But it was so incredibly fast.
“Abort!” he shouted as the missile suddenly disappeared.
For a split second Flammarion’s breath was caught in his throat. Something had happened.
The missile had malfunctioned. It had destroyed itself in mid-air. It had simply disintegrated, the pieces falling to earth much too small to be seen from this distance.
A fireball began to blossom around the engine on the left wing. Suddenly it grew to tremendous proportions, and pieces of the jetliner-these big enough to easily be distinguished from this distance-began flying everywhere.
Something had struck them on the port side, and the Airbus began to sag in that direction, slowly at first, but with a sickeningly increasing acceleration.
Alarms were flashing and buzzing all over the place, and Elver’s panel was lit in red.
“We’ve lost our portside engine,” Piaget shouted.
“I can’t hold it,” Elver shouted. “She’s going over!” He had the stick and right rudder pedal all the way to their stops, but still the jetliner continued to dive as she rolled over to port.
He thought it was almost as if they had lost their left wing. The entire wing!
His copilot, Piaget, who had been on the radio with the tower, was speaking loudly but calmly into the microphone. “Mayday, mayday, mayday! This is Swissair one-four-five, just off the end of runway two-six. We’ve lost control. We’re going in. We’re going in. Mayday, mayday, mayday!”
Elver reached out and chopped all power to the starboard engine. The powerful thrust on that wing was helping to push them over.
Piaget should be given a commendation for his coolness and dedication under pressure.
It was just a fleeting thought, replaced by the certainty that none of them were likely to survive beyond the next fifteen or twenty seconds.
The reduced thrust on the starboard wing seemed to have the effect of slowing their port roll, but only for a moment or two. Then they continued over.
“Mayday, mayday, mayday…!” Piaget was shouting into the microphone.
The ground was very close now. Looking out the windshield Elver estimated their altitude at less than one hundred feet.
He could hear people screaming in utter terror and hopelessness back in the passenger compartment, but a moment of calmness came over him now that he knew for sure he was going to die.
It was happening too fast, Elver thought. And much sooner than he’d ever expected.
The moment before impact he reached out for the master electrical switches.
“Putain,” the cabbie swore, and he suddenly jammed on the brakes and hauled the taxi over to the side of the highway.
McGarvey, seated in the back, had been thinking about the last time he and Marta had parted. That had been Lausanne, several years ago. She’d been sitting in their kitchen, and on his way out with his suitcase, he looked back in at her. A pistol lay on the table, but she made no move to reach for it.
He wondered what he would have done had she picked it up and pointed it at him. He supposed he would have done exactly as he had done.
He was shoved violently forward. At first he thought they’d hit something. The driver was looking back the way they had come even before he’d brought the taxi to a complete halt.
“Qu-est qu’il-y-a?” McGarvey shouted, irritated, but then he turned and looked in the same direction as the driver, and his gut instantly tightened.
An airliner was down. A huge ball of fire and smoke billowed up into the clear sky to the southwest. He’d heard no noise, partly because of the distance, partly because of the traffic noises, and partly because the cabbie had been playing the radio very loud.
Traffic on the N7 was coming to a standstill as McGarvey jumped out of the cab. It was definitely a downed airliner, and he knew in his heart of hearts that it was the Swissair flight he’d just put Marta on.
The cabbie got out of the taxi and crossed himself. “They are all dead,” he muttered half under his breath.
A big puff of black, oily smoke was slowly dissipating in the air not too far to the east, about where McGarvey figured the main east-west runway ended. Below that, and a little farther east, the faint traces of what appeared to be a small jet contrail also hung in the air.
The trail was distorting on the very slight breeze, but it was still identifiable.
McGarvey stared at it for a full second or more, willing himself not to come to the conclusion that had formed almost instantly in his mind. But it was inevitable.
The Swissair flight was down because someone standing near the end of the runway had shot it down with a handheld ground-to-air missile.
Either a Russian-made SA-7 Strela, or the American Stinger. Both were readily available on the market for a couple of thousand dollars each. And either would be effective in bringing down a jetliner.
In the next minutes all efforts would be concentrated on the crash site in a desperate effort to rescue anyone who might have survived the crash. Allowing the man or men who had fired the missile a chance to escape in the confusion.
Not if he could help it.
McGarvey shoved the cabbie aside, jumped behind the wheel and took off, back toward the airport, the wrong way down the highway.
Chapter 8
Lieutenant Bellus finally made some sense of what Flammarion was screaming, and his blood went cold.
“It’s crashed! It’s down! Oh, God, there’s fire everywhere! It’s horrible!”
“Scramble the crash units,” Bellus shouted.
“They’re on their way! But I tell you no one can survive down there. Don’t you see, the wing was off. It was gone, in pieces. They didn’t have a chance.”
“Calm yourself, Raymond, and tell me what happened,” Bellus shouted.
Marie-Lure was taking a call, and her console was lit up like a Christmas tree, but she was staring at the shift supervisor.
“Oh, it’s horrible! Horrible!”
“What happened to that airplane?” Bellus demanded. “Raymond, pull yourself together.
Other lives may depend on this. Do you understand?”
“Yes, I see,” Flammarion responded, calming down a little. “The fire units are halfway across the field. We’re diverting all traffic to De Gaulle and Le Bourget.”
“Very good. Now, exactly what happened?”
“It was a rocket, I think.”
“What do you mean, a rocket? Was it a warplane? What?”
“No, from that Air Service van. I saw it with my own eyes, Jacques. He held it on his shoulder, and fired it when one-four-five took off. Just after she lifted off.”
“The Swissair flight?”
“Yes, yes. I thought it would be all right… but then there was a flash and the wing started to come off. They didn’t have so much as a chance, Jacques.”
Bellus held a hand over the telephone mouthpiece. “Is there any word from Capretz or Gallimard?” he asked Marie-Lure.
“Nothing yet.”
“What about Dubout? He should be out there by now.”
“He doesn’t answer his radio.”
“Who else is on the apron?”
“Peguy, Bourgois and Queneau.”
“Tell them I want that Air Service maintenance man picked up. But tell them to be careful, he’ll be dangerous.”
“Sir?”
“He shot down the Airbus, and it’s got something to do with the Americans.”
“My God.”
Bellus turned back to the phone. Flammarion was babbling something. He had gone to pieces again.
“Listen to me, Raymond,” Bellus said. “Listen. Can you still see that Air Service van out there?”
“What… the van? Yes, it’s still there. I’m looking at it now. But your jeep is gone.”