Pandemic (3 page)

Spiros had been given the last piece of equipment by one of his many nephews as a birthday present, which was the only reason it was still attached to the bulkhead in the tiny wheelhouse. He had
never used it, and he never would. He knew the waters around Crete the way a gardener knows his lawn, and almost never even glanced at a chart. To have utilized the small digital display of the GPS
would have been, for Spiros, an admission of defeat.

Although Crete is one of the most visited holiday islands in the Mediterranean, attracting more than two million tourists every year, it has never been particularly popular with devotees of
recreational diving. Quite apart from the prospect of a fine of up to one hundred and fifty thousand pounds if caught diving without a permit, the island of Crete is the top of a submerged mountain
and, although there are excellent bathing beaches, around most of its coast the seabed slopes rapidly away, plunging precipitously to depths of hundreds of feet.

If Crete isn’t a popular diving destination, the islands of Gavdopoúla and Gávdos are even less so. The only above-surface projections of another seamount lying some twenty
miles to the south of Crete, the islands are tiny – Gávdos is the biggest at about five miles long by three wide – and, as with Crete itself, the seabed slopes rapidly to depths
in excess of a thousand feet. Gávdos has a population of around fifty, while Gavdopoúla is unoccupied apart from a bunch of goats.

But between Gavdopoúla and Gávdos lies a saddle, a section of seabed that almost joins the two islands and lies at an average depth of only one hundred feet below the surface of
the Mediterranean. And it was there that Aristides had found the wreckage.

When he first spotted the case, he didn’t realize what it was. Caught in the powerful beam of the underwater torch, the object swayed slightly, almost imperceptibly, from side to side. A
bulky, squared shape festooned with brown and green marine growth, it rocked very gently with the slight current. But it caught his attention because of where it was, rather than what it was.

Visibility underwater in the Mediterranean is usually good, but at a depth of eighty-five feet the light is grey and weak, and Spiros Aristides could see clearly only what his torch beam
illuminated. And what it illuminated puzzled him. He lowered the beam and again played it around what was left of the aircraft’s cabin.

Aristides knew little about aircraft but even he could recognize an executive jet when he saw one. Or what once had been an executive jet.

After he’d discovered the seat the previous afternoon, he’d guessed that there was more to find, but it had taken him all of three dives to locate the remains of the cabin. The
section of wing, torn away from the fuselage, had been easy, one end embedded in the sand, the other pointing up towards the surface in mute entreaty. He’d found bits of unidentifiable
twisted metal, and a long and heavy chunk of corroded steel and aluminium that he’d guessed was an engine, but it wasn’t until he looked among the rocks fifty metres to the south of
where the wing lay that he’d found the cabin. And even then he’d nearly missed it.

Covered in marine growth, it had looked pretty much like another rock, until Aristides’s trained eyes had spotted the three more or less regular shapes of what had once been windows along
one side of it.

Aristides had checked his chronometer before doing anything else, and realized any exploration of the wreckage would have to wait. He’d looped a rope through two adjacent holes in the
fuselage and secured it with a loose knot, then tied the other end to one of his lifting bags. He’d partially filled the bag, using expelled air from his aqualung, enough to give it
sufficient buoyancy to hang in the water some twenty feet above the wreck. That had acted as a marker on this, his next dive.

The front of the fuselage had been ripped off, leaving a wide opening through which Aristides now peered. Bubbles from his exhaled breath foamed and swirled above his head, forming an irregular
silvery mass in the centre of the cabin roof. There had once been six seats in the passenger compartment, but only five were still secured to its buckled floor. The sixth lay about two hundred
metres away, tipped on its side on the seabed some ninety feet below the surface. That same seat, and its grisly occupant, was what Aristides had found first.

Three shrunken, skeletal shapes peered impassively back at him from the seats they had now occupied for over thirty years. He rested the beam of his torch on them, one at a time. Their clothing
had largely vanished, as had their flesh and the fabric of the seats they rested in. The two bodies closest to him had slumped down, but a third, towards the rear of the cabin, still sat
unnaturally upright.

Aristides crossed himself, then eased forward gently into the cabin, careful to avoid touching either of the first two bodies, until he could see the third one clearly. Then the reason for the
corpse’s unnatural stance immediately became clear. A shard of metal, probably aluminium and apparently ripped from the fuselage of the aircraft itself, had speared through the back of the
seat and was still lodged between two vertebrae of the corpse’s neck.

Hanging suspended centrally amid what was left of the cabin, Aristides swung round in a complete circle, his eyes following the torch beam as he searched for anything of value or interest. He
stopped the beam between two of the seat frames and focused it on a dark bulky shape squatting among the marine growth and debris covering the buckled floor of the cabin.

Aristides moved carefully towards this object, transferred the torch to his left hand and then extended his right arm. He gave the thing an experimental prod, and it moved slightly across the
floor. Then he pulled it towards him and studied it more closely. Made of what appeared to be rotting leather, it looked like the kind of bag usually carried by doctors.

Putting the torch down carefully on the floor, and wedging it so that it illuminated the bag, Aristides pulled the heavy diving knife from its sheath strapped to his right calf. Holding the bag
firmly with his left hand, he stabbed the knife into the side of it and then ripped it open. He tipped the bag onto its side and looked down in puzzlement as a cascade of corroded medical
instruments tumbled out.

Aristides mentally shrugged and transferred his attention to the object that caught his attention immediately he had peered into the cabin. Unlike the leather bag, this was bouncing gently and
improbably against the ceiling of the aircraft cabin, rather than lying on the floor. That meant that it was either naturally buoyant or, more likely, waterproof and airtight.

Picking up his torch again, Aristides reached for the object of his interest. Only then did he notice what appeared to be a small silvery tail dangling from it. As he peered more closely, he
realized that this tail was actually a handcuff and immediately he recognized the bulky briefcase. The handcuff, which had presumably once been fastened around the wrist of one of the corpses below
it, suggested that the case contained something valuable. Light, certainly, but valuable.

Professionally conscious of the passage of time, Aristides checked his chronometer and backed out of the aircraft’s cabin, now holding the briefcase in his left hand. He wanted to try to
identify the aircraft itself, if he could, before having to surface.

Aristides secured the case to the line holding the lifting air bag, then swam back to the remains of the fuselage. He noticed what appeared to be part of a registration number visible near the
rear end of the cabin, on the starboard side, and rubbed his gloved hand over it until he could make out the first letter. He couldn’t interpret any of the following digits until he’d
scraped off some of the marine growth with his diving knife. That revealed three numbers which, together with the initial letter ‘N’ – Spiros instantly interpreted this as the
Greek capital letter
nu
– he wrote on his waterproof pad. It looked to him as if there was another number, perhaps even two numbers, but it or they were indecipherable without shifting
more growth.

Aristides wondered if the registration would be repeated on the other side of the cabin, and swam around to check. But when he spotted the jagged hole in the fuselage, he forgot all about
checking numbers.

Southern Adriatic Sea

There was a brief silence on the frequency, then the squadron Senior Pilot, flying Tiger One, responded.

‘Tiger Two from Leader. Can you make it back to Mother?’

‘Negative,’ Richter snapped. ‘I need a long concrete runway to put this down on, not a steel postage stamp.’

‘Roger. Go to Guard and check in with Homer. Suggest you steer two four zero initially. I’ll accompany you. Snakes, Tiger Leader turning port and following Two. See you back on
board.’

Richter was already in the turn onto south-west, as he switched frequency and selected the emergency code 7700 on his Secondary Surveillance Radar transponder. This setting generates an
unmistakable, and absolutely unmissable, symbol on air traffic control radar displays.

‘Homer, this is Pan aircraft Tiger Two on Guard.’

On all warships, the Operations Room is a darkly colourful, and invariably noisy, environment. The illumination is derived from the reddish glow of radar screens, from small reading lights
mounted on the consoles, from the myriad multi-coloured tell-tales and illuminated controls. The noise is caused by the constant chatter on Group Lines, intercoms and radio frequencies as
specialist officers and ratings do their work.

The Operations Room on Five Deck is in every sense the nerve centre of the
Invincible
. Around the perimeter, information is gathered from the ship’s own sensors – principally
radar and sonar – and from sensors mounted on other vessels and aircraft that transmit to the ship using secure data-links. Here the Air Picture Compilers track and identify all airborne
radar contacts, while Surface and Sub-surface Compilers perform identical functions for their specific areas of responsibility.

The collated data provide the Warfare Officers, working at consoles in the centre of the room, with a complete picture of the air, surface and underwater environment around the warship, and
enable them to act or react as the situation warrants. Surprisingly to the uninitiated, during any kind of action or alert the Captain will be found sitting on a swivel chair virtually in the
centre of the Operations Room, and he will direct all aspects of the ship’s activities from there. No longer does he fight battles from the bridge, as was the norm during the Second World
War. Today, instead, a seaman officer will take the bridge watch, to visually ensure the safety of the ship and to check that helm and engine revolution orders don’t run the vessel aground or
into a collision.

Inside the Operations Room, close to the port-side door and beneath the printed title ‘Homer’, is a radar console manned by a specialist Air Traffic Control officer whose principal
responsibility is the safe recovery of the ship’s organic air assets. The Military Emergency (Guard) frequency – 243.0 megahertz – is monitored whenever the ship is at sea, but is
generally patched through an Ops Room speaker rather than listened to by Homer, who normally has more than enough traffic on his primary aircraft recovery frequency.

As soon as he heard the Pan call – ‘Pan’ being the lower of the two states of aircraft emergency, the more serious one being ‘Mayday’ – Lieutenant John Moore
leaned back in his seat and looked up at the Radio Direction Finder display mounted above his console, simultaneously selected Guard on the frequency selector panel, and pressed the transmit
key.

‘Pan aircraft Tiger Two, this is Homer. You’re loud and clear. State the nature of your emergency.’

‘Tiger Two has a rough-running engine and is requesting diversion ashore. Present heading is two four zero at Flight Level three five zero, squawking emergency. Tiger One is in company to
relay as required.’

‘Roger, all copied, and you’re identified by your emergency squawk. You’re forty-two miles off the coast, and estimate you’ll be feet dry in about six minutes. Standby
for airfield information.’

The moment the call had been heard on Guard, Homer’s radar console had become the focus of most of the activity in the Operations Room. His assistant had pulled out the relevant en route
chart and the en route supplement covering Italy and was scanning the ERC, looking for the closest airfield that could take the Sea Harrier.

Moore’s next priority was to shed his other traffic so that he could concentrate on the emergency aircraft. In fact, he had nothing else on frequency at that moment, but he was expecting
Snake One and Two to check in imminently. To pre-empt them, he called the Air Warfare Officer on Group Line Six.

‘AWO, Homer. Snakes should be on recovery soon, and I don’t want them on my frequency until we’ve sorted out Tiger Two. Can you raise the ASaC Sea King and get Snakes to call
Director for recovery?’

‘Already doing it.’

‘Thanks.’

Then Moore looked at the chart his assistant was holding, glanced across at the airfield details listed in the ERS, nodded and transmitted again.

‘Tiger Two, Homer. Suggested diversion airfield is Brindisi-Casale. Runway is eight thousand six hundred feet in length, airfield location approximately one nine zero range fifty from your
present position.’

‘Roger,’ Richter said. ‘Turning port onto one nine zero and starting a cruise descent.’

‘Initial Contact Frequency for Brindisi-Casale Approach Control is three seven six decimal eight, but suggest you call them first on Guard.’

‘Roger.’

Commander (Air), who’d been up in Flyco when Richter made the Pan call, had immediately left his position and arrived at that moment in the Operations Room.

‘Where is he?’ he demanded.

Moore glanced round then pointed over to the southwestern side of his radar screen. ‘Here, sir. He’s about to call Brindisi.’

As Moore spoke, Richter’s voice echoed round the Ops Room from the Guard speaker. ‘Brindisi, Brindisi, this is Pan aircraft Tiger Two.’