by Wilbur Smith
From the air traffic control tower there was an unobstructed view across the airfield and over the apron and service areas around the terminal. The observation platform below the tower had been cleared of all but military personnel.
‘ – I have road blocks at all the main entrances to the airfield. Only passengers with confirmed reservations and current tickets are being allowed through – no thrill seekers – and we are using only the northern section of the terminal for traffic.’
Peter nodded and turned to the senior controller. ‘What is the state of your traffic pattern?’
‘We have refused clearance to all private flights, incoming and departing. All domestic scheduled flights have been re-routed to Lanseria and Germiston airports, and we are landing and despatching only international scheduled flights – but the backlog has delayed departures by three hours.’
‘What separation are you observing from 070?’ Peter asked.
‘Fortunately the international departures terminal is the farthest from the aircraft, and we are not using the taxiways or the apron of the southern section. As you see, we have cleared the entire area – except for those three S.A. Airways aircraft which are undergoing overhaul and servicing, there are no other aircraft within a thousand yards of 070.’
‘I may have to freeze all traffic, if—’ Peter paused, ‘or should I say, when we have an escalation.’
‘Very well, sir.’
‘In the meantime, you may continue as you are at present.’ Peter lifted his binoculars and once again very carefully examined the huge Boeing.
It stood in stately isolation, silent and seemingly abandoned. The bright, almost gaudy marking gave her a carnival air. Red and blue and crisp sparkling white in the brilliant sunlight of the highveld. She was parked fully broadside to the tower, and all her hatches and doors were still armed and locked.
Peter traversed slowly along the line of perspex windows down the length of the fuselage – but over each of them the sunshades had been firmly closed from the interior, turning them into the multiple eyes of a blinded insect.
Peter lifted his scrutiny slightly onto the windshield and side panels of the flight deck. These again had been screened with blankets, hung over them from inside, completely thwarting any glimpse of the crew or their captors – and certainly preventing a shot into the flight deck, although the range from the nearest corner of the terminal was not more than four hundred yards, and with the new laser sights one of Thor’s trained snipers could pick through which eye of the human head he would put a bullet.
Snaking across the open tarmac of the taxiway was the thin black electrical cable that connected the aircraft to the mains supply, a long, vulnerable umbilical cord. Peter studied it thoughtfully, before turning his attention to the four Panhard armoured cars. A little frown of irritation crossed his forehead.
‘Colonel, please recall those vehicles.’ He tried not to let the irritation come through in his tone. ‘With the turrets battened down, your crews will be roasting like Christmas geese.’
‘General, I feel it my duty—’ Boonzaier began, and Peter lowered the glasses and smiled. It was a charming, friendly grin that took the man by surprise, after the previous stern set of features – and yet the eyes were devoid of humour, cracking blue and hard in the craggy granite of the face.
‘I want to defuse the atmosphere as much as possible.’ The necessity to explain irked Peter, but he maintained the smile. ‘Somebody with four great cannons aimed at him is more likely to make a bad decision, and pull the trigger himself. You may keep them in close support, but get them out of sight into the terminal car park, and let your men rest.’
With little grace the colonel passed the order over the walkie-talkie on his belt, and as the vehicles started up and slowly pulled away behind the line of hangars, Peter went on remorselessly.
‘How many men have you got deployed?’ He pointed to the line of soldiers along the parapet of the observation balcony, and then to the heads visible as specks between the soaring blue of the African sky and the silhouette of the service hangars.
Two hundred and thirty.’
‘Pull them out,’ Peter instructed, ‘and let the occupants of the aircraft see them go.’
‘All of them?’ incredulously.
‘All of them,’ Peter agreed, and now the smile was wolfish, ‘and quickly, please, colonel.’
The man was learning swiftly, and he lifted the miniaturized walkie-talkie to his mouth again. There were a few moments of scurrying and confusion among the troops on the observation deck below before they could be formed up and marched away in file. Their steel helmets, like a bobbing line of button mushrooms, and the muzzles of their slung weapons would show above the parapet, and would be clearly visible to an observer in the Boeing.
‘If you treat these people, these animals—’ the colonel’s voice was choked slightly with frustration, ‘– if you treat them soft—’
Peter knew exactly what was coming, ‘– and if you keep waving guns in their faces, you will keep them alert and on their toes, Colonel. Let them settle down a little and relax, let them get very confident.’ He spoke without lowering the binoculars. With a soldier’s eye for ground he was picking the site for his four snipers. There was little chance that he would be able to use them – they would have to take out every single one of the enemy at the same instant – but a remote chance might just offer itself, and he decided to place one gun on the service hangar roof, there was a large ventilator which could be pierced and would command the port side of the aircraft, two guns to cover the flight deck from both sides – he could use the drainage ditch down the edge of the main runway to get a man into the small hut that housed the approach radar and ILS beacons. The hut was in the enemy’s rear. They might not expect fire from that quarter – point by point from his mental checklist Peter planned his dispositions, scribbling his decisions into the small leather-covered notebook, poring over the large-scale map of the airport, converting gradients and angles into fields of fire, measuring ‘ground to cover’ and ‘time to target’ for an assault force launched from the nearest vantage points, twisting each problem and evaluating it, striving for novel solutions to each, trying to think ahead of an enemy that was still faceless and infinitely menacing.
It took him an hour of hard work before he was satisfied. Now he could pass his decisions to Colin Noble on board the incoming Here, and within four minutes of the big landing wheels hitting tarmac his highly trained team with their complex talents and skills would be in position.
Peter straightened up from the map and tucked the notebook under the flap of his button-down breast pocket. Once again he scrutinized every inch of the silent, batteneddown aircraft through his glasses – but this time he allowed himself the luxury of gut emotion.
He felt the anger and the hatred rise from some hidden depth of his soul and flush his blood and tighten the muscles of his belly and thighs.
Once again he was confronted by the many-headed monster. It crouched out there in ambush, waiting for him as it had so often before.
He remembered suddenly the shards of splintered glass littering the cobbles of a Belfast street and glittering like diamond chips in the arc lamps, the smell of explosives and blood thick in the air.
He remembered the body of a young woman lying in the gutted interior of a fashionable London restaurant. Her lovely young body stripped by the blast of all but a flimsy pearl-coloured pair of French lace panties.
He remembered the smell of a family, father, mother and three small children, burning in the interior of their saloon car, the bodies blackening and twisting in a slow macabre ballet as the flames scorched them. Peter had not been able to eat pork since that day.
He remembered the frightened eyes of a child, through a mask of blood, a dismembered arm lying beside her, the pale fingers still clutching a grubby little rag doll.
The images flashed in disjointed sequences across his memory, feeding his hatred until it pricked
and stung behind his eyes and he had to lower the binoculars and wipe his eyes with the back of his hand.
It was the same enemy that he had hunted before, but his instincts warned him that it had grown even stronger and more inhuman since last he had met and fought it. He tried to suppress the hatred now, lest it cloud his judgement, lest it handicap him during the difficult hours and days that he knew lay ahead – but it was too powerful, had been too long nurtured.
He recognized that hatred was the enemy’s vice, that from it sprang their twisted philosophy and their monstrous actions, and that to descend to hatred was to descend to their sub-human levels – yet still the hatred persisted.
Peter Stride understood clearly that his hatred was not only for the ghastly death and mutilation that he had witnessed so often. More it was fostered by the threat that he recognized to an entire society and its civilized rule of law. If this evil should be allowed to triumph, then in the future laws would be made by the wild-eyed revolutionary, with a gun in his fist – the world would be run by the destroyers instead of the builders, and Peter Stride hated that possibility more even than the violence and the blood, and those he hated as a soldier hates. For only a soldier truly knows the horror of war.
His soldier’s instinct now was to immediately engage the enemy and destroy him – but the scholar and philosopher in him warned that this was not the moment, and with an enormous effort of will he held that fighting man’s instinct in check.
Yet still he was deeply aware that it was for this moment, for this confrontation of the forces of evil, that he had jeopardized his whole career.
When command of Atlas had been plucked away and a political appointee named in his place, Peter should have declined the offer of a lesser position in Atlas. There were other avenues open to him, but instead he had elected to stay with the project – and he hoped that nobody had guessed at the resentment he felt. God knows, Kingston Parker had no cause for complaint since then. There was no harder working officer on Atlas, and his loyalty had been tested more than once.
Now all that seemed worth while, and the moment for which he had worked had arrived. The enemy waited for him out there on the burning tarmac under an African sun, not on a soft green island in the rain nor in the grimy streets of a crowded city – but still it was the same old enemy, and Peter knew his time would come.
His communications technicians had Colin Noble on the main screen as Peter ducked into the Hawker’s cabin that was now his command headquarters, and settled into his padded seat. On the top right screen was a panoramic view of the southern terminal area, with the Boeing squatting like a brooding eagle upon its nest in the centre of the shot. On the next screen beside it was a blow-up through the 800-mm zoom lens of the Boeing’s flight deck. So crisp was the detail that Peter could read the maker’s name on the tab of the blanket that screened the windshield. The third small screen held a full shot of the interior of the air traffic control tower. In the foreground the controllers in shirt sleeves sitting over the radar repeaters, and beyond them through the floor to ceiling windows still another view of the Boeing. All these were being shot through the cameras installed an hour earlier in the terminal building. The remaining small screen was blank, and Colin Noble’s homely, humorous face filled the main screen.
‘Now if only it had been the cavalry instead of the U.S. Marines,’ Peter said, ‘you’d have been here yesterday—’
‘What’s your hurry, pal. Doesn’t look like the party has started yet.’ Colin grinned at him from the screen and pushed his baseball cap to the back of his head.
‘Damned right,’ Peter agreed. ‘We don’t even know who is throwing the party. What’s your latest estimate on arrival timer
‘We’ve picked up a good wind – one hour twenty-two minutes to fly now,’ Colin told him.
‘Right, let’s get down to it,’ Peter said, and he began his briefing, going carefully over the field notes he had taken. When he wanted to emphasize a point, Peter called for a change of shot from his cameramen, and they zoomed in or panned to his instruction, picking up the radar shed or the service hangar ventilator where Peter was siting his snipers. The image was repeated not only on the command console but in the cavernous body of the approaching Hercules so that the men who would be called to occupy those positions could study them now and prepare themselves thoroughly for the moment. The same images were hurled across the stratosphere to the circling satellite and from there bounced down to appear, only slightly distorted, on the screens of Atlas Command in the west wing of the Pentagon. Sagging like an old lion in his armchair, Kingston Parker followed every word of the briefing, rousing himself only when a long telex message was passed to him by his assistant, then he nodded a command to have his own televised image superimposed on Peter’s command console.
‘I’m sorry to interrupt you, Peter, but we’ve got a useful scrap here. Assuming that the militant group boarded 070 at Mahé, we asked the Seychelles Police to run a check on all joining passengers. There were fifteen of them, ten of whom were Seychelles residents. A local merchant and his wife, and eight unaccompanied children between nine and fourteen years of age. They are the children of expatriate civil servants employed on contract by the Seychelles Government, returning to schools in England for the new term.’
Peter felt the weight of dread bring down upon him like a physical burden. Children, the young lives seemed somehow more important, somehow more vulnerable. But Parker was reading from the telex flimsy in his left hand, the right scratching the back of his neck with the stem of his pipe.
‘There is one British businessman, Shell Oil Company, and well-known on the island, and there are four tourists, an American, a Frenchman and two Germans. These last four appeared to be travelling in a group, the immigration and security officers remember them well. Two women and two men, all young. Names Sally-Anne Taylor, twenty-five years, American, Heidi Hottschauser, twenty-four and Gunther Retz, twenty-five, the two Germans and Henri Larousse, twenty-six, the Frenchman. The police have run a back check on the four. They stayed two weeks at the Reef Hotel outside Victoria, the women in one double room and the two men in another. They spent most of the time swimming and sunbathing – until five days ago when a small ocean-going yacht called at Victoria. Thirty-five foot, single-hander around the world, skippered by another American. The four spent time on board her every day of her stay, and the yacht sailed twenty-four hours before the departure of the 070.’
‘If the yacht delivered their arms and munitions, then this operation has been planned for a long time,’ Peter pondered, ‘and damn well planned.’
Peter felt the tingling flush of his blood again, the form of the enemy was taking shape now, the outline of the beast becoming clearer, and always it was uglier and more menacing.
‘You have run the names through the computer?’ he asked.
‘Nothing,’ Parker nodded. ‘Either there is no intelligence record of them, or the names and passports are false—’
He broke off as there was sudden activity on the screen that monitored the air traffic control tower, and another voice boomed out of the secondary speaker, the volume was set too high, and the technician at the control board adjusted it swiftly. It was a female voice, a fresh, clear young voice speaking English with the lilt and inflexion of the west coast of America in it.
‘Jan Smuts tower, this is the officer commanding the task force of the Action Commando for Human Rights that has control of Speedbird 070. Stand by to copy a message.’
‘Contact!’ Peter breathed. ‘Contact at last.’
On the small screen Colin Noble grinned and rolled his cheroot expertly from one side of his mouth to the other. ‘The party has begun,’ he announced, but there was the razor edge in his voice not entirely concealed by his jocular tone.
The three-man crew had been moved back from the flight deck, and were held in the first class seats vacated by the group of four.
Ingrid had made the cockpit of the Boeing her headqua
rters, and she worked swiftly through the pile of passports, filling in the name and nationality of each passenger on the seating plan spread before her.
The door to the galley was open and except for the hum of the air-conditioning, the huge aircraft was peculiarly silent. Conversation in the cabins was prohibited, and the aisles were patrolled by the red-shirted commandos to enforce this edict.
They also ordered the use of the toilets: a passenger must return to his seat before another was allowed to rise. The toilet doors had to remain open during use, so that the commandos could check at a glance.
Despite the silence, there was a crackling atmosphere of tension down the full length of the cabin. Very few of the passengers, mostly the children, were asleep, but the others sat in rigid rows, their faces taut and strained – watching their captors with a mixture of hatred and of fear.
Henri, the Frenchman, slipped into the cockpit.
‘They are pulling back the armoured cars,’ he said. He was slim, with a very youthful face and dreaming poet’s eyes. He had grown a drooping blond gunfighter’s moustache, but the effect was incongruous.
Ingrid looked up at him. ‘You are so nervous, chéri.’ She shook her head. ‘It will all be all right.’
‘I am not nervous,’ he answered her stiffly.
She chuckled fondly, and reached up to touch his face. ‘I did not mean it as an insult.’ She pulled his face down and kissed him, thrusting her tongue deeply into his mouth. ‘You have proved your courage – often,’ she murmured.
He dropped his pistol onto the desk with a clatter and reached for her. The top three buttons of her red cotton shirt were unfastened, and she let him grope and find her breasts.
They were heavy and pointed and his breathing went ragged as he teased out her nipples. They hardened erect like jelly beans – but when he reached down with his free hand for the zipper of her shorts, she pushed him away roughly.