After the Crash Read Online Free PDF Page B

to spin
out into eternity those few seconds, going back over all the details
to the point of absurdity. That night, he did not realise at first what
he had found. He thought it must have been a corpse – the body of
a dead baby. But it was the only body of a passenger on the Airbus
that had not been burned to cinders. The baby was very young –
less than three months old. It had been ejected on impact, from the
front left door of the Airbus’s cabin, which had been partially blown
open when the plane crashed into the mountainside. All of this
was reconstructed afterwards by the experts, proved in great detail
during the inquiry, as they attempted to calculate which seats the
baby and its parents had occupied on the plane. Have no fear: I will
come back to this shortly. Please be patient . . .
    Mouchot, the young fireman, was convinced that what he had
discovered was a corpse: after all, the baby had been covered with
snow for more than an hour. And yet, when he bent over it, he saw
that the child – its face, its hands, its fingers – was hardly even blue.
The body was lying about a hundred feet from the blaze. It had
been kept warm by the protective heat of the burning cabin. The
young fireman quickly carried out mouth-to-mouth resuscitation,
exactly as he had been taught, followed by a very gentle cardiac
massage. He could never have believed he would be able to save a
newborn baby, particularly in conditions such as these.
    The baby was breathing again, weakly. In the minutes that followed, the emergency services took care of the rest. Afterwards, the
doctors confirmed that it was the fire in the clearing, the heat produced by the molten cabin, that had saved the infant – a little girl
with blue eyes, very blue eyes for one so young, probably European
to judge from her pale skin. She had been ejected far enough from
the plane not to be burned alive, but close enough to benefit from
the protection of the fire’s warmth. What had consumed the other
passengers, including the child’s parents, had saved her life. That
was what the doctors said to explain the miracle.
    Because it truly was a miracle!
Most of the national newspapers finished their special report on
the disaster late that night; they could not wait for the emergency
services’ verdict. Only one paper, the Est Républicain , took the risk
of waiting longer, of holding the presses, of making its staff stay up
even later, of sending out a general alert. A good editor’s hunch,
probably. The Est Républicain had at its disposal an army of freelancers in every corner of the Jura mountains, and they hung about in
front of hospitals, by police cars . . . News of the miracle first began
to spread at about 2 a.m. In its edition of 23 December, 1980, the Est Républicain was able to use the headline on its front page: The
Miracle of Mont Terrible . Alongside the photograph of the burntout fuselage, the newspaper published a colour photograph of the
baby being held by a fireman in front of the Belfort-Montbéliard
hospital. The brief caption told the story: The Airbus 5403, flying
from Istanbul to Paris, crashed into Mont Terri, on the Franco-Swiss
border, last night. Of the 169 passengers and flight crew on board, 168
were killed upon impact or perished in the flames. The sole survivor was
a baby, three months old, thrown from the plane when it collided with
the mountainside, before the cabin was consumed by fire.
France awoke to the news of this tragedy. In every household in
the country, the orphan discovered in the snow moved people to
tears. That morning, the Est Républicain ’s scoop was taken up by all
the other newspapers, all the radio stations and television channels.
Perhaps you can recall it now? The wave of hot tears that rained
down in an outpouring of national grief.
One detail remained. The newspaper had published a picture of
the miracle child, but not her name. It was difficult, at two in the