‘No flight plan, no runway lights,’ the cop said, raising a single eyebrow to show that he didn’t believe a word. ‘Maybe I’m Clint Eastwood and you’re the Easter bunny.’
‘Evening, boys!’ Craig boomed, surprising Ewart and the cops as he grabbed the door handle on the passenger side of the pickup. He ripped the door open and punched the cop out with his massive fist before dragging him into the snow.
Ewart realised that Craig had made a smart move: they had to take out the cops in the first vehicle before they were outnumbered. As the driver reached for his holster, Ewart pulled the stun gun and gave him fifty thousand volts. He dragged him out on to the tarmac and gave him a right- hander before snatching the cop’s gun from its holster.
‘Back it up,’ Craig shouted.
Ewart was surprised to find himself taking rather than giving orders, but Craig clearly knew his stuff. Ewart jumped into the driver’s seat, belted up, put the gearbox into reverse and sped backwards towards the second police car as it came through the barrier. It was one of the little Russian jobs and the back end of the pickup reared up over its bonnet, severing the windscreen pillars and concertinaing the roof.
Ewart crunched the pickup back into first gear, but the rear wheels were off the ground and it wouldn’t budge from its position mounted on top of the little car. This was a pain: they could have used it to drive up the taxiway. He jumped out of the cab as he was deafened by the passing jet. The pilot had to apply full reverse thrust to slow her craft before it ran out of icy runway.
As aircraft tyres squealed, Ewart peered into the little cop car with the pickup driver’s pistol in his hands. The sudden reverse had taken the two men inside by surprise and their seatbelts had kept them pinned in position as the rear end of the pickup crushed them. It wasn’t something you’d want to look at twice.
Ewart looked around for Craig and spotted him smacking the guard’s head against the Plexiglas inside the security booth.
‘Plane’s on the ground, Craig,’ Ewart shouted. ‘Let’s move.’
It was six hundred metres to the runway and the icy ground made it difficult to achieve anything faster than a brisk walk. Up ahead, the co-pilot opened up the small passenger jet and dropped a set of steps as Irene wheeled James alongside.
‘Do you need a carry?’ the co-pilot asked James, as Irene took off the blanket and helped him to his feet.
James shook his head as he stumbled forward and grabbed the railing at the edge of the steps. ‘We’ve got two more coming,’ he said.
The co-pilot looked surprised. ‘You were supposed be ready and waiting.’
‘The police turned up,’ Irene explained anxiously. ‘My husband and his companion should be here any second.’
As soon as James was inside the cramped jet, he collapsed into the leather chair nearest the door and gasped for breath. The cockpit door was open and the pilot nodded from her position in front of a line of dials and computer screens.
‘Hey,’ James said, smiling with relief.
‘What’s the delay, kid?’
‘Two more coming,’ James said. He thought about adding
hopefully
, but didn’t.
The runway was pitch black and he was alarmed to see two more sets of headlamps coming up the narrow road towards the security barrier.
Irene stood out on the tarmac, shouting her head off. ‘Craig, where are you?’
The pilot craned her neck to look backwards out of the cockpit, before shouting to the co-pilot. ‘We’ve got snow and ice building up on the wing. De-icing is on, but if we don’t get off the ground in a minute or two, someone will have to climb up there and give it a scrape.’
As James watched the police cars turning through the security barrier, Irene finally heard a shout over the idling jet engines.
‘It’s Craig,’ Irene shouted. ‘They’re coming.’
But the headlights were coming faster.
‘Get inside and pull up the steps,’ the pilot shouted. ‘I’m turning ready for take-off.’
The co-pilot practically shoved Irene up the steps. ‘You can’t leave my husband,’ she begged.
James watched anxiously as the co-pilot grabbed the handrail to raise the steps a few centimetres, so that the pilot could turn the aircraft without them scraping along the ground. A deafening blast of air came through the door as the pilot gave a tiny boost to the right engine, enabling the aircraft to swing a hundred and eighty degrees.
The headlamps looked even bigger when James stared out the opposite side of the aircraft, but he still couldn’t see Ewart or Craig.
‘We’re going,’ the pilot shouted, as she started flicking switches and pressing buttons.
‘You can’t leave them here,’ Irene shrieked.
‘They’ve got a gun,’ the co-pilot said firmly. ‘That gives them a chance of getting away. We’ve got three thousand litres of fuel in the wings and an auxiliary tank in the cargo bay. If one bullet hits us we’ll go up like a bomb.’
As if to emphasise the point, the muzzle of an automatic weapon sparked just outside the aircraft. It hit one of the cars, making it veer off-course. Then something thunked against a carbon fibre panel, almost directly beneath James’ seat. After an anxious second, he saw Ewart scrambling to his feet after a dramatic skid under the belly of the aircraft. Ewart grabbed the rail at the bottom of the steps and lunged inside.
‘Where’s my Craig?’ Irene screamed. A second blast of automatic gun fire sounded from somewhere behind the aircraft.
‘Pull the steps up,’ the pilot ordered. ‘Now.’
‘Don’t you dare,’ Irene shouted as Ewart scrambled down the aisle and collapsed into a seat at the back.
‘I was alongside him till a few seconds ago,’ Ewart called. ‘I slid under, Craig ran around behind the tail.’
The co-pilot leaned out of the doorway and sighted Craig, lying on the runway just a couple of metres behind the tail. The big man had slipped on the ice, crunched his knee and was struggling to get up.
‘What the
hell
are you doing?’ the pilot shouted as the co-pilot jumped down the steps.
James could see the pilot’s hands on the throttles, ready to take off the second she pushed them forward. Outside, the nearest car was less than two hundred metres away.
James leaned forward and peered through the door to try and see what was going on. Craig was hopping towards the aircraft with one arm around the co-pilot’s back. He was tall enough to grab the railings near the top of the stairs. He pulled up his injured legs and swung himself into the aircraft. The co-pilot tripped over Craig as he came inside and sprawled across the cabin.
The pilot looked at James and screamed: ‘Get the door!’
Sheer terror gave James the strength to reach over the two men and grab the metal lever that retracted the steps. The pilot hit the throttles as soon as the steps were off the ground and James had to grab hold of a handrail above the door to stop the blast of air from knocking him back.
A siren sounded in the cockpit and a voice warning blared out of a speaker above James’ head. ‘
Danger, main door improperly secured. Danger, main door improperly secured
…’
Craig crawled along the aisle and the co-pilot got back to his feet as a hydraulically assisted bolt locked the door into place. The red warning light went out, replaced by a reassuring green bar with
door secured
written across it.
James clicked his seatbelt on as the co-pilot scrambled into the cockpit, but a quick glance out of the far side window showed him that the excitement wasn’t over. The car that Craig had shot off-course was coming alongside them and the cop in the passenger seat was aiming a pistol. He remembered what the pilot said about a single stray bullet blowing the whole plane – but the cop only got one shot in before the twin jets gained an edge over the small Russian petrol engine.
The ice on the runway made the take-off hairy. The pilot was fighting her tail rudder, trying to keep the aircraft from skidding off the runway. All James could see was her hand on the throttles, but her shaking arm and bulging tendons made it clear that this was no routine take-off.
Then the nose lifted and everything went smooth. Everyone in the aircraft let out a collective gasp. James looked around and saw Craig, with ripped trousers and a bloody gash over his knee, belting up in the leather seat behind him.
James peered out of his window and looked back at Aero City. There were a few cars moving along the roads and odd glimmers of light from buildings with their own generators. He felt relieved for about ten seconds, then his ears popped and his sinuses exploded with pain.
James opened his eyes slowly. It took a couple of blinks for his surroundings to come into focus. He was in a hospital bed. The back of his throat felt like it had been scoured and he had a tube up his nose, electrodes wired to his chest, a drip in his arm and a port taped to the back of his hand for injections. He felt hungry and needed to pee
really
bad. Then he raised his head slightly and noticed Lauren.
‘Hey,’ James croaked, as he watched his sister breaking into a giant smile.
‘Kerry,’ Lauren yelled happily over her shoulder. ‘He’s awake!’
‘Where am I?’
‘East Side military hospital, near campus,’ Lauren explained, as Kerry’s boots squeaked towards the bed. She had her winter jacket and gloves on, as if she’d been about to leave.
‘I’ll fetch the nurse,’ Kerry said, before dashing off again.
James tried to sit up, but Lauren sat on the edge of the bed and pushed him down gently.
‘You’ll pull your tubes out.’
‘But I’m busting,’ James explained.
‘Just go,’ Lauren said gently. ‘You’re all wired up down there.’
‘Eh?’
‘With a catheter and a bag.’
James shuddered. He knew that catheters are inserted into the penis, and while he had no memory of it going in, he immediately realised that he’d have to endure the painful procedure of it being yanked out at some point in the future.
Even with covers over him, James felt weird having Lauren sitting next to him as the high-ceilinged hospital room echoed with the sound of his pee running into a bag.
‘How long have I been here?’
‘Since yesterday,’ Lauren said. ‘But you were in a hospital in Finland for two days before that.’
‘You mean, like a coma or something?’
‘Not a full-blown coma, but you’ve been drifting in and out of consciousness. You’re groggy now because they gave you a general anaesthetic this morning, before you went down to theatre.’
‘Theatre?’
‘You’ve got a broken rib. They made a little incision in your chest and pulled out a loose bone fragment. They also did a bit more work on your broken nose while you were under.’
‘The last thing I remember is shutting the door of an aeroplane … And a bloke with a bloody knee and …’
‘That was Saturday,’ Lauren nodded. ‘It’s Wednesday now. You had a blood clot inside your nose. As the plane rose up, the atmospheric pressure dropped, the gas trapped inside your sinuses expanded and the pain knocked you out. The pilot had to make an emergency landing in Helsinki.’
Kerry came back into the ward, followed by a fat nurse. He gave James a huge smile and spoke with a Caribbean accent as he pulled a small torch out of his pocket.
‘Nice having you back with us, James,’ he said. ‘Look at the light and try to follow it with your eyes.’
James obediently tracked the narrow beam as it moved in front of his face.
‘Great stuff,’ the nurse smiled, as he pushed a few buttons on a monitoring device beside the bed. It hummed as it spat out a length of curled-up paper.
‘This looks fine,’ the nurse said, as he studied the figures. ‘How do you feel?’
James shrugged. ‘I just feel a bit dull, like I’m all wrapped in cotton wool or something.’
‘Anything else?’
‘My nose hurts and I’m
completely
starving.’
Lauren looked at the nurse. ‘Is he OK?’
The nurse nodded reassuringly. ‘He’ll be confused for the next couple of hours. But his heart rate and blood oxygen levels are healthy. Doctor Packard should be here shortly and I expect he’ll run a few tests before he’s satisfied, but it all looks fine to me.’
‘Your blood oxygen level was dangerously low when you arrived in Helsinki,’ Lauren explained. ‘They were worried that you might have brain damage.’
‘I’ll come back tomorrow,’ Kerry smiled, as the nurse headed out of the room.
‘Can’t you stay a bit longer?’ James asked.
Kerry shook her head. ‘It’s midnight. I was on my way out ten minutes ago. My cab driver will be losing his rag.’
‘Night then,’ James said, as Kerry reluctantly headed for the door. Then he turned towards Lauren. ‘What about you?’
‘Nah,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘I’ll sit with you as long as you like. When you arrived here yesterday I told them that I wasn’t leaving the hospital until you did. Zara got cross with me, but when …’ Lauren stopped talking and gave a massive sob. ‘When …’
James reached out from under his sheets and put his hand on Lauren’s knee.
‘At first, when you were missing I was
so
scared,’ Lauren sobbed. ‘Then they found you and I was OK. But then they said about the emergency landing and you were drifting in and out of consciousness and they didn’t know how badly injured you were. So when you got back here I … I told Zara that the only way I’d leave your side was if they dragged me out kicking and screaming.’
James felt his eyes blurring with tears. ‘Come on sis, I’m gonna be OK.’
‘I know we have our own friends and that, James, but you and me are special. We go all the way back to when Mum was alive. I mean, I can remember when I could barely walk and I used to drive you nuts by following you
everywhere
.’
If it hadn’t been for tubes, bruises and a complete lack of energy, James would have sat up and hugged her. ‘Brothers and sisters are weird,’ he croaked. ‘Somehow you end up loving each other but making each other crazy at the same time.’
Two days after his operation, James was still in hospital and going stir crazy. The bruises and swellings were reducing, all of his tubes and sensors had been removed and he was eating normally and using the toilet down the hall. Lauren agreed to return to campus once she saw that her brother was on the road to recovery, but she still travelled to the hospital after lessons every day, usually accompanied by Kerry and a couple of James’ other mates.