Air Force One is Down u-2

by John Denis

  Mac swung his legs to the floor and, in one continuous movement, stood with his back to the closet door, fingers groping behind him for the handle. The Alsatian padded noiselessly towards him, trailing its chain. The powerful body swayed fractionally from side to side like a suspension-bridge in a high wind. Its flecked eyes never left the man’s face.

  McCafferty found the knob handle of the closet and yanked hard on it. The door shot open and struck him on the shoulder-blade. His fingers traced the fastening: it was a ball catch connecting to a socket in the jamb, and disuse had made it a pretty stiff fit.

  He stepped aside and pulled the door ajar, praying that the closet was big enough to enter. His luck held: it was a walk-in, lined with empty shelves.

  The dog followed him into the closet.

  Mac stepped out again, more quickly. The Alsatian came after him, chain rattling, the dog panting, exuding a strong odour.

  McCafferty backed once more into the closet, the dog at his heels.

  The American jumped out this time. So did the dog, but turning in its own length, whereas Mac used one long stride, backwards and forwards.

  In again. The dog spun round, brushing his leg.

  And Mac leapt clear over its body, slamming the door on its muzzle just as the dog turned to follow him.

  The Alsatian threw itself in fury against the door, but the rusty catch held. McCafferty dragged the bed in front of the closet and jammed it close to the wall.

  Then he raced to the locked door of the room, and jerked frantically at the chain embedded in the woodwork. Already he could hear Selim pounding up the stairs to the landing and along the corridor, attracted by the hysterical baying of the Alsatian from its dark prison.

  Sweat poured from Mac’s brow as he leaned his muscles against the chain. With a rending screech the staple came loose. He wrenched out the collar fastener, tore over to the closet and stabbed the hook into the door over the catch, lifting his bunk and using the bed end to hammer the metal into the wood.

  Selim was already at the door. Mac snapped off the light-switch and stood behind the door, holding the slack length of chain in his hands.

  Expecting the light still to be on, Selim switched his gun to his left hand and jabbed the button of his torch with his thumb, directing the beam towards the source of the noise.

  McCafferty’s vicious kick broke Selim’s wrist. He dropped the gun and howled in a discordant counterpoint to the ululation of the dog. Mac jumped him and looped the chain around his neck.

  Gradually the American brought the Arab to his knees, trapping the man’s body with his legs. Selim coughed and gagged, and the scream died in his throat as McCafferty choked his life away.

  Unbelievably, the dog had forced the closet door, and Mac saw the bed slide out into the room as the huge brute urged its body into the widening gap.

  Then the Alsatian was clear, and its desperate barking changed to a snarl of rage. In the light of the torch, still incongruously gripped in Selim’s dead hand, McCafferty saw the dog spring, streamers of foam hanging from its extended jaws.

  He dropped to the floor, rolled over, grabbed Selim’s Walther pistol and poured shot after shot into the flying body of the killer Alsatian. The dog crashed into the partly open door, whinnied, then lay still beside him, panting. Mac turned his head and forced himself to look into its dying eyes. The saliva congealed on its tongue and the rasping breath stopped.

  He was free.

  He staggered down the stairs and out into the night, dragging in great gulps of cool air. Then he collected his wits and searched for a second car.

  He found one at the rear of the villa, but the vehicle was locked and there was no key in the ignition. Mac ran into the house and up the stairs. He kicked Selim’s corpse on to its back, and snatched a bunch of keys from the trousers pocket.

  It was only when he was well on his way to the American consulate at the wheel of the car that he fully appreciated the difficulties that still confronted him.

  As he had half-jokingly reminded Dunkels an eternity ago, McCafferty had no means of proving his identity. He had been stripped of everything — wallet, credit cards, security passes, money. He owned nothing more than the clothes he stood up in: a pair of baggy pantaloons and a torn, soiled, blood-soaked djellaba.

  Worse even than that, he must now try to convince a sceptical consul that he was in reality a man whom the consul himself had seen with his own eyes boarding the personal aircraft of the President of the United States not three hours before.

  EIGHT

  The three-handed draw game was still in progress when Jagger returned to the rest room cabin. He bent over the table and said to Cooligan, ‘How’s it going, Bert?’

  Jagger drew out a handkerchief to dab at his face as Cooligan replied, ‘Fine — since you left. Your going brought me luck.’

  ‘Yeah?’ Jagger queried. ‘Is that a fact? Well, see what this brings you, then.’ He clamped the linen square over his nose and mouth and sprayed all three men. One by one, the cards fell from their nerveless fingers and their heads slumped on to the green baize. The flimsy little table almost overturned, but Jagger caught it in time, steadying it and holding it upright. He could not afford too much noise penetrating in either direction.

  Jagger relieved Cooligan of his gun and murmured, ‘Sweet dreams.’

  Next, the flight deck. Kowalski was saying to the Commander, ‘There’s a hell of a lot of mush up ahead on the screen. Think we ought to contact Naples?’ Fairman turned to view the radar, and grunted noncommittally. Then he ordered Latimer to make the link with the control station.

  ‘Naples Control, Air Force One to Naples Control,’ the pilot intoned. Naples replied; still the same formal, robotic voice. ‘There’s a heavy radar return building up ahead, Naples,’ Latimer continued. ‘Request change in routing to Geneva.’

  Naples considered the question, and radioed back, ‘Roger, Air Force One. Change to a heading of two-seven-six. Do you copy?’

  Naples got an affirmative, and Latimer signed off …

  * * *

  Bartolomeo Volpe had tucked his student books into his battered document case in the social sciences lecture theatre at the University of Bologna and left early with the permission of his tutor who, like Bartolomeo, was a cadre chieftain in the Red Brigades. At about the same time, Christina Patakeminos leaned back in her chair in the social sciences lecture theatre at the University of Athens, closed her eyes, and waited impatiently for the mid-morning break.

  Bartolomeo boarded a plane heading south, and arrived in Naples at the precise scheduled time passed on to him in the instructions from his local Communist cell. He queued for a bus to take him out of the city, and checked his watch and grinned as he imagined the dark-eyed Christina doing much the same thing from Athens’ Egypt Square.

  Neither the boy nor the girl — who had become lovers at a youth seminar in Sofia a bare six weeks earlier — knew from whom the Athens and Bologna Communists received their orders. The ignorance did not bother them; they bombed when and where they were told to bomb; killed whomever they were told to kill. They were admirable products of international terrorism.

  No killing on this one, the Italian thought regretfully as the bus dropped him at the appointed spot on the coast road. Important, though, the cell had said: a strike at the very roots of capitalism.

  The electricity cables feeding Naples Control radar station skirted the sea cliffs in a dark gully away from the main road. The supply to Athens Control was also strategically hidden near the cliffs dropping down to the Aegean Sea from the Plain of Marathon. Bartolomeo checked the time again, his eyes almost crossing on the second hand as it swept round to zero-minute.

  He levered the lid off a junction box and clamped a small magnetic timing device to its metal side. Then he clipped through a pair of wires laid bare in the cable, and twisted their ends on to the twin terminals of the timer. The clock hands were set for thirty-five minutes.

  Hundreds of mile
s away, Christina Patakeminos followed the same drill-sequence down to the last letter, smiling to herself as she thought of Bartolomeo duplicating her movements south of Naples. They pressed the switches on their timers barely half a second apart.

  Bartolomeo screwed down the lid of the junction box, shinned off the pylon and walked away into the night, whistling an aria from Verdi’s Luisa Miller. Christina hummed a catchy little number by Theodorakis and hitched a lift back to Athens …

  * * *

  Jagger was surprised to meet Sabrina Carver on his way to the flight deck of Air Force One. ‘Trouble, Airman?’ he queried.

  Sabrina shook her head, and her mane of dark hair lifted off her shoulders and settled again. ‘Just being diplomatic,’ she replied. ‘Feisal — you know, the Arab boy — wanted to see the works. Colonel Fairman said it’d be all right.’

  Jagger nodded and brushed past her, scarcely noticing the contact, fingering the strap on the holster of his gun. Sabrina shrugged and murmured, ‘Mac, you sure are one business-like fella.’

  Jagger rapped on the locked door of the flight deck and was admitted at the same instant as the Naples Controller said ‘Christ Almighty!’ when his radar screen blanked out.

  ‘Hey, what the—?’ exclaimed an operator.

  ‘Where’s everything gone?’ screeched a supervisor.

  ‘Everything including us, Athens and Air Force One,’ the Controller returned grimly. He blinked rapidly and snorted his disbelief.

  ‘Tried the hot line?’ the supervisor asked.

  ‘Dead.’

  ‘Shee — it.’

  ‘Quite.’

  * * *

  General Morwood, in the Pentagon Operations Room, was almost as tersely expressive when he took the call from Naples. ‘Lost them?’ His eyes went to the wall map, smaller than UNACO’s but still showing the Boeing’s tracer. ‘How can you have lost them?’ he demanded. ‘We still have them on the inertial guidance track.’

  ‘I mean we’ve lost all our radar, sir,’ the Naples Controller said a shade desperately, ‘and so have Athens. As far as we know, Air Force One is still there. And of course, General, if you say it is … well, that’s good enough for me.’

  Morwood motioned to his closest aide, a full Colonel. ‘Tell Philpott at UNACO what’s happening,’ he whispered, covering the mouthpiece, ‘then listen in here. I’m gonna tear the heads off Naples and Athens.’

  * * *

  ‘Hi there, Mac,’ carolled Latimer as Jagger climbed into the flight deck, ‘getting bored back there?’ Fairman added a greeting and Kowalski gave the security chief a wry grin. Feisal’s eyes were widening as he studied the instrumentation.

  ‘Yeah,’ Jagger returned, ‘I thought you guys might need livening up a bit. Eh, sonny,’ he drawled to the Arab boy, ‘maybe you’d better get back to your seat, huh? You can come up here again later.’

  Jagger’s tone was light and casual, but Fairman looked at the security man’s eyes and whispered, ‘Something up?’ Jagger nodded. Feisal hesitated, and appealed mutely to the Commander. Fairman patted his shoulder and said, ‘Scoot, kid. Like the Colonel says, you can be our guest another time.’ Reluctantly, the boy edged out through the door.

  Fairman waited until the door closed, and then inquired, ‘What the hell’s wrong, Mac? Do you have problems we don’t know about?’

  Jagger grinned crookedly, shaking his head. ‘Not exactly, Tom,’ he said, ‘it’s you who have the problems.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like this.’ Jagger pulled out his gun and rammed it into the back of the first flight engineer’s neck. ‘All of you,’ he commanded, ‘freeze.’

  * * *

  Basil Swann stuttered out the news that Morwood’s operations room had reported radar blackouts from Naples and Athens.

  Philpott slammed down his glass on the table, rose to his feet and crossed to the office door, Sonya just behind him. He strode into the UNACO Ops centre and stared at the map. The green snake was still inching across the Mediterranean.

  ‘I was about to add, sir,’ Swann said, ‘that General Morwood said not to panic, because his trace still shows AF One, and so does ours. He says it must be purely a localised fault.’

  Philpott stared at him in amazement. ‘Two localised faults?’ he inquired acidly. ‘Naples and Athens going out at the same time is sheer coincidence? Nothing to worry about?’ His face started to go red until Sonya squeezed his arm.

  ‘We are not panicking, Basil,’ she said, ‘but we are concerned.’

  ‘Too damned right we are,’ Philpott snorted. ‘Even if Morwood can convince himself that something like a widespread electrical storm can simultaneously knock out a pair of radar dishes hundreds of miles apart, he can’t convince me.’

  Swann gulped with difficulty and asked for instructions. Philpott pounded his fist with his palm, and his brow creased in concentration. ‘It’s got to be Smith,’ he muttered, ‘and even then he’d need some help.’

  ‘Sir?’ Swann inquired.

  ‘Get this, Basil,’ Philpott replied, pointing a rocksteady finger. ‘I want a squadron of fighters from Naples Command scrambled. Do it now — and I mean NOW — and tell them to stand by. I want no questions from them, no arguments, just action.’

  Swann nodded. ‘And their orders, sir?’

  ‘No direct orders yet. Get them on stand-by; instant readiness. Use my Red Priority; that should persuade them I’m serious.’ He swore and slumped into a monitor’s chair.

  Basil Swann blinked behind the lenses of his horn-rimmed glasses and took small, neat steps to the console of UNACO’s master computer …

  * * *

  Fairman’s iron control stilled all thoughts of panic among the Air Force One flight crew. ‘If this is a joke, Colonel,’ he said slowly to Jagger, ‘I’ll have your ass for it.’

  ‘No joke, Colonel,’ Cody replied. ‘It’s a stickup — for real.’

  Fairman looked steadily at him, but could see no humour in his eyes, no smile on his lips. Nothing but the ugly snout of the gun denting the flesh of the engineer’s shaven neck. ‘You’ve been … you have been bought?’ he asked, soft-voiced, incredulously.

  ‘Sort of,’ Jagger gritted, ‘but don’t let it worry you. Just bear in mind that I’m a qualified and experienced pilot; that I know every alarm system and button in the plane. Reach for one and I blow Chuck’s head off. And that’s for real, too: soft-coned bullets, low-calibre, dum-dum variants. Used like this at close range, there’s no damage to the fabric, no depressurising. No damage to anything or anyone but Chuck. And he’ll be dead. You’re next, Tom. So behave.’

  The stunned crew heard another voice filtered through Latimer’s headphones. ‘Naples Control calling Air Force One! Report your position! Report your position! Do you read?’

  ‘No,’ Jagger ordered, reaching out and jerking off the headset, ‘you don’t copy, Pat. Everybody, unplug.’ They remained mute, not moving. Jagger pressed the muzzle of his gun more firmly still into the engineer’s flesh and said quietly, ‘Unplug, guys. Don’t play heroes — just do it.’

  Tom Fairman’s unwavering stare met Jagger’s cold, flinty eyes. The Commander reached forward and ripped the plug of his headset from the control panel. Numbly, the other crew members followed suit …

  Although Fairman had initially cursed his flight plan because of the need to avoid sensitive airspace, he had in fact been permitted to take the orthodox ‘Great Circle’ route from the Persian Gulf to Switzerland, overflying Saudi Arabia and Egypt to emerge from Africa over the Mediterranean, and leaving Sicily to his left and the Italian coast to starboard as he made his way up to Genoa and across the Alps. That, anyway, was the original plan. It would have covered a distance of about 2600 miles in a flying time in the order of five hours, which was less than half of the Boeing 707’s full endurance.

  Air Force One had flown 1950 miles in three hours forty-five minutes when Jagger entered the flight deck just as Fairman was pointing out to Feisal the
retreating blob of Crete and the still-distant coast of Greece.

  Mister Smith’s ‘identikit’ Boeing freighter, now wearing the livery of the President’s plane, had taken off from its abandoned wartime airstrip on the coastal belt of Yugoslavia. Its target — the rendezvous point with the real Air Force One — lay four hundred miles to the south at latitude 37 degrees North and 19 degrees 15 minutes East, on the lower fringe of the Ionian Sea. Gradually, the two great aircraft began to converge …

  * * *

  The Air Force One navigator, Kowalski, studied the new course ordered by Jagger with an amused sneer on his lips. ‘I see it,’ he murmured, ‘but I don’t believe it. Where the hell are we supposed to be going? And why, for the love of God, do we have to go down from 28,000 feet to 250 feet in what I reckon to be no more than, say, ten minutes? It sure is going to stir things up behind.’

  Jagger leaned forward and transferred the gun to a point somewhere between Kowalski’s eyes. ‘Then the quicker you set about it,’ he whispered, ‘the sooner their discomfort will be over.’

  He straightened up. Latimer mouthed an obscenity and fiddled moodily with the controls just as the crew of the fake Boeing — a pilot and co-pilot, mercenary fliers fresh out of Mozambique — started climbing at the rate of 2900 feet a minute. …

  ‘Repeat your new projected course,’ Jagger ordered, and Latimer intoned, ‘We’ll be heading 350 degrees, diving to 250 feet. Bang up the middle of the Strait of Otranto, as requested, sir.’

  Jagger ignored the sarcasm and turned his attention to the bank of circuit breakers controlling the wireless and navigation aids of the aeroplane. ‘Take ’em out — all of ’em,’ he rapped to the flight engineer, who glanced at Fairman for approval.

  The Commander pursed his lips and sighed. ‘He’s got the gun,’ Fairman snarled, ‘so do as he says.’

  Jagger congratulated him on his common sense. Fairman looked balefully at the man he supposed to be his friend Joe McCafferty. ‘I hope to Christ you know what you’re doing, Mister,’ he said, ‘because when you wipe out that lot you leave us about as well equipped as the Wright brothers were on their first flight, and they weren’t flying over water in darkness. You might as well ask me to crash this bird into the sea right now.’