Алистер Маклин - Air Force One is Down

‘Now there’s something you don’t know about, Mister Smith. Your pet doppelgänger has one just like that,’ he said, indicating the bomb timer.

Smith looked apprehensive, and impressed.

‘How clever of you to find that out, Mr Philpott,’ he murmured. ‘So our Colonel McCafferty – whose name, incidentally, used to be Cody Jagger – has designs on the hostages too, has he?’

He remained in silent thought for perhaps a minute, then turned his blank grey eyes on the UNACO chief.

‘I would only have considered killing the captives in the event of the direst emergency, Philpott. I think you believe that. Jagger, on the other hand … Jagger is all beast. Clearly I must waste no more time.’

He dropped the detonator timer back into his pocket, and pressed a button on the second device.

‘Look!’ he directed, pointing dramatically out to sea.

Philpott followed his arm. In a blaze of fiery sparks, a rocket scorched into the air from Saucer Island and drew a comet’s tail track in the night-sky.

Brigadier Tomlin stalked over to the tripod in the light room and jammed his eyes for the hundredth time into the socket of the telescope.

‘This is getting ridiculous,’ he barked, ‘nothing’s happening at all.’

‘It’s less than an hour since the deadline,’ Sonya Kolchinsky pointed out reasonably, ‘and Smith didn’t guarantee to act immediately. Anyway, with all this hardware around, we may have succeeded merely in frightening him off. He’s not to know, after all, that we’re only here to have a look-see.’

Tomlin straightened up and bristled at her.

‘It’s not my job, ma’am,’ he said, ‘to make life easier for a bounder like Smith.’

She was about to frame a suitably barbed reply when the lighthouse-keeper drew their attention to the rocket, which neither of them had seen leave the island, being too occupied in glaring at each other.

‘Damn and blast it!’ Tomlin roared, ‘so that’s how he’s doing it.’

He snatched a communicator from the table and snapped, ‘All units, repeat, all units. Track that rocket. Don’t lose sight of it. Mark where it falls and recover it. Move!’

Smith watched the performance through powerful binoculars and chuckled as the watchdog ships peeled away. ‘So splendidly predictable, the military,’ he mused. ‘Do you not agree, Mr Philpott?’

‘I take it that the little fireworks display had nothing to do with the collection of the ransom,’ Philpott observed.

Smith wagged his head, and tut-tutted. ‘But there you would be wrong, my dear fellow. True, it served admirably as a divertissement , but its principal objective is important, indeed crucial, to my plan for picking up the diamonds.’

Sonya Kolchinsky wasn’t fooled, either.

‘We’re going to the island, Brigadier,’ she announced firmly.

‘We are not, Mrs Kolchinsky,’ Tomlin replied, equally firmly.

Sonya bridled.

‘You have more than sufficient units tracking that Roman Candle. We will take the command boat – the flagship, as I believe you call her – to the island.’

‘And why, pray?’

‘Mainly because I say so. I shouldn’t need to remind you, Brigadier, that you are under UNACO command. I don’t believe for a moment that the rocket has been magically oriented to pick up our bag of diamonds and transport them to Smith’s current lair. We will investigate.’

Tomlin heaved a theatrical sigh and muttered, ‘As you wish, ma’am.’

When the launch slowed to a halt at the gibbet end of the island, Tomlin pointed to where the pole had been and proclaimed, ‘There! I told you – it’s gone!’

Sonya frowned, then peered into the water where the strong searchlights of the boat were playing.

‘It hasn’t, Brigadier,’ she cried, ‘it’s still there.’

Before Tomlin could prevent her, she stepped from the prow of the cutter and jumped on to the island.

Tomlin shouted, ‘It’s mined! For God’s sake, be careful!’

Sonya turned to him and waved.

‘Don’t be silly, of course it’s not mined,’ she called out.

She trotted over to the centre of the rock slab and found the tube from which the rocket had been launched. A length of singed cord lay half out of the hole, and she examined it curiously. Then she returned to the edge of the island and searched for the pole – which, as she had reported to Tomlin, was indeed still there, only now it was lying horizontally on the surface of the sea, with the cross-bar projecting down into the water.

Tomlin followed her gaze.

‘By Jove,’ he mumbled incredulously, ‘the bag is still there, too. Shall I have it recovered, ma’am?’

‘Please, Brigadier,’ Sonya replied.

But as a crewman with a boathook leaned over to scoop up the leather bag, a dark, ghostly shape cleaved the water past the launch. Its nose speared the six-inch metal ring which Smith had insisted must be fastened to the end of the bag. The grey shadow swam away, and with it went fifty million dollars in cut diamonds.

Tomlin’s eyes almost left his head.

‘What – what the blue b… – bloody blazes was that?’ he spluttered.

Almost in a dream, and half to herself, Sonya Kolchinsky murmured, ‘God Almighty, you’ve got to hand it to Smith, haven’t you.’

‘ What was it? ’ Tomlin demanded, his puce countenance turning purple in the garish light.

Sonya pulled herself together.

‘What was it, Brigadier? A dolphin, of course. What on earth did you think it was – a submarine?’

McCafferty finished prodding the bruise on Sabrina’s head and remarked, unfeelingly, ‘I think you’ll live.’

‘Gee, thanks,’ she replied. ‘Are we ready, then?’

McCafferty bowed and conducted her into the cramped seat of the Kamov helicopter.

‘Your carriage awaits, m’lady,’ he joked.

They had collected the hostages and sent them back under Cooligan to the Kosgo airstrip, located for them by the Yugoslav Air Force. Mac suggested that the AF One crew should recover their aircraft and prepare it for take-off. If all turned out well, and Smith was either captured or at least prevented from snatching the diamonds, Philpott’s party would join them later for the trip to Geneva.

‘Anyway, Bert, I’ll see you’re kept informed,’ he promised, as the small convoy pulled out of the car-park and descended to the floor of the hostage-cave valley.

‘Which way, skip?’ Sabrina inquired as they took off.

‘The coast,’ McCafferty answered matter-of-factly. ‘That’s where the ransom-drop is taking place.’

They zoomed up into the starlit sky and Mac banked the Kamov sharply to bring it round for a nose-down straight run to the Adriatic …

‘A what?’ Philpott echoed faintly.

‘A dolphin,’ Smith said. ‘That’s what I was doing when I pulled on the rope-line just now. It released the end-wall of the dolphin’s cage, and it was also the signal for her to start swimming.

‘She needed to keep going for only three or four minutes, homing in on an ultrasonic direction-beacon built into the pole of what you called the gibbet, which your considerable armada was frightened to examine in case the apparatus, or indeed the entire island, was mined.’

‘Which of course it wasn’t,’ Philpott supplied drily.

‘Which of course it wasn’t,’ Smith confirmed.

He then explained at length how the dolphin had been purchased and trained at a dolphinarium in America until she could have made the pick-up blindfolded. The rocket also operated a device linked to a cord which uprooted the guy-rope supporting the pole, and tilted the gibbet down to sea-level, Smith added.