David Gilman - The Devil's breath

But they hadn’t yet, had they? Mr. Slye was a good employee and he knew he needed to relieve some of his master’s burden-because Chang was his master; he held the power of life and death over him. Chang had enough to worry about. There was the massive hydroelectric scheme that would generate billions of dollars; there were the illegal drug shipments coming in from all over the world through Walvis Bay, and then there was the not-inconsequential matter of the destruction of the natural habitat and the thousands of people who would probably die as a result of Chang’s plan. And that was why Mr. Slye had taken it upon himself to remove one of the loose ends-Kallie van Reenen.

She had taken the boy from Windhoek Airport and equipped him for his journey. Slye had tracked her northwards to the remote airfield where she met her father. He had left with a safari party so he was not involved, but his informers had told him of the girl’s flight plan filed for Walvis Bay. That was a long way from home. She had information she should not have, that was Mr. Slye’s conclusion. It had not taken much to ensure that one of his local men fixed her plane, guaranteeing it would crash.

Most satisfyingly, he had heard her Mayday call over Skeleton Rock’s radio transmitters.

Even more gratifying was the sound of an explosion and the girl’s scream. Mr. Slye was convinced that Kallie van Reenen must have crashed in the middle of nowhere. In the unlikely event of the crash site ever being found, an investigation would conclude that her old plane was simply not reliable enough. In the meantime, hyenas and jackals would dispose of her remains.

He flipped open his PDA and ticked off one item on his list of things to do. It read: Kill Kallie van Reenen.

Kallie had done her preflight checks as always, but when she took off she thought the engine sounded ragged. She had pushed in the throttle, gained takeoff speed and hauled the plane into the sky.

Within an hour she knew she was in trouble. There was the unmistakable smell of avgas; the engine shook violently in its mountings, followed almost immediately by a loss of power. The aviation fuel was flooding the engine compartment at just about the same time as her brain flooded with fear at falling out of the sky. Fire was her immediate concern, so there was no point in trying to restart the engine. The Cessna 185 was known among pilots as a tail-dragger, difficult at takeoff and landing; if she managed to land without power, she was going to need all her skill to come out of it in one piece. The plane’s nose dropped; the propeller whirled of its own volition, nothing more than a windmill. Her training kicked in. Calmly but urgently, she banked the plane into the start of a sweeping arc, away from the rocky hills piercing the dunes ahead, all the time looking for a suitable landing site. She flicked the radio dial to the emergency frequency: 121.5 megacycles. “Mayday, Mayday, Mayday,” she called. The international distress signal sounded unreal, coming from her own lips. It was something she had never expected to say. “This is Victor Five, Bravo Mike November … Mayday, Mayday, Mayday …”

And then there was a bang and she was spattered with fluid. She yelled in fright, wiped her eyes clear and brought the plane back under control as best she could. No more time for Mayday signals, she had to get the plane down.

Without the comfort of any response from her radio message-there was a real chance that there was no one close enough to hear her cry for help-she gave one last shout for help, giving her location as best she could, and felt her stomach churn as the plane dropped in a swallowlike curve towards the ground.

The wind whistled through the cockpit, the death of the engine eerily shrouding her in its silence. She was losing altitude rapidly now, the plane was shaking and the vibration shuddered into her arms through the controls. She got her airspeed down to eighty knots, which was near perfect for gliding. A needle-thin strip of track drew a line in the sand in the far distance, and another led for several kilometers to a remote farmhouse. She swooped and curved through the sky, using the configuration to bring the plane lower and lower, trying to get it into the correct landing position. It was tricky and dangerous; she needed to apply the plane’s flaps in the moments before landing, and if she misjudged her rate of descent and final approach she would end up careering off the track. Once the flaps were down, she would be totally committed to the landing. If it was deep sand down there, it would suck in the wheels and cartwheel the plane-and that would probably kill her. She side-slipped the aircraft, allowing it to remain at a reasonable speed, and by watching the relative motion of the intended point of touchdown through the windscreen she fine-tuned the rate of descent. Whatever the outcome, she knew she would be alive or dead in less than a minute.

A final banked curve, the controls juddered; she leveled out, eased the nose up, shoved the flap levers down and felt the wheels bounce.

The wheels skidded across the hardened surface and she guided the trusty old plane to a final standstill.

Silence.

Then she heard the sound of metal creaking: the engine cooling down.

She sat for a moment, letting her relief at her survival wash over her. And then she laughed. She had brought a crippled aircraft down safely in some of the most frightening minutes of her young life, and she was covered in Tobias’s Desert Buster Ice-Cold Special.

It was the flask that had exploded. She licked some of it from her face. It tasted better than at any other time she could remember.

Mike Kapuo listened carefully to her story. She told him everything that had happened since she had picked Max up at Windhoek Airport, why he was in Namibia; and then finally recounted her own terrifying experience.

“You’re certain it was sabotage?”

“Yes, I thought I didn’t recognize the mechanic when I went back to my plane. The fuel injectors had been loosened-they came away after about an hour’s flying-and a piece of the braided pipe had been replaced with a length of plastic tubing.”

“So what? I’ve done the same with the fuel line on one of my old cars. That’s not proof of sabotage or attempted murder.”

“Yes it is,” she insisted. “Avgas melts plastic. It was enough to get me up into the air, and then it was only a matter of time. If the injectors had not rattled loose, then the pipe would have melted. It was double insurance to bring me down.”

He nodded without saying anything. Kapuo knew the aftereffects of trauma; she would need food and rest.

“We’ll talk tomorrow. You’re coming home with me.”

“Mike, I can’t.”

“Yes you can. I’ll have someone go out and look at your plane, and we’ll thank the farmer who brought you in.”

“You do believe me?”

“Yes, I do. I saw an interdepartmental report about two men being severely injured at Eros Airport the day you picked up this Max Gordon boy. They were known hard men, who hired themselves out for any unpleasant work that needed doing. We’ve also had a report on this boy’s missing father for a few weeks now, but initial searches gave us nothing. We figured he was either dead or dying. You know how it is out there.”

“Max’s father sent a letter to England from here, in Walvis Bay. And this guy he works with, someone called Leopold, he was here as well,” Kallie told him.

Kapuo hesitated, debating with himself how much he should tell her. How much might his friend’s daughter know? Kapuo folded his jacket over his arm and eased her out of the office. “You need a hot bath and some of Elizabeth’s cooking. We’ll tackle this whole thing tomorrow morning.” His wife’s food and a decent bed for the night would bring the girl down to earth a little. Lower her defenses.