Bolt Action

by Charlie Charters

  The pilots, not men of faith, even in the terrifying circumstances of night landings on a moving deck, find themselves now scrambling to think of something spiritual and prayer-like. As the clock counts down, the tension squeezes the chest. A strange vice-like grip tightening the skull.

  On board PK412

  The only word to describe the woman standing in front of them is matronly. Big, heavy, in a baggy, light blue, velour tracksuit, bouncing back and forth across two seats in Row 33. Giant projectile breasts. The Pakistani woman is shouting, screaming, bellowing at the top of her considerable voice in a language unknown to Tristie Merritt. Something South Asian. The noise so shrill that the nearby passengers seem to be grinding their teeth against the pain. Their startled heads bob into sight from behind the backs of seats. Up and down the aisles, startled, alarmed looks.

  Salahuddin and Tristie are standing in the aisle, a seat’s width away. Captain Salahuddin looking alarmed by this Everest of wailing womanhood. The portly steward looking lost. Whiffler is coming down the aisle, yawning and rubbing sleep from his eyes and wearing a What the Hell is Going On? look.

  Tristie can’t help but notice more and more passengers are grasping whatever it is that the woman’s shouting, dominos beginning to fall . . .

  It’s fairly obvious what has happened. The cord of her in-seat telephone is looped over the backrest. She must have been on the phone to someone, and that someone has given her the news. Whatever it is they know down there – the bolted cockpit door, the missing crewman Zaafir – the screams are suddenly in English, and in a different, menacing tone. ‘You will never see your children again. NEVER, I TELL YOU . . . NEVER.’ More chilling and infinitely contagious. Tristie puts her hand on Salahuddin’s shoulder and when he turns she mouths, ‘Hijack,’ pantomiming a telephone.

  Sharp questions and the first blooms of anger rise in the faces of passengers. An epidemic starting to build.

  Salahuddin nods. Yes. Puts up his hands in despair. What are we supposed to do? He glances back at this mammoth female, hopelessness in his face. The realisation she’s some three times his weight, and ripped up with the adrenalin of fight or flight that would make her an impossible takedown. Those big untouchable sacks of breast.

  Come on, Captain. Be the Man . . .

  This creature of Beelzebub, her madness increasingly bewitching the cabin, burning everyone up. Then a shaft of bright light bringing clarity . . .

  Before Mad Woman knows a thing, Tristie vaults on to the aisle seat next to her. With the whole cabin watching, she hits her in mid-screech, and makes the slap look like nothing. Easy. Like it’s a cinch to knock a 300-pound woman to her knees. She falls down to a final scream, the row of seats rocking as she collapses. Then silence. It hurts like hell, Tristie’s hand a giant bee sting, But she makes it look easy . . . and that is what the rest of the plane had needed to see.

  Tristie climbs down off the seat. Looks at Salahuddin. ‘Talk to these people, your passengers, about what’s going on. Give them some confidence. Tell them you’re putting together a plan.’

  ‘We are?’ Salahuddin blinks, then gives an almost imperceptible shake of his head. Like he’s seeing things. ‘We are. You are right, of course.’ And, back in command, he finger-points this way and that, shouting to his crew how to deal with the Mad Woman in Row 33.

  Thankfully Whiffler had read Tristie’s mind. He had sensed what was needed, scuttled back to first class and woken Button, who’d raided the in-flight medical supplies. Button, oozing tranquillity, tap-taps on Mad Woman’s arm with a syringe of calm-down juice. ‘That’s better.’

  As they make their way back to the front of the plane, past rows of shocked faces, Tristie draws the captain to one side. ‘Our biggest problem is panic. The emotion we respond to fastest. And it’s the most dangerous by far.

  ‘This is your plane and these are your passengers . . .’ She waves away Whiffler, who’s signalling from the galley, making the universal army call for a brew-up. ‘. . . we need to be getting them to do things, to distract them from what’s going on. I’ve seen it happen before and it’s already building. When people are under stress for long periods, if their minds are given the time and space to roam, there will be madness on our hands. A collective furore. Very few will be unaffected, believe you me. Some will just calcify, go silent, zombie-like. But most will ready to stampede.’

  The captain plays this scenario in his mind, pulls a pained, anxious face while biting on his bottom lip. ‘Yes,’ he speaks slowly, deliberately, ‘all of your points are well made.’

  ‘Excuse me for not knowing enough about Pakistan, but how many major language groups in your country?’

  ‘I would say six or seven: Urdu is our lingua franca but it isn’t the mother tongue of many people, less than ten per cent. The big populations are Sindhi. Pashto. Balochi. Punjabi, that’s my mother tongue . . . Saraiki. Hindko. These are the main blocs.’

  ‘And how many Pakistanis are there on this flight?’

  Salahuddin shrugs his shoulders. ‘At a guess, eighty per cent of the flight.’

  Tristie always had a head for numbers. Three hundred and forty-five passengers and seventeen crew. ‘About two hundred and ninety people.’

  ‘About right.’

  ‘I think we should move people around, try to get them sitting in little groups with their kin, people they feel comfortable with. It’s a big task, there could be some anxiety and frustration at times, but it will keep everybody occupied for, hopefully, a couple of hours at least. First, get your people to explain what we are trying to do. Lots of smiles. No stress whatsoever. And bring forward the next meal service so people have something else to focus on. I’ll get my big colleague over there, we call him Button, I’ll get him to handle the Caucasian passengers if that’s any help.’

  ‘Problem.’ Salahuddin points a finger heavenwards. ‘It feels like we’re doing that Hezbollah thing, separating the Israelis, the Jews, from the rest of the passengers. I foresee this causing its own tensions. Big tensions . . .’

  ‘Which we can explain away. With our best Come Visit Pakistan smiles. Look. We’ve got no guns or munitions to threaten people with. We’re hardly a bunch of terrorists ourselves.’

  ‘What if people don’t want to move?’

  ‘That’s fine. No coercion. Remember. There’s no real point to this, other than to keep people distracted, get their minds on something different.’

  ‘Like rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic?’

  Not helpful.

  Tristie looks down and lets out a long sigh, so he knows how irritated she is at this foot-dragging. It’s at this precise moment that she gets distracted. Whiffler is singing in the galley. That tune by the Kaiser Chiefs. Ten feet away, brewing tea for himself and Button . . . he’s watching people getting lairy and thinking it’s not going to be very pretty. ‘I Predict A Riot’. It’s unhelpful timing, possibly unintentional, but part of her wants to snicker with laughter.

  Eventually Whiffler runs out of lyrics and is left humming.

  It helps Tristie focus and she puts her hands up to Salahuddin. Surrender. Self-admonishment. That female instinct: let him think it is his own clever idea. A game that had to be played if she is to get what she needs. A tremolo of anger in her voice. ‘You want to talk about deckchairs on the Titanic . . . remember, the Titanic wouldn’t have sunk if the officer in charge of the bridge that night had turned into the iceberg, rammed it, instead of trying to skim around the side. A most natural and intuitive reaction for him, avoiding that iceberg, but it doomed the ship and all her passengers. Let’s not try and slide our way around this problem. Let’s confront it. Head on. OK?’

  Salahuddin examines her, hardly a trace of movement in his solid, drawn features. He’s a bastard to read, this pilot. He holds his steady gaze for what feels like a count of ten, then calls over a pair of stewards. No idea what he’s saying to them but he’s whispering to them, busy, busy, as though it’s all top secret.

/>   The only distinct sound is Whiffler, still tinging and twanging on the aluminium galley insets, drumming, humming happily to himself. ‘I Predict A Riot’ . . . Waiting for his beloved cup of tea to brew.

  Salahuddin swings around from the little knot of cabin crew, and moves towards Tristie. Purposeful at last. ‘We can work together, you and me, but whatever happens,’ and he flexes his jawbone, ‘I mean whatever happens, you do not tell my crew that you and those others are ex-army.’

  ‘Is it such a huge problem?’

  ‘Yes, a huge problem.’ And he looks her in the eye. ‘Your government has helped turn our country into a plaything for incompetent soldiers and corrupt politicians. That is unforgivable. Once . . .’ and with his eyes shining slightly, he jerks a thumb back towards his crew, his people ‘. . . once upon a time, I’d like you to remember, before all this madness came from the West, we actually had a pretty decent country. And the best airline in Asia to go with it.’

  The Situation Room Complex

  Ground Floor, West Wing

  The White House

  0822 Washington time, 1322 London time, 1822 Islamabad time

  The staff officer folds up the tele-message print-out, moves hurriedly from the National Security Council’s watch station, twelve short paces up the narrow, carpeted corridor, and eases open the heavy door into the main conference room. The news is that the two Super Hornets are on station, tucked in, as per standing orders, slightly above and five miles behind the Boeing 777. One fighter on either side.

  As a relatively junior GS-12, the NSC staffer can’t put names to every single face in the modest, hushed room that he has entered, but he’s aware it’s a pretty stellar crowd. The mood is electric this morning and things are threatening to run amok in the watch station. Foreign leaders, desperate to talk, are being left on hold like this was Papa John’s Pizza, not the White House . . . sure, please tell Mr Prime Minister, the president knows you’re waiting . . . Yes, please convey to the Madam President that I’m sure he’ll join the video conference when he’s free . . . Yes, of course, please let His Highness know . . . They’d flicked as many of the calls as possible to the Secretary of State and his people, who are working from a soundproofed cabin next to the situation room, with panels of glass that mist instantly at the touch of a button.

  So. Committed to the situation room this frantic morning are the president, Charles Hannah, the Secretary of State, who’s half in, half out of all the discussions, and the Attorney General. The Secretary for Homeland Security. The acting head of the CIA. Plus the Transport Secretary paired alongside the top official of the Federal Aviation Administration. All seated round a long, polished table, about the only wood feature left in the whole ultra-modern room. The vice-president and Defence Secretary are hooked in live from two separate air force planes, one heading off to Korea, the other halfway back from Alaska. Somebody is giving a briefing on another video link, the room has six of them, huge, flat screens that dominate their respective wall spaces. One is permanently slaved to a map of the north Atlantic showing a little red dot, PK412, inching from east to west with radial lines plotted outward from New York in increments of 250 miles. It’s hard not to see this plane as an intruder, minute by minute getting closer and closer, menacing the US heartland . . .

  The staffer wants to be in and out of the room as fast as possible, too many things fizzing through his brain, so he doesn’t focus overmuch on the briefing. An East Coast, Massachusetts sort of voice explains from one of the screens the State Department’s early take on things: the Arab League in Cairo are denouncing Washington’s aggressive posture, getting their condemnations in quickly . . . the Organisation of the Islamic Conference warns that downing the plane will be seen as an act of war on all Muslim nations. Everybody has commented that things are moving so fast . . .

  There’s buzz about an Iran or a Venezuela-type country calling an emergency special session of the United Nations . . . ‘Just loose talk at the moment,’ the guy from State notes confidently. ‘No chance of getting seven votes off the Security Council . . . and, er, it’s our assessment, at this time, that they’ll be hard pushed, we feel, to get a majority of the member states . . .’ A point on which he sounds less than totally assured.

  A row of seats for the underlings is set back from the main table and everybody there is crouched, eyes concentrated with serious intent as the situation reports continue. The staffer can’t help but notice there’s a White House staff photographer in the back, quietly clicking away. Consigning this moment to history.

  The GS-12 needs to find the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who, confusingly, is out of uniform. A measure of how quickly things had had to come together this morning. The security detail hadn’t quite grabbed the admiral by his arms, legs and belt as they had Vice-President Cheney on 9/11, but it had been near enough. Get Here Now. The staffer quickly scans the room, craning his neck this way and that, sees his man obscured by the solid shape of Secretary Salazar of Homeland. He holds out a note for the admiral to take and it’s snatched greedily. As he waits for any verbal or written response, the staffer follows all the eyes in the room towards the briefing screen . . . he notices first the change in voice. Midwest accent. Kansas perhaps. A different presenter, talking to his audience behind a lectern with a Department of Energy backdrop. Round faced, choleric . . .

  ‘It’s a public holiday here and in London, so the really big US and UK investors are not in play . . . but there’s already been a significant jump in crude oil futures on the two exchanges in Dubai, the Oman and Fujairah contracts. The Internet oil traders are also spiking this thing through the roof. Up eighteen, nineteen dollars a barrel in one day and still rising sharply . . . Crazy stuff when you consider twenty-five dollars a barrel is the record one-day jump. Tomorrow there’s going to be an awful lot of upward pressure. For sure, this will roll through into prices for Brent and West Texas Intermediate . . .’ and the guy from Energy rolls his eyes, tugs at the collar of his too-tight shirt ‘. . . because the market clearly anticipates this is going to blow up ugly. Serious ugly. Both short and long term . . .’

  The staffer feels a tug on his sleeve and looks down at the admiral, who leans forward to whisper. ‘Get the live video from the Super Hornets prepped, and the comms link to the senior pilot. I want it to be the next thing we look at. Let’s see what these goddamn people are up to.’

  On board PK412

  There are three of them in the galley. Whiffler, Tristie and the captain, who’s pinched a number of first-class menus and on the blank cover pages is scribbling out diagrams. A sort of catharsis. Schematics of the cockpit door, the plane’s fuselage and cockpit in elevation, side elevation and cross-section, and so on. He’s got a good eye for detail.

  Whiffler, expert in explosives, and their number-one guy on mechanical stuff, is leaning in towards Salahuddin. Peppering him with questions as he draws, questions that an amateur like Tristie would never think of. ‘So the power connections are through the L-plates in the door frame . . . what happens when the delta pressure changes? . . . This is DC current, right?’

  She leaves the two of them going hard at it, trying to work out a way into the cockpit. The shape of an even bigger idea, the very barest glimmer of an outline, is beginning to form in her mind. A real crapshoot.

  A fifth-storey penthouse

  Overlooking Regent’s Canal

  Islington, London

  1347 London time, 0847 Washington time, 1847 Islamabad time

  The packaging on the steak-and-mince pie with the nice lattice pastry had said ‘Serves Three’ but it was gone in four bites and only one person was involved. The Weasel. The pie is now warming his insides nicely, just as the soapy bathwater is thawing out his exterior. He had woken up freezing cold in a strange bed.

  He sucks on a lit cheroot, sinks into the depth of bubbles and tries to blow smoke rings. Bring some character to this antiseptically fancy bathroom.

  Happiness is a cigar . . .

/>   The mobile rings. His Ward 13 phone. A look of irritation streaks across his face. But he turns quickly, sloshing the water, in time to see the damn thing ringing and vibrating all at the same time, skittling across the black marble washbasin surround. Moments from tumbling to the floor.

  He lunges sideways from the bath, a hand stretched out, just in time to miss the phone tipping over the edge. It tumbles. Hits the rim of the toilet bowl and for a shocking second pirouettes on the white porcelain, spinning on its end, before disappearing out of sight.

  ‘Shit,’ and with the movement of his lips, the cheroot drops to the wet floor. Sizzling quietly. But the phone is still making a noise. A sort of chirping. Damaged but not destroyed. He levers himself out of the tub with a big slop of bathwater, grabs the handset and presses Answer. Soap and shampoo suds still plugging his ear . . .

  Moments later Weasel is standing in front of a TV set, dripping wet, a white towel cinched around his waist.

  ‘Jesus, Tristie . . .’ He points the remote at the satellite box. ‘You mean . . . you guys are on that plane?’

  ‘Just tell me what they’re saying.’

  ‘Well, CNN is showing a map of the Atlantic. You’re pinpointed on it, about halfway across. Some link to a website called openatc.com.’ Weasel pauses to listen to the CNN commentary. ‘The correspondent in Islamabad is talking about unconfirmed reports out of Pakistan that the plane has been hijacked by Islamic terrorists. That they’re in control. There’s talk that probably a list of demands has been sent to the US embassy there and the State Department. That’s all uncorroborated. The guy says the country has gone mad with rumour, he’s quoting from blogs and Twitter and all sorts of crap, says frankly he doesn’t know what to think at the moment. The caption reads . . . “At This Hour: US Cabinet Reviews Shoot-Down Option” . . . oh fuck, Tristie . . .’