Jack Du Brul - Charon's landing

Once again Mercer and Aggie were thrown violently, falling to the ceiling as the raft tipped upside down and was yanked below the surface in a headlong plunge. While it had been designed to be watertight in the most adverse surface conditions, the pod’s fiberglass hull was not designed to survive a prolonged submergence. In seconds, the seams where the upper-works and hull joined were creaking and popping, a tiny jet of water shooting from around one of the gasketed mounting bolts.

Seconds before the hull imploded, Mercer scrambled back to the controls and pressed the second of the two buttons. Spring clips securing the tethers to the hull snapped open. Free of the plummeting living module, the escape pod rocketed back to the surface of the Sound, surrounded by a champagne fountain of air bubbles. It was launched completely out of the water, like a humpback whale breaching during its annual migrations. Its design was such that it quickly settled on an even keel, even if its two occupants were no longer in any condition to care. It took all of Mercer’s remaining energy to strip himself out of the survival suit and wet clothing and curl up under several of the blankets that had been dislodged from a storage locker, Aggie Johnston held tightly to his chest.

“We made it, darling,” he mumbled and then remembered that escaping the rig was only half the battle. The real fight was still to come.

The television image was grainy and broke up every few seconds due to atmospheric disturbances as it bounced back to earth from a communications satellite. On the screen, a woman stood in front of the massive facade of Heathrow’s Terminal 4, her beautiful face composed of equal parts of pity and eagerness. As a professional broadcast journalist, this was the type of incident she lived for. The doors behind her were cluttered with swarming rescue workers in heavy flame-retardant gear, uniformed police, and suited members of Special Branch. The incident that had brought them all here had occurred on the other side of the building, out on the huge apron where aircraft had been waiting for clearance from the bomb detection teams. The sound from the BBC Special Report was much sharper than the pictures beamed into Hasaan bin-Rufti’s Hawker Siddeley, now only fifteen minutes from touchdown at Dubai, the closest international airport to the Emirate of Ajman.

Rufti was seated in the main cabin, his bulk sagging over and around the confining arms of the luxury seat. His fingers and lips were greased with the molten butter dripping from the lobsters he was consuming. He had just finished sucking the pale red meat out of the tiny underclaws of two huge imported Maine lobsters when the report had broken into the financial news he had been watching. The napkin hanging down his chest was the size of a tablecloth and was streaked yellow with butter, like a urine-soaked diaper.

Although he didn’t pause from his afternoon snack as he listened, his piggy eyes did brighten somewhat.

“This is Michaela Cooper reporting live from Heathrow, where the terrorist threat has intensified in the most horrifying way. Twenty minutes ago, while the airport was still under a high security alert following a bomb explosion in the main concourse, a refueling lorry was driven, apparently by suicide bombers, into a grounded British Airways Boeing 767.

“Unconfirmed reports so far indicate that the entire aircraft was destroyed by the collision between the plane and the lorry. A source here has told me that the bodies of the tanker’s real crew were found in a maintenance hangar shortly before the explosion, their throats slit, but again this is unconfirmed.” She glanced down to the notes in her hand, her shimmering blond hair falling around her shoulders. When she looked up, the hair remained draped over the silicone swell of her breasts. “The aircraft was scheduled to depart for Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, several hours ago. However, it was halted on the tarmac by the ongoing terrorist threat, now said to be the work of a group called Kurdistan United. They are the same terrorists claiming responsibility for the attack at the British Museum yesterday evening.”

“So the monkeys did it after all,” Rufti said aloud as he watched the broadcast, bits of lobster dribbling from his liver-shaped lips.

Having Tariq detonate the grenade in Heathrow’s international concourse and the making of a couple of well-timed phone calls to the airport manager’s office had bought enough time for the suicidal Kurds to set up a proper assault on Khalid Khuddari’s plane. Even as he made preparations to return to the UAE and confront the Crown Prince, Rufti had managed to put together a spur-of-the-moment plan that had worked brilliantly, with no exposure to himself. While he had personally made the two calls to Heathrow, his pilot had assured him that the communications gear aboard the Hawker would prohibit the signal from being traced.

Rufti had spent millions of dollars recruiting, training, and arming the Kurdish nationals to attack Khuddari at the British Museum. The operation had been planned down to the finest detail so that nothing could possibly go wrong. But of course it had. It had been left up to him to improvise a new plan to eliminate his greatest rival. With no prior planning and only the barest minimum of time, the Kurds had managed to use the window created by Tariq’s grenade to infiltrate Heathrow’s grounds, overcome the fuel company workers, and slam their truck into the parked Boeing.

“Unbelievable,” he muttered, shaking his fat-swaddled skull back and forth slowly.

The attack at the museum had been simplicity itself, while launching an assault at an airport already on high-security alert had to be the most difficult operation a terrorist cadre could accomplish. How the Kurds failed at the first but managed the second was a mystery. “Truly unbelievable.”

The camera view shifted to a long-range shot, a thousand-millimeter lens focusing on the pandemonium on the runways. After the explosion, the authorities had evacuated the rest of the planes immediately. They stood alone on the tarmac, yellow inflatable slides hanging from their exits. The passengers had been bused to a cargo warehouse for temporary shelter, three Fox combat reconnaissance vehicles standing outside the sealed doors, their 30mm Rarden cannons at the ready. The remains of the British Airways 767 were nothing more than a smoking heap on the asphalt, a charred ruin that was the funeral pyre to 165 passengers and crew. The camera sharpened even further, showing fire trucks pumping white foam onto the twisted remains, crews in silver fireproof suits edging as close as possible to the hot aircraft.

Michaela Cooper’s tone was doleful as she continued her report, but Rufti no longer paid her any attention. Khalid Khuddari had been on that plane, and now he was dead. Rufti had lived up to his part of the bargain with the Iranians and the Iraqis. It was now up to Kerikov to destroy the Alaska Pipeline and sink the tanker off the western coast of America, and within days the maps of the Middle East would have to be redrawn once again. The Saud family would be dead, their huge nation becoming a territory held jointly by Iran and Iraq, Kuwait would be absorbed by her northern neighbor, and he, Hasaan bin-Rufti, would be the new absolute ruler of all the Emirates.

Rufti was almost giddy. From the jaws of defeat, he had scored a stunning victory, proving himself to his partners. His negotiations with the ministers from Iran and Iraq, stretching over many months but culminating only days before in London, had hinged on both him and Kerikov first accomplishing their parts. Rufti could now settle back and wait comfortably for Kerikov to execute his side of the operation. Once done, the combined armies of the Middle East’s most belligerent neighbors would sweep southward while the United States and Europe sat impotently as their precious oil was taken from them.