Hellfire (31 page)

He looked down. His shirt was wet with perspiration, but now he was sweating with relief. Perhaps I’ll have a drink now, he thought to himself. Something to steady my nerves. He looked up, and pressed the overhead button for calling the air hostess.

She arrived a minute later. ‘
Oui, monsieur?
’

‘I think I would like a drink now,’ he said. He knew he had been very rude to her before, so he tried to smile.

‘Of course, sir, what can I get you?’

He waited another minute for her to bring his beer: an almost cold bottle of Kronenbourg, along with a plastic cup, a paper mat and a small packet of salted pretzels. She leaned over to give him the bottle and he had just opened his mouth to thank her when he sneezed explosively. Right at her. It was the sort of sneeze that makes people turn and look.

‘What on earth . . .’ the air stewardess said.

Randolph blinked. ‘I’m very sorry,’ he mumbled, massively embarrassed that his sneeze had sprayed a thin mist of saliva at the woman’s face.

But the air stewardess didn’t seem to be worried about the sneeze. She was staring through Randolph’s tiny window. Randolph frowned again. He looked out of the window. He blinked.

He found it hard to say how close the aircraft was that flew alongside them. Only tens of metres, because he could see, quite clearly, through the side windows of the aircraft’s cockpit, the pilot. He had a grey helmet and a boom mike to his mouth. As Randolph stared at him, the pilot turned his head to the left, and it was almost as if their eyes met.

A bell-like sound from within the cabin. Randolph looked up to see that the ‘fasten seatbelt’ sign was turned on. The air stewardess had straightened up. Randolph looked at her face. There was no doubt about it: she was frightened.

He glanced guiltily at the shoulder bag on the seat next to him, then back out of the window.

The captain’s voice came over the loudspeaker. ‘Ladies and gentleman, the fasten seatbelt signs are now on, so I would ask you to return to your seats.’ A pause. ‘Some of you may have noticed military aircraft on either side of us. I would like to take this opportunity to assure you that there is absolutely no cause for alarm.’

But anyone who heard the captain’s voice would be able to tell that he was far from calm. A murmur of barely restrained panic filled the cabin, and Randolph found that he was sweating more than ever.

Danny stormed into the ops room on the frigate, Tony and Caitlin following closely. Their clothes were still dripping wet and their weapons were still slung over their shoulders. The ops room itself was buzzing with activity. Radios blaring. The ops officer and his team of Aussie naval guys urgently issuing updates. The Porton Down team standing quietly in one corner, their faces studious as the heart of the military machine pumped in front of them.

Danny strode over to the Porton Down team and handed Dr Phillips his camera. ‘You need to look at what’s on that.’

Without bothering to answer, Phillips took the camera and plugged it into a nearby laptop. Meanwhile, the ops officer strode up to Danny. ‘I’ve got London on the line for you.’

‘What’s happening to the plane?’ Danny demanded.

‘Three RAF tornadoes have just caught up with it.’

‘Where is it now?’

‘Mauritanian airspace.’

A beat.

‘Are they going to . . .’

‘No decision’s been made.’ The ops officer pointed at a laptop on the far side of the room. ‘London,’ he said. ‘They want to talk to you.’

Danny moved over to the laptop and sat in front of it. There was a grainy video image of a bearded man in a wheelchair, his head resting against a headrest. ‘
Daniel Bixby, SIS
,’ he said. ‘
Are you Black?
’

Danny nodded.

‘
I need a full debrief of what occurred on the
Golden Coral.’

Danny didn’t fuck around. He gave a detailed explanation of everything that had occurred on the ship. When he got to the bit about the open storage container, Dr Phillips crouched down next to him and interrupted. ‘The apparatus in there was an aerosol filling machine. You use it to fill an empty aerosol can. I’m uploading the pictures to your server now.’

‘
If one of those aerosols is released into the cabin of an aircraft, what happens?
’ Bixby asked.

‘The air recirculates through the cabin once every few minutes. The aircraft acquires a certain proportion of fresh air from outside, but it’ll only take seconds for the pathogen particles to diffuse across the plane.’

‘
Just tell me what that
means,’ Bixby snapped.

Phillips sniffed. ‘How many people on that plane?’ he asked.

‘
Two hundred and seventy-nine, including crew.
’

‘Then you have two hundred and seventy-nine vectors infected with an extremely aggressive, modified form of
Y. pestis
. If our previous experience is anything to go by, they could become symptomatic within an hour. You
can’t
let them come into contact with anyone, or you’ll have an epidemic on your hands.’

Bixby stared into the screen for a moment.

‘
I need to speak to the Chief
,’ he said, before wheeling his chair back and disappearing from sight.

They had been circling for an hour.

The initial panic in the cabin had subsided into a tense silence. It was only occasionally broken when one of the passengers lost it with a member of the cabin crew.
What was going on
, they wanted to know.
Why weren’t they being told anything?
Randolph would strain his ears to hear the cabin crew calmly trying to tell them that the captain would update them as soon as he had any information. But they didn’t sound any more reassured than the alarmed passengers.

Randolph couldn’t take his eyes off the military aircraft to his right. It stuck so closely and exactly to the larger plane that he almost had the sensation that they weren’t even moving. When they passed through a patch of cloud, which momentarily obscured the fighter jet, it made him start, as though he was jumping out of a hypnotic trance. He realised that somebody was coughing a few rows behind him, and that they had been doing so for several minutes.

There was a sudden change in the sound of the aircraft’s engines. Randolph felt a momentary sense of weightlessness, and there was a general gasp around the cabin that told him he was not the only one. For only the second time since the fighter jets had appeared, the captain’s voice came over the loudspeaker. He sounded deadly serious. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, you’ve probably noticed that we’ve started to lose height. It’s nothing to be concerned about, but we will be performing an emergency landing in approximately ten minutes. You will need to adopt the brace position, and I would ask you to study the card in the seat in front of you very carefully . . .’

The volume of anxious chatter in the cabin increased again. Randolph pulled the laminated safety card from the pouch of the seat in front of him. The captain was still talking, but Randolph wasn’t listening any more. For some reason his attention had focused in on the sound of the person coughing behind him. He felt irritation building in his own chest.

He suddenly, involuntarily, coughed.

He stared at the laminated card. A thin film of mucus covered the images of smiling figures sliding on to life rafts.

The mucus was streaked with blood.

‘Where’s the landing site?’ Sir Colin Seldon’s voice cracked with tiredness.

Bixby clicked on a map of north-west Africa, then used his forefinger to outline a blank region of desert. ‘Eastern Mauritania,’ he said. ‘About a hundred and fifty miles west of the Mali border. It’s completely deserted, sir. About a hundred miles in any direction from any human habitation. There’s a possibility of Bedouin wanderers . . .’

‘Can we hide a plane there?’ Seldon said.

‘I think so, sir. For a few days at least.’

‘The aircraft’s transponders were killed while it was still on its original flight path?’

‘Yes, sir. And we’ve arranged for it to be wiped from the air traffic control radar systems. It looks like it disappeared in mid-air. We’ve got cross-agency support and we’ve spoken to the Americans, the Australians and the French. Everyone’s singing from the same hymn sheet. Until we know if there’s some kind of pathogen on board, the aircraft has, to all intents and purposes, disappeared from the sky.’ He coughed uncomfortably.

‘What is it, Bixby?’ the Chief said. ‘Spit it out?’

‘Are you sure this is a good idea sir? The press will be all over it, and if someone finds out we forced an emergency landing in the Mauritanian desert and lied about the aircraft’s location . . .’

‘Is it a
good idea
?’ Seldon snapped. There was a tremor in his voice that Bixby had never heard before. ‘We have nearly three hundred passengers in mid-air infected with a highly contagious, highly aggressive strain of weaponised plague. We let them land in Paris, the whole Western world goes into a mad panic. Even if we contain the infection, the terrorists win the moment we start carrying the body bags out of the plane. The genie will be out the bottle and we’ll see bio attacks left, right and centre. So is this a good idea? Of
course
it’s not a good idea. The rule book hasn’t been written on this yet. There
are
no good ideas any more.’

Bixby had never seen him so fierce. So out of control. So pale.

‘We don’t even have any
fucking
leads
,’ the Chief muttered.

‘We have one, sir,’ said the analyst.

‘What?’

‘The Caliph, sir,’ Bixby said quietly.

‘Oh,’ the Chief said, his voice heavy with sarcasm. ‘The Caliph. The one nobody’s ever seen and who nobody will ever talk about.
Great.
Let me know as soon as
he
turns himself in, won’t you?’

He stood up and stormed away from the computer terminal, leaving Bixby with his head resting against the padded headrest, his face impassive.

There was a clunking sound from below the aircraft. Randolph didn’t know what it was, but he heard someone in the row behind him say it was the landing gear extending.

He had moved to the window seat. Several people were crying nearby. Plenty of others were coughing. They all had a dry, hacking cough, and Randolph wanted to join in. He was
desperate
to join in, but after seeing his own blood-stained mucus, he didn’t dare. He found that he was wheezing heavily as he looked out of the window. He kept thinking about his daughters, wondering if they had been released yet, and if he was ever going to see them again. The thought that he might not caused a very real pain in his chest.

He tried to occupy his mind by guessing the plane’s altitude. They had been descending for some time, but all he could see was the fighter jet travelling alongside them. Suddenly, though, as he was watching, he heard a roar from the jets’ engines as they peeled away. Within seconds they were out of sight.

Randolph blinked. He looked down to earth. He could see, in the moonlight, that they were only a hundred feet above the ground. They were over the desert – there were ripples in the moonlit sand below, where the ground was flat.

The captain’s voice over the loudspeaker. Tense. Urgent. ‘
Brace! Brace! Heads down, stay down!
’

The hubbub of the passengers swelled into a terrified moan. Randolph bent forward, rested his forehead against the seat in front and laid his hands on the back of his head. The aircraft’s engines became very high-pitched. The sound of crying from inside the cabin grew louder. Several people screamed.

There was a sickening jolt as the aircraft’s wheels hit the sand. The aircraft bounced. Five seconds later it hit the ground again and Randolph felt a rush of g-force as the spoilers on the wings angled upwards and the aircraft dramatically lost speed. But suddenly there was another jolt. The aircraft spun forty-five degrees and the screeching of the engine was matched only by the screaming of the passengers inside. Randolph wanted to shout out, but fear silenced him. He just muttered a prayer as the fuselage wobbled and the wing tip to his right-hand side brushed against the sand.

This is it
, he thought to himself.
This is the moment I die.

But then, unexpectedly, there was silence and stillness.

There was a moment when it sounded as if the whole cabin was taking a collective breath of relief.

Then Randolph coughed again, and there was blood over the underside of the table folded into the seat in front.

It was over.

Danny had left the ops room. The place was doing his head in. He needed some air. Out on the deck, he gripped the railings and allowed a film of spray to wash over him. They’d failed. Targets Red and Blue were dead. Ripley was dead. A plane full of innocent victims were, right now, going the same way as his SAS mate. He didn’t know what the head shed would be doing with that flight, but he knew there would be a cover-up of some sort. If word got out that there had been a successful bio-attack on the West, all bets were off. They’d be seeing copycat scenarios all over the world.