To Cole’s amazement and unbridled joy, the extinguisher travelled in a more or less straight line, smashing straight through the Bell’s cockpit window and into the pilot’s face, smashing through his head until it buried itself in the partition wall behind, where it twirled around lethargically with the remains of its propellant gases.
At the same time as he fired the Glock, his other hand also hit the counter-measures control on the Herc’s instrument panel.
White-hot flares burning at more than a thousand degrees dispersed themselves all around the aircraft, firing out at every angle, a brilliant, symmetrical fireworks display in the cold night sky.
Cole observed as the first helicopter shook, the pilot dead, slumped over the controls, nothing controlling the Bell’s flight now, and it skittered, banked, yawed, and ultimately fell from the sky, erupting in a bright orange fireball on the ground below.
Meanwhile, the flares, designed to confuse heat-seeking missiles fired at the aircraft, were successfully doing another job entirely. The second helicopter had been in the direct path of the rear flare cluster, and two thousand high-powered flares had fallen directly onto the Bell’s main rotor, destroying it instantly.
Flares also passed through the cockpit and the rear compartment, and the men onboard all burned to death before the second helicopter, like the first, fell to earth and exploded in a raging inferno, flames shooting up to lick the underside of Cole’s own ravaged aircraft.
23
Cole checked through the broken glass at the lights below him, just visible through the bitter December weather. He thought for a moment of what he was doing, where he was headed. When President Ellen Abrams had last met him, she had been a Senator and he had been something of a hero. But now?
Sitting there in the cockpit of the hijacked plane, the mangled body of the RAF pilot at his side, he just didn’t know. If he hadn’t killed Crozier, would the CIA man have revealed everything about the plan? Would this entire thing have been avoided? It was possible, certainly. In this respect, Cole was in a sense partially responsible for the cold war that was to come.
He shook off the feeling. He had to get the information he had to Abrams, and hope that she would be able to use it; it was his only hope for redemption, and the only way to save the world from a possible future annihilation.
And so he had to concentrate. The weather was appalling, freezing cold and with driving snow that speared its way into the cockpit, obscuring his vision and dulling his reflexes.
He knew that below him would soon be Annapolis, and then he would be over DC proper, on his way to the impromptu runway that was being prepared on Constitution Avenue.
With poor visibility, damaged instruments and a potentially frozen runway on which to land, Cole was under no illusions about his chances.
24
The altimeter still seemed to be operational, as well as the unit-to-ground image, and Cole prayed that the readouts were accurate, as he was going to have to rely on them to get the Hercules down. If the chopper attack had damaged the integrity of that information, it could be disastrous — an error of five metres could make the difference between landing in relative safety, or smashing down into the concrete highway and breaking the plane into a million pieces.
The noise was fierce — the lack of cockpit windows meant that Cole was subjected to the full, insanely loud roar of the four huge propellers, as well as the horrific wind noise that whistled through the cabin. It was cold too, terribly cold, and he was inordinately glad of the warm sweater he had been given to wear back in the cells in Munich.
Cole had deployed the landing gear, and had been pleased to see that it still functioned — had it been damaged, it would have reduced his chances even more. As he over-flew eastern DC, he began to work the throttle and the altitudinometer, and the big aircraft began to slow and descend.
He still couldn’t see anything except for vague lights outside the cockpit, but his maps told him he was nearing Capitol Hill, at a height of just five hundred metres and closing.
He came down, lower and lower, speed reducing more and more. He knew the Hercules was designed to land on short runways, and with a light load could land in as little as two hundred and fifty metres. Constitution Avenue was much longer than this, but Cole was aware that the weather was incredibly bad, and he wasn’t even preparing to land on a proper runway, but rather a hopefully-cleared urban boulevard.
And then the sound changed, higher pitched for an instant, and Cole knew he had just cleared the top of the Capitol building itself, the brilliant white porticoed Georgian edifice standing proud atop of Capitol Hill, overlooking the rest of the Washington Mall beneath.
His height was just a hundred metres and closing, his speed just a hundred knots, and he was looking, searching from the open cockpit, looking for –
There! Lights directly below him, in two long straight lines, exactly where he had hoped the avenue would be, and Cole was pleased — happy not only that he had navigated to the correct position, but also that Abrams had organised high-power lights to be strung out along both sides of the street, providing some merciful visual assistance.
The road was coming up at him quickly now, and he pushed down on the yoke as he neared the iced concrete surface. Eighty, forty, twenty metres, everything happening too quickly, the ground rushing up towards him, lights blinding him now, and then his entire body shook with the impact as the aeroplane hit the street hard.
The big Hercules rolled from side to side, trying to find grip, some purchase on the slippery surface of the avenue, even before its weight had fully settled on the wheels. And then the yoke was fully down, and the plane’s weight collapsed onto the landing gear, and Cole struggled to keep the massive aircraft in a straight line as it plummeted along the boulevard, past the National Archives on the left and then the Natural History and American History Museums on the left, the huge needle of the Washington Monument illuminated further over, a sight that caught Cole’s eye as the aircraft swung towards it, and then left his vision as the Herc swung back to the right.
Cole heard the high-pitched whine as the tyres still struggled to secure their grip on the tarmac, and then a shriek as one of the wheels broke loose from the frame, the heavy bulk of the aircraft collapsing to the street on one side, scraping along the icy street at an odd, dangerously off-balanced angle.
But then Cole felt his progress slowing, the actual body of the aircraft digging into the concrete of the street, ripping up the tarmac and being braked against the churned-up surface.
Cole felt the plane drop a level again as another wheel collapsed, and then the Hercules started to spin on its axis, but slowly — ever so slowly now, as its forward momentum reduced — until eventually, mercifully, finally, the vehicle came to a complete stop.
Cole’s breathing, ragged and hollow, now also started to slow as he regained his composure, trying to get his bearings.
He shook his head clear, and tried to make out the surroundings directly outside the broken cockpit.
His eyes focussed badly, then cleared, and then re-focussed. He smiled as he recognized the view from the flight deck straight ahead. Through the driving snow and hail he could make out the incongruous decorative lights of the National Christmas Tree on the Ellipse directly in front of him, and beyond that, the reassuring Georgian familiarity of the White House, the home of the President of the United States of America, Ellen Abrams.
He’d made it.