*
'Friday. They want you out.’
‘Who the hell are you? What are you
talking about?’
‘Comrade Pasviri will be with them. Prepare
yourself.’ The phone went dead.
Lee stood up from his desk, his mind raced,
trying to tie the voice to one of a hundred faces and while filtering through the
possibilities he projected his anger beyond the office window.
‘Bastards,’ he cursed, ‘thieving, bloody
bastards.’ Hoax or otherwise, like a mental leech the caller’s voice had
already worked its teeth beneath his skin.
Twenty-plus years had come and gone
since the death of his father, from then on he had run the Empress Deep on his
own. Pedal your own bicycle his old
man always insisted. Lee frowned sharply and the crow’s feet at his temples
puckered with annoyance. He was forty-seven, most men would have already
slipped sedately into middle age, but still his stomach was iron-flat and his
resolve was that of a rebellious thirty year old.
A dark foreboding sky hung above the
Empress Deep. A mating pair of Martial eagles soared in close to the cloud’s
edge. The late shift had assembled at the shaft head, one by one the miners
stepped inside the conveyance – then the banksman drew down the steel door and
for the umpteenth time Lee heard the shrill ring of the shaft signal bell and
watched the metal cage with its thirty men drop like a stone to the dark throat
of the mine. Reluctantly, he brought his anger under control and picked up the phone - he dialled an outside number...
*
Second Extract:
...Roberto held the Cessna’s image
within the narrow eyelet of the launcher’s sights and he marvelled at the
pilot’s stupidity. With the aircraft less than a mile out from the clearing, he
fully depressed the trigger on the grip stock to uncage the missile’s seeker
electronics. The missile’s infrared tracking sensor picked up the aircraft’s
heat emissions and illuminated the launcher’s red ‘locked-on’ light. An audible
buzzer sounded and Roberto applied slight lead to the oncoming target.
Within that next brief
moment, the missile’s onboard power supply ignited the throw-out motor and with
a thrust speed of over 30 metres per second drove the Strela-2 clear of its
launcher. Both the forward steering guidance and four, rear mounted stabilizing
fins unfolded as the missile left the tube. At five metres out, the rocket’s sustainer
motor activated and accelerated the missile to its maximum speed of 430 metres
per second. Tethered by its thread of silver smoke the missile lifted
phoenix-like above the lagoon, the rumble of its motor dulled by distance and
the drone of the approaching aircraft; the harrier for the goose – the falcon
for the dove.
Enraptured by his sole
possession of an open sky, the pilot again banked steeply, then at a lower
altitude he levelled out and dipped the Cessna’s wings, first to port and then
alternately to starboard. The act itself was inflammatory, another vindictive
show of the pilot’s growing bravado. He was the conqueror, the victorious hunter-killer
pouring scorn upon his aggressors. Comrade Pasviri would reward him personally
for his skill as a reconnaissance pilot. From his port-side window the pilot laughed
aloud at the confusion being acted out far below him. It was then that he saw
the missile and the laughter died in his throat.
With realignment ability
of nine degrees per second, the Strela’s AM tracking sensor stayed locked on to
a powerful source of black heat growling from the aircraft’s twin exhaust ports.
In a vain attempt to avoid destruction, the pilot rammed the yoke fully
forward, forcing the aircraft into a steep dive. That loss of control drained
his courage and left him floundering; he had lost sight of the Strela, the
roles had been reversed. He was now the prey; the claustrophobic child trapped
inside some dark room and he screamed out loud, gripped by insurmountable
panic.
The missile wobbled in
flight as its on-board seeker momentarily lost that powerful central eye of
infrared radiation. However, quickly it made minute alterations to the missile’s
angle rate tracking system. From beneath, it found the Cessna’s downward flight
path; as the Peregrine falcon might flush its prey from the sheer sides of some
Welsh mountain, so did the Strela rise from below in deadly pursuit of its
quarry.
It struck the Cessna’s fuselage
at its lowest point, amidships of the aircraft’s exhaust outlets – detonating
the fragmentation warhead just a metre forward from the pilot’s feet.
Most of the blast
energy was absorbed by the solid mass of the Cessna’s engine, but to the rear
of its mountings the flimsy metal bulkhead had been ripped through. Fanned by
rushing wind, acrid smoke from burning oil and avgas forced its way inside the
cockpit.
Flung against his
harness by the explosion, the pilot was left confused and disorientated, then the
violent shuddering of his stricken aircraft and the ingress of terrible heat
snapped him back to full awareness.
Where once his legs had
operated the steerage pedals, now, through a ragged hole in the floor a furnace
roared where his feet had been – it was then, like starving wolves to the
stumps of both his legs did that gnawing pain engulf him...
*
