Алистер Маклин - Air Force One is Down

‘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.’

Jagger switched the point of the gun to Fairman, but the Commander didn’t flinch.

‘I mean it, Mac …’ he added, ‘ you know that, for God’s sake. I don’t have to tell you. You’re a pilot yourself. We have to have eyes. Don’t leave us blind, or we won’t make it.’

‘So you need … what?’ Jagger asked, unsure of himself now.

The sketchy introduction to basic flying in his briefing had in no sense prepared him for this; Smith’s orders had been to take off McCafferty, not match his knowledge built from a lifetime’s career.

‘You know damned well what I need!’ Fairman exploded. ‘I want the radio altimeters, the weather radar and the flight system. That way we might just – and I mean just – get wherever you want to go, though landing will be something else – but something else, I promise you. Keep the communications locked up, OK, but give me eyes.’

Jagger’s gaze ranged from face to face as though seeking confirmation of Fairman’s words. The flight engineer – they were all now under the spell of the weaving gun – had paused within range of the circuit breakers which would cut the liner’s communications – or most of them. But now he tripped the switches, and then made the mistake of letting his eyes flicker nervously to a metal box fixed to the bulkhead.

‘What’s in there?’ Jagger rapped, following the man’s eye-line.

‘Just some more circuit breakers,’ the engineer replied in a tone which was a little too casual to be credible.

‘Open it,’ Jagger commanded, and the engineer rummaged in his bag for a screwdriver.

‘You, Colonel,’ Cody said turning to Fairman, ‘can have your eyes, but get this aircraft down to sea-level.’

Fairman ordered Latimer to illuminate the ‘fasten seat-belts’ sign, and then he set the new heading. Latimer confirmed that he had carried out the necessary checklist of procedures for the descent, and the flight system put the Boeing into a slow right-hand turn on to the course Jagger had directed.

Cody kept an eye on Latimer until his attention was distracted by a screw falling from the cover-plate of the mysterious box on the bulkhead. The engineer lifted the plate off to reveal more circuit breakers.

The hijacker gestured with his revolver. ‘Those too,’ he said, ‘trip them.’

The flight engineer looked helplessly in Fairman’s direction, but Jagger transferred the gun to within six inches of his face and said, ‘Now!’

Reaching up with a trembling hand, the engineer obeyed. The green light on Philpott’s wall display twinkled out.