Mr Wong Goes West (26 page)

Ten minutes later, Jackson emerged from the on-board business centre with a photograph in his hand. His brow was knitted. ‘Joyce, I got the email with the picture of the fake technician. I’m not sure if…well, here it is. Have a look.’

‘Right, thanks.’ She took it from his hand but had difficulty focusing on it: her head was still woozy from the gas. ‘Hey. This isn’t him. This is a woman. The guy I was talking about was younger, a Chinese American called Danny Tang. He did the windows. This is Ms Tammy Poon, the woman who worked with him. She’s in charge of wheel mountings or something. I think they got the wrong person.’

‘Now that’s weird. She’s the one they said had the fake papers.’

‘Could there have been two technicians on the team with fake papers?’

‘Do you think so?’

‘No, actually I don’t. Danny kept trying to imply that several people saw the shootings, although when it came down to it, he had to admit that it was just him. That woman Poon was more honest. She admitted from the start that she was
not with him and didn’t see anything. I don’t think they were working together. It’s a mystery. I think they got the wrong person.’

‘I think we’ve solved enough mysteries for a while,’ said Jackson. ‘I need to go get something to eat.’

‘Another chicken salad?’

He sighed. ‘You noticed?’

‘Yeah. You don’t have to lose weight. A bit of weight looks good on a big guy.’

‘Thanks. You’re a pal.’

‘And you’re a planet.’

He mock-slapped her.

Within minutes, CF Wong was snoring loudly in what he liked to think of as ‘the Queen’s bed’, in the largest room of the presidential suite.

Joyce was at the Captain’s Bar, eating ice cream and flirting wildly with Army Armstrong-Phillips.

All was at peace with the world.

And then the real trouble started.

In the town of Cloud Mountain, some brothers organised a competition to construct the scariest ghost.

The oldest brother stuffed old clothes with straw and made a dead man, which he hung in his doorway.

The second-oldest brother took a piece of wood and carved a fox fairy, which he placed in his window.

The middle brother took a piece of paper and drew a white ghost, which he stuck to his wall.

The second-youngest brother took some sticks and made a forest demon, which he tied to his roof.

The youngest brother did nothing. But he accidentally knocked over his rooftop water tank. He ran off to hide in the forest before his wife came home and discovered what he had done.

The judges looked at each of the ghosts in turn.

When they came to the youngest brother’s house, they could see nothing. But the damp floorboards of the empty house creaked and groaned and moaned.

The judges dropped their writing tablets and fled, screaming.

Blade of Grass, a man finds ultimate comfort in good friends, good food and good drink. But he finds the ultimate tale of horror only in his imagination.

From ‘Some Gleanings of Oriental Wisdom’
by CF Wong.

The bombs went off at midnight. They were tiny packages of explosives, each smaller than a human fist. Getting a bomb of any appreciable size onto a plane is supposed to be virtually impossible these days. When it comes to a VIP plane with multiple extra layers of security, then it should be impossible. This particular aircraft had sixteen separate bomb-sensors on board, designed to detect everything from Semtex-A to liquid-and gel-based explosive substances. Unfortunately, the bombs on Skyparc were so small and had been placed so low in the craft that they were not detected by any of the sensors. None of the four were in the main body of the aircraft.

Three of the bombs contained explosive devices, tiny, but powerful enough to rip steel. Yet it was not the strength of the devices that were going to cause the trouble, but their locations. Each of the aircraft’s three wheel assemblages had one such bomb. They were placed on the mechanisms that lowered the undercarriage. As the devices exploded, the hydraulic systems were ripped to shreds, blown out of their mountings, or simply left dangling—all three wheel housings of the plane had been left inoperable. The fourth bomb was slightly different. It was an incendiary device, designed to release bursts of paraffin and
oxygen, and then ignite a fire. It had been placed in the lower tail of the aircraft. It went off with a loud
ffft
sound, and the flame quickly took a grip.

The devices all went off in that strange half-night that exists on airplanes, a sort of false midnight designed to mark the mid-point of the journey, and which was, therefore, not actually midnight according to the body clocks of any of the people on board.

CF Wong, in a coma-like state as deep as the Marianas Trench, slept through it without any reaction.

Joyce McQuinnie was also asleep—but on a sofa in the bar. Army Armstrong-Phillips had placed a blanket over her and loosely tied a safety belt around it.

The pilot, former Royal Air Force Captain Turlough Malachy, was the first person to react. He heard the explosions as a single, rather extended
bang
—and he was immediately concerned.

Things did go wrong on aircraft, rather more often than members of the public were supposed to know. But in ninety-nine point nine nine nine per cent of cases they were predictable things. One system would go down, and a back-up system would spring into place. Everything important in an aircraft was duplicated as there was no room for risks. Such irritations would normally announce themselves through a change in the display in front of him. A light would start flashing. The computers would alert him to a material change that they had detected. In rare, serious cases, a little alarm would go off in the pilot’s cabin, making sure he did not miss anything.

But a bang? An unexpected, percussive sound? A noise loud enough to be heard over the hums of the one hundred-plus machines in the immediate vicinity of the pilot? That could be seriously bad news. And when you were thirty-nine thousand
feet in the air with a load of VIP passengers, any bad news had to trigger an emergency response.

He quickly stabbed a button that alerted the other senior officers, who were resting in their quarters nearby, and told them that he needed help. Within a minute, all three were at his side.

‘What is it, Captain?’ said Enrico Balapit, a half-Filipino, half-American giant of a man with black-brown hair. ‘Engine down?’

Malachy shook his head. ‘Not an engine. I don’t know. There was a bang. A big one. Extended. Maybe more than one—a string of explosions: three, maybe four. Look.’

They stared at the display. Lights had started flashing on all the indicators connected to the undercarriage.

‘Jesus. Looks bad,’ Balapit said.

‘Something. It’s…’ Malachy was left speechless—unusual for him. ‘I don’t know. Something bad has happened. Maybe something really bad.’

A whoop-whoop-whoop sound erupted in the cabin.

‘Hell, there’s a fire on board. Where is it? Jesus.’

Balapit slid into his seat and started tapping at buttons on the display. ‘It’s in the back of the plane. The very back. Seems to be under the tail. Or in the tail.’

‘A fire in the tail? Then why are the wheels out of action? None of this adds up. Unless the machines are screwed.’

The displays appeared to show trouble at the extremes of the plane—at the tail, at the wheels almost directly below the pilots, and at the wheel assemblages under the centre of the wings.

‘How in heaven could four things go wrong at once, at different ends of the damn airship?’

First officer Ubami Sekoto entered the cabin. ‘What is it?
Shit.’ He stared at the array of flashing warning lights on the pilots’ displays. ‘Electrical problem in the display?’

‘Sadly not. It’s bad, soldier. Not sure just how bad, yet, but it ain’t good.’ Malachy spoke without tearing his eyes away from the blinking lights. ‘Go to the back, see if you can find out what’s wrong at the tailplane. Get some staff out to the main cabins, keep everyone calm, make sure no one is panicking or trying to get out of the doors or doing anything dumb like that. Don’t say anything detailed yet.’

‘Yes, Captain.’

It took them several minutes to work out what had happened. All the wheel assemblages had failed simultaneously: main circuits and back-up circuits. The chances of that happening naturally were zero. This was no accident. Someone had blown out the plane’s entire undercarriage system. There was no way they could land. But why was there a fire at the back of the aircraft? There were no wheels there. Another explosive device?

Within minutes, Enrico Balapit had contacted ground control at every airport in the vicinity. ‘There are airports, but no big ones, and none close to us,’ he told Malachy.

‘In this particular case, it doesn’t matter. We wouldn’t be able to land, even if there was. Shit.’

‘What are we going to do, Captain?’

‘Keep in control, soldier, keep in control.’ Malachy glanced at his neighbour. Balapit was visibly shivering. To go from deep sleep to a massive emergency had clearly caused havoc with his nerves and it looked as if he could barely coordinate his hands and eyes accurately enough to operate the equipment.

But he continued to do his job, looking for help from the ground. After a minute, he had a radio link to an air traffic controller from the biggest nearby airport, which was
slightly north of them in southwest China. The man spoke understandable English, although with a heavy accent.

‘I going to try to find out what’s going on,’ the man on the ground said. ‘I will call local hotel.’

‘What? A hotel? We’re in a burning aircraft thirty-nine thousand feet above your head and you want to book us rooms at a hotel?’

‘I want to see if there is any news on CNN or one of those channels about what’s happening. This is China. We are not allowed CNN except at hotels where foreigners stay.’

‘Understand. Any news at all, I want it immediately.’

‘Understand. Over.’

‘Jesus.’ Malachy shook his head. ‘This is crazy. I’m going to concentrate on keeping this bird in the air. Enrico, send a team to the back of the plane with more extinguishers to help Sekoto. Let’s hope to God he can locate the fire and put it out. I hope to high heaven it’s a false alarm, but if it isn’t we’d better piss on it before it spreads.’

After organising a party of staff to head to the tailplane, Balapit returned to his seat and got a signal through to several larger but more distant airports, but then dropped them when the mainland Chinese ground contact almost directly below them got back in touch. ‘Some news has been released to major news channels including CNN about trouble on your plane. There are some reports on it. They started on Reuters and Agence France Presse. Some of the news outlets have pieces on it. I managed to call it up on
CNN.com
using a proxy server outside China.’

‘About us? What’s it say?’

‘It says that a group of activists called Earth Agents have announced that they have bombed Skyparc. It says there is no independent confirmation that anything has happened to
the aircraft, which is in mid-flight between Hong Kong and London. I read it to you: “A spokesman for Skyparc initially dismissed the claim, explaining that the aircraft had such high security that it would be impossible to get a bomb on board. However, in the past few minutes, the official line from the company changed to ‘no comment’. On board Skyparc are a number of top people from Britain, including business leaders and other senior establishment figures.’’’