Murray then caught another red flashing in his mirror and a pair of headlamps glared back at him, gaining fast. Ryderbeit and No-Entry were both kneeling on the seat, facing backwards and fitting fresh clips into their carbines. Their pursuers this time were in a large yellow Land Rover, its siren blaring even above the crescendo of the Red Alert.
Murray had the speedometer touching sixty, running out across the smooth concrete apron as Ryderbeit crouched over the short-muzzled M16 and fired two more quick bursts. In the mirror Murray saw both headlamps explode and go black. Ryderbeit aimed again and this time his muzzle jerked round in a scything arc that cut upwards across the windshield and homed in on the revolving red beacon which suddenly went out, and he was yelling at No-Entry: ‘Give it ’em on fully automatic!’ This time the whole jeep seemed to lurch as Jones’ little plastic gun emptied itself in a single roar — thirty rounds in just over one second flat. The Land Rover behind swerved blindly, then rocked to a standstill. No one got out: though Murray had noticed the long antenna swung out from the bonnet like a fishing rod, and knew that unless No-Entry’s last burst had killed them all — or at least put them fully out of action — that radio was going to be critical.
He was still holding their speed at around 60 m.p.h., following the orange-painted lines and arrows that splayed out across the concrete towards the Air Freight Transport runways; while behind, over a wide horizon, several large fires were already lighting the sky and the sirens kept up their agonised rhythm like the panting of asthmatics. Fighter-jets were starting up behind the sandbagged walls; the secondary, slower siren howls of Air and Military Police were now baying out against the chaos of the night: and for the first time Murray began to take stock of what had really happened.
Less than two minutes had passed since those first two rockets had hit the field, and been followed — his mind registering almost subconsciously — by at least a dozen more explosions. He recognised them well as Soviet 122’s: lethal, highly manoeuvrable weapons which are also notoriously inaccurate. And the fact that at least a dozen of them had landed inside a relatively compact area of the field indicated that they were being loosed off from unusually close range, perhaps as the prelude to a large-scale assault.
But the first two rockets had struck a few seconds before the Red Alert went off — which suggested that something very odd indeed was happening. Was it mere coincidence that Jackie Conquest had fired General Virgil Greene’s button at almost the precise second that, at a mile or two away, some scrawny Viet Cong had lit his fuse and stood back? For Murray doubted even America’s mighty war-machine capable devising an alarm system so exact that it could activate a Red Alert within seconds of the first explosions.
Yet this was just what had happened. And as they drove further into the dark wastes of the Air Freight Transport Area, he began to have an ugly feeling, not that things were going wrong, but that they might be going just a little too right.
They were now perhaps a quarter of a mile from the two crashed Fleetwoods and the Land Rover, when, about three hundred yards ahead, illuminated under the glow of more flares, they saw the familiar silhouette of a Caribou transport plane. It was already lined up at the head of the runway, red and green wing-lights on, facing down the lane of orange landing beacons. Around its wings and below its tail was a cluster of vehicles — a forklift truck, jeeps, several motorcycle outriders. Murray made no attempt to slow down, even for the large stencilled sign under a flashing red warning light:
AFTA / RUNWAY IV / TSN
ALL UNAUTHORISED PERSONNEL
KEEP OUT!
He almost laughed aloud. After that first numbing shock of seeing Conquest die, he now felt a heady exhilaration, the release and recklessness of a gambler on a wild streak — no road back now — all bridges burnt and the only way out down that empty runway in the slim blunt-nosed Caribou with its anus-vent closed under the tail, fuel trucks withdrawn, forklift empty, all systems go.
Some of the vehicles, dim now under the dying flares, were beginning to move away towards them, followed by the outriders.
Only the last two hundred yards now of flat oil-streaked concrete: men climbing out of the nose and rear doors of the plane: more on the ground — perhaps half a dozen in all — as Murray switched on the jeep’s own siren and Ryderbeit unclipped the windshield fasteners, folding the Perspex forward on to the bonnet, his M16 reloaded and at the ready.
The forklift truck, flanked by the outriders, came grinding towards them. Murray kept up his speed, swerving round them with Ryderbeit and No-Entry still holding their weapons level with the bonnet. The motorcycles snarled past without incident. He began to brake only when the jeep was about thirty yards from the Caribou, with the siren still going and Ryderbeit yelling, ‘If there’s goin’ to be any shootin’, let’s get between ’em and the bloody plane!’
Murray pulled up just behind the Caribou’s port engine, which was already turning. As he did so, several men in khaki baseball caps ran towards one of the two jeeps parked behind the plane’s tail. Obviously last-minute maintenance men. But Murray had his eyes on a third vehicle
