A Sentimental Traitor Read Free

time I tried it.’
    The banter was heavy, but they knew they now faced a serious task – and some tough decisions.
    ‘So where are we going to put her down?’ the first officer asked.
    ‘You tell me. Is Stansted an option?’
    If they diverted north, it would mean they’d avoid flying over central London.
    ‘I don’t think so,’ the first officer replied, flicking rapidly through the plates of his airfield handbook. ‘Runway Zero Four there is only three thousand and fifty-nine
metres,’ he read out loud. ‘We’ll need more than that.’
    ‘So Heathrow it is.’
    ‘Heathrow Two Seven Right is three thousand nine hundred metres. That should do it.’
    ‘It will bloody well have to.’
    The Airbus was now becoming difficult to control, the pilot’s sidestick refusing to cooperate. Every time it was shifted or turned, the plane decided to do something else, its own thing.
It was like trying to command a wayward cat. They flew on through the night, but with much less certainty.
    The two men weren’t frightened, they had their training to fall back on. Anyway, there was too much for them to do, no time for thought or fear. There was air traffic control to inform,
Abi to brief once more – this would be an emergency landing, the passengers would have to be set in the brace position, not an easy task with so many kids on board. But they could still make
it on one engine and one hydraulic system.
    They were flying over the mouth of the estuary. Ten thousand feet, two hundred and twenty knots, two hundred and fifty miles an hour. Only ten minutes to landing. Ahead of them they could see
the lights of the Dome and Kings Cross station, and beyond that the towers of the Parliament building and the stacks of Battersea Power Station. Everything was set out before them, dressed in its
finery, London getting ready to celebrate Christmas.
    Abi answered the summons to the cockpit. She listened quietly and very intently as the captain gave her the fresh briefing, repeating it back to him to show she had understood.
    ‘Soon home, love,’ the captain concluded, trying to reassure her.
    But it wasn’t destined to be that simple.
    The missile hadn’t exploded, yet the damage it inflicted had been catastrophic. The missile had hit the front part of the engine, sending shards of searing-hot metal into the hydraulic bay
that lay just behind the wing. The missile itself had broken up and part of that, too, had bounced off the engine and been hurled into the bay, where it had made a direct hit on the first hydraulic
reservoir. These were about the size of industrial pressure cookers, and Green had been destroyed immediately. Meanwhile the turbine discs in the rear of the crippled engine – that part of
the engine where the energy was concentrated – had begun to spin out of control, speeding up until they shattered and flew apart. It was a fragment of one of these discs that had punctured
the second reservoir. Green was dead, Yellow was dying.
    The Blue System had survived intact, at first, but even though the hoses feeding it were made of stainless steel, in the intense slipstream that was ripping through the damaged fuselage, one of
these had been bent and forced up against a fragment of missile casing that had lodged in the bay. As the plane flew on, the hose was pounded ceaselessly, remorselessly, against the razor-sharp
shard of metal, until it, too, failed.
    They were down to five thousand feet. Not much more than six minutes to Heathrow. They knew they weren’t going to make it.
    No discussion, no time for that, and nothing in the manual for this, it was all instinct, an instantaneous throw of the dice.
    ‘I’m going for the river,’ the captain said.
    ‘Better that than another Lockerbie.’
    ‘I agree. Particularly when we’re doing the flying.’
    The captain had to make a choice; he might still be left with some fragment of control before the last of the hydraulic fluid pissed away in the night air.