A Couple of Short Extracts from Empress Gold

Hi - Empress Gold now in final stages ( hooray!), so here are a couple of short, non-spoiler excerpts. Will keep you posted - thanks for your patience.

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'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...

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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...

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