by Chris Ryan
But anyone who heard the captain’s voice would be able to tell that he was far from calm. A murmur of barely restrained panic filled the cabin, and Randolph found that he was sweating more than ever.
Danny stormed into the ops room on the frigate, Tony and Caitlin following closely. Their clothes were still dripping wet and their weapons were still slung over their shoulders. The ops room itself was buzzing with activity. Radios blaring. The ops officer and his team of Aussie naval guys urgently issuing updates. The Porton Down team standing quietly in one corner, their faces studious as the heart of the military machine pumped in front of them.
Danny strode over to the Porton Down team and handed Dr Phillips his camera. ‘You need to look at what’s on that.’
Without bothering to answer, Phillips took the camera and plugged it into a nearby laptop. Meanwhile, the ops officer strode up to Danny. ‘I’ve got London on the line for you.’
‘What’s happening to the plane?’ Danny demanded.
‘Three RAF tornadoes have just caught up with it.’
‘Where is it now?’
‘Mauritanian airspace.’
A beat.
‘Are they going to . . .’
‘No decision’s been made.’ The ops officer pointed at a laptop on the far side of the room. ‘London,’ he said. ‘They want to talk to you.’
Danny moved over to the laptop and sat in front of it. There was a grainy video image of a bearded man in a wheelchair, his head resting against a headrest. ‘Daniel Bixby, SIS,’ he said. ‘Are you Black?’
Danny nodded.
‘I need a full debrief of what occurred on the Golden Coral.’
Danny didn’t fuck around. He gave a detailed explanation of everything that had occurred on the ship. When he got to the bit about the open storage container, Dr Phillips crouched down next to him and interrupted. ‘The apparatus in there was an aerosol filling machine. You use it to fill an empty aerosol can. I’m uploading the pictures to your server now.’
‘If one of those aerosols is released into the cabin of an aircraft, what happens?’ Bixby asked.
‘The air recirculates through the cabin once every few minutes. The aircraft acquires a certain proportion of fresh air from outside, but it’ll only take seconds for the pathogen particles to diffuse across the plane.’
‘Just tell me what that means,’ Bixby snapped.
Phillips sniffed. ‘How many people on that plane?’ he asked.
‘Two hundred and seventy-nine, including crew.’
‘Then you have two hundred and seventy-nine vectors infected with an extremely aggressive, modified form of Y. pestis. If our previous experience is anything to go by, they could become symptomatic within an hour. You can’t let them come into contact with anyone, or you’ll have an epidemic on your hands.’
Bixby stared into the screen for a moment.
‘I need to speak to the Chief,’ he said, before wheeling his chair back and disappearing from sight.
They had been circling for an hour.
The initial panic in the cabin had subsided into a tense silence. It was only occasionally broken when one of the passengers lost it with a member of the cabin crew. What was going on, they wanted to know. Why weren’t they being told anything? Randolph would strain his ears to hear the cabin crew calmly trying to tell them that the captain would update them as soon as he had any information. But they didn’t sound any more reassured than the alarmed passengers.
Randolph couldn’t take his eyes off the military aircraft to his right. It stuck so closely and exactly to the larger plane that he almost had the sensation that they weren’t even moving. When they passed through a patch of cloud, which momentarily obscured the fighter jet, it made him start, as though he was jumping out of a hypnotic trance. He realised that somebody was coughing a few rows behind him, and that they had been doing so for several minutes.
There was a sudden change in the sound of the aircraft’s engines. Randolph felt a momentary sense of weightlessness, and there was a general gasp around the cabin that told him he was not the only one. For only the second time since the fighter jets had appeared, the captain’s voice came over the loudspeaker. He sounded deadly serious. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, you’ve probably noticed that we’ve started to lose height. It’s nothing to be concerned about, but we will be performing an emergency landing in approximately ten minutes. You will need to adopt the brace position, and I would ask you to study the card in the seat in front of you very carefully . . .’
The volume of anxious chatter in the cabin increased again. Randolph pulled the laminated safety card from the pouch of the seat in front of him. The captain was still talking, but Randolph wasn’t listening any more. For some reason his attention had focused in on the sound of the person coughing behind him. He felt irritation building in his own chest.
He suddenly, involuntarily, coughed.
He stared at the laminated card. A thin film of mucus covered the images of smiling figures sliding on to life rafts.
The mucus was streaked with blood.
‘Where’s the landing site?’ Sir Colin Seldon’s voice cracked with tiredness.
Bixby clicked on a map of north-west Africa, then used his forefinger to outline a blank region of desert. ‘Eastern Mauritania,’ he said. ‘About a hundred and fifty miles west of the Mali border. It’s completely deserted, sir. About a hundred miles in any direction from any human habitation. There’s a possibility of Bedouin wanderers . . .’
‘Can we hide a plane there?’ Seldon said.
‘I think so, sir. For a few days at least.’
‘The aircraft’s transponders were killed while it was still on its original flight path?’
‘Yes, sir. And we’ve arranged for it to be wiped from the air traffic control radar systems. It looks like it disappeared in mid-air. We’ve got cross-agency support and we’ve spoken to the Americans, the Australians and the French. Everyone’s singing from the same hymn sheet. Until we know if there’s some kind of pathogen on board, the aircraft has, to all intents and purposes, disappeared from the sky.’ He coughed uncomfortably.
‘What is it, Bixby?’ the Chief said. ‘Spit it out?’
‘Are you sure this is a good idea sir? The press will be all over it, and if someone finds out we forced an emergency landing in the Mauritanian desert and lied about the aircraft’s location . . .’
‘Is it a good idea?’ Seldon snapped. There was a tremor in his voice that Bixby had never heard before. ‘We have nearly three hundred passengers in mid-air infected with a highly contagious, highly aggressive strain of weaponised plague. We let them land in Paris, the whole Western world goes into a mad panic. Even if we contain the infection, the terrorists win the moment we start carrying the body bags out of the plane. The genie will be out the bottle and we’ll see bio attacks left, right and centre. So is this a good idea? Of course it’s not a good idea. The rule book hasn’t been written on this yet. There are no good ideas any more.’
Bixby had never seen him so fierce. So out of control. So pale.
‘We don’t even have any fucking leads,’ the Chief muttered.
‘We have one, sir,’ said the analyst.
‘What?’
‘The Caliph, sir,’ Bixby said quietly.
‘Oh,’ the Chief said, his voice heavy with sarcasm. ‘The Caliph. The one nobody’s ever seen and who nobody will ever talk about. Great. Let me know as soon as he turns himself in, won’t you?’
He stood up and stormed away from the computer terminal, leaving Bixby with his head resting against the padded headrest, his face impassive.
There was a clunking sound from below the aircraft. Randolph didn’t know what it was, but he heard someone in the row behind him say it was the landing gear extending.
He had moved to the window seat. Several people were crying nearby. Plenty of others were coughing. They all had a dry, hacking cough, and Randolph wanted to join in. He was desperate to join in, but
after seeing his own blood-stained mucus, he didn’t dare. He found that he was wheezing heavily as he looked out of the window. He kept thinking about his daughters, wondering if they had been released yet, and if he was ever going to see them again. The thought that he might not caused a very real pain in his chest.
He tried to occupy his mind by guessing the plane’s altitude. They had been descending for some time, but all he could see was the fighter jet travelling alongside them. Suddenly, though, as he was watching, he heard a roar from the jets’ engines as they peeled away. Within seconds they were out of sight.
Randolph blinked. He looked down to earth. He could see, in the moonlight, that they were only a hundred feet above the ground. They were over the desert – there were ripples in the moonlit sand below, where the ground was flat.
The captain’s voice over the loudspeaker. Tense. Urgent. ‘Brace! Brace! Heads down, stay down!’
The hubbub of the passengers swelled into a terrified moan. Randolph bent forward, rested his forehead against the seat in front and laid his hands on the back of his head. The aircraft’s engines became very high-pitched. The sound of crying from inside the cabin grew louder. Several people screamed.
There was a sickening jolt as the aircraft’s wheels hit the sand. The aircraft bounced. Five seconds later it hit the ground again and Randolph felt a rush of g-force as the spoilers on the wings angled upwards and the aircraft dramatically lost speed. But suddenly there was another jolt. The aircraft spun forty-five degrees and the screeching of the engine was matched only by the screaming of the passengers inside. Randolph wanted to shout out, but fear silenced him. He just muttered a prayer as the fuselage wobbled and the wing tip to his right-hand side brushed against the sand.
This is it, he thought to himself. This is the moment I die.
But then, unexpectedly, there was silence and stillness.
There was a moment when it sounded as if the whole cabin was taking a collective breath of relief.
Then Randolph coughed again, and there was blood over the underside of the table folded into the seat in front.
It was over.
Danny had left the ops room. The place was doing his head in. He needed some air. Out on the deck, he gripped the railings and allowed a film of spray to wash over him. They’d failed. Targets Red and Blue were dead. Ripley was dead. A plane full of innocent victims were, right now, going the same way as his SAS mate. He didn’t know what the head shed would be doing with that flight, but he knew there would be a cover-up of some sort. If word got out that there had been a successful bio-attack on the West, all bets were off. They’d be seeing copycat scenarios all over the world.
Danny felt for his Sig. Before, that hunk of metal slung close to his body had made him feel secure. Not any more. Guns were for a different kind of war. Danny couldn’t shake the feeling that in the past few days, war had changed. He thought of what he’d left back home. Clara. The baby. What kind of world was his kid about to be born into?
He turned. Thirty metres further along the deck he saw Tony and Caitlin. They were facing each other, and standing very close – closer than ordinary colleagues. Danny felt a bit of a pang. Tony suddenly looked over in his direction – he clearly knew his Regiment colleague was looking. Danny didn’t feel he wanted to see any more. He turned his back on them and walked back towards the flight deck. He was looking forward to getting back to Hereford.
He squinted. In the distance, maybe half a klick away, he saw the lights of a chopper approaching. The flight deck itself had been cleared, and one of the frigate’s loadmasters stood in the centre of the deck carrying two glowing, handheld beacons. Thirty seconds later he was waving them above his head to bring the chopper safely in to land.
The side door opened. A man exited and started running almost directly towards Danny to escape the downdraught. He wore slacks, an open-necked shirt and a lightweight jacket. His tousled hair blew in the wind, but Danny recognised him immediately. Hugo Buckingham.
He felt his face go craggy. What the hell was Buckingham doing here? Just when he’d thought this shitstorm of an op couldn’t get any worse, the person he loathed more than any other had just landed on the frigate. He stood very still as Buckingham ran with his head bowed towards him. He was only ten metres away when Buckingham finally looked where he was going and saw Danny standing there.
The MI6 man stopped in his tracks. He made a futile attempt to smooth down his hair, then shook the dust from the lapels of his jacket. ‘Black, old sport,’ he said finally.
‘Buckingham.’
‘Presiding over what I understand you fellows like to call a clusterfuck?’
‘What are you doing here? Has the captain got some filing that needs doing?’
‘Actually, actually, I made the decision to come straight here from Saudi. Following up a lead. Not to mention that the Firm want somebody to take you in hand.’ He strode up to Danny, jutting out his absurdly handsome chin. ‘They’re baying for your blood in London, Danny. The bad news for you is that I’m the best friend you’ve got.’ He smiled.
The last time Danny had seen Buckingham, the MI6 man had ended up wincing in the gutter after Danny had laid into him. It took every ounce of self-control to stop himself from doing the same thing now.
‘Take me to the ops room,’ Buckingham said. ‘I require a full debrief. Get a move on, Black. I haven’t got all bloody night, you know.’
Randolph stared in horror at the blood.
He was almost unaware of the commotion in the cabin. Almost, but not quite. The silence after the emergency landing had lasted no more than a few seconds before it dissolved into renewed panic. Several people were crying – including, Randolph realised, the little girl in the seat ahead. The aisles were full of people surging to the emergency exits. Randolph stood up and saw the nice air hostess standing with her back to one of the side doors while three angry customers shouted at her to get out of the way and let them open up and escape the plane.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking.’ He sounded rattled. Not nearly so suave and calm as he had when they took off. ‘For your own safety, please return to your seats. The exterior temperature is below freezing and we have very little information about our surrounding terrain. The aircraft is the safest place for us to remain while we wait for . . .’
The captain’s voice dissolved into a sudden fit of coughing. The loudspeaker went dead. For a moment, the volume in the cabin reduced too. But only for a moment. The three men started yelling at the air stewardess again. Two more came to help her, standing in front of the door with their arms folded.
Randolph realised that the little girl in the seat in front was looking at him. He stared at her. A thin patch of blood had stained the area under her nostrils. And maybe Randolph was imagining it, but there was also a swelling on her left cheek.
He collapsed heavily into his seat. His body was aching. His skin was burning up. He stared at the back of his rough, calloused, fisherman’s hands, and saw that there were swellings appearing there, too.
Daniel Bixby wheeled his way across the floor of the operations room deep beneath the MI6 building, his head immobile against the padded headrest. One of his assistants walked briskly alongside him. ‘Flight BA33489 is on the ground. The pilots have been instructed to keep the passengers contained. The African air traffic control agency is already going nuts. It looks to them like the aircraft disappeared into thin air over Niger . . .’
If Bixby had the strength to shake his head, he would have done. Nothing good could come of this. But the decision was above his pay grade, and it was already made.
Another of his assistant analysts came striding up towards him. His eyes were alight.
‘What is it?’ Bixby asked.
‘GCHQ have picked something up. A satellite call from the Golden Coral, made approximately thirty-five minutes before the ship went down. The call lasted just over ten seconds.’
‘Can we listen to it?’
The analyst shook his head. ‘I’m afraid not,’ he said. ‘But we have a rough location of the sat phone that received the call.’
‘Go on.’
The analyst pointed to a large VT screen on the wall which showed a map of the world. He momentarily tapped a keyboard just below it. A dot appeared on the screen, surrounded by a wider circle. The dot itself was centred on the ocean in the middle of the Persian Gulf. The circle covered a large patch of sea, but also the northern coast of the United Arab Emirates, the eastern coast of Saudi Arabia, and almost all of Qatar.
Bixby stared at the screen for a moment.
‘Get me the Chief,’ he said.
Flight BA33489 had been on the ground for a full hour. The lights were off to preserve power. It was almost pitch black.
Randolph was sweating even more than usual. His limbs were weak, his chest hoarse. Two more swellings had appeared on the back of his hand, and he could feel others elsewhere on his body. They hurt, badly, but he was too scared to look at them. His head was spinning, and it was hard to keep track of what was going on. Every time he closed his eyes he saw his children as they had been in that awful video. And every time he opened them, he was presented with a scene that was almost as chilling.
To his left, on the other side of the aisle, three passengers were wheezing badly. In front of him, he heard the sound of the little girl retching. Nobody was trying to leave the plane any more, and he understood why: they felt too ill. Randolph himself was desperate to use the lavatory, but he didn’t have the strength to get up. And when, two minutes later, he soiled himself, it was with a strange mixture of disgust and relief. The stench in the cabin told him he was not the first person to do this.
His head fell listlessly to the right. He stared out into the darkness and shivered. The temperature in the cabin was dropping. He wondered if he should tell someone about the deodorants, but he knew he never would. Not while he knew those monsters had his daughters.
He winced. A sharp pain cracked through his head. Lights, outside. They were descending from the sky, and great clouds of sand were billowing up and surrounding them, no more than ten metres from the tip of the aircraft’s wing. There was noise. The noise of engines.