by Peter James
I screwed the cover back onto the light and slipped into the first lavatory on the left. I shut the door behind me, but didn’t lock it, and put my tool box on the floor. I took out a large adjustable spanner, wound it open until it fitted over one of the four bolts that secured the steel lavatory to the floor, and wound it tight onto the bolt.
The bolt wouldn’t budge at first, and a small amount of thread came away, but then it slackened and began to turn easily. I worked through the other three, lifting them out in turn and putting them carefully to one side; then I lifted up the entire lavatory, to reveal a black hole, about eighteen inches in diameter, which stank worse than the breath of a London Underground commuter. I put the seat down in the tiny space beside me. There was a sucking and gurgling, which told me the sewage tender had begun pumping the tank out.
At least the aircraft boffin at Combined Central Information knew his stuff. His tiny office was crammed full of model aeroplanes, and he looked more like an errant schoolboy than the three-times decorated Squadron Leader and fighter-pilot ace he had been in the Second World War. Reginald Braithwaite was known to the whole of British Intelligence as Biggles, and those that ever had dealings with him discovered one thing: there was nothing he didn’t know about aircraft. He had assured me that the Illushyn had a manhole directly underneath this lavatory seat, for inspection purposes, and he had been right; he’d also told me I would need a gas mask, an aqualung, and a wet-suit, and on that he was also right.
I already had the wet-suit on underneath the boiler suit, which I peeled off, and I removed the rest of the kit from the bottom two layers of the tool box; the kit included a stubby weapon with a bulbous magazine that looked not unlike an early Sten gun, and another weapon that resembled a Very pistol, and clipped them both onto the belt of my wet-suit. Then I took a bolt cutter, and snapped off the ends of the four bolts, so that they would lie in their holes without protruding, and look, to anyone that did not try to turn them, as if they were holding the bowl to the floor.
I waited until the tender had finished pumping, and then I put on the gas mask, pulled up the hood of my wetsuit, pulled on a pair of rubber gloves, packed up the overalls and the bolt-cutter into the tool box, and squeezed down into the hole.
My feet dangled into space, and for a moment I wondered if Biggles had got his measurements wrong and it was more than four feet to the bottom; but then my feet squelched into several inches of a slimy substance that I preferred not to think too hard about, and I touched the floor. I reached up my hands, and pulled the tool box down, placing it on the floor beside my feet, then reached up again, took hold of the lavatory bowl, and manoeuvred it back into its correct position. I took four bolts from the tool box, pushed them up through the four holes into the base of the lavatory, and hand-turned them until they were sufficiently tight to prevent the lavatory from moving. There was a small hole in the centre of the lavatory, through which I could see up into the tiny room; the light was on, but that would go off soon, when the maintenance men switched off the generator.
I stood bent double in this hell-hole, where I was to spend the next sixteen hours, listening to the sound of my breathing through the gas mask, idly hoping that some giant man-eating alligator hadn’t decided to make this place his home. It was cold, very cold, and I was already getting cramp from being arched. I didn’t want to sit down in that horrible mire, but I had a tough day ahead, and if I didn’t get some sleep tonight, I wasn’t going to be any good for anything.
As I gingerly began to lower myself down, I decided that, compared to this place, the Black Hole of Calcutta would be like a honeymoon suite at the Savoy.
9
Totes is a small town that lies midway between Dieppe and Rouen, and is really more a large village. Like many sleepy French places, it straddles two main roads. At one end of Totes is an outstandingly beautiful manor house, with red brick walls and white shutters, set some way back from the road. Half a mile up a cart track behind it, is a cluster of barns, silos, cowsheds, chickens, dogs and pigs, the central point of which is an ancient, grey stone farmhouse.
The proprietor, Gaston Leuf, was a wizened old farmer, with a shrivelled body and a wrinkled face. Except when he was sleeping, he had never been seen without a blue beret on his head and the stump of a yellow Gauloise sticking out of his mouth. If you ever wanted a photograph of a classic French farmer, you’d travel a long way to find a better specimen than Gaston Leuf.
It was a glorious early November morning, and the whole of Normandy was shrouded in a three-foot-high mist that the sun was slowly dispersing. The whole land looked like a fairy-tale setting, and there was a feeling of serene peace.
Leuf had been looking forward to today, for today he was going to show off; today for the first time in his life, he would be driving to market in a new tractor. It was a gleaming orange and dark grey Renault TX 145-14 Turbo, with sixteen forward and sixteen reverse gears, all with synchromesh, a maximum forward speed of thirty kilometres per hour, and an air-conditioned all-weather cab.
Today, everyone would be jealous, as he thundered, not rattled, but positively thundered, into market, at the helm of the turbo-charged Renault, towing his covered cattle wagon behind him. He hurried into the kitchen, where his wife, Yvonne, was brewing the coffee.
‘Bonjour, ma cherie!’ He kissed her on the cheek. ‘Voom, voom!’ he said, like the excited schoolboy he had once been, sixty years ago. The land he had sold to the council would be paying for a lot of things, but none would he enjoy more than his tractor.
Before sitting down to his breakfast of coffee and bread rolls, he hurried out to the large barn to look once again at his new machine. He pulled open the doors and marched in, beaming. Then he stopped in his tracks and the beam froze on his face. The tractor had gone. The trailer had gone too, but for several moments he did not notice that. He did not notice, either, that both his ladders were gone. He stood, staring in blank amazement. Who, in all the sleepy decades that Totes had passed through, had ever heard of one drop of milk, or one egg, or one chicken, let alone one whole great, spanking brand-new synchromesh-geared Renault tractor being stolen? Leuf spat on the ground. ‘Vache!’ he said, and spat again. ‘Qui?’ he said, ‘mais qui?’
If you happen to be a person who enjoys a good night’s kip, the sewage tank of an Illushyn 62 aircraft is probably not the place for you; it sure as hell wasn’t for me. I looked at my watch. It was five to seven. It was about the three hundredth time that I had looked at my watch since half past six the previous evening. Outside it would be light; people would be waking up, getting their morning papers, having hot showers and warm toast and splashing on sweet-smelling colognes and aftershaves and talcs.
Shortly after nine o’clock, I began to hear signs of activity: the electric whine of baggage-loader trucks, the rattle of a catering truck, then the thumping of footsteps, and the whole aircraft shaking – passengers were boarding.
At five past ten precisely, I heard the first engine fire up. The hissing whine started low at first, then built to a higher and higher pitch, and then the next engine started, and repeated the process, and then the next, until all four were whining fiercely, and then they died down to a quieter deeper pitch. A few moments later, I was sent skidding across the floor of the tank and crashed into the back wall; the plane couldn’t have been moving more than a few miles per hour, but the floor was so slippery that it only needed the slightest motion to send me hurtling out of control like a clown on an ice rink. I got back underneath the lavatory and gripped onto the grab handles.
The plane was now taxiing at a good speed. I wondered which way the wind was blowing – that would decide the direction in which we took off. I wondered, if the plane crashed, whether anyone would ever find me in here. I checked all my equipment, and tried for the hundredth time to push my gas mask against my nose and get rid of the damn itch that had been there for at least ten of the last fourteen hours. I desperately wanted to blow my nose, but there was nothing, no
thing whatsoever, however bad, that was going to induce me to remove that gas mask.
The aircraft stopped; I knew we were probably standing in a queue of aircraft all waiting for take-off clearance from the control tower, and we remained motionless for several minutes.
Then the engines built up to a crescendo once more, and the aircraft began to move forward. My arms, holding onto the handles above me, stretched to their full length as the rest of my body was yanked by the acceleration back towards the rear of the tank. The wheels bumped, bumped, bumped, then the bumping suddenly stopped, and I swayed madly, like a gorilla on a trapeze, smashed my back up against the roof of the tank, and swung wildly down, cracking my knees on the floor.
The aircraft’s climb took an eternity, and my arms were aching like hell, but I was going to hang on; I was not going to go skidding across that damn floor any more. Finally the Illushyn began to level out, and the pressure came off my arms, and soon we were on an even keel. The four engines were all at the rear and the noise and the vibration down here was deafening me and shaking me to pieces at the same time. The steel chamber caused the noise to echo, and it seemed to be getting louder and louder. And then it began to happen: someone came into the lavatory.
I looked up, and watched trousers being pulled down, and then underpants, and then a pair of large pink cheeks descended towards me, with a hairy pair of balls and a long thin penis at the front. The whole lot dangled down inside the seat, blocking out almost all the tiny amount of light. I imagined the expression on the face of the owner of this apparatus. He had probably been holding his legs together since boarding the flight, and at the first opportunity, he had dashed in here, and was now seated with a gleam of blissful expectancy on his face. Had he known what lurked beneath him, I had a feeling the expression might have been somewhat different.
As I wondered, I took careful aim with my pistol: it was a Capchur gun, the type that zoo-keepers use for firing drugged darts into unapproachable animals. It works on compressed air, and the tiny pin-like darts dissolve in the skin they penetrate. With a ‘plunk’ that made a roar and an echo down here that sounded like a twenty-one-gun salute, a tiny dart filled with a large dose of Scoline embedded itself into the right cheek of the man’s buttocks. Even as he exclaimed in surprise, and began to stand up to find out why he had felt this sudden pin-prick pain, the drug had started to travel through his blood stream, turning him, fraction of second by fraction of second from being wide awake into being dog-tired; so dog-tired that by the time he got to his feet, he could not remember why it was that he had stood up, and by the time he had sat down again, he was fast asleep.
I unscrewed the four bolts, removed them, and then, using all my weight, and all the leverage I could get from the slippery floor, I pushed the bowl sideways, being careful not to send it and its occupant tumbling over with a crash that would bring a stewardess running in. He was a heavy customer, and it took a full minute of pushing to clear a gap for me to climb through. I had had to wait for someone to come into the lavatory in order that the door be locked – it was the only way I could emerge safely from my hiding place. The man whose luck it had been to come in first was a well-built man in his late forties; from his close-cropped hair and his poor quality clothes, I guessed he was almost certainly a Russian, but I wasn’t interested enough to start trying to make sure.
I rinsed my rubber-gloved hands, and dried them carefully, then peeled the gloves off – I didn’t want slippery fingers right now. I pushed earplugs into my ears, and turned them until they were a snug fit, then I removed the two stun grenades that were clipped to my belt. With only a two-second fuse on each, I didn’t want to go dropping them under my feet. At the same time, I didn’t want to expose myself in the aisle of the aircraft for longer than was necessary. The armed guards on Aeroflot flights are instructed to shoot on sight anyone behaving suspiciously. Appearing from the lavatory in a wet-suit and gas mask, with a minor arsenal of weapons hanging from clips around my body, it was not unlikely I would have qualified under the category of ‘suspicious behaviour’.
I unlocked the door, pulled it back, placed a grenade in each hand, and stepped out. I pulled out the pin of the first one with my mouth, lobbed the grenade as far down the aisle as I could, pulled the second pin out with my hand, and lobbed that grenade down towards the middle of the aisle, retreated into the lavatory and pulled the door hard shut.
There were two muffled booms in rapid succession, and I now had exactly ten seconds. The stun grenade is a device that was originally dreamed up by the SAS and developed for them. Known as flash-bangs, they had been modified by the Playroom boffins so as not to be a fire risk. They produce a combined flash and explosion that completely deafens, and their effect in a closed environment is to paralyze totally, for a minimum of ten seconds, anyone in their vicinity. They will not cause any actual bodily damage, other than to eardrums, and therefore would not, in theory, damage the structure of the aircraft. For the next ten seconds, everyone in the passenger compartment of the aircraft, including the KGB vigilante, would be paralyzed. The flight crew in the cockpit would be unaffected. They would have heard the two bangs, muffled somewhat, and they would doubtless be wondering what on earth had happened.
By the time four of the ten seconds had elapsed, I had sprinted the length of the aisle, negotiated two rigid stewardesses in the process, and was pressing the intercom button to the cockpit: in what the lingo expert at Combined Central Intelligence had informed me was a perfect Muscovite accent, I yelled the rough Russian equivalent of ‘Don’t sit there, you dumb motherfuckers. Come back and help us!’
It had the desired effect. As the eighth second elapsed, the door opened, and an inquisitive engineer poked his head out into what he expected would be the normal, pressurized air of the cabin, but was in fact a cloud of the same sleeping gas Horace Whalley had enjoyed, squirting hard out of the nozzle of the device that was now clamped under my right arm and looked not unlike an early-model Sten gun, but which was in fact a very recent model gas-gun. By the time the ninth second had elapsed, he was fast asleep, and after the tenth second had passed, so were his chums – the pilot, co-pilot, navigator and radio operator. I turned the nozzle down towards the aisle of the aircraft and squeezed the trigger much harder. Within seconds, the entire cabin was filled with the gas.
I pulled the flight crew out into the aisle, then went back into the cockpit and pulled the door firmly shut behind me. I looked at my watch: one minute and twenty seconds had elapsed. From the dose I had given, it would be some minutes yet before the people back in the cabin would begin to come round, although I couldn’t be sure. I hoped for their sakes it wouldn’t be much more.
It was five minutes to eleven. The sky was clear blue without a cloud to be seen, and Margate was twenty-three thousand feet below our port wing, as the plane continued its course on auto-pilot.
Didier Garner looked at his watch and grimaced. It was five to ten, Paris time; one hour and twenty minutes of his ten-hour working day had so far elapsed without his lighting up a single Winston. Normally he would be lighting his fourth about now, but today he was finished with smoking; he had quit, and he was going to stay quit. The last hour and twenty minutes had been hell, but he had got through them, and he would get through the rest of the day – somehow. He looked out of his window into Place Vendôme, out across the square towards the Ritz. It was a bright sunny November morning, and everything looked good for the director of Heli-Transport France. It was about time. For six weeks the company’s three Aérospatiale Puma helicopters, the backbone of his fleet, had been grounded by the authorities after a piece of engine cowling had sheared off one and plummeted through the roof of a parked car. The problem had been traced to a mechanic carrying out faulty maintenance work, but the grounding had cost the company a fortune. From today, the grounding had been lifted, and there was a full schedule for the helicopters for several weeks ahead, which would quickly resolve the company’s financial crisis.
The white telephone on his desk buzzed and he picked up the receiver to take a call from his chief engineer at their operational base in Senlis. Within sixty seconds of picking up the receiver, he had reached inside his desk, taken out a Winston cigarette, placed it between his lips, and was now holding the flame of his gold Dupont lighter to the end. During the night, someone had stolen all three Pumas.
I sat in the pilot’s seat of the Illushyn, and ran my eyes systematically over the controls. Up until three days ago, the largest aircraft I had ever flown was a twin-engined Piper Aztec, and now I was at the helm of an aircraft that was a Russian copy of a VC 10.
For the past three days, I had done nothing but take off, circuit and land a VC 10 at the British Airways training school; take off, circuit, land, until I was sick to the back teeth of doing it; take off, circuit, land until I could do it, do it all, without asking one single question. Right now, I was glad of those last three days, damned glad.
I checked the altimeter, the airspeed, and the rest of the instruments, took the control column in my left hand, and with my right hand, reached out and switched off the automatic pilot. A voice behind me suddenly bellowed through the intercom in Russian. I didn’t speak a great deal of Russian, but I knew enough to understand what the voice was saying. It was saying ‘Who the hell are you?’
I replied, in the best Russian I could muster. ‘Your plane is in the hands of the Israeli Freedom Front. Remain calm and nothing will happen to you; attempt to come through this door, and everyone on this aircraft will die.’ I knew there was no way they could get through the door. It had been designed to keep out the most determined of hijackers. The Stechkin pistol that the security guard doubtlessly carried, would in no way be capable of penetrating either the door or its bolts. I switched off the intercom, leaving them to stew.