Andy McDermott - The Midas Legacy

‘Soon, soon,’ the nervous Russian assured him. He called out to another crew member at the winch controls, who responded with a helpless shrug. ‘Very soon.’

A soldier hurried into the hold. ‘Sir! The transporter just smashed through the fence. It’s coming straight at us.’

The colonel ran to a side hatch and looked out. Headlights were visible in the distance. ‘Shit!’ he growled, hurrying back to the loadmaster. The missile was now in its cradle, the chains going slack. ‘We take off now!’

‘No, no!’ protested the Russian. ‘Not safe! Have to fix straps, chain down—’

‘Do it on the move.’ Kang shouted an order. The other soldiers in the hold instantly responded by snapping their rifles to firing position, all aiming at the loadmaster. ‘Tell the pilots to take off now , or I kill you.’ He switched to Korean to issue another command to Sek. ‘Take three men and get up to the cockpit. I want this plane moving in the next sixty seconds.’

The captain saluted, then he and three of his team raced for the ladder to the Antonov’s upper deck at the rear of the hold. Kang faced the loadmaster again. ‘Well? Do it!’

The Russian licked his dry lips, then shakily drew a walkie-talkie from his belt.

Eddie reached the winch. He let out a few feet of steel cable and supported the hook on one shoulder, then looped the line around its shank. Once it was secure, he started up the winch again, unspooling more cable and collecting it into long coils.

‘What are you doing?’ Nina shouted over the engine’s roar.

‘We’ve got to make sure the warheads never get out of here!’ he yelled back.

‘How?’ One terrifying solution came to her. ‘You… you want to crash into the plane?’

‘We could, but that’d be a bit bad for us too! And we might not even do enough damage; it’s a big-arse plane. But if it gets into the air and then comes straight back down again, really hard…’ He stopped the winch, estimating that he had enough slack in the cable to work with, then glanced over his shoulder. ‘Buggeration and fuckery!’

Nina saw the cause of his alarm. ‘It’s setting off!’ The Antonov had left its parking position, heading for the taxiway. It was apparently leaving in a hurry, the aft clamshell doors open and the rear ramp still being raised.

Eddie quickly clambered back to the driver’s side of the cab, hanging the heavy steel loops from one of the roof’s spotlights and signalling for Nina to move over. She slid sideways, her husband climbing in to take her place. ‘Whatever you’re planning, it might be a good time to rethink it,’ she said nervously.

‘Same plan, just a bit more dangerous. And by a bit, I mean loads. If I can lasso the landing gear before it takes off, it’ll drag the transporter with it. It might be a big plane, but this truck’s pretty chunky too; having it hanging off the wheels’ll seriously fuck up its aerodynamics and hopefully make it crash. I was going to put the cable across the runway and try to catch it as it went past, but now we’ll have to chase it.’

‘Which means,’ Nina said unhappily, ‘we’ll both have to be in the transporter when the plane takes off.’

He gave her a look of grim resignation, putting one of his hands on hers. ‘Yeah. I know.’

She stared sadly ahead, seeing not the aircraft but an indelible image from her own mind. ‘Goodbye, Macy,’ she whispered, a tear trickling down her cheek.

There was nothing he could say in response to that. Instead he angled the TEL to intercept the aircraft, the transporter jolting over the rough expanse of grass. ‘Okay, you take over again,’ he said. ‘I’ll climb out and get ready to chuck the cable. Come alongside the plane, and get as close as you can to the wheels.’

They hurriedly made another seat swap, Eddie clambering back on to the step and closing the door behind him. The plane grew ever larger. ‘Damn, that thing is big,’ Nina said.

Eddie couldn’t disagree. The An-124’s high-mounted wings and broad belly gave it a hulking, overbearing appearance, a towering bully straight from the Cold War. Adding to the impression was its undercarriage; rather than separate sets of landing gear spread out beneath the fuselage, as on an airliner, the Antonov went for brute strength, five massive double-tyred legs in a row on each side of its hull. It even had two sets of nose wheels rather than just one.

All the better, as far as he was concerned. The more wheels, the more chance he had of snagging one. ‘Okay!’ he shouted as the transporter bounded over a drainage ditch on to the taxiway. ‘Catch up with it!’

Nina swung the TEL around — discovering that its twelve-wheel steering system turned it more sharply than she’d expected. Eddie yelped as centrifugal force threw him outwards, the looped cable shimmying around the spotlight. ‘Careful!’

‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ she snapped. ‘I should have been learning how to drive a truck rather than raising a child!’

He smiled. ‘Love you too.’ Steadying himself, he collected the coils of cable and looked up at the Antonov. ‘Wow, the last time I chased a massive jet along a runway, I was in a Ferrari…’

The TEL came in behind the An-124’s starboard wing. Even with the giant freighter only at taxi speed, the jet blast from the two huge engines was fearsome. Searing air, reeking of fuel, scoured Eddie’s exposed skin. He waved for Nina to position the truck in line with the fuselage. She did so, the Antonov’s stern sliding into view ahead. The rear ramp was almost fully raised, folding to act as a bulkhead at the back of the hold. The two huge clamshell doors forming the tailcone’s underside started to close. The aircraft was almost ready for take-off.

The wing loomed above as Nina brought the transporter closer to the row of wheels. Eddie briefly considered using a rifle to strafe and puncture the fuel tanks, but dismissed the idea. Jet fuel was hard to ignite; even a red-hot bullet was unlikely to start a fire, never mind cause an explosion, and the pilots would know within seconds that they had a fuel leak and stop the plane.

If that happened, the warheads would leave North Korea by some other means — and by then he and Nina would be dead. Downing the Antonov was the only way to make their sacrifice count. ‘Okay,’ he said as he held on to the spotlight and hefted his metallic lasso, ‘let’s rope us some Russian dogies…’

Kang stood in the cockpit with Sek and one of his men, watching over the pilots’ shoulders as the runway’s lights drew closer. Faced with the threat of having their aircraft impounded and themselves ending up in a North Korean prison — or simply being shot — the Russian aircrew had unwillingly set the Antonov in motion before finishing their pre-flight checks, hurriedly running through as many of the items on their list as possible as the plane trundled towards take-off position.

The colonel’s radio crackled. ‘Yes?’ he said. ‘Have you killed the spies?’

‘Uh… no, sir,’ said the worried soldier down the channel. ‘We haven’t caught up with the missile transporter yet.’

‘Why not?’

‘It’s chasing you!’

Kang and Sek looked at each other in alarm. ‘Which side?’

‘The right, sir.’

Ignoring the co-pilot’s protests, Kang shoved him aside to lean over and peer back through a side window. ‘I can’t see them,’ he said, straightening.

‘They might try to crash into us,’ said Sek, worried.

Kang addressed the pilot, a man named Petrov, in English. ‘We are being chased by a truck! It might ram the plane, or block the runway. We have to go faster and take off.’