treat them soft-” Peter knew exactly what was coming, “and if you keep waving guns in their faces, you will keep them alert and on their toes, Colonel. Let them settle down a little and relax, let them get very confident.” He spoke without lowering the binoculars. With a soldier’s eye for ground he was picking the site for his four snipers. There was little chance that he would be able to use them they would have to take out every single one of the enemy at the same instant but a remote chance might just offer itself, and he decided to place one gun on the service hangar roof, there was a large ventilator which could be pierced and would command the port side of the aircraft, two guns to cover the flight deck from both sides he could use the drainage ditch down the edge of the main runway to get a man into the small hut that housed the approach radar and ILS beacons. The hut was in the enemy’s rear. They might not expect fire from that quarter. point by point from his mental checklist Peter planned his dispositions, scribbling his decisions into the small leather-covered notebook, poring over the large-scale map of the airport, converting gradients and angles into fields of fire, measuring “ground to cover” and “time to target” for an assault force launched from the nearest vantage points, twisting each problem and evaluating it, striving for novel solutions to each, trying to think ahead of an enemy that was still faceless and infinitely menacing.
It took him an hour of hard work before he was satisfied.
Now he could pass his decisions to Colin Noble on board the incoming Herc, and within four minutes of the big landing wheels hitting tarmac his highly trained team with their complex talents and skills would be in position.
Peter straightened up from the map and tucked the notebook under the flap of his button-down breast pocket.
Once again he scrutinized every inch of the silent, battened-down aircraft through his glasses but this time he allowed himself the luxury of gut emotion.
He felt the anger and the hatred rise from some hidden depth of his soul and flush his blood and tighten the muscles of his belly and thighs.
Once again he was confronted by the many-headed monster. It crouched out there in ambush, waiting for him as it had so often before.
He remembered suddenly the shards of splintered glass littering the cobbles of a Belfast street and glittering like diamond chips in the arc lamps, the smell of explosives and blood thick in the air.
He remembered the body of a young woman lying in the gutted interior of a fashionable London restaurant. Her lovely young body stripped by the blast of all but a flimsy pearl-coloured pair of French lace panties.
He remembered the smell of a family, father, mother and three small children, burning in the interior of their saloon car, the bodies blackening and twisting in a slow macabre ballet as the flames scorched them. Peter had not been able to eat pork since that day.
He remembered the frightened eyes of a child, through a mask of blood, a dismembered arm lying beside her, the pale fingers still clutching a grubby little rag doll.
The images flashed in disjointed sequences across his memory,
feeding his hatred until it pricked and stung behind his eyes and he had to lower the binoculars and wipe his eyes with the back of his hand.
It was the same enemy that he had hunted before, but his instincts warned him that it had grown even stronger and more inhuman since last he had met and fought it. He tried to suppress the hatred now, lest it cloud his judgement, lest it handicap him during the difficult hours and days that he knew lay ahead but it was too powerful, had been too long nurtured.
He recognized that hatred was the enemy’s vice, that from it sprang their twisted philosophy and their monstrous actions, and that to descend to hatred was to descend to their sub-human levels yet still the hatred persisted.
Peter Stride understood clearly that his hatred was not only for the ghastly death and mutilation that he had witnessed so often. More it was fostered by the threat that he recognized to an entire society and its civilized rule of law. If this evil should be allowed to triumph, then in the future laws would be made by the wild-eyed revolutionary, with a gun in his fist the world would be run by the destroyers instead of the builders, and Peter Stride hated that possibility more even than the violence and the blood, and those he hated as a soldier hates. For only a soldier truly knows the horror of war.
His soldier’s instinct now was to immediately engage the enemy and destroy him but the scholar and philosopher in him warned that this was not the moment, and with an enormous effort of will he held that fighting man’s instinct in check.
Yet still he was deeply aware that it was for this moment, for this confrontation of the forces of evil, that he had jeopardized his whole career.
When command of Atlas had been plucked away and a political appointee named in his place, Peter should have declined the offer of a lesser position in Atlas. There were other avenues open to him, but instead he had elected to stay with the project and he hoped that nobody had guessed at the resentment he felt. God knows, Kingston
Parker had no cause for complaint since then. There was no harder working officer on Atlas, and his loyalty had been tested more than once.
Now all that seemed worth while, and the moment for which he had worked had arrived. The enemy waited For him out there on the burning tarmac under an African sun, not on a soft green island in the rain nor in the grimy streets of a crowded city but still it was the same old enemy, and Peter knew his time would come.
His communications technicians had Colin Noble on the main screen as Peter ducked into the Hawker’s cabin that was now his command headquarters, and settled into his padded seat. On the top right screen was a panoramic view of the southern terminal area, with the
Boeing squatting like a brooding eagle upon its nest in the centre of the shot. On the next screen beside it was a blow-up through the
800 mm. zoom lens of the Boeing’s flight deck. So crisp was the detail that Peter could read the maker’s name on the tab of the blanket that screened the windshield. The third small screen held a full shot of the interior of the air traffic control tower. In the foreground the controllers in shirt sleeves sitting over the radar repeaters, and beyond them through the floor to ceiling windows still another view of the Boeing. All these were being shot through the cameras installed an hour earlier in the terminal building. The remaining small screen was blank, and Colin Noble’s homely, humorous face filled the main screen.
“Now if only it had been the cavalry instead of the U.S. Marines, Peter said, you’d have been here yesterday-“
“What’s your hurry, pal. Doesn’t look like the party has started yet.” Colin grinned at him from the screen and pushed his baseball cap to the back of his head.
“Damned right,” Peter agreed. “We don’t even know who is throwing the party. What’s your latest estimate on arrival time?”
“We’ve picked up a good wind one hour twenty-two minutes to fly now,“Colin told him.
“Right, let’s get down to it,” Peter said, and he began his briefing, going carefully over the field notes he had taken.
When he wanted to emphasize a point, Peter called for a change of shot from his cameramen, and they zoomed in or panned to his instruction, picking up the radar shed or the service hangar ventilator where Peter was siting his snipers.
The image was repeated not only on the command console but in the cavernous body of the approaching Hercules so that the men who would be called to occupy those positions could study them now and prepare themselves thoroughly for the moment. The same images were hurled across the stratosphere to the circling satellite and from there bounced down to appear, only slightly distorted, on the screens of
Atlas Command in the west wing of the Pentagon. Sagging like an old lion in his armchair, Kingston Parker followed every word of the briefing, rousing himself only when a long telex message was passed to him by his assistant, then he nodded a command to have his own televised image superimposed on Peter’s command console.
“I’m sorry to interrupt you, Peter, but we’ve got a useful scrap here. Assuming that the militant group boarded 070 at Malic, we asked the Seychelles Police to run a check on all joining passengers. There were fifteen of them, ten of whom were Seychelles residents. A local merchant and his wife, and eight unaccompanied children between nine and fourteen years of age. They are the children of expatriate civil servants employed on contract by
