The Henchmen's Book Club Read Free Page A

technicians were wise enough identify
themselves up front as not being on The Agency’s books and had to agree to
recompense The Agency for their passage home. They are expensive tickets at two
million dollars a seat but preferable to option B.
    As for the boys with rival outfits, they
were in a slightly more fortunate position in that their bills got sent
directly to their own agencies. If their outfits had standing agreements with
The Agency, that was. If not, then they too were advised to have a few million
air miles going spare or a rubber dinghy and arms like Popeye.
    Captain Takahashi’s co-pilot popped his
head out of the cockpit and barked something at the Captain in Japanese. I
couldn’t understand the words but body language is the same the world over,
particularly the body language of someone who’d just seen the Old Bill closing
fast on the radar. Captain Takahashi barked something back at him and the
co-pilot disappeared to start the engines as Captain Takahashi finished
dragging the rest of the survivors on board.
    Captain Campbell and the worst of the
injured men were last to be pulled on board. One of them, another Russian I
just about recognised as Mr Andreev, was in a terrible state. I really couldn’t
see him lasting the journey, but Captain Takahashi took the time to get him
onboard all the same because he held an Agency card. A few of the more
unscrupulous blokes I’ve worked for would’ve just put two in his head and left
him for the sharks, but Captain Takahashi didn’t even contemplate it despite
his co-pilot’s running commentary over the intercom. He eased him through the
door, then slammed it shut the moment Mr Andreev’s ankles were over the
threshold and shouted at his co-pilot to step on it.
    Two of Captain Takahashi’s girls laid on
top of Mr Andreev to stop him from plummeting down the aisles, while the rest
of us were slammed back into our seats as the plane accelerated across the
water. Captain Takahashi wasn’t the sort of bloke to let a take-off stop him
from wandering around his own plane though and he fought his way forward until
he was behind his seat and flipping buttons alongside his co-pilot.
    The first of these pinged a seatbelt sign
on over all of our heads advising us that we were in for a bumpy take-off
– as if we didn’t know – while rest started deploying flares and
smoke from the rear of the plane.
    “Looks like it’s going to be a close
one,” Mr Petrov said in the seat alongside of me and a moment later we left the water and banked hard right.
    All sorts of alarms started screaming in
the cockpit up front and Captain Takahashi responded by pumping chaff and
flares out of the back to tell us Mr Petrov was more right than he knew. Above
the din of the engines I heard a whoosh as the first missile ploughed through
the chaff and missed our tail by a whisker, and suddenly we were banking hard
left. The plane was at a virtual right angle as Captain Takahashi dodged and
weaved all over the sky and from the port side window I could suddenly see our
pursuers; three warships, stretched out across ten miles of open ocean and
closing in to mop up Tempest’s mess. While we’d been in the water we’d been
sheltered by the island, but as soon as we’d taken off we’d announced ourselves
to their radar.
    Captain Takahashi now dove toward the sea
hard and levelled off barely fifty feet from the waves, only to then sweep north.
All around me faces and knuckles were almost opaque with fear, all except those
of Captain Takahashi’s girls, who looked like they were having another mundane
day at the office.
    A stream of white-hot tracer fire
suddenly lit up the skies around us as our pursuers realised they were getting
nowhere with their Sea Sparrows but a little more dodging and weaving and we
were across the horizon and out of range. More Sparrows were launched after us,
but Captain Takahashi’s bird was jam-packed with the latest radar deflecting
technology and after