After the Crash Read Online Free PDF Page A

dense crowd; as if the swarm of
humanity might stop moving and part like the Red Sea, so he could
run after Emilie. His vision went blurred. His heartbeat accelerated. His throat tightened. He knew the warning signs so well: the
tachycardia, the respiratory problems . . . He turned his gaze away
from the square.
    As soon as he did so, he began to breathe more easily.
His hands touched the pale green notebook again.
So Emilie had won, as she always did. He too was going to have
to confront his past.
    Marc took a deep breath and opened the notebook. Grand-Duc’s
handwriting was small and dense. Slightly jumpy, but perfectly
legible.
Then Marc began to read.
     
Crédule Grand-Duc’s Journal
    It all began with a disaster. Before 23 December, 1980, I doubt if
anyone – or hardly anyone – had ever heard of Mont Terri. I certainly hadn’t. Mont Terri is one of those little peaks in the Jura
mountains, on the border between France and Switzerland, a peak
located inside a loop of the Doubs river. It is a mountain where
cows are pastured, a long way from anywhere, with the nearest
towns being Montbéliard on the French side, and Porrentruy on
the Swiss side. Although it is not especially high – 2,638 feet, to
be precise – it is nevertheless not always accessible, particularly in
winter, when it is covered with snow. Mont Terri is known, above
all, for having been a Franco-Swiss département – known as Mont
Terrible – during the Revolution. Since then, it has been forgotten
by everyone except the hundred or so people who live there. When
the Airbus 5403 from Istanbul to Paris smashed into its south-west
flank on the night of 22-23 December, journalists opted to use the
name ‘Mont Terrible’, rather than Mont Terri. You have to look at it
from their point of view: ‘The Tragedy of Mont Terrible’ is a much
better headline than ‘The Tragedy of Mont Terri’.
    Perhaps people still remember the accident today. Perhaps not.
There are so many such disasters, and they are all alike. A few
months before I began to write this, a Boeing 747 crashed near
Tenerife in the Canaries, killing one hundred and forty-six people.
The year after the tragedy of Mont Terrible, on 1 December 1981,
a DC-9 from Ljubljana to Ajaccio crashed into Mont San Pietro,
killing one hundred and eighty: the only air accident in Corsican
history. But everyone has forgotten about that, apart from the Corsicans. Today, everyone remembers the crash at Mont Sainte-Odile
. . . until the next crash takes its place in their memory.
    At the time, in 1981, people were talking about a chain of disasters.
What a load of rubbish! All you have to do is look at the statistics. Trust me: I spent hours reading websites about plane crashes.
They are staggeringly detailed, providing numbers of deaths plus
other facts and figures about the moments before the final dive.
This may seem unbelievable, but the statistics show that in the last
forty years, there have been more than 1,500 aeroplane crashes, with
more than 25,000 fatalities. A quick calculation reveals that this
makes nearly forty crashes per year: almost one per week, somewhere in the world.
So it’s not surprising that everyone has forgotten about the trag
edy of Mont Terri back in 1980. One hundred and sixty-eight deaths
are now just so many specks of dust.
    At the time, I too didn’t pay much attention to the Mont Terri
disaster. That morning, I barely even registered the news. I was staking out criminals on the coast near Hendaye: a case involving the
embezzlement of casino profits, against a backdrop of Basque terrorism . . . It was pretty dangerous stuff, but exciting: my specialty
at the time. I had gone solo as a private detective five years earlier,
after almost twenty years acting as a mercenary all over the world. I
was nearly fifty years old, with a bad hip and a spine as twisted as a
caduceus. Each week of stake-out, I put on over two pounds, which
I