STOP AT NOTHING: 'Mark Cole is Bond's US cousin mixed with the balls out action and killing edge of Jason Bourne' Parmenion Books (33 page)

20

For his part, Matthew Raines had never flown a helicopter in such appalling conditions. It was an effort just to keep the Bell from crashing, never mind in a perfect attack position.

Hansard had made contact with him just minutes before, ordering him into the snow-filled skies above Washington.

Raines had first met Hansard when he was still in the Army, flying helicopters in Afghanistan. Hansard had taken him with him first to the DIA, and then into the SRG, and now Hansard had him permanently stationed in DC, from where he often still flew missions. He had never led an actual attack in American airspace however, and was justifiably nervous, although Hansard had assured him it had all been cleared with United States authorities.

The two men attached to straps in the passenger compartment, leaning out of each door with their weapons firing at the nearby cargo plane on full auto, Raines had worked with before. They too were SRG operatives, and Raines knew they were good, and despite the weather the men had already managed to destroy most of the front end of the plane.

They each used a 5.56mm Steyr AUG, which was a reliable modular design from Austria that came in a range of different variants. This one had the twenty-four inch heavy barrel, and was used as a light support weapon, where its performance could be devastating.

As Raines homed back in towards the plane, he saw the rounds from the other helicopter – piloted by a close friend and fellow SRG pilot – trace up the body of the Hercules, until the rear section started spewing a thin black cloud out across the driving mid-air snow.

21

Cole’s mind raced as he sat at the controls, trying his best to shake the attack. The trouble was that the big Herc just wasn’t built for manoeuvrability, whereas a helicopter was, and the two little birds were all over him.

He felt the aircraft pull to the right, and then his eyes were drawn to the fuel readout. There wasn’t much left to start with, but Cole watched with rising apprehension as the needle started to drop lower and lower.

Raines battled with the controls to keep the helicopter steady as he pulled up alongside the Hercules cockpit once more; he knew there was no chance the pilot would be able to bank away in time.

Meanwhile, his opposite number had boxed the Hercules in from behind.

As he turned his chopper broadside on to the big plane, he glanced towards the rear. There he saw Marcus Davies, the ex-Marine Force Recon operator, as he leaned out of the Bell’s side door, leaning heavily against the strap, trying to steady his rifle against the barrage of wind, ice and snow.

If there was anyone left alive in the cockpit, there wouldn’t be for much longer.

22

Cole grimaced as the first helicopter reappeared in front of him, and he strained to see through the snow as the aircraft banked across him, a man leaning out, rifle up and aimed.

The distance was close, and he knew that any second the entire flight deck would once more be hosed down with the hundreds of deadly high-velocity rounds that were draped around the man’s shoulders, feeding from a bandoleer straight into the big rifle.

Cole felt the rear of the craft judder as the second helicopter attacked from the rear.

It was now or never, Cole decided, reaching for the cockpit fire extinguisher.

Raines couldn’t help but laugh as his eyes focussed on the Hercules cockpit and he saw the lone man behind the controls, raising a small pistol up towards the helicopter.
What the hell did he expect to accomplish with that?
, Raines wondered incredulously.

He saw the muzzle flash, and then as he waited for Davies to respond with his own gunfire, he only had time to catch a glint of metal as what looked like a missile fired straight towards him from the Hercules cockpit.

Cole watched as the fire extinguisher shot across the narrow gap between the two aircraft, its highly pressurized gas contents powering it away from the cockpit at over a hundred miles per hour.

Instead of wasting his ammunition by firing directly at the helicopter, Cole had instead shot a single, small-diameter hole in the bottom of the fire extinguisher and had then watched as the gas escaped at extreme velocity from the hole, resulting in what amounted to a small aluminium missile shooting across the night sky.

To Cole’s amazement and unbridled joy, the extinguisher travelled in a more or less straight line, smashing straight through the Bell’s cockpit window and into the pilot’s face, smashing through his head until it buried itself in the partition wall behind, where it twirled around lethargically with the remains of its propellant gases.

At the same time as he fired the Glock, his other hand also hit the counter-measures control on the Herc’s instrument panel.

White-hot flares burning at more than a thousand degrees dispersed themselves all around the aircraft, firing out at every angle, a brilliant, symmetrical fireworks display in the cold night sky.

Cole observed as the first helicopter shook, the pilot dead, slumped over the controls, nothing controlling the Bell’s flight now, and it skittered, banked, yawed, and ultimately fell from the sky, erupting in a bright orange fireball on the ground below.

Meanwhile, the flares, designed to confuse heat-seeking missiles fired at the aircraft, were successfully doing another job entirely. The second helicopter had been in the direct path of the rear flare cluster, and two thousand high-powered flares had fallen directly onto the Bell’s main rotor, destroying it instantly.

Flares also passed through the cockpit and the rear compartment, and the men onboard all burned to death before the second helicopter, like the first, fell to earth and exploded in a raging inferno, flames shooting up to lick the underside of Cole’s own ravaged aircraft.

23

Cole checked through the broken glass at the lights below him, just visible through the bitter December weather. He thought for a moment of what he was doing, where he was headed. When President Ellen Abrams had last met him, she had been a Senator and he had been something of a hero. But now?

Sitting there in the cockpit of the hijacked plane, the mangled body of the RAF pilot at his side, he just didn’t know. If he hadn’t killed Crozier, would the CIA man have revealed everything about the plan? Would this entire thing have been avoided? It was possible, certainly. In this respect, Cole was in a sense partially responsible for the cold war that was to come.

He shook off the feeling. He had to get the information he had to Abrams, and hope that she would be able to use it; it was his only hope for redemption, and the only way to save the world from a possible future annihilation.

And so he had to concentrate. The weather was appalling, freezing cold and with driving snow that speared its way into the cockpit, obscuring his vision and dulling his reflexes.

He knew that below him would soon be Annapolis, and then he would be over DC proper, on his way to the impromptu runway that was being prepared on Constitution Avenue.

With poor visibility, damaged instruments and a potentially frozen runway on which to land, Cole was under no illusions about his chances.

24

The altimeter still seemed to be operational, as well as the unit-to-ground image, and Cole prayed that the readouts were accurate, as he was going to have to rely on them to get the Hercules down. If the chopper attack had damaged the integrity of that information, it could be disastrous – an error of five metres could make the difference between landing in relative safety, or smashing down into the concrete highway and breaking the plane into a million pieces.

The noise was fierce – the lack of cockpit windows meant that Cole was subjected to the full, insanely loud roar of the four huge propellers, as well as the horrific wind noise that whistled through the cabin. It was cold too, terribly cold, and he was inordinately glad of the warm sweater he had been given to wear back in the cells in Munich.

Cole had deployed the landing gear, and had been pleased to see that it still functioned – had it been damaged, it would have reduced his chances even more. As he over-flew eastern DC, he began to work the throttle and the altitudinometer, and the big aircraft began to slow and descend.

He still couldn’t see anything except for vague lights outside the cockpit, but his maps told him he was nearing Capitol Hill, at a height of just five hundred metres and closing.

He came down, lower and lower, speed reducing more and more. He knew the Hercules was designed to land on short runways, and with a light load could land in as little as two hundred and fifty metres. Constitution Avenue was much longer than this, but Cole was aware that the weather was incredibly bad, and he wasn’t even preparing to land on a proper runway, but rather a hopefully-cleared urban boulevard.

And then the sound changed, higher pitched for an instant, and Cole knew he had just cleared the top of the Capitol building itself, the brilliant white porticoed Georgian edifice standing proud atop of Capitol Hill, overlooking the rest of the Washington Mall beneath.

His height was just a hundred metres and closing, his speed just a hundred knots, and he was looking, searching from the open cockpit, looking for –

There! Lights directly below him, in two long straight lines, exactly where he had hoped the avenue would be, and Cole was pleased – happy not only that he had navigated to the correct position, but also that Abrams had organised high-power lights to be strung out along both sides of the street, providing some merciful visual assistance.

The road was coming up at him quickly now, and he pushed down on the yoke as he neared the iced concrete surface. Eighty, forty, twenty metres, everything happening too quickly, the ground rushing up towards him, lights blinding him now, and then his entire body shook with the impact as the aeroplane hit the street hard.

The big Hercules rolled from side to side, trying to find grip, some purchase on the slippery surface of the avenue, even before its weight had fully settled on the wheels. And then the yoke was fully down, and the plane’s weight collapsed onto the landing gear, and Cole struggled to keep the massive aircraft in a straight line as it plummeted along the boulevard, past the National Archives on the left and then the Natural History and American History Museums on the left, the huge needle of the Washington Monument illuminated further over, a sight that caught Cole’s eye as the aircraft swung towards it, and then left his vision as the Herc swung back to the right.

Cole heard the high-pitched whine as the tyres still struggled to secure their grip on the tarmac, and then a shriek as one of the wheels broke loose from the frame, the heavy bulk of the aircraft collapsing to the street on one side, scraping along the icy street at an odd, dangerously off-balanced angle.

But then Cole felt his progress slowing, the actual body of the aircraft digging into the concrete of the street, ripping up the tarmac and being braked against the churned-up surface.

Cole felt the plane drop a level again as another wheel collapsed, and then the Hercules started to spin on its axis, but slowly – ever so slowly now, as its forward momentum reduced – until eventually, mercifully, finally, the vehicle came to a complete stop.

Cole’s breathing, ragged and hollow, now also started to slow as he regained his composure, trying to get his bearings.

He shook his head clear, and tried to make out the surroundings directly outside the broken cockpit.

His eyes focussed badly, then cleared, and then re-focussed. He smiled as he recognized the view from the flight deck straight ahead. Through the driving snow and hail he could make out the incongruous decorative lights of the National Christmas Tree on the Ellipse directly in front of him, and beyond that, the reassuring Georgian familiarity of the White House, the home of the President of the United States of America, Ellen Abrams.

He’d made it.

25

The Secret Service Emergency Response Team section leader directed the driver of the lumbering, tractor-like Snow Cat – vital in conditions that were the worst Washington had ever seen - towards the landing zone. The figure of the man who had piloted the aircraft had pulled himself out of the cockpit window frame and dropped to the ground behind a snowy ridge. The heavy metal unit clanked and ground its way slowly forwards.

‘Weapons hot,’ he ordered his men, and they all racked back the cocking levers of their cold weather-modified assault rifles.

As the Snow Cat rumbled over the hill, the eight armed men swarmed out of the vehicle, weapons raised.

Cole’s hands were already raised in surrender in preparation for them. He knew the White House’s security force would be on high-alert and geared up for action, and would therefore be in a state of mind where they would react with force to any slight movement.

Essentially, they would have no idea who he was or what his intentions were; they would just have orders to arrest him on sight.

Although it was a relief not to have the elements channelled directly into him at high speed as they had been in the plane, at least there had been heating in the cockpit. It was freezing cold at ground level, and Cole was again glad of the thick woollen sweater that helped shield him from the subzero elements.

The cold air assaulted Cole’s unprotected head and face though, and he could feel his brain instantly start to go numb. He had been on training exercises in the Arctic Circle that hadn’t been as cold as this.

‘Strip,’ the team leader now ordered. Cole knew they wanted to check for explosives, but was reluctant – the cold could potentially kill him within a few minutes. When he saw the guns press forwards towards him ever so slightly in response to his delay though, he complied; first taking off his gloves, then his boots and then his thick jump suit.

Cole’s breath caught in his throat as he stood there in his underclothes, his body already starting to react. Then the leader nodded, and four men rushed forwards and grabbed hold of him, dragging him through the snow back towards the big all-terrain vehicle.

Once inside the heated compartment, the men cuffed his hands and then covered him in a thermal blanket. He was already shivering uncontrollably, unable to breathe properly.

Inside his near-frozen brain, he started to get a mental grip on himself, forcing himself to relax, to breathe, to allow the warmth to re-enter his body. Soon he was calm again, his breathing regular.

His eyes focused in time to see his clothing being loaded into the back of the Snow Cat, and moments later the vehicle was moving again, the roar of its big diesel engine competing loudly with the crash of its rotating tracks.

‘Sir,’ he heard the team leader announce into his radio, ‘it’s Team A. We’re on our way back.’