Devil May Care - Sebastian Faulks [82]
A dark, thick-set man in combat trousers and a white T-shirt leaned over from the aisle. ‘I am Massoud,’ he said. ‘We do checks with pilot. We leave in
half-hour. You stay where you are. If you move, we kill you.’
‘Worse than Dan Air,’ said Bond. ‘Do you have a cigarette?’
‘Be quiet. No smoke. Fasten seat-belt.’
Bond did as he was told. This was the moment in a flight he normally enjoyed, knowing that he would have a few hours to himself, unreachable by the demands of M or any of the women in his life – time in which he could read a few pages of Ben Hogan on The Modern Fundamentals of Golf, then watch the sun glinting on the wings as he sipped a Bloody Mary over the Arctic cloudscape.
Bond looked up to see another man staring down at him from the aisle. He wore a grubby BOAC shirt. He looked English, and afraid. ‘My name’s Ken Mitchell,’ he said, in the tones of the Surrey golf course. ‘I’m the pilot of this crate for my sins. I’m just here to tell you not to try anything funny. It’s our only hope. I do the take-off and get us most of the way. Then they’re going to bring you up to the flight deck for the last bit. They’ve promised me that if I play ball with them, they’ll let me go. Don’t muck it up for me, Mr Bond. It’s my little girl’s birthday tomorrow.’
‘All right,’ said Bond. ‘Any tips on how to fly it?’
‘ To keep her level, don’t look at the instruments. Pick something on the horizon, the edge of a cloud or something. Orientate yourself by that, not by the instruments. But we’ll be on autopilot most of the way. She flies herself.’
‘ Thank you. Now sit back and enjoy your flight, Ken.’
Mitchell gave him one last imploring look as he was grabbed by the arm and pushed back towards the cockpit.
A few minutes later, Bond felt the jolt of the engines engaging as the plane began to taxi. Through his window he could see the green light winking on top of the simple control tower, half a mile distant. At the end of the runway, the big plane turned and stopped.
Bond heard the Rolls-Royce engines roar from the back of the fuselage, and then they were moving forward purposefully, rapidly accelerating. He felt the small of his back pushed against the padded first-class seat as the nose lifted and the rear thrust drove the great plane up through the thin air into the burning desert sky.
In the steel hangar in Noshahr, the last of the camouflage nets was cleared from the nose of the Ekrano
plan and the engines were started. The fourteen-man crew all carried fake British passports, though eight were Persian, two Iraqi, two Turkish, one was a Saudi, and the last, who sat at the radio console wearing headphones, was a Farsi-speaking Russian.
It was the first time the Ekranoplan, modified by the addition of four extra fuel tanks, six rocket launchers and four surface-to-air missiles, had left the hangar, and there was tension among the men as the mighty engines opened up on the calm sea. The drag created by the bow wave meant that more power was necessary to achieve the initial lift-off from the sea than to run at full speed. The maximum drag came well before take-off speed, as the craft needed to climb its own bow wave to get clear of the water. As the screaming of the engines rose and the Ekranoplan remained stuck to the ocean, the Russian looked at the anxious faces around him. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said in Farsi.
The pilot reached out and pulled down the switch in front of him that activated the PAR – Power Augmentation of Ram – which briefly diverted the engine thrust to force air beneath the wings. Suddenly, there was an upward surge, and they were skimming clear above the water on a cushion of air. The pilot was able to drop the engine revs even as the
speed increased, and spontaneous applause went round the cramped crew area.
The traffic stopped along the sea-front at Noshahr and Chalus, and hundreds of local people stood and stared at the breathtaking sight.
Oblivious to