Chris Ryan - Osama

Eva’s voice didn’t sound like her. ‘It’s me…’ she rasped. ‘Eva…’

‘Hello? Can you hear me? Who’s this?’

‘Eva Buckley!’ she shouted as loud as she could. The line was still poor. ‘You have to listen to me! There’s going to be a terrorist attack… ten planes… five in the UK… five in the US… explosives in the food trays… they’ll be in the air any second now… you need to find Joe Mansfield… he has the flight numbers…’

Silence.

Eva looked at the mobile’s screen. It was blank. No battery.

‘ No! ’ she yelled, and in a fit of frustration she hurled the phone against the windscreen. It clattered down into the footwell, but Eva didn’t see it. She was looking at the clock. Ten precisely.

She was too late.

0500 EST.

The hangar at Tampa International was almost silent. The passengers were still held at gunpoint. Two of them had been removed from the others. They were a short, dumpy Middle Eastern woman and a taller man, also of Arabic extraction. Two members of the SWAT team had brought them over to the other side of the parked buses and forced them onto the ground with their hands on the backs of their heads. Their two items of hand luggage were next to each other on a trestle table, behind which a studious-looking young woman wearing a white coat and latex gloves was examining four identical bottles of shampoo.

She picked one of them up, opened it rather nervously, and squirted a small puddle onto a petri dish. It was green, thick and viscous. A look of suspicion crossed the woman’s face. She dabbed the substance with a strip of litmus paper, which she held up to the light. She sniffed the petri dish and then, working quickly, checked samples from the other three bottles. When she was done, she looked up at a waiting member of the TSA.

‘I’ll need to do more tests,’ she said, ‘but…’

She hesitated.

‘Binary explosives?’ the TSA man asked.

The young woman looked back at the petri dishes. ‘No. I think it’s…’

‘What?’

‘…just shampoo.’

Pressed to the floor of the Agusta, MP5s pointing at him and the vibrations of the aircraft juddering through him, Joe couldn’t tell in which direction they were travelling. A voice above him – one of the ARU – was barking into his headset: ‘Roger that, we have him apprehended… heavily armed, sir… firing on a moving fuel truck.’

‘ You have to listen to me! ’ Joe roared again, and was rewarded with a boot in the ribs. He barely felt it. All his attention was on the voice.

‘I don’t recommend uncuffing him, sir… the guy’s… a threat to the safety of the aircraft…’ And then, in shocked tones, as though someone had just torn a few strips off him: ‘Yes, sir…’

Joe was pulled to his knees, and he felt the cuffs being unlocked. A quick glance at the position of the sun told him they were heading north, but he had no more chance to get his bearings before one of the ARU thrust a headset at him. ‘ Put it on – now! ’

Joe did as he was told.

‘Who am I talking to?’ he demanded.

‘ This is GCHQ. Give me the flight numbers, now! ’

There was no time to think about this sudden change of heart, or even how they knew he had the intelligence. Joe just ripped the handwritten A4 sheet from his pocket and started screaming the flight numbers down the line: ‘ Bravo Alpha Seven Two Niner, Echo Zulu Three Eight Six, Lima Tango Two Two Three… ’

Flight BA729 from Heathrow to Dublin was gaining speed down the runway. The cabin crew were strapped in, and all phones and electrical equipment had been switched off. The man in the back row continued to sweat and to mutter silently to himself as the G-force pressed him back into his seat. The aircraft shuddered; the engines screamed. Any second now they would be airborne.

But then the sound of the engines changed. There was a murmuring in the cabin. The plane was slowing down.

The man at the back had stopped muttering and was now looking sharply around. Just behind him, by the catering trolleys, the air steward who had checked he was OK was looking at one of his colleagues. This was clearly unexpected.

The conversation in the cabin was louder now, but the engines were quieter. Above both noises came the distant sound of sirens, growing nearer. The man in the back row looked left, across his two neighbours, and out of the window. He saw two police cars, an ambulance and an unmarked white van screaming across the airfield.

‘Ladies and gentlemen.’ The captain’s voice was not panicked, but he was clearly being very careful to sound calm. ‘There’s nothing to worry about, just a minor technical issue…’

But the passengers weren’t fooled. They too had seen the emergency vehicles. And as the aircraft ground to a complete halt, they saw the flak-jacketed, armed police burst out of the unmarked white van. Someone screamed. At least half the passengers ripped off their seatbelts and got to their feet.

The captain’s voice came over the Tannoy again: ‘Cabin crew, engage the emergency chutes. Ladies and gentlemen, please stand clear of the aisle to allow…’

Nobody was listening. Passengers were already rushing towards the emergency exits, even though they hadn’t been opened yet. From the rear of the plane two members of the cabin crew tried to push themselves down towards the centre, passing the sweating Middle Eastern man and his two neighbours, who had got to their feet and were trying to squeeze past him. The man angled his legs to the right, allowing them into the aisle to follow in the wake of the cabin crew.

And only then, as the other passengers scrambled for the exits, and the blue neon of the emergency vehicles flashed in through the windows of the aircraft, did the man remove his mobile phone from his pocket. His hands were shaking, his brow a sea of sweat. He felt detached from the noise and hysteria of the rest of the cabin as the emergency chutes opened. He felt at peace. He looked over his right shoulder. From here he could see, in the cabin crew’s service area, the metal food trolley. It was no more than three metres away.

He switched on the phone. It took thirty seconds to power up.

Half the passengers had alighted now. The man could hear harsh voices shouting instructions somewhere outside and although he could not make out what they were saying, he knew he didn’t have much time.

The cabin was almost empty now. The harsh voices grew more distinct. He could understand them: ‘Get away from the aircraft! Get away from the aircraft! ’

He activated Bluetooth. The phone started to search for nearby devices.

He was muttering again. This time his words were not silent, but formed the dull drone of a whispered prayer. The harsh voices were closer. They were in the cabin and were shouting not at the passengers who had, he estimated, all disembarked, but at each other: ‘Rows A to F, clear! Rows M to S, clear!’

His prayer continued. Still seated, he couldn’t see the newcomers, but he could sense one of them drawing closer. They would shoot him on sight, of course. Sweat trickled down the back of his neck as he stared at his phone.

New device found.

He sensed the approaching man stop. How far away was he? Five metres? A little more?

Device connected.

Had the newcomer seen the man still sitting in his seat? Had he worked out something was wrong?

He had only to press a button now, and his phone would detonate the Semtex stashed in the meals on the food trolley.

Then the man heard the newcomer’s voice. ‘ Evacuate the aircraft! Evacuate! Now! ’

The time had come. He would take at least one person with him.