Foxbat Read Free

jockey from Vauxhall Cross –
     had put it: ‘Fly in, take a look and fly out. A piece of piss.’
    It had sounded so easy in the Hereford briefing room, but both Richter and Dekker knew –
     from intimate personal experience – that the simplest operation could, and frequently did, turn to rat-shit in the blink of an eye. So Dekker was checking the photograph again, looking
     for anything they might previously have missed.
    The pilot hadn’t been kidding about the flight. Richter didn’t know if it was heat
     rising from the desert or wind shear or something else, but the Hercules was bouncing violently as it tracked east. And the hard turns the pilot kept making didn’t help either. For
     obvious reasons, the route into Algeria had been carefully plotted to bypass all military establishments, and even every settlement the satellites had identified,while
     simultaneously having to stay at low level to keep below radar cover. The result was a flight path like the meanderings of a drunken snake, the pilot barely ever able to fly straight and
     level, but twisting constantly to avoid one potential hazard or another.
    ‘I’m going up-front,’ said Richter, leaning across to Dekker, who nodded that
     he’d understood.
    Richter unbuckled his seatbelt, stood up and inched his way forward. There was no need,
     operationally or otherwise, for him to visit the cockpit, but the truth was that, like many qualified pilots, he was a lousy passenger. He knew the two men in the driving seats had been
     picked from the cream of the Royal Air Force for the Special Forces Flight, but he’d still rather be flying the aircraft himself.
    He pulled open the cockpit door, surprised as before at how spacious the Hercules’ flight
     deck was, and how quiet it was compared to the noise at the rear. The co-pilot, a senior flight lieutenant, glanced back to acknowledge him, but the pilot didn’t take his gaze away from
     the view through the cockpit windows, as he pulled the Hercules into yet another turn to starboard.
    ‘Problem?’ Adam Johnson asked.
    ‘No,’ Richter shook his head. ‘I just felt like a change of scene. It’s
     not a lot of fun back there. Where are we just now?’
    The co-pilot pointed to the screen of the navigation computer on the console located between the
     two seats. ‘Right here. We’re about forty-five minutes from Aïn Oussera flying in a straight line, or around ninety minutes on our selected route.’
    Richter gazed through the windscreen at the terrain a bare two hundred feet below them. The
     moon was low in the eastern sky but illuminated the landscape reasonably well, and what he could see of it didn’t look inviting. The word ‘desert’ tends to conjure up images
     of golden sand dunes extending in gentle waves to a cloudless blue horizon, but the Algerian desert was very different. It was fairly flat, which was the good news, but the ground was studded
     with rocks that cast long shadows in the moonlight. It looked like the kind of surface where Richter would have thought twice about landing a helicopter, far less a seventy-ton fixed-wing
     aircraft, even one optimized for rough-ground operations.
    ‘Are you going to be able to land safely on that crap?’ he asked.
    ‘On that, no,’ Johnson replied, ‘but the area the eyes in the sky have located
     for us is fairly clear of rocks. We’ll do a pass over it first, just to check, and if it looks OK we’ll put the Herc down.’
    ‘And if it isn’t?’
    ‘We’ll opt for Plan B, head on to the second landing area, and try there.
     It’ll mean a longer drive for you and the Regiment guys, that’s all. And if we can’t land there either, we’ll turn round and fly you back to Morocco in time for
     breakfast.’
    ‘That isn’t really an option,’ Richter argued. ‘We have to do this. Somehow you have to get us down there.’
    ‘I know, but trust us, we’ve done this before. This Herky-bird can land pretty much
     anywhere.’ Johnson