Revenger

97

The airspace over southern England is managed by the London Area Control Centre, at Swanwick, Hants. It handles something in the region of 5,500 flights every single day of the year. Any international flight can only take place after a detailed flight plan has been filed and approved. Any flight without such a plan immediately attracts the attention of the authorities, even if it is, for the time being, heading away from the English mainland. If the pilot does not respond to attempts to make radio contact, then the control centre contacts the RAF base at Coningsby, Lincolnshire, and declares a ‘QRA situation’.

The acronym stands for Quick Reaction Alert and its immediate effect is to scramble a flight of three Typhoon jets belonging to RAF 3 (Fighter) Squadron. A Typhoon can travel at a top speed of 1,400 miles per hour. The distance between Coningsby and Shoreham-by-Sea, as the crow flies, is a little over two hundred miles. A fighter travelling through congested airspace cannot travel quite as directly as a crow. But even so, it can catch up with a Cessna 172 heading slowly south-west on a bearing straight down the Channel towards the Atlantic Ocean very quickly indeed. Its problem is knowing what to do when it gets there.

The Cessna 172’s standard cruise speed is around a hundred and twenty knots, but Carver had throttled back to less than seventy-five. This had given the RAF pilots a problem. They couldn’t just shoot him down, because he had the Head of the Secret Intelligence Service on board. On the other hand they couldn’t fly alongside him because they simply couldn’t go that slowly without stalling their planes. They were therefore having to loop around him in figures of eight, which was far from ideal when flying in close formation through weather conditions that combined low cloud, high wind, driving rain and appalling visibility.

The rain was beating so hard against the glass the wipers weren’t getting rid of it, just moving it around. Carver’s personal ‘Learn to fly in a day’ campaign hadn’t got as far as finding the heater controls — even if there were any — so he was seriously bloody cold. There was absolutely no way he was ever going to bring the plane in to land. But for all that, the funny thing was, Carver was in pretty good shape.

He felt as though he was, to some degree at least, in control of his own destiny. And in the end, that was probably the best you could hope for.

Of course, in the long run we all die. Carver wasn’t the kind of man who dealt much in metaphors, but it struck him that Jack Grantham’s situation was an appropriate metaphor for the human condition. He was blind, dumb and utterly helpless to change anything at all about his fundamental circumstances. Whether he liked it or not, there would soon come a time when the fuel tanks ran dry, the engine cut out, the plane tumbled down into the ocean and his lights went out for good.

Carver, on the other hand, still had some ability to act. Soon he would, of his own free will, make the choice to throw himself from the plane. He reckoned that the plane would soon be passing the tip of the Cherbourg peninsula. The French coast would then be about fifteen kilometres away. By any reasonable calculation, the chances of him making it were slim to non-existent. Even if his chute opened, parachuting into high seas was an insanely risky procedure. Plenty of experienced special forces men had died because they hit the water too fast, or too heavily loaded, and kept going right on down to the bottom. There was an obvious danger of becoming tangled in one’s lines or the canopy itself. If by some miracle he was able to splash down successfully, there was then the minor issue of staying alive in cold, stormy seas, finding the proper bearings, and swimming long enough and far enough to bump into a passing boat or the coast itself.

When you started considering all the different variables, all the things that had to go perfectly in order for him to make it, the odds entered the realm of a lottery win, or a jackpot on a Vegas slot machine.

But at least he was giving it a go. And maybe it would all work out. Maybe he could get to France. If he did, it really wouldn’t be much of a problem for him to get anywhere in the world from there. Carver imagined himself somewhere warm, by the sea: the Atlantic coast of Brazil, maybe. He’d run a boat: nothing fancy, just a good, solid, working boat he could use to go fishing or for travelling up and down the coast. Maybe he could even get a little plane, just like this one, but with floats so he could fly to distant islands and land in crystal-clear lagoons. He’d not want for money and there’d be a woman somewhere that he could get along with, even if he couldn’t imagine loving anyone else just yet. He’d spend most of his time outdoors, doing simple, satisfying work. He’d always been better at blowing things up than building them in the first place, but maybe he could pick up the basics of carpentry and bricklaying and build his own home, with a vegetable garden out back to feed him.

But what would any of it mean if Alix wasn’t there?

She was the reason he wasn’t scared of dying. Carver didn’t believe in God or an afterlife. He wasn’t opposed to religion, and he’d always respected the work that military padres did, comforting the dying or the relatives of men who’d been killed in action. He just couldn’t find any faith within himself. It was an absence of sensation, like being colour-blind or tone-deaf. The life he’d led hadn’t helped. He’d seen too much evil, too much pointless suffering and pain to imagine that there was any point to it all. But he could imagine being at peace. And if he and Alix had both gone into that endless night, then they would in some way be together again. Or at least he wouldn’t feel the desperate sense of separation he did now, as if they were divided by an infinitely high, impenetrable wall.

Whatever happened, when he jumped out of the plane, he’d accept it. He’d made his choice. He’d chosen his departure. He was fine about that.

He looked up at the rear-view mirror and adjusted it so that he could see Grantham behind him. Grantham had become progressively more agitated as the flight had gone on, and was now writhing in his seat as his mummified silver-taped head darted up and down and from side to side, as if he could actually look for some means of escape. It was impossible to hear anything over the sound of the engine, but Carver presumed that there would be muffled squeals and grunts coming from that gagged mouth.

The plane was constantly being shaken by the wind and rain, like a rattle in the hands of a giant baby. Suddenly there was an even more pronounced buffeting, and a roar loud enough to overwhelm every other noise in Carver’s ears, as the Typhoons blasted past at point-blank range. The message was obvious: we can’t shoot you down and we can’t force you to land, but we can make your life bloody uncomfortable.

Oh no, they couldn’t.

As the jets sped away to the far end of their turning circle, Carver took the fins, mask and snorkel from his pack. He put them on and then undid his seatbelt and opened the door. Or rather, he tried to open it. Taken together, the speed of the plane and the storm-force headwind amounted to a hurricane, and it took every ounce of Carver’s strength to shift the door, inch by inch, degree by degree, until he could twist his knees round and use them to keep it from slamming back in his face.

He was looking out under the wing now, trying to judge the move he would have to make to get out, step on to the wheel-guard and then jump as far away from the plane as possible. He didn’t mind taking his chance with the sea, but it would be just a little bit tragic if he had his brains knocked out by a stabilizer before he’d even pulled the ripcord.

A thought came unbidden to his mind, the memory of a time he’d thrown himself from another doomed plane. Alix had been with him that time. They’d only had one parachute between them… and that had been attached to an armed atomic bomb set to detonate the moment it dropped below an altitude of fifteen hundred metres. Next to that moment of rampant insanity, this jump was a Sunday-school outing.

A great grin crossed Carver’s face as he thought of Alix and all the times they’d had together.

Somewhere off in the distance he saw the lights of the Typhoons as they turned and came in for another run.

Carver gave them the finger. ‘Fuck you,’ he muttered. Then he inched his legs out of the cabin and down until his fins were resting on the wheel-guard. He gripped his left hand against the door frame to hold himself, and then shifted his bodyweight out of the plane, with his back pressing against the inside of the open door.

Now he was perched on the side of the plane. He thought of his captive writhing and twitching inside the cabin. He thought of the jets turning round for another approach. He thought of the house he would build by the sea in Brazil.

Above all, he thought of the woman he loved.

Then Sam Carver shouted, ‘Ali-i-i-i-i-x!’ and he jumped off the plane, into the storm-tossed skies and down towards the chilly, grey-black embrace of the sea.