by Peter James
Ten miles out over the North Sea, I looked carefully at the radar screen, and scanned the clear sky with my eyes. Then I started a long banking turn to the right and the English Channel. I was going to have to keep a sharp eye out. I had no flight plan filed for the course I was flying, and, moreover, I was heading up the Channel and straight across one of the world’s busiest air corridors.
Down below, and a long way to the left, I could make out Calais. Calais passed by and then Boulogne began to appear. Dover passed by on my right, and then Beachy Head came into view. Scanning every inch of the sky with my eyes, I descended to eighteen thousand feet, and then banked sharply to the left and headed straight for the French coast. I didn’t bother to switch the radio on; I knew that a torrent of abuse would pour out from the French air-traffic control boys. I descended to ten thousand feet.
After a few minutes, I could see Dieppe dead ahead and very clear. I cut the airspeed to two hundred and fifty knots, and started a sharper descent. We crossed Dieppe at seven thousand feet, and the Illushyn was beginning to respond very sluggishly to my movements of the control column. It was twenty-one minutes past eleven.
Two gendarmes were operating a speed trap on the N27 Dieppe to Rouen road. They sat on their Motoguzzi 1,000cc motor bikes, one of them beaming a vascar detector down the empty road behind them. It was a long, straight and very wide stretch of dual carriageway, and it was busy only in the summer months.
Behind the gendarmes was a large cornfield, across which a tractor chugged, pulling a large covered trailer. It was a smart new Renault tractor, but neither of the gendarmes paid any attention to it. Their eyes were on a silver sports car, a kilometre up the road, and coming their way at what looked considerably faster than the one hundred and forty kilometres per hour that were permitted. The gendarme holding the vascar detector aimed the device carefully and squeezed the trigger. The needle raced past the one hundred and forty mark, and carried on, past the two hundred mark, hit the stop at two hundred and twenty and snapped off.
The driver of the Aston Martin DBS Vantage held the slim steering wheel tightly in his hands. The Super-Snooper radar detector on his dash screeched loudly as he rocketed past the articulated lorry at one hundred and forty-five miles an hour, and he then saw the two gendarmes up ahead, by the roadside.
His reaction was to drop from fifth gear into fourth, and flatten the accelerator pedal. In spite of the speed at which he was already travelling, the massive brake-horsepower of the engine thrust the small of his back deeper into the rich leather of his seat-back, and the speedometer climbed up to one hundred and sixty-five miles an hour. He allowed himself a fraction of a second to look in the mirror and see that the police were setting off after him, and then they ceased to become even specks in the distance. He shifted into fifth gear, and the car surged forward. The speedometer swept past the one hundred and seventy mark, one hundred and seventy-five, flickered up past one hundred and eighty, and then finally hovered around the one hundred and eighty-five mark. He passed an orange 2CV Citroen and nearly blew it off the road with his slipstream. The driver was enjoying himself, and his enjoyment of the fine car and the thrill of the speed was all the more satisfying because he was actually being paid to do this.
A mile and a half behind him, the two Motoguzzis accelerated down the road, their sirens bleating. Half a mile behind them, the articulated lorry, with the Montélimar licence plates, suddenly acted very strangely, slewing across the road, and then reversing, so that it blocked the road completely.
My airspeed was now one hundred and forty knots. The stall-warning buzzer shrieked almost continuously. There was hardly any response to my movements of the control column. Down below, the road stretched out. Then the articulated lorry came into view, exactly in the right place. We passed barely fifty feet over its roof; I had full flap, the undercarriage down and locked, and beneath that bulbous nose in front of me, the road was rushing up to meet us. We sank down, down; I fought with the column to keep the nose up, and with the rudder to keep the aircraft straight. It must be now, I thought, it must be now! I pushed the four throttle levers forward, and as the surge of acceleration came, I felt the centre wheels touch, ever so gently, and I was about to congratulate myself. I pulled the throttle levers back to cut the thrust, but to my surprise, the aircraft at that moment lifted several feet back up into the air, and then thumped back down with a jarring I could feel through every bone in my body. We lifted up again and crashed down again, then up again, then down again, and this time, to my relief, we stayed down, racing along the road. Then finally, the nose came down and the nose-wheel touched. I waited for a moment for it to settle, then I wrenched the throttle levers right back into full reverse thrust, and stood on the brakes for all I was worth.
The speedometer sank: one hundred and twenty, one hundred, eighty, seventy, sixty, and finally down to ten knots. I turned the aircraft sharply to the right, off the road and into the cornfield, and halted about one hundred yards from the tractor, which was already pounding its way over to us.
I switched on the intercom. ‘There are detonators aboard this aircraft which will destroy it in exactly four minutes; you must open all exits, including the emergency exits, and you are to leave by the escape chutes, and get as far away from the aircraft as you can. Anyone who tries to interfere will be shot. Long live Israel! Freedom to the Jews in the Soviet Union!’
The tailgate of the articulated lorry lowered, and an Aérospatiale Puma helicopter appeared from inside. Another two followed it. All three had emblazoned on the sides the name: Heli-Transport France.
The tractor and trailer stopped at the rear of the aircraft. Among the contents of the trailer was a corpse with a new set of dentures. That corpse, which had been acquired through the services of the Department of Anatomy at the Elephant and Castle, had probably been given the best dental treatment to which any corpse had ever been treated. If the soldier who had died of a heart attack had known that the body he had donated to medical science would so serve his country, he would, for sure, have died a proud man.
The new dentures with which the corpse had been kitted were for the purpose of identification. They had been made, correct to the last detail, from the dental records of Sir Isaac Quoit. I sure as hell hoped Quoit was aboard this aircraft after the lengths to which we had been.
I could see passengers scurrying from the aircraft across the cornfield. Among them I recognized tough KGB deputy chief Ztachinov, evidently not as tough as he had thought. He was going to have some red-faced explaining to do when he got home, if he wanted to hang on to his job.
There were three taps on the door in rapid succession, followed by two slow ones, and then three more quick ones. I opened it up. Two men, wearing the blue denim peasant clothes of the French farming fraternity, but distinguishable from ordinary French farmers by the balaclavas that concealed their faces and the Sterling sub-machine-guns in their hands, stood outside.
‘Ready to go, sir. We’ve got Sir Isaac.’
‘Where was he?’
‘In the hold, surrounded by two thousand chickens.’
Two minutes later, the three Pumas lifted up into the sky. I looked down at the stubble of the cornfield, at the great silver bird with the red-star markings and the hammer and sickle on its tailplane, and the crowd of people standing, looking like bewildered ants, a few hundred yards off from the Illushyn. Suddenly the plane produced two orange bursts, followed by two thick puffs of black smoke, then a massive flame ripped down its entire length like a knife-blade, before turning into a blazing ball of fire that enveloped the plane completely. I looked across at the man who sat in the seat opposite me: a large, portly man, with nine days’ stubble on his chin, crumpled clothes on his body, and confusion in his eyes.
‘Don’t worry, Sir Isaac,’ I said cheerfully, ‘you’ll be back home within a few hours.’
Quoit smiled feebly. He would smile even more feebly when the news was broken to him that he was officially dead, and w
as going to have to stay dead for a considerable time to come.
One Puma peeled off and headed down towards the centre of France. The second peeled off and headed east towards Germany. We headed north, out towards the Channel. A long way west, down the Channel, beyond the control of the French coastguards, a Special Boat Service high-powered launch awaited us. Heli-Transport France would eventually get back two of its Pumas. One would be found abandoned in Germany, the other abandoned in central France. The third wouldn’t be found until the day the English Channel was drained.
The French coast slipped away beneath us. I looked at my watch: it was eight minutes to twelve, British time. At the switchboard of the France-Soir newspaper, one telephone line in particular would be engaged: the caller was telling the news editor about the successful hijack and the destruction of the Illushyn by the Israeli Freedom Front, a new faction whose aim was to rain blows upon the Soviet Union until every last Jew in Russia had either been released or was granted full rights as a citizen. Their first blow had just been dealt.
As the world read its papers, and heard its news, during the next twenty-four hours, I wondered how many people would ever guess that the Israeli Freedom Front’s name had been dreamed up on the fifth floor of MI5’s Carlton House Terrace headquarters, and that the group in question were not an assortment of fanatical Jews, but fourteen professional soldiers from a regiment of the British Army called the SAS, and one, not entirely unhappy, very hungry, and exceedingly smelly spy.
10
It was 10 November, and the temperature in Adamsville, Ohio, was minus two degrees Celsius. The underfloor heating ducts pumped out warm air for all they were worth, their strenuous effort masked by the quiet and gentle hush of blowing air, which was the only sound that could be heard in Harry Slan’s office.
Harry Slan sat down at his desk. It was two minutes to nine, and he was frozen stiff. He stared through the window, the lower half of which was misted up, at the glow of the weak sun on the snow-covered ground, and at a gritting truck that moved slowly down the road outside, its blue lights flashing brightly.
There was a large pile of mail on his desk, which he looked forward to opening. He enjoyed opening mail, especially when he couldn’t tell from the outside what the contents were, or who this or that letter was from. There was always a chance it could be from some anonymous benefactor enclosing a cheque for vast riches – unlikely, as he knew, but possible.
Third down in the pile was a postcard from a workmate on holiday in Hawaii. The picture showed a glorious stretch of white beach, with a scattering of yachts anchored a short way out to sea. A grin came across his face as he cast his mind back to Chanson II. Nearly two months had passed since that glorious, incredible, utterly decadent, utterly filthy, most wonderful long weekend of his life. He had toyed with the idea of writing to Eva, but fear of being discovered by his wife, Myrtle, had so far prevented him. On many occasions during the past six weeks he had sat back, his eyes open, but the shutters at the back of them drawn, his mind four thousand miles away, inside a body that lay on soft cushions on a hard teak deck, under the glow of a hot mediterranean sun, out of sight of the rest of the boat, while his stunning German beauty gently nibbled away at a very hard object she had just removed from his bathing trunks.
He was snapped out of his reveries by the sound of his office door opening, and Matt Krosnick, the chief engineer of the Adamsville plant of American Fossilized Corporation, came in. It was Thursday morning, inspection morning, when the two of them would walk through the entire plant.
‘Morning, Matt,’ said Slan. He started to get up from his desk, and then stopped, and felt himself blush a little, and tried not to blush, which made things worse. He couldn’t stand up, not in front of anyone, not right now: he had a gigantic erection.
‘Morning, Harry,’ Krosnick looked at him oddly. ‘Oh – you haven’t finished your mail. Want me to come back in ten minutes?’
‘No,’ said Slan, desperately wanting him to go away and come back in ten minutes. ‘No, don’t worry.’
Slan stood up from his desk in an almost doubled-up position. He buttoned up his jacket and sank his hands deep inside his trouser pockets, and began to walk around to the front of his desk, whilst keeping his body turned away from Krosnick. Krosnick wondered if he was suffering from a slipped disc.
American Fossilized’s Adamsville plant employed nine hundred and thirty men. In fifteen years of operation, working with lethally radioactive uranium hexa-fluoride gas, producing the fuel elements that would eventually spend a year or so inside the core of one of many nuclear reactors, followed by six months to a year at the bottom of a cooling tank, followed by several centuries encased in massive radiation-proof casks and entombed at the bottom of oceans, or deep underground, not a single man had been killed, injured, or even suffered the slightest overdose of radiation; and this was due to Slan’s vigilance. He was proud of the safety record, and he had reason to be.
After the morning’s inspection, Slan and Krosnick lunched in the canteen, then Slan returned to his office, sat down, and continued with his morning’s post. Halfway through the pile, was a large white envelope addressed to him, and marked ‘Private and Confidential’. The postmark was New York. He wondered who could have sent it, but didn’t come up with any ideas. Taking his paper knife, he slit the envelope open along the top. He pulled out first a typewritten note. It read simply: ‘Sorry to send these to you at work, but not sure of your home address. Thought you’d enjoy a little souvenir!’ He then pulled out four photographs. They were colour photographs, taken with a camera with a very expensive lens, and taken by a photographer who, without any doubt, judging from the clarity of the picture, the excellent composition, depth of field, and colour fidelity, knew his trade.
The first depicted Harry Slan and a very attractive dark-haired girl, lying on a bed side by side, naked, and apparently joined together at the naval. The second depicted Slan, again completely naked, bent double in the middle of a room, whilst the same dark-haired girl, wearing nothing but yellow wellingtons, administered the lash of a rope across his backside. Slan winced at the memory, not of the whipping, but of how he had had to avoid letting his wife see his backside for three weeks afterwards. The third showed Slan and this same girl sitting side by side in a large swing chair on what appeared to be the deck of a yacht; behind them was an expanse of flat blue sea, and a long way back towards the horizon was the unmistakable outline of the French port of St Tropez. Closer inspection of the photograph revealed that Harry Slan’s bathing trunks were hanging around his ankles, and the girl, who was topless, was holding his very erect penis firmly between her forefinger and her thumb. The fourth photograph showed them making love in a cabin, doggy-style.
Slan had turned very white, and his hands were shaking. For two months, he had been convinced that the reason Deke Sleder had invited him for that weekend was because Sleder was going to buy American Fossilized, and he wanted to meet his future works manager. He had thought it odd that there should have been so many people from the nuclear energy industry on that yacht together, but, with Eva there, he really hadn’t been too interested in wasting time conversing with other men. Since he had returned home, he had begun taking the Wall Street Journal. He scoured its pages, and whenever he saw mention of one of Sleder’s companies, or of Sleder himself, he positively beamed with smugness at knowing this great man personally.
He wasn’t beaming any more. ‘Sorry to send these to you at work, but not sure of your home address’ – was whoever sent this crazy? ‘Thought you’d enjoy a little souvenir!’ Had Deke Sleder, if it was he who had sent this, gone stark raving mad? His wife, Myrtle, opened all the mail that came to their house, regardless of whether it was marked Private, Confidential, or Danger, do not open – contains nuclear bomb. Ever since a colleague, for a joke, had bought him a subscription to a monthly pornographic magazine which arrived in a plain brown wrapper. Myrtle had taken command of the mail. She was a violently jeal
ous woman, convinced that every woman in Adamsville was after her husband’s body, and she had informed him, more times than he could count, and in great detail, of the very many unpleasant things she would do to him if she ever found out he had been unfaithful to her.
He stuffed the photographs into the central drawer of his desk, then pulled them out, marched them over to a filing cabinet and stuffed them into a file marked Personal. Then he took them out of that file and stuffed them into a file marked Overseas enquiries – dormant. Then he took them out of that file, had one more careful look, then tore each into a hundred pieces, and burned the pieces in his ashtray.
He studied the note for some clue, but none was forthcoming. He tore the note into shreds and dropped the pieces into his waste paper basket.
He wondered if it was a joke. If it was, then it was a damned strange joke, and he couldn’t think who could have perpetrated it. He hadn’t become friendly enough with any of the other people on the boat that weekend for any of them to have pulled a prank. If it wasn’t a joke, then what was the purpose? There was no demand for money, not even a hint of a demand. Whatever the purpose was, Harry Slan didn’t like it; he didn’t like it one bit.
11
Anyone who wanted to be a fly on the wall of the conference room on the fifth floor of 46 Carlton House Terrace would have needed fog-lights to see through the canopy of smoke that encircled the massive oval-shaped mahogany table, and completely concealed the fine stuccoed ceiling.
All four walls were heavily panelled, with several layers of sound-proofing materials, and an outer layer of oak. To reduce the possibility of any eavesdropping to an absolute minimum, the room had no windows.