Алистер Маклин - Air Force One is Down

He muttered to himself, not caring whether anyone else heard, that it was like being back at flying school. When the end of the runway slid down the windshield, you were too high. When it slid up, too damned low. So far it remained dead centre, and Fairman hoped, prayed, that it would stay there.

It was a long, dangerously slow, descent. Air Force One shot out the searching beams of its own landing lights, and a hundred tons of aeroplane followed the twin rays as they raked the pitted track between the smoking paraffin lamps.

Fairman completed the run in, and the great silver airliner burst on to the runway in a squeal of tyres. Fairman’s knuckles whitened as he gripped the steering column and fought to keep it under control.

‘Reverse thrust!’ he yelled.

Latimer obeyed. The noise of the jets rose in an ear-splitting boom to a crescendo as all seventy-six thousand pounds of thrust were diverted to slow the liner’s progress along the absurdly short landing strip.

Air Force One rattled and shook, and the plane’s speed fell dramatically, throwing the stateroom passengers violently against their restraining belts. Crockery, personal articles, document cases, all flew off the tables and smashed against the bulkhead.

Outside, the girl’s hand flew to her mouth and cut off a shriek of terror as the huge shape bore down on them. She pulled at Smith’s arm, and he allowed himself to be dragged back behind the low wall, as if that afforded any ultimate protection from the racing jetliner.

Fairman watched the faint, flickering bank of lights at the end of the strip draw closer and closer. Then, suddenly, there was nothing in the windscreen but blackness.

Latimer, Kowalski and Jagger held on to anything that wouldn’t move, and the Boeing slewed into a hard right turn, its tyres smoking. It came to rest nearly at a right angle to the gully, its port wing hanging out over the deep gash of the crevasse.

Latimer licked his dry lips and said, ‘Hairy.’

‘Cut engines,’ Fairman breathed.

The pilot chopped the switches and the whining jets died to a whimper.

‘Excellent,’ Smith purred. ‘You see, my lovely Branka,’ he said to the girl, ‘you can always rely on the United States Air Force in an emergency.’

Two Air Force Ones? Morwood queried. Definitely, Philpott explained: one hijacked and diverted, the other taking its place until the radar picked up the scent again. Then it would be seen cruising along the correct course at the correct altitude, and its crew would bail out at the appropriate time, probably when a ship was waiting at a prearranged signal to pick them up. The bomb on board the plane would throw the Pentagon and UNACO into total confusion while the real AF One was spirited away.

‘Like where?’ Morwood demanded.

‘The angle of turn before the liner disappeared from the inertial guidance system trace would indicate Greece or Yugoslavia,’ Philpott surmised.

‘No closer than that?’ Morwood persisted.

‘If you want me to guess,’ Philpott replied, ‘I’d say Yugoslavia. If it’s Smith and he has help, which I believe he may, then it’ll be Yugoslavia, because he could not operate with complete freedom in Greece, and neither could the sort of assistance I think he’s getting.’

‘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.