“I wish you were right.” Alex shook his head. “But Cray’s got a huge organization. He’s put years of planning and millions of pounds into this. He’s got Yassen Gregorovich working for him. He must know something we don’t.”
He went over to her. He wanted to put an arm round her but he ended up standing awkwardly in front of her instead. “Listen,” he said. “This is going to sound really big-headed and you know I’d never normally tell you what to do. But the thing is, I have sort of been here before…”
“What? Locked up by a maniac who wants to destroy the world?”
“Well, yes. Actually I have.” He sighed. “My uncle was trying to turn me into a spy when I was still in short trousers. I never even realized it. And it’s true what I told you. They made me train with the SAS. Anyway, the truth is … I know things. And it may be that we do get a chance to get back at Cray. But if that happens, you have to leave everything to me. You have to do what I say. Without arguing…”
“Forget it!” Sabina shook her head. “I’ll do what you say. But it was my dad he tried to kill. And I can tell you, if Cray leaves a kitchen knife lying around, I’m going to shove it somewhere painful…”
“It may already be too late,” Alex said gloomily. “Cray may just leave us here. He could have already left.”
“I don’t think so. I think he needs you; I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because you came closest to beating him.”
“I’m glad you’re here,” Alex said.
Sabina looked at him. “I’m not.”
Ten minutes later the door opened and Yassen Gregorovich appeared carrying two sets of what looked like white overalls with red markings – serial numbers – on the sleeves. “You are to put these on,” he said.
“Why?” Alex asked.
“Cray wants you. You’re coming with us. Do as you’re told.”
But Alex still hesitated. “What is this?” he demanded. There was something disturbingly familiar about what he was being asked to wear.
“It is a polyamide fabric,” Yassen explained. The words meant nothing to Alex. “It is used in biochemical warfare,” he added. “Now put it on.”
With a growing sense of dread, Alex put the suit on over his own clothes. Sabina did the same. The overalls covered them completely, with hoods that would go over their heads. Alex realized that when they were fully suited up, they would be virtually shapeless. It would be impossible to tell that they were teenagers.
“Now come with me,” Yassen said.
They were led back through the house and out into the cloister. There were now three vehicles parked on the grass: a jeep and two covered trucks, both painted white with the same red markings as the suits. There were about twenty men, all in biochemical suits. Henryk, the Dutch pilot, was in the back of the jeep, nervously polishing his glasses. Damian Cray stood next to him talking, but seeing Alex he stopped and came over. He was bristling with excitement, walking jauntily, his eyes even brighter than normal.
“So you’re here!” he exclaimed, as if welcoming Alex to a party. “Excellent! I’ve decided I want you to come along. Mr Gregorovich tried to talk me out of it, but that’s the thing about Russians. No sense of humour. But you see, Alex, none of this would have happened without you. You brought me the flash drive; it’s only fair you should see how I use it.”
“I’d rather see you arrested and sent to Broad-moor,” Alex said.
Cray simply laughed. “That’s what I like about you!” he exclaimed. “You’re so rude. But I do have to warn you, Yassen will be watching you like a hawk. Or maybe I should say like an eagle. If you do anything at all, if you so much as blink without permission, he’ll shoot your girlfriend first. And then he’ll shoot you. Do you understand?”
“Where are we going?” Alex asked.
“We’re taking the motorway into London. It’ll take us just a couple of hours. You and Sabina will be in the first truck with Yassen. Eagle Strike has begun, by the way. Everything is in place. I think you’ll enjoy it.”
He turned his back on them and went over to the jeep. A few minutes later the convoy left, rolling out of the gates and back up the lane to the main road. Alex and Sabina sat next to each other on a narrow wooden bench. There were six men with them, all armed with automatic rifles, slung over the white suits. Alex thought he recognized one of the faces from the compound outside Amsterdam. Certainly he knew the type. Pale skin, dead-looking hair, dark, empty eyes. Yassen sat opposite them. He too had put on a biochemical suit. He seemed to be staring at Alex, but he said nothing and his face was unreadable.
They travelled for two hours, taking the M4 towards London. Alex glanced occasionally at Sabina and she caught his eye once and smiled nervously. This wasn’t her world. The men, the machine guns, the biochemical suits … they were all part of a nightmare that had come out of nowhere and which still made no sense – with no sign of a way out. Alex was baffled too. But the suits suggested a dreadful possibility. Did Cray have biochemical weapons? Was he planning to use them?
At last they turned off the motorway. Looking out of the back flap, Alex saw a signpost to Heathrow Airport and suddenly he knew, without being told, that this was their true destination. He remembered the plane he had seen at the compound. And Cray, talking to him in the garden. Henryk is very valuable to me. He flies jumbo jets. The airport had to be part of it, but it still didn’t explain so many things. The president of the United States. Nuclear missiles. The very name – Eagle Strike – itself. Alex was angry with himself. It was all there in front of him. Some sort of picture was taking shape. But it was still blurred, out of focus.
They stopped. Nobody moved. Then Yassen spoke for the first time. “Out!” A single word.
Alex went first, then helped Sabina down. He enjoyed feeling her hand in his. There was a sudden loud roar overhead and he looked up just in time to see an aircraft sweeping down out of the sky. He saw where they were. They had stopped on the top floor of an abandoned multistorey car park – a legacy of Sir Arthur Lunt, Cray’s father. It was on the very edge of Heathrow Airport, near the main runway. The only car, apart from their own, was a burnt-out shell. The ground was strewn with rubble and old rusting oil drums. Alex couldn’t imagine why they had come here. Cray was waiting for a signal. Something was going to happen. But what?
Alex looked at his watch. It was exactly half past two. Cray called them over. He had travelled in the jeep with Henryk and now Alex saw that there was a radio transmitter on the back seat. Henryk turned a dial; there was a loud whine. Cray was certainly making a performance out of this. The radio had been connected to a loudspeaker so that they could all hear.
“It’s about to begin,” Cray said. He giggled. “Exactly on time!”
Alex looked up. A second plane was coming in. It was still too far away and too high up to be seen clearly, but even so, he thought he recognized something about its shape. Suddenly a voice crackled out of the loudspeaker in the jeep.
“Attention, air traffic control. This is Millennium Air flight 118 from Amsterdam. We have a problem.”
The voice had been speaking in English but with a heavy Dutch accent. There was a pause, an empty hissing, and then a woman’s voice replied. “Roger, MA 118. What is your problem, over?”
“Mayday! Mayday!” The voice from the aircraft was suddenly louder. “This is flight MA 118. We have a fire on board. Request immediate clearance to land.”
Another pause. Alex could imagine the panic in the control tower at Heathrow. But when the woman spoke again, her voice was professional, calm. “Roger your mayday. We have you on radar. Steer on 0-90. Descend three thousand feet.”
“Air traffic control.” The radio crackled again. “This is Captain Schroeder from flight MA 118. I have to advise you that I am carrying extremely hazardous biochemical products on behalf of the Ministry of Defence. We have an emergency situation here. Please advise.”
The Heathrow woman replied immediately. “We need to know what is on board. Whe
re is it and what are the quantities?”
“Air traffic control, we are carrying a nerve gas. We cannot be more specific. It is highly experimental and extremely dangerous. There are three canisters in the hold. We now have a fire in the main cabin. Mayday! Mayday!”
Alex looked again. The plane was much lower now and he knew exactly where he had seen it before. It was the cargo plane that he had seen in the compound outside Amsterdam. Smoke was streaming out of the side and even as Alex watched, flames suddenly exploded, spreading over the wings. To anyone watching, it would seem that the plane was in terrible danger. But Alex knew that the whole thing had been faked.
The control tower was monitoring the plane. “Flight MA 118, the emergency services have been alerted. We are beginning an immediate evacuation of the airport. Please proceed to twenty-seven left. You are cleared to land.”
At once Alex heard the sound of alarms coming from all over the airport. The plane was still two or three thousand feet up, the flames trailing behind it. He had to admit that it looked totally convincing. Suddenly everything was starting to make sense. He was beginning to understand Cray’s plan.
“Time to roll!” Cray announced.
Alex and Sabina were led back to the truck. Cray climbed into the jeep next to Henryk, who was driving, and they set off. It was difficult for Alex to see what was happening now as he only had a view out of the back, but he guessed that they had left the car park and were following the perimeter fence around the airport. The alarms seemed to have got louder; presumably they were getting nearer to them. A number of police sirens erupted in the distance and Alex noticed that the road had got busier as cars tore past, the drivers desperate to get away from the immediate area.
“What’s he doing?” Sabina whispered.
“The plane isn’t on fire,” Alex said. “Cray’s tricked them. He’s evacuating the airport. That’s how we’re going to get in.”
“But why?”
“Enough,” Yassen said. “You don’t speak now.” He reached under his seat and produced two gas masks which he handed to Alex and Sabina. “Put these on.”
“Why do I need it?” Sabina asked.
“Just do as I say.”
“Well, it’ll ruin my make-up.” She put it on anyway.
Alex did the same. All the men in the truck, including Yassen, had gas masks. Suddenly they were completely anonymous. Alex had to admit that there was a certain genius to Cray’s scheme. It was a perfect way to break into the airport. By now all the security personnel would know that a plane carrying a deadly nerve agent was about to crash-land. The airport was in the throes of a full-scale emergency evacuation. When Cray and his miniature army arrived at the main gate, it was unlikely that anyone would ask them for ID. In their biochemical suits they looked official. They were driving official-looking vehicles. The fact that they had arrived at the airport in record time wouldn’t be seen as suspicious. It was more like a miracle.
It happened exactly as Alex suspected.
The jeep stopped at a gate on the south side of the airport. The guards there were both young. One of them had only been in the job for a couple of weeks and was already panicking, faced with a red alert. The cargo plane hadn’t landed yet but it was getting closer and closer, stumbling out of the air. The fire was worse, clearly out of control. And here were two trucks and an army vehicle filled with men in white suits, hoods and gas masks. He wasn’t going to argue.
Cray leant out of the door. He was as anonymous as the rest of his men, his face concealed behind the gas mask. “Ministry of Defence,” he snapped. “Biochemical Weapons division.”
“Go ahead!” The guards couldn’t hurry them through fast enough.
The plane touched down. Two fire engines and an assortment of emergency vehicles began to race towards it. Their truck overtook the jeep and came to a halt. Looking out of the back, Alex saw everything.
It started with Damian Cray.
He was sitting in the passenger seat of the jeep and had produced a radio transmitter. “It’s time to raise the stakes,” he said. “Let’s make this a real emergency.”
Somehow Alex knew what was about to happen. Cray pressed a button and at once the plane exploded, disappearing in a huge fireball that erupted out of it and at the same time consumed it. Fragments of wood and metal spun in all directions. Burning aviation fuel spilt over the runway, seeming to set it alight too. The emergency vehicles had fanned out as if to surround the wreckage, but then Alex realized that they had received new orders from the control tower. There was nothing more they could do. The pilot and his crew on the plane were certainly dead. Some unknown nerve gas could even now be leaking into the atmosphere. Turn round. Get out of there. Go!
Alex knew that Cray had cheated whoever had flown the plane, killing them with exactly the same cold-blooded ruthlessness with which he killed anyone who got in his way. The pilot would have been paid to send out the false alarm and then to fake a crash landing. He wouldn’t have known that there was a load of plastic explosive concealed on board. He might have expected a long stay in an English prison. He hadn’t been told his job was to die.
Sabina wasn’t watching. Alex couldn’t see anything of her face – the gas mask had fogged up – but her head was turned away. For a moment he felt desperately sorry for her. What had she got into? And to think that this had all begun with a holiday in the South of France!
The truck jerked forward. They were inside the airport. Cray had managed to short-circuit the entire security system. Nobody would notice them – at least not for a while. But the questions still remained. What had they come for? Why here?
And then they slowed down one last time. Alex looked out. And at last everything made sense.
They had stopped in front of a plane, a Boeing 747-200B. But it was much more than that. Its body had been painted blue and white, with the words UNITED STATES OF AMERICA written across the main fuselage and the Stars and Stripes emblazoned on its tail. And there was the eagle, clutching a shield, just below the door, mocking Alex for not having guessed before. The eagle that had given Eagle Strike its name. It was the presidential seal and this was the presidential plane, Air Force One. This was the reason why Damian Cray was here.
Alex had seen it on the television in Blunt’s office. The plane that had brought the American president to England. It flew him all over the world, travelling at just below the speed of sound. Alex knew very little about it, but then virtually all information about Air Force One was restricted. But one thing he did know. Just about anything that could be done in the White House could be done on the plane, even while it was in the air.
Just about anything. Including starting a nuclear war.
There were two men standing guard on the steps that led up to the open door and the main cabin. They were soldiers, dressed in khaki combat gear and black berets. As Cray got out of the car, they brought up their guns, moving into a position of alert. They had heard the alarms. They knew something was happening at the airport but they weren’t sure what it had to do with them.
“What’s going on?” one of them asked.
Damian Cray said nothing. His hand came up and suddenly he was holding a pistol. He fired twice, the bullets making hardly any sound – or perhaps the noise of the gun was somehow dwarfed by the immensity of the plane. The soldiers twisted round and fell onto the tarmac. Nobody had seen what had happened. All eyes were on the runway and the still-burning debris of the cargo plane.
Alex felt a surge of hatred for Cray, for his cowardice. The American soldiers hadn’t been expecting trouble. The president was nowhere near the airport. Air Force One wasn’t due to take off for another day. Cray could have knocked them out; he could have taken them prisoner. But it had been easier to kill them; already he was putting the gun back into his pocket, two human lives simply brushed aside and forgotten. Sabina stood next to him, staring in disbelief.
“Wait here,” Cray said. He had removed his gas mask. His face was flushed w
ith excitement.
Yassen Gregorovich and half the men ran up the steps onto the plane. The other half stripped off their white suits to reveal American army uniforms underneath. Cray hadn’t missed a trick. If anyone did chance to turn their attention away from the cargo plane, it would seem that Air Force One was under heavy guard and that everything was normal. In fact, nothing could have been further from the truth.
More gunfire came from inside the plane. Cray was taking no prisoners. Anyone in his way was being finished without hesitation, without mercy.
Cray stood next to Alex. “Welcome to the VIP lounge,” he said. “You might like to know, that’s what they call this whole section of the airport.” He pointed at a glass and steel building on the other side of the plane. “That’s where they all go. Presidents, prime ministers … I’ve been in there once or twice as a matter of fact. Very comfortable, and no queues for passport control!”
“Let us go,” Alex said. “You don’t need us.”
“Would you rather I killed you now, instead of later?”
Sabina glanced at Alex but said nothing.
Yassen appeared at the door of the plane and signalled. Air Force One had been taken. There was no one left to fight. Cray’s men filed past him and made their way back down the stairs. One of them had been wounded; there was blood on the sleeve of his suit. So at least someone had tried to fight back!
“I think we can go on board,” Cray said.
All his men were now dressed as American soldiers, forming a half circle round the steps leading up to the door of the plane, a defensive wall in the event of a counter-attack. Henryk had already climbed up; Alex and Sabina followed him. Cray was right behind them, holding his gun. So there were only going to be the five of them on the plane. Alex filed the information somewhere in his mind. At least the odds had been shortened.
Eagle Strike Page 17