The Night of the Triffids by Simon Clark Page A

problem.'
        'What kind of problem?' He spoke almost dreamily, obviously still running through his own mental calculations.
        'I've lost contact with ground control.'
        'Is that serious?'
        'Yes. Very.'
        'Try again.'
        'I have. They're not responding.'
        I opened the throttle and the sharp cone of the fighter's nose lifted. The altimeter reversed its downward progress as we regained height.
        'We're climbing,' Seymour said unnecessarily. 'We need to land, don't we?'
        'We do. But preferably on the runway - not in someone's cabbage patch.'
        'You mean we can't land until we re-establish radio contact?'
        'Something like that,' I said tightly. 'I'm going to circle for a few moments while they - I hope - cure their technical hiccup.'
        And so we circled for ten minutes…
        Twelve minutes.
        Fifteen, sixteen.
        The fuel gauges crept towards that ominous red zone.
        Still no radio contact.
        And still no light beyond the canopy. Not even that dreary red sky. It lay high above the cloud we now swam through. The Javelin was like an eel slithering through the silt bed of a particularly mucky river.
        After seventeen minutes I told Seymour, 'If we stay up here much longer we'll have to get out and walk.'
        'Pardon?'
        'Don't worry, an old flyer's joke.' I eased the stick forward and the plane descended. I was going to add something about how to use the ejector seat if the fuel ran out. But in this murk, and bearing in mind that Seymour was a complete novice at flying, it might have been kinder simply to put a pistol to his head.
        With radio contact lost I'd have to rely on some dead reckoning to get me within eyeball contact of the runway lights. Before take-off I'd seen a couple of rocket flares fired that showed the clearance between ground and cloud was about a thousand feet.
        If I took this crate down carefully I could skate in on the underside of the cloud without any real danger of flying into the side of a hill or anything. While an altimeter at that height is no longer a precise instrument, the Gloster Javelin did have a brace of extremely powerful landing lights. Even at a thousand feet I'd be able to see if we were over dry land or water.
        Steadily, I took the plane down to the thousand-feet mark.
        I had perhaps seven minutes' fuel left.
        Any kind of landing in those circumstances would, inevitably, be a rough one.
        I had worked out that I'd flown in a large circle in my climb above the clouds. In the centre of that circle, along a line of radius of some fifteen or so miles, lay the Isle of Wight. It seemed to me that if I headed along that line at an altitude of around a thousand feet I would see the runway lights, and if not those at any rate the lights of towns and villages.
        But I hadn't counted on the weather being even filthier than before.
        Raindrops rattled against the perspex canopy like machine-gun bullets. The aircraft's own landing lights only revealed swathes of yet more rain that twisted and curled like smoke.
        It seemed that I had three options - at least, when it came to flying.
        Option one: to fly through the swirling rain and turmoil of winds that buffeted the plane.
        Option two: to fly in the utter darkness of the clouds.
        Option three: to eschew the clouds and darkness altogether for the dull red heavens above. (I use the word 'heaven' in the sense of a realm high above your head - if anything, that region above the clouds was more reminiscent of hell: a chillingly gloomy hell, at that.)
        But, in fact, my airborne options were rapidly decreasing. With my fuel indicators nearing zero and still no resumption of contact with ground control I actually had no choice but to continue skimming the underside of the storm clouds. I flew for a good thirty seconds or so at