Kara’s Game. Gordon Stevens

you, Amsterdam …’ they all heard her voice.

      

      ‘Lufthansa 3216 is airborne,’ the operation commander informed Finn.

      The holding room for the assault teams was in a building away from the main terminal complex at Heathrow, the Operations Room was on the floor above, and the hangar to the side was sealed and guarded, the 737 in it and the assault teams practising their approach and entry.

      They had come in as soon as the hijack had been reported to Hereford – the advance team flying in in the Agusta 109, nothing about the helicopter to suggest its purpose and nothing about its markings to indicate the identities of the men in the back: the operations officer, the team commander, the assault group commander, the sniper group commander, a signaller, and the operations clerk. The rest of the teams screaming up the motorway in the unmarked Range Rovers and the plain white van with the back-up gear close behind. Nobody seeing them, of course; nobody, except those with a need to know, aware they were here.

      ‘Which way are they heading?’

      ‘Nobody’s sure yet.’

      Finn stood the teams down, left the hangar, and went to the Operations Room.

      

      Lufthansa 3216 flying north, Strike was informed. Lufthansa 3216 still in Dutch air space.

      

      For one moment she was no longer on the flight deck. For one moment she was back in Bosnia, the snow was on the ground and the cold of winter was tight around her. Flour was fifteen deutschmarks a kilo, the black marketeer next to her was saying. I only have ten – the other man was even more desperate than those around him – my wife and my children are starving, they haven’t eaten for days. Take it or leave it, the black marketeer was telling him. The man was reaching into his coat, pulling out a gun and shooting the black marketeer. What good is fifteen d’marks to you now, he was saying. Was turning away and disappearing into the crowd. One day this would be her, she had thought; one day it would be her lying on the ground or in the snow. A bullet in her head and her blood running down her face.

      ‘Ask Control for a routeing for London Heathrow,’ she told Maeschler.

      

      She’s asked directions for Heathrow – the whisper spread round the women on The Green, in the middle of Parliament Square. She’s bringing Lufthansa 3216 into London.

      Bastard – Langdon turned to the other members of Strike.

      You were right – the operation commander nodded as Finn came into the Ops Room. She’s requested a routeing for Heathrow.

      She was always going to – Finn helped himself to a coffee and settled at one of the desks.

      Because at ten o’clock this morning she actually told us what she was going to do. Not directly, but in the way she specified the deadline in a number of hours – twelve to be precise – rather than as a time. Which means that where she’ll be when the deadline expires, it might not actually be ten o’clock this evening. Therefore she was going to change time zones. Therefore she was coming to Heathrow.

      Because Lufthansa 3216 had taken off from Berlin with thirteen metric tonnes of fuel – nine tonnes for the flight plus four reserve. And a Boeing 737 burned fuel at a rate of two and a half tonnes an hour. Which gave a flying time of just over five hours.

      The hijack had taken place thirty minutes into the flight, plus the thirty minutes to return back over Berlin. So effectively you were down to four hours. Add Berlin – Paris, where the hijacker had first landed, then Paris – Amsterdam, where the hijacker had flown next, plus the usual in-flight delays and the fact that an aircraft burned more fuel when it was landing and taking off than it did when cruising, and you could knock another two and a half off. So when 3216 had taken off from Amsterdam it had less than ninety minutes’ flying time.

      Then run that against the first assumption that the hijacker was going to switch time zones. Throw in a second, that the Amsterdam stop-over was merely an interlude, and that the hijacker was targeting the Big Players – Paris, London, Moscow and Washington. And she was telling you where she was going next.

      Paris was out because she’d already been there, and, in any case, it was in the same time zone as Amsterdam. And Moscow and Washington were out because of flight times. Which only left one.

      

      ‘Lufthansa 3216. Route direct to Refso.’ The Dutch controller’s English was clipped and precise. ‘Then Lambourne Three Alpha arrival.’ Refso was the reporting point between Dutch and British air space; Lambourne, in Essex, was a navigation beacon on the route into London from Amsterdam, and Lambourne Three Alpha was the standard routeing from the Lambourne beacon into Heathrow. ‘Contact London on one three six decimal five five.’

      Maeschler leaned to his right and began to adjust the frequency.

      ‘Check ATIS first,’ she told him.

      Because that will tell us the conditions at Heathrow, including which runway we’re landing on. Which in turn will tell us our route in. And the authorities may not like the way we’re coming in and might try to change it. And if they try, I want to know.

      Maeschler glanced at the first officer and dialled up the frequency for Heathrow.

      ‘This is Heathrow Information Charlie …’ The details were updated every twenty minutes. ‘Runway in use Two Seven Left. Surface wind two six zero, eighteen knots. Overcast at four thousand feet. QNH is one zero one eight.’

      So now you know – Maeschler looked back at the woman in the jump seat. And everyone else will also know. Because anyone with the right set can pick up our messages on VHF, and those who can’t can listen to them being played live on radio and television. Which you understood already, of course. Because you planned it as you planned everything.

      

      Pity they didn’t know much about the hijackers, Finn thought. Four of them, from the debriefs of the passengers she’d released. Two men and two women, all heavily armed, though there had been no indication how they had smuggled their weapons on board. But nothing apart from that, not even the names and aliases they were using. Because the hijacker had hacked a pirate programme into the computerized check-in system in Berlin, activated when the computer received confirmation that 3216 was airborne, and wiped all record of the passenger list. Therefore the security people hadn’t been able to check which passengers were genuine, and which were the hijackers travelling under false passports or genuine passports assigned to someone sitting comfortably at home in Bremen or Copenhagen or Manchester.

      He topped up the coffee, checked the television monitors against the right-hand wall of the room, and placed the two radios on the desk – one VHF tuned to the frequency 3216 was using, and the other a transistor so that he could listen to the press reports of the progress of 3216, and ipso facto the details the hijackers were receiving.

      The Operations Room was silent, almost eerie. Just like one of the RSGs, Finn thought. He’d been down one once, part of an exercise. An attack on a Regional Seat of Government, one of the underground bunkers for use in the event of nuclear war: four levels in a hollowed-out hill in Essex. Everything ready for World War Three – desks and chairs and bunks, even the blankets folded on them and the notepads and pencils perfectly in position. Everything silent as everything was ready and silent in the Ops Room now. Everything waiting, except the Cold War had ended, the threat of the ultimate mushroom over the world had lifted, and the RSG had been decommissioned. Just like the Ops Room until twenty minutes ago. Then somebody had pressed the button: then the hijacker had requested a routeing for Heathrow.

      

      It was one-thirty London time, Lufthansa 3216 over the North Sea. The nerves had gone from her stomach now, and her mind was calm.

      … The next time the United Nations lets your people down … She remembered the moment he had told her. The corridor in the hospital, the night dark and freezing, the children crying and the Serb shells thundering outside.