Blood Rules Read online

  The absence of military interference both reassured and worried him. He knew of times when fighters had flown slowly in front of commercial aircraft under hijack, forcing them to lose speed and consequently height. Sometimes the fighter pilot got it wrong, causing the civilian plane to crash. But why was nobody apparently interested in their fate?

  As if reading his thoughts, Leila said, “South Yemen is a communist country, one of the poorest in the world. You are entering its easternmost province, the Sixth Governorate, Al Mahra. There are almost no roads, the scattered tribes cannot speak Arabic, the government itself does not claim to control its hinterland. It is desolate beyond belief, lonely beyond description; there is nowhere like it in this quadrant of the globe, which is why I chose it.”

  “Any fire-fighting equipment on the ground?”

  “None.”

  Morgan gripped the yoke harder. “I’ll need a fly-past at a thousand feet,” he said at last. “And I’ll need to ditch fuel. Right down to the stack pipes.”

  “As you wish. You are as aware as I am that without fuel the aircraft’s air-conditioning units will rapidly fail. The weather is hot and humid; I cannot tell you when your ordeal will end.”

  “I can’t risk landing with all this fuel aboard.”

  “It is your choice. If you jettison down to the stack pipes, you will still be left with ten or eleven tons. Call the ground now, please.”

  She had not used the word “please” before. Morgan chalked that up as a minor victory. He did not register that it was merely the first of her steps along the path toward subverting him.

  Ross made contact on the frequency she had given him, recording visibility, wind speed, and direction. The man on the ground spoke clear English, though it plainly was not his first language.

  “What is your QNH?” Ross asked. The voice answered with sea-level air pressure, and the copilot automatically reset his altimeter without noticing that whoever was on the ground must have done this before. But Morgan understood, and once again he experienced the by now familiar crawling sensation along the nape of his neck. When the voice added a vector for final approach, the impression hardened. These people were technically perfect.

  He circled counterclockwise, because that way the port wing tilted down and he had a better view of the ground, reducing height all the while. The surface looked flat as an ice rink. At three thousand feet, he couldn’t see the gravel, but his mind had insidiously come to accept whatever the woman told him, and he knew the gravel was there.

  He called for the log, not content to rely on memory. His plane was hardly new, but it had only flown thirteen hours since its last B check, when every system would have been examined and either passed or replaced. Short of a full month-long overhaul, it was the toughest inspection an aircraft could undergo. In theory she was as capable as the day she received her airworthiness certificate. And by God, thought Morgan, she’d better be.

  He put away the log and looked down. Somebody had lit a fire. No, more than one … four pillars of dense black smoke billowed into the air, seemed to hover, then began slowly to drift from left to right, toward the sea. They pinpointed the four corners of an elongated rectangle. The runway.

  Morgan glanced at Ross. “What do you think?”

  Ross compressed his lips and drummed twice on the side of the yoke. Morgan understood. His second officer was saying, If it’s flat enough, and broad daylight, you can put her down anywhere. Which was true, as far as it went.

  Morgan glanced up at Leila. “I’m going to fly due east, out to sea, very low. If it’s yes, I’ll come around and start my approach. If no …”

  “It will be yes.”

  “And if I judge we can’t make it, what then?”

  Leila replied with a shrug, “Then we shall go our separate ways, we to heaven and you to hell.”

  Morgan looked into the glossy darkness of her eyes, saw the charcoal glowing there, and told himself, She means it. He took the TriStar down to a thousand feet and let Ross fly her while he stood to peer through the left-hand windshield panel. Smoke clouded his vision for a second; then they were through and climbing again to a safe height.

  Ross looked at him questioningly. Morgan felt the wetness on his back and tried to ignore it, tried to clear his mind. “All right,” he said at last. “It’s a go.”

  Leila did not relax by so much as one iota. Indeed, her concentration seemed to wind itself up in tune with Captain Morgan’s, while he dictated flap settings, altitudes, vectors. All the while the two pilots were conscious of her listening, monitoring their discussion more closely than any of the company’s test captains, astute to detect the first hint of trickery.

  “I will do the landing,” Morgan announced. “No one else is to have any responsibility at all. Is that understood?”

  Ross said yes.

  “Peter?”

  A momentary hesitation; then the flight engineer nodded.

  “All right. I have the yoke. Speed brakes … three, two, one, now.”

  The plane shuddered and perceptibly slowed. They were coming around, into the wind, still far out over the Arabian Sea, and the sun was in Morgan’s eyes. He nudged the nose down, keeping his speed constant, and began a standard series of landing checks, as if they were making a daylight approach to Heathrow: fuel reserve, altimeters, flaps.

  Ross picked up his mood. His hands no longer grasped the control column as if it were the only thing between him and the abyss. This was his world, the one he knew best, the one he’d been trained for, and as long as he could take refuge inside it, working from second to second, he feared nothing and no one.

  They calculated throttle settings in case they had to abort, although both of them knew they were only going to get one shot at this. Through the windshield they could see the four great bonfires gliding up toward them, inexorably as on the simulators, only this was real and the rock was real and if they misjudged the approach there would be no friendly voice over the intercom saying, “Ouch! Why not run it through again, Rog?”

  “Speed: two hundred thirty knots.”

  “Flaps eighteen.”

  The flaps extended, the aircraft shuddered again and sank. The bonfires were billowing up now, in vast towers that seemed to fill their vision.

  “Two twenty knots.”

  “Gear down.”

  A distant rumble. “Gear down and three green lights.” “Anti-skid five releases.”

  Speed dropped dramatically. Morgan edged the plane onto its final approach path, boosting the throttles to overcome the danger of a stall on the turn.

  “One ninety knots.”

  “Flaps twenty.”

  “One eighty … full flaps, forty-two.”

  At five hundred feet, the runway was one and a half miles away. Just in time, Ross remembered to turn on the seat-belt sign, make a hurried announcement. In the passenger cabin, people braced themselves. They were noisier now. Many were crying or praying aloud. “Mary,” one man kept shouting. “Mary, Mary, Mary…. ”

  The hijackers strapped themselves into rear-facing crew seats, keeping their weapons trained on the cabins.

  Raful Sharett lay slumped in his seat. Leila had chopped him when the engine failed. Blood streaked his face; a strip of skin had been torn back from his skull, revealing white bone. With every jolt of the plane his body shook, a helpless doll. He moaned, licked his lips, opened his eyes. Where was he?

  Robbie folded up his letter and stuffed it into the seat flap in front of him. He gripped his knees and tried hard not to think about what would happen next. Dad, said a small voice inside his head. I love you. And then, he wasn’t sure why: I’m so sorry I wasn’t a better son…. I’m so sorry, Dad … Mum. At the word Mum a tear trickled down his cheek and he dashed it away, but he could not still that small voice, not even when it suddenly burst out, Why, why, why did you have to go away?

  In the cockpit Leila slid onto the observer’s seat and shouldered the belt.

  “Four hundred
feet,” Ross said. “A hundred to go … three hundred, decision height!”

  And Morgan answered him, as smoothly as if calling a bridge hand, “Continuing. Touchdown at one hundred and fifty knots.”

  “That’s too high!” Ross’s voice came out almost in a scream.

  “I’ll need the control on that surface. Now be quiet and fly!

  One hijacker had been left to cover the Club Class cabin. Raful’s eyes focused painfully on him, sitting upright and alert in the crew seat. Sometimes he looked down the port side of the plane, sometimes the starboard. Raful’s right hand strayed to his pocket, made contact with a hard object

  Meanwhile, Morgan was planing between the first pair of bonfires and he was too high; Ross’s shout had thrown him, damn, nose down, left rudder, just a touch, just a touch

  He throttled back.

  The plane shuddered; Raful Sharett saw the hijacker’s watchful eyes squint in apprehension. Now or never. He leaned forward, bringing his head as close as he could to the seatback in front of him, and gagged loudly.

  “You! Sit back, or I’ll shoot!”

  Raful heard the click of a safety belt being undone, but the lethal cigarette lighter containing cyanide gas was no longer in his pocket; it lay deep in the elastic pouch sewn onto the forward seat. He slumped backward, exhausted but triumphant. The hijacker lowered himself into the crew seat, keeping his eyes fixed on Raful. By now the plane was quaking like an animal in its death throes.

  “One hundred feet above ground,” Ross called. “Fifty … forty… thirty…”

  Morgan’s right hand descended to the throttles. A sudden vision of his wife sitting in a deck chair on the lawn of their house in Weybridge flashed through his mind and was gone.

  “… twenty … fifteen.”

  Morgan shut down the throttles. Flare out, nose up, angle her into the crosswind … nudge the stick forward to get the nose wheel down, then back a touch

  The main wheels scraped the surface. Morgan squeezed the yoke forward, half a second, less, then back again. He felt the gear take the plane’s weight.

  All hell broke loose.

  It sounded like the end of the world: a hundred machine guns opening up at once, raking the underside of his hull. Gravel! Abort! Too late, too late, get her down, just get her down in one bloody piece!

  He yanked the throttles through the gate, into reverse thrust. The surface wasn’t flat at all, it was ridged every which way, and it was covered with loose stones. He could hear the screams in the cabin behind him but it meant nothing, because he was hauling on the throttles with all his might, the plane was shaking and shuddering itself apart, seams would be bursting soon, there’d be stones in the engines, explosion, Christ, don’t think about that….

  The spoilers came up, killing the lift on the wings. He got the nose down somehow; God knew how, Morgan didn’t. He was still traveling at one hundred and thirty miles an hour. Ahead of him he could see nothing at all, just whiteness. The plane was juddering so much that Morgan thought his brains must shake out of his skull. He braked. Nothing. Again: this time, some drag communicated itself through the soles of his feet, but the banging went on like the worst artillery barrage in the world; he could feel drumming come up through his shoes, into his legs, his torso, his neck … tire burst! The plane lurched to one side; the left wing went down. He tried the rudder, tried too hard, overcompensated, somehow got her out of the deadly slew.

  One hundred miles an hour. Ninety. It was like being in a metal foundry, or a super-sophisticated studio where the engineers were determined to demonstrate every noise in the canon: tiny taps, shells exploding, panel beating, bang, bang, bang! Eighty miles an hour.

  More rudder, keep that ruddy wing tip up!

  Sixty miles an hour.

  The starboard engine went out with a snap and a whine, and Morgan jabbed down on the rudder with his left foot. He braked again.

  He could hear himself think.

  Forty miles an hour. He reached for the nose-wheel rudder and it responded. “Flaps in.”

  Ross watched a fish-white hand stretch out to the switches, only later realizing that it was his own.

  Slowly, slowly, the inhuman, unbearable noise died away. The plane lurched around to the left, sank a little, and settled into a deathlike silence.

  Morgan had finished with engines. He switched them off. As he did so, he allowed himself to acknowledge, for the first time, that they were down. They were alive.

  He became aware of a strange noise. For a long time he couldn’t identify it. Then it came to him. Clapping. The rear cabin was racked with thunderous applause, in which tears and laughter mingled.

  Ross was saying something incoherent, had grabbed both his hands between his own, and was shaking him as if he wanted to tear them off. When another hand descended onto Morgan’s shoulder, he turned, startled, to see that the woman terrorist had risen to stand behind him. He stared and stared, unable to comprehend what he saw. Her face was wet with tears.

  “yes,” she said, and as she spoke the word she shook her head, squeezing his shoulder. “Yes, you are a pilot.”

  Selim lifted the handset from its bracket by the first class galley, the one Leila had used to initiate the hijack.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “you have landed in South Yemen, where you will be held as hostages for the release of certain Iranian war heroes now in prison in Iraq. We have no wish to hurt any of you, and we will not do so unless one of two things happens. First, if our demands are rejected; second, if you try to escape. If either event should happen, then things will change.” He paused for emphasis. “Things will definitely change.”

  Like all the other passengers, Colin listened as if his life depended on catching every word. After Selim had finished his announcement, the cabin was quiet. No one moved or spoke. The euphoria generated by their safe landing had dissipated. Colin heard someone being sick a few rows behind him. Apart from that, the silence that descended on the cabin with the final click of the intercom stayed perfect.

  “My God, my God,” he heard a soft voice say beside him, and he turned, quickly, aware of another person whose need outweighed his own. He was sitting next to a boy about the same age as Robbie. His face was distemper-white, splashed with ugly, unformed splotches of crimson. His hands lay in his lap, twisting something back and forth. They were shaking. Every so often they would jump in spasm.

  There was an empty seat between the two of them. Colin raised the armrest and slid along to sit next to the boy. He laid a hand on his forearm. “It’s going to be all right,” he said firmly. “Hold on.”

  “Can’t… can’t.”

  Colin gripped the forearm more tightly. “You can make it.”

  “I’m diabetic,” the teenager muttered. “I’d only got one shot left.”

  Colin looked at the object in Tim’s hand, saw it was a small bag made of clear plastic and that the ampoule inside had smashed.

  “It broke,” Tim said. “In the crash, it broke.”

  “You.”

  Something hard nudged at Colin’s shoulder. Not a blow, not aggressive, just a hard tap. He swung around to find that one of the hijackers had come to stand in the aisle opposite his seat. The muzzle of his submachine gun rested a few inches from Colin’s face.

  “Don’t change seats again.”

  Colin looked into the man’s eyes. They were intelligent. To judge from the lines around them, they were capable of expressing humor. He was wearing an expensive gray pinstripe suit, his hair was neatly combed, and he did not look the least bit like a killer. This man might have been the ambassador to one of the gulf states. But for the gun.

  Colin swallowed. “No. I won’t.” He cursed himself for capitulating so readily and so early on in the crisis, but being able to speak at all represented some small victory.

  The man slowly walked away down the aisle. Colin closed his eyes. He wanted to think, without distraction.

  He should never have boarded this fli
ght with Robbie. Never! Celestine had warned him, but he’d chosen to put his son at risk regardless. Don’t think about that, he told himself, it’s futile. Think about the future.

  Someone, soon, would come to rescue the passengers. He must be ready for that. He must prepare. Because he was going to get out of this alive and in one piece. Robbie too.

  The only thing standing between him and survival was conscience.

  He might have to kill in order to survive. Or to save his son. Most of these passengers wouldn’t see it that way. They’d think they could do whatever was necessary to escape, but when the time came they wouldn’t be able to shrug off the decent, basic humanity their parents had instilled in them.

  Colin had already committed the features of one hijacker to memory. When the moment came, there must be no mistakes. Kill or be killed. He could do whatever was necessary, to save Robbie. He knew that.

  He’d done it before.

  20 JULY: 1600:

  SUSSEX, ENGLAND

  CELESTINE Hanif lay on her back with her legs raised at an angle of 45 degrees and wondered who had masterminded the transformation of Gravetye Manor into a hotel.

  “… ninety-seven, ninety-eight, ninety-nine …”

  She would have painted the ceiling a different color. But the four-poster bed was exquisite.