Cyberstrike, James Barrington [short story to read .TXT] 📗

The rotors were still turning and he had no idea how to stop them or kill the power. And he needed urgent help for the warrant officer, who was still obviously unconscious – or worse – in the right-hand seat.

North looked around the cockpit, wondering which of the myriad buttons operated the radio. Then he glanced through the windscreen and guessed help was already on its way. He could see a couple of fire engines, one a kind of Land Rover conversion and the other a full-size prime mover, lights flashing and heading in his general direction, preceded by what he guessed was a small van used by air traffic control, headlights on and amber rooflight flashing, driving at speed towards him.

The driver stopped the van on the runway directly in front of the Eurocopter and about fifty yards away, well clear of the rotor disk, and an angry-looking man got out. He stared at the aircraft and, apparently when he was sure North had seen him, he walked quickly over to the left-hand side of the aircraft.

North opened the door on his side and waited for him.

The noise of the engines and rotors made normal conversation impossible, but it didn’t look as if conversation was what the new arrival wanted. In what was clearly a parade-ground voice he bellowed at North.

‘What the fuck are you playing at? This is the main fucking runway.’

North grabbed him by the front of the woolly-pully the man was wearing, pointed at the warrant officer and shouted in the man’s ear.

‘Get out of my fucking face and get a medic for him.’

Then he shoved him away.

Just under half an hour later, North was sitting in a fairly uncomfortable chair in what he guessed was an air traffic control briefing room, a mug of obviously instant coffee in his hand and looking at an RAF squadron leader who had pulled another chair round to sit opposite him. The name-plate on the left-hand side of the officer’s light blue pullover bore the name Gerard.

‘You were bloody lucky,’ he said.

‘Tell me about it,’ North responded. ‘If the pilot had collapsed ten minutes earlier you’d have been pulling my mangled dead body out of a flaming wreck somewhere out in the bundu.’

The Eurocopter had been shut down on the runway by an RAF helicopter pilot who was familiar with the aircraft type, and it had then been towed to the hardstanding on which it had been supposed to land. In the process, the warrant officer pilot had been taken out of the aircraft and rushed by ambulance to the station medical centre. His condition, according to what Squadron Leader Gerard had told North when he entered the briefing room, and which had been passed on by the ambulance crew, was unchanged: he was unconscious and completely unresponsive.

Gerard nodded.

‘The local controller told me what he saw from the VCP – the visual control position in the tower – but what happened in the aircraft?’

‘I was sitting in the cabin and looking through the windscreen and the guy just collapsed. No warning signs, no prior indication, and we were chatting away over the intercom for pretty much the whole flight. When he collapsed, he pushed the collective all the way down, which was why the chopper lost height so quickly. I got into the left-hand seat, pulled the collective up again and hoped for the best.’

‘Have you ever flown a helicopter before?’

North shook his head firmly.

‘Never,’ he replied. ‘I’ve flown in them dozens of times and I’ve seen how the pilots take off and land, but that was the first time I’ve ever sat at the controls of any kind of aircraft. And I’d be quite pleased if it was the last time as well. I just tried to get the thing on the ground as quickly as I could without killing anyone, myself included. Is it damaged?’

‘It’ll need a full check because that was quite a hard landing. In fact, according to the local controller it looked like three hard landings, one after the other.’

‘Sounds about right. Look, I need to get to this briefing I’m here for. That should take no more than two or three hours. Any chance of getting a lift back to Hereford when it’s finished?’

‘We can probably arrange that,’ Gerard replied. ‘Helicopter or—’

‘No bloody chance,’ North snapped. ‘I want something with four wheels, all of them on the ground, plus a steering wheel and a competent and qualified driver sitting behind it.’

‘I’ll see what we can do.’

Chapter 4

Present day

Secret Intelligence Service Headquarters, Vauxhall Cross, London

Professor Ben Morgan looked across the table at Dave North.

‘So I suppose you’re going to take some flying lessons now, Dave?’ he asked. ‘I mean, you’ve already got one landing to put in your logbook. Or technically a barely controlled crash, but at least you walked away from it.’

North shook his head.

‘No way,’ he said, ‘but I promise you that from now on I’m going to pay even more attention to the people who drive me around the sky, because the only reason I walked away from that was because I had a vague idea about how a helicopter flew. If I’d never watched somebody flying a chopper before, right now I’d be dead.’

‘We’re delighted you’re not,’ Dame Janet Marcham-Coutts, the head of C-TAC, the Counter-Terrorism Advisory Committee, said from her normal seat at the head of the table. ‘Apart from anything else it would take far too long to house-train another ex-SAS officer.’

Unusually for a meeting of the group, that day the men were outnumbered, Dame Janet being flanked by Angela Evans, a long-time member of C-TAC, and on the other side by Natasha Black, the group’s newest recruit, albeit on a part-time basis. She worked at GCHQ out at Cheltenham and had joined C-TAC on Ben Morgan’s personal recommendation. Every member of C-TAC brought something different to the table, and Natasha Black – a strikingly unusual figure with a broad