The Pekin Target
Page 27
There hadn’t been time to break out of here and run. I could have run the wrong way, got blotted out like a beetle. But I wanted something to do while I waited, and there was nothing I could do except sit here and leave it to karma: it will stop, or it will not stop; I will die, or I will not die.
Thunder in the night, and the blinding white of lightning.
The cabin shook, its Perspex tinged now with the red of emergency lights as vehicles began moving in.
Uproar and dazzle, while the mind tried to stay calm. Then fear, cold and shivering and primeval as I looked upwards and saw the huge shape of the thing towering against the night sky while its bellowing shook the earth, and then I was working automatically, ripping the pins from the hinges and kicking the doors out and hunching low across the front seats with my head in my hands as the impact came and its force wrenched the machine sideways with the scream of metal on metal as the jet’s landing gear caught the tail of the Mi2 and the main weight of the DC10 passed on, veering towards a group of hangers as I bounced off the wall of the cabin and smashed through the jagged Perspex on the other side with one hand clinging and finding a grip and swinging me round before the edge of the Perspex came away and I went down, rolling through debris and finding my feet and beginning to run as the big jet ploughed across the grass median between the runway and the taxying path, smashing away a radar dish and overturning a firetruck and hitting an earth bank and spinning slowly with its huge tail section crashing sideways against the steel doors of a hangar and breaking open the rear of the fuselage at right-angles before it came to a halt.
I ran fast. Two emergency vehicles overtook me and a man shouted but I didn’t hear what he said. The night was loud with sirens and bright with red as the lights moved in towards the jet. I kept on running. A man in police khaki tried to stop me as I neared the plane but I broke free and ran on, clambering up the sheared and twisted wreckage of the airframe and finding a way in. There was some gunfire forward, and I saw the silhouette of a crew member knocking another man down in the centre aisle. Much nearer me was a Caucasian with his neck broken, half buried among shattered bottles and cups that had burst through the doors of the catering hatches; then I saw the Chinese, getting off the floor with one shoulder bright with blood.
I steadied him. “Tung Chuan?” I asked him.
He was in shock, his young eyes staring into my face.
“Are you Tung Chuan?”
He went on staring, then nodded slowly.
“Tung Chuan,” he said.
I began leading him out of the plane.
The End