As I set off in my car I remembered when these huge airliners had come into service. Although they represented no significant advance in aviation technology — in effect they were double-decker versions of an earlier airliner — there was something about the figure 1000 that touched the imagination, setting off all kinds of forebodings that no amount of advertising could dispel.
A thousand passengers… I mentally counted them off — businessmen, elderly nuns, children returning to their parents, eloping lovers, diplomats, even a would-be hijacker. It was this almost perfect cross-section of humanity, like the census sample of an opinion pollster, that brought the disaster home. I found myself glancing compulsively at the sea, expecting to see the first handbags and life-jackets washed ashore on the empty beaches.
The sooner I could photograph a piece of floating debris and return to Acapulco — even to the triviality of the film festival the happier I would feel. Unfortunately, the road was jammed with southbound traffic. Clearly every other journalist, both foreign and Mexican, present at the festival had been ordered to the scene of the disaster. Television camera-vans, police vehicles and the cars of over-eager sightseers were soon bumper to bumper. Annoyed by their ghoulish interest in the tragedy, I found myself hoping that there would be no trace of the aircraft when we arrived and stepped onto the beach.
In fact, as I listened to the radio bulletins, there was almost no information about the crash. The commentators already on the site, cruising the choppy waters of the Pacific in rented motor-boats, reported that there were no signs of any oil or wreckage.
Sadly, however, there was little doubt that the aircraft had crashed somewhere. The flight-crew of another airliner had seen the huge jet explode in mid-air, probably the victim of sabotage. Eerily, the one piece of hard information, constantly played and replayed over the radio, was the last transmission from the pilot of the huge aeroplane, reporting a fire in his cargo hold.
So the aircraft had come down — but where, exactly? For all the lack of information, the traffic continued to press southwards. Behind me, an impatient American newsreel team decide to overtake the line of crawling vehicles on the pedestrian verge, and the first altercations soon broke out. Police stood at the major crossroads, and with their usual flair managed to slow down any progress. After an hour of this, my car’s engine began to boil, and I was forced to turn the lame vehicle into a roadside garage.
Sitting irritably in the forecourt, and well aware that I was unlikely to reach the crash site until the late afternoon, I looked away from the almost stationary traffic to the mountains a few miles inland. The foothills of the coastal range, they rose sharply into a hard and cloudless sky, their steep peaks lit by the sun. It occurred to me then that no one had actually witnessed the descent of the stricken airliner into the sea. Somewhere above the mountains the explosion had taken place, and the likely trajectory would have carried the unhappy machine into the Pacific. On the other hand, an observational error of a few miles, the miscalculation of a few seconds by the flight-crew who had seen the explosion, would make possible an impact point well inland.
By coincidence, two journalists in a nearby car were discussing exactly this possibility with the garage attendant filling their fuel tank. This young man was gesturing towards the mountains, where a rough road wound up a steep valley. He slapped his hands together, as if mimicking an explosion.
The journalists watched him sceptically, unimpressed by the story and put off by the young man’s rough appearance and almost unintelligible local dialect. Paying him off, they turned their car onto the road and rejoined the slowly moving caravan to the south.
The attendant watched them go, his mind on other things. When he had filled my radiator, I asked him: ‘You saw an explosion in the mountains?’
‘I might have done — it’s hard to say. It could have been lightning or a snow-slide.’
‘You didn’t see the aircraft?’
‘No — I can’t say that.’
He shrugged, only interested in going off duty. I waited while he handed over to his relief, climbed onto the back of a friend’s motorcycle and set off along the coast with everyone else.
I looked up at the road into the valley. By luck, the farm track behind the garage joined it four hundred yards inland on the far side of a field.
Ten minutes later I was driving up the valley and away from the coastal plain. What made me follow this hunch that the aircraft had come down in the mountains? Self-interest, clearly, the hope of scooping all my colleagues and at last impressing my editor. Ahead of me was a small village, a run-down collection of houses grouped around two sides of a sloping square. Half a dozen farmers sat outside the tavern, little more than a window in a stone wall. Already the coast road was far below, part of another world. From this height someone would certainly have noticed the explosion if the aircraft had fallen here. I would question a few people; if they had seen nothing I would turn round and head south with everyone else.
As I entered the village I remembered how poverty-stricken this area of Mexico had always been, almost unchanged since the early 19th century. Most of the modest stone houses were still without electricity. There was a single television aerial, and a few elderly cars, wrecks on wheels, sat on the roadside among pieces of rusting agricultural equipment. The worn hillslopes stretched up the valley, and the dull soil had long since given up its meagre fertility.
However, the chance remained that these villagers had seen something, a flash, perhaps, or even a sight of the stricken airliner plummeting overhead towards the sea.
I stopped my car in the cobbled square and walked across to the farmers outside the tavern.
‘I’m looking for the crashed aircraft,’ I told them. ‘It may have come down near here. Have any of you seen anything?’
They were staring at my car, clearly a far more glamorous machine than anything that might fall from the sky. They shook their heads, waving their hands in a peculiarly secretive way. I knew that I had wasted my time in setting out on this private expedition. The mountains rose around me on all sides, the valleys dividing like the entrances to an immense maze.
As I turned to go back to my car one of the older farmers touched my arm. He pointed casually to a narrow valley sheltering between two adjacent peaks high above us.
‘The aircraft?’ I repeated.
‘It’s up there.’
‘What? Are you sure?’ I tried to control my excitement for fear of giving anything away.
The old man nodded, his interest fading. ‘Yes. At the end of that valley. It’s a long way.’
Within moments I had set off again, restraining myself with difficulty from over-taxing the engine. The few vague words of this old man convinced me that I was on the right track and about to achieve the scoop I had yearned for throughout my professional career. However casually he had spoken he had meant what he said.
I pressed on up the narrow road, forcing the car in and out of the potholes and rain-gullies. At each turn of the road I halfexpected to see the tailplane of the aircraft poised on a distant crag, and the hundreds of bodies scattered down the mountain slopes like a fallen army. I started to run over in my mind the opening paragraphs of my dispatch, telephoned to my startled editor while my rivals were fifty miles away staring into the empty sea. It was vital to achieve the right marriage of sensation and compassion, that irresistible combination of ruthless realism and melancholy invocation. I would describe the first ominous discovery of a single aircraft seat on a hillside, a poignant trail of ruptured suitcases, a child’s fluffs’ toy and then — a valley floor covered with corpses.