Алистер Маклин - Air Force One is Down

Mac kept the position at Sabrina’s insistence, and immediately regretted it, for Smith, holding the wheel with one hand and the leather bag between his knees, fired a machine-gun from the hip. McCafferty throttled back and screamed away as the shots ricocheted off his undercarriage.

‘You’ve annoyed him now, my pet,’ he said to Sabrina, who shouted back, ‘So what!’

‘Leave it to me,’ McCafferty insisted at the top of his voice, ‘I’ve got an idea that can’t miss. Start shooting again when I tell you.’

He brought the Kamov in carefully to starboard of the boat, then opened up and dipped to the seaward side, yelling ‘Now!’ Sabrina pressed the trigger of the machine-pistol and kept her finger down until the gun was belching nothing but hot air.

Distracted, Smith yanked the wheel over and ploughed into a course for the shore. He fired back over his shoulder but his aim was erratic, and McCafferty, instead of beating a hasty retreat, managed to close until he was flying directly above the dinghy, knot for knot at Smith’s speed.

Try as he might, Smith couldn’t shake the Kamov loose, and Mac dropped the aircraft down until he was no more than a few feet over Smith’s head. Lower and still lower he sank, while the down-draught from the helicopter’s flailing rotors grew more violent.

Sheets of water strafed the boat, buffeting and blinding its driver. He could no longer use the gun, for he could not sight a target. He could no longer steer the dinghy, for he could not see where he was going.

He tugged and twisted the wheel this way and that, and each time he abandoned his course he somehow strayed back to it. He was an experienced sailor, but this was worse than the most awesome typhoon he had ever known. Smith shrieked his fury at the wind and the waves – and all the time, though he did not know it, he was sailing closer and closer to the rocky shore.

McCafferty looked ahead, peering through the spray, and saw the coastline looming up, now less than fifty yards away. Grimly he kept the Kamov at its post, tossed like a cork though it was in its own down-draught. At the last possible moment he pulled up and away and Smith could see – but it was too late. He spun the wheel frantically to avoid a rock, and instead struck a floating log a few feet offshore.

The sodden, splintering wood acted as a launching ramp, and Smith’s dinghy took to the air. It spun like a dart and thudded into the beach. Smith was catapulted through the windscreen and flung to the wet sand like a rag doll. Fairy lights exploded before his eyes, and he was glad the torture was over. McCafferty spread the flats of both hands wide in a repeated sweeping gesture, and Sabrina got the message: there was no room to land the helicopter on Smith’s beach. She jabbed her own finger towards his recumbent form on the sand, and Mac nodded vehemently. Sabrina checked that she had a full clip in the machine-pistol, slung it over her shoulder, and heaved herself out of the Kamov. Her feet found the landing skids, and she vaulted lightly to earth, sending Mac off with a cheery wave to find another landing place.

She bent over Smith’s body: he was starting to come round. Mischievously, Sabrina picked up the ransom sack and put it under his head as a pillow. Then she checked the shattered Avon dinghy, retrieved Smith’s gun, unloaded it and threw the magazine away. The lantern he had brought with him still worked, so she propped it on a rock and switched it on.

Smith opened his eyes, and saw her pale face, framed by the now quiescent halo of hair, cast in the light of the full moon and the rays of the red metal lamp. His gaze fell to the gun she held trained on him. She was kneeling about four feet from him, and when he levered himself up to support his body on his elbows, she relaxed and sat back on her heels.

‘Game’s up, Mister Smith,’ Sabrina said laconically. ‘Too bad. You’re quite a guy in your own weird, perverted way.’

His head darted from side to side like a cobra’s as he searched the beach for the bag of diamonds.

Sabrina grinned and remarked, ‘Maybe you’re not so smart, huh?’

‘What have you done with them?’ Smith asked. ‘Taken them back to Philpott? I can’t believe you’d do that, Sabrina … you of all people. Your body would look so – exquisite – picked out in diamonds.’

Sabrina gave an ironic chuckle.

‘Mister,’ she said. ‘I’ve stolen more diamonds than you’ve had Lobster Thermidors. What’s so special about these?’

‘They’re mine ,’ Smith replied, ‘by right of conquest, planning, superb execution. They’re mine , and I want them … but I will share them with you. Fifty-fifty?’

She shook her head.

‘It’d be no fun that way,’ she mused. ‘I get my kicks from stealing diamonds, not by being made a present of them. Besides, where would I spend them? I don’t have your contacts, and Mr Philpott would be very displeased.’

Smith sat up, shaking off the last effects of his ordeal.

‘Then come with me,’ he urged. ‘I don’t have to tell you we’d make a superb team. I’ll share everything with you, Sabrina … and I have so much. Great houses, châteaux, a ranch, an island in Micronesia–’

‘Only one?’

Smith grinned.

‘I know you’re mocking me now, but just use that agile brain of yours and think . You’re still young and quite appallingly beautiful. Do you want to waste your substance running from the police of a dozen countries, or risking your life for Malcolm Philpott’s gratification?

‘You’re an odd girl, you know; very odd. You’re quite splendidly amoral on one side of your existence, and I deeply admire you for your remarkable accomplishment as a jewel thief. And yet there’s this grotesque puritanical streak in you that seemingly makes you want to deny to other people the pleasure you yourself derive from criminal activities. It’s a disturbing mixture; and I am not sure I could easily accommodate to it.’

‘That’s that then,’ Sabrina returned briskly. ‘I told you we’d never make it. Apart from anything else, what do I really know about you, Mister Smith? What does anyone know – you, even? Who are you, where are you from, what do you really look like? Oh, I know the face you’ve got now, but that’s different from the one you wore when we last met. No – on reflection, I don’t think I could ever “accommodate”, as you put it, someone so desperately anonymous as you, Mister Smith. Master criminal you may be, but you’re not a person in the accepted sense. You’re a kind of – kaleidoscope. And colour patterns bore me, buddy. I like cool, glittering sparkles – lots of them.’

Smith surveyed her with a sardonic grin.

‘Too bad. But at least tell me what you’ve done with the ransom sack.’

She pointed behind him.

‘The metal ring which you were so insistent we fastened to it, is at this moment about an inch and a half from the back of your right hand.’

Smith jerked his eyes down and murmured, ‘Delightful, my pet. You are truly capricious. I like that.’

She waved the gun at him.

‘That’s as close as you’re going to get to them, sweetheart. When McCafferty comes back, you return to the cooler, and the rocks, unfortunately, to the Amsterdam Diamond Exchange. In fact, I think I hear Mac’s engine now.’

Smith cocked his ear and observed that she was probably right. Then he started a stream of aimless chatter, probing her about minor irrelevancies, praising her, praising Philpott, McCafferty, UNACO, the Savoy Hotel Grill Room … and by the time her suspicion that he was trying to distract her hardened into certainty, a boat had drawn up on the beach. A man clad in a black wet suit, holding a large torch in one hand and a gun in the other, stood behind her.