Then it happened; the final rattle of gunfire that would destroy the plane, and destroy them all. The plane lurched upwards and slowed. There was a huge crunch as the plane began to disintegrate. The rear of the aircraft where Kate clung huddled partly exploded, and then buckled and groaned. Yet, to Kate’s surprise she was not spinning down. She could not hear the crunch and splinter of the plane as it continued to fall apart. There were no bullets spraying in, just the sound of the engines and the wind. Even stranger, Hector was yelling in triumph.
‘What happened?’ yelled Kate.
‘I think Hector managed to reverse the plane into the fighter,’ Mum yelled back.
‘You can’t reverse a plane,’ shouted Kate.
Yet that was exactly what Hector had managed to do. He was trying to avoid the fighter, but by pulling up sharply he had slowed the large plane. The fighter had simply run into the back of them.
‘I think the fighter crashed into the rear of our plane,’ yelled Kate.
‘Yes,’ shouted Mum, ‘radical braking. Your father has managed to get several cars to run into the back of our car at roundabouts. It’s probably genetic.’
‘Is Dad OK?’ Kate asked. It seemed strange, but when death seemed imminent, even her father laid in her mother’s arms was something she could ignore. Now she was worried.
‘He has muttered a few things. I think he’s just hit his head.’
‘Kate dear,’ shouted Mum after a pause, ‘things don’t look too good. When I said parachutes I was rather hoping we would parachute to safety. It never occurred to me that you’d use them as a weapon. Are there any left?’
Kate just shook her head. Their problems were definitely not over. One engine was on fire and the other was leaving a dark trail of smoke across the sky. Added to this, Kate had just noticed that there were other planes around them. She raced forward to the cockpit. The best place for her now was at Hector’s side.
Hector, rather annoyingly, was in a very good mood.
‘It’s a Typhoon,’ he explained.
‘What?’ questioned Kate.
‘It’s a Royal Air Force plane,’ said Hector, pointing to the plane on the starboard side. ‘Fly by wire, carbon fibre.’
Hector’s wild unfettered enthusiasm and simple joy at being near a Royal Air Force vacuum cleaner, that by some accident of design could fly, left Kate feeling exasperated.
‘And that one,’ said Hector, pointing to their port side, ‘is another type of jet fighter, but it’s not British. I think it’s american. It might be a Raptor. They’ve got vectored thrust. That means the power is directed.’
‘Hector,’ shouted Kate, ‘why is this good?’
‘I think they’re here to protect us,’ explained Hector. He went on to demonstrate his enthusiasm by waving wildly to both of the pilots. As far as Kate could see they were waving back.
‘You don’t think they’re a bit late,’ said Kate, ‘in case you hadn’t noticed the last plane that was trying to shoot us out of the sky was rammed by the highly dangerous pilot I’m sitting next to. It wasn’t shot down by those two, and the other one that was trying to kill us might come back.’
‘No,’ said Hector, still wildly cheerful, ‘that old fighter would never dare attack with these two jets near us.’
This was undoubtedly true. Unfortunately, there was very little either of the planes could do to help them stay in the air. They were losing height; the fire in the starboard engine was getting worse and spreading down the wing. When Kate looked at the starboard wing she could see that quite a bit of it was missing.
The good news was that all of the port wing was still there, even if there were quite a few holes ripped in it. The even better news was that Kate could see that the two jet fighters were leading them to an airfield. It had bright lights and what looked like a lot of fire engines judging by the blue and red flashing lights.
‘Oh no,’ thought Kate, ‘Hector loves fire engines, he’ll probably die of happiness before he lands the plane.’
As they neared the airfield Kate could see the roads surrounding them were crammed with cars and people. They had all stopped to watch their stricken, flaming aircraft attempt its desperate landing.
Kate spent the next few seconds looking over the controls. She tried to ignore the fact that the starboard engine was now fully alight and had stopped spinning completely. She decided to lower the landing gear early so that if she got it wrong she would have time for another attempt. She did not think there was any possibility that Hector might turn the aircraft around for a second attempt at landing. They only had one chance!
Nothing happened. Kate knew she picked the correct controls because she had raised the landing gear earlier after her mother’s eccentric time in the cockpit. Kate moved the switch to lift the landing gear up and then pressed the switch down again.
‘Come on,’ shouted Kate in frustration, as she desperately waggled the switch back and forth.
Kate looked around the cockpit at the holes, tattered cloth, smashed glass and shattered metal, and decided that her attempts were futile.
Hector had seen the problem and reassured Kate that he landed his plane in the computer game without any landing gear lots of times. At first this had simply been because he forgot to put the landing gear down, but later he landed without landing gear just because it was fun. The main thing, he explained to her, was not to hit the ground too hard, but to skid along. A tumble and spin on the ground was always something that lost you points.
‘Well,’ said Kate, ‘at least if you crash this you won’t lose any points. Your head may no longer be connected to your bottom via the middle part of your body, but at least your score on the computer game won’t go down.’
Hector spotted the sarcasm but ignored it. This was brilliant; this was better than the best daydream he had ever had; better even than the ones in religious education lessons. He was about to crash land a real plane and he was unsure whether to concentrate on the controls and the task at hand, or whether to carry on trying to count fire engines.
‘Hector,’ yelled Kate, ‘you’re looking at the fire engines. Concentrate on landing the plane you buffoon. If I live, and I have all my limbs, I’ll buy you a really big model fire engine. And in case you haven’t noticed the port engine is now on fire as well.’
‘Oh great!’ exclaimed Hector, as visions of a brand new favourite toy swam the into view in his mind’s eye, alongside the real vision of the rapidly approaching runway. He snapped back into reality because the plane yawed to one side as Kate lowered the flaps. Not all of the flaps worked, and Hector had to stretch to reach the pedals for the rudder.
The concrete was racing below. It looked hard and unforgiving. There were flashing blue lights all around as the fire engines raced along beside them.
The landing was brutal, but relatively quick. Hector flew along the runway for quite some way before making contact. He did not stall the plane, but he certainly made it lose a lot of its speed before it finally made contact with the concrete runway. There was a crunch as they hit the ground, followed by a horrible deafening scraping noise that filled the whole aircraft.
‘See,’ said Hector cheerfully as the fuselage scraped to a halt on the runway concrete, ‘I said we’d survive.’