“Very nice, but he has his wife with him,” she said. “A classic mixed-race marriage.”
“Really?” Jackson asked. “Sounds like your sort of person. Anything that looks remotely dangerous?”
“There’s a guy in second class who keeps looking at me when he thinks I’m not looking, does that count?” Syeda asked. “I can’t decide if he’s a sick pervert who finds me attractive, or a racist, or what.”
“Could be both,” Jackson suggested. “A racist who finds you attractive. How many movies have been made on that subject?” His radio buzzed. “Excuse me?”
He listened carefully. “Pardon?” He said finally. “This is Flight 719; please repeat.”
Silence. “I can’t hear anything,” he muttered. “It was strange; it sounded like a mayday call.” He lifted the radio. “Paris control, this is Flight 719; I need to report a possible distress call, two minutes ago.”
He scowled. “They’ve put me on hold,” he said. He shivered; the voice had been oddly familiar. “There’s no other British Airlines flight out here, is there?”
“Not until the morning,” his co-pilot, Fred Diarchal, said. “We’re the last.”
“How odd,” Jackson said. “Syeda; you’d better go back to tucking the little babies in. I’m going to keep a listening watch.”
“Yes, Captain,” Syeda said. “Good luck with the distress call.”
Jackson glared at her. “Don’t even joke about it,” he said. It was then that the shaking began.
The seat was cramped, the food bland and tasteless – and if the champagne had been real Jim Oliver would have eaten his hat. Still, for all the uncomfortable of the flight, it did have some advantages; it was not a regular flight for the underworld. The association – or gang of crooks to the unenlightened and the law enforcement people – that he worked for understood the dance between law enforcer and law breaker as well as anyone, and better than most.
Oliver smiled. The use of his laptop computer was forbidden on the flight itself, but there were many other ways to amuse himself. One way was thinking about the datachip he held within his small collection, one packed with games that were legal and high-tech computer information, which was anything, but. Packed within the thousands of lines of complex computer code were secrets that would be worth millions to the right people; commercial secrets that the French or German industries would pay through the nose for, if they were within France for them to grasp.
He smiled to himself, covertly, a hidden little smile, and winked at one of the stewardesses. She stalked off, having classified him as a male chauvinist pig, and he smiled again. It was safe to have a classification; let her see him as a pig and she would miss what lay beneath. His book, a tome on the recent war in Iraq, lay open in front of him and he began to read.
We come, not to conquer, but to liberate, he read, and then the shaking began.
Professor Adrian Horton sat back in the comfortable seat and gently stroked the cheek of his beautiful wife Jasmine. Her pale skin contrasted, as always, with his dark skin; she was the light to his darkness, as he was fond of remarking. Their children, Stuart and Emma, slept beside them, lost in dreams.
It was worth it, he thought, and sighed. Years spent arguing with the Dean, asking for permission to research in the French archives. Years of arguing with the French custodians, who believed that the free flow of knowledge should halt just because France was going through one of its periodic episodes of anti-Anglo feelings. Days spent convincing Jasmine that she could look after the children while he studied; all worth it in the end.
He smiled to himself, privately, and reread the letter. It was simple and to the point; it granted him access to the locked files of the 1945-50 war crimes trials, many of which had been sealed or restricted after DeGaulle’s second term in office. He could spend hours there, maybe even years….
He dismissed the thought with a chuckle, feeling Jasmine move against him in her sleep. There was no way that she would let him remain within a dusty cell for weeks, when the beaches were so close and the water so warm. Carefully, covertly, like he had done when they were both courting, he gently slipped his hand inside her blouse. She sighed in her sleep, pushing against him, as he stroked her breasts. It was then that the shaking began.
The first sign was a screeching noise coming from the headphones; all the radio channels had gone haywire at once, projecting a torrent of raw static directly into their heads. Jackson yanked his headphones off and threw them away, rubbing his ears in pain. Beside him, Diarchal was bleeding; blood fell from his ruptured eardrums.
“Call a medic,” Jackson snapped at Syeda, as a wave of light slashed in at them from the cockpit windows. The night sky was suddenly lit with all the colours of the rainbow, sleeting in against the aircraft and powering through it; screams echoed from the cabin. The aircraft shook violently, and shook again, and Jackson tried desperately to take back control. The aircraft swung from side to side, moving as if a giant was shaking it deliberately, and nothing he could do could change it.
“Mayday, mayday,” he snapped into the radio. The torrent of static abated slightly, then redoubled; he heard his own voice echoing through the airways. It taunted him; mayday, mayday, and he cursed. His swearwords vanished into the ether and re-echoed back through the radio. A shiver ran through him; he’d just sent the distress call they’d heard earlier.
Syeda was preying in Arabic, her words clearly Arabic; some schools were even offering Arabic lessons in a gutless act of political correctness. “Shut up before you panic them,” Jackson shouted at her, and saw her face crumple. The plane shook again, a wall of light moving towards it, and Jackson had only seconds to realise that the sheet of multicoloured energy meant certain death and it reached the plane and…
And they broke though into darkness. High above them, the stars glowed brightly; the altimeter reported that they had lost height. Jackson wasn’t surprised; he’d expected to slam into the ground. To have lost just some height seemed like a miracle.
“We have lost some of our engines,” Diarchal said grimly. His ears were still bleeding; his voice was louder than necessary. “We have to divert.”
“I know,” Jackson said, and flipped the emergency switch. The signal began pulsing; the automated transmission warning of an aircraft in distress. He scowled and opened the intercom; he had to tell the passengers something.
“Can I have your attention please?” He asked, keeping his voice as normal as he could. “We have encountered an unusual combination of St Elmo’s fire and high pressure turbulence.” He wasn’t sure if he believed himself, but it sounded good. “In the process, we have taken some minor damage and will be diverting to land at another airport. Please keep your seatbelts fashioned and keep your children calm.”
He closed the intercom, feeling his pistol with a sigh of relief. “Anything from Paris or Nantes?”
“Nothing,” Diarchal said. The co-pilot spoke again into the radio; there was no reply. “Systems failure?”
“Possibly,” Jackson said, thinking fast. He took the stick and moved it slightly; the 747 aircraft moved like a wounded whale. He met Diarchal’s eyes and they shared a grim thought; they might have to land on the ground without aid. The death toll could be considerable.
“Hey, where are the lights?” Syeda asked. Jackson stared out of the cockpit and gasped; the lights of France had vanished. Here and there, from place to place, there was a pinprick, but the main lights had vanished. They shared another look; this was turning into a disaster.