There were numerous buttons and controls on both the collective and the cyclic, he noticed, and he guessed that one of them probably worked the radio, but he had no idea which one. And talking to somebody on the ground wouldn’t help him very much at that moment. If he was going to walk away from this he’d have to land the helicopter himself.
North kept a firm grip on the collective and moved the cyclic very gently forward. The Eurocopter responded by moving ahead. He pulled back and moved it to the left. He knew what the helicopter would do, but he was just trying to get a feel for the way it responded, to gauge how much pressure he needed to exert to achieve a certain degree of movement. It felt controllable in a somewhat uncontrolled way.
He put his feet on the two rudder pedals and applied gentle force to the left-hand one as he turned the aircraft. That made the turn smoother, but right then he wasn’t interested in smoothness, only in getting the thing on the ground.
Next, he lowered the collective lever very slightly and felt more than saw that the aircraft was starting to lose height.
‘You can do this,’ he murmured to himself, though he was way out of his depth and he knew it.
North knew that the way helicopters landed wasn’t to descend vertically from height but to fly towards the designated landing area, losing height all the time, making an approach not unlike that of a fixed-wing aircraft, and then air-taxi before coming to a hover over the landing spot and vertically descend the last few feet to the ground. He was going to have to try to do that, but on his own terms.
He couldn’t risk maintaining the present heading because that was taking him towards a hangar and other buildings, so he put a little more pressure on the collective to stop his slow descent and moved the cyclic and the rudder pedal so that the aircraft was pointing towards one of the runways. If he cocked up his landing out there in the wide-open space of the airfield, at least he wouldn’t end up crashing into one of the buildings and taking anyone else with him.
North gently released some of the pressure on the collective to re-start his descent and held the cyclic as straight as he could. He picked a space a few hundred yards away, more or less in the middle of the runway, and aimed the helicopter straight for it. He kept the speed down, still trying to get a feel for the aircraft’s handling.
He felt the Eurocopter yaw to the left and corrected the movement as gently as he could but ended up swinging it to the right. He was being careful with the controls but guessed that he was repeatedly over-correcting, so he tried to relax and let the aircraft stabilise itself.
North remembered hearing a pilot tell him years earlier that if you went hands-off in a fixed-wing aircraft nothing would happen: it would just keep on flying at the same height and in the same direction at the same speed. But if you did the same thing in a helicopter, absolutely anything could, and probably would, happen and you needed to fly hands-on all the time. Not a particularly encouraging thought in his present situation.
He adjusted the position of the collective when it looked to him as if he was going down too slowly. He didn’t want to overshoot the runway and end up on the grass, though he assumed it was probably stabilised to cope with additional weight in case an aircraft ran off the edge of the asphalt.
He guessed he was only about one hundred feet above the ground, and still descending. His entire attention was focused on what he was doing.
Without his headset, the noise in the cockpit was uncomfortably loud, but there was nothing he could do about that. The runway stretched out below him, getting closer all the time as he tried coordinating the movements of the cyclic and the rudder pedals to keep the aircraft pointing straight ahead while still gently lowering the collective.
The runway surface seemed to rush towards him as he covered the last few feet in descent.
At the last second he pulled up on the collective to reduce the aircraft’s downward movement. That caused the helicopter to lurch to one side – probably because he’d applied too much force – and for an instant he feared it was going to topple over, though the logical part of his brain told him it couldn’t do that because the rotor was on top of the fuselage and mechanically that couldn’t happen.
North had been holding the helicopter in a slightly nose-down position and the nosewheel of the Eurocopter hit the runway first. The aircraft bounced back up into the air, the lurch causing the two mainwheels to bounce off the runway as well.
But that was good enough, and he was near enough, so North lowered the collective lever all the way down. With another bump the helicopter settled onto all three wheels of the undercarriage more or less in the middle of the runway. He slumped back in the seat, his relief palpable.
The rotors were still turning and he had no idea how to stop them or kill the power. And he needed urgent help for the warrant officer, who was still obviously unconscious – or worse – in the right-hand seat.
North looked around the cockpit, wondering which of the myriad buttons operated the radio. Then he glanced through the windscreen and guessed help was already on its way. He could see a couple of fire engines, one a kind of Land Rover conversion and the other a full-size prime mover, lights flashing and heading in his general direction, preceded by what he guessed was a small van used by air traffic control, headlights on and amber rooflight flashing, driving at speed towards him.
The driver stopped the van on the runway directly in front of the Eurocopter and about fifty yards away, well clear of the rotor disk, and an angry-looking man got out. He stared at the aircraft and, apparently when he was sure North had seen him, he walked quickly over to the left-hand side of the aircraft.
North opened the door on his side and waited for him.
The noise of the engines and rotors made normal conversation impossible, but it didn’t look as if conversation was what the new arrival wanted. In what was clearly a parade-ground voice he bellowed at North.
‘What the fuck are you playing at? This is the main fucking runway.’
North grabbed him by the front of the woolly-pully the man was wearing, pointed at the warrant officer and shouted in the man’s ear.
‘Get out of my fucking face and get a medic for him.’
Then he shoved him away.
* * *
Just under half an hour later, North was sitting in a fairly uncomfortable chair in what he guessed was an air traffic control briefing room, a mug of obviously instant coffee in his hand and looking at an RAF squadron leader who had pulled another chair round to sit opposite him. The name-plate on the left-hand side of the officer’s light blue pullover bore the name Gerard.
‘You were bloody lucky,’ he said.
‘Tell me about it,’ North responded. ‘If the pilot had collapsed ten minutes earlier you’d have been pulling my mangled dead body out of a flaming wreck somewhere out in the bundu.’
The Eurocopter had been shut down on the runway by an RAF helicopter pilot who was familiar with the aircraft type, and it had then been towed to the hardstanding on which it had been supposed to land. In the process, the warrant officer pilot had been taken out of the aircraft and rushed by ambulance to the station medical centre. His condition, according to what Squadron Leader Gerard had told North when he entered the briefing room, and which had been passed on by the ambulance crew, was unchanged: he was unconscious and completely unresponsive.
Gerard nodded.
‘The local controller told me what he saw from the VCP – the visual control position in the tower – but what happened in the aircraft?’
‘I was sitting in the cabin and looking through the windscreen and the guy just collapsed. No warning signs, no prior indication, and we were chatting away over the intercom for pretty much the whole flight. When he collapsed, he pushed the collective all the way down, which was why the chopper lost height so quickly. I got into the left-hand seat, pulled the collective up again and hoped for the best.’
‘Have you ever flown a helicopter before?’
North shook h
is head firmly.
‘Never,’ he replied. ‘I’ve flown in them dozens of times and I’ve seen how the pilots take off and land, but that was the first time I’ve ever sat at the controls of any kind of aircraft. And I’d be quite pleased if it was the last time as well. I just tried to get the thing on the ground as quickly as I could without killing anyone, myself included. Is it damaged?’
‘It’ll need a full check because that was quite a hard landing. In fact, according to the local controller it looked like three hard landings, one after the other.’
‘Sounds about right. Look, I need to get to this briefing I’m here for. That should take no more than two or three hours. Any chance of getting a lift back to Hereford when it’s finished?’
‘We can probably arrange that,’ Gerard replied. ‘Helicopter or—’
‘No bloody chance,’ North snapped. ‘I want something with four wheels, all of them on the ground, plus a steering wheel and a competent and qualified driver sitting behind it.’
‘I’ll see what we can do.’
Chapter 4
Present day
Secret Intelligence Service Headquarters, Vauxhall Cross, London
Professor Ben Morgan looked across the table at Dave North.
‘So I suppose you’re going to take some flying lessons now, Dave?’ he asked. ‘I mean, you’ve already got one landing to put in your logbook. Or technically a barely controlled crash, but at least you walked away from it.’
North shook his head.
‘No way,’ he said, ‘but I promise you that from now on I’m going to pay even more attention to the people who drive me around the sky, because the only reason I walked away from that was because I had a vague idea about how a helicopter flew. If I’d never watched somebody flying a chopper before, right now I’d be dead.’
‘We’re delighted you’re not,’ Dame Janet Marcham-Coutts, the head of C-TAC, the Counter-Terrorism Advisory Committee, said from her normal seat at the head of the table. ‘Apart from anything else it would take far too long to house-train another ex-SAS officer.’
Unusually for a meeting of the group, that day the men were outnumbered, Dame Janet being flanked by Angela Evans, a long-time member of C-TAC, and on the other side by Natasha Black, the group’s newest recruit, albeit on a part-time basis. She worked at GCHQ out at Cheltenham and had joined C-TAC on Ben Morgan’s personal recommendation. Every member of C-TAC brought something different to the table, and Natasha Black – a strikingly unusual figure with a broad pink streak running through her otherwise natural black hair – was not only a mathematical genius, but because of her position at GCHQ she could also provide immediate access to a wide range of surveillance data and other secret stuff should the need arise.
‘Agreed,’ Angela Evans said. ‘You’re much too valuable to lose. So what happened to the pilot? Was it a heart attack or a stroke or something? And is he okay now?’
Dave North shook his head.
‘He didn’t make it. He was an Army warrant officer named Bob O’Brien and he died in the medical centre at Brize Norton. It’s that I want to talk to you about. It wasn’t a heart attack or a stroke that knocked him out, and really I’d have been amazed if it had been. All pilots go through regular aircrew medicals to make sure that this kind of thing doesn’t happen, and those medicals are really thorough.’
‘The old idea of an Army medical,’ Morgan interrupted, ‘was that the doctor made you strip off, grabbed your testicles – sorry, ladies – and told you to cough. I’m still not entirely sure what that was supposed to check. But if that bit was okay he’d tell you to stop smoking and cut down on the booze and chips and burgers and then pass you as fit. I’m assuming aircrew are treated rather differently.’
‘Damn right they are,’ North replied. ‘They go through a whole battery of tests and get pulled off flying duties if there’s any serious anomaly, and O’Brien had sailed through his annual medical only a couple of months ago. More to the point, he was given a full autopsy because of what had happened and that revealed no signs at all of heart disease or any other conditions that could have caused his death.’
Morgan looked at him, narrowing his eyes slightly.
‘You didn’t come here just to tell us how you cheated death by doing a barely controlled crash in a chopper,’ he said. ‘They did find something, didn’t they?’
North nodded.
‘I don’t understand the technicalities of it, but their first assumption was that the blood supply to his brain through the carotid artery had been interrupted. Some kind of a stroke, in other words. But that would probably have caused damage to the brain, and they couldn’t find any indication of that. They also couldn’t find any evidence of furring of the arteries or excessive amounts of cholesterol in his blood. And they checked for the presence of plaque in his bloodstream and especially in the coronary arteries, and that result was negative as well, or at least well within safe limits.’
‘But,’ Morgan said.
North nodded.
‘You’re right, Ben. There is a biggish but coming. Because they could find no obvious signs of damage to O’Brien’s veins and arteries, or to his heart, to the transport system if you like, the docs decided to check his blood, the stuff actually flowing through his circulatory system. At that stage, all they knew for certain was that his heart had stopped beating, but they didn’t know why. Again, they did the obvious, like checking for the presence of alcohol or drugs, but he was clear on both counts. SAS personnel are subject to random blood tests anyway, and if there’s any trace of a non-prescribed drug in their system they get RTU’d – returned to unit – immediately, so the result was no surprise. SAS personnel drink booze, often quite a lot of booze, but they don’t take drugs. Everything seemed correct and normal, but they knew something had happened because he was dead, so they decided to do a deeper analysis of the blood samples they’d taken.’
North paused and glanced around the table.
‘I don’t know how much any of you know about human blood but—’
‘Enough to know I don’t particularly like looking at it, especially if it’s my own,’ Angela Evans said.
‘Right. Anyway, blood isn’t just one thing. It isn’t just a thick red liquid. There’s all sorts of different stuff in it, and there’s a process called blood fractionation that allows doctors, or rather laboratory technicians, to separate out the different components because they have different weights. So they spin the blood in a small glass tube in a centrifuge and they end up with three separate components.
‘The largest volume of a sample and the lightest stuff is the blood plasma, which is a clear liquid, and that’s what everything else is suspended in. The heaviest part of the blood is the erythrocytes or red blood cells, so when blood has been fractionated they form a dark red layer at the bottom of the tube. Between the two is what’s called the buffy coat, and I’ve no idea why it’s called that. It’s a—’
‘It’s called the buffy coat because it often looks buff in colour. That’s a kind of light yellowy brown,’ Natasha Black interrupted, and they all turned to look at her. She gave a wide smile and nodded. ‘That’s me,’ she said. ‘I’m a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles, especially where useless information is concerned. I’m a demon at cocktail parties, not that I often get invited. Or not more than once, anyway.’
‘Thanks,’ Morgan said, and nodded at North to carry on.
‘Right. So the buffy coat is a very thin layer made up of a small quantity of white blood cells called leucocytes mixed with platelets. The leucocytes are responsible for fighting disease, intruders and other foreign bodies, and the platelets are what make blood clot if you cut yourself or suffer an injury. Again, nothing looked out of place and the analyses came back negative or within normal limits.’
‘But,’ Morgan said again.
‘But then one of the technicians noticed a sort of discolouration right at the top of the plasma layer. As I said, that’s a clear liquid, bu
t he thought that at the very top there was a slight grey tinge, barely noticeable. Whatever it was, it had to be lighter than the plasma because it was sitting on top of it. He used a magnifying glass and it looked to him like a very, very thin grey film lying on the plasma, but using a hand lens he couldn’t see any details. He prepped a microscope slide with some of the film, but even under the highest magnification he had on the optical microscope it was still just a greyish smear, with no indication what it was made of. But whatever it was, it shouldn’t have been there, so the technicians decided to take the next obvious step.’
‘A SEM,’ Natasha Black suggested. ‘Or maybe even a STEM, if they had access to one.’
Dame Janet looked at her blankly, not sure whether to be impressed or irritated. ‘A SEM?’ she asked.
‘Scanning electron microscope. Digs down into the stuff that optical devices can’t see. The problem with trying to see anything really small is light itself. The wavelength of visible light is between 0.4 and 0.7 micrometres and you can’t see anything smaller than half that wavelength, so 0.2 micrometres. A micrometre used to be called a micron, and it’s one millionth of a metre. To give you an idea of the scale we’re talking about, a human hair is about fifty micrometres in diameter. There’s stuff you can do to get higher resolution, like sub-diffraction microscopy, but they’re just workarounds. To see atoms and molecules you have to forget the optical stuff and use electrons, because they have a smaller wavelength. That gives you a resolution of between one and twenty nanometres, and a nanometre is a billionth of a metre, so really sodding small.’
‘You mentioned a STEM?’ Morgan said.
‘Yup. A STEM – an STM – is a scanning tunnelling microscope, and that makes the SEM look kind of clunky. The STM works at the atomic level, so the resolution’s between about a tenth and a hundredth of a nanometre. And there are a few other high-tech gadgets in the same field like the AFM and the TEM, the atomic force microscope and the transmission electron microscope. They’ve both got about the same level of resolution as the STEM.’
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