Passenger 13

CHAPTER THREE

The place Ben had rented during his leave was a little ivied stone cottage right on the River Usk, in wooded countryside a few miles outside the Welsh market town of Brecon. Low ceilings, exposed beams, thatched roof, old-fashioned leaded windows that peeked out through ivy and climbing roses. The stone fireplace was adorned with brass ornaments, and in a nod to tradition a pair of crossed cricket bats hung over the mantelpiece.

Ben didn’t care too much for cricket, but he did care for the peace and quiet of the place, as far as you could get from the boiling white heat and madness of the desert war front line. He could have spent these few weeks at his house near Galway Bay on the western Irish coast, but they didn’t hold annual international jazz festivals there and the gunman who’d almost managed to kill him had kindly done so at just the right time to allow him to catch some acts he’d long wanted to check out.

Jazz was the last thing on his mind that night as he burst inside the cottage and went straight over to flip on the TV. Scanning through the channels in search of a news programme he grabbed a fresh bottle of Laphroaig from the cardboard box that served as his temporary drinks cabinet, ripped off the cap and poured himself out a triple measure.

When he found a news programme he wasn’t surprised to see that the Cayman Islands air crash was one of the headline items. He listened and watched intently: interviews with shocked island airport authorities; grim-faced mourners; aerial footage of Royal Cayman Island Police and Navy rescue craft pulling wreckage from the water. From the air it was clear that the inter-island shuttle aircraft must have come down on a bar of exposed coral reef in the middle of the sea while on a routine crossing from the tiny island of Little Cayman to Grand Cayman, its larger sister seventy-five miles south-west. The plane appeared to have detonated on impact. Judging by the charred state of the bodies so far recovered, nobody had stood a chance of escaping a horrible fiery death.

Ben gulped whisky and went on watching. The three-engined Britten-Norman Trislander being too small a plane to carry a ‘black box’ flight data or cockpit voice recorder, the primary witness on whose testimony the suicide theory hung was the air traffic controller reported to have been in radio contact with the pilot shortly before the crash, struggling to talk him out of bringing the plane down. In the aftermath of the crash, the controller was unavailable for comment.

Four of the dozen passengers aboard the CIC inter-island flight had been British: a holiday couple, their son, and a retired dentist. But the main focus was on the man the media were already branding ‘kamikaze pilot’ and ‘suicide killer’, Nick Chapman. His final words to the air traffic controller, captured on tape moments before the crash, were a distorted, muffled yell over the chaos of the screaming passengers and the roar of the propeller engines. ‘I’m taking her down! I’m taking her down!’

As the dramatic audio clip played, the TV screen flashed up a photo of the man who’d said those words and plunged fourteen people to their deaths along with him. A tanned, lean-faced man of forty-six, smiling warmly for the camera. His hair was greyer than Ben remembered it.

But there was no doubt about it. He was the same Nick Chapman that Ben had served with in 22 SAS, not so many years ago.