Алистер Маклин - Air Force One is Down

Mac had a gun in his hand and was prepared to make an issue of it … but still he had the field to himself. He shrugged, took a chance in opening the throttle wide (which was far from standard practice), and pointed the nose in the direction which seemed to give him the longest take-off run.

Within a hundred yards the tail had responded to the gentle forward pressure on the stick. Mac’s view improved as the nose of the rather old-fashioned aircraft levelled, and fifty yards further on the airspeed indicator was showing forty-five knots. He wound the elevator trim to prepare for flight, and found himself smoothly airborne, and climbing steeply, without any conscious effort.

When he crossed the perimeter of the little airfield, the altimeter was already showing two hundred feet. He breathed a sigh of relief and turned back over the field to fly south after Dunkels. As he passed the group of rusting sheds, he peered out and again saw no one moving around.

‘Where the hell’s the resident mechanic?’ he thought. ‘There must be one. You can’t leave the entire place unattended with all these planes lying about.’ Then the penny dropped: Smith must have nobbled the mechanic to leave Dunkels a clear field for take-off.

McCafferty turned his attention back to Dunkels, estimating the Kamov’s course at about 190 degrees. Setting the same course for himself, he climbed four thousand feet to enlarge his view and compensate for the start the German had on him. He figured he could make up the leeway with the superior performance of the UTVA – particularly if he pushed it slightly beyond the recommended limit. He scanned the area below him on both sides, every inch of land and sky, not seeing the beauty of the rolling countryside nor the sunlit, tree-lined slopes … he looked only for the tell-tale signs which would betray the elusive helicopter: the glint of reflected light from the whirring blades; the fly-sized black speck against the bright blue; the dark shadow stealing across a green meadow.

A road, a river and a railway line passed beneath his gaze. To his left a small town nestled in a fold of the gentle hills. Mac fumbled for a crumpled, dog-eared chart left in the cockpit, and identified the town as Glina. He peered more closely at the chart: next stop, Topusko – to starboard.

He leaned to his right, looking out, searching for Topusko, and there was the Kamov, flying so low that it appeared for one ludicrous moment to be covering the ground like a car. McCafferty chuckled and spat out the chewing-gum, which in any case had lost its flavour …

While rerouting McCafferty to Yugoslavia, Philpott decided that Sonya and he should stick to their original plan and make for Rome. Whisked through customs at Fiumicino as VIPs, they left the airport with their minimal luggage untouched, ignored the thieving con-men operating as unlicensed taxi-drivers, and the yellow cabs themselves, and made for a NATO staff-car sitting by the ‘No Parking’ sign. The jaded high-ranking officer in British Army uniform standing by the car unlaced his arms and pasted on a welcoming beam.

The officer – tall, greying and keen-eyed, with a toothbrush moustache that ended precisely at the corners of his mouth – threw up a salute that was somewhere between a wave and a semaphore signal.

‘Morning. Tomlin. Brigadier.’

Philpott replied, ‘Morning. Philpott. UNACO.’

Tomlin said, ‘I’m NATO. Naples. In charge of the local end.’

Philpott said, ‘My associate, Mrs Kolchinsky. We’re in charge of both ends.’ He nodded towards Sonya and then they both shook hands with the soldier.

‘We don’t usually meet – ah – visiting firemen,’ Tomlin continued earnestly, ignoring Philpott’s darkening brow. ‘However, I’ve been ordered to this time, so you must be pretty important.’

‘Not really,’ Philpott responded off-handedly, ‘just an ordinary chap with some ordinary questions, Brigadier.’

‘Oh, splendid,’ Tomlin said, conducting them into the car and seating himself in a jump-seat. ‘Jolly good show. Well then, fire away.’

Sonya’s firm grip on his wrist was helping Philpott control his rising temper, though he found it difficult to fuel his anger in the face of Tomlin’s complete insouciance.

‘Well, to start with, is there any word on the wreckage of Air Force One?’ he inquired.

‘Ah,’ Tomlin said, leaning forward conspiratorially, ‘yes, there is.’

He instructed the corporal at the wheel of the car to drive them away, then confided to Philpott that the wreckage of the plane had been located.

‘ But –’ he added, and gaped when Philpott supplied, ‘But it’s not Air Force One.’

‘Quite right,’ Tomlin confirmed. ‘But how on earth did you know?’

Philpott tapped the side of his nose. ‘Fireman’s secret,’ he whispered. ‘It was a Boeing 707, I take it?’

It was, Tomlin conceded, though as far as they could make out from the debris, it was a freighter, not an airliner. There was no registration mark, so the plane could take days to trace.

Philpott digested the news; he had hoped to link Smith definitively with the hijack through an instant identification of the ‘look-alike’ Boeing, but it seemed he would have to wait for his affirmative evidence. Not, though, for long.

A squawk from the front of the vehicle announced a radio message. Tomlin shot back the dividing partition and rapped, ‘What did they say, Corporal?’

‘Headquarters, sir,’ the NCO replied. ‘Ransom demand for the OPEC ministers received in Trieste and, I think, Dubrovnik. Something’s gone out on one of the American news agencies, too.’

The Brigadier was all business now.

‘HQ then, and step on it.’ He preened himself as though he had been personally responsible for the invention of radio, and said to Philpott, ‘Bit of a turn-up, no?’

‘No,’ Philpott said, ‘I was expecting it.’ The soldier arched an expressive eyebrow, but said nothing. Philpott moved in smoothly for the kill. ‘What’s more, Brigadier,’ he said slyly, ‘one gets you ten that the guy behind the ransom demand is called Smith.’

Tomlin sniffed. ‘Bit, eh, sort of – commonplace, isn’t it?’

Philpott chuckled. ‘The name, maybe; not the man.’

In the operations room at NATO HQ, Philpott and Sonya studied blow-ups of the Polaroid pictures wired over on request from Trieste and from the AP bureau in Belgrade. Tomlin shot one of the prints under a desk magnifier and the image was thrown on to a wall screen.

‘All present and correct, sir?’ he inquired, suitably chastened since his discovery that the hijacker was indeed named as Mister Smith.

Philpott and Sonya mentally ticked off ministers and crew members, all of whose faces were on record at UNACO. Unobtrusively, they were intently scanning just one among the dozen or so faces – for Jagger, naturally, was in the group of captives.

‘Unbelievable,’ Philpott murmured.

‘Uncanny,’ Sonya said. ‘It’s the greatest surgery I’ve ever seen. Everything … even Mac’s mother would swear–’

‘Brigadier–’ Philpott cut her off with a peremptory, though not unkind, gesture, ‘have you formed any opinion about the background to the snapshot?’

The Brigadier said without hesitation that it was a castle. ‘Flagstone floor,’ he explained airily, ‘roughcast walls. We’ve got a few of ’em in England, you know.’

‘No, I didn’t,’ said Philpott interestedly, ‘you must tell me some time.’

The sarcasm was lost on Tomlin, who merely nodded sagely and repeated, ‘No doubt of it. A castle.’

Philpott agreed, and asked the Brigadier if he knew of any castles in Yugoslavia.

‘Is that where it’s supposed to be?’ Tomlin bleated.