Atom Bomb Angel

9

Totes is a small town that lies midway between Dieppe and Rouen, and is really more a large village. Like many sleepy French places, it straddles two main roads. At one end of Totes is an outstandingly beautiful manor house, with red brick walls and white shutters, set some way back from the road. Half a mile up a cart track behind it, is a cluster of barns, silos, cowsheds, chickens, dogs and pigs, the central point of which is an ancient, grey stone farmhouse.

The proprietor, Gaston Leuf, was a wizened old farmer, with a shrivelled body and a wrinkled face. Except when he was sleeping, he had never been seen without a blue beret on his head and the stump of a yellow Gauloise sticking out of his mouth. If you ever wanted a photograph of a classic French farmer, you’d travel a long way to find a better specimen than Gaston Leuf.

It was a glorious early November morning, and the whole of Normandy was shrouded in a three-foot-high mist that the sun was slowly dispersing. The whole land looked like a fairy-tale setting, and there was a feeling of serene peace.

Leuf had been looking forward to today, for today he was going to show off; today for the first time in his life, he would be driving to market in a new tractor. It was a gleaming orange and dark grey Renault TX 145-14 Turbo, with sixteen forward and sixteen reverse gears, all with synchromesh, a maximum forward speed of thirty kilometres per hour, and an air-conditioned all-weather cab.

Today, everyone would be jealous, as he thundered, not rattled, but positively thundered, into market, at the helm of the turbo-charged Renault, towing his covered cattle wagon behind him. He hurried into the kitchen, where his wife, Yvonne, was brewing the coffee.

‘Bonjour, ma cherie!’ He kissed her on the cheek. ‘Voom, voom!’ he said, like the excited schoolboy he had once been, sixty years ago. The land he had sold to the council would be paying for a lot of things, but none would he enjoy more than his tractor.

Before sitting down to his breakfast of coffee and bread rolls, he hurried out to the large barn to look once again at his new machine. He pulled open the doors and marched in, beaming. Then he stopped in his tracks and the beam froze on his face. The tractor had gone. The trailer had gone too, but for several moments he did not notice that. He did not notice, either, that both his ladders were gone. He stood, staring in blank amazement. Who, in all the sleepy decades that Totes had passed through, had ever heard of one drop of milk, or one egg, or one chicken, let alone one whole great, spanking brand-new synchromesh-geared Renault tractor being stolen? Leuf spat on the ground. ‘Vache!’ he said, and spat again. ‘Qui?’ he said, ‘mais qui?’

If you happen to be a person who enjoys a good night’s kip, the sewage tank of an Illushyn 62 aircraft is probably not the place for you; it sure as hell wasn’t for me. I looked at my watch. It was five to seven. It was about the three hundredth time that I had looked at my watch since half past six the previous evening. Outside it would be light; people would be waking up, getting their morning papers, having hot showers and warm toast and splashing on sweet-smelling colognes and aftershaves and talcs.

Shortly after nine o’clock, I began to hear signs of activity: the electric whine of baggage-loader trucks, the rattle of a catering truck, then the thumping of footsteps, and the whole aircraft shaking — passengers were boarding.

At five past ten precisely, I heard the first engine fire up. The hissing whine started low at first, then built to a higher and higher pitch, and then the next engine started, and repeated the process, and then the next, until all four were whining fiercely, and then they died down to a quieter deeper pitch. A few moments later, I was sent skidding across the floor of the tank and crashed into the back wall; the plane couldn’t have been moving more than a few miles per hour, but the floor was so slippery that it only needed the slightest motion to send me hurtling out of control like a clown on an ice rink. I got back underneath the lavatory and gripped onto the grab handles.

The plane was now taxiing at a good speed. I wondered which way the wind was blowing — that would decide the direction in which we took off. I wondered, if the plane crashed, whether anyone would ever find me in here. I checked all my equipment, and tried for the hundredth time to push my gas mask against my nose and get rid of the damn itch that had been there for at least ten of the last fourteen hours. I desperately wanted to blow my nose, but there was nothing, nothing whatsoever, however bad, that was going to induce me to remove that gas mask.

The aircraft stopped; I knew we were probably standing in a queue of aircraft all waiting for take-off clearance from the control tower, and we remained motionless for several minutes.

Then the engines built up to a crescendo once more, and the aircraft began to move forward. My arms, holding onto the handles above me, stretched to their full length as the rest of my body was yanked by the acceleration back towards the rear of the tank. The wheels bumped, bumped, bumped, then the bumping suddenly stopped, and I swayed madly, like a gorilla on a trapeze, smashed my back up against the roof of the tank, and swung wildly down, cracking my knees on the floor.

The aircraft’s climb took an eternity, and my arms were aching like hell, but I was going to hang on; I was not going to go skidding across that damn floor any more. Finally the Illushyn began to level out, and the pressure came off my arms, and soon we were on an even keel. The four engines were all at the rear and the noise and the vibration down here was deafening me and shaking me to pieces at the same time. The steel chamber caused the noise to echo, and it seemed to be getting louder and louder. And then it began to happen: someone came into the lavatory.

I looked up, and watched trousers being pulled down, and then underpants, and then a pair of large pink cheeks descended towards me, with a hairy pair of balls and a long thin penis at the front. The whole lot dangled down inside the seat, blocking out almost all the tiny amount of light. I imagined the expression on the face of the owner of this apparatus. He had probably been holding his legs together since boarding the flight, and at the first opportunity, he had dashed in here, and was now seated with a gleam of blissful expectancy on his face. Had he known what lurked beneath him, I had a feeling the expression might have been somewhat different.

As I wondered, I took careful aim with my pistol: it was a Capchur gun, the type that zoo-keepers use for firing drugged darts into unapproachable animals. It works on compressed air, and the tiny pin-like darts dissolve in the skin they penetrate. With a ‘plunk’ that made a roar and an echo down here that sounded like a twenty-one-gun salute, a tiny dart filled with a large dose of Scoline embedded itself into the right cheek of the man’s buttocks. Even as he exclaimed in surprise, and began to stand up to find out why he had felt this sudden pin-prick pain, the drug had started to travel through his blood stream, turning him, fraction of second by fraction of second from being wide awake into being dog-tired; so dog-tired that by the time he got to his feet, he could not remember why it was that he had stood up, and by the time he had sat down again, he was fast asleep.

I unscrewed the four bolts, removed them, and then, using all my weight, and all the leverage I could get from the slippery floor, I pushed the bowl sideways, being careful not to send it and its occupant tumbling over with a crash that would bring a stewardess running in. He was a heavy customer, and it took a full minute of pushing to clear a gap for me to climb through. I had had to wait for someone to come into the lavatory in order that the door be locked — it was the only way I could emerge safely from my hiding place. The man whose luck it had been to come in first was a well-built man in his late forties; from his close-cropped hair and his poor quality clothes, I guessed he was almost certainly a Russian, but I wasn’t interested enough to start trying to make sure.

I rinsed my rubber-gloved hands, and dried them carefully, then peeled the gloves off — I didn’t want slippery fingers right now. I pushed earplugs into my ears, and turned them until they were a snug fit, then I removed the two stun grenades that were clipped to my belt. With only a two-second fuse on each, I didn’t want to go dropping them under my feet. At the same time, I didn’t want to expose myself in the aisle of the aircraft for longer than was necessary. The armed guards on Aeroflot flights are instructed to shoot on sight anyone behaving suspiciously. Appearing from the lavatory in a wet-suit and gas mask, with a minor arsenal of weapons hanging from clips around my body, it was not unlikely I would have qualified under the category of ‘suspicious behaviour’.

I unlocked the door, pulled it back, placed a grenade in each hand, and stepped out. I pulled out the pin of the first one with my mouth, lobbed the grenade as far down the aisle as I could, pulled the second pin out with my hand, and lobbed that grenade down towards the middle of the aisle, retreated into the lavatory and pulled the door hard shut.

There were two muffled booms in rapid succession, and I now had exactly ten seconds. The stun grenade is a device that was originally dreamed up by the SAS and developed for them. Known as flash-bangs, they had been modified by the Playroom boffins so as not to be a fire risk. They produce a combined flash and explosion that completely deafens, and their effect in a closed environment is to paralyze totally, for a minimum of ten seconds, anyone in their vicinity. They will not cause any actual bodily damage, other than to eardrums, and therefore would not, in theory, damage the structure of the aircraft. For the next ten seconds, everyone in the passenger compartment of the aircraft, including the KGB vigilante, would be paralyzed. The flight crew in the cockpit would be unaffected. They would have heard the two bangs, muffled somewhat, and they would doubtless be wondering what on earth had happened.

By the time four of the ten seconds had elapsed, I had sprinted the length of the aisle, negotiated two rigid stewardesses in the process, and was pressing the intercom button to the cockpit: in what the lingo expert at Combined Central Intelligence had informed me was a perfect Muscovite accent, I yelled the rough Russian equivalent of ‘Don’t sit there, you dumb motherfuckers. Come back and help us!’

It had the desired effect. As the eighth second elapsed, the door opened, and an inquisitive engineer poked his head out into what he expected would be the normal, pressurized air of the cabin, but was in fact a cloud of the same sleeping gas Horace Whalley had enjoyed, squirting hard out of the nozzle of the device that was now clamped under my right arm and looked not unlike an early-model Sten gun, but which was in fact a very recent model gas-gun. By the time the ninth second had elapsed, he was fast asleep, and after the tenth second had passed, so were his chums — the pilot, co-pilot, navigator and radio operator. I turned the nozzle down towards the aisle of the aircraft and squeezed the trigger much harder. Within seconds, the entire cabin was filled with the gas.

I pulled the flight crew out into the aisle, then went back into the cockpit and pulled the door firmly shut behind me. I looked at my watch: one minute and twenty seconds had elapsed. From the dose I had given, it would be some minutes yet before the people back in the cabin would begin to come round, although I couldn’t be sure. I hoped for their sakes it wouldn’t be much more.

It was five minutes to eleven. The sky was clear blue without a cloud to be seen, and Margate was twenty-three thousand feet below our port wing, as the plane continued its course on auto-pilot.

Didier Garner looked at his watch and grimaced. It was five to ten, Paris time; one hour and twenty minutes of his ten-hour working day had so far elapsed without his lighting up a single Winston. Normally he would be lighting his fourth about now, but today he was finished with smoking; he had quit, and he was going to stay quit. The last hour and twenty minutes had been hell, but he had got through them, and he would get through the rest of the day — somehow. He looked out of his window into Place Vendôme, out across the square towards the Ritz. It was a bright sunny November morning, and everything looked good for the director of Heli-Transport France. It was about time. For six weeks the company’s three Aérospatiale Puma helicopters, the backbone of his fleet, had been grounded by the authorities after a piece of engine cowling had sheared off one and plummeted through the roof of a parked car. The problem had been traced to a mechanic carrying out faulty maintenance work, but the grounding had cost the company a fortune. From today, the grounding had been lifted, and there was a full schedule for the helicopters for several weeks ahead, which would quickly resolve the company’s financial crisis.

The white telephone on his desk buzzed and he picked up the receiver to take a call from his chief engineer at their operational base in Senlis. Within sixty seconds of picking up the receiver, he had reached inside his desk, taken out a Winston cigarette, placed it between his lips, and was now holding the flame of his gold Dupont lighter to the end. During the night, someone had stolen all three Pumas.

I sat in the pilot’s seat of the Illushyn, and ran my eyes systematically over the controls. Up until three days ago, the largest aircraft I had ever flown was a twin-engined Piper Aztec, and now I was at the helm of an aircraft that was a Russian copy of a VC 10.

For the past three days, I had done nothing but take off, circuit and land a VC 10 at the British Airways training school; take off, circuit, land, until I was sick to the back teeth of doing it; take off, circuit, land until I could do it, do it all, without asking one single question. Right now, I was glad of those last three days, damned glad.

I checked the altimeter, the airspeed, and the rest of the instruments, took the control column in my left hand, and with my right hand, reached out and switched off the automatic pilot. A voice behind me suddenly bellowed through the intercom in Russian. I didn’t speak a great deal of Russian, but I knew enough to understand what the voice was saying. It was saying ‘Who the hell are you?’

I replied, in the best Russian I could muster. ‘Your plane is in the hands of the Israeli Freedom Front. Remain calm and nothing will happen to you; attempt to come through this door, and everyone on this aircraft will die.’ I knew there was no way they could get through the door. It had been designed to keep out the most determined of hijackers. The Stechkin pistol that the security guard doubtlessly carried, would in no way be capable of penetrating either the door or its bolts. I switched off the intercom, leaving them to stew.

Ten miles out over the North Sea, I looked carefully at the radar screen, and scanned the clear sky with my eyes. Then I started a long banking turn to the right and the English Channel. I was going to have to keep a sharp eye out. I had no flight plan filed for the course I was flying, and, moreover, I was heading up the Channel and straight across one of the world’s busiest air corridors.

Down below, and a long way to the left, I could make out Calais. Calais passed by and then Boulogne began to appear. Dover passed by on my right, and then Beachy Head came into view. Scanning every inch of the sky with my eyes, I descended to eighteen thousand feet, and then banked sharply to the left and headed straight for the French coast. I didn’t bother to switch the radio on; I knew that a torrent of abuse would pour out from the French air-traffic control boys. I descended to ten thousand feet.

After a few minutes, I could see Dieppe dead ahead and very clear. I cut the airspeed to two hundred and fifty knots, and started a sharper descent. We crossed Dieppe at seven thousand feet, and the Illushyn was beginning to respond very sluggishly to my movements of the control column. It was twenty-one minutes past eleven.

Two gendarmes were operating a speed trap on the N27 Dieppe to Rouen road. They sat on their Motoguzzi 1,000cc motor bikes, one of them beaming a vascar detector down the empty road behind them. It was a long, straight and very wide stretch of dual carriageway, and it was busy only in the summer months.

Behind the gendarmes was a large cornfield, across which a tractor chugged, pulling a large covered trailer. It was a smart new Renault tractor, but neither of the gendarmes paid any attention to it. Their eyes were on a silver sports car, a kilometre up the road, and coming their way at what looked considerably faster than the one hundred and forty kilometres per hour that were permitted. The gendarme holding the vascar detector aimed the device carefully and squeezed the trigger. The needle raced past the one hundred and forty mark, and carried on, past the two hundred mark, hit the stop at two hundred and twenty and snapped off.

The driver of the Aston Martin DBS Vantage held the slim steering wheel tightly in his hands. The Super-Snooper radar detector on his dash screeched loudly as he rocketed past the articulated lorry at one hundred and forty-five miles an hour, and he then saw the two gendarmes up ahead, by the roadside.

His reaction was to drop from fifth gear into fourth, and flatten the accelerator pedal. In spite of the speed at which he was already travelling, the massive brake-horsepower of the engine thrust the small of his back deeper into the rich leather of his seat-back, and the speedometer climbed up to one hundred and sixty-five miles an hour. He allowed himself a fraction of a second to look in the mirror and see that the police were setting off after him, and then they ceased to become even specks in the distance. He shifted into fifth gear, and the car surged forward. The speedometer swept past the one hundred and seventy mark, one hundred and seventy-five, flickered up past one hundred and eighty, and then finally hovered around the one hundred and eighty-five mark. He passed an orange 2CV Citroen and nearly blew it off the road with his slipstream. The driver was enjoying himself, and his enjoyment of the fine car and the thrill of the speed was all the more satisfying because he was actually being paid to do this.

A mile and a half behind him, the two Motoguzzis accelerated down the road, their sirens bleating. Half a mile behind them, the articulated lorry, with the Montélimar licence plates, suddenly acted very strangely, slewing across the road, and then reversing, so that it blocked the road completely.

My airspeed was now one hundred and forty knots. The stall-warning buzzer shrieked almost continuously. There was hardly any response to my movements of the control column. Down below, the road stretched out. Then the articulated lorry came into view, exactly in the right place. We passed barely fifty feet over its roof; I had full flap, the undercarriage down and locked, and beneath that bulbous nose in front of me, the road was rushing up to meet us. We sank down, down; I fought with the column to keep the nose up, and with the rudder to keep the aircraft straight. It must be now, I thought, it must be now! I pushed the four throttle levers forward, and as the surge of acceleration came, I felt the centre wheels touch, ever so gently, and I was about to congratulate myself. I pulled the throttle levers back to cut the thrust, but to my surprise, the aircraft at that moment lifted several feet back up into the air, and then thumped back down with a jarring I could feel through every bone in my body. We lifted up again and crashed down again, then up again, then down again, and this time, to my relief, we stayed down, racing along the road. Then finally, the nose came down and the nose-wheel touched. I waited for a moment for it to settle, then I wrenched the throttle levers right back into full reverse thrust, and stood on the brakes for all I was worth.

The speedometer sank: one hundred and twenty, one hundred, eighty, seventy, sixty, and finally down to ten knots. I turned the aircraft sharply to the right, off the road and into the cornfield, and halted about one hundred yards from the tractor, which was already pounding its way over to us.

I switched on the intercom. ‘There are detonators aboard this aircraft which will destroy it in exactly four minutes; you must open all exits, including the emergency exits, and you are to leave by the escape chutes, and get as far away from the aircraft as you can. Anyone who tries to interfere will be shot. Long live Israel! Freedom to the Jews in the Soviet Union!’

The tailgate of the articulated lorry lowered, and an Aérospatiale Puma helicopter appeared from inside. Another two followed it. All three had emblazoned on the sides the name: Heli-Transport France.

The tractor and trailer stopped at the rear of the aircraft. Among the contents of the trailer was a corpse with a new set of dentures. That corpse, which had been acquired through the services of the Department of Anatomy at the Elephant and Castle, had probably been given the best dental treatment to which any corpse had ever been treated. If the soldier who had died of a heart attack had known that the body he had donated to medical science would so serve his country, he would, for sure, have died a proud man.

The new dentures with which the corpse had been kitted were for the purpose of identification. They had been made, correct to the last detail, from the dental records of Sir Isaac Quoit. I sure as hell hoped Quoit was aboard this aircraft after the lengths to which we had been.

I could see passengers scurrying from the aircraft across the cornfield. Among them I recognized tough KGB deputy chief Ztachinov, evidently not as tough as he had thought. He was going to have some red-faced explaining to do when he got home, if he wanted to hang on to his job.

There were three taps on the door in rapid succession, followed by two slow ones, and then three more quick ones. I opened it up. Two men, wearing the blue denim peasant clothes of the French farming fraternity, but distinguishable from ordinary French farmers by the balaclavas that concealed their faces and the Sterling sub-machine-guns in their hands, stood outside.

‘Ready to go, sir. We’ve got Sir Isaac.’

‘Where was he?’

‘In the hold, surrounded by two thousand chickens.’

Two minutes later, the three Pumas lifted up into the sky. I looked down at the stubble of the cornfield, at the great silver bird with the red-star markings and the hammer and sickle on its tailplane, and the crowd of people standing, looking like bewildered ants, a few hundred yards off from the Illushyn. Suddenly the plane produced two orange bursts, followed by two thick puffs of black smoke, then a massive flame ripped down its entire length like a knife-blade, before turning into a blazing ball of fire that enveloped the plane completely. I looked across at the man who sat in the seat opposite me: a large, portly man, with nine days’ stubble on his chin, crumpled clothes on his body, and confusion in his eyes.

‘Don’t worry, Sir Isaac,’ I said cheerfully, ‘you’ll be back home within a few hours.’

Quoit smiled feebly. He would smile even more feebly when the news was broken to him that he was officially dead, and was going to have to stay dead for a considerable time to come.

One Puma peeled off and headed down towards the centre of France. The second peeled off and headed east towards Germany. We headed north, out towards the Channel. A long way west, down the Channel, beyond the control of the French coastguards, a Special Boat Service high-powered launch awaited us. Heli-Transport France would eventually get back two of its Pumas. One would be found abandoned in Germany, the other abandoned in central France. The third wouldn’t be found until the day the English Channel was drained.

The French coast slipped away beneath us. I looked at my watch: it was eight minutes to twelve, British time. At the switchboard of the France-Soir newspaper, one telephone line in particular would be engaged: the caller was telling the news editor about the successful hijack and the destruction of the Illushyn by the Israeli Freedom Front, a new faction whose aim was to rain blows upon the Soviet Union until every last Jew in Russia had either been released or was granted full rights as a citizen. Their first blow had just been dealt.

As the world read its papers, and heard its news, during the next twenty-four hours, I wondered how many people would ever guess that the Israeli Freedom Front’s name had been dreamed up on the fifth floor of MI5’s Carlton House Terrace headquarters, and that the group in question were not an assortment of fanatical Jews, but fourteen professional soldiers from a regiment of the British Army called the SAS, and one, not entirely unhappy, very hungry, and exceedingly smelly spy.