The jumbo lurched into view again, its great white body irradiated by the glare of the arc lights. The intensity of the lights left ghostly traces across the video picture with each oscillation of the camera.
The picture steadied as the cameraman appeared to find a niche from which it was safe to film.
The door immediately aft of the cockpit sprang open. A man in a light-coloured suit appeared, hesitated a fraction too long, and jumped. The figure lay motionless for a moment on the tarmac before commencing a painful crawl towards the scant cover offered by the nose wheel.
A second figure appeared at the doorway. Girling took in the mask, the sleeveless T-shirt and the Kalashnikov pointed purposefully at the ground. There was a ripple of light from the muzzle, the passenger writhed for a moment, then lay still. Before the cameraman pulled back the shot, Girling saw a suit dotted with weeping black holes.
Cramer, off-camera, swore, then asked the cameraman if he got the shot. Somehow, he managed not to make it sound offensive.
‘Christ, why doesn’t someone help these bastards?’ Cornelius pleaded. ‘Why doesn’t the militia move in? Where’s the fucking Delta Force?’
Girling was too horrified to answer, but somewhere at the back of his mind the questions registered one by one.
For the Amal militiamen, weaned on the law of the Kalashnikov, this was one battle they would want to sit out. This wasn’t their fight. As for Delta, or whoever the Americans had out there, they probably couldn’t get near the beach, let alone the aircraft. This massacre had taken everyone by surprise.
A violent explosion tore the picture in half. The entire tail section of the jumbo fell to the ground.
‘This is terrible,’ Cramer said, his voice breaking under the strain. ‘The whole of the rear of the aircraft is in flames. I can see people jumping to the ground, their clothes on fire… now there’s movement at the front, by the cockpit…’ The camera adjusted to capture the nose of the jumbo. Girling moved closer to the screen. A group of people were sliding down an escape chute. At first he thought they were just passengers, but then he noticed some of them carried guns.
About twenty of them gathered around the front of the plane before wheeling away from the burning airliner, away from the glare of the arc and camera-lights. Girling was reminded of a flock of sheep worried by dogs.
Cramer’s voice broke over the speaker. ‘I can see Franklin, the Ambassador. He’s in the middle of that group by the front of the plane.’
Three shadows passed across the front of the lens, one of them distinguishable as Cramer, the other two carrying film and sound equipment. There was a brief interruption as the transmission switched to the new camera.
Girling dropped his eyes to the floor. ‘Cramer, you always were a stupid arsehole,’ he whispered.
Kelso looked at him questioningly.
‘He’s going after them,’ Girling said. ‘James Cramer wants to be a bloody hero.’
The picture jumped from the pot-holed concrete of the taxi-way to the sand dunes of the beach beyond. Behind them, there was a huge explosion from the airfield as another set of fuel tanks exploded inside the jumbo. The fireball that rose into the sky illuminated the waves, a hundred yards distant, as surely as a star-shell from a Very pistol.
It was clear the terrorists had no idea they were being followed. From the shaky picture, Girling built up an image of Cramer and his camera crew bobbing in and out of the dunes after their quarry. After several minutes, the camera motion stopped and the picture settled. A little way off, it was just possible to see the terrorists and their captives squatting in a hollow between the dunes.
In the background, Girling heard the distant screams of burning passengers and the crackle of flames.
Cramer’s voice came over the speaker as a hoarse whisper. ‘They’re signalling to someone or something out there. Wait. I can see a boat.’
They all felt the tension in his voice.
A forty-foot fishing smack bobbed on the waves just beyond the gentle breakers, its deck windows reflecting the flames from the airport.
The terrorists herded them down to the water’s edge. Flanked on all sides by their captors, the prisoners formed a single file and headed gingerly towards the boat.
‘Can’t they do something?’ Cornelius croaked.
‘With these pictures the Americans should be able to pick them up,’ Girling said. He sounded dis-passionate, but it was the last emotion he felt.
Cornelius’s eyes never left the screen. ‘But it’ll be black as pitch out to sea.’
‘Not to a radar or FLIR operator, it won’t.’
Girling hadn’t finished the sentence when the picture died and the screen went blank.
‘Oh, Jesus,’ Cornelius said.
Cramer and his crew had just bought the farm.
CHAPTER 5
Barely one hour after the flames had been extinguished at Beirut International, the US Government’s Counter-Terrorism Committee, TERCOM, convened in the situation room on the third floor of a discreet government building on Connecticut Avenue, Washington, DC.
Joel Jacobson got to his feet. If his four colleagues across the tables were waiting impatiently for his situation report, they did not show it. There was not much Jacobson could tell them that they did not know already or that they had not seen via the live TV coverage from Beirut.
Except for the Soviet development. But Jacobson wanted to hold that back a while.
The dim overhead lighting accentuated Jacobson’s pallid complexion and pockmarked cheeks. At forty-five years old, Jacobson was the youngest member of TERCOM. It was a job he relished because it gave him unlimited access to everything the USA had ever gleaned about the Middle East — everything. But it still wasn’t enough. Take the Al-Hasakah gas pipeline explosion the previous month in Syria. Through their satellites they had seen the conflagration, but it was information on the ground they lacked. Jacobson often wondered what had really happened to Soviet Minister Koltsov. The region was a place that consumed him utterly, for the simple reason it was an insoluble mess and therefore a teasing conundrum. He had made its study his whole professional life.
He had spent the last two hours staring into a terminal linked to the National Security Agency’s Magnum Sigint/Comint satellite, which was scouring for the merest whiff of the terrorists who had absconded from the beach at Beirut. Thanks to the British Secret Intelligence Service, they knew what kind of radio equipment the boat carried. It was a useful clue that enabled the NSA to narrow its search of the airwaves, but so far it had picked up nothing. Had there been any information, it would have been passed to the Navy, which was conducting a more upfront search for the boat in the Eastern Med.
Jacobson’s monologue began with a status report on known casualties at Beirut. More than a hundred US citizens were feared dead. The terrorists had achieved their break-out from the airliner by planting bombs throughout the cabin and detonating them, either by remote control, through preset timing mechanisms, or infra-red triggers.
The effect had been devastating. In the ensuing confusion, the terrorists had rounded up Ambassador Franklin and his staff and shepherded them away from the airliner to the beach. It had been confirmed that there were up to sixteen terrorists on the 747 at the time of the break-out. They were calculated to be super-fit and highly trained.
Jacobson looked up for a reaction, but his audience remained impassive.
He moved on to the more sensitive issue of why the US had been surprised by the break-out.
Although there had been a Delta Force detachment waiting offshore in one of the ships of the Navy task force, they had not been moved into position. As he spoke, someone was roasting for that mistake, but Jacobson conceded — for the politicians at least — it had been a tough choice. If US forces had been caught on the ground without Lebanese government approval, there would have been hell to pay. Lebanon’s allies the Iranians were making noises about belligerent US behaviour again. No one wanted to pre-empt a new Middle East conflict so soon after the last one. Things were tricky enough in the Gulf as it was.