raw mushrooms.
“Christ!” she screamed wildly and lunged for the manual oxygen release. Above each seat the panels dropped open and the emergency oxygen masks dangled down into the cabins on their corrugated hoses.
“Kurt! Henry!” Ingrid shrieked into the cabin intercom.
“Oxygen! Take oxygen! It’s Delta. They are going to Delta.” She grabbed one of the dangling oxygen masks and sucked in deep pumping breaths, cleansing the numbing paralysing gas from her system. In the firstclass galley one of the hostages collapsed slowly forward and tumbled onto the deck, another slumped sideways.
Still breathing oxygen, Ingrid unslung the camera from around her neck, and Karen watched her with huge terrified dark eyes. She lifted the oxygen mask from her face to ask: “You’re not going to blow,
Ingrid?” Ingrid ignored her and used the oxygen in her lungs to shout into the microphone.
“Kurt! Henri! They will come as soon as the mains are switched on again. Cover your eyes and ears for the stun grenades and watch the doors and wing windows.” Ingrid slapped the oxygen mask back over her mouth and panted wildly.
“Don’t blow us up, Ingrid!” Karen pleaded around her mask.
“Please, if we surrender Caliph will have us free in a month. We don’t have to die.” At that moment the lights of the cabin came on brightly,
and there was the hiss of the air-conditioning. Ingrid took one last breath of oxygen and ran back into the firstclass cabin, jumping over the unconscious figures of the hostages and of two air hostesses. She grabbed another of the dangling oxygen masks above a passenger seat and looked down the long fuselage.
Kurt and Henri had obeyed her orders. They were breathing oxygen from the roof panels. The German was ready at the port wing panel, and
Henri waited at the rear doorway hatch both of them had the short big-mouthed shot pistols ready, but their faces were covered with the yellow oxygen masks, so Ingrid could not see nor judge their expressions.
Only a small number of the passengers had been quick enough and sensible enough to grab the dangling oxygen masks and remain conscious but hundreds of others slumped in their seats or had fallen sideways into the aisles.
A thicket of dangling, twisting, swinging oxygen hoses filled the cabin like a forest of ha has obscuring and confusing the scene, and after the darkness the cabin lights were painfully bright.
Ingrid held the camera in her free hand, for she knew that they must continue breathing oxygen. It would take the air-conditioning many minutes longer to cleanse the air of all trace of Factor V, and she held a mask over her mouth and waited.
Karen was beside her, with her shot pistol dangling from one hand and the other pressing a mask to her mouth.
“Go back and cover the front hatch,” Ingrid snapped at her.
“There will be-“
“Ingrid, we don’t have to die,” Karen pleaded, and with a crash the emergency exit panel over the port wing burst inward,
and at the same instant two small dark objects flew threw the dark opening into the cabin.
“Stun grenades!” Ingrid howled. “Get down!” Peter Stride was light and jubilant as an eagle in flight.
His feet and hands hardly seemed to touch the rungs of the ladder,
now in the swift all-engulfing rush of action there were no longer doubts, no more hesitations he was committed, and it was a tremendous soaring relief.
He went up over the smooth curved leading edge of the wing with a roll of his shoulders and hips, and in the same movement was on his feet, padding silently down the broad glistening metal pathway. The raindrops glittered like diamonds under his feet, and a fresh wind tugged at his hair as he ran.
He reached the main hull, and dropped into position at the side of the panel, his fingertips finding the razor- tight joint while his number-two man knelt swiftly opposite him.
The grenade men were ready facing the panel, balanced like acrobats on the curved slippery upper surface of the great wing.
“Under six seconds.” Peter guessed at the time it had taken them to reach this stage from the “go. It was as swift and neat as it had never been in training, all of them armed by the knowledge of waiting death and horror.
In unison Peter and his number two hurled their combined strength and weight onto the releases of the emergency escape hatch, and it flew inwards readily, for there was no pressurization to resist, and at exactly the same instant the 7 stun grenades went in cleanly, thrown by the waiting grenade men, and all four members of Peter’s team bowed like Mohammedans in prayer to Mecca, covering eyes and ears.
Even outside the cabin, and even with ears and eyes covered, the thunder of the explosions was appalling, seeming to beat in upon the brain with oppressive physical force, and the glare of burning phosphorus powder painted an X-ray picture of Peter’s own fingers on the fleshy red of his closed eyelids. Then the grenade men were shouting into the interior, “Lie down! Everybody down! They would keep repeating that order Israeli sty leas long as it lasted.
Peter was a hundredth of a second slow, numbed by the blast,
fumbling slightly at the butt of the Walther, thumbing the hammer as it snapped out of the quick-release holster, and then he went in feet first through the hatch, like a runner sliding for home base. He was still in the air when he saw the girl in the red shirt running forward brandishing the camera, and screaming something that made no sense,
though his brain registered it even in that unholy moment.
He fired as his feet touched the deck and his first shot hit the girl in the mouth, punching a dark red hole through the rows of white teeth and snapping her head back so viciously that he heard the small delicate bones of her neck crack leas they broke.
Ingrid used both arms to cover eyes and ears, crouching forward into the appalling blast of sound and light that swept through the crowded cabins like a hurricane wind, and even when it had passed she was reeling wildly clutching for support at a seat back, trying to steady herself and judge the moment when the attackers were into the hull.
Those outside the hull would escape the direct force of the explosives she was about to detonate; there was a high survival chance for them. She wanted to judge the moment when the entire assault team penetrated the hull, she wanted maximum casualties, she wanted to take as many with her as possible, and she lifted the camera above her head with both hands.
“Come on!” she shrieked, but the cabin was thick with swirling clouds of white acrid smoke, and the dangling hoses twisted and writhed like the head of the Medusa. She heard the thunder of a shot pistol and somebody screamed, voices were chanting, “Lie down” Everybody down”
It was all smoke and sound and confusion, but she watched the dark opening of the emergency hatchway, waiting for it, finger on the detonator button of the camera.
A supple black-clad figure in a grotesque mask torpedoed feet first into the cabin, and at that same instant Karen shrieked beside her.
“No, don’t kill us,” and snatched the camera from Ingrid’s raised hands, jerking it away by the strap, leaving Ingrid weaponless. Karen ran down the aisle through the smoke, still screaming, Don’t kill us!”
holding the camera like a peace offering. “Caliph said we would not die.” She ran forward screaming frantically. “Caliph-” and the black-clad and masked figure twisted lithely in the air, arching his back to land feet first in the centre of the aisle; as his feet touched the deck so the pistol in his right hand jerked up sharply but the shot seemed muted and un-warlike after the concussion of the stun grenades.
Karen was running down the aisle towards him, screaming and brandishing the camera, when the bullet took her in the mouth and wrenched her head backwards at an impossible angle. The next two shots blended into a single blurt of sound, fired so swiftly as to cheat the hearing, and from such Close range that even the Velex explosive bullets ripped the back out of Karen’s shirt and flooded it with a brighter wetter scarlet as they erupted from between her shoulder blades. The camera went spinning high across the cabin, landing in the lap of an unconscious passenger slumped in one of the central seats between the aisles.
Ingrid reacted with the instinctive speed of a jungle cat, diving forward, flat on the carpet aisle below the line Of fire; shrouded by the sinking white smoke of the grenades she wriggled forward on her belly to reach the
