Lethal Sky

by Greg Barron

  Marika moves into the passenger cabin, scanning for more targets. The others have taken cover behind seats. Badi is nowhere to be seen. She stands and fires a couple of rounds into the back of the seat he had been in but there is no sign of whether he took a hit or not.

  A man appears from five rows back, snaps off a three-shot burst. These weapons are hardly the most accurate small arms, but one bullet passes so close to her right ear that it leaves her momentarily deaf. Marika takes him out with a single round in the forehead, leaving him slumped across a seat.

  The machine pistol Marika carries has a thirty-round magazine of copper-jacketed 9mm rounds, and Marika estimates that she has used seven or eight.

  Flimsy tray tables and upholstery are unlikely to stop bullets, but spraying rounds indiscriminately will soon mean an empty weapon. Throwing herself forward on the carpeted floor, weapon held sideways in front of her body, she looks ahead, a set of legs protruding in the darkness below a seat cushion. She fires a burst, just above the level of the seat, knowing that the bullets will pass straight through the frame and cushions — deformed, perhaps, but effective nonetheless.

  The response is dramatic: a scream, then a babble of incomprehensible words. Marika sees blood drip down from the seat. She crawls forward. The person in the seat is Cassie, a bloodstain spreading across her white dress as she clutches at wounds in her abdomen, mouth open, sobbing and fighting for air, her eyes already dulled.

  Ignoring the sight, Marika crawls forward, one seat at a time. She hears a noise behind her: one of the wounded men fumbling towards a fallen assault rifle. Sends a round into his forehead, the impact blossoming like a red paintball round on his skin.

  Another man appears in the middle of the aisle. His machine pistol opens up, while he screams like a Hollywood Apache, the gun in his arms shuddering, rounds whipcracking over her head, before she alters the aim on the machine pistol and takes him out with two rounds high in the chest, one just below the notch of his neck.

  Marika hears a shout of pain from behind her, then a change in the engine beat. The plane tilts dramatically.

  Jesus Christ, the bastard accidentally shot the pilot.

  She looks through the front windscreen. He has not yet had time to turn the plane around. The coast is now visible, far in the distance.

  New York.

  America.

  As far as Marika can tell, there are only two people still alive on this aircraft. One is her, the other is Badi. Hatred threatens to cloud her judgement. She wants to spring up and run down the aisle, pump bullets into his body until he lies torn and broken, no longer able to hurt, kill and torture. She recalls the internet video footage they unearthed of his part in suppressing the Syrian revolution. Images of men killed, riddled with bullets when there could be no further reason to fire but for bloodlust.

  Now I want to do the same — to him. To kill him over and over. Yet he is waiting for me. He wants me to throw caution to the wind.

  There is no question of a silent stand-off. Downing or crashing the plane over water is one thing; allowing it to wing its way over the continental United States is another — completely out of the question.

  Marika rises to her haunches, then begins a slow duck walk down the aisle. Covering left and right with the machine pistol, just the lightest finger pressure on the trigger, watching for any sign of colour or movement.

  An instant later she hears a sound behind her, and halfway down the fuselage one of the overhead baggage lockers flies open and a man appears, lying prone inside, holding a handgun, firing twice before Marika takes him out with a round in the forehead and one in the chest.

  He falls, she waits to check that he is dead, then moves on. Then, reaching the seat where Badi had been sitting just a few moments earlier, she starts to have doubts. Is he up front somewhere? No, she decides, that’s not possible. He must be in the aft section of the plane.

  Another row, just two more to go. The tension builds in her, and the pilotless aircraft rocks at some turbulence. The movement scarcely breaks her concentration; she lets her body sway but her eyes never lose sight of her surroundings.

  The last seat. She is tempted to send a burst through the upholstery, stopping herself only at the last moment. Still no sign of him. Her eyes rise to the rear antechamber. The two doors: male toilets on the left, female on the right.

  Marika moves into the gap between them. Neither is locked, the occupancy lights showing green. Badi is in one of those cubicles. There is nowhere else he can be. He will be armed, his own deadly plastic machine pistol pointed at her. She will have just microseconds to fire, and her chances of doing so before his firearm belches the contents of its magazine into her body are not odds worth taking.

  The cubicles are small. She has maybe ten rounds left. Which would he have chosen? Male is too obvious, yet …

  Swivelling sharply, Marika aims into the door of the men’s, fires a burst, then turns, redirecting the muzzle into the female equivalent, bullets chewing easily through the upholstered foam-core exterior.

  Still with a couple of rounds left she steps back, kicks the door of the male cubicle open. Nothing. Then the other. Stands back, breathing hard. Staring uncomprehendingly. Badi is gone.

  EIGHTY-ONE

  IRELAND

  LOCAL TIME: 1200

  Tom Mossel stands in the yawning doors of the hangar and calls the director of the CIA on his cell phone. Around him men at arms are standing, weapons slung, talking in dejected groups. The target is long gone.

  ‘Charlie, this is Tom. There is a Courtrevolt Air Grumman AT-560, registration number golf-charlie-alpha-6352 on its way into your airspace. It left Ireland almost five hours ago. It filed a flight plan to New Jersey but may have deviated from that flight plan. It has onboard an unknown quantity of the verified anthrax spores. I suggest you locate and destroy the plane over the sea using high-temperature munitions as soon as possible.’

  Tom closes the call, and then walks outside, his face turned away so the men cannot see it.

  Marika Hartmann is, as far as he knows, on that plane. She is, and always has been, one of the good ones. Something special that he had recognised right from the moment she first came to the DRFS on a trial. They had developed a father–daughter relationship. In a strange kind of way he loves her.

  Giving the order that will lead to her death is one of the hardest things he has ever had to do, ranking with calling in a missile strike on the Ka Tirsan base nine months earlier.

  This is the end, he knows, of his career. Later, when he returns to London, he’ll tender his resignation to the Prime Minister. He’ll get a generous pension and his replacement will call him from time to time to ask his advice. He’ll drink half a bottle of scotch every night and think about all the things he could have done differently.

  Tom Mossel, head bowed, moves across the apron towards the chopper.

  EIGHTY-TWO

  ATLANTIC OCEAN

  LONDON TIME: 1210

  Looking back up along the fuselage and through the cockpit windows, Marika can see the coast even closer now, aware that, without control, the plane is rising steadily.

  The sun highlights skyscrapers, freeways, turnpikes, bridges and traffic. The spectacular array of highrise buildings, sparkling like jewels, can only be the central business district of New York.

  She turns her attention back to the cubicles. Somehow, Badi has got through to the baggage hold, and surely that is where the deadly cargo is stored.

  There must be a way down there, she thinks. She falls to her knees, looking for the outline of a hatch in the poor light. Nothing. Surely such a hatch would have to be pressurised, unless of course the hold is pressurised too.

  Her eyes sweep over the area. Nothing there.

  A friend of Marika’s once flew a Dash-8 turboprop aircraft around rural Queensland for a living, before she landed a plum Qantas international job. Marika remembers her talking about an access hatch from the flight deck to the hold. Wasn’t
it in the rear of the cabin? She walks back through and starts to examine the panels and floor there, finding nothing that could possibly hide a hatch of any kind.

  ‘Shit,’ she swears to herself, tapping the bulkhead with the flat of her hand. The toilet cubicles, the hatch must be there somewhere.

  Moving inside she sees the chewed-up fibreglass and nomex panels where her bullets struck. No sign of the cracks or edges surrounding a hatch. She opens the door of the other cubicle, and behind it finds an unscrewed panel. Someone has already unfastened it and gone through.

  That’s it.

  The space looks too small for a grown man or woman to fit through, but Marika knows that spatial awareness of one’s own frame size can be an illusion. Holding the machine pistol in front of her she goes in, head first, feeling like she’s in a laundry chute, hands over her head, wriggling, worming, pushing her way until finally she drops through and beyond.

  There, in the dark baggage hold, she crouches, waiting, watching, listening, even her olfactory senses tuned to the slightest change. The hold lacks the soundproofing of the rest of the aircraft. The noise of the engines is ear numbing. After a few seconds she sees that it is not, as she first thought, fully dark. There are cracks of light between the hatch doors. The hold area is not large, not much bigger than an average-sized bedroom, though it lacks standing room.

  Marika does not move or make a sound. Badi will still have his weapon, but will not be rash enough to blindly spray bullets, and the muzzle flash will give away his position.

  Time ticks on for what must be less than a minute but feels like ten.

  The space is so muffled with luggage and equipment that when his voice comes, it is bare of cadence. Deadpan, lifeless, yet loud enough to carry over the engine noise.

  ‘I called my colleagues at the Sydney house we spoke of earlier,’ he says. ‘I told them to pillage it like Mongols. To burn the house. To kill the inhabitants like pigs, and let the fat of their livers fan the flames.’

  Marika knows that he is goading her, trying to get her to betray her position. She says nothing, breathing open-mouthed in complete silence, trying to banish the images his words have conjured in her mind.

  Badi’s presence here is darkly malevolent, the air is filled with the blood-scent of him, as if the souls of the many thousands he has killed in his lifetime are here with them.

  ‘It is fitting that you have come,’ he goes on. ‘I have attached a small charge of C4 explosive to the two stainless steel tanks that between them contain one hundred kilograms of LSS-253 spores. In my hand I hold a contact switch that will detonate the charge as soon as I am convinced that we have crossed the coast.

  ‘The explosion will be sufficient to puncture the tanks and create a hole in the floor of the aircraft, but not enough to damage more than a small percentage of the spores. The cloud will fall over New York like rain. Of course, it is unlikely that you and I will survive the explosion.

  ‘If you try to rush at me now I will detonate the charge. There is an onshore breeze blowing onto Manhattan Island. Even from our current height and position the spores will still disperse on land.’

  Marika does not make a sound, not even shifting her weight, concentrating all her efforts into her sense of hearing. He is not far away … if she can only hear his breath. The voice, however, seems to come from everywhere, powerful and low, seemingly resonating in the aircraft hull like another engine. By swivelling her head slowly, however, using her right ear like a satellite dish, Marika realises that he is probably a little behind her, to the right.

  If what he says is true, she has no way of stopping him before he can depress the switch. Yet waiting is worse. Onshore breeze or not, any release will be far better here, still off the coast, than over Queens or Brooklyn.

  The machine pistol is no good to her here. There are not enough rounds left to risk a searching burst that stands a chance of taking him out before he can return fire. Instead, as quietly as possible, she loops the weapon over her shoulder, then sinks down to her haunches, scrabbling around with her hands.

  She considers hefting a weighty suitcase in his direction — a direct hit might knock him over and give her time to wrestle the switch out of his hands — then rejects the idea. A near miss might just precipitate him into pressing the switch.

  Her hands move on. A heavy iron ring — tie down lugs, a toolbox of some kind. Reaches the wall and feels along. A cold steel cylinder hanging from a bracket on a bulkhead wall.

  A fire extinguisher. At first the discovery seems pointless. It is hardly a weapon, and is quite large, too heavy to throw effectively in such a confined space. For a couple of seconds she sits there, thinking.

  What type is it?

  The most severe fire danger on an aircraft comes from fuel, even if a blaze starts with other flammables. It will almost certainly be a wet foam type, similar to that used by Hazmat teams, because of its containment qualities.

  There are disadvantages: pouring foam out through a nozzle is relatively slow. Yet, she thinks, what if she could get it out fast, fill the hold with foam, muffle any explosive blast and contain a potential spore release? Slowly, achingly slowly, she lifts the extinguisher from the hook. It is heavy, but not unmanageably so.

  Marika hefts the awkward cylinder, lifts it back as far as she can, holding it near the base, then half stands, swivelling from the hip in order to bring all the power of her body into the impact. The head of the extinguisher smashes against the bulkhead, snapping off the plastic fitting. The tank leaps in her hands, pouring out a solid forty millimetre thick jet of foam as she throws it as far as she can into the darkened hold. Then, scrabbling for the hatchway, she thrusts herself through like a bullet up a gun barrel, already feeling the tide of foam from behind on her ankles, scrambling through into the toilet cubicle, breathing as if she has just run the Albert Embankment on one of her dawn fitness forays.

  Turning, pushing the hatch back into place, Marika is halfway back down the aisle when she hears an explosion from below, muffled, as Badi detonates the charges.

  Then, into the flight deck, slipping into the co-pilot’s seat and looking down, she sees the line of white sand that must be Long Beach. The suburban grid behind it is less than a kilometre ahead. Beyond lies the maze of green islands and vein-like channels. Barnum Island. Cedar Island. Further on, the ceaseless suburbs of one of the most densely populated areas on earth. Oceanside, Valley Stream, Queens, then finally the island of Manhattan.

  Boats cut swathes of white across the ocean below, and she can see splashes of colour on the beaches. People. Mansions on the shoreline. Reefs and breakwaters in the shallows.

  The plane has not altered trim since the explosion and as she settles down beside the controls she begins a mantra in her mind: Please do not have holed the hull. Please do not have holed the hull.

  The foam should have contained the blast, and the contents of the pressure vessel, but she doesn’t know for sure. All she knows is that she has to bring this aircraft down into the sea, and do it as fast as she can.

  Marika settles her right foot onto the rudder and pushes. The plane begins to bank but wobbles erratically; this she ignores, keeping the pressure up until the plane points away from the city and back out to sea. Now it is simply a matter of getting down as fast as possible short of a nosedive crash.

  With both hands on the yoke she pushes down. The airframe responds immediately, nose lowering sharply. It starts to yaw, then wobble from side to side. The feeling is truly frightening, directing two jet engines and thirty tonnes of metal towards the sea. The main problem is sheer speed. The Grumman will hit the sea like a lightning bolt.

  Out the window Marika can see the Yanks coming — jets, naval vessels. At last they seem to know, but it may well be too late.

  Not if I can help it.

  Marika took a pledge a long time ago that means she is willing to lay down her life for the cause of peace and justice, but it is not in her nature to do so unless there
is no alternative. Besides, the less the aircraft breaks up on impact the easier any salvage/containment operation will be.

  The Grumman is equipped with a ‘ditching’ button, on the overhead panel adjacent to the cabin pressure controls. Marika was taught to locate it during an air hostage rescue training course, and she reaches up and squeezes it between her thumb and forefinger, levering it into the upright position as is required. This control, designed to allow an aircraft that has crash-landed onto the sea to float for as long as possible, shuts down all openings on the underside of the aircraft, preventing the ingress of seawater: the avionics inlet; five or more various valves including fuel tank isolators.

  The altimeter already shows that the plane has dropped back down to one thousand feet, and is falling sharply. For some seconds the engines drone on, then the frame shudders as first the port, then starboard engines cut out completely.

  The silence is uncanny. Like most jets, the Grumman is not an efficient glider, and there is a new sensation of falling as it plunges. Marika wonders if she has done the wrong thing, though at least the isolation of the fuel tanks will reduce or eliminate the chances of a fuel explosion on impact.

  She turns away from the controls. Nothing further can be done, with the open sea looming up at speed. She knows that the cockpit is not the place to be at the time of impact. Standing, she moves aft, attempting to make her way back down the fuselage, gripping the seats on either side as she goes, as close to experiencing pure terror as she has been for some time.

  Possible courses of action flash through her mind: piling lifejackets around her, but they will of course be the inflatable type — water activated — useless as cushioning. Besides, there is no time.

  Marika moves to one of the rear-facing seats, tightens the seatbelt, brings up her knees and huddles into the crash position, bracing herself, a glance through the windows telling her that they are just seconds from impact.