Cockpit

The third cup of coffee had been a mistake. Rachel had known that before she drank it, and knew it again when the interphone sounded just as she was trying to fold the little paper lid into the empty cup without getting coffee on her flight paperwork. She set it down carefully in the recess beside her seat and pressed the call switch. ‘Flight deck,’ she said, moving the empty cup away from her papers with the back of her hand. ‘It's Lucía. Sorry to bother you. I've got another passenger feeling unwell.’ The senior attendant sounded as though she were walking; Rachel could hear the occasional interruption of a voice near her. Rachel glanced at the clock above the navigation display. Nearly four hours since departure from Madrid, though the cabin had been awake and feeding people for most of that time. ‘Another as in the lady who was sick after lunch, or another altogether?’ ‘Different passenger. Thirty-one Golf. Man in his sixties, travelling with his wife. He's been complaining of a headache. Now he's a bit dizzy when he stands up.’ She added, before Rachel had to ask, that she'd persuaded him to sit down. ‘He says he's quite all right if people would leave him alone. His wife disagrees.’ Rachel asked about breathing, colour, alertness and any medical history the man had disclosed. Lucía had already covered most of it, but answered carefully, occasionally pausing to consult a colleague. She wanted to know whether they objected to using portable oxygen if his condition worsened. Rachel told her to follow the company's medical procedures, seek suitable medical assistance if necessary and keep the pilots informed. She wrote the seat number on the back of a crew sheet, with a question mark beside dizzy. There was nothing yet to be gained by treating him as anything more than an individual passenger who needed attention. When the line cleared, Daniel Hart was peeling the wrapper off the second half of his sandwich. He kept it on a tissue on his left knee, as if the cockpit were an expensive hired car whose owner might demand to inspect the upholstery afterwards. His coffee, unlike Rachel's, was still half full. He had the irritating ability to ignore it until the precise moment he wanted it. ‘Another one?’ Hart asked when she turned back. ‘Thirty-one Golf. Headache and dizziness. We had the woman in eighteen who was nauseous, and the teenager who said he felt faint after standing in the queue for the toilet.’ Rachel put the new details alongside the others, leaving room for an update. ‘Teenagers have been feeling faint after standing up since they invented them,’ Hart said. Rachel asked whether that was his considered medical opinion, and he gave her a dry look over the sandwich. ‘Put it in the report if you like.’ He took another bite of his sandwich. She checked that she'd written down his symptoms rather than one of the crew's guesses about their cause. The inside of the aircraft remained as uneventful as the outside. The flight management display placed them over a stretch of ocean with no distinguishing feature, the autopilot holding their cleared level. Engine and system indications were unremarkable; as far as its controls could tell them, the air-conditioning system was working properly. Behind them, more than two hundred people were sleeping, reading, eating, working and asking the cabin crew how much longer they had to Santo Domingo. The ordinary scale of that life always struck Rachel when she saw it at the start of a boarding. A cabin filled gradually, one person insisting that a bag would fit overhead if everybody gave him a minute, another asking whether she could move because the seat belt was twisted, a family assembling itself across three rows of seats. By the time the flight was in the air it had become an abstraction again, weights and counts and fuel and the number of meals loaded. Hart finished chewing before he spoke. ‘What have you got for cabin altitude?’ Rachel checked the relevant indications, though she had looked at them less than twenty minutes earlier. The cabin pressure and differential remained where they should be, the temperatures were behaving, and she could see no pertinent warnings. Hart asked whether the crew had reported anything about the aircraft itself. She told him they hadn't. He listened while she read the values, then folded the sandwich wrapper and placed it on the tissue. ‘Ask Lucía to keep the cases separate for now,’ he said. ‘Times, symptoms, where they're sitting. We don't want to talk ourselves into one interesting illness when it turns out to be three ordinary ones.’ ‘I've already started.’ She offered him the back of the crew sheet. Hart moved closer to read but left it in her hands, as he always did with another pilot's working papers. ‘Of course you have,’ he said, and went back to the flight plan. They were used to each other's competence. It had once made long flights pleasantly easy, the unremarkable ease of two people who could anticipate the other's next action and had little need to fill the hours by talking. They could still work together without discussion. On a simulator he could tell what she intended from the pressure of her hand on a control. At breakfast in a hotel restaurant, he could sit three tables away and act as though he hadn't seen her. She had flown with him twice since the investigation, both times because rostering had put them together. The first had been uncomfortable enough that the senior cabin crew member, sensing a quarrel she could not name, had tried to cheer them with a story about a passenger bringing a live chicken aboard in a shoe box. Hart had laughed politely. Rachel had kept her attention on the taxi chart. On this flight they had worked well together from engine start. Neither had suggested that meant anything beyond the work. She made a short entry in the flight notes, then checked the progress information. The wind had settled more favourably than the last update had promised. Their planned track across the Atlantic remained uncomplicated. In the corner of her awareness was the map of alternates they had reviewed during the pre-departure briefing, part of the quiet discipline of oceanic flying: knowing where you could go even when you had no intention of going there. ‘Did you get any sleep?’ Hart asked when the next stretch of checks was complete. ‘Enough.’ Rachel knew what he was about to say, and didn't give him the satisfaction of expanding on it. He called it a pilot's answer. ‘You asked a pilot,’ she reminded him. Hart tried his coffee, which had gone cold. ‘I was downstairs before six. Someone was moving furniture on the floor above mine. Either that or they had a very large suitcase and no wheels.’ ‘The hotel has lifts.’ ‘You'd think.’ He set the cup back in its holder, and for a while they attended to the ordinary work of the flight. She remembered Hart years earlier turning an uneventful night crossing into a running discussion of terrible airport hotels, gradually adding one invented detail too many until she'd caught him trying not to smile. She had learnt an extraordinary amount from him during those years, mostly about flying and some of it so incidental she'd recognised its value only much later: how to speak to a controller who was too busy for a long explanation, when to ask for help, why a junior crew member might hesitate before telling the flight deck that something was wrong. On the last subject he'd been especially good. Make yourself the kind of captain someone can interrupt, he'd told her more than once. An alert sounded, routine and unrelated to the cabin. Hart attended to the relevant message while Rachel cross-checked the display. They dealt with it between them, made the necessary acknowledgement, and continued. The work had its own pace, sometimes several minutes of uneventful monitoring followed by a burst of very precise attention. Even in the quiet portions there were things to prepare or review. Rachel preferred not to sit still long enough for her mind to return to old grievances. Lucía called again twenty-seven minutes later. Rachel had changed the empty cup for water and was confirming the next expected position report when the handset lit. This time the chief attendant's voice sounded less amused. ‘Sorry, Rachel. Thirty-one Golf says he's better now. But we've got someone else complaining of a headache. Twenty-six Charlie. She asked for water and then said the light was hurting her eyes. We're looking after her.’ ‘Any nausea?’ ‘A little. She doesn't usually get migraines, apparently. We've asked her to stay seated.’ Rachel repeated the details as she wrote. Hart set down the paperwork he was reading and listened without interrupting. Lucía added that the teenager had recovered completely after sitting quietly for a while and had gone back to watching a film, an observation she seemed to offer as evidence that the earlier case might not belong in the same collection. Hart asked to be put on the speaker so he could hear Lucía's next report. She said the remaining crew were fine, though Inés had developed a headache after a poor night's sleep on the previous sector. Hart asked whether Inés had managed to eat and drink something herself. ‘Yes, Captain,’ Lucía said. When he followed up by asking about her own meals, she sounded almost cheerful. ‘Are you about to tell me to get eight hours' sleep?’ ‘Only if you can explain how you intend to do that.’ There was a brief laugh from the other end. Something clattered nearby, and a woman asked a question in Spanish. Lucía answered her before returning to Rachel, who wanted the time of each first complaint and the part of the cabin in which it had occurred. ‘You think there's a connection?’ Lucía asked. She sounded more serious now. ‘I don't know. It may help us to see where they all are.’ Rachel waited while the attendant found something to write on. Lucía promised a list when she had spoken to the other crew, and returned to her work. After the line cleared, Hart leaned across for a better look at Rachel's notes. His hand stopped short of the paper, leaving it to her to turn it so he could read. ‘You know what that looks like,’ Rachel said once she had shown Hart the newest entries. ‘Several passengers feeling unwell on a nine-hour flight.’ He read down the numbers again. There was no trace of satisfaction in his voice. ‘You were hoping I'd disagree?’ ‘I'd be delighted if it turned out to be something they served with lunch.’ ‘Someone will have eaten the same chicken. Ask about meals if it becomes relevant.’ Hart handed back the sheet, and Rachel marked the request in the margin. Catering remained a possible explanation, along with dehydration, fatigue, anxiety and illnesses neither of them was qualified to diagnose. She thought about the woman in twenty-six Charlie, whose headache had arrived after the others. With an aircraft this size, people developed ordinary complaints all the time. She had once diverted for a passenger with chest pain who'd turned out to have indigestion, and once continued with a passenger everyone thought had indigestion until a nurse on board insisted he required urgent treatment on landing. It had taught her very little about predicting illnesses and rather a lot about listening to people with better information. Hart was still considering the complaints when he said, ‘If the next one has a headache as well, we'll need to treat it differently.’ ‘We could ask Lucía for a proper count now.’ Rachel heard herself answer more sharply than she intended. Hart pointed out that Lucía had already offered to make one. She acknowledged it and reached across to check the next point on their route. ‘Rachel.’ He waited until she looked up. His attention remained on the paper between them, and when he spoke it was about the flight. ‘Run through the nearer alternates when you get a moment. No urgency. I'd rather have the information before we need it.’ She was already checking. Hart accepted that with a faint lift of his eyebrows and returned to his own work. Rachel compared the latest weather and arrival estimates, marking the details in the same compact handwriting she'd used for the medical cases. There were enough reasons to do this well even if the information never became necessary. Beyond the windscreen the ocean continued beneath a high scattering of cloud. Their indications showed the aircraft doing everything asked of it. Rachel adjusted the angle of the paperwork against the light and went through the figures again, leaving the cabin report where she could reach it when Lucía called.