Hostage by Clare Mackintosh

FORTY-EIGHT

30 MINUTES FROM SYDNEY | MINA

The plane starts to bank, the siren as loud and insistent as the panic in my head that tells me this is it—this is the end. I can’t breathe, a sudden, overwhelming claustrophobia made worse by the endless sky taunting me through the windows.

Whomp whomp whomp. It goes on and on, drilling into a head already full. Eleven years of bitterness, of anger, of the raw sense of failure that followed me home from training school and never left. If only I hadn’t swapped flights with Ryan, if only I hadn’t gone back to work after Sophia arrived, if only I hadn’t frozen that day eleven years ago. If I’d trusted myself, trusted my instincts. If I’d made a complaint, stood my ground. If only. This wouldn’t be happening.

Whomp whomp whomp. There must be a hundred switches in front of me, their unfathomable names etched in tiny white letters. FLIGHT DETENT. STAB TRIM. VERT SPD. F/D ON. One of them is the autopilot—but which one? I try to make myself look systematically, one row at a time, but my eyes dart around, losing my place. I can’t see it. It’s not there.

I pull on the headset. “Charlie!” There’s no time to waste on call signs and radio etiquette, and the siren’s loud enough to speak for me.

“I hear you, Mina—that’s the autopilot.” He could be telling me the kettle’s boiled, his voice is so calm. “Look at the top strip of instruments, right below the glare shield.”

“Charlie, we’re dropping.” In front of me is a large screen that shows an artificial horizon. Slowly, the plane is dipping to the left; the altitude readout on the right-hand side is dropping steadily. Nine thousand eight hundred, nine thousand seven hundred… Sydney stretches out beneath the sunrise.

“To the right of the top panel—”

Nine thousand six hundred.

“VERT SPD, V/S, HOLD.” I read the litany of white letters, all the time waiting for the plane to tip headlong into a dive we’ll never come out of. “A/P ENGAGE?”

Nine thousand five hundred.

“A/P ENGAGE. There are three buttons—you want the left one. L CMD. Press it.”

I press it. Instantly, the siren stops, the warning lights extinguished. I still don’t trust myself to breathe.

“Are you okay, Mina?”

“I—I think so.” My hands are shaking. “I don’t know what I did, Charlie.”

“It’s okay.”

“I had a panic attack. I didn’t mean to turn it off. I didn’t think—” I let go of the transmitter, my words as confused as my thoughts. I don’t remember what I touched, only that I had to be on my own, had to get Rowan out of the flight deck.

“Hey, it’s over. It’s all okay now.”

After I left training school, I’d continued to look at their website, continued to google for snippets of news from the small private airport from which they operated. It was how I learned that a pilot had lost control of their light aircraft. A member of the public saw the plane come down, but by the time the emergency services were on scene, the fire had taken hold. There were no survivors.

The instructor was Vic Myerbridge. His student was a new female pilot. Cass Williams.

When recordings of the plane’s transmissions were played at the inquest, it became evident that there had been some kind of a struggle, and although the coroner recorded death by misadventure, it was enough for the school to quietly remove the glowing obituary they had posted on their website.

In the months that followed, I was haunted by the knowledge that by doing nothing, I had at once saved my own life and caused Cass to lose hers. I had been spared, but I had none of the euphoria that should accompany a near miss: instead, I was held hostage by the weight of my guilt. Even without fighting back—without putting my own life on the line—I could have told someone. There would have been an investigation, Myerbridge would have been suspended; Cass would never even have been in that plane with him.

Instead, I allowed him to put his arm around me, to walk me off the airfield as if I were an invalid. I allowed him to talk over my head, to tell people I’d had some kind of panic attack. I allowed him to make me doubt my own memory.

I never told Adam. I couldn’t bear to see the judgment in his eyes. My own was more than enough to bear.

“Mina,” Charlie calls up. “We’re ready to start our approach.”

I think of the passengers back there in the cabin—the pregnant woman FaceTiming her husband; Lachlan and his parents; Lady Barrow; poor Ginny and her reluctant fiancé. My finger hovers above the controls for the PA, knowing I need to tell the passengers something but not trusting myself to give them the reassurance they need.

I press the button and fight to keep my voice steady. “This is your pilot speaking.” Let the passengers think I have everything under control; let them at least believe we’ll get down safely. “We will shortly be starting our final descent to Sydney, so please return your seats to the upright position and fasten your seat belts.” The familiarity of the patter calms me, and when I replace the handset, I look out at the vast sky ahead of me. I can do this. I think of the desperate phone calls I heard in the cabin—of the promises, the confessions, the declarations—and I know that I owe it to them to get us safely down. I owe it to Sophia, who I promised would never again be without a mother. I owe it to Cass Williams, who wouldn’t have died if I’d only had the strength to fight back.

I owe it to myself. I have to prove to myself that I can fly.

Charlie’s upward inflection fills my headset. “Mina, can you take us down to five thousand feet?”

My mind is momentarily blank, then I remember the ALT button, and I drop our altitude and then our speed. “Okay—done.”

“Look for a knob marked HDG. We’re going to use that to turn.”

I see it before he’s finished speaking—below the glare shield, left of the autopilot button—and I turn it a hundred and eighty degrees before pressing the button, as instructed. Almost immediately, the plane begins to turn.

“Good job, Mina. Remember I told you where the flap lever was?” I reach across for it. “Lift it up, then move it down one slot.” There’s a grinding noise and a thud as the flaps find their place, noises I would normally find reassuring. I picture where I’d be, had this flight gone to plan: walking through the cabin, checking seat positions, tray tables. Looking forward to my hotel room, to a walk around Sydney. Now all I want is to be safely on the ground.

“Four thousand feet.”

I do as Charlie says, repeating the instructions in confirmation. Heading zero-seven-zero. Three thousand feet. Flaps. Heading zero-three-zero. With each new heading, the plane makes a farther turn, until I can see the airport ahead of us.

“Look for a button marked APP,” Charlie says. “That’s our approach button. It’ll capture the localizer and the glide slope, which will take us safely down on an autoland.”

It takes me a while to find it—just below the autopilot button—and as I’m pressing it, Charlie’s already on the next instruction: to lower the landing gear. The handle’s in the middle position, and I pull it out and then down, the rush of air making a long rumbling sound.

“Mina, did you press the APP button? Is the bar beneath it lit up?”

I look at the panel. Nothing’s lit up.

“I pressed it, but…”

“You’ve missed the intercept. We’ll need to go around again. How much fuel do we have left?” I find the right button and read out the figure from the bottom screen. I picture Charlie, sitting at a computer in Brisbane, watching an LED light move slowly across the screen. There’s a long pause, and when he speaks again, the calm in his voice sounds forced. “Okay, Mina. Let’s try that again.”

“Do we have enough fuel?”

A beat. I close my eyes. Think of Sophia and Adam. Charlie hasn’t told me if they’re okay, and I don’t know if it’s because he doesn’t know or because he knows they’re not.

“It’s tight, Mina. I’m not going to lie.”

I take a deep breath. It has to be enough. We can’t get this close only to fail.

“Heading zero-nine-zero.”

“Zero-nine-zero,” I repeat once I’ve made the turn. We’re flying at three thousand feet, the air clear below us. The ocean is navy blue, tiny, white horses galloping across the waves. It seems impossible that we only set off from London yesterday; so much has happened in twenty hours. My tiredness feels as solid as me, a greatcoat draped around my shoulders, weighing me down, my alertness a sham fueled by fear, like the temporary burst of energy after coffee.

“One-eight-zero.”

“One-eight-zero.”

“Three-one-zero.”

I make the final heading, and the plane’s nose moves slowly toward the airport. I am not flying this plane but guiding it, and I wonder at the feat of engineering that allows us to maneuver several hundred tons of metal through the air, from one country to another.

“Now press the APP button.”

I press it firmly, releasing it only when I see the horizontal bar light up beneath my finger. In a few moments, I feel the plane turn and line up with the runway as we finally capture the localizer. I breathe.

“Flaps all the way out now, Mina.”

As Charlie gives me our final speed, the plane goes nose-down, the top of a glide slope that will take us to the runway. I sit on my hands, knowing that the slightest jolt of an instrument will switch off the ILS.

Parallel runways protrude into Botany Bay like a two-tined fork, and as we descend, I see that the left has been cleared of aircraft, the planes grounded on the adjacent runway. A bank of emergency vehicles waits to one side.

The automated countdown begins. Fifty, forty, thirty…

I’ve never been a religious person, despite my mother’s entreaties to join her for Mass every Sunday. But as the runway rushes up to meet us, bright-blue ocean either side, I keep my eyes on the center line, and I pray.