`. ```htmlHe saved fifty thousand people. There is no record of it anywhere.Fourteen months ago Danny Kerr put a Hercules into the sea with its tanks dry and its outboards feathered, and forty tonnes of aeroplane went down in eleven hundred fathoms with the worst load he had ever carried strapped down in the back of it.
Nobody knows. No government, no service, no newspaper. Six people were on that aircraft and four of them scattered to the ends of the earth and will never say a word.
Now Danny pumps fuel at a moorland aerodrome in Yorkshire for a hundred and ninety pounds a week. He cannot fly, because to renew a licence he would have to explain what happened to the last aircraft he commanded. He has two rooms over a shuttered shop, a daughter thirty-one miles away who does not know he is in England, and — for the first time in twenty years — a life he has begun to want.
Then a solicitor's letter arrives at the house of the man who taught him to fly.
It is entirely polite. It makes no allegation against anybody. An insurance company has quietly been given the position of a wreck, and an insurer with a position on a hull it has paid out on has a duty to go and look.
They cannot shoot him. They are going to file him. And eleven hundred fathoms down, in the hold of that aeroplane, fifteen tonnes of something has been corroding since the day it went in.
Relentless, technical and quietly devastating, Cold Front is the second novel in the Danny Kerr series.