Revenger (40 page)

This was the heart of a facility that was the oldest of its kind in the entire United Kingdom: Shoreham Airport.

Kevin Cripps was waiting to meet him.

‘She’s over there,’ he said, pointing to the ranks of private aircraft lined up on the apron. ‘Second row back, third from the end. I’ve got the key and, oh yeah, here’s the other thing you asked for.’

He handed over a surprisingly insignificant starter key, and a
blue
object that looked like a car-seat cushion, with a strap at each corner. It was an emergency parachute, designed for aerobatics pilots who found themselves in trouble and needed to bail out, fast.

‘Thanks,’ said Carver. ‘You got the money?’

‘Every penny.’ Cripps grinned. ‘And I even got the car back, and all. Oh, while I remember . . . the way the wind is blowing, you’ll want to use this runway, right here.’ He pointed out across the field to a point just beyond the lines of planes. ‘You’ll be starting at this end, so you shouldn’t have any trouble getting there. Then just turn the plane into the wind, slam on the power and you’re off.’

‘It’s a bit more complicated than that, but thanks. The plane’s ready to go, right?’

‘Absolutely. Had her filled and pre-flight checked by the bloke who sold her. He even gave me a little test flight, just to prove she was in perfect working order, nice little spin round the airfield.’

‘You’d better help me on with this,’ Carver said, holding up the parachute.

Neither man was a qualified pilot, but both had their parachute wings, so Cripps was swift and efficient as he helped Carver into the harness.

The job had just been completed when Carver heard a sound with which he was becoming altogether too familiar: the sirens of approaching police cars.

‘Looks like I’m going to need the car a little bit longer,’ Carver said. ‘Thanks for everything.’ He held out his hand.

Cripps grinned, held out his and was taken completely by surprise when Carver swung his right arm up and hit him hard the special forces way, with the heel of his hand, just to the side of his chin. Cripps reeled with the blow and Carver grabbed his shoulders.

‘Listen to me,’ he said. ‘You bought the plane for me in all innocence. You had no idea why I wanted it. When I got here, I attacked you and overpowered you. Like this . . .’

He let go of Cripps’s arms, swung his leg round and tripped him over. Cripps lay sprawled on the ground as Carver got into the car
and
drove straight at the low metal fence that separated the car park from the apron. The Mazda smashed through it and Carver drove straight towards the nine-year-old Cessna 172 that he had found online that morning and then asked Cripps to buy.

Shoreham is only a very minor airport and on a cold, grey afternoon in November, with the light failing as the rain sets in, traffic is almost non-existent. A single Shell petrol bowser was filling up one of the aircraft about fifty metres from Carver’s craft, but that aside there were no signs of life anywhere.

Apart, that is, from the police cars that could be seen coming through a gate on the very far side of the airfield, racing in Carver’s direction.

He got out of the car, opened the boot and slung Grantham over his shoulder, noticing only too late the damp, acrid wet patch at the front of Grantham’s trousers that was now pressing against the shoulder of Trent Peck’s fancy leather flying jacket. Carver opened the door of the plane and hefted Grantham on to the passenger seat, where he lay, wriggling feebly, until Carver sat him up and strapped him in.

Then he took his place in the pilot’s seat.

Carver had never in his life flown an aircraft. But as the 9/11 bombers had demonstrated, it was possible to do a great deal with an aircraft without qualifying as a pilot. And he didn’t need to do much beyond getting this thing up in the air and pointing it in the right direction.

One of the tasks he had been undertaking as he’d sat in front of his iPad, eating his porridge and chocolate bars, was to look at some of the very many clips on YouTube showing the pre-flight and take-off routines for a Cessna 172, which has been built in greater numbers than any other aircraft on earth. He had also downloaded and worked on a flight simulator. He was pleasantly surprised to discover how similar the imitation had been to the real thing. The instrument panel in front of him was entirely familiar, as was the routine.

He pulled the big red fuel-mixture knob fully out. He pulled the
throttle
out a little less than a centimeter. He turned the battery and the fuel pump on, let it run for a while, and turned it off again.

Then he turned the key, the engine caught at the first attempt, and the propellor started whirling round in front of him.

Carver pushed the fuel-mixture knob back in, made sure the flaps were up, and moments later the plane was taxiing towards the runway.

Up ahead Carver could see the lights of the police cars cutting across the grass outfield. He presumed they were aiming for the middle of the runway, trying to head him off. They’d probably be trying to radio him, too, telling him to turn off his engine. But the radio wasn’t on, and anyway he didn’t have a headset, so the hell with that.

He had to admit that his steering could do with a little refinement. The plane slewed around the apron like a Saturday-night drunk, but it was only a matter of seconds before he found himself at the start of the runway, pointing directly at the lights of the oncoming cars, and maxing the throttle.

And then he noticed that he didn’t just have cars to worry about. A police helicopter, stationed at the airfield, was rising into the air from an apron to the left of the runway. It hovered for a second, maybe twenty metres above the ground, and then darted to its right.

Now Carver was picking up speed.

The police cars were coming straight at him.

The helicopter was cutting across his path.

Aircraft speed is measured the same way as the speed of ships: in knots. Carver had memorized the take-off speed of a Cessna 172, which was sixty-four knots, or a little less than seventy-five miles per hour. From what he could gather from his research this morning, it took between ten and fifteen seconds for a plane like his to get up to that speed.

He had been heading down the runway for eight seconds. The cars were coming towards him at least as fast as he was heading towards them. Call it an impact speed of a hundred and fifty miles per hour; enough to write off anyone involved in the collision.

If the helicopter were to crash into him in mid-air, everyone in both crafts would certainly be killed, as might anyone caught beneath the falling debris.

The oncoming cars were now so close he was dazzled by their headlights.

The helicopter was buzzing around so insistently its engine was audible over the racket of his own.

Someone had to back down within the next second or they’d all be dead.

And Carver kept going. He didn’t slow down. He didn’t veer off course in any way. Because he knew he had a single decisive tactical advantage over everyone else on or over the airfield.

He really didn’t give a damn if he crashed.

They did. They wanted to go home for their tea that night. That was why the stream of cars divided to the left and right of the Cessna. The helicopter veered away. Carver pulled on the joystick and the plane rose up into the air and headed straight ahead, over the airfield and the town and out across the English Channel beyond.

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.