by Lex Lander
‘It’s only ground mist.’
‘It’s all the excuse they need to sit around in the mess playing cards.’
Away to the left was the flight control tower, lights burning at its upper windows. If anyone was to look out now, fog or no fog, we were done for.
‘Finito,’ Raul proclaimed. ‘Let’s go.’
The clatter of tools being dumped in the tool box. We ducked back behind the chopper in case they were going to pass our way. Footsteps, murmured conversation decreasing in volume as they made off, towards the hangar.
‘You OK?’ I said to Elena.
She grinned an affirmative and by unspoken command we headed for the shoe box building. A glass door on the long side facing us led into a lobby with another glass door that opened up on what I guessed was the Spanish equivalent of an officers’ mess. It was occupied by a dozen or so uniformed men, whose heads turned towards us in complete synchronicity, like a well-choreographed stage act.
‘Who are you?’ one said; he was a bit older than the rest, with receding hair and a burgeoning paunch. Not a pilot then.
‘What do you want?’ another asked.
The machine pistols were down by our sides. We raised them to gut level, so they would get the message that we weren’t just delivering groceries.
Elena was quick to come to the point.
‘Which one of you is the helicopter pilot?’ she demanded.
Nobody owned up. Elena grimaced and looked at me for guidance.
I beckoned the paunchy officer to come over. He hesitated. I wagged the gun. I daren’t waste bullets on a demonstration.
He came, dragging his feet.
‘I want to know who is the helicopter pilot,’ I said. ‘If you don’t tell me in five seconds I will shoot one of your colleagues.’
He paled. I started the countdown, but got no further than two. The pilot who had spoken second, indicated a tall, lanky guy with too much hair, wearing a flier’s blouson.
‘It’s him. No need to shoot anybody.’
Elena summoned the lanky officer over and interrogated him about flying the helicopter. His nods and monosyllabic affirmatives were good enough for me.
‘He’s coming with us,’ I announced to the room at large. ‘If anyone comes after us they’ll be shot.’
‘They might come after us in a fighter,’ Elena warned.
Outside the fog was thinning. If conditions continued to improve, Elena was probably right. A couple of the pilots exchanged whispers. Elena silenced them with a curt command.
It was going to be tricky, the outcome uncertain. In our favour, Gib was only a few minutes flying time away. Worst case scenario we could put the chopper down anywhere reasonably level.
Elena took charge of our pilot, asked him his name.
‘Teniente Torres,’ he said, tone and expression surly.
‘Vale, Torres. Outside and no funny business.’
While she shepherded Torres out of the mess, I hung around covering the remaining pilots, so as to let her get to the chopper before they could take action or phone for assistance.
I gave her a couple of minutes, then reversed out through the inner door. The pilots just stood there, watching me but making no effort to interfere. My backside bumped into the outer door. A final macho glare to terrify them into immobility, and I plunged through the doorway.
The chopper was in sight now as the mist continued to disperse. Our abductee was just going through a doorway in the side of the fuselage, with encouragement from Elena’s machine pistol.
I glanced back at the mess. Several of the pilots were moving towards the door. I fired a single shot through a window. The shattering of the glass was more dramatic than the gunshot, and the pilots scattered, diving to the floor.
I started forward at a run. When I reached the chopper Elena and Torres were already inside; he was getting settled in the left-hand captain’s seat, Elena standing over him. The controls and instruments were arranged along a black oval panel in front of the seats, and in a second panel between the seats. The Perspex bubble of the nose canopy was sub-divided into a number of individual panes.
‘Get on with it,’ Elena snapped at Torres, making sure he could see the machine pistol.
While he got stuck in with what I assumed were the pre-flight checks, I stayed by the open door to discourage the others. I also used the lull in activities to check the state of the magazine of my gun, thumbing the rounds out into my cupped hand. The count was four plus another in the breech. Too few to waste on automatic fire.
More action inside the building, some of the braver souls now venturing outside. Two at least held pistols. I popped off an aimed shot just above their heads. Glass sprayed, and the group flung themselves flat once again.
‘How much longer?” I called over my shoulder to Elena.
‘Two minutes.’
I heard the pilot chanting Spanish stuff, most of which being aeronautical-ese was a mystery to me. I caught the words ‘freno’, ‘bateria’, and ‘rotor’ but the rest was just monologue.
‘Darse prisa!’ I heard Elena yell at him. Hurry up.
A mumbled response from Torres, then more monotonal chanting.
Somebody fired at us from the mess. I heard the bullet clang against the sliding door panel, metal striking metal. I retreated from the doorway. A second shot, a second clang. If they kept it up sooner or later a bullet would find me. I crouched, to reduce the target size. I didn’t want to kill anyone, but if it was them or me …
Overhead the rotor began to crank, very slowly. A rumble, was followed by a clatter as the engine fired. I decided waste half of my remaining ammunition, and peeping around the edge of the doorway, loosed off two shots, at the handful of officers who were now advancing cautiously towards the chopper. Down they went yet again, although some of them fired their handguns, mostly missing the chopper. If they were fighter pilots the Spanish Air Force needed to step up its target practice.
The rotor was going at a lick now, making the old familiar slapping sound. The floor under my feet shifted and I braced myself against a bulkhead. More bullets pattered against the fuselage. Then abruptly we left the ground, the floor vibrating, and unseen metallic stuff rattling. Hanging on to the head restraint of the left hand seat, I peered through the front canopy. The runway and green-brown areas of grass on either side were falling away. The parked fighters shrank in size as I watched, became toylike.
Torres seemed relaxed enough, his right hand gripping a short control stick and stirring it lightly; his left hand was down beside his seat, also in action. I felt the chopper respond, the floor tilting upwards towards the front as he increased the climb rate at some muttered instruction from Elena, accompanied by the jab of a gun muzzle in his neck.
She moved to the co-pilot’s seat and strapped herself in while keeping Torres covered. She grinned at me; she seemed to be getting quite a kick out of our little escapade.
‘Sit down and fasten the straps,’ she ordered me.
Behind her seat was a passenger seat. I flopped into it, buckled the straps. We were now well above what was left of the mist, skies all around blue and free of clouds. A perfect day for vacationers. Some object struck the windshield and was flipped way leaving a mark like a dead insect. It didn’t bother me. Any moment now we would be out of range, even of a rifle.
‘Looks like we made it.’ I said to Elena.
Her eyes sparkled.
‘Isn’t it fun?’
To her we were just goofing around, playing a practical joke on the Air Force. I hoped they would see the theft of a helicopter in that light.
We were accelerating forward now, the note of the engine rising and the rotor at full hammer. Somewhere in the array of dials and digital readings must have been a ground speed indicator but it wasn’t evident. Digits flickered and tumbled and winked in profusion, confusing me but hopefully telling Torres all was well.
Hills and a large lake were rolling past beneath us, and beyond the lake
was the sea and a town, possibly Sotogrande. To my right the Rock, less impressive from up here, was obscured by its habitual low cloud.
‘Can you tell what’s our altitude,’ I asked Elena, shouting to make myself heard over the thunder of the engine.
She prodded Torres. ‘Quantos metros de altura temenos?’
‘Ochocientos,’ he grunted.
Eight hundred feet. If it mattered. If we were shot down at any altitude above sea level the outcome was likely to be fatal.
We hadn’t seriously discussed tactics. I assumed we were going to land at Gib airport.
‘Unless you’d prefer to come down in the sea,’ Elena said, with a terse laugh.
‘We may need clearance to land? We’d better tell Torres. Or maybe not, if your people will be listening in.’
‘They’ll guess anyway.’
Torres fired a question at Elena, too fast for me.
‘He asked where he’s to go.’
I told him to head out to sea, to mislead the Spanish radar. The summit of the Rock edged past on our right. I could see the red cabin of the cable car en route for the top. A straight dash for the airport, capitalising on our start, might have been a smarter move. I wondered how long it took to scramble a fighter. Five minutes? Three? No, that would be from a state of readiness. Those fighters I had seen were not parked for instant getaway.
I peered through the Perspex. Behind and below us Irazola’s forces would be preparing to break camp. They wouldn’t move until nightfall, using darkness to cloak their advance. From their encampment to the frontier was not much more than an hour, even for the heaviest armour. I visualised the tanks rumbling down through the pass on their way to the coast, steel dinosaurs in the night, tracks squeaking and squealing. I imagined the shouted orders, the cursing, the milling confusion that goes hand-in-hand with a major military exercise, the inevitable mishaps: a jeep toppling into a ditch, a tank carving the corner off a wall, one troop-carrier shunting another.
Up here in the blue though, all was calm apart from the racket from the engine. Then the radio stuttered, the staccato jabber too fast for me to translate.
‘What are they saying?’ I shouted at Elena.
She shushed me. More rapid fire dialogue, then she said, ‘They are sending up two fighters. They have been instructed to shoot us down on sight.’
‘Christ!’ I wasn’t even wearing a parachute. ‘Is this thing armed?’
Elena relayed the question to Torres.
‘Si. Two heavy machine guns. The fighters will be carrying air-to-air missiles however.’
The radio went quiet. I scanned the sky, swivelling my head from side to side. Notwithstanding that a visual sighting would serve no purpose, since those fighters could outpace us many times over. Likely as not a missile ploughing into the fuselage would be the only notice we would receive.
We were beyond the coast now and ahead was all water. Elena instructed Torres to descend and head back for the airport by the shortest straightest route. The priority now was to get down before we were shot down.
He nodded, glanced over at me as if for confirmation. We began to turn in a wide circle and lose altitude. Our view of the sea was replaced by a view of the Rock and the runway at its base. We were not far above the surface of the water now, flapping over a small sailing boat, a line of white faces following our progress.
Elena turned in her seat to face me. ‘André …’
‘What is it?’
‘I love you, mi cariño.’
No honest reply would have been adequate, so I reached out and rested a hand on her shoulder to try and convey my feelings for her, even if they didn’t quite add up to love.
Maintaining wave-skimming height, Torres was on his final run for the airport, the sun bursting into the cabin with the brightness of a phosphorous shell. The north face of the Rock was on our left, growing in magnitude with every passing second.
A patch of sea up ahead shivered as if in a spasm. Now you see it, now you don’t. I stared at the spot, but it told me nothing. Then the chopper gave a shudder and there was a sound of tearing metal. I glanced over my shoulder. A jagged rent had appeared in the sliding door. So that was what ‘shoot on sight’ meant.
Torres shouted, ‘They’re shooting at us!’
Cannon fire was less deadly than a self-homing missile, which was all you could say in its favour. Or so I deluded myself until the second burst left a gaping hole a few feet behind me. The chopper rocked, swinging like a pendulum. The sea was suddenly very, very close. We flew on, shuddering and clattering, the Rock closing in on us at a frightening rate. A slender aircraft suffused the screen going from left to right, too close for safety, too fast to change course. A screeching of metal to metal followed, accompanied by a loud bang. Our aircraft quivered and the fighter went cartwheeling spectacularly across the surface of the sea, throwing up arcs of spray from its extremities, like an aquatic catherine wheel.
God knows how, but Torres kept his nerve. It felt as if our machine was shaking itself apart as we thundered over the water, the airport coming up fast. Then the second fighter appeared on our right, two o’clock high. It flicked past, going too fast to engage us. Now it was already swinging across the sky in a semi-circle, coming back for the kill.
Gibraltar airport was no more than a kilometre distant. To land we had to reduce speed, which would have made us sitting-duck targets. To stay aloft was a no more enticing prospect and would only prolong the inevitable. Our craft was in poor shape, creaking and vibrating; some of the instruments were doing a war dance and an orange square of light was flashing from the control panel. Behind my head an alarm was wailing. Torres seemed to be fighting the stick with both hands wrapped around it.
We were facing approximately west, the isthmus of land between the Rock and Spain the slenderest of threads, the runway tapering to vanishing point out in the bay. Our altitude was virtually zero, all Torres had to do was keep us aloft and fly in a straight line for less than a minute.
A feeling of helplessness came over me. We were entirely dependent on Torres and I wasn’t enjoying it one bit.
‘Here he comes!’ Torres warned. I looked in all directions but saw nothing. A faint drumming, like distant hooves, and something exploded in my face spraying me with warm fluid. Elena cried out and we wobbled violently, the airport runway no longer in view. I called her name, struggled to get free of the harness.
‘Don’t … move.’ Her voice was hoarse, barely audible. ‘I’m … all right.’
The chopper stabilised, Torres continuing to perform miracles in keeping us aloft. Elena was motionless, kept in place by her harness. If she was hurt there wasn’t a damn thing in the world I could do about it.
Cold air was funnelling up between my legs, and fluid continued to sprinkle me from some unseen source. The fighter had gone into a zoom climb after the attack. When it reappeared it was off to port, a speck that doubled then quadrupled in size, gobbling up the airspace between us at a prodigious rate. Ahead, the runway was close – so close it seemed that all we had to do was sink down onto it. Instead we shot upwards as if snatched by some giant lifting device and the fighter, moving too fast to conform, passed beneath, the patter of its cannon cutting off short. It was a brilliant piece of flying by Torres who then brought us down so fast I left my stomach behind. Under my feet something was banging about. I got the impression the fuselage was about to tear itself apart.
‘Are you all right?’ I asked Elena but my voice was drowned by the general din. The machine pistol slid off her lap and hit the floor with a clatter.
The runway broadened to an arrowhead shape as we homed in on it. A twin-turboprop aircraft in drab military grey was sitting on the tarmac in front of the airport buildings, its props whirling discs. Stay there just a moment or two longer, I cautioned in my mind. People were pouring from the buildings, rushing to the side of the runway to stare.
A yelp of rubber, a bounce before finally settling. We were down, fifty m
etres from a goggling line of spectators who came rushing over to render aid. The rotor was slowing. Torres was tilted sideways, his head resting against the Perspex, as if he had dozed off. Blood covered the right side of his head and his shoulder.
Tendrils of smoke oozed lazily from under the control panel. I had by now discovered the quick-release button of the harness and was out in a flash, clambering over the seat to get to Elena.
Her body had been hit at least twice by shrapnel. There were two distinct wounds and she had bled so much that her clothes were saturated with it; little of the original colour still showed.
Her head had flopped back, her eyes were closed, the sweeping black lashes lying like little fringes on her pale cheeks, below the big fringe. Not a mark on her pale face. At peace. And in her peace she was the most beautiful creature on earth.
‘Elena,’ I said, uselessly, helplessly, my voice breaking with emotion.
‘Hey you – get out of there!’ The shouting was accompanied by a hammering on the fuselage. ‘She’ll go up in a minute.’
I laid my hand along Elena’s cheek. ‘No, she won’t,’ I murmured. ‘She’s not going up ever again.’
Smoke belched out from under Elena’s seat; smoke interspersed with tongues of flame. The heat seared my leg. I didn’t feel a thing.
Afterwards they told me they had had to drag me out.
Chapter Thirty
‘Mild concussion,’ the doctor pronounced. ‘First degree burns to upper right leg, minor bruising and lacerations. You’re a lucky man by all accounts. Finish those dressings, will you, nurse?’
‘Never mind that,’ I said, sitting up on the bed as the nurse fussed around me. I was clad only in undershorts and socks. ‘What day is it?’
‘Day? Friday.’
‘The 8th?’
He nodded. My watch was still on my wrist: it was ten minutes after eleven and room was sunny. Thirteen hours had gone by since we landed. We? Where was Elena?
Then it all came back to me, vivid as a nightmare. Especially the blood … Elena’s blood … blood everywhere …