by Scott Baker
When he opened them again a few seconds later, he saw a man, tattered and grubby, on a scooter speeding down the runway towards him. What was even stranger was the sight of two fat security guards running behind him. An airport police van squealed past them in an effort to run the scooter down.
It would have all been amusing had there not suddenly been the yellow muzzle flash and white smoke of handgun fire from the police. The sight made Ron uncomfortable, a feeling not eased when he realised that the scooter was heading straight for him. Which meant—
Crack! His windscreen split. Was it a bullet? No, but it was some flying pieces of runway torn up by the ridiculous onslaught of gunfire. What were these guys thinking?
‘Ah, control, this guy’s getting a little close, request permission to taxi, there’s some gunfire here. Over.’
Nothing, static. ‘Control?’
‘Sorry there, Azulejo, permission denied. You’re to sit tight in your location. Over and out.’ The British voice of the control tower vanished. Not the usual guy.
Ron watched in unsettling fascination as the man on the scooter, who looked like Robinson Crusoe, weaved through the stationary fixtures all over the airport. Baggage cars, refuelling vehicles and cargo containers all provided moments of temporary cover from the police van that was chasing him. Then, quite suddenly, he was out in the open again, on the runway – and still headed straight for Ron’s plane.
‘Ah, control, I’m going to have to make a move from my location—’
‘That’s a negative,’ the tower cut in. The tower never cut in. ‘Hold your position.’
Ron stared at the man, speeding towards him, and further down the runway, the police van, still firing wildly. Ron knew that this was crazy, but he also realised that getting out of the plane would do nothing but expose him to the stray and inaccurate bullets being fired. The props were spinning at the front, giving a false sense of protection. The propellers only appeared to be everywhere at once, but he knew that they weren’t.
He ducked down behind the dashboard of the small plane as the scooter man, now only twenty feet away, vanished from view. Ron sighed in relief; once the scooter had passed him, surely the police would have to stop firing in his direction?
No sooner had Ron begun to rise back into his seat than his passenger door opened and a ragged, bearded and sweat-covered man climbed up into his passenger seat. Why hadn’t he locked the doors? Well, he justified to himself, maybe because he hadn’t expected any more passengers once he’d gotten out on the runway ready for take-off.
He was too stunned to speak, but his passenger was not.
‘Go!’ the strange man commanded. ‘Go now!’
‘Get the fuck out!’ Ron swore at the man, who smelled like a sewer. The man looked around the cockpit and then reached forward, pulling something from under the front dash. The flare signal gun. Ron’s eyes widened in terror as the man pointed the gun directly at his head.
‘Go now! Those cops aren’t really cops. They’ll shoot me, and you – and if you don’t take off now I will shoot you in the face and take off myself!’ The man’s voice was commanding, in contrast to his shabby appearance.
Ron looked into the man’s eyes. This man was desperate, but he was not crazy. Slowly the pilot sat up and faced the front. The van rushed towards them at speed.
‘Now!’ the man yelled again.
A bullet zinged past and another slammed into the fuselage. They were shooting at his plane! Setting his jaw, Ron pushed the throttle into full ahead and the whirring sound of the propellers rose. The plane leaped forward. He gripped the steering column with both hands. The van was closing quickly; if he was going to make this, he had to get into the air as quickly as possible. Did he have enough runway between his aircraft and the speeding van? Could he get into the air in time? At the rate they were closing, he would know in about eight seconds.
The ground rushed by outside the tiny plane’s windows, and Shaun looked down at the fixed landing gear, silently willing the wheels up. Another bullet made contact, this one far more accurate as the strut of the wing on his side was gashed.
Come on! Shaun’s brain screamed, joining in the effort of will for both their survival.
The van rushed forward. The gap was closing.
Bullets. Ping ping ping! Glass shattered on Shaun’s window. Ping! SMASH! Another bullet hit the very top of the windscreen, not directly enough to shatter it, but enough to increase the crack snaking across its length. Ping! Ping ping ping!
The Cessna sped forward. The van closed. Four seconds. Three. Shaun took the gun away from the pilot’s head. Two. Ron pulled back with all his might on the steering column. ‘Aaaarrrghhhh!’ he growled, half with effort and half with terror. Shaun thrust the gun out his shattered window. One second. He fired.
Everything seemed to happen at once.
The Cessna lifted its nose and rose, the landing gear hitting the top of the speeding van and ripping off. But the flare had already found its mark. The van had barely cleared the speeding plane when the vehicle’s front passenger cabin exploded. The engine beneath it did the same. The violence of the shockwave forced Ron to fight for control to stay in the air. He felt sick.
Shaun had the flare gun back at Ron’s head in an instant, the second flare still loaded. He watched below him as they burst through the black smoke and saw the van disappear below and behind them. It still moved forward, out of control, with long flames billowing from underneath. Like a speeding fireball it shot through another safety barrier and sailed into a power terminal below. This explosion truly was spectacular. The intense voltage ignited the van’s fifty-gallon fuel tank with an enormous KABOOM!
Ron’s eyes were locked straight ahead, but even through his headphones he heard the noise. Explosion after explosion; a daisy chain of substation destruction.
‘What was that?’ he called, but Shaun could not hear him above the engine. Ron dared a glance at the man, who still had the flare gun trained on his temple. He gestured to the large headphones that hung on a peg on Shaun’s side door. The wind rushed in where the window had blown out and it was not until he had put the headphones firmly over his ears that the howl of rushing wind quieted enough for him to hear his own thoughts.
‘Where we headed?’ Ron asked his passenger.
Shaun squinted at hearing the pilot’s voice through his headphones.
‘Just talk. The microphone is on a noise gate. It opens when you speak.’
Shaun did so. ‘North. North and west. Towards Boone.’
The pilot nodded but said nothing. He did not want to show how terrified he was. He knew that panic was not a good state to fly in, and he still held hope of getting out of this alive.
‘You know Grandfather Mountain?’ Shaun asked, breaking the silence.
Ron nodded, and reached forward to twiddle some knobs. Shaun pressed the flare gun firmly onto Ron’s head by way of response.
‘I have to chart our course. If I don’t they’ll shoot us down. If you wanna get there, you have to let me do this.’
Shaun watched him for a moment, and then nodded.
‘You’re cleared north-west to Boone.’ The tower crackled over the radio as if nothing unusual had happened.
‘What was that?’ Ron asked, motioning behind them.
‘The van hit the power substation and exploded,’ Shaun said simply.
‘That’s gonna cause some power cuts,’ Ron remarked, hoping that soon the man’s arm would tire and he would take the flare gun away from the side of his head.
‘It does,’ Shaun said, allowing himself to turn and look again at the pilot. He doubted that this guy would try to fight with him now – what could he do that would not endanger his own life?
‘It took out the whole airport for the day,’ he said, a little sadly. Ron missed the tense.
They flew on in silence for another twenty minutes, Shaun finally relaxing his arm. The scenery below changed dramatically over the time, going from the gree
n of the Carolina hills to the awesome ruggedness of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Neither their size nor magnificence impressed Shaun today, though – not after the Khyber Pass.
‘So, you mind me asking why the cops were after you?’ Ron said.
‘They weren’t cops,’ Shaun muttered in the same, distant tone.
‘No? Well, they looked like cops to me,’ Ron replied, trying not to sound antagonistic.
‘They weren’t. They were part of a group trying to get something from me. Well, something they think I have, but I don’t have it yet.’
‘What’s your name?’ Ron asked, hoping to make enough of a personal connection with the desperate man that he would decide not to flare gun him in the head.
‘Shaun. Shaun Strickland,’ he said so quietly that the microphone cut out and Ron didn’t hear it clearly.
‘Mind telling me what this is all about?’ Ron asked, beginning to think that he might be able to talk his way out of flying across the state.
‘Let’s just say I’m a treasure hunter, looking for a map to lead me to my buried treasure,’ he said, in a tone that signalled the end of the conversation.
It was perhaps half an hour later when the question came up. They had, after all, no landing gear.
‘I don’t suppose you’ve had any thoughts about how we’re going to land us?’ Shaun asked Ron.
The pilot smiled thinly. ‘I’ve had lots of thoughts, and basically they all scare me to death. I’ve never done a belly flop before, but I’ll notify Boone that we are going to need to make an emergency landing.’ He pointed out the window. ‘There’s your mountain,’ he said.
Shaun looked out. Even from above, Grandfather Mountain still looked higher than the surrounding peaks. It was rugged and beautiful. From the plane he could see the campsite where he had stayed with his brother Tim as a child; it looked tiny. It was more developed now and had a permanent amenities block and—
CRACK!
The sudden jolt of the plane alerted both men to the fact that the wing strut on Shaun’s side had gone; the damage from the onslaught of bullets at the airport had finally taken its toll. Immediately warning lights flashed and a beep sounded through the headphones.
‘What’s that?’ Shaun asked, not understanding.
‘We’re losing fuel. We’re all right without a strut, but the fuel’s stored in the wings, and I wasn’t planning on flying to the state line today!’
Shaun looked out and saw the precious liquid streaming away into the air. His face perfectly portrayed his combined sense of panic and dread.
‘It’s in the wing? We’re lucky they didn’t hit it when they were shooting.’
Ron shot Shaun a sideways glance. Then the fuel ran out. ‘Oh shit!’ Ron cursed. ‘We’re too far short of the airport to try to make it. There’s nowhere else to land!’
Shaun looked down at Carolina’s Grandfather Mountain. No, it could not end like this.
‘The campsite.’
‘What?’
‘The campsite, back there,’ Shaun motioned. Ron looked at the clearing covered in tents and cabins. It was the only break in the treeline. He did not hesitate, he could not; they were losing altitude too quickly.
To call what happened a belly landing would be a stretch of the definition. Dropping more than gliding, the plane came down. People on the ground, not having the benefit of engine noise to alert them, realised too late what was happening. They only noticed the plane on its first earth-shattering impact.
Shaun and Ron had braced themselves, but they had pathetically little to grab onto. Ron had flown around and approached from the uphill side, trying to land down the slope to lessen the jolt. It did not matter. The first impact was immense and slammed both Shaun and Ron forward against the windshield, which finally succumbed to its crack and smashed. Because of the slope, the plane hit tail first, gouging the turf of the campsite. The fuselage broke in two, the tail section ripping free and catapulting the front section into a somersault after its initial bounce.
Shaun and Ron were thrown around the cabin like rag dolls, their seatbelts proving painfully inadequate. People dived out of the way, desperately trying to flee the cartwheeling plane. Several tents were collected along the way, but the body of the plane passed through the campsite and out the other end quickly.
Knocked unconscious, Ron’s limp body saved itself simply by offering no resistance to the forces that flung it around. Shaun, however, bounced around the spinning cabin, smashing his head, body and limbs countless times, but nothing broke.
Eventually, on the fifth rotation, the cabin plunged through the trees and down an embankment. Shaun was thrown clear, flying out the open back of the cabin where the tail had been ripped off. He sailed through the air and landed hard, falling through branches on his way down and coming to rest in a mixture of mud, moss and foliage. He could not move, and as he slipped into unconsciousness he noted with interest that the cabin was still smashing its way through the trees. He wondered when it would finally stop moving, and whether Ron would be alive when it did.
CHAPTER 63
They had searched the hill for more than a year. They had come in every guise – as tourists, as campers; two of them had even become bona-fide hike leaders in order to search the trails – and what had they found? Nothing.
Grandfather Mountain was a big place. A very big place. It took tourists year round, and when the snows allowed, offered a range of hiking adventures from the hour-long nature walks to the three-week adventures across various trails. Every conceivable inch of the mountain that was accessible, and a lot of it that was not, had been searched by members employed, directly or indirectly, by a representative of the Holy Roman Catholic Church – Cardinal François Le Clerque. The search had begun just a month after the death of Pope Nicholas II in 2005, and led them here last year, the searchers knowing only that they were to look for an ancient diary and a map.
Not a lot changed up on Grandfather Mountain. The animals liked it that way, even though the crowds had become bigger in the past few years. The Blue Ridge Mountains were covered in forests most often found in Canada. The base rock that poked through to form cliffs and crags was more than a billion years old, pre-dating the formation of the continents themselves. Now, though, it had become a hiker’s mecca, with a distinctive mile-high bridge measuring more than two hundred and thirty feet and spanning an eighty-foot chasm. The suspension bridge gave hikers who stayed late at night a whole new definition of the mile-high club.
Twenty-nine-year-old Georgina Milani had earned her membership to the club many times over, and rather liked her latest assignment. She had it easy, and all she had to do was search. Of course, it was Le Clerque’s idea of punishment. She was one of his top assassins but had trouble controlling her temper. Her last assignment in Iran had ended abruptly when she took offence to one of her Persian counterparts’ suggestion that women were not meant to be outside the house without proper covering, and that they were ineffective in this line of work. Georgina, a wild-blooded Italian, thought he was incorrect, and she proved it by killing him, his family and two witnesses.
It was she who had made the initial call back to the black-suited sentry, and alerted the four men who were also scouring the mountain that day. When Georgina arrived at the scene of the crash, she found that other hikers had already freed the unconscious pilot and were building a makeshift stretcher to carry him out. She walked over to the twisted wreckage; the word Azulejo was still visible on the side.
She moved around the crash site and wondered how the pilot had survived. Looking back up the hill to where the plane had cut its way through the trees, she visualised the violence of the crash. She superimposed the carriage in her mind’s eye, tumbling and flipping out of control, collecting trees and branches as it bounced before slamming into that rock and coming to a halt.
Walking closer to the mangled wreckage, she noticed something else. The group of rocks where the plane had finally come to rest had been disturbed.
A whole boulder, which had sat in place the whole time Georgina had been at the park, had been knocked a full two feet to the side, revealing a gap between the rocks. The fact that there was blood on the rocks prompted her to investigate further. Yes, someone had gone in here. There were footprints in the mud. Not shoe-prints, but footprints, bare feet.
She turned on the flashlight that always hung at her side and slid into the gap. The earth was freshly disturbed, but the small cavern was completely closed off from the outside world. The cave was air- and water-tight, or would have been until that plane knocked the boulder loose. Georgina knew that she would have walked past this a thousand times without a clue that there was a hollow inside. It could have remained undiscovered for years, or even centuries.
She scrambled back up through the cavern opening. The crowd had moved the man onto the stretcher and were preparing to take him away, but she got to him first. Shoving people roughly out of the way, she leaned over the pilot. He was a mess; alive but not awake. She slapped his cheek.
Nothing. Again, SLAP!
‘Hey!’ some guy objected.
She spoke in a thick Italian accent: ‘Back the fuck off, I’m a professional!’ She accented her words with another SLAP!
This time, the pilot groaned.
In an instant, Georgina pulled open his eyelids and withdrew a pen from her pack. She swivelled the pen until a bright green light illuminated one end. She moved the light across his face and watched his eyes follow.
‘Sir, I need you to focus on the light. Focus on the light, sir. Good. That’s good. Tell me who was with you in the plane. Was there someone else with you in the plane?’
Ron followed the light with his eyes. Man he hurt, but suddenly, things were getting easier. Easier when he followed the light. It started to dance and twirl in little patterns. Everything started to feel better.
‘Sir, who was with you in the plane?’
She wanted to know about the crazy man. No, not crazy … desperate. ‘Sh,’ he tried, but then coughed up blood. It was okay, the light was still there. Nothing hurt. He tried again. ‘Shhtreetlund,’ he gurgled.