The effect of the sudden noise was immediate. Half of the carabinieri jumped into one of the cars, switched on the lights and sirens, and turned it down the lane leading towards the hangar.
‘Cat and pigeons,’ Dekker muttered. ‘You want me to slow them down a bit?’
‘Not unless you have to,’ Richter said. ‘Belt in, both of you, and if you know any good gods, this would be an excellent time to pick one and start praying.’
He pushed the throttle forward gently, in order to start the Piper moving. As soon as the wing tips cleared the hangar doors, he increased the power setting and sent the little aircraft skidding across the grass towards the nearer end of the basic runway.
‘Aren’t you supposed to take off into wind?’ Dekker asked, gesturing towards the windsock, which was now moving lazily, but pointing in the general direction Richter was heading.
‘You just concentrate on the shooting and let me do the flying.’
The carabinieri vehicle had almost reached the hangar, and the turn-off beside it, when the Piper reached the near edge of the short-cropped grass. Dekker watched as the officers piled out of it. He couldn’t hear what they were saying, but their gestures were quite unmistakable.
‘I think they know we’re in this aircraft,’ he said urgently. ‘They’re going to start shooting any time now, so getting ourselves airborne is probably a good idea.’
‘I’m doing it,’ Richter snapped, engaging full flap and lining up the Piper along the grass strip ahead of them.
The carabiniere driver was now sounding his horn in a long, continuous blare of sound, easily audible even over the roar of the Piper’s Lycoming engine.
‘Now they’ve spotted the Peugeot,’ Dekker said, looking back through the side window of the aircraft.
The other car lurched to a halt beside the hangar and its doors swung open. Grey-clad officers spilled out, weapons in hand.
‘There’s just been an incident near the border,’ Clayton Richards said, putting down his desk phone and standing up.
‘Whereabouts? And what sort of incident?’ Westwood asked.
Richards strode over to the map. ‘Near Sestriere, just here.’ He pointed at a curving minor road that lay to the west of Turin. ‘Our contact in the carabinieri has reported that shots were fired at police vehicles, but we’ve no reports of casualties at the moment. It happened about fifty minutes ago, and apparently the carabinieri are now in pursuit of a vehicle with at least two people in it.’
‘That could be it,’ Westwood said, after a moment. ‘At least, it’s the first report of anything happening that sounds likely. I’ll scramble the U2 out of Aviano and see what that can detect. And I’ll also check with Langley and find out if any of the KH-12 birds were within range at the time this happened.’
The Piper was now accelerating quickly along the grass strip, with the throttle fully open. Richter was controlling the direction with the rudder pedals, and starting to ease back on the control yoke as the aircraft’s speed increased. The little aircraft banged and crashed around on the uneven surface, as the wheels hit humps and dips, and the cabin shook uncomfortably.
Behind them, there was a sudden rattle of submachine-gun fire as the Italian officers opened up. If the carabinieri had been armed with rifles, it would have been a different story, but the weapons they were carrying were intended for close-quarter fighting against soft targets — human beings, in fact — and the Piper was already nearly a hundred yards away from them before they started firing. A couple of stray rounds hit the roof of the cabin, drilling harmlessly through its thin aluminium skin. Out of the corner of his eye, Richter saw another round hit the port wing, near the tip.
But he was ignoring everything except getting the aircraft into the sky. The Piper was feeling lighter, that almost indefinable sensation felt through the controls as the aircraft approached sixty knots — which he guessed was about take-off speed. Moments later, he eased back gently on the yoke. The nose lifted, and the bouncing and juddering ceased, as the Piper lifted smoothly into the air, about a hundred yards from the far end of the grass strip.
Richter kept the throttle fully open and continued climbing as quickly as he could — which wasn’t that fast. He was used to a Harrier’s 50,000 feet-per-minute rate of climb, and the Piper felt more like it was going up at only fifty feet a minute.
‘Thank God for that,’ Raya murmured, both hands firmly clutching her seat belt.
‘Can we get to England in this thing?’ Dekker asked.
‘No,’ Richter said shortly, raising the undercarriage as the Piper picked up speed. ‘With full tanks it can cover about eight or nine hundred miles, but we’d never make anything like that distance. We’ve just shot our way out of Italy, and there’s absolutely no reason why the Italians shouldn’t ask the French to force us down somewhere. If we tried going all the way, we’d find a couple of Mirages or something on either side of us really soon. And if we didn’t land where and when they told us, they’d probably just shoot us down.’
‘So what’s the plan?’
‘Simple. We’re out of reach of the Italians now, so we use this aircraft simply to hop over the border into France, pick our own landing spot, and then vanish.’
Richter checked the altimeter. They had climbed to an indicated altitude of just over 3,000 metres, and were probably already five or six miles from the grass strip, but still heading east, towards Turin. He continued the climb. Attached to the dashboard of the Piper was a plastic plate with radio frequencies, various speeds and other information written on it. In fact, the kind of stuff that a pilot flying in this area would need to have immediately available. At the bottom of the plate were two heights indicated in metres.
The first number was 2,160, which was probably the elevation of the grass landing strip, so the pilot would know what his altimeter should be telling him when he reached the touch-down point. The second was just over 5,000 metres, which Richter guessed was the safety altitude for this area, which would guarantee clearance above even the highest peaks in all weather conditions. That was the altitude he was going to aim for, as long as the Piper could reach it — and it was probably pretty close to the plane’s maximum ceiling.
But, first, it was time he altered course.
Clayton Richards looked up as somebody knocked at the door of his office, before stepping inside. It was a junior officer clutching a sheaf of photographs.
‘From Langley, sir,’ he said. ‘The latest downloads from the last Ikon satellite pass.’
‘Thanks,’ Richards growled, then cleared a space on his desk and spread out the pictures so that he and Westwood could look at them together.
The definition was high and the images were amazingly clear, but there was nothing the designers of the satellite cameras could do about the laws of physics, so there was a limit to what could be seen from even a state-of-the-art, high-speed platform travelling some two hundred miles above the ground.
Helpfully, one of the analysts at the NRO had annotated the photographs before sending them to CIA Headquarters, so the Franco-Italian border was clearly marked, as was Turin and several of the larger towns in the area. In response to Westwood’s specific request, they’d also indicated two apparently abandoned carabinieri cars on the road outside the town of Cesana Torinese. That was interesting, and served to confirm the report Richards had already received about an ‘incident’ near the border.