supervisors labored in perpetual semidarkness under dim moonglow lights. Around them, tightly packed equipment—radarscopes, controls, radio communications panels—lined all four walls.

The pervading tone in the radar room was calm. However, beneath the calmness, at all times, was a constant nervous strain. Cause of the added tension today was a signal on a radarscope which, in turn, had triggered a flashing red light and alarm buzzer in the control room. It denoted an aircraft in distress. In this case, the aircraft was a U.S. Air Force KC-135, high above the airport in the storm, and seeking an immediate emergency landing.

The tower watch chief on the floor above had been promptly informed of the distress signal. He, in turn, had declared a category three emergency, alerting airport ground facilities.

The flatface scope, at the moment the center of attention, was a horizontal glass circle set into a tabletop console. Its surface was dark green, with brilliant green points of light showing all aircraft in the air within a forty-mile radius. As the aircraft moved, so did the points of light. Beside each light point was a small plastic marker, identifying it. Controllers moved them by hand as aircraft progressed and their positions on the screen changed. As more aircraft appeared, they were identified by voice radio and similarly tagged. Tonight there was an extraordinary number of aircraft on the screen.

Keith was seated closest to the flatface. His body was tense, he was concentrating, his face strained, as it had been for months. The green reflection of the scope accentuated deep hollows beneath his eyes. Anyone who knew Keith well, but had not seen him for a year or so, would have been shocked both by his appearance and his change in manner. Keith was six years younger than his brother, Mel, but nowadays appeared a good deal older.

The radar supervisor, Wayne Tevis, was observing Keith covertly at this moment, watching the signs of increasing strain. Tevis was ready, if necessary, to relieve Keith from radar watch, a decision which instinct told him might have to be made at any time.

His eyes on Keith’s flatface scope, Tevis drawled, “Keith, that Braniff flight is closing on Eastern. If you turn Braniff right, you can keep Eastern going on the same course.” It was something which Keith should have seen himself, but hadn’t.

The problem, which most of the radar room crew was working at feverishly, was to clear a path for the Air Force KC-135, which had already started down on an instrument landing approach from ten thousand feet. The difficulty was—below the big Air Force jet were five airline flights, stacked at intervals of a thousand feet, and orbiting a limited airspace. All were awaiting their turn to land. A few miles on either side were other columns of aircraft, similarly stacked and, lower still, were three more airliners, already on landing approaches. In between them all were busy departure corridors. Somehow, the military flight had to be threaded down through the stacked civilian airplanes without a collision occurring. The situation was complicated by radio failure in the KC135, so that voice contact with the Air Force pilot had been lost.

Keith Bakersfeld thumbed his microphone. “Braniff eight twenty-nine, make an immediate right turn, heading zero-nine-zero.” At moments like this voices should stay calm. Keith’s voice was high-pitched and betrayed his nervousness. The Braniff captain obeyed instructions. When a controller gave the order “immediate,” pilots obeyed instantly and argued later.

In another minute or so the Braniff flight would have to be turned again, and so would Eastern, which was at the same level. As part of the game, pieces had to be raised or lowered while they still moved forward, yet none must come closer than three miles laterally or a thousand feet vertically from another, and none must go over the edge of the board. And while all of it happened, the thousands of passengers, anxious for their journeys to end, had to sit in their airborne seats—and wait.

Behind him Keith could hear Wayne Tevis trying to raise the Air Force KC-135 on radio again. Still no response. The position on the blip showed the pilot was doing the right thing—following exactly the instructions he had been given before the radio failure happened.

The Air Force flight, Keith knew, had originated in Hawaii and come non-stop after mid-air refueling over the West Coast, its destination near Washington. But west of the Continental Divide there had been an engine failure, and afterward electrical trouble, causing the airplane commander to elect an unscheduled landing at Smoky Hill, Kansas. At Smoky Hill, however, the KC-135 was diverted to Lincoln International. It was soon afterward that radio failure had been added to the pilot’s other troubles.

Most times military aircraft stayed clear of civil airports. But in a storm like tonight’s help was asked and given without question.

Keith Bakersfeld was trying hard to maintain his concentration, to retain a mental picture of his sector and every aircraft in it. It required instant memorizing—identifications, positions, types of aircraft, speeds, altitudes, sequence of landing…a configuration which was never still. A controller’s nightmare was to “lose the picture,” a situation where an overtaxed brain rebelled and everything went blank. It happened occasionally, even to the best.

Keith had been the best. Until a year ago, he was one whom colleagues turned to when pressures built to unreason.

Now, colleagues shielded him as best they could, though there was a limit to how much any man could help another and do his own job, too.

Keith was on his own; Tevis, the supervisor, had propelled himself and his high stool across the room to check another controller. Keith’s mind clicked out decisions. Turn Braniff left, Air Canada right, Eastern through a hundred and eighty degrees. It was done; on the radar screen, blips were changing direction. He would not lose the picture; not tonight, not now.

There was a reason for not doing so; a secret he had shared with no one, not even Natalie, his wife. Only Keith Bakersfeld, and Keith alone, knew that this was the last time he would ever face a radarscope or stand a watch. Today was his last day with air traffic control. It would be over soon.

It was also the last day of his life.

“Take a break, Keith.” It was the tower watch chief’s voice. Keith had not seen him come in.

Keith knew at once why he was being relieved. There was still a crisis, and they didn’t trust him.

Wayne Tevis leaned forward. “Lee will take over, Keith.” He motioned to another controller who had just returned from his own work break—a scheduled one.

Keith nodded, though he remained in place and continued to give radio instructions to aircraft while the new man got the picture. It usually took several minutes for one controller to hand over to another. The man coming in had to study the radar display, letting the over-all situation build in his mind.

Coupled with tense mental sharpness was another requirement—a controlled, studied calmness at all times on duty. The two requirements—contradictory in terms of human nature—were exhausting mentally.

“Okay,” the new man said, “I have the picture.”

Keith slid out from his seat, disconnecting his headset as the controller took his place.

The tower chief told Keith, “Your brother said he might drop around later,”

Keith nodded as he left the radar room.

Air traffic emergencies of one kind or another occurred several times a day at Lincoln International, as they did at any major airport. Category one was the most serious, but was rarely invoked, since it signaled an actual crash. Category two was notification of imminent danger to life, or physical damage. Category three, as now, was a general warning to airport emergency facilities to stand by; they might be needed, or they might not. For controllers, however, any type of emergency involved additional pressures and aftereffects.

Keith entered the controllers’ locker room which adjoined the radar control room. The small cubicle with a single window had three walls of metal lockers, and a wooden bench down the center. No one else was in the locker room, and Keith reached for the light switch and turned it off. Enough light came in through the window for him to see.

Then, opening his locker, he took out the lunch which Natalie had packed before his departure from home this afternoon. As he poured coffee from a Thermos, he wondered if Natalie had put a note in with his meal, or, if not a note, some item she had clipped from a newspaper or a magazine. She often did one of both, hoping, he supposed, that it might cheer him. She had worked hard at doing that, right from the beginning of his trouble.

More recently, however, there had been fewer notes and clippings. Perhaps Natalie, too, had finally lost heart.

A picture of Natalie was taped to the inside of his locker door. He had brought it here three years ago. The picture showed Natalie in a bikini. She was seated on a rock, laughing, one slim hand held above her eyes to shield them from the sun. Her light brown hair streamed behind; her small face showed the freckles which always appeared in summer. They had been on a motoring holiday in Canada, and for once their children, Brian and Theo, had been left behind in Illinois, with Mel and Cindy. The holiday proved to be one of the happier times that Keith and Natalie had ever known.

Perhaps, Keith thought, it wasn’t a bad thing to be remembering it tonight.

Pushed in behind the photo was a folded paper. It was one of the notes he had been thinking about, which Natalie put occasionally in his lunch pail. This clipping was about continuing experiments, by U.S. geneticists. Human sperm, it reported, could now be fast frozen and stored indefinitely. When thawed, it could be used for fertilization of women at any time.

Natalie had written:

It appears you can have babies merely by opening a refrigerator door.

I’m glad we had our ration

With love and passion.

She had been trying then; still trying desperately to return their lives… the two of them; and as a family… to the way they had been before.

Mel had joined forces, too, attempting with Natalie, to induce his brother to fight free from the depression which engulfed him totally.

Even then a part of Keith had wanted to respond, to respond to love with love himself. But the effort failed, because there was no feeling or emotion left within himself, only remorse and despair.

Keith wondered again if Natalie had put in a note with his meal tonight, hoping that she had. There were ham and sandwiches, a container of cottage cheese, a pear, and wrapping paper. Nothing more.

It was his own fault; there had been no time. Today, because of the preparations he needed to make, he had left home earlier than usual. She had not asked why he wanted to leave early. If there had been questions, he would have had to invent something, and he would not have wanted the last words between them to have been a lie.

He had driven to the airport business area and registered at the O’Hagan Inn where, earlier in the day, he had made a reservation by telephone. In a few hours from now, when Keith’s duty watch was ended, he could go there quickly. The room key was in his pocket.