Atom Bomb Angel

8

The full Aeroflot Illushyn 62 accelerated down the runway, its four Kuznetsov turbo-fan engines greedily gobbling kerosene, and converting the precious liquid into something that was even more precious at this particular moment, as far as the pilot was concerned: the 92,600 pounds of thrust that would accelerate the Illushyn to the one hundred and forty miles per hour needed in order to lift off from the runway and avoid ploughing through the snow-covered perimeter and into the office buildings that lay a few hundred yards beyond.

Captain Yuri Gromkyan preferred, on balance, to fly in the summer; but when the aircraft was jam-packed, like today, to its maximum take-off weight, the denser air of winter was safer for take-off. He knew that on this November day, with the outside temperature hovering around the zero mark at four o’clock in the afternoon, the Illushyn needed four hundred yards less length of runway to take off than in the heat of summer.

He saw his co-pilot, Viktor Kieviz, out of the corner of his eye, scanning the engine and flight instruments, ready to call out the airspeed readings, leaving him free to concentrate on the ribbon of Moscow’s Sheremetieva Airport tarmac rapidly shortening in front of him.

‘One hundred twenty… one hundred thirty… one hundred thirty-five,’ read Kieviz.

In three seconds they would be past the point of no return for this runway, past the point beyond which, no matter what happened, he had to lift off. because he could never stop the aircraft in time to avoid going through that perimeter fencing, across the highway, and into the office complex.

‘One four O.’

Gromkyan pulled back the control column, the nose came up instantly and the tarmac began to drop away. When he had first learned to fly, on single-engined planes, he learned to push the control column forward a little immediately after lifting off, to let the flow of air build up under the wings, before starting the climb up to cruising altitude; but in this massive aircraft, it was the thrust of the jet engines rather than the airflow which propelled it upwards into the sky. He just kept the nose pointed at a seventeen-degree angle upwards, the throttles wide open, and instructed Kieviz to retract the undercarriage. Kieviz pushed the lever to the up position, and then flicked the switch that would extinguish the No Smoking sign in the 169 seat cabin behind the locked door at the rear of the cockpit.

There was, they both knew, a VIP in that cabin: Nicholai Ztachinov, deputy head of the KGB. He was coming out on this Sunday afternoon flight to Heathrow, London, and would be returning to Moscow in the morning. Ztachinov was a chain-smoker, and it had been made very clear to Gromkyan that Ztachinov did not like to be kept waiting for his smokes.

At two thousand feet, as they came up into the first wisps of cloud, Gromkyan engaged the automatic flight-control system, which was already programmed to fly to London. Almost immediately, the aircraft adopted a banking attitude, in a long slow sweep around, upwards and to the left, and then began to level out.

‘What do you fancy doing in London tonight, Viktor?’ asked Gromkyan.

‘A McDonald’s hamburger followed by a negress with big bazonkas.’

‘Count me in,’ said Yolef Stiz, the flight engineer who sat behind them.

‘And me too,’ grinned Gromkyan.

‘I’ll go along with that,’ said Vasilik, the radio operator. Korshov, the navigator nodded his assent also.

‘Botnick at the Embassy’s promised to arrange it all. He can get negresses for forty roubles.’

‘Forty roubles!’ said Stiz. ‘I don’t want one with gold teeth — just an ordinary one will do.’

‘Yes, well, you don’t want an ugly one do you?’ said Gromkyan. ‘Remember the story you told us when you were on the New York run?’

Stiz remembered. The negress he had picked up who was so cheap — so stunningly beautiful and yet so cheap. He’d clambered into bed and discovered she was possessed not of breasts and vagina, but of a pair of testicles and eight inches of penis.

Gromkyan scanned the instruments carefully, checking each one in turn. At seventeen thousand feet they broke through the cloud into the rich orange sky. The winter sun, a weak red ball, hung only a short distance above them. In one hour it would be almost dark. In sixty-five minutes they would be south of Riga, and in a further hour and a quarter they would be over Heligoland. There they would turn a few degrees to the left, cross the North Sea and fly over Clacton VOR and into London. It would be five in the afternoon local time when they arrived, and they should be in their Embassy quarters by six thirty. Gromkyan wondered whether Botnick was laying on the party in the Embassy, or whether they would be going out. He hoped they would be going out; he liked the atmosphere of London at night, even on a Sunday.

Behind the crew in the cockpit was a bullet-proof door which could only be opened from inside the cockpit — an anti-hijacking measure. On the other side of that door, one hundred and fifty passengers, including the deputy chief of the KGB, several Russian diplomats — including one KGB and two GRU agents — two English diplomats, a group of Russian buyers of agricultural machinery, twelve Englishmen in the overcoat-manufacturing industry, a Welsh university lecturer and his wife returning from their honeymoon, and a motley group of tourists and businessmen, together with the standard Aeroflot plain-clothed armed guard, were beginning to relax. They had survived take-off; they now had to survive only the service and the landing.

I stood outside the boundary of Heathrow, near a maintenance-area entrance. It was the kind of afternoon that makes organizers of garden fêtes hang themselves from marquee guy-ropes. It was filthy wet, and a continuous, thick spray of rain drove down, which was whipped into every pore on my face by a wind that blew solidly and strongly, without pausing to gust. It was exactly the sort of afternoon I had been praying for. It was five o’clock and nearly dark, and I knew nobody would want to know anything except getting his body inside a dry hot room and getting a cup of wet hot tea inside his body.

The guard in the hut at the entrance to the airside didn’t give a monkey’s about me, and unless he was about to qualify for the world speed-reading championships, he couldn’t have absorbed much of my pass — not that it would have mattered if he had, for it was a pretty authentic document. Nor did Hawkeye appear to think the orange boiler suit that I wore, and the blue metal tool box that I carried, to be out of order. He might have perhaps wondered why I was on foot and not in a vehicle, but he knew that the Russians were a strange lot, and if being communists meant they had to walk outside on a day like this, then that was their problem.

Fifteen miles to the east, an Aeroflot Illushyn 62 had just been given clearance by the Heathrow tower to land after a Quantas jumbo. Because of the high winds. Captain Gromkyan switched the controls to manual and began his landing descent, his eyes and Kieviz’s eyes glued to the instrument panels. Sinking slowly from the sky, the Illushyn moved onto the correct course for Heathrow’s runway 28 Left, and headed towards the airport at its approach speed of two hundred and ten knots.

I walked towards the maintenance hangars. Pan Am’s massive maintenance complex was over to the left, and beyond that was Air India’s.

The air filled with the howl of the Quantas jumbo coming in overhead, its flaps fully extended and hanging down, its undercarriage poised like talons, a bright light urgently winking, the air below shaking from the noise and the wake; it glided smoothly down and out of sight beyond the sheds, like some gigantic condor.

I reached the shadows of the British Airways hangars, and stayed there, walking around until I could get a clear view of the massive concrete parking area, and the particular section of it that interested me — Delta 32. An Air India Boeing 707 taxied across the apron. A fuel tanker drove off behind its tail into the murky dark. Another roar built up overhead, and with landing lights full on and belly lights winking furiously, full flaps down, and the rudder no doubt angled several degrees to the right into the vicious cross-wind an Illushyn 62 sank down out of the wet sky, through the wake turbulence of the jumbo before it, and onto the wet tarmac of the lighted runway.

Captain Gromkyan allowed the plane to cruise down the runway for some moments, then, satisfied that all wheels were down and the course was true, and assuming there were no obstructions ahead that should make him slam open the throttles and abort the landing — because he couldn’t see anything other than the lights which stretched out towards the horizon and converged some distance before it — he reached out his right arm, and pulled the throttle levers into full reverse thrust.

The four turbo-fan jet engines bellowed against the rain and the wind, their roar echoing across the acres of wet tarmac, grass and concrete, bouncing off the walls of the hangars, and then dying down as the aircraft slowed to taxiing speed. I stood, in the dark, with the rain concentrated above my head, by a poor gutter, into a raging stream that tore down the back of the neck of my boiler suit.

Outside the small French town of Carentan; on the route nationale 13, about fifty kilometres from Cherbourg, is a Routier restaurant much loved by French lorry drivers. One driver, Jean-Pierre Edier, had been looking forward to having dinner there all the way up from Montélimar, which he had left that morning. He had in fact already driven through Carentan on his way up to Cherbourg to deliver his load of nougat, bound for Quebec. Now he was shot of his load, he could relax, eat his dinner and have a good long sleep in the bunk bed at the back of the Volvo’s luxurious cab — since it was a Sunday, he could only deliver, he couldn’t collect. In the morning, he would pick up a load of cane sugar which he would deliver to Montélimar.

As Edier reached the doorway of the restaurant, he belched. A massive bowl of oysters, winkles, whelks, shrimps and crab, followed by white fish in cognac, followed by a hefty tournedos marinated in red wine, followed by a greedy chunk of camembert, followed by apple-and-meringue pie, washed down by a litre of vin ordinaire and a half-pint of cognac très rough, was getting near the limit the much-abused belly inside his sprawling frame could cope with. He shoved two francs inside a Space Invaders machine and lost all three of his men without firing a shot. He shoved two francs into a pinball machine and lost all five balls in rapid succession. He wisely decided it was time to call it a day.

As he negotiated his bulk through the flimsy doorway, the chilly night air blasted his face. He blinked twice, and stared across the road at where he was certain he had parked his company’s thirty-two tons of lorry and trailer; he blinked again, because what he was now staring at was an empty space, and none of the spaces nearby that were occupied by other vehicles was occupied by the vehicle that his gaze sought.

‘Merde!’ said Jean-Pierre Edier, wondering if calling the police in his inebriated state would be the smartest thing. ‘Merde!’ he repeated.

Captain Gromkyan obeyed the parking instructions at Heathrow Tower, and brought the Illushyn to a standstill at Delta 32. He closed the fuel cocks in front of him and slightly to the right, and the whine of the four engines slowly faded away. The electric gangway transporter was already heading out across the concrete towards them, and four men raced out of the gloom to place chocks under the wheels of the aircraft. A fuelling tender started its engine, and the sewage removal tender and the baggage trucks started forward.

I left my hiding place and, clutching my tool box, joined in the general throng of activity. A bunch of men and women in boiler suits identical to mine clutching boxes, brushes, pails, cloths and black bags, stood waiting quietly, heads bowed against the driving rain. Two passenger coaches pulled up at the foot of the gangway.

First down the gangway came Ztachinov, which gave me a shock; I had no idea he was on the plane. I recognized him from photographs. He had one of those faces one never forgets, and can never mistake — an ugly face, a face that bore a thousand grudges: a long thin nose; high cheekbones; short hair with a hint of a quiff at the front; cold eyes, one of them was glass — a legacy from a car accident — and it was a common joke that it was easy to tell which was the glass eye — it was the warmer-looking of the two.

After the last of the passengers had disembarked, the group of cleaners raced to get up to the top of the gangway and out of the cold and wet, and I placed myself in their midst. Nobody even stood at the entrance to look at the identity card each man and woman held out.

The interior of the plane was a drab green colour, and the atmosphere was more that of a troop transporter than a passenger liner. I marched straight down to the back and stopped at the last row of seats before the lavatories. From the top of my tool box, I took a screwdriver and pliers, and began to dismantle a reading light above one seat.

A cleaning lady walked past me, without paying me any attention at all and went into the first lavatory on the left. In the space of about thirty seconds, she had wiped the basin, checked the towels and tissues and the soap, mopped some urine off the floor, and moved on to the next lavatory. I continued to fiddle with the light. Less than a minute and a half later, her job with the three lavatories was done, and she walked off back down the aisle.

I screwed the cover back onto the light and slipped into the first lavatory on the left. I shut the door behind me, but didn’t lock it, and put my tool box on the floor. I took out a large adjustable spanner, wound it open until it fitted over one of the four bolts that secured the steel lavatory to the floor, and wound it tight onto the bolt.

The bolt wouldn’t budge at first, and a small amount of thread came away, but then it slackened and began to turn easily. I worked through the other three, lifting them out in turn and putting them carefully to one side; then I lifted up the entire lavatory, to reveal a black hole, about eighteen inches in diameter, which stank worse than the breath of a London Underground commuter. I put the seat down in the tiny space beside me. There was a sucking and gurgling, which told me the sewage tender had begun pumping the tank out.

At least the aircraft boffin at Combined Central Information knew his stuff. His tiny office was crammed full of model aeroplanes, and he looked more like an errant schoolboy than the three-times decorated Squadron Leader and fighter-pilot ace he had been in the Second World War. Reginald Braithwaite was known to the whole of British Intelligence as Biggles, and those that ever had dealings with him discovered one thing: there was nothing he didn’t know about aircraft. He had assured me that the Illushyn had a manhole directly underneath this lavatory seat, for inspection purposes, and he had been right; he’d also told me I would need a gas mask, an aqualung, and a wet-suit, and on that he was also right.

I already had the wet-suit on underneath the boiler suit, which I peeled off, and I removed the rest of the kit from the bottom two layers of the tool box; the kit included a stubby weapon with a bulbous magazine that looked not unlike an early Sten gun, and another weapon that resembled a Very pistol, and clipped them both onto the belt of my wet-suit. Then I took a bolt cutter, and snapped off the ends of the four bolts, so that they would lie in their holes without protruding, and look, to anyone that did not try to turn them, as if they were holding the bowl to the floor.

I waited until the tender had finished pumping, and then I put on the gas mask, pulled up the hood of my wetsuit, pulled on a pair of rubber gloves, packed up the overalls and the bolt-cutter into the tool box, and squeezed down into the hole.

My feet dangled into space, and for a moment I wondered if Biggles had got his measurements wrong and it was more than four feet to the bottom; but then my feet squelched into several inches of a slimy substance that I preferred not to think too hard about, and I touched the floor. I reached up my hands, and pulled the tool box down, placing it on the floor beside my feet, then reached up again, took hold of the lavatory bowl, and manoeuvred it back into its correct position. I took four bolts from the tool box, pushed them up through the four holes into the base of the lavatory, and hand-turned them until they were sufficiently tight to prevent the lavatory from moving. There was a small hole in the centre of the lavatory, through which I could see up into the tiny room; the light was on, but that would go off soon, when the maintenance men switched off the generator.

I stood bent double in this hell-hole, where I was to spend the next sixteen hours, listening to the sound of my breathing through the gas mask, idly hoping that some giant man-eating alligator hadn’t decided to make this place his home. It was cold, very cold, and I was already getting cramp from being arched. I didn’t want to sit down in that horrible mire, but I had a tough day ahead, and if I didn’t get some sleep tonight, I wasn’t going to be any good for anything.

As I gingerly began to lower myself down, I decided that, compared to this place, the Black Hole of Calcutta would be like a honeymoon suite at the Savoy.