Authors: Sebastian Faulks
Leiter levered himself up on to his elbow. ‘But if you’re not letting them have all the detail they need . . .’
As he spoke, he saw a shadow on the dusty ground behind J. D. Silver’s black penny loafers. Felix’s CIA training, many years ago but wired deeply in his reflexes, stopped him reacting in any way.
But he knew he needed to keep talking. ‘I don’t think you’re telling me the whole truth, Carmen. Sure, we want the Brits in Vietnam; sure, I think those guys in the State Department would absorb a small attack if they thought it would help us in the long run. But not this. This is a big one. A very big one. Know what I think, Carmen? I think someone told stories
about you. You and your car men. I think you got turned. Blackmail. I think someone from the Soviet Union had a little word with you, my friend, and – ’
Silver screamed in anger and raised his gun to fire at Felix’s heart, but before he could pull the trigger, part of the contents of his head shot through his nose, as Hamid crashed a heavy white rock down on to his skull, with a crack that echoed round the foothills of Noshahr.
Felix climbed shakily to his feet. He put his good arm round Hamid’s shoulder. ‘ Thank you, Hamid.’
‘
Allahu Akbar
.’
Felix took a moment to regain his breath. ‘Yes, I think he is. I think you may be right there, Hamid. Now let’s get Mr Alizadeh home.’
Bond calculated that they had been airborne for nearly three hours. He could see in the clear sunlight that they were over the Ural mountains.
‘Can I talk to the pilot?’ he said to the guard in the aisle seat. The man shook his head. He probably didn’t speak English, Bond thought.
‘Get Massoud,’ he said.
The man shook his head again.
‘I need to know how this plane works,’ said Bond.
‘Get Massoud, will you?’
The guard made guttural noises to the man in the seat in front of them, and this guard, who wore an American cap of the Chicago Bears, got reluctantly to his feet and went forward. A minute later, he returned – not with Massoud but with Ken Mitchell.
‘ They want you up front now,’ said Mitchell.
‘Don’t try anything funny.’
‘Who’s flying this thing at the moment?’ said Bond.
‘It’s on autopilot. You don’t have to do a thing. Not until we get close. Then we have to lose height.’
‘Do you know why?’ said Bond.
‘No. Funnily enough, when I have a gun at my head I just do what I’m told.’
‘I think it’s time you knew,’ said Bond. ‘In the hold of this plane is a large cargo of explosive. We’re going to drop it on Zlatoust-36, Russia’s biggest nuclear stockpile.’
‘Dear God.’ Mitchell slumped forward against the seat in front of him.
‘Now, Ken,’ said Bond, ‘do you still want me not to try anything funny?’
The guard next to Bond slapped him in the mouth with the back of his hand. ‘No talk.’
‘What going on?’ Massoud came down the aisle from the now empty flight deck.
He withdrew a Colt .45 from his waistband. Big
stopping power, thought Bond, but dangerous at this altitude.
‘Get up,’ said Massoud, pointing the gun at Bond’s head.
‘I’m not moving,’ said Bond.
‘Get up!’ screamed Massoud. He leaned over the guard and grabbed Bond by the throat. Bond could see how this ‘thick-neck’ had controlled the protection and racketeering of a whole bazaar. The guard undid Bond’s seat-belt and Bond kept his hands tight behind his back, holding the recently severed rope in them.
He allowed Massoud to manhandle him over the guard in the aisle seat, but as his hand trailed over the man’s neck, Bond dropped the cut ropes and sliced down with all his strength into the jugular vein with the shard of glass. Blood spurted on to the seat in front as the man screamed. As he fell forward, Bond grabbed the gun from his holster, and, swivelling powerfully on his heel, smacked the butt of it into Massoud’s face. Massoud fell back across the empty row of seats opposite, momentarily stunned, while Bond threw himself to the floor of the aisle. At the same moment there was the magnified
explosion of a Soviet pistol going off, and Bond saw the face of the guard in the seat in front of him blown
away as the bullet entered his head below the eye socket. The Chicago Bears cap was blown ten rows up the aircraft.
From the floor, Bond looked back down the aisle. Half-way up the economy section, her feet planted, and a Makarov 9 mm semi-automatic held at the apex of the triangle made by both hands joined, her long dark hair pinned neatly up beneath the cap, stood a woman in the brand-new, pressed uniform of a BOAChostess.
The guard from the row behind Bond’s leaned out into the aisle and fired at Scarlett. As he did so, he presented a simple target to Bond, who fired up from the floor with the Luger he had taken from his neighbour. The man’s body fell back across the seats. Massoud, meanwhile, had gathered himself and struggled to his feet. Scarlett saw him coming and fired again with her Makarov as Bond threw himself at Massoud’s ankles. Bond was on top of him in the cramped space of the legroom in the row opposite. He got his hands round Massoud’s throat, but found himself thrown back across the gangway as
Massoud’s big Colt went off once.
The bullet went straight through the reinforced Perspex window next to the guard Bond had just shot. The immediate decompression sucked the
man’s corpse towards the small jagged hole, where for the time being it made an effective plug. There was a shout from Mitchell. ‘Stop shooting!
Something’s screwed up the bloody autopilot!’
The big new aircraft, so powerful and smooth on its flight thus far, suddenly lurched, fell about a hundred feet, stopped as though it had hit a solid floor, sending a shudder through every rivet of the airframe, then howled and began to dive.
Bond, Massoud and Scarlett were all thrown to the floor.
‘Get to the flight deck, Ken,’ Bond shouted. ‘For God’s sake, we’re going down.’
Bond’s face was drenched in the blood from the jugular of the man he had stabbed, while all around them the first-class seats were spattered with the red brain and muscle of the other two thugs. Bond was shouting and swearing at Ken Mitchell, but Mitchell seemed paralysed by panic, merely gripping the edge of one of the seats. Bond crawled over and shoved the muzzle of his gun into Mitchell’s ear.
‘If you don’t get on that flight deck right now I’m going to blow your brains out. Go!
Go!
’
Mitchell began to slither and slide down the bloody, plummeting aisle. Bond could see his face screwed up in tears.
‘Get in there!’ roared Bond.
Massoud managed to find a foothold long enough to fire at Bond, but the buffeting of the turbulence as the plane continued to dive caused the bullet to go upwards into the ceiling.
Further back in the plane, Scarlett had taken a handhold on a seat leg. But it was evident she had no clear view of Massoud and was holding her fire.
Mitchell staggered towards the flight deck as the other three held on to the sides of the seats. Bond could see Massoud’s legs about five rows back, but hesitated to fire in case, even with the under-powered Luger, he caused further decompression.
The next thing he knew, the plane took another gigantic buffet, and pitched downwards. Mitchell crashed against the bulkhead and fell to the floor. Scarlett screamed and Bond saw her body sliding down the aisle. Massoud caught her as she went past and held on to her arm. Bond watched as he drew her into his row, with his arm round her throat. She had lost her gun.
Somehow, in the yawing and pitching aircraft, Massoud managed to get to his knees, dragging Scarlett with him for cover. His strength was extraordinary, thought Bond. He was like a caveman
dragging off his woman by the hair as he manoeuvred them both towards the front of the plane with one free hand. As he went past Bond, their eyes met and Bond saw the muzzle of his gun in Scarlett’s ear. There was no need for words. Once Massoud hit the blood, he was almost able to slide down to the flight deck – where he took the empty pilot’s seat.
The plane levelled out, and Bond surveyed the damage. The holed window was continuing to cause decompression, and it was hard to move against the sucking force. Some of the seats had been shaken free of the floor, and Bond knew that if the guard’s body finally succumbed to the pressure and broke through the Perspex, the situation would worsen dramatically.
Mitchell seemed to be unconscious, and his body lay where it had fallen across the aisle just short of the flight deck.
Bond made his way down, stepped over Mitchell and opened the door. Scarlett sat at the controls with Massoud’s gun against her head.
Massoud looked at Bond calmly. ‘Drop your gun. Or I kill her.’
‘You wouldn’t risk firing again,’ said Bond. ‘Not with that big thing.’
Massoud dropped his arm and pulled hard across Scarlett’s windpipe. ‘ This what we do in bazaar,’ he said. ‘ To traders who don’t pay. No need to fire.’
‘All right, all right,’ said Bond.
‘Sit down.’ Massoud pointed to the co-pilot’s seat.
‘Give me gun.’
Bond saw Scarlett’s wide and frightened eyes pleading silently with him and did as he was told. Massoud glanced rapidly at a chart he had taken from the central console and, more carefully, at the forest of dials in front of Scarlett. ‘Six minutes,’ he said. ‘ Take plane down.’ And he demonstrated to Scarlett how, when he moved the control arm forward, the plane lost height. Beside him, beneath his right hand, was the switch that Gorner’s engineers had installed. It connected to the bomb rack and the door-release mechanism in the adapted cargo bay. Massoud was fingering it impatiently.
At the same moment, the Ekranoplan was taking on fuel from a tanker at a prearranged stop off Fort Shevchenko on the westernmost tip of Kazakhstan. The target was thus a static one for the pilots of the three RAF Vulcan B-2s coming in at five thousand feet at just below the speed of sound – a velocity
they had maintained since departing from their secret location in the Gulf, scrambled by an emergency order from Northolt, based on information from a Noshahr call box via Tehran and Regent’s Park. One of the planes was loaded with a Blue Steel missile, a rocket-powered stand-off bomb armed with the 1.1 megaton yield Red Snow warhead. The other two carried 21 one-thousand-pound conventional bombs.
The nuclear-armed aircraft was instructed to attack only if the first two planes were unsuccessful and stood off at a distance of some twenty miles. As the British pilots closed in for the kill, the airwaves crackled with anticipation. They began the operation with both leading Vulcans on a classic ‘lay-down’
attack, releasing ten bombs each in a long, wavering trail.
The sea around the Ekranoplan rose up in towering sheets of salt water that swamped the tanker as well as the hybrid craft herself, which shook to the limit of her stress equations. But she remained intact as the bombers climbed up into the sun, banked and regrouped.
Neither pilot was trained for a second pass, as the slow delivery speed of the aircraft made it vulnerable to Triple ‘A’ and surface-to-air missiles. ‘ The kitchen
sink first time’ was the pilots’ rule of thumb, but these were no ordinary circumstances.
After brief radio contact, both planes came round for a second attempt, but this time the Ekranoplan was ready for them and fired one of its missiles directly into the flightpath. Seeing its approaching white vapour trail, the pilot of the first plane fired chaff and went into a sharp emergency climb. The second plane was slower to react, and the missile, rising like a lethal white firework, tore a section from the starboard wing. Unable to control the plane, the pilot was forced to climb as high as he could before ejecting, his co-pilot following suit, their parachutes opening five thousand feet above Fort Shevchenko. The stricken plane spiralled back into the sea with three crewmen still on board.
The first Vulcan, meanwhile, levelled off, and, after a steep banking manoeuvre, ran in at nine hundred feet for a seemingly suicidal third pass. This time, however, its angle and low altitude were too much for the stranded amphibian’s defences, and the plane dumped its remaining bombs with geometric precision. As they hit the side of the fuel tanker there was a calculated delay before detonation to allow the aircraft to escape the blast.
The astonished Vulcan pilot looked down from
his climb to see the Ekranoplan lifted clear of the water and disintegrating into a million particles as the giant explosion shook the Caspian Sea to its bedrock.
.
18. Zlatoust-36
‘One minute,’ said Massoud.
Below them, the Ural mountains towered grey and jagged. They could make out the sprawling city of Chelyabinsk in the eastern foothills to their right. Away to the left a large expanse of water stretched to the western horizon. The bright sun and clear, sparkling air made navigation childishly simple. Under Massoud’s instruction, Scarlett continued to move the control arm forward so the needle in the altimeter whirled anticlockwise and the big plane tilted steeply down towards the nuclear city of Zlatoust, cradled in its secret folds of rock. The door of the flight deck burst open, and a Luger pistol pointed at Massoud’s head. It was all that Bond needed. As Massoud turned his gun away
from Scarlett, Bond threw himself across the cabin and grabbed his arm.
The roaring sound of a shot reverberated round the small area, and Ken Mitchell pitched forward, the Luger falling from his hand. Bond and Massoud were now locked in a struggle to the death, with Scarlett tangled between them.
The combined weight of their bodies on the control arm had sent the plane into a nose dive, and Bond’s knee was jammed against the throttle levers, making the Rolls-Royce Conway engines howl. Bond felt Massoud’s fingers on his neck, digging down for the arteries. He thought of the slave workers in Gorner’s plant and of the girls paraded for them. He smashed his forehead into Massoud’s face, and, as the thick-neck reeled back against the side of the cockpit, Bond drove his knee into the unprotected groin.