The Becket Approval by Falconer Duncan (best big ereader .TXT) 📗

and sat at a table across from him. He ordered a coffee and concentrated on his phone. Mahmoud watched him for a while before deciding the man wasn’t interested in him. Another five minutes and he’d leave.

What Mahmoud wasn’t aware of was that the new arrival was photographing him. The recognition images were messaged to GCHQ in England and within a few minutes it was confirmed that Mahmoud was not Saleem.

When Mahmoud left the cafe he was too inexperienced to notice the Arab man follow him or the two other men that tagged along from wherever they'd been waiting. Mahmoud had done the journey several times already and would do it again the following evening. All he wanted to do was get back to the house.

As Mahmoud made his way through dark, narrow streets his followers came together, caught up with him, pounced on him from behind and dragged him into an alleyway. They held him down, covering his mouth to keep him quiet while one of them injected a fluid into his neck. They kept their firm grip of him for almost a minute while he went limp and his eyes changed from frantic to relaxed and then shut. A car pulled up. Mahmoud was tossed into the back. The others jumped in and the vehicle drove away.

Gunnymede was abruptly woken up by a combination of the scream of hydraulic motors, a burst of bright sunlight and a fierce wind. The air circled inside the small space like an entrapped tornado and rapidly reduced in violence to severe wind as the bay doors opened beneath him. The sun was low in the sky and directly ahead of the plane.

He’d fallen into a deep sleep, no doubt assisted by the pure oxygen, and fought to switch himself on. He quickly unplugged the oxygen umbilical from the main supply and plugged it into the small bottle attached to his harness. The hammock release cord dangled above his face. He took a moment to ensure his gear was secure, his kit between his legs. All seemed good. Time to drop into the gap between the wheels. He gave the toggle a yank.

Nothing happened.

He gave it another sharp tug but the hammock remained locked into place. He quickly checked the cable, where it went through the rings along the aircraft body but he couldn’t see an obvious jam. He pulled hard on it with both hands, acutely aware the second hand was ticking, tugging at it violently but still it remained jammed.

The wheel suddenly jerked upwards a few inches hitting him in the back before returning to its position. Signal number one. A minute to go. Another tug and still nothing. This was not good. He wrapped the toggle around his hand, gripped it with the other and pulled as hard as he could. He paused a moment, positioned himself better and pulled on it again until he needed to relax. What the hell!

The wheel jerked again. Holy shit! He had three seconds to drop.

He mustered all his strength, raised his feet to the ceiling, pulled hard on the toggle and held the pressure. This was his last effort. The seconds were flying by, as was the plane over his target. He pushed as hard as he could with his feet, yelling out loud with the effort, his thighs taking the strain.

Something snapped! He flew back, the chute on his back hitting the wheel, flipped onto his side, dropped into the gap between the wheel and the left door and out of the plane in a single, slick movement. His head hit the slipstream first and he tore along the bottom of the aircraft as if it was sucking him up to it. The plane’s skin was millimetres from his face but before he could make contact with it, it disappeared in a snap and he spun like a rag doll in the aircraft’s slipstream. He fought against the g-force, pushed out his arms and legs, spreading like a starfish. Within seconds the spin was broken and he went stable on his back, nothing but blue sky in his vision. The plane was already a mile away.

He remained in that position for a short while, taking a moment to recover. Any elation that he felt having managed to survive was overshadowed by a fear he’d gone too far off course. He checked his altimeter. Three minutes before his chute opened. The backpack was still between his legs. The chute square on his back. The stealth suit flapping wildly. He hoped it was doing its job. If so, some Russian radar technician somewhere was seeing a dead bird plummet having struck a passenger plane bound for Beijing.

The blue sky instantly disappeared and everything was bright white. Keeping his arms outstretched he pulled in his knees. The move flipped him over and seconds later the cloud disappeared and there was the planet. He checked the compass beside the altimeter and turned himself to face north. The terrain was sandy brown with clumps of dark foliage and snaking streaks of black and grey. On the western horizon he could make out the rectangular patterns of cultivated fields. To the north was the salt lake of Elton ten miles across. It was supposed to be north east of him. He was way off.

He turned to face west and adopted the tracking position, keeping his body as thin as possible, his arms by his sides and legs straight, forming a saucer curve with his arse higher than his head. The wind tore at him but he didn’t experience any obvious sense of forward movement. He knew that in theory, in that position, his vertical drop would be around 120 mph while his horizontal speed should be 70 mph.

He concentrated on the area directly ahead. It was slowly moving towards him and began to fit the map he’d memorised. He could see the winding