A Different War mg-4

by Craig Thomas

  He was accredited as the technical expert representing the airplane manufacturer, and that seemed sufficient.

  The flight recorders and the cockpit voice recorder had been recovered.

  He had listened to a cassette tape of the latter, chilled by more than the wind and the glare of the lightning. It had been like listening to Hollis die, like reliving the airplane's own attempt to kill him.

  Instability, growing like cardiac pains at a frightening rate, the airplane convulsing then dropping, its altitude spouting away from it like blood from a severed artery.

  The sea rushed at him again from an angry cleft in the rocky shore, and he flinched away from the spume. Along the pebbled shoreline, across the rocks to the edge of the tide, there were gouges, splintered rock, great scars… small scorch marks There had been virtually no fire.

  The fuselage he had leapt from a small boat into the main fuselage as it had wallowed in the tide was crushed, broken, but hardly burned.

  The 494 had been out of fuel, tanks virtually empty and the instability had been because the fuel flow had not been computer controlled… and there had been no panic and no realisation because the flight engineer's panel had assured the crew that everything was normal, normal. But it had happened again, with a different computerised fuel management system. It had happened to an airplane that had encountered no problems with fuel management. Instead, it had been racking up the kind of fuel economy figures that both Vance and Burton required.

  Better than Boeing, cheaper than any other airliner… Gant glanced up again at the fuselage, tilted drunkenly towards the angry sea. The floating crane was limping away towards the harbour at Tammisaari with one of the big engines aboard. Smaller craft nipped and huddled between the surges of the sea, two of them marked with red crosses.

  Floating morgue wagons. The divers, now that most of the bodies had been located and marked with little bobbing flags anchored to them, were waiting for better weather, exhausted. The scene was already an aftermath, just a day after the crash.

  Nothing but the fuel management computer could have gone wrong, would have caused the same sudden loss of altitude, the same disaster without fire. He had hardly needed the accounts of eye-witnesses to confirm his analysis. No, there was some flame, but not a big fire… No, there was no explosion. One man, an ornithologist camped on the islet, had video camera footage of the crash and its immediate aftermath…

  His eyes had been a good enough account. And his nose.

  No overpowering scent of aviation fuel.

  Unless the routine overnight servicing of the airplane had created a fault, then there was no other explanation. Unless he or Alan Vance's technical people could find something wrong with the computer that controlled the fuel flow, then there would be no answer at all. He looked behind him, back along the track the plane had made along the shoreline, at the fragments of metal and perspex it had shed like old, flaking skin. He needed to talk to the Norwegian engineers who'd worked on the 494. And study the flight recorder readouts and computer realisations… like watching a movie he had seen before, one that had terrified.

  He experienced a strange, new pity for Vance, and avoided looking up again towards the low headland on which he knew Vance would still be standing, immobile as if suffering paralysis. This broken machine was, quite literally, a broken dream; Vance's only dream during the years he had known him, had been his son-in-law, his pilot. Not money, not fame just the plane, flying. The sea soaked him again, and the scene was once more lit with vivid, garish lightning.

  Gant shivered, as if the emotion he experienced made him weak, sickly.

  It was finished, for good. Vance, standing up there facing the storm like some old Indian chief calling on the Great Spirit in the face of his people's massacre, knew with a chilling, final certainty that it was over. The newspapers, the TV had pronounced. Wall Street would foreclose. Vance was bankrupt. The whole world was a repo man knocking at his door.

  But, for God's sake, why? Airplanes were safe, they didn't fall out of the sky easily, regularly. Of all the accidents he had investigated, no two no almost three, he reminded himself, in the space of a week died in exactly the same way, unless it was during a war. Or unless

  … He shivered violently at the magnified, shattering noise of the fuselage grating on rock. It was impossible. Only terrorists did things like Almost three in a week.

  The idea could not be blown from his imagination by the wind or burned out by the lightning.

  Gant felt very cold.

  Ray Banks' Mercedes, a vivid petrol blue in colour, was parked beside a large hoarding which proclaimed the Millennium Urban Regeneration Project. Beneath the grandiose boast were the gold stars on blue ground of the European Union and a list of the principal contractors and architects for what had become known in the region as the Venice of the Midlands. The larva of a marina scheme based around the city's old, polluted or derelict canal system had become the gigantic butterfly of the regeneration of perhaps a quarter of the entire city.

  Marian brought the Escort Cabriolet to a halt beside Banks' car and tugged on the hand brake Banks appeared gloomy as he got out of the Mercedes. He waved his arm to indicate the empty, half-renovated warehouses and the stretch of recovered canal that was the site of Banks Construction's contribution to the project.

  This is it," he said.

  Thanks for agreeing to show me round. On a Bank Holiday, as well."

  The site, partially ring-fenced, was silent. She could hear the distant sound of traffic on the breeze. Dust moved softly across the acres of concrete and earth seemed to lightly coat the buildings, too, as if they were already part of some failed business investment.

  These three warehouses they're my bit. Turn 'em into shops, offices, apartments. We're only a half-mile from the canal basin and the main part of the marina oh, you'd better put one of these on. Mtf that any thing's likely to drop on your head 'cause no one's working here any day of the week!"

  He pulled two hard hats from the parcel shelf of the Mercedes and handed her one of them. She collected her blonde hair, worn loose that morning, and heaped it into the hat as she jammed it on her head.

  "Dressing the part, I see," he added and she caught the glint of attraction in his look, felt the study of his eyes.

  "Don't all workmen wear denims?" she enquired innocently.

  "My blokes don't look like you do in jeans."

  Thank you, kind sir." Her smile defused something that was a squib rather than a grenade. There were tiny black insects already settled on the bright yellow of her cotton shirt. She glanced at the hoarding.

  Euro-Construction were the principal contractors. Banks' small firm did not rate a mention. There were other names, European and even American… and she recognised two of them as familiar. They, like Euro-Construction Plc, belonged under the umbrella of Winterborne Holdings, David's conglomerate. She rubbed her arms as if cold.

  "All right?" he asked solicitously.

  "Just these tiny flies, or whatever they are."

  "Oh, right. Well, you'd better follow me, then." He glanced at his watch.

  She had rung him a little after nine and had immediately made herself sound eager to be of assistance to Banks. Kenneth had agreed, during their discussion at Uffingham, that she must be allowed to pursue her instincts… that the appalling suspicion that David Winterborne was some kind of crook must either be satisfied or dismissed. Besides, Kenneth Aubrey's legendary curiosity had, she had realised almost at once, been aroused, and it was fiercer than sexual desire and unabated by age. Behold, I show you a mystery she, like everyone who knew Aubrey, knew his motto. It had not been difficult to persuade him that the danger was minimal, the possible outcome momentous.

  She and Banks walked past a Portakabin with dusty windows, two of them broken.

  Concrete-mixers, a parked bulldozer, a dredging crane leaning over the canal like a still heron. Fishing a large bunch of keys from the pocket of his dark blazer, he unlocked the f
resh-painted doors of the first warehouse.

  "You'll see how far we've got and what's still to do. There's no good reason why we're not getting on with it."

  It seemed no more cool in the shadow of the building. Perhaps it was the heat of the morning, but she felt a sudden and unexpected diffidence; the conspiratorial feverishness of her conversation with Aubrey had worn off, vanished like a headache. The shadow of the warehouse over the towpath and the canal was sharply black. Banks ushered her through the door.

  A film set, she thought at first; then, merely a building site.

  Scaffolding, the smell of fresh plaster, dusty bootprints across the floor, hardened concrete on a board, a crumpled crisp packet that scuttled like a crab in the breeze that had entered with them. Sunlight burned through dirty windows and made the dust in the air glow.

  "See?" said Banks, almost bullying her into sympathy.

  "Nothing behind the bloody facade! And no money to go on…" His voice faded before her continuing silence.

  His imminent bankruptcy had been the goad her concern required.

  "Are the other two like this?" He nodded fiercely.

  "And this is to be what, offices?" She waved her hand.

  That's it. Thousands of square feet of office space around a central atrium. See?

  Keep the tall windows that way—" He gestured towards the beginnings of flooring and a gallery.

  "One of the others is supposed to become apartments, the third more offices. The other two are even less forward than this one."

  "How long have they been like this?"

  "Stopped work a month ago completely. Paid off the last few blokes, my best, out of my own pocket, too. Haven't had a bloody penny out of the main contractors since then or for another six months before I had to down tools!"

  His face was brick red with remembered arguments, recollected outrage and growing paranoia and anxiety.

  "And they just keep saying the cheque's in the post, is that roughly it?"

  "Exactly it. Euro-Construction with the other fat cats backing them because they don't have any cash-flow problems just smile like my mother-in-law does when you try to persuade her that white is white and black black against her better judgement-!" He could not avoid grinning at his own waving arms, deep frustration.

  "Honest, Marian it's a right Fred Karno's army setup…" His eyes wandered the warehouse as intently as if he were studying a home that had burned down, then he snapped: "Come on, I can't stand looking at this any longer!"

  The shadow was cooler outside, at least for the first moments. Gnats swirled like smoke above the still water of the canal. Empty paint tins, the occasional condom, sodden cardboard and the inevitable mattress littered the towpath or stuck up out of the stagnant water.

  "I even asked that bloody Euro MP of ours toffee-nosed pillock! to make a few enquiries. I never heard from him again, and his secretary can never get hold of him."

  "Ben Campbell, you mean?"

  That's him. Not much good for anything, is he?"

  "I don't think he'd like to hear you say that." She heard the bell ring of a collar dove, startled by their presence, as its wings lifted it up to the roof of the warehouse. They passed beneath a narrow road bridge over the canal. She smelt the heavy, unappetising scent of cooking on the breeze.

  The nearest streets aren't they to be redeveloped or something?" She'd had letters and phone calls of protest, but had been able to do nothing other than make soothing noises. The city's councillors and planners had decided the old back-to-backs must go not in favour of tower blocks, which was at least something, but to be replaced by a prettified, faked village-style development.

  "Oh, the cooking smells. Sure they are but no one's been moved out yet. The compulsory purchase orders have been served, the prices agreed… but that's the council, mean buggers. They haven't paid up yet because no one's ready to develop the place. I think they've pulled down two houses and a pub so far."

  "Are you—?"

  He shook his head.

  "Egan Construction are down for that redevelopment."

  "Indeed."

  The other warehouses were on the opposite bank of the canal. A pair of new moorings had been excavated beside one of the buildings, there were even brass rails. A mattress floated where a cruiser should have been berthed, or a fashionably old-fashioned narrow boat. They turned a slow bend in the canal and she saw it stretching into the distance between other warehouses, beneath low bridges, amid the canyons of red-brick buildings, towards the canal basin.

  "Are they working on the basin?" she asked. Banks' work was, after all, on the periphery, at the flippant edge of the whole project once it had moved its epic entre from the marina towards the regeneration of a quarter of the city. If money was in the least tight, then he'd be the first to suffer. She had, as yet, no sense of the scale of delay.

  "Sort of one or two blokes dithering about. A lot of it was completed with local funding private and council before the whole thing expanded.

  Not much lately, though," he added.

  "Most of this section of the development has shut up shop."

  She recalled the opening ceremony and the very public steering of a JCB by the PM digging out the first rubble rather than cutting the first turf two years before. The PM possessed a gravitational attraction towards the grandiose; a building site was a newly discovered country, virgin territory for his classless society. Some colleagues referred to his fatal attraction for such schemes, and the hope that Glenn Close might spring up from the bath and stab him to death. He had made one of his characteristically lame speeches regarding the redevelopment as the largest urban regeneration scheme in Europe, perhaps the world.

  This part of it seemed to retain his fingerprints, she reflected sourly. Two weeks' enthusiasm followed by the remaining evidence of something in which interest had been lost. It was still a building site.

  She deflected her thoughts from the familiar with a conscious effort. A figure dressed in a cap and uniform shirt and trousers was emerging from a small Portakabin sited on a stretch of weedy concrete. Beyond it, she could see the tired, cramped streets scheduled to disappear and hear the noise of thudding music and the screams of children. The man was in his late fifties, short, bow-legged, a mobile phone slung at his waist like a cowboy's gun.

  "Oh, it's you, Mr. Banks," he offered, studying Marian with an intensity that belied his casual greeting.

  "Hello, Stan." On the man's cap and shoulder badges, Marian saw the blazon Complete Security. The surprise of memory must have been evident in her face.

  "Anything wrong, Mr. Banks?" He did not look at Banks as he spoke.

  "Only the usual. I'm just showing—"

  "I'm a relative!" Marian gushed.

  "An MP in the family, Mr. Banks? You never said."

  "I apologise," Marian offered quickly.

  "We didn't want you to attach any importance to… You were saying, Ray funding?" She glanced at her watch.

  "I need to be back for lunch, Ray. Sorry and all that. Could we—?"

  Snotty bitch. It was as if he had spoken the words, so clear was the sentiment in his eyes. Nice one, Marian after your classic Piece of stupidity.

  "Oh, yes take care, Stan."

  They moved away, turning back to where their cars were parked. She sensed the security man's study of her as sharply as a lust. Bow legs do not a slow wit make, she recited, angry at her inept, unthinking lie. Complete Security… coincidence? The firm belonged to the Winterborne Holdings Group. Effectively, David owned the company that employed Fraser, who had, almost certainly, killed Michael Lloyd.

  Not coincidence… She resisted the temptation to turn and look back.

  The security guard would be watching, without the shadow of a doubt.

  And knew she had tried to lie to him, and wore a mobile phone on his belt like a pistol.

  "I want to see more," she announced, surprising Banks.

  "I want to know how much is not being done. Did yo
u bring the plans?"

  He nodded.

  "Everything. Each site, the whole overview. What do you want them for?" His words were uttered with the kind of childish, resentful whine that attempted to wheedle adults about to redirect their attentions.

  "Because… if you want my help, Ray, I want to know what is really going on!"

  Or do I…? She could not prevent the question. Conjuring images that mocked the PM, the grandiosity of this urban regeneration scheme, no longer seemed anything more than an insider's game, the irritating chuckles and giggles of people sharing an unimportant joke or piece of gossip.

  "OK, OK what do you want to see?"

  What do I want to see? Evidence that David is a crook and one of his employees is a murderer or evidence that Banks is paranoid and bitter and probably deserves to go out of business? Damn Kenneth's curiosity, she decided, it's infectious.

  The heart of the matter," she announced. The biggest bits — are they dragging their heels on those as well? That's what I want to know, Ray."

  Because here, with these three warehouses and stretch of canal to be rejuvenated, she could only count in hundreds of thousands, perhaps one or two million. David could have easily sold one of his small companies, floated a minor share issue, cashed in some stock, if that was the size of the stake. There was no evidence that tens, hundreds of millions were disappearing.

  The video camera footage shot in the moments after the crash was replaying on a TV screen. The instruments that had thus far been removed from the flight deck were spread, like bones or runes, on a trestle table in front of Gant and Blakey from Vance Aircraft. As were photographs, weighted down with pebbles against the howling wind that blew through the frail canvas tent. Outside, the rescue and salvage work had been postponed until the storm abated. It lurched and bullied like an enraged drunk against the tent, which was erected in a hollow of sand and tussocky grass behind the low headland of the island.

  "See?" Gant was saying, his finger pointing at the TV screen, where the video film flickered and swayed as if affected by the squall.