The jet blasts struck the Boeing one after the other as the
Mirages attacked. Ingrid clutched wildly for support with her free hand, but kept the pistol jammed into the navigator’s neck. “I mean it,” she kept shouting. “I’ll kill him and they could hear the screams of the passengers even through the bulkhead of the flight deck.
Then the last Mirage was passed and gone and the Boeing’s flight director recovered from the battering of close separation and quickly realigned the aircraft on the radio navigational beacons of Jan Smuts
Airport.
“They won’t buzz us again.” Ingrid stepped back from the flight engineer, allowing him to lift his head and wipe away the trickle of blood on the sleeve of his shirt. “They can’t come again. We are into controlled airspace.” She pointed ahead. “Look!” The Boeing was down to five thousand feet, but the horizon was obscured by the haze of smog and summer heat.
To the right rose the smooth silhouette of the Kempton Park Power
Station cooling towers and, closer at hand, the poisonous yellow tablelands of the mine dumps squatted on the flat and featureless plain of the African high veld
Around them human habitation was so dense that hundreds of windowpanes caught the early morning sun and glittered like beacons.
Closer still was the long, straight, blue streak of the main runway of Jan Smuts Airport.
“Take her straight in on runway 21 ingrid ordered.
“We can’t,-“
“Do it,” snapped the girl. “Air traffic control will have cleared the circuit. They can’t stop us.”
“Yes, they can,” Cyril
Watkins answered. “Just take a look at the runway apron.” They were close enough now to count five fuel tenders, to see the Shell company insignia on the tanks.
“They are going to block the runway.” With the tankers were five brilliant red vehicles of the fire service and two big white ambulances. They bumped wildly over the grass verge of the runway and then, one after the other, tenders and fire control vehicles and ambulances parked at intervals of a few hundred yards down the white-painted centre line of the runway.
“We can’t land,” said the captain.
“Take her off automatic and fly her in by hand.” The girl’s voice was different, hard, cruel.
The Boeing was sinking through a thousand feet, lined up for runway 21 and directly ahead the revolving red beacons on top of the fire vehicles seemed to flash a direct challenge.
“I can’t pile into them,” Cyril Watkins decided, and there was no longer hesitation nor doubt in his tone. “I’m going to overshoot and get out of here.”
“Land on the grass,” the girl shrieked. “There is open grass on the left of the runway put her down there.” But Cyril
Watkins had leaned forward in his seat and rammed the bank of throttles forward. The engines howled and the Boeing surged into a nose-high climb.
The young flight engineer had swivelled his stool and was staring ahead through the windscreen. His whole body was rigid, his expression intense and the smear of blood across his forehead was in vivid contrast to the pallor of his skin.
With his right hand he gripped the edge of his desk, and the knuckles of his fist were white and shiny as eggshell.
Without seeming to move the blonde girl had pinned the wrist of that rigid right hand, pressing the muzzles of the pistol into it.
There was a crash of sound, so violent in the confines of the cabin that it seemed to beat in their eardrums. The weapon kicked up as high as the girl’s golden head and there was the immediate acrid stench of burned cordite.
The flight engineer stared down incredulously at the desk top.
There was a hole blown through the metal as big as a teacup, and the edges were jagged with bright bare metal.
The blast of shot had amputated his hand cleanly at the wrist.
The severed member had been thrown forward into the space between the pilots” seats, with the shattered bone protruding from the mangled meat. It twitched like a crushed and maimed insect.
“Land,” said the girl. “Land or the next shot is through his head.”
“You bloody monster,” shouted Cyril Watkins, staring at the severed hand.
“Land or you will be responsible for this man’s life.” The flight engineer clutched the stump of his arm against his belly and doubled over it silently, his face contorted by the shock.
Cyril Watkins tore his stricken gaze from the severed hand and looked ahead once more. There was wide open grass between the runway markers and the narrow taxiway.
The grass had been mown knee-high, and he knew the ground beneath it would be fairly smooth.
Cyril’s hand on the throttle bank pulled back smoothly, almost of its own volition, the engine thunder died away and the nose dropped again.
He held his approach aligned with the main runway until he was well in over the threshold lights. He did not want to alert the drivers of the blocking vehicles to his intention while they still had time to counter it.
“You murderous bitch,” he said under his breath. “You filthy murderous bitch.” He banked the Boeing steeply, realigned it with the long strip of open grass and cut the throttles completely, bringing her in nose-high and just a fraction above the stall, flaring out deliberately low and banging the Boeing down into the grass for positive touch down.
The huge machine settled to the rough strip, jolting and lurching wildly as Cyril Watkins fought the rudders to keep them lined up,
holding his nose wheel off with the control yoke, while his co-pilot threw all her giant engines into reverse thrust and trod firmly down on the main landing gear brakes.
The fire engines and fuel tankers flashed past the starboard wing tip. The startled faces of their crews seemed very close and white then 070 was past, her speed bleeding off sharply so her nose wheel dropped and she rocked and swayed gradually to a dead stop just short of the brick building which housed the approach and landing beacons,
and the main radar installations.
It was 7.25 a.m. local time and Speedbird 070 was down.
“Well, they are down,” intoned Kingston Parker.
“And you can well understand the extreme efforts that were made to prevent them. Their choice of final destination settles one of your queries, Peter.”
“ Peter nodded. “It’s got to be political.
I agree, sir.”
“And you and I must now face in dreadful reality what we have discussed only in lofty theory-” Parker held a taper to his pipe and puffed twice before going on.
Morally justifiable militancy.”
“Again we have to differ, sir.”
Peter cut in swiftly. “There is no such thing.”
“Is there not?” Parker asked, shaking his head. “What of the German officers killed in the streets of Paris by the French resistance?”
“That was war,” Peter exclaimed.
“Perhaps the group that seized 070 believes that they are at war
“With innocent victims?” Peter shot back.
“The Haganah took innocent victims yet what they were fighting for was right and just.” As an Englishman, Dr. Parker you cannot expect me to condone the murder of British women and children.” Peter had stiffened in his chair.
“No,” Parker agreed. “So let us not speak of the MauMau in Kenya,
nor of present-day Ireland then but what of the French Revolution or the spreading of the Catholic faith by the most terrible persecution and tortures yet devised by man were those not morally justifiable militancy?”
