High Citadel. Desmond Bagley
and the neck of the flask suddenly jammed against his teeth. He spluttered and yelled incoherently and thrust hard against Armstrong.
Rohde was thrown out of his seat and found himself sitting in the aisle, together with Coughlin and Montes. He struggled to his feet, shaking his head violently, then he bent to help Montes, speaking quick Spanish. Mrs Coughlin helped her husband back to his seat.
Willis had been making a note in the margin of his book and the point of his pencil snapped as Forester lurched against him. Forester made no attempt to regain his position but looked incredulously out of the window, ignoring Willis’s feeble protests at being squashed. Forester was a big man.
The whole cabin was a babel of sound in English and Spanish, dominated by the sharp and scratchy voice of Miss Ponsky as she querulously complained. ‘I knew it,’ she screamed. ‘I knew it was all wrong.’ She began to laugh hysterically and Rohde turned from Montes and slapped her with a heavy hand. She looked at him in surprise and suddenly burst into tears.
Peabody shouted, ‘What in goddam hell is that limey doing now?’ He stared out of the window at the airstrip. ‘The bastard’s going to land.’
Rohde spoke rapidly to Montes, who seemed so shaken he was apathetic. There was a quick exchange in Spanish between Rohde and the girl, and he pointed to the door leading to the cockpit. She nodded violently and he stood up.
Mrs Coughlin was leaning forward in her seat, comforting Miss Ponsky. ‘Nothing’s going to happen,’ she kept saying. ‘Nothing bad is going to happen.’
The aircraft straightened as O’Hara came in for his first approach run. Rohde leaned over Armstrong and looked through the window, but turned as Miss Ponsky screamed in fright, looking at the blur of rock streaming past the starboard window and seeing the wingtip brushing it so closely. Then Rohde lost his balance again as O’Hara pulled the Dakota into a climb.
It was Forester who made the first constructive move. He was nearest the door leading to the cockpit and he grabbed the door handle, turned and pushed. Nothing happened. He put his shoulder to the door but was thrown away as the plane turned rapidly. O’Hara was going into his final landing approach.
Forester grabbed the axe from its clips on the bulkhead and raised it to strike, but his arm was caught by Rohde. ‘This is quicker,’ said Rohde, and lifted a heavy pistol in his other hand. He stepped in front of Forester and fired three quick shots at the lock of the door.
VI
O’Hara heard the shots a fraction of a second before the Dakota touched down. He not only heard them but saw the altimeter and the turn-and-climb indicator shiver into fragments as the bullets smashed into the instrument panel. But he had not time to see what was happening behind him because just then the heavily overloaded Dakota settled soggily at the extreme end of the strip, moving at high speed.
There was a sickening crunch and the whole air frame shuddered as the undercarriage collapsed and the plane sank on to its belly and slid with a tearing, rending sound towards the far end of the strip. O’Hara fought frantically with the controls as they kicked against his hands and feet and tried to keep the aircraft sliding in a straight line.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw Grivas turn to the door, his pistol raised. O’Hara took a chance, lifted one hand from the stick and struck out blindly at Grivas. He just had time for one blow and luckily it connected somewhere; he felt the edge of his hand strike home and then he was too busy to see if he had incapacitated Grivas.
The Dakota was still moving too fast. Already it was more than halfway down the strip and O’Hara could see the emptiness ahead where the strip stopped at the lip of the valley. In desperation he swung the rudder hard over and the Dakota swerved with a loud grating sound.
He braced himself for the crash.
The starboard wingtip hit the rock wall and the Dakota spun sharply to the right. O’Hara kept the rudder forced right over and saw the rock wall coming right at him. The nose of the plane hit rock and crumpled and the safety glass in the windscreens shivered into opacity. Then something hit him on the head and he lost consciousness.
VII
He came round because someone was slapping his face. His head rocked from side to side and he wanted them to stop because it was so good to be asleep. The slapping went on and on and he moaned and tried to tell them to stop. But the slapping did not stop so he opened his eyes.
It was Forester who was administering the punishment, and, as O’Hara opened his eyes, he turned to Rohde who was standing behind him and said, ‘Keep your gun on him.’
Rohde smiled. His gun was in his hand but hanging slackly and pointing to the floor. He made no attempt to bring it up. Forester said, ‘What the hell did you think you were doing?’
O’Hara painfully lifted his arm to his head. He had a bump on his skull the size of an egg. He said weakly, ‘Where’s Grivas?’
‘Who is Grivas?’
‘My co-pilot.’
‘He’s here – he’s in a bad way.’
‘I hope the bastard dies,’ said O’Hara bitterly. ‘He pulled a gun on me.’
‘You were at the controls,’ said Forester, giving him a hard look. ‘You put this plane down here – and I want to know why.’
‘It was Grivas – he forced me to do it.’
‘The señor capitan is right,’ said Rohde. ‘This man Grivas was going to shoot me and the señor capitan hit him.’ He bowed stiffly. ‘Muchas gracias.’
Forester swung round and looked at Rohde, then beyond him to Grivas. ‘Is he conscious?’
O’Hara looked across the cockpit. The side of the fuselage was caved in and a blunt spike of rock had hit Grivas in the chest, smashing his rib cage. It looked as though he wasn’t going to make it, after all. But he was conscious, all right; his eyes were open and he looked at them with hatred.
O’Hara could hear a woman screaming endlessly in the passenger cabin and someone else was moaning monotonously. ‘For Christ’s sake, what’s happened back there?’
No one answered because Grivas began to speak. He mumbled in a low whisper and blood frothed round his mouth. ‘They’ll get you,’ he said. ‘They’ll be here any minute now.’ His lips parted in a ghastly smile. ‘I’ll be all right; they’ll take me to hospital. But you – you’ll …’ He broke off in a fit of coughing and then continued: ‘… they’ll kill the lot of you.’ He lifted up his arm, the fingers curling into a fist. ‘Vivaca …’
The arm dropped flaccidly and the look of hate in his eyes deepened into surprise – surprise that he was dead.
Rohde grabbed him by the wrist and held it for a moment. ‘He’s gone,’ he said.
‘He was a lunatic,’ said O’Hara. ‘Stark, staring mad.’
The woman was still screaming and Forester said, ‘For God’s sake, let’s get everybody out of here.’
Just then the Dakota lurched sickeningly and the whole cockpit rose in the air. There was a ripping sound as the spike of rock that had killed Grivas tore at the aluminium sheathing of the fuselage. O’Hara had a sudden and horrible intuition of what was happening. ‘Nobody move,’ he shouted. ‘Everyone keep still.’
He turned to Forester. ‘Bash in those windows.’
Forester looked in surprise at the axe he was still holding as though he had forgotten it, then he raised it and struck at the opaque windscreen. The plastic filling in the glass sandwich could not withstand his assault and he made a hole big enough for a man to climb through.
O’Hara said, ‘I’ll go through –