Air Force One is Down u-2

by John Denis

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘The KGB.’

  Morwood digested this information, and was tempted metaphorically to spit it out as inedible. Philpott broke the ensuing silence to round out the picture of Smith which was already forming in the General’s shrewd mind. In the end, the catalogue of Smith’s known previous crimes against humanity, against social systems and conventions, against established order and security, convinced the Pentagon that Smith must indeed be the man behind the hijack of the President’s plane. And if Philpott said the criminal must have Soviet help, then Morwood accepted that as a running hypothesis.

  ‘Makes it difficult for us, though, Malcolm,’ he added.

  ‘I get the point,’ Philpott conceded. ‘It’s impossible for the USA to act in any role on Yugoslav soil. You might have got away with a presence in Greece, but not in Yugoslavia. I accept that. I also accept the unstated corollary to your premise: it’s UNACO’s baby. It can’t be anyone else’s.’

  Morwood chuckled drily. So America was, for once, on the sidelines — and the opposition already had a head start on UNACO.

  ‘How so?’ Philpott asked.

  Morwood’s chuckle deepened to a belly laugh.

  ‘Haven’t you seen the latest tape from the United Nations? There’s a special emergency debate on the assumed hijack, and the Russians are already stirring it for you to the limit of their capacity for troublemaking; which I assure you is considerable. You’re practically on a no-win streak even before you get your first shots off, old boy. Let’s see you wriggle out of this one.’

  Philpott cursed his own forgetfulness in failing to keep a weather eye on his employers, and ordered Swann to cue in the General Assembly on the video. It became speedily apparent that, if anything, Morwood had understated the seriousness of UNACO’s position.

  Saudi Arabia had followed Iraq, Bahrain, Iran and every other combination of outraged OPEC dignity in attacking first the Americans, and then UNACO, for allowing terrorism to erupt under their very noses in the US President’s personal and supposedly ultra-secure aeroplane.

  ‘Are the lives of our leading citizens of so little consequence to our supposed allies that they are unable to ensure their safety on a five-hour plane trip?’ thundered Libya.

  ‘Never before have even the imperialist bandits of the Western world manifested so patent and brutal a contempt for the servants of Islam,’ Iran echoed. ‘Are we such dirt beneath their feet that we are to be trussed up and handed to the first criminal dog that comes along, yapping to do his masters’ bidding and lining his pockets with a ransom which the Americans are clearly confident they will not have to furnish?’

  Philpott winced before the TV monitors, knowing that worse was to come.

  ‘And this pallid lackey of the United States, this “UNACO” —’ (the Bahraini ambassador invested the acronym with such withering scorn that Philpott feared the characters would melt on his office door) ‘— this crypto-capitalist sore in the UN body politic, whose salaries we pay, whose staff we keep in sybaritic idleness, who actually made the security of this flight their particular responsibility … is it too invidious to suggest that doors may have been left open for this aerial highwayman, that palms were greased, souls corrupted — that Malcolm Gregory Philpott, defender of our freedoms, pillar of international rectitude, doughty champion of the oppressed and opponent of the malefactor … is it so unimaginable that Philpott himself might have a share in the complicity of this foul and dastardly act?’

  Philpott reached for the switch, and before the monitor pictures faded he saw the Russian delegation unravel their folded arms and bang the table in cynical approbation …

  * * *

  Smith’s guerillas coupled a tractor to Air Force One and towed her to the shelter of a dilapidated but roomy hangar. There, a busy little crane covered every visible inch of the Boeing in tarpaulin sheets, leaving only the main hatch uncovered. A flight of steps was wheeled up and Achmed Fayeed opened the door. Smith stalked into the building and stood at the foot of the stairway tapping a gloved hand with a silver-topped ebony stick. He was ringed by swarthy lieutenants, sub machine-guns at the port.

  Achmed led the way, and stood before Smith, grinning widely, twirling the pistol on his finger, cowboy-style. Smith said nothing, but reached out his hand and placed it on the young Arab’s left shoulder in an unmistakable gesture of approval and comradeship.

  The hostages and crew members filed or were carried down the steps, Hemmingsway following the OPEC ministers, with Sabrina Carver behind him. To Sabrina’s bewilderment, there was no sign of McCafferty, and hope sprang in her breast that even now he might still be at liberty, waiting for the right moment to gain the upper hand and free the prisoners. She also calculated that her Air Force One uniform and obvious anonymity would conceal her own identity, but she was wrong.

  Smith’s face now wore a smile of clear amusement as she tried to use Hemmingsway as a shield. ‘I must admit,’ he said slowly, ‘that I did not expect to find you on board this aircraft. But why play the shrinking violet, my dear Sabrina? Modesty never suited you, as I recall from our brief sojourn at my château before the ill-fated venture on the Eiffel Tower.

  ‘Can you conceivably, I wonder, have changed your vocation after — what is it — three and a half years? No longer the international jewel thief extraordinary, but abandoned to the monastic womb of Service life? It seems unlikely. Perhaps you would care to offer an explanation of your presence here.’

  Achmed cut in, ‘No need, Mister Smith. I can tell you about her. She’s with UNACO.’

  ‘Aaah,’ Smith drawled, ‘so … one of Mr Philpott’s eager little beaveresses. Doubtless you were prostituting yourself for him on our previous encounter, too? Yes, your silence and evident shame indicate that to be the case. Well, now, Miss Sabrina Carver, clearly I underestimated you then. Be assured that I shall not make the same mistake again. Achmed, I give her into your personal and special care. Do what you will with her — only make sure that she suffers … Make very sure of that, Achmed.’

  Fayeed caught her wrist and pulled her to him, and Sabrina had to restrain herself from retaliation, but now was not the time, she told herself; she had to learn their location and get word to Philpott. And look after the boy, Feisal. Achmed could wait.

  Smith continued, ‘And one still not with us? Could he also be suffering from unaccustomed shyness?’

  ‘No chance, Mister Smith,’ Jagger called from the doorway of the plane.

  ‘My dear Colonel,’ Smith crowed, ‘join us, please, and complete our pleasure.’

  All eyes were on him as he descended the steps — on him, and on the gun which he still carried in his hand.

  ‘Oh, my God, no,’ Sabrina breathed, ‘not you, Mac. Not you.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Mister Smith sneered. ‘Indeed, I don’t know how we should have managed without Colonel McCafferty’s all-too-willing assistance.’

  TEN

  The US consul in Bahrain was neat, pedantic and obstinate, and called Mackie-Belton. He had been immediately prejudiced against the grimy, blood-streaked figure who had forcibly invaded his privacy and interrupted his dinner with an Arabian lady of enormous discretion but small reserves of patience. Now Mackie-Belton’s own tolerance was approaching the end of its tether.

  ‘Put yourself in my position,’ he insisted, not for the first time, ‘and give me one reason — not half a dozen or twenty — just one reason why I should believe you. You come bursting in here uninvited, wearing filthy Arab clothing and a USAF shirt, underwear and socks, obviously having fought your way out of some seedy drinking party, and without a shred of either evidence or identification to back you up, you insist you’re someone whom I know from my own experience you cannot possibly be.

  ‘When I clearly do not accept your story, you insult me, threaten me, bully me, try to cajole me into telephoning the Director of UNACO and the operations room at the Pentagon — and then you are outraged when I propose calling the polic
e. Let me tell you — and do not come any closer, please — let me tell you that the only reason you are still here and the police are not, is that your story is so incredible, so fantastic, that it just might have a grain of truth in it.’

  Mac sighed and slumped into a lumpy armchair, his legs outstretched, his fingers plucking disconsolately at the beading on the upholstery. He lifted his eyes wearily to Mackie-Belton, and saw scarcely a chink in the implacable hostility of the plump little man in the white tuxedo, thinning brown hair plastered down to cover his scalp, buck teeth gleaming in the tight mouth. The consul’s bi-focals were suspended by the ear-pieces from a thin gold chain looped around the back of his neck, and falling to rest on his pleated white dinner-shirt like some extravagant Order from a Middle Eastern potentate.

  ‘So what will you do, Mr Belton?’ he muttered.

  ‘Mackie-Belton, if you don’t mind. Well, for a start, I will not contact either the Pentagon or UNACO, but I will endeavour to find someone on this island who might know you and could confirm that you bear at least a passing resemblance to Colonel Joseph McCafferty whom we know to be aboard Air Force One — which, by the way, in my opinion, you do not, although I have met the gentleman only once.’

  Mac groaned and passed his hand over his face — then snatched it away and sat bolt upright in the chair, his blazing eyes and harsh breathing unsettling Mackie-Belton even more.

  ‘Of course!’ he hooted triumphantly, and Mackie-Belton winced anew, ‘you’re right, of course! Now shut up and listen, because I’m going to tell you something which you will believe!

  ‘Ankara, wasn’t it? Don’t interrupt, don’t move, don’t even breathe … Ankara, yeah, three — no, four — years ago. I’d had my wallet stolen and I was strapped for money. I came to you —’ his brow furrowed with the effort of remembrance ‘— I came to you in a little green office …’ (he shut his eyes and clenched his fists) ‘… with a damned great palm tree in the corner. The door was marked “Consulate: Documentation and Credit”, or something like that.

  ‘You let me have five hundred dollars, didn’t you? Reluctantly, as I recall, but you were able to check my papers and everything figured. I sent it back by money order as soon as I got to London. For Christ’s sake, there were only two of us in the room, Mr Mackie-Belton. No secretary, no aide. I couldn’t possibly know this unless I’d been there. I even remember your last words: you said “Give my respects to Fortnum and Mason,” and I replied that Selfridge’s Food Hall was nearer my mark, which didn’t seem to please you at all.

  ‘Now then. God damn it — am I right? And if so, who am I?’

  Mackie-Belton frowned, lifted the gold-rimmed bi-focals on their slim chain, breathed first on one lens, then the other, extracted a crisply folded white handkerchief from his top pocket and polished the glass with fastidious deliberation, then replied slowly, ‘You are Colonel Joseph McCafferty.’

  Mac leaned back in the chair, crossed his legs, grinned and said, ‘Olé and yippee. So — can we go to work? Because time, Mr Mackie-Belton, is of the essence. It’s Air Force One I’m talking about — a hijack plot, OK? It’s happening, Consul.’ He rose to his feet, towering over his unwilling but benign host. ‘Even now, it could be happening.’

  For the next half-hour, McCafferty fretted, fumed and boiled while Mackie-Belton contacted the American embassies in Ankara and London, then Andrews Air Force Base, then his brother at Princeton University and finally, when he was convinced that he had enough personal cover to preserve his own career if Mac turned out to be an extremely gifted lunatic, slotted through a call to Basil Swann — who didn’t believe him.

  Mackie-Belton chewed his lip, hummed off-key and raised his plucked eyebrows as he handed the receiver to McCafferty, making a careful note of the duration of each call for the telephone bill which he would inevitably pass to UNACO. But if Mac had found the consul stubborn, the diplomat wasn’t even in the same league as Basil Swann. He struggled in vain against Basil’s adamantine logic, then changed his tack and switched to the form of personal recollection which had eventually persuaded Mackie-Belton.

  Gradually, the doubt crept into Swann’s voice, and Mac seized the opportunity to demand — in tones which Basil (who had had brushes with McCafferty before) could not fail to recognise — that he should be connected to Philpott.

  An hour and fifty minutes after barging into the consul’s thankfully secluded villa, where the Arabian lady’s unstoical forbearance had passed breaking point, Mac talked at last to his chief. They pieced the story together from fragments of each other’s intelligence or inspired guesswork: Mac had no direct knowledge of Smith’s involvement, but was able to supply Dunkels, Achmed and the Yugoslav connection; Philpott knew nothing of the Bahrainian assault, but papered over the cracks with the radar incidents and the elimination of AF One’s inertial guidance track, together with the explosion of the fake Boeing.

  Philpott, at least, made his decision swiftly. While acknowledging that McCafferty’s tale verged on the unbelievable, the two men were agreed that (a) the President’s plane had been hijacked with the real or false McCafferty on board; and (b) that Smith was behind it, luring the aircraft by some means and for some as yet undisclosed purpose to Yugoslavia, where a Russian (almost certainly KGB) nexus had been established.

  ‘Right,’ Philpott said, ‘we move — though not, I fear, to Yugoslavia. We have to play our cards very cleverly, Mac. Anything to do with that place, or any other member or of the Red camp, is such sensitive territory it’s just not true. UNACO members they may be, but they spit like tigers if I suggest one of them may be directly implicated in something, even if it’s unintentional.’

  ‘So where do we go, and what do we do?’ McCafferty asked.

  ‘We go to Rome,’ Philpott replied, ‘and start from there. It’s the best staging post in Europe, as you know. They’re a joy to work with, the Italians; they’re so used to duplicity they regularly double-cross themselves.’

  ‘And what shall we do when we get there?’

  ‘With any luck, we’ll pick up this guy Dunkels and hope he’ll lead us to Air Force One.’

  ‘Which is in Yugoslavia,’ Mac pointed out reasonably.

  ‘By then,’ Philpott said warily, ‘I’ll have persuaded the Yugoslav Government to offer strictly limited co-operation to a strictly limited UNACO force.’

  ‘You and me?’

  ‘Right. Oh, eh, plus Sabrina Carver, who’s on the plane.’

  There was a pregnant silence from McCafferty’s end. Then, with suspicion and something like anger slowly rising in him, he said, ‘I didn’t know Sabrina Carver was one of us, sir.’

  ‘No,’ Philpott agreed, ‘you didn’t, did you?’

  To the right of the stone door-frame a tapestry dropped fully six feet to the floor. Like the dark, richly-coloured oil painting next to it, starting level with its top and running for about the same distance along the wall, the tapestry portrayed a hunting scene. Its frayed canvas showed, in dull browns, greens and blues, the sticking of a wild boar by a small army of hunters; it was an unequal battle, though the boar had matched tusk for spear to some effect. The oil painting was of a more usual scenario, a stag at bay in a glen, standing off the snarling dogs who were being encouraged by mounted huntsmen, bloodlust contorting their features. Only the stag retained a shred of dignity, its great brown eyes registering bewilderment rather than fear.

  From the picture, the eye travelled almost by compulsion to the set piece which dominated the long, white-walled room: the head of a ‘royal’ or ‘imperial’ stag, mirror-image of the doomed giant in the oil painting, its twelve-point antlers casting shifting, spiky shadows on the wall in the lamplight. Below the deer king, but still above the door, processing around the room in a mournful frieze of sudden death, were smaller stags, an eagle or two, a peregrine falcon, a grimacing boar, some barn owls, a brace of obligatory foxes and a few pet hounds, interspersed with the brass funnels of hunting horns and non-functional guns by the
rackful.

  The furniture was of heavy, pitted wood, and the windows were cross-hatched with ironwork. The light, from two oil lanterns, was feeble, creating pools of shade, recesses, and places of uncertain passage. Sabrina thought it fitting that Mister Smith should immure his hostages in his trophy room. So, too, as it happened, did Smith.

  The terror and desperation reflected by the mounted heads and corpses communicated themselves to Smith’s captives. The crew members talked, aimlessly for the most part, in whispers, Jeanie Fenstermaker holding a handkerchief to her eyes and being comforted by the diminutive Wynanski; Cooligan lolling against a table apart from the engineers, tight-lipped and coldly enraged by McCafferty’s treachery; Fairman, Kowalski and Latimer conversed in low tones about likely locations, for although they knew roughly whereabouts in Yugoslavia the airstrip lay, they had been blindfolded for the trip to the castle. Of the oil titans, Dorani endlessly smoked cheroots, to the disapproval of Hamady, who was discussing ransoms with him; and Hemmingsway poured words into the uncaring ear of Sheikh Arbeid. Only Zeidan, like the mighty stag, was impassive and alert, his smouldering eyes probing the furthest reaches of the room, seeking weaknesses, disadvantages …

  * * *

  The minibus, its windows darkened, had driven to a halt outside the hangar at Kosgo where Sheikh Zeidan asked the one question which Smith had permitted the hostages.

  ‘Who are you, dog?’ said the old Arab. Smith’s fingers caressed the silver point of his cane, and he took three steps to stand over the crippled sheikh, his eyes narrowed, his mouth like a closed man-trap. Zeidan had not troubled even to meet his gaze.

  ‘You may call me Mister Smith.’

  ‘May I — Smith?’

  Achmed bounded to the wheelchair and turned it roughly so that Zeidan faced him. ‘Mister Smith, cousin,’ he grated, ‘do not forget that.’