Flashback (The Saskia Brandt Series Book Two) (27 page)

‘I flew with a couple of Yanks,’ said the first officer. ‘Got to know their lingo. Sometimes your accent slips, buddy. Where are you really from? The deep
sahth
? What other jokes do they make down
there-ah
?’

But
, thought Cory, panicked,
in-built mechanisms select my accent, mechanisms I cannot control
.

He felt as though a crack had run through his psyche.

Mechanisms I cannot control.

Those winds that Hilton Cook would call his own – the laws of physics, bedrock of his being – were, true enough, public forces as indifferent to his will as Cory was indifferent to the fear of Harkes. But those laws governed Cory too. How could he step beyond their jurisdiction? He had been travelling in time for two months. Was that long enough to become a zombie like Hilton Cook?

The amber had set.

Take the parachute.

Run.

‘Well, Colonel?’ asked the commander.

Vertigo
.

Cory dropped to the floor and clawed at the parachute. His hand had almost touched the strap when Don Checklin’s boot – carefully but firmly – came down on his neck and pressed him against the deck plate.

‘Well done, Don,’ said Hilton Cook. ‘Odds-on our friend here is a Yank. Special operations. And we’re the babysitters. See, Reg? What did I tell you?’

‘Don’t get excited. We need to tie him up and radio Santiago.’

As his skull rattled between the boot and the deck, Cory waited for the homunculus of his training to wake. How must Lisandro have strained against the brutish Englishman who pressed his lungs to tiny pockets, the better to butcher?

Hilton Cook appeared before him, crouching, and punched down on his ear. As he landed a second blow, Cory took his wrist and twisted it. The wrist broke. Hilton grunted. Cory put the first officer in a head lock and brought him down. Their eyes were inches apart. For the first time since his training, Cory let the fires of his ichor fully ignite.

‘Denis,’ said Commander Cook, ‘tell Santiago tower we’ve got trouble.’

Cory dashed Hilton’s head against a stanchion. He saw the navigator reach for a fire extinguisher. The man was encumbered by bulky clothing and the stiff leash of his oxygen tube, but he brought the canister down hard enough to sting Cory’s palms as he stopped it. Before the navigator could shift his grip for a second strike, Cory trapped his hand with his own and drove the canister against the radio operator’s bulkhead. The navigator shouted as his hand came away bloody. Cory worked the extinguisher from his grip and punted his cheek with the end. The navigator collapsed across his map table. Cory ripped away his own mask and stood up. He turned the valve on the extinguisher, spun, and doused the face of Denis Harmer before the man could grab him. Harmer collapsed with his hands to his face. Cory swung the extinguisher again. He struck away the hands and the mask beneath them. The wide, boyish expression stayed Cory’s fury. He tried to reconcile the real terror of the man with the counterfeit terror of a puppet. He could not. The radio operator squeezed his eyes shut the instant before Cory swung again.

He braced his neck against the buzzing canopy and used the radio operator’s bulkhead to launch at Commander Cook, who jerked away and pressed his shoulder into the yoke.
Star Dust
pitched earthwards. Shadows yawned. The sun, which had been obscured in the cloud-cloaked Buenos Aires, found his eyes. Before Cory could prevent it, the pilot hooked his neck and threw him against the empty starboard seat. The seat broke and Cory struck the cargo access panel. He struggled to right himself.

Cory gripped a fuselage handle. He reached for the hose that led to the pilot’s mask, but Cook was ready. His elbow split Cory’s lip. While he blinked to clear the dizziness, a second impact wrenched his neck. He lost his grip on the handle and fell across the unconscious body of the navigator, who had slid to the front of the aircraft.

‘God
damn
,’ he shouted. His accent was Georgian, that of his father. He demanded his automata ramp the release of neurotransmitters, inhibit their re-uptake, and dampen monoamine oxidase activity.

A freshness blew through his mind.

Commander Cook was buckled to his chair. He could not move as Cory worked his body. He knew where to strike the man, and how. The Irvin jacket offered little protection. Cory landed his last blow with a shout that his old instructor had termed
kiai
, a Japanese word meaning ‘concentration of spirit’: an incongruous memory to recall in the cockpit of this doomed plane.

When it was over, each watched the other, panting. Cory saw Cook reach for his mask, but his fingers slid from the clasp. Cory helped unfasten it. The orbit of his right eye was broken.

‘Help me pull her out,’ the commander said. His words were slurred.

Cory put his hands over those of the commander. The aircraft came level.

‘Don’t hurt. The passengers. Land the plane.’

‘Can this thing fly itself?’

Commander Cook indicated a lever to his left, mounted on the fuselage beneath the oxygen hose connector. ‘Auto controls clutch. And. And altitude control.’ Cory reached across and pulled the lever until it clicked. When he looked again at the captain, he saw that Cook was unconscious.

Cory struggled to maintain his focus. The crew was dealt with. He had stopped Harmer before the Mayday could be sent. And, as far as he could tell, none of the passengers knew what had happened in the cockpit. It was possible that Miss Evans would come forward to check the cause of the dive. But Cory still had time. He had the parachute and the aircraft was flying even and true. He could still make it.

First, he removed the oxygen masks of the crew and spoiled their seals. They might still wake at this altitude, but he wanted it to take as long as possible. As he worked, he looked at the turned head of Commander Cook.
‘Don’t hurt. The passengers. Land the plane.’

Cory sank to his haunches in despair. He rubbed the bridge of his nose and told himself that this would be worth it. He was fighting a larger war here. These were innocents but their deaths would not be uncounted. They would be stars on a wall somewhere. Cory would see to it.

The fire axe struck his shoulder with enough force to make him turn, biting down on his scream, looking up at the fury of Miss Evans. She put a foot in the small of his back to help work the blade free. As it came down again – certain to kill him – Cory made a fist and raised his arm with all the strength he had left. It looked like an absurd salute, but he prayed that the bones in his forearm would hold, and they did. The axe was deflected into the deck plate.

The block would not work a second time. Cory had to get to his feet. He did so with a flip that reignited the pain in his shoulder. The pain expanded and his head was consumed with disorienting flashes of electricity and cloudbursts of deadness and when his vision cleared he saw that Miss Evans was several inches above the deck where he had pressed her into the canopy by her neck. Cory looked in horror at his shaking hands. He let go and they both collapsed to the floor. Cory bit his tongue at the pain in his shoulder and waited for his wits to return. All the while, the engines pealed.

~

His pocket watch confirmed that he had only minutes left. The murder of Miss Evans had taken him outside of himself. He was no longer the man he had once been. That man who had proposed to Catherine: gone. With this realisation, his situational awareness returned. He began to work numbers, possibilities. Only minutes left.

He stepped between the seats, over the bodies, to the altimeter. They were at 21,000 feet and holding. Their speed was 190 knots.

Think, Georgia
.

Miss Evans had fallen on her side with her arms and legs splayed. She might have been running. Cory thought about Patrick Harkes and wanted revenge. There was a principle in chess that a defensive move must go beyond defence. It must also attack. The escape with his life would be his defensive move, but his attack would be the transmission of the agreed signal. Jennifer, who was waiting for it, would understand that Cory had completed his secondary mission to kill Harkes. This misinformation would be worth the trouble if Harkes also intercepted it and derived the intended meaning. He would consider himself safe. A man who considered himself safe would not exercise the same caution when making his travel arrangements.

Cory smiled.

It had to begin with
STEN
.

Then
E
.

Wait;
D
, not
E
.

D, E, C.

STENDEC.

Not so difficult. Harkes would figure it out.

He pushed Miss Evans aside and shook Denis Harmer. Harmer blinked, but did not regain consciousness. Cory took the smelling salts from his pocket and broke a capsule beneath Harmer’s nose. The man’s swollen eyes widened. He rose to his elbows and his head bobbed within the turtle shell of his flight jacket. Cory pressed himself against the half-bulkhead of radio equipment to obscure Harmer’s view of the bodies and held his neck to prevent his head turning.

‘I’m pressing a nerve between the second and third cervical vertebrae,’ Cory said. He added an electromagnetic component to his voice that would register in Harmer’s headphones. ‘If you attempt to deviate from my strict instructions, you’ll be in more pain than you can imagine. Now: I want you to send our ETA together with a letter sequence.’

‘My eyes hurt. What did you do? Some chemical?’

‘It’s stuff from the fire extinguisher. Your eyes will clear in a minute. Now, I want you to send this sequence: Sugar, Tare, Easy, Negat, Dog, Easy, Charlie.’

‘Where’s the Skipper?’

‘You’ve got five seconds. Four.’

‘Alright, alright. Let me get set up.’

Harmer felt for the transmitter on the higher of the two radio panels. He plugged two jacks into the lower bank. He tried to face Cory, but Cory squeezed his neck. Harmer moaned.

‘Do what you’re told.’

‘You sound American. Is this some OSS caper?’

‘Send it now and I’ll let go. Make the message conform to all the normal conventions. I’m listening in. If there is even a hint of the word ‘hijack’, that’s it for you.’

‘But your code alone will indicate trouble.’

‘No. At worst, enigma.’

‘So it’s a game.’

The
dits
and
dahs
stopped his thoughts as Harmer thumbed the Morse paddle left and right. Cory felt the translation of the message flash through him:

Santiago tower from CS-59. ETA 17:45. S-T-E-N-D-E-C.

Cory watched the dials on the receiver. Nothing moved.

‘Did they get it?’ he asked.

‘Give it time.’

The reply came loud and clear from Santiago tower.

Dit-dit-dah-dah-dah-dit-dit.

‘What does that mean?’ asked Cory.

‘He doesn’t understand.’

‘Send the message again.’

‘Why? What is it?’

Cory adjusted his grip. ‘I told you to send it again. Quickly.’

‘OK, OK.’

As the Morse paddle flapped again, Cory listened to the blaring engines. The sky was overcast, for the most part, and the Lancastrian kept to the line set by the rudimentary automatic pilot. Cory understood this machine. It was a workhorse. And, equally, so were the unthinking mannequins inside. The radio operator: his movements were correlated with his nervous chemistry, and the pitch of the aircraft, and his body within it. That movement itself correlated with the instant before. And that movement correlated with another movement, still earlier, until the movements described a sequence that could be reversed to the moment of his birth. And the dance partner was Time, always leading. Time the entrapper. The
milonguera.

The radio man is a puppet. Watch his eyebrows gather. See his lips purse. It is an illusion worked by a grim operator. Each string leads to a bony finger. Say! Doesn’t the puppet look angry?

‘Was it worth it?’ Harmer shouted bitterly. He struggled to look at Cory. ‘All this,’ he gasped, ‘to send some bloody code-word?’

Cory looked at his own hand, holding the neck. Puppet? A better metaphor was the ventriloquist’s dummy. Cory let go.

Denis Harmer leaned around the bank of radio equipment.

Or was Harmer more like an animated cartoon? With motion comes the illusion of life. But each still frame betrays the lifelessness of the character.

~

Time did not keep pace with the acceleration of his thoughts. For Cory, time was an absolute whose minutes moved no faster than his Ramsey IV caesium oscillator. He killed Denis Harmer in 73,541,054,160 beam cycles. Eight seconds his murder. Then Cory rested the axe against the fuselage and pulled his white handkerchief from his pocket. He stilled the tremors in his fingers by twisting them through its fabric.

Though Harmer’s question needed no answer, he said, ‘Probably not.’

~

He considered the canopy. The air was opaque and depthless. There was an escape hatch directly above him, but it was not designed to be used during flight. The slipstream would toss him to the rudder fins. His only chance was through the door at the rear of the fuselage and, to get to it, he would need to deal with the passengers.

He touched his injured shoulder. The wound was deep and his left arm was weakening. Jack Gooderham, Peter Simpson and Harald Pagh were able men.

With a sigh, he took the oxygen pipe from Commander Cook’s mask and used the axe to cut a length from it. He made a V-shaped split in both ends and attached one to the spout of the fire extinguisher. He paused, reconsidered his plan, and detached it from the extinguisher. He licked his finger and pushed some spit into the canister. Then he reattached the assembly. His infallible chronometer marked fourteen seconds.

He leaned across Commander Cook and turned the cock for the passenger oxygen supply. With the flow stopped, he tore the main hose from the fuselage and pushed it into the other end of the pipe he had split with the axe. The oxygen supply was now connected to the fire extinguisher.