Bolt Action (31 page)

Whiffler grabs a paper towel, blows his nose. ‘Wouldn’t work. Wouldn’t put current back into the door, Tristie. Even if we could somehow explode a window . . . damned if I know how to do that with, what, spoons, paper cups, plastic forks. Like a frigging
Blue Peter
project . . .’

Button hollers at them from the first-class cabin. Sharp and urgent. ‘Tristie. Better come and have a look. Port side.’

They move quickly to join him, taking up position next to the windows. Salahuddin presses his nose against the clear plastic fascia and grumbles something that sounds like ‘Bastards’.

The CF-18 Hornet that’s parked about a hundred yards off their port wing is painted in what professionals call gunmetal grey. But, given too its menacing shape, it reminds Tristie more of the colouring of a mako shark. About the deadliest hunter known to mankind.

Just the tiniest maple leaf, red on a white background, is stencilled below the bulky ejection seat. The word
Canada
is reversed out and almost invisible, above the engine intake to the rear of the cockpit. The tail is painted in celebration of fifty years of NORAD. And that’s when this plane’s intent hits. NORAD. The US Navy Super Hornet that buzzed them before might have been, perhaps, nothing more than a spotter. She unfolds one of the TV sets, and thumbs her way through to the flight show channel to find out where the hell they are . . .

She uses the length of her thumbnail to measure the distance on the screen against the scale. Her heart sinks. Crap. They must be very near Canadian airspace already . . .

Just the one crewman, or woman possibly, with a battle-green flight suit and a hint of orange for the life jacket. Scanning them through a super-shiny black visor. No hint of humanity, like skin or hair, or a bob of the head. More like an android, process driven, no doubt. Obey order . . . select target . . . arm missile . . .

Salahuddin leans over the plush first-class chair. ‘What is the significance of
this
plane, please?’

No point bullshitting themselves any more. ‘Probably, this is the plane that’s going to shoot us down . . .’

COBRA meeting

Downing Street, London, SW1A

S
heila ‘Noppy’ Davane thinks this has to be a historic diplomatic low point. She listens to the US president raging at the shrinking British prime minister, a handful of senior cabinet members cosseted around him. Shell-shocked civil servants behind them line the long expanse of this panelled room.

‘. . . and you were going to share with us the fact you lost this critical software feature, the essence of the whole goddamn Trident programme,
exactly when
?’

There’s a lot of mumbling and looking down at notes. A ghastly lie is about to be told.

‘I’m afraid, Mr President, I’m guilty as charged. Guilty of taking my eye off the ball on this one. If you feel that I’ve let you down . . .’ An understatement, but the British prime minister oozes reasonableness, in a classically trained public-school-to- Oxford-to-merchant-bank sort of way. ‘
Mea culpa
, Charles, my dear friend,’ and he proceeds to castigate his own people, mocks their intelligence, says he never thought for a second . . .

The prattle of politicians lying to each other and lying to themselves always sounds the same to Davane after a while. She doesn’t much care for the politicians she serves and they don’t like her. An uncomfortably needlesome and irritating reminder of the limitations of democracy, an affront to their cosy sensibilities.

Davane is standing deliberately out of sight, at an angle to both the screen and the wide-angle lens that is beaming
reciprocal vision back to Washington. Leaning against a column.

Just minutes before, Davane had been waved into the COBRA meeting by a grim-faced Home Secretary, and limped stiffly towards a distant place at the baize-coloured table. The discussions were mostly about the escalating riots, what to do, but she noted that a synopsis of Merritt’s file was lying open in front of both the Home Secretary and the prime minister. That was when all hell had broken loose.

It started with one of the female assistants, trying to run through the heavy oak door faster than the door was willing to open. The room winced as she ran into the door’s sharp edge, trying to relay news that President Charles Hannah was on the warpath. Clutching her head, looking like she might faint, she managed to get out, ‘He knows about Merritt and the Trident.’

A wide shot of the situation room had flashed on to their screen. Big brother, muted for the moment. The president was leaning over a long table, glowering into the camera with an almost unhinged look of deep malevolence.

The prime minister had quickly leaned forward to eyeball each of his COBRA room conspirators. ‘We’re all clear what it is we’re saying to the Americans?’ One part statement of fact, one part question. A last chance for the naysayers to speak, and it took a minute for the PM to iron out the few remaining malfeasants.

It was then that Hannah had been switched through. And he’d been going at them ever since, sounding – to Davane – like an overpowered, under-oiled machine. ‘If you
think
the American government will
stand by
, and not put
every
resource into tracking
down
those treacherous thieves
you’re
about to pay off . . .’

A long time ago, early seventies, part of Davane’s MI5 training had been entrusted to a portly former grammar schoolteacher, no longer considered safe around teenage boys, but evidently OK to instruct future generations of the security service. He had taught Russian and Latin, and over the months drummed
into Davane the necessity of embracing chess. ‘Use the game, Sheila, to order your thoughts,’ the teacher would exhort, ‘to give you an organising principle. Otherwise all this chaos and skirmish that we see from one day to the next means nothing. Search for the deeper and more patterned purpose, then you will have isolated your enemy’s strategy.’ All secrets flowed from two simple questions.
Cui bono?
Who benefits? And
Cui malo?
Who is harmed?

As the Ulsterwoman listens to President Hannah venting his frustrations, reduced now in her mind to the faint sound of an insect drone, she works through the permutations. Racking her brain.
Cui bono? Cui malo?
Her mind goes over and over the same point . . . what am I missing here?

And she keeps coming back to Cambridge professor Grigor Rothko . . . Britain, the US, Canada, Pakistan, the Middle East, the Islamic world, each staring down respective gun barrels. And the first shot is about to be fired . . . in a perfect circular firing squad.

In chess terms, Davane is quick to recognise that America (Britain and Canada too) faces zugzwang, German for ‘a compulsion to move’. An insidious, strategically awful place to be. Doing nothing is not an option. It is
your
turn. You
must
move, even if it’s like being in a burning dinghy in shark-infested waters . . . you don’t want to. Washington must act even though movement in any direction will significantly weaken her position.

What else had Rothko said, when she was so quick to hang up on him? Her palms feel sweaty, genuine alarm ringing through her, as the president’s hectoring rumbles on.

‘
Just hope you know what you’re doing?
’

She grits her teeth, squeezes her eyes tight shut. The sheer physical force of her complete focus elicits a mouse-like squeal of concentration. She can’t see the querying expressions of the rest of the room, is beyond caring anyway. A number of the civil servants throw her looks of complete contempt . . .

In the dark space of her mind, there’s a sliver of something
edging in and out of her reach, a flash of colour in the shadowy depths. Through sheer willpower she will get to it . . . I
will
. . . that message from the cockpit. From ‘Zaafir’. Moving into reach, her hope rises, then, like quicksilver, it fades to black . . . A scratchy high-frequency radio message because they were in the middle of the Atlantic, beyond the range of normal VHF. No radar coverage . . .

Her corpulent grammar school instructor bellowing,
Cui bono? Cui malo?
And Professor Rothko peering into the lens . . .
Just hope you know what you’re doing.

OK, Sheila, she’s demanding of herself, in the wide-open spaces of your imagineering, answer me a question. If this is bad – the certainty that this Pakistan Airlines plane is going to be shot down – what about this situation could be even worse?

Her eyes flick open. A look of complete horror. Her mouth agape.
Oh my God . . .
A knife-edge of ice-cold fear cuts down her spine.

Davane bolts forward, jarring the long table and several chairs. What were once querying looks in the COBRA room turn to abject bewilderment, as this silver-haired, roly-poly auntie from the darkest of MI5 shadows barges in front of the video camera, waves her arms, turns to face the two sets of audience that she MUST connect with and SWAY . . .
Oh my God
keeps running through her mind. I’ve heard that voice before . . .

‘Mr President, you’ve had your turn . . . please, will you now shut the
fock
up . . .’

On board PK412

1028 Washington time, 1528 London time, 2028 Islamabad time

T
here’s a scene in
Schindler’s List
when Ben Kingsley’s character, the key Jewish fixer for Oskar Schindler, finds himself swept up and herded on to a train headed for one of the death camps. As the train slides away from the platform, Schindler, actor Liam Neeson, runs from one boxcar to another, desperate to find Kingsley. In each carriage, as Schindler scans the faces, he doesn’t find anger, or pleading, or a murmur of protest, even movement. Just beaten-down blank faces. Empty of hope, and squeezed of all feeling.

It was Jews then; mostly Muslim now. Tristie’s looking at those same faces, row after row of them. Empty of all hope.

The Ward 13 trio walk through this nightmare of death-pale, soon-to-be-dead faces, in an awkward convoy, guiding the injured, young Gujranwala wrestlers and their team leader towards the back of the plane. No more hysteria. No display of anger, despite the new fighter jet that’s buzzing them. A few tears, a little sobbing, and time for hushed farewells on Airfones. From various quarters, the sound of different prayers being intoned, eyes closed or turned to heaven. Quiet fearfulness. Waiting on the inevitable.

Every so often, the bleakest irony, the babble of a toddler. Happy to be alive.

As they edge towards the rear, the cadre of travelling parents and well-wishers accompanying the wrestlers spring to their feet. There’s a welcome and relieving hubbub of noise and
activity. Hand luggage comes thumping down from the overhead lockers high above, and soon the air is full of the smell of muscle balms, exotic, potent stuff, and the squeal of bruised men being manipulated and massaged.

Button and Whiffler are standing just fore of the rear toilets, next to a particularly miserable-looking lad with a droopy left arm, helping him get something from one of the lockers over the central tier of seats. Button’s a huge man, with a giant wingspan, and even he has to stand on tiptoe to reach inside.

Watching, Tristie finds herself doing some dead-reckoning. It seems strange not to have taken it in before, but this aircraft cabin is huge. As in a seriously high ceiling. Certainly compared to the Lockheed Tristars that the Royal Air Force use to trundle around the world.

She stops Salahuddin as he walks up the aisle. ‘This cabin is very high, Captain.’

His mood is on automatic pilot as well. ‘What of it?’

‘I don’t suppose there’s any space up there, between the internal overhead cabin lining and the skin of the plane?’

‘Why do you ask?’
Come on, Salahuddin . . . pull your finger out.

She chooses her words carefully, says them slowly. ‘Because I haven’t given up yet.’

He rocks his head this way and that. Unsure. Unwilling – who knows. He rubs slowly around the shape of his lower lip, considering his options. He seems to have pulled himself back from proud-but-defeated. Finally he dredges up a response with a weary shrug. ‘The Boeing 777 is the first modern airliner with a truly circular fuselage . . .’

Tristie scans from one side to another. ‘But . . . isn’t the width of the cabin a lot more than the height?’

‘We are standing on an inserted floor surface, Ms Merritt. The fuselage is basically a long circular tube. Twenty foot and four inches wide in all directions, rivet to rivet.’

She jabs her index finger upwards. ‘Again, how much space between the cabin fittings and the actual plane fuselage?’

‘Down the length of the fuselage? At its midpoint, the highest value? About forty inches.’

She frogmarches him into the nearest galley, a little to the rear of the trailing edge of the plane’s wing, and shutters the curtains. Two stewardesses and a purser look up, mute and indifferent. Waiting. For infinity.

‘
Forty inches?’
She measures up to her hipbone. ‘That’s more than three feet of crawl space.’

‘Some airlines use this fact to create a dedicated crew rest area. Build in some cots, a little private stairway. Very nice. But you want to go into the cockpit, yes?’

‘Of course.’ She feels a need to stir up a spark of urgency here. He reaches up to one of the plastic storage trays and rummages around for a letter-writing set. Clicks on a colourful ballpoint pen,
Madame Tussauds – Amsterdam
, and gets sketching. Basic side shot of a plane. Tail. Undercarriage. Fuselage.

‘This is my Boeing 777 with its nice straight body. Look. Perfect . . . ‘ Then he draws a series of dotted lines bisecting the plane just to the rear of the cockpit window. ‘. . . until you get to the nose section. Section Forty-one, we call it. The nose is actually the same shape and design as the Boeing 767, a significantly smaller plane. They do this for interoperability. To make it easier for the airlines.’

She looks over his shoulder. ‘OK.’

‘The 777 fuselage has to shrink dramatically to fit into that smaller 767 cone, the barrel-shaped Section Forty-one nose. Like squeezing a litre into a pint pot. It’s the crawl space, your three feet, that is sacrificed. The three feet is there from the back of the plane to the bulkhead at the front of first class, that’s your basic tube shape, but it’s not there by the time you get to the cockpit. The crawl space has tapered down to nothing.’

‘It can’t be
nothing.
’

‘Nothing.’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘I mean
nothing
. English. As in no thing there.’

‘Do you know this, it’s on a plan you’ve actually seen? Or is this an educated guess?’

Salahuddin looks stern, his jaw rigid. He chooses not to answer the question directly.

Instead the pilot holds up the ballpoint. Shows it clearly, thumb and middle finger stretched over either end. ‘This pen is just perhaps six inches long. I would be astonished, absolutely amazed, if there was more than the length of this pen in crawl space by the time you reached the over-cockpit area.’

‘
You are kidding me . . .
’ Tristie can feel the adrenalin beginning to kick in. ‘We’ve been playing with zero
this
, and calamity
that.
And you’ve just given me a glimmer of hope, you beautiful, wonderful man . . .’ He puts his hands up to ward off the cheek-kiss he correctly senses is her next move.

Rushing out of the galley, almost straight into Whiffler and Button, she gives them the quickest brief on what she plans to do. With her left hand shaped into a letter C, she mimics the size of the pen, Salahuddin’s guess at the possible crawl space.

Whiffler snorts his approval. ‘That’s a good 12 inches. We’re well sorted.’

‘Whoa. Stop now.’ Tristie rolls her eyes. ‘Back up, you’re saying that’s a foot long? Christ Almighty, Whiffler,
that . . .
’, she looks at the arc between her thumb and middle finger, ‘
. . . that
is not 12 inches.’

Wounded now. Whiffler bristles. ‘How come you’re the expert on what a foot is?’

Pause.

Standing in the aisle, with passengers now focussing expectantly on them, Button and Tristie look at each other. Not quite believing. It doesn’t seem the right moment to be having
this
dicussion. Then the huge medic, perhaps not the smartest guy in the team, barks his reply.

‘Because she’s got a bloody foot, you idiot.’

To which Whiffler pulls a dismissive face, like they’re both clearly out of their minds, before mumbling, ‘ten, maybe eight inches then.’

‘Halve that and you’re getting close . . .’ Tristie shakes her
head in disbelief, on the edge of laughing out loud. Any other time she’d rip him full of holes. A good soldier could tell the difference,
hear
the difference, between a 7.62 and a 5.56 round. But if that same soldier was male, and you asked him about inches . . .well, don’t hold your breath.

She carries on, a new confidence whipping through her. Part of this was optimism, part amusement at Whiffler. He is
her
soldier,
her
responsibility, and she is damn well not going to lose any of them. ‘Button, round up some more willing wrestlers, anybody else in the cabin who looks stout. We’re going to need to build a human tower of sorts. Whiffler, stop worrying about your tadger and follow me . . .’

Salahuddin is padding quickly behind them as they run up the aisle. He extemporises all sorts of questions and worries. Fretting about the avionics and cabling ducts. Forty per cent of the avionics and flight control systems are in Section 41, many of them engineered into the overhead panelling. Drama. Drama. Most of all he wants to know how they’re going to penetrate the fibreglass fascia of the cabin linings. ‘This is a very specialist job. I don’t even know how to begin getting through all the decorative panels and support structure. Very complicated.’

‘Captain, that’s why we have Whiffler here. He and Button are Paras. And the Paras are the world’s experts at breaking things. So you and I get to stand back and watch.’

Whiffler is already balanced on the headrest of the first class seats, bobbing around between the front of the first-class cabin, the bulkhead and the narrow corridors that link the galley to the cockpit. Looking upwards. Pushing and probing. Testing for weak points. Energised again.

‘Whiffler. I need a decent-sized hole up there. Soon as.’

‘Sure thing.’ He bounces like a monkey from a first-class seat, levers one foot across the aisle, on to the fixed shelf of one of the lockers so he can feel the ceiling panel for the first time. Legs akimbo, almost at full stretch.

Tristie turns away . . . some make-or-break phone calls to make.