The Henchmen's Book Club (19 page)

“I
guess it doesn’t bother you that this information may lead to the deaths or
arrest of whoever’s signed up with Three-X,” Tempest goaded. “Perhaps even
friends of yours.”

“Is
that how you’re going to say his name then? Three-X?”

“Just
answer the question,” Tempest pressed.

“He
isn’t taking on any of my mates, I know that for a fact,” I assured him, safe
in the knowledge X
³
’s labour force would be made up of
RS
or
EE
monkeys, not Agency Affiliates. And if a little corner of the
world was to be threatened with annihilation by some Oedipus
nutjob
, I’d really rather it was stopped unless I was a
part of it and on a generous completion bonus.

“Anything
else?” Tempest asked.

“Yeah,
just one thing, watch out for Sun Dju’s shoes, she’s got killer heels,” I told
him. Tempest clearly didn’t understand what I meant but he nodded as if he did
anyway, ever eager to play it suave.

“I
love ladies with feet to die for,” Tempest declared, starting his car and
summoning it towards where we were both standing with a flick of his remote
control key chain. The door sprang open and Tempest climbed in. “Fair exchange
is no theft,” he trilled. “I’ll see you around then, Mark the Affiliate –
either in Tesco’s or
Tora
Bora.”

“Oi!”
I shouted after him.

“What?”

“How
am I meant to get home? It must be bloody fifteen miles to Petworth.”

“Shouldn’t
be a problem for a you. I thought you said you were a foot soldier?” he
guffawed, before thrashing his Jag through the circular gravel driveway and
spinning it a hundred-and-eighty degrees to rejoin the road.

“Oi,
Tempest!” I cried after him again when he passed, and to my surprise he stopped
and looked back.

“What?”

I
knew he wouldn’t give me a lift or lend me twenty quid for the cab fare home,
so I asked him the one question he still hadn’t answered.

“How
did you get out of that turbine pipe on Thalassocrat’s island?” but Tempest
just revved his V8 engine and roared off into the night.

“Cock
smoker!” I frowned.

The
pub’s lights suddenly dimmed behind me and the door clicked with the sound of a
latch being flicked. Not that I’d had any money for another drink anyway, so I
pulled up my collar, dug my hands into my pockets and began the long walk home
all over again.

22.
PROPERTY OF A GOVERNMENT

“Target approaching. First strike operatives take your positions!” came the
order as the twelve of us took to our chariots and clipped ourselves in. A rush
of freezing air accompanied the bomb bay doors spreading beneath us and all at
once, the deep blue vista of the Atlantic far far below took our collective
recycled breaths away.

I wasn’t altogether mad keen on this
particular operation so I’d volunteered to be one of the first out of the
plane, figuring I stood a better chance out there in the open skies than
on-board our lumbering Tupolev once we’d broken radar cover. Now that I was
strapped in, with nothing but 45,000ft and Flash Gordon’s shopping trolley
between me and a really bad day, I was suddenly regretting not volunteering to
stay back and organise the lads’ end of job party.

“Start chariots,” a tinny American voice
told my left ear, so I twisted the key in the centre of the dashboard and the
instrument panel lit up accordingly.

That whole business with Jack Tempest had
occurred a little over eight months ago and I’d spent five nights stewing on it
and living in a camouflaged bivouac across from my farm to see if anyone else
came for me. When nobody did I eventually accepted I was safe. Well, more or
less. Tempest still knew where I lived and I didn’t like that one little bit,
but then again what could I do? Bolt? Of course that would have been the
sensible solution, but then most of my money was tied up in my property so I
would’ve lost everything if I'd ran.

After a few sleepless nights I eventually
decided to put the whole lot on the market and up-sticks to East Sussex. Not
exactly a monumental migration but the thought of a beachfront property and a
boat suddenly appealed to me. Unfortunately, the housing market had taken such
a tumble since I’d bought my farm that the pennies I was looking to make on it
wouldn’t have got me half an hour in a dinghy, let alone anywhere to live. The
estate agent had been terribly apologetic about the whole situation, so much so
that he almost moved into a one-bed shallow grave in my back garden for his
smugness.

I was buggered.

I put together an escape bag and started
dropping cash, documents and weapons in various luggage lockers and deposit
boxes right along the south coast in case I had to leave in a hurry, but then
salvation came along. A job. And this one was a compact little international
hijacking with a very, very tasty payday. There was just one thing:

How did I feel about heights?

“First strike operators away!”

The brackets above our heads released and
we plunged through the bomb bay doors and into the abyss in rows of three, two
seconds apart.

The air was crystal clear around us and
roared past our visors as we dead-dropped a thousand feet from the Tupolev
before our engines automatically kicked in and blasted us forward. Tiny wings
unfolded behind our knees and our chariots began to respond as we pulled on
their sticks to climb once more.

We spread out to get our bearings before
regrouping for our approach. A few more switches locked our guidance systems
onto the C-17 Globemaster ten miles ahead and we accelerated as a unit on a
count of three. Our chariots could travel just short of Mach 1 at this
altitude, which closed the gap between us and the C-17 in no time at all,
though we all had to remember to wear our thermals.

It was only when we fanned out into our
attack formation that I noticed there were now only eleven of us. Someone’s
chariot hadn’t started. I didn’t know whose, but from the hastily redrafted
orders that were now buzzing my left ear, I hazarded a guess that it had been
someone in the third drop row, which meant either Mr Woo, Mr Hodgson or Mr
Passey. Somewhat selfishly I hoped it was Mr Hodgson, as he’d voted against
adding
The Hound of The Baskervilles
to our reading list.

Not that I had much time to think about
it. We’d been spotted by the C-17 the moment our engines started because a
starburst of decoys exploded in the skies right behind its tail and two of her
three F-16 escorts peeled away to engage us.

“Break right!” Chariot Five told me and
together we ripped through the blue and into the sun.

The nearest F-16 chased us, but we were
too small and too fast for his plane’s guidance computer to lock onto and
without the time to reprogram it, he went route one and opened up with his
20-mm cannons.

A stream of white-hot lead filled the
skies around us but the spread smacked of panic fire. We were so many in number
and swarming all over him that he failed to pick out any single one of us.

After a few seconds of aerial mating, I
swung around behind him and was rewarded with an urgent beeping in my left ear
to tell me I now had missile lock. I wiggled my thumb to fire off four missiles
and was momentarily blinded by their smoke trails as they raced for their
target. The F-16 saw them as soon as they left my tubes and the pilot threw his
plane in a desperate bank of rolls and turns as he fought to prolong his career
in the US Air Force but it was to be in vain. More and more mini air-to-air
missiles started homing in on him and when the first caught his wing, it
knocked him into an unstoppable corkscrew that sent him spiralling towards the
sea.

The pilot ejected a moment before the
second, third and fourth missiles struck home, obliterating his place of work
in a flash of light, to join Mr Woo in the drink.

The remaining missiles circled for a few
seconds more, sniffing their own tails as they searched for another target
before taking a shine to the poor unfortunate pilot himself. All at once they
darted in his direction with merciless intent and I could hardly look when all
four self-destructed just a few hundred yards short as Mr Smith in Chariot One
hit the kill override. He’d said he would do this if this happened. All we
wanted were the F-16s out of the sky and now we’d achieved this, why kill for
the sake of killing? It was bad karma. If truth were told, I wasn’t that fussed
one way or the other. The F-16 pilot was going to have his work cut out walking
away from this day’s work as it was, so a couple of hours dying inch-by-inch in
the frozen north Atlantic would’ve probably had him cursing Mr Smith for his
clemency anyway.

The other F-16 pilots didn’t have the
same quandaries as they’d not been as quick with their ejector seats, so after
just another thirty seconds of aerial ballet the C-17 found itself flying on
alone – unescorted, unprotected and open for business.

Phase one of Operation
Sky Flame
complete. Proceed with phase
two.

When the Chariots regrouped, we found
there were now only nine of us. Two more had gone the way of the crabs, but
such losses had been factored into the planning of this skyjacking so we had
more than enough men to see through our objectives.

We pushed our sticks in the direction of
the C-17 and closed the distance in a little over two minutes. In all that
time, we could hear the C-17’s pilot sending out Maydays to whoever was
listening, which would have been quite an audience to be honest. Two carrier
groups had straddled the Atlantic below us to underwrite this particular
plane’s transit across the pond and they were no doubt scrambling as many
fighters as they could into the air this very minute. We had time, but not an
inexhaustible supply of it.

“Flight KT-315, you are instructed to
drop to twenty thousand feet and slow to two-hundred knots,” Mr Smith told the
C-17’s pilot as we formed up around the plane.

The pilot ignored us and continued to send
his Mayday.

“Flight KT-315, failure to comply will
result in the downing of this plane,” Mr Smith warned him, but the pilot
continued to do his own thing.

All at once, the C-17 banked violently,
throwing its wings at our starboard formation. He was too slow and too ungainly
to catch us though so instead he took the C-17 into a steep dive to leave us in
his jet-stream.

“Take him,” came the order, so we dived
after transport and fell some twenty thousand feet before levelling off at
twenty-five. We descended on him immediately and despite another couple of
abortive rolls the C-17 knew he couldn’t get away. All he could do was play for
time.

Chariot Four was the first to try
reigning him in, trailing the C-17’s wing until they were like a shark and pilot
fish swimming through an ocean of blue and white, but one particularly thick
bank of cloud told for Mr Clarke as the C-17 flipped Chariot Four into the
ocean with a flick of its portside fin.
 

Chariot Six was next to try, along with
me riding Chariot Five. We closed in on a wing each and synchronised our flight
paths until we were within touching distance. I knew I was one turn of the
stick away from total disaster, but a little LED light started blinking on my
instrument display, so I flicked the limpet-switch and was sucked hard onto the
wing. And not a moment too soon either. The C-17 rolled once more, hoping to
bat me into the blue, but the pilot would’ve had more luck simply strolling out
onto the wing to tell me to “clear off” because I was now stuck fast and going
nowhere.

Chariot Six had made it too and quickly
got to work overriding the plane’s controls. Three minutes and a few magnetic
cables later and the Globemaster’s pilot was suddenly redundant. We now had the
plane.

We took it down to the altitude and speed
we wanted and the remaining Chariots formed up around it. Two of them rode up
alongside the cockpit, while the remaining four dropped back to the plane’s
rear. As hard as the C-17 tried, they couldn’t stop us from rolling open the
rear doors by remote control.

A volley of small arms fire immediately
erupted from the cargo hold to scatter the trailing Chariots.

“Flight KT-315, hold your fire. I repeat,
hold your fire or we will retaliate,” those on board were told, but the crew
were determined to go out draped in flags and continued trying to repel us,
leaving ourselves no option but to do things the hard way.

With Chariot Six flying the plane, I was
surplus to requirements on the wings, so I deactivated my limpet and fell back
a few hundred feet before my engine rebooted. I straightened up, stopped
swirling and fired my boosters, clawing my way back through the sky until I
came up beneath the plane where most of the other Chariots had clustered.

Some foolhardy USAF Rambos were hanging out
over the tail ramp emptying M4 Carbines in our direction, but it would’ve taken
a lucky shot to nail us from that distance, so we sailed in
zig-zags
to draw their fire as Chariots One and Three climbed up and around before dropping
behind the tail to strafe them with 9-mm hollow points.

Several bodies fell out of the plane then
Mr Smith put on a burst and took Chariot One right into the cargo hold.

“I’m in,” came the staccato radio burst.
With that as our cue, three more of us dropped around and accelerated into the
back of the plane, crashing through crates and cargo netting before deploying
grappling anchors to stop us from tumbling straight out again.

I slapped a button on the side of my
helmet to turn my black visor clear and unclipped my harness to roll out of my
Chariot.

Bullets were pinging all around me as the
crew fired from deep within the belly of their aircraft, but their situation
was only getting worse as their day wore on. Only ten minutes earlier they’d
been a routine military flight, protected on three sides by the latest F-16
fighters and two carrier groups, now their escorts were gone, half their crew
was dead, they’d lost control of their aircraft and armed raiders were on-board
in numbers.

I shook off my thick thermal gloves,
flexed my fingers a couple of times, then tore out my Model 61 Skorpion machine
pistol and began picking off targets.

A square-jawed USAF Sergeant was
crouching behind a tangle of netting and keeping Mr Smith’s head down with clip
after clip from his Colt .45.

I squeezed my trigger and ripped his foot
clean off the end of his leg, before knocking his beret loose when he toppled
into the picture. Now clear, Mr Smith jumped forward and took up position by a
stack of netted crates.

“Bogeys spotted at nine hundred miles.
What’s your status FSOs?” came the request from the Tupolev.

“We are moving forward. Bring down
Mother,” Mr Smith shouted into his mic as he peppered the galley with his own
Skorpion.

“Roger,” the Tupolev replied, and began
its descent.

“Flight KT-315, you must give up or you
will all be killed,” Mr Smith tried one last time, but he was found no takers,
so the four of us lobbed stun grenades forward, squeezed our eyes closed as
they detonated.

We dispatched five airmen on our charge
and a couple of Langley types who’d been overseeing the flight before securing
the main cargo area. There were more airmen towards the bow, but they could
stay where they were as far as we were concerned. We’d pushed into the aircraft
as far as we needed to push. Now we got to work.

Mr Woo and Mr Vasiliev took up defensive
positions while me and Mr Smith secured the prize – a CSMK radar jamming
smart missile. It had just been developed by the US Air Force and featured the
very latest in cutting edge technology, similar to a Cruise Missile, only with
one very important difference; it was radar invisible. Completely. Very handy
in a day and age dominated by early warning systems and counter measures. If
your target wanted to know what had happened, he’d have to ask Saint Peter when
he saw him because he’d get no warning of any sort before the bomb hit. It was
the ultimate tool of assassination. And those who held it were to be feared.