Authors: James Barrington
Hutchings released his seat belt and stood up. John Baxter was sitting directly opposite him and, as Hutchings looked across the cabin, he suddenly fell forward limply against the restraint of
the belt. Hutchings spun round to look at the other two men. Roger Middleton was already slumped sideways across his seat and, even as he watched, Andy Franks also suddenly collapsed.
Hutchings stepped over to Baxter and ripped off the oxygen mask, then did the same for Middleton and Franks. What the hell was going on here? Realizing the oxygen supply had to be contaminated,
he bent over Franks and pressed his hand to the side of the man’s neck. He found a pulse, weak and irregular, but it was there. He then checked Middleton with the same result. Something in
the emergency oxygen tanks had knocked the other three men unconscious. But at least they were alive, and now they were breathing normal cabin air, so they’d presumably soon come round.
But how had this happened? Clearly the aircraft had been sabotaged. Somebody on the ground at Andrews or somewhere had tampered with the emergency systems. What about the flight crew? Did they
breathe from the same oxygen supply as the passengers? Hutchings was suddenly aware that the Gulfstream was still in a rapid descent, but were the pilots lying unconscious over their controls as
the aircraft headed straight down towards the Mediterranean?
He crossed to the cockpit door and turned the handle. The door was locked. That was now mandatory on commercial flights, but it struck him as being unusual procedure in a State Department
executive jet engaged on official government business. He rapped sharply on the door and called out.
Sutter and Haig turned and eyed the locked door. ‘Sounds like someone didn’t do what he was told,’ Haig murmured.
Sutter nodded and undid his seat belt. ‘I’ll go sort it out. Level us at fifteen.’ They’d received further descent clearance less than a minute earlier. He removed the
push-dagger from his jacket pocket, locked the blade in place and slid it into the rear waistband of his trousers. Then he released the bolt and opened the door.
Grant Hutchings was almost blocking the doorway. ‘There’s something wrong with the oxygen supply,’ he said. ‘Maybe the plane’s been sabotaged.’ He turned to
indicate his three companions.
You got that right
, Sutter thought, pulling out the dagger and stabbing it hard towards the CIA officer’s back, just as he moved away. But at that moment Hutchings turned back
towards him, as if wanting to say something else.
Hutchings reacted instinctively when he saw the weapon, his basic unarmed-combat training taking over. He continued turning, swinging his left arm across to block the blow. He punched hard with
his right fist, aiming for Sutter’s solar plexus, and if the blow had connected that would have been the end of it.
But while Hutchings had received basic training in self-defence, the other man was an expert. Sutter was skilled in karate and some half-dozen other forms of unarmed combat, so the punch got
nowhere near him. He blocked it effortlessly, knocking Hutchings’s arm to one side, and at the same time dropping the dagger. He folded his fingers at the second joint, wedging his thumb
firmly against his index finger and stiffened his right hand into a blade. He smashed his hand into Hutchings’s throat, delivering a short-arm jab that fatally crushed his windpipe.
The big CIA agent staggered backwards, lifting both hands to his neck, which just made Sutter’s job easier. He punched Hutchings twice in the stomach and he fell to the floor. Then Sutter
stepped back to pick up the dagger and bent over the injured man.
Over the flaring agony of his ruined throat, Hutchings sensed his life ebbing away. The last thing he heard was his killer’s contemptuous remark, just before the dagger ripped through his
rib-cage, its point slamming into his heart.
‘Why didn’t you just breathe through the fucking mask, you stupid bastard?’
For a few seconds, Sutter ignored the corpse in front of him and looked at the other three passengers. All appeared to be still unconscious, but unconscious wasn’t what he needed.
He moved quickly from one to another, replacing the oxygen masks on their faces, then turned back to Hutchings. He checked for a pulse but predictably found nothing, and there was surprisingly
little blood from the fatal wound, because the heart had ceased pumping almost immediately the dagger had entered the chest cavity.
Leaving Hutchings where he was lying, Sutter made a final check of the other three men, then returned to the cockpit. The narcotic would be seeping slowly into the air, and he wanted to spend as
little time as possible in the cabin.
‘OK now?’ Haig asked, as Sutter closed the cockpit door and refastened the bolt.
‘Should be. One of them didn’t put his mask on quickly enough, or maybe he smelt something. Anyway, he’s dead now. Another ten minutes should be enough for the others, then we
can turn off the oxygen. We’ll stay down here at fifteen for a while, then ask for clearance back to high level. When you talk to the controller again, tell him we think the problem was
instrumentation rather than an actual depressurization, but we’ll need to land at Cairo just to get it checked.’
Thirty minutes later the Gulfstream was back up at forty-one thousand feet on autopilot. Sutter and Haig were relaxing in the cockpit, sharing the sandwiches they’d found in one of the
catering packs provided for the G450’s passengers, and Cairo Air Traffic Control had already been alerted to expect the unscheduled arrival.
Cairo, Egypt
O’Hagan and Petrucci had set their alarm for three. The two men made coffee – one of the few amenities the hotel possessed was coffee-making facilities in each
room – and then sat waiting for the phone call that would determine exactly when they’d have to leave.
O’Hagan’s mobile rang just before three-thirty. He listened carefully for a few seconds. ‘Right, see you then.’ He turned to Petrucci. ‘They’ll arrive in
about ninety minutes, so we need to be out of here soon. I’d better get Wilson moving.’
‘We’ll be mobile in fifteen,’ he announced when his call was answered. ‘Which hotel?’ He scribbled down the name and address. ‘We’ll be in a white
Mercedes van.’
‘Right,’ Petrucci said. ‘I’ll go grab my stuff and get the Merc. I’ll see you outside in ten minutes.’
In his hotel room at Abbassia, Richard Wilson rang Dawson’s mobile. ‘It’s me,’ he said. ‘Check yourself out right now.’
Twenty-five minutes later Petrucci pulled the Mercedes over to the kerb outside the hotel where Wilson was standing waiting with the cases beside him. O’Hagan opened the passenger door and
stepped out, his face creasing into a smile as he extended his hand.
‘Hi, Dick. Good to see you. Is that it?’ He was pointing towards the larger of the suitcases sitting on the pavement.
‘That’s it.’
‘And where’s Ed?’
‘Ain Shams Hospital. They held him overnight for observation, but I gave him a call just after you reached me, so he should be out by now.’
Wilson and O’Hagan heaved the cases into the rear of the van as Petrucci got back behind the wheel, and the Mercedes eased away from the kerb. The hospital was nearby and when the van
turned into the access road running past the admissions unit, they all saw the lone figure standing outside.
‘Everything OK?’ Wilson asked.
‘No problems,’ Dawson replied. ‘Once I told them I was feeling fine, they let me go as soon as I’d filled in a “you can’t sue us if you walk out of
here” form. Is the plane here?’
O’Hagan glanced at his watch. ‘Not yet. They’re about an hour from touchdown, so we’re in good time. They’re in a Gulfstream G450. We’re technicians going to
inspect the aircraft. We won’t need passports or anything, because we’re only going as far as the tech site. Once the G450 is down – and Roy will call me as soon as he’s
parked it – we’ll talk our way in.’
‘And then?’ Wilson asked.
‘And then we’ll find out from them what the score is and what else we have to do before we can take off for Dubai.’
Gulfstream G450, callsign November Two Six
‘Cairo, November Two Six on handover and requesting airfield information.’
‘November Two Six is identified. Active runway is two three right, wind light and variable, altimeter one zero one eight. You’re number two in the pattern, no delays
expected.’
Haig called out the pre-landing checks as Sutter disengaged the autopilot and lined up the Gulfstream with the extended-runway centreline. He progressively increased the angle of the flaps as
Sutter reduced the throttle settings and brought the speed down, then he lowered the undercarriage. With final checks complete, he flared the aircraft as they passed over the piano keys, and waited
for the main wheels to make contact with the runway.
‘Cairo Ground, November Two Six is down and requesting taxi instructions. Be advised we’re expecting a maintenance check because of a suspected depressurization problem en route. We
don’t require a refuel or customs clearance and we won’t be leaving the aircraft.’
Fifteen minutes later Sutter shut down the engines on the assigned stand and peered out of the cockpit windows towards the approach road. Then he reached for his mobile phone and made a
ten-second call.
Cairo Airport, Egypt
Petrucci was driving, simply because he spoke the best Arabic. He stopped the Mercedes at the gate leading to the airfield’s technical site while the guards checked
his identification and that of the other three men, who were now all wearing white overalls.
They weren’t held up for long. The control tower already knew the Gulfstream had experienced a problem, and Sutter had told them he’d contacted a local maintenance facility on a
company frequency, so the van’s appearance at the airfield was expected.
The guard emerged from the building beside the tech site gate and handed back their ‘Cairo Specialist Aviation Services’ identification cards, printed two months earlier in the
States. After giving them directions to the hardstanding where the G450 was parked, he recited a very brief list of tech-site driving rules, and finally raised the barrier.
‘There it is,’ O’Hagan said, pointing through the windscreen. Petrucci turned onto the hardstanding and parked.
‘You didn’t get rid of the bodies,’ O’Hagan said, staring at four dead CIA officers, as Sutter emerged from the cockpit to greet them.
‘We couldn’t. We’d planned to dump them in the Med, but this aircraft has integral stairs on the door, so though we could have got it open, we would never have been able to
close it again after dropping the stiffs. Shouldn’t be a problem, though. We can get them into the van and bury them somewhere in the desert, right?’
‘As long as we don’t get stopped on our way out it should be OK,’ Petrucci agreed. ‘How many?’
‘These four and another two – the original crew – locked in the john.’
‘Six? Oh, Christ. We’d better make two trips. Maybe three, for safety. We’ll go out once empty and I’ll tell the gate guards we’ve got to go and pick up equipment
or something – and if they don’t check the back of the van we’ll do two more trips immediately.’
Transferring the bags and suitcases from the van to the Gulfstream took under three minutes; moving the bodies, however, was clearly going to be more difficult and take longer. Petrucci climbed
into the Mercedes and started the engine, O’Hagan joining him. Sutter watched from the door of the Gulfstream as the vehicle drove away.
Wilson and Dawson stripped the bodies of their weapons and holsters, and all identification documents, then removed their watches and rings, because they could be engraved, and even cut the
labels from their clothing. They would need the pistols and CIA identification themselves, but it was just as important to ensure that there would be no easy way to identify the bodies once
they’d been dumped. They wouldn’t have time to bury them deeply, so the corpses might be discovered within weeks or even days. That didn’t bother them, but it was essential that
the bodies were not identified for at least four days.
And then there was nothing they could do but wait for O’Hagan and Petrucci to come back with the Mercedes.
Friday
Cairo Airport, Egypt
As the van reappeared beside the Gulfstream ten minutes later, Petrucci opened the doors while O’Hagan climbed the aircraft steps to where the others were waiting.
‘Everything go OK?’ Wilson asked.
‘No problems,’ O’Hagan replied. ‘They’re much more interested in what comes into the tech site than what goes out, so I think we can risk shifting all the stiffs at
once. And if they decide to search the van once we get to the gate, it’s only a drop-down barrier so I think we can drive straight through it and then just dump the vehicle somewhere with the
bodies inside. That has to be a last resort, of course.’
‘Yeah, but if you do crash the barrier, what then? You have to get yourself back here.’
‘This place isn’t like a major US airport, and security’s pretty lax. I reckon we could sneak over a fence somewhere. We’ll be wearing overalls so we’ll look like
we belong.’
It was early morning, with little activity on the hard-standing, but still they took no chances. Petrucci brought up the four tarpaulins from the van and they wrapped them round the corpses.
Sutter and O’Hagan left the aircraft and waited by the Mercedes, but almost immediately heard Petrucci call out a warning: ‘Vehicle approaching.’
They watched as a small van drew up beside the Gulfstream, the lettering on the side proclaiming that it came from a ground handling company. Two smartly dressed Arabs stepped out and approached
them.
‘Good morning, gentlemen,’ the first one said, in perfectly fluent English. ‘I see the specialist assistance you requested has arrived. Do you require any services from
airfield technical support?’
‘No thanks,’ Sutter replied. ‘We think the problem was instrumentation, but the technicians here need to carry out a few more checks to be certain. If that’s all it is,
then we’ll be leaving here later today.’