He turned his back on them and went over to the jeep. A few minutes later the convoy left, rolling out of the gates and back up the lane to the main road. Alex and Sabina sat next to each other on a narrow wooden bench. There were six men with them, all armed with automatic rifles, slung over the white suits. Alex thought he recognized one of the faces from the compound outside Amsterdam. Certainly he knew the type. Pale skin, dead- looking hair, dark, empty eyes.
Yassen sat opposite them. He too had put on a biochemical suit. He seemed to be staring at Alex, but he said nothing and his face was unreadable.
They travelled for two hours, taking the M4 towards London. Alex glanced occasionally at Sabina and she caught his eye once and smiled nervously. This wasn't her world. The men, the machine guns, the biochemical suits … they were all part of a nightmare that had come out of nowhere and which still made no sense—with no sign of a way out. Alex was baffled too. But the suits suggested a dreadful possibility. Did Cray have biochemical weapons? Was he planning to use them?
At last they turned off the motorway. Looking out of the back flap, Alex saw a signpost to Heathrow Airport and suddenly he knew, without being told, that this was their true destination.
He remembered the plane he had seen at the compound. And Cray, talking to him in the garden.
Henryk is very valuable to me. He flies jumbo jets. The airport had to be part of it, but it still didn't explain so many things. The president of the United States. Nuclear missiles. The very name—Eagle Strike—itself. Alex was angry with himself. It was all there in front of him. Some sort of picture was taking shape. But it was still blurred, out of focus.
They stopped. Nobody moved. Then Yassen spoke for the first time. “Out!” A single word.
Alex went first, then helped Sabina down. He enjoyed feeling her hand in his. There was a sudden loud roar overhead and he looked up just in time to see an aircraft sweeping down out of the sky. He saw where they were. They had stopped on the top floor of an abandoned multistorey car park—a legacy of Sir Arthur Lunt, Cray's father. It was on the very edge of Heathrow Airport, near the main runway. The only car, apart from their own, was a burnt-out shell. The ground was strewn with rubble and old rusting oil drums. Alex couldn't imagine why they had come here. Cray was waiting for a signal. Something was going to happen. But what?
Alex looked at his watch. It was exactly half past two. Cray called them over. He had travelled in the jeep with Henryk and now Alex saw that there was a radio transmitter on the back seat.
Henryk turned a dial; there was a loud whine. Cray was certainly making a performance out of this. The radio had been connected to a loudspeaker so that they could all hear.
“It's about to begin,” Cray said. He giggled. “Exactly on time!” Alex looked up. A second plane was coming in. It was still too far away and too high up to be seen clearly, but even so, he thought he recognized something about its shape. Suddenly a voice crackled out of the loudspeaker in the jeep.
“Attention, air traffic control. This is Millennium Air flight 118 from Amsterdam. We have a problem.”
The voice had been speaking in English but with a heavy Dutch accent. There was a pause, an empty hissing, and then a woman's voice replied. “Roger, MA 118. What is your problem, over?”
“Mayday! Mayday!” The voice from the aircraft was suddenly louder. “This is flight MA 118.
We have a fire on board. Request immediate clearance to land.” Another pause. Alex could imagine the panic in the control tower at Heathrow. But when the woman spoke again, her voice was professional, calm. “Roger your mayday. We have you on radar. Steer on 0-90. Descend three thousand feet.”
“Air traffic control.” The radio crackled again. “This is Captain Schroeder from flight MA 118. I have to advise you that I am carrying extremely hazardous biochemical products on behalf of the Ministry of Defence. We have an emergency situation here. Please advise.” The Heathrow woman replied immediately. “We need to know what is on board. Where is it and what are the quantities?”
“Air traffic control, we are carrying a nerve gas. We cannot be more specific. It is highly experimental and extremely dangerous. There are three canisters in the hold. We now have a fire in the main cabin. Mayday! Mayday!”
Alex looked again. The plane was much lower now and he knew exactly where he had seen it before. It was the cargo plane that he had seen in the compound outside Amsterdam. Smoke was streaming out of the side and even as Alex watched, flames suddenly exploded, spreading over the wings. To anyone watching, it would seem that the plane was in terrible danger. But Alex knew that the whole thing had been faked.
The control tower was monitoring the plane. “Flight MA 118, the emergency services have been alerted. We are beginning an immediate evacuation of the airport. Please proceed to twenty-seven left. You are cleared to land.”
At once Alex heard the sound of alarms coming from all over the airport. The plane was still two or three thousand feet up, the flames trailing behind it. He had to admit that it looked totally convincing. Suddenly everything was starting to make sense. He was beginning to understand Cray's plan.
“Time to roll!” Cray announced.
Alex and Sabina were led back to the truck. Cray climbed into the jeep next to Henryk, who was driving, and they set off. It was difficult for Alex to see what was happening now as he only had a view out of the back, but he guessed that they had left the car park and were following the perimeter fence around the airport. The alarms seemed to have got louder; presumably they were getting nearer to them. A number of police sirens erupted in the distance and Alex noticed that the road had got busier as cars tore past, the drivers desperate to get away from the immediate area.
“What's he doing?” Sabina whispered.
“The plane isn't on fire,” Alex said. “Cray's tricked them. He's evacuating the airport. That's how we're going to get in.”
“But why?”
“Enough,” Yassen said. “You don't speak now.” He reached under his seat and produced two gas masks which he handed to Alex and Sabina. “Put these on.”
“Why do I need it?” Sabina asked.
“Just do as I say.”
“Well, it'll ruin my make-up.” She put it on anyway.
Alex did the same. All the men in the truck, including Yassen, had gas masks. Suddenly they were completely anonymous. Alex had to admit that there was a certain genius to Cray's scheme.
It was a perfect way to break into the airport. By now all the security personnel would know that a plane carrying a deadly nerve agent was about to crash-land. The airport was in the throes of a full-scale emergency evacuation. When Cray and his miniature army arrived at the main gate, it was unlikely that anyone would ask them for ID. In their biochemical suits they looked official.
They were driving official-looking vehicles. The fact that they had arrived at the airport in record time wouldn't be seen as suspicious. It was more like a miracle.
It happened exactly as Alex suspected.
The jeep stopped at a gate on the south side of the airport. The guards there were both young.
One of them had only been in the job for a couple of weeks and was already panicking, faced with a red alert. The cargo plane hadn't landed yet but it was getting closer and closer, stumbling out of the air. The fire was worse, clearly out of control. And here were two trucks and an army vehicle filled with men in white suits, hoods and gas masks. He wasn't going to argue.
Cray leant out of the door. He was as anonymous as the rest of his men, his face concealed behind the gas mask. “Ministry of Defence,” he snapped. “Biochemical Weapons division.”
“Go ahead!” The guards couldn't hurry them through fast enough.
The plane touched down. Two fire engines and an assortment of emergency vehicles began to race towards it. Their truck overtook the jeep and came to a halt. Looking out of the back, Alex saw everything.
It started with Damian Cray.
He was sitting in the passenger seat of the jeep and had produced a radio transmitter. “It's time to raise the stakes,” he said. “Let's make this a real emergency.” Somehow Alex knew what was about to happen. Cray pressed a button and at once the plane exploded, disappearing in a huge fireball that erupted out of it and at the same time consumed it.
Fragments of wood and metal spun in all directions. Burning aviation fuel spilt over the runway, seeming to set it alight too. The emergency vehicles had fanned out as if to surround the wreckage, but then Alex realized that
