by Wilbur Smith
‘She’s taking me to a pop concert tomorrow night – The Living Dead, no less,’ Peter chuckled. ‘Seems I haven’t lived until I hear the Dead.’
‘Give M.J. my love, and a kiss,’ Colin told him.
Peter placed high value on his new-found privacy. He had lived most of his adult life in officers’ quarters and messes, constantly surrounded by other human beings. However, this command had given him the opportunity to escape.
The cottage was only four and a half minutes’ drive from the compound but it might have been an island. It had come furnished and at a rental that surprised him pleasantly. Behind a high hedge of dog rose, off a quiet lane, and set in a sprawling rather unkempt garden, it had become home in a few weeks. He had even been able to unpack his books at last. Books accumulated over twenty years, and stored against such an opportunity. It was a comfort to have them piled around his desk in the small front room or stacked on the tables beside his bed, even though there had been little opportunity to read much of them yet. The new job was a tough one.
Melissa-Jane must have heard the crunch of gravel under the Rover’s tyres, and she would certainly have been waiting for it. She came running out of the front door into the driveway, directly into the beam of the headlights, and Peter had forgotten how lovely she was. He felt his heart squeezed.
When he stepped out of the car she launched herself at him and clung with both arms around his chest. He held her for a long moment, neither of them able to speak. She was so slim and warm, her body seeming to throb with life and vitality.
At last he lifted her chin and studied her face. The huge violet eyes swam with happy tears, and she sniffed loudly. Already she had that old-fashioned English porcelain beauty; there would never be the acne and the agony of puberty for Melissa-Jane.
Peter kissed her solemnly on the forehead. ‘You’ll catch your death,’ he scolded fondly.
‘Oh, Daddy, you are a real fusspot.’ She smiled through the tears and on tip-toe she reached up to kiss him full on the mouth.
They ate lasagne and cassata at an Italian restaurant in Croydon, and Melissa-Jane did most of the talking. Peter watched and listened, revelling in her freshness and youth. It was hard to believe she was not yet fourteen, for physically she was almost fully developed, the breasts under the white turtle-neck sweater no longer merely buds; and she conducted herself like a woman ten years older, only the occasional gleeful giggle betraying her or the lapse as she used some ghastly piece of Roedean slang – ‘grotty’ was one of these.
Back at the cottage she made them Ovaltine and they drank it beside the fire, planning every minute of the weekend ahead of them and skirting carefully around the pitfalls, the unwritten taboos of their relationship which centred mostly on ‘Mother’.
When it was time for bed she came and sat in his lap and traced the lines of his face with her fingertip.
‘Do you know who you remind me of?’
‘Tell me,’ he invited.
‘Gary Cooper – only much younger, of course,’ she added hurriedly.
‘Of course,’ Peter chuckled. ‘But where did you ever hear of Gary Cooper?’
‘They had High Noon as the Sunday movie on telly last week.’
She kissed him again and her lips tasted of sugar and Ovaltine, and her hair smelled sweet and clean.
‘How old are you, anyway, Daddy?’
‘I’m thirty-nine.’
‘That isn’t really so terribly old.’ She comforted him uncertainly.
‘Sometimes it’s as old as the dinosaurs—’ and at that moment the bleeper beside his empty cup began its strident, irritating electronic tone, and Peter felt the slide of dread in his stomach.
Not now, he thought. Not on this day when I have been so long without her.
The bleeper was the size of a cigarette pack, the globe of its single eye glared redly, insistent as the audio-signal. Reluctantly Peter picked it up and, with his daughter still in his lap, he switched in the miniature two-way radio and depressed the send button.
‘Thor One,’ he said.
The reply was tinny and distorted, the set near the limit of its range.
‘General Stride, Atlas has ordered condition Alpha.’
Another false alarm, Peter thought bitterly. There had been a dozen Alphas in the last month, but why on this night. Alpha was the first stage of alert with the teams embarked and ready for condition Bravo which was the GO.
‘Inform Atlas we are seven minutes from Bravo.’
Four and a half of those would be needed for him to reach the compound, and suddenly the decision to rent the cottage was shown up as dangerous self indulgence. In four and a half minutes innocent lives can be lost.
‘Darling,’ he hugged Melissa-Jane swiftly, ‘I’m sorry.’
‘That’s all right.’ She was stiff and resentful.
‘There will be another time soon, I promise.’
‘You always promise,’ she whispered, but she saw he was no longer listening. He dislodged her and stood up, the heavy jawline clenched and thick dark brows almost meeting above the narrow, straight, aristocratic nose.
‘Lock the door when I’m gone, darling. I’ll send the driver for you if it’s Bravo. He will drive you back to Cambridge and I will let your mother know to expect you.’
He stepped out into the night, still shrugging into his duffle coat, and she listened to the whirl of the starter, the rush of tyres over gravel and the dwindling note of the engine.
The controller in Nairobi tower allowed the British Airways flight from Seychelles to run fifteen seconds past its reporting time. Then he called once, twice and a third time without reply. He switched frequencies to the channels reserved for information, approach, tower and, finally, emergency, on one at least of which 070 should have been maintaining listening watch. There was still no reply.
Speedbird 070 was forty-five seconds past ‘operations normal’ before he removed the yellow slip from his approach rack and placed it in the emergency ‘lost contact’ slot, and immediately search and rescue procedures were in force.
Speedbird 070 was two minutes and thirteen seconds past ‘operations normal’ when the telex pull sheet landed on the British Airways desk at Heathrow Control, and sixteen seconds later Atlas had been informed and had placed Thor Command on condition Alpha.
The moon was three days short of full, its upper rim only slightly indented by the earth’s shadow. However, at this altitude it seemed almost as big as the sun itself and its golden light was certainly more beautiful.
In the tropical summer night great silver cloud ranges towered into the sky, and mushroomed into majestic thunder heads, and the moonlight dressed them in splendour.
The aircraft fled swiftly between the peaks of cloud, like a monstrous black bat on back-swept wings it bored into the west.
Under the port-side wing a sudden dark chasm opened in the clouds like the mouth of hell itself, and deep in its maw there was the faint twinkle of far light, like a dying star.
‘That will be Madagascar,’ said the captain, his voice over-loud in the quiet cockpit. ‘We are on track.’ And behind his shoulder the girl stirred and carefully transferred the grenade into her other hand before she spoke for the first time in half an hour.
‘Some of our passengers might still be awake and notice that.’ She glanced at her wristwatch. ‘It’s time to wake up the others and let them know the good news.’ She turned back to the flight engineer. ‘Please switch on all the cabin lights and the seat-belt lights and let me have the microphone.’
Cyril Watkins, the captain, was reminded once again that this was a carefully planned operation. The girl was timing her announcement to the passengers when their resistance would be at its lowest possible ebb; at two o’clock in the morning after having been awoken from the disturbed rest of intercontinental flight their immediate reaction was likely to be glum resignation.
‘Cabin and seat-belt lights are on,’ the engineer told her, and handed her the micro
phone.
‘Good morning, ladies and gentlemen.’ Her voice was warm, clear and bright. ‘I regret having to waken you at such an inconvenient hour. However, I have a very important announcement to make and I want all of you to pay the most careful attention.’ She paused, and in the cavernous and crowded cabins there was a general stir and heads began to lift, hair tousled and eyes unfocused and blinking away the cobwebs of sleep. ‘You will notice that the seat-belt lights are on. Will you all check that the persons beside you are fully awake and that their seat belts are fastened. Cabin staff please make certain that this is done.’
She paused again; the belts would inhibit any sudden movement, any spontaneous action at the first shock. Ingrid noted the passage of sixty seconds on the sweep hand of her wristwatch before going on.
‘First let me introduce myself. My name is Ingrid. I am a senior officer of the Action Commando for Human Rights—’ Captain Watkins curled his lip cynically at the pompous self-righteous title, but kept silent, staring ahead into the starry, moonlit depths of space ‘– and this aircraft is under my command. Under no circumstances whatsoever will any of you leave your seats without the express permission of one of my officers – if this order is disobeyed, it will lead directly to the destruction of this aircraft and all aboard by high explosive.’
She repeated the announcement immediately in fluent German, and then in less proficient but clearly intelligible French before reverting to English once again.
‘Officers of the Action Commando will wear red shirts for immediate identification and they will be armed.’
As she spoke her three companions in the front of the first-class cabin were stripping out the false bottoms from their canvas flight bags. The space was only two inches deep by fourteen by eight, but it was sufficient for the broken-down twelve bore pistols, and ten rounds of buckshot cartridges. The barrels of the pistols were fourteen inches long, the bores were smooth and made of armoured plastic. This material would not have withstood the passage of a solid bullet through rifling or any of the newer explosive propellants but it had been designed for use with the lower velocity and pressures of multiple shot and cordite. The breech piece was of plastic as were the double pistol grips, and these clipped swiftly into position. The only metal. in the entire weapon was the case-steel firing pin and spring, no bigger than one of the metal studs in the canvas flight bag, so they would not have activated the metal detectors of the security check at Mahé airport. The ten cartridges contained in each bag had plastic cases and bases; again only the percussion caps were of aluminium foil, which would not disturb an electrical fields. The cartridges were packed in looped cartridge belts which buckled around the waist.
The weapons were short, black and ugly; they required reloading like a conventional shotgun, the spent shells were not self-ejecting and the recoil was so vicious that it would break the wrists of the user who did not bear down heavily on the pistol grips. However, at ranges up to thirty feet the destructive power was awesome, at twelve feet it would disembowel a man and at six feet it would blow his head off cleanly – yet it did not have the penetrating power to hole the pressure hull of an intercontinental airliner.
It was the perfect weapon for the job in hand, and within a few seconds three of them had been assembled and loaded and the two men had slipped on the bright scarlet shirts that identified them over their tee-shirts and moved to their positions – one in the back of the first-class cabin and one in the back of the tourist cabin, they stood with their grotesque weapons ostentatiously displayed.
The slim, pretty, dark-haired German girl stayed in her seat a little longer, working swiftly and neatly as she opened the remaining coco-de-mer and transferred their contents into two of the netting bags. These grenades differed only from the one carried by Ingrid in that they had double red lines painted around the middle. This signified that they were electronically fused.
Now Ingrid’s clear young voice resumed over the cabin address system, and the long rows of passengers – all fully awake now – sat rigid and attentive, their faces reflecting an almost uniform expression of shock and trepidation.
‘– The officer of the action commando who is moving down the cabin at this time is placing high explosive grenades—’ The dark-haired girl started down the aisle, and every fifteen rows she opened one of the overhead lockers and placed a grenade in it, closed the locker and moved on. The passengers’ heads revolved slowly in unison as they watched her with the fascination of total horror. ‘A single one of those grenades has the explosive power to destroy this aircraft – they were designed to kill by concussion the crew of a battle tank protected by six inches of armour – the officer is placing fourteen of these devices along the length of this aircraft. They can be detonated simultaneously by an electronic transmitter under my control—’ the voice contained a hint of mischief now, a little undercurrent of laughter ‘– and if that happened they’d hear the bang at the North Pole!’
The passengers stirred like the leaves of a tree in a vagrant breeze; somewhere a woman began to weep. It was a strangled passionless sound and nobody even looked in her direction.
‘But don’t worry yourselves. That isn’t going to happen. Because everybody is going to do exactly as they are told, and when it’s all over you are going to be proud of your part in this operation. We are all partners in a noble and glorious mission, we are all warriors for freedom and for the dignity of man. Today we take a mighty step forward into the new world – a world purged and cleansed of injustice and tyranny and dedicated to the welfare of all its peoples.’
The woman was still weeping, and now a child joined her on a higher, more strident note.
The dark-haired girl returned to her seat and now she retrieved the camera that had activated the metal detector at Mahé airport. She slung it around her neck and crouched again to assemble the two remaining shot pistols; carrying them and the cartridge belts she hurried forward to the flight deck where the big blonde kissed her delightedly and unashamedly on the lips.
‘Karen, Liebling, you were wonderful.’ And then she took the camera from her and slung it around her own neck.
‘This—’ she explained to the captain ‘– is not what it appears to be. It is the remote radio detonator for the grenades in the fuselage.’
He nodded without replying, and with obvious relief Ingrid disarmed the grenade that she had carried for so long by replacing the safety pin. She handed it to the other girl.
‘How much longer to the coast?’ she asked as she strapped and buckled the cartridge belt around her waist.
‘Thirty-two minutes,’ said the flight engineer promptly, and Ingrid opened the breech of the pistol, checked the load and then snapped it closed again.
‘You and Henri can stand down now,’ she told Karen. ‘Try and sleep.’
The operation might last many days still, and exhaustion would be the most dangerous enemy they would have to contend with. It was for this reason alone that they had employed such a large force. From now on, except in an emergency, two of them would be on duty and two would be resting.
‘You have done a very professional job,’ said the pilot, Cyril Watkins, ‘– so far.’
‘Thank you.’ Ingrid laughed, and over the back of his seat placed a comradely hand on his shoulder. ‘We have practised very hard for this day.’
Peter Stride dipped his lights three times as he raced down the long narrow alley that led to the gates of the compound without slowing the Rover, and the sentry swung the gate open just in time for him to roar through.
There were no floodlights, no bustling activity – just the two aircraft standing together in the echoing cavern of the hangar.
The Lockheed Hercules seemed to fill the entire building, that had been built to accommodate the smaller bombers of World War II. The tall vertical fin of its epinage reached to within a few feet of the roof girders.
Beside it the Hawker Siddeley HS 125 executive jet seemed dainty and ineffectual. The diff
ering origins of the machines emphasized that this unit was a co-operative venture between two nations.
This was underscored once more when Colin Noble hurried forward to meet Peter as he cut the Rover’s engine and lights.
‘A grand night for it, Peter.’ There was no mistaking the drawl of mid-Western America, although Colin looked more like a successful used-car salesman than a colonel in the U.S. Marines. In the beginning Peter had believed that this strict apportioning of material and manpower on equal national lines might weaken the effectiveness of Atlas. He no longer had those doubts.
Colin wore the nondescript blue overalls and cloth cap, both embroidered with the legend ‘THOR COMMUNICATIONS’ which deliberately made him look more of a technician than a soldier.
Colin was Peter’s second in command. They had known each other only the six weeks since Peter had assumed command of Thor – but after a short period of mutual wariness the two men had formed one of those fast bonds of liking and mutual respect.
Colin was of medium height, but none the less a big man. First glance might have given the impression that he was fat, for his body had a certain toad-like spread to it. There was no fat upon his frame, however, it was all muscle and bone. He had boxed heavyweight for Princeton and the marines, and his nose above the wide laughing mouth had been broken just below the bridge, it was lumped and twisted slightly.
Colin cultivated the boisterous bluff manner of a career athlete, but his eyes were the colour of burned toffee and were brightly intelligent and all-seeing. He was, tough and leery as an old alley cat. It was not easy to earn the respect of Peter Stride. Colin had done so in under six weeks.
He stood now between the two aircraft, while his men went about their Alpha preparation with quick understated efficiency.
Both aircraft were painted in commercial airline style, blue and white and gold, with a stylized portrait of the Thunder God on the tail fin and the ‘THOR COMMUNICATIONS’ title down the fuselage. They could land at any airport in the world without causing undue comment.
