Dark Horizon, page 29
Zameer’s hot breath reeked of stale tobacco and Nasir scowled back at him. ‘I did no such thing—’
‘Liar!’ Zameer’s rage was out of control, and he smacked Nasir around the head, like a teacher disciplining a troublesome student. ‘You have always been irresolute where Hamid was concerned!’ He jabbed a finger at him. ‘You should have let Malik break his neck! You shame me, you shame al-Sakakin, and you shame God himself with your faults!’
But Nasir was no longer listening to the older man’s spittle-flecked ranting. His gaze was caught by a blaze of smoky white light in the air above and the echo of strange thunder off the distant sides of the valley.
The first of the cruise missiles hurtled by in a blur, the crackling rocket motor passing over the Hawker as the rolling jet reached the mid-point of the airstrip.
Kate fought the impulse to turn her head and watch the weapon hit, but still the impact lit up the night like a brief flicker of daybreak.
Guided in by coordinates drawn from satellite imagery, the lead missile roared over the heads of their pursers and struck the airfield’s central buildings, the stubby control tower, the barracks and the block where Kate and the others had been held captive. Its penetrator warhead drilled into the foundations before it detonated, fire bursting up from beneath the structures like a volcanic eruption.
The shockwave threw up debris and fractured concrete, briefly compacting the air into an expanding ring of white vapour that swept over the airfield, knocking down anyone on their feet and slamming on to the fleeing jet with the force of a charging rhino.
Kate felt the Hawker jerk sideways, and she fought it, putting all she had into raising the nose. The juddering undercarriage left the ground as the second Tomahawk made its death-dive through the blossoming dust cloud created by the first.
The trailing missile dove into the far end of the runway, where the satellites had pegged the location of the parked jet. The Hawker wasn’t there any more, but Zameer, Nasir and the men with them were. They perished without time to scream as the missile tore open asphalt, earth and sandstone.
The second shockwave hit the jet with enough force to whip Kate’s head back and forwards against the seatback, sending a bolt of livid agony down her neck. The Hawker’s nose dipped alarmingly, but she countered by forcing it into a sharp, climbing turn, fighting it every last degree with more power from the engines.
‘Fly, you bugger!’ she shouted, ‘Fly!’
Green indicators on the control board answered back by flicking to amber and bright red. The jet’s yoke vibrated under her hands and every dial Kate looked at had something bad to tell her.
Twitchy with adrenaline, she fumbled at the navigation panel, forcing herself to keep her fingers steady as she stabbed out commands on the illuminated keypad. As the plane banked, she caught sight of the glow of fires on the ground through the canopy’s side window.
From the inky darkness of the night sky, it was hard to pick out detail, but it was clear that the airfield had been ruined, scoured from the face of the world in a brief and terrible hell storm.
Kate forced herself to look away and not dwell on Lillian Breeze, on the co-pilot Ray and the dead men they were leaving behind. The Hawker was up, and they were flying. But how long that would last was a question she didn’t have the answer for. The jet was losing fuel and hydraulic fluid at an alarming rate, something that could only have been caused by multiple bullet punctures through the fuselage.
She straightened out the turn as best she could, finding the jet on a swift northerly heading toward the Algerian coastline and the Alboran Sea beyond. Kate frowned as she tried to calculate their fuel consumption, hearing movement back in the rear cabin.
‘We live,’ said Hamid, as he made his way on to the flight deck. ‘Once more, you prove your worth.’
‘Yeah, well, you can take your praise and shove it,’ she replied coldly. ‘I should have kicked you off and left you behind to cook with the rest of your shit-bag mates.’
Hamid chuckled, entertained by her resentment. ‘But you did not, because you are not capable of that act.’ He climbed into the co-pilot’s seat once again, scowling at the warning lights. ‘I know your kind, Hood. You can kill when it is as easy as pushing a button to drop a bomb on a faceless target. But when you have to look your enemy in the eye? Your will is lacking.’
She couldn’t find a response – on some level Kate knew he was right. Tonight she had used a gun in anger. She had shot at men who wanted her dead, but it was still at a remove. It was impersonal and distanced. And, after all of that, she still hadn’t been able to save Breeze’s life.
Hamid leaned forward, studying the map screen. ‘We must leave this area as quickly as possible, before the Americans come to check on their handiwork.’ He smiled slightly. ‘In a way, they have done me a service. They have disposed of the dead wood.’
‘Your brother was down there.’
He shrugged. ‘Nasir made his choice. And he has paid for it.’
Kate expected nothing more. If Hamid was true to anything, it was only his ruthless sense of self-preservation.
She turned back to the controls, studying the flickering digital map, thinking aloud. ‘The nearest airport we can approach is to the west, at Nador-Al Aaroui across the Moroccan border.’ She looked in that direction. ‘They have a long runway there; I can declare an emergency.’
‘And deliver me into the hands of the very enemies I sought to escape?’ Hamid shook his head. ‘No. You will maintain this heading across the water.’ He fiddled with the map display, shifting the image, and Kate sensed he was piecing together a plan of action as it came to him. ‘There is an airfield in southern Spain, in the Sierra de Tejeda range. I have contacts in that region.’
Kate considered telling Hamid that it was unlikely the Hawker would make it that far, or that the Spanish Air Force would scramble its F/A-18 Hornet interceptors to shoot them down if they appeared on radar – all probable fates for the wounded jet. Instead, she asked the more pertinent question: ‘Why the hell would I do anything you say?’
Hamid cocked his head, watching the thin line of the coast as it passed beneath the Hawker’s wings. ‘Because those you care for are not safe from me. Al-Sakakin could find them before, and I will have them found again. Let us say you take us to Morocco, say that I am arrested and incarcerated once more. Do you think that will make you safe from me? The equation has not changed. Your lover and his son will die screaming if you do not take me to safety. That is the bargain that was struck tonight, yes?’
He delivered his ultimatum with cool arrogance. Beside Kate sat a man who lived a life soaked in violence, willing to do anything and everything to justify his twisted, odious impulses. In that moment, she saw right through – finally – to who Hamid really was.
‘You do what you do and you say it’s about a God and a religion,’ she told him, ‘but it isn’t. That’s a mask you wear, the same way you wore Yusuf’s identity. That man Zameer knew it, didn’t he? That’s why he wanted you gone. You use that lie to justify the horrible actions you commit; the murders and the bombings. You do it because, deep down, you’re not really a believer. You’re just a stunted little fucker with a black heart full of hatred.’
Anger flashed in Hamid’s eyes, but then he looked away. ‘Perhaps so. But I am still the one in control here.’
Breeze’s last words echoed in Kate’s mind. He can’t disappear again.
She fell silent, the moment stretching as they flew on into the darkness over the sea. Kate knew Hamid would disappear, if by some miracle they made it to landfall in Spain. He would kill her the moment they touched down. He would vanish into the shadows, gather those still loyal to him and resurface in a few months at the head of another terrorist atrocity. And Kate would have allowed it to happen.
‘No,’ she said, at length. ‘You’re not in control. I am.’
Her right arm shot out and she punched Hamid in the head with as much force as she could muster, slamming his face against the control panel. Then, before he could recover from the blow, Kate rammed the flight yoke all the way forward.
The Hawker’s engines shrieked as the nose dipped sharply, and the jet fell into a terminal dive toward the wave-tops rolling beneath them.
Hamid reeled back in the co-pilot’s chair, his face a mask of red from a free-flowing gash across his forehead. The G-force of the jet’s full-speed descent pressed both of them into the backs of their seats, but still he tried to clutch at her, clawing wildly at Kate’s arm as he cursed and yelled.
Starlight glittered over the surface of the water, giving it the look of a sheet of beaten silver, and Kate focused her attention on sending the Hawker into its embrace. She remembered the off-hand threat she’d made earlier, to crash the jet into the sea and end this whole damned nightmare of a flight. Now that promise would consume her.
With a cry of effort, Hamid pitched across the flight deck’s centre console and grabbed her, landing a powerful punch in Kate’s stomach and pulling at the yoke. As she reacted, the Hawker’s nose came up, but it was too late to stop the inevitable.
Even with its terminal trajectory flattening, it was impossible to pull away in time. The jet’s damaged underside struck the wave-tops with a stunning crash of splitting metals. For one dizzying second, the Hawker skipped over the sea, and then a line of fracture from the collision opened a jagged rent in the starboard wing root. Conduits, cables, framework and skin peeled back and the wing tore off, flicking up and away.
Still moving forward as it slowed against the resistance of the waves, the Hawker’s fuselage rolled over, its portside wing coming up like the sail of a racing yacht. On the flight deck, Kate twisted upwards, held in her seat by the safety restraint belts. Hamid had no such protection, dragged away from her by gravity to fall downward against the starboard panels.
Shock made her shiver, and she swallowed back vomit. Kate’s chest, arms and joints seethed with pain from the force of the impact. She tasted blood in her mouth and let out a ragged cough.
The stricken jet listed in the swell as the last of its forward velocity bled away. Then it tilted sharply backwards, the tail falling and the nose rising, as the heavy engines clustered at the rear of the Hawker pulled it down.
Behind her, Kate heard the percussive gush of seawater flowing into the passenger cabin, punching its way through the damage done by the lost wing. As the cabin flooded, the jet’s weight increased. It would quickly be dragged under the waves and, if it didn’t break apart, all the way to the bottom of the Mediterranean shallows.
Hamid rolled off the panels and skidded to the back of the flight deck, still alive and still mobile despite Kate’s hopes to the contrary. He growled in pain, clutching at a broken wrist, but the sound shifted abruptly. The terrorist laughed at her.
‘Incredible,’ he snorted, wiping blood from his face. ‘I have taught my lessons well. You learned, Hood! You learned from me! Finally you are willing to kill your enemy, even if you lose your life in the act.’
Is he right? The question burned like the pain across her body. This mad, suicidal gesture. It is what he would do!
Kate twisted, working the release on the safety restraints as the jet’s nose rose slowly toward the vertical, the lights on the control panel flickering and dying.
He can still get out, she realised. The escape hatch over the wing was awash, but the main boarding door was above the waterline. He can reach it and slip away. He can still disappear.
‘It will not be enough,’ Hamid told her, as if intuiting her thoughts. ‘I have not come this far to be ended by the likes of you. Be assured – when I am safe and this is over, I will make sure those you love pay for your defiance.’ Then, without giving her another moment of consideration, he scrambled down the steepening incline of the deck and into the vestibule, clutching at handholds.
Looking back – looking down at him now – Kate could make out Hamid’s shadowed form as he worked at the boarding hatch’s emergency release mechanism. Beneath him, briny water churned and frothed as it continued to fill the cabin.
In that second, Kate had never hated anyone as much as she hated Hamid. Not those martinets who had shredded her dreams of flying fast jets, not the man who had told her he loved her and lied to her face, not the people who had used her and threatened her with the mistakes of her past.
Hamid was all that stood between Kate and peace. He was too lethal to be let back out into the world. Not just to her, or to Alex and George, but to anyone unlucky enough to be caught in the firing line of his rage.
Kate rolled off the back of her seat and dropped down the flight deck, the floor and the ceiling now the walls, the rear bulkhead now beneath her feet. She clipped the frame of the safety door as she fell, scoring a nasty wound on her shin, but the pain was a brief flash of sensation as she passed through the gap and slammed full tilt into Hamid.
The force of the impact tore him away from the half-opened boarding hatch and both of them crashed into the stinging, night-cold water filling the back of the cabin.
Coiling about one another, Kate and Hamid went under, trading sluggish blows and kicks, the flood around them choked with floating debris. Strange pulses of colour illuminated the water, blood-shade crimson glowing from the remaining navigation light and white flashes from the anti-collision strobe.
Hamid loomed over her and bellowed, air frothing out of his mouth in a foam of bubbles and furious sound. He punched at her torso and Kate felt the knife-stab of a rib cracking.
She knew that if she ran out of air, if she had to go back up to the surface, he would win this fight. Her only allies were speed and violence.
He doesn’t think you’re capable of fighting back, said a voice in her head, a voice that sounded like Lillian Breeze’s sarcastic drawl. Prove him wrong.
Ignoring the burning in her lungs, Kate clawed at Hamid’s face, jabbing her thumbs into his eyes. Then she grabbed his shoulders and forced him down deeper into the cold seawater, putting her full weight on him as he flailed madly.
In the flashes of light, Kate saw a line of nylon cargo netting adrift around them, floating up from where it was tethered to the deck.
She snatched the closest handful of net and pulled it across, bunching it up, wrapping it around Hamid’s thrashing arm. He tried to jerk free, but it had the opposite effect, stirring the water and dragging up more of the nylon webbing. He saw what she was trying to do and landed another brutal blow in her belly. She lost her breath in a rush of air bubbles and fought down the urge to flee.
Kate pushed hard against the cabin wall and heaved the cargo net over Hamid’s head. Every fibre in her body screamed for breath, begging her to swim away. She twisted the line around Hamid’s neck and kicked him in the head, shooting upward with the force of impact.
He grabbed at her ankle and tried to pull her back down, but Hamid was caught between trying to save himself and taking Kate with him. For an instant, she feared he would let himself die just to make her pay for fighting back, but then her foot cracked him across the nose and he let go, struggling frantically to free himself as the Hawker sank deeper.
Kate’s head and shoulders burst out of the water. The flooding had risen to the level of the vestibule, with another torrent streaming now in through the half-open boarding hatch. As a last act, she grabbed the day-glow yellow mass of a life vest floating nearby and put her shoulder into the hatch, screaming with effort as she forced it open wide enough to drag herself through.
The pull of a wave caught her, shoving her away from the sinking wreck. She managed to tug the vest over her head and secure it. Pulling the inflation toggle, compressed air filled the yellow bladder around her neck and torso, automatically righting her to a head-up position.
She could only float in the peak and trough of the shallow waves and watch as the Hawker submerged. The crumpled pinnacle of the jet’s nose cone retreated into a slick of oil and loose debris floating on the surface. With a last outgassing of air, like a sad exhalation of breath, it went under.
Kate stared fixedly at the spot where the plane sank as the cold of the sea crept through her clothes and her flesh, pushing its way into her bones. Her numbed, shaking hands found a shard of broken aluminium fuselage floating among the wreckage and she held it tightly, barely registering the sharp edges against her palm.
She waited for what seemed like forever; waited for the water to froth and eject a furious Hamid back into the air. Ready to bury her makeshift dagger in his throat. Ready to look him in the eye and kill him, if that was what it would take.
But that moment never came, and slowly Kate allowed herself to accept that her ordeal might be over. She let go of the metal shard and it drifted away.
Triggered by immersion in the water, the flotation vest’s automatic emergency light and locator beacon blinked into action, broadcasting a signal that would be picked up by any ships in the area. If someone had seen the Hawker go down – if a vessel was close enough to get to her in the next couple of hours – she might still win the race before hypothermia set in. But if not . . .
Kate pushed that dark thought away, into the depths. She sank back, her aching neck pressed against the vest’s thick collar, and looked up at the cloudless night filling the sky above her, from horizon to horizon.
Stars shone diamond-bright up there, and she let out a gasp. The hot streaks of tears lined Kate’s face over her pale, cold cheeks, and finally she found the brightest glow above; the resolute light of Polaris.
Smiling, as she thought of Alex’s warm touch on her hands and the sound of George’s laughter, Kate closed her eyes and waited for the dawn.
Acknowledgments
Writing a book can often feel like flying a plane – working to get air under the wings and keeping things at altitude to go the distance – but while the author is the pilot, there’s always a big crew of people who help to keep everything airborne with provision in personal and professional capacities.
