camera.
It was twenty feet to where the camera had landed, but Ingrid moved with the speed of a serpent; she knew that the smoke was hiding her, but she knew also that to reach the camera she would have to come to her feet again and reach across two seats and two unconscious bodies.
Peter landed in balance on the carpeted aisle, and he killed the girl swiftly, and danced aside, clearing space for his number two to land.
The next man landed lightly in the space Peter had made for him,
and the German in the red shirt jumped out from the angle of the rear galley and hit him in the small of the back with a full charge of buckshot. It almost blew his body into two separate parts, and he seemed to break in the middle like a folding penknife as he collapsed against Peter’s legs.
Peter whirled at the shot, turning his back on Ingrid as she crawled forward through the phosphorous smoke.
Kurt was desperately trying to pull down the short, thick barrel of the pistol, for the recoil had thrown it high above his head. His scarlet shirt was open to the navel, shiny hard brown muscle and thick whorls of black body hair, mad glaring eyes through a greasy fringe of black hair, the scarred lip curled in a fixed snarl.
Peter hit him in the chest, taking no chance, and as he reeled backwards still fighting to aim the pistol, Peter hit again, in the head through the temple just in front of the left ear; the eyelids closed tightly over those wild eyes, his features twisted out of shape like a rubber mask and he went down face first into the aisle.
“Two.” Peter found that, as always in these desperate moments, he was functioning very coldly, very efficiently.
His shooting had been as reflexively perfect as if he were walking a combat shoot with jump-up cardboard targets.
He had even counted his shots, there were four left in the
Walther.
“And two more of them,” he thought, but the smoke was still so thick that his visibility was down to under fifteen feet, and the swirling forest of dangling oxygen hose still agitated by the grenade blasts cut down his visibility further.
He jumped over the broken body of his number two, the blood squelching under his rubber soles, and suddenly the chunky black figure of Colin Noble loomed across the cabin.
He was in the far aisle, having come in over the starboard wing.
In the writhing smoke he looked like some demon from the pit, hideous and menacing in his gas mask. He dropped into the marksman’s crouch,
holding the big Browning in a double-handed grip, and the clangour of the gun beat upon the air like one of the great bronze bells of Notre Dame.
He was shooting at another scarlet-shirted figure, half seen through the smoke and the dangling hoses, a man with a round boyish face and drooping sandy mustache. The big Velex bullets tore the hijacker to pieces with the savagery of a predator’s claws. They seemed to pin him like an insect to the central bulkhead, and they smashed chunks of living flesh from his chest and splinters of white bone from his skull.
“Three,” thought Peter. “One left now and I must get the camera.” He had seen the black camera in the hands of the girl he had killed, had seen it fall, and he knew how deadly important it was to secure the detonator before it fell into the hands of the other girl,
the blonde one, the dangerous one.
It had been only four seconds since he had penetrated the hull,
yet it seemed like a dragging eternity. He could hear the crash of the slap-hammers tearing out the door locks, both fore and aft. Within seconds there would be Thor assault teams pouring into the Boeing through every opening, and he had not yet located the fourth hijacker, the truly dangerous one.
“Get down! Everybody down!” chanted the grenade men, and Peter spun lightly, and ran for the flight deck. He was certain the blonde girl would be there at the control centre.
Then, in front of him lay the girl he had shot down, the long,
dark hair spread out around her pale, still terrified face. Her hair was already sodden with dark blood, and the black gap in her white teeth made her look like an old woman. She blocked the aisle with a tangle of slim boneless limbs.
The forward hatch crashed open as the lock gave way, but there were still solid curtains of white smoke ahead of him. Peter gathered himself to jump over the girl’s body, and at that instant the other girl, the blonde girl, bounded up from the deck, seeming to appear miraculously from the smoke, like some beautiful but evil apparition.
She dived half across the block of central seating, groping for the camera, and Peter was slightly off balance, blocking himself in the turn to bring his gun hand on to her. He changed hands smoothly, for he was equally accurate with either, but it cost him the tenth part of a second, and the girl had the strap of the camera now and was tugging desperately at it. The camera seemed to be snagged, and Peter swung on her, taking the head shot for she was less than ten paces away, and even in the smoke and confusion he could not miss.
One of the few passengers who had been breathing oxygen from his hanging mask, and was still conscious, ignored the chanted orders “Get down! Stay down!” and suddenly stumbled to his feet, screaming, “Don’t shoot! Get me out of here! Don’t shoot!” in a rising hysterical scream.
He was directly between Peter and the red-shirted girl, blocking
Peter’s field of fire, and Peter wrenched the gun off him at the moment that he fired. The bullet slammed into the roof, and the passenger barged into Peter, still screaming.
“Get me out! I want to get out!” Peter tried desperately to clear his gun hand, for the girl had broken the strap of the camera and was fumbling with the black box. The passenger had an arm around Peter’s gun arm, was shaking him wildly, weeping and screaming.
From across the central block of seats, Colin Noble fired once.
He was still in the starboard aisle and the angle was almost impossible, for he had to shoot nine inches past Peter’s shoulder, and through the forest of dangling hose.
His first shot missed, but it was close enough to flinch the girl’s head violently, the golden hair flickered with the passage of shot, and she stumbled backwards, groping with clumsy fingers for the detonator.
Peter chopped the hysterical passenger in the throat with the stiffened fingers of his right hand and hurled him back into his seat,
trying desperately to line up for a shot at the girl knowing he must get the brain and still her fingers instantly.
Colin fired his second shot, one hundredth of a second before
Peter, and the big bullet flung the girl aside, jerking her head out of the track of Peter’s shot.
Peter saw the strike of Colin’s bullet, it hit her high in the right shoulder, almost in the oint of the scapula and the humerus,
shattering the bone with such force that her arm was flung upwards in a parody of a communist salute, twisting unnaturally and whipping above her head; once again the camera was flung aside and the girl’s body was thrown violently backwards down the aisle as though she had been hit by a speeding automobile.
Peter picked his shot, waiting for a clean killing hit in the head as the girl tried to drag herself upright but before he could fire, a mass of black-costumed figures swarmed out of the smoke, and covered the girl, pinning her kicking and screaming on the carpet of the aisle.
The Thor team had come in through the forward hatch, just in time to save her life, and Peter clipped the Walther into his holster and stooped to pick up the camera gingerly. Then he pulled off his mask with his other hand.
“That’s it. That’s all of them, he shouted. “We got them all.
Cease fire. It’s all over.” Then into the microphone of the transceiver, “Touch down! Touch down!” The code for total success.
Three of his men were holding the girl down, and despite the massive spurting wound in her shoulder, she fought like a leopard in a trap.
“Get the emergency chutes down,” Peter ordered, and from each exit the long plastic slides inflated and drooped to the tarmac already his men were leading the conscious passengers to the exits and helping them into
