The plane rocked again.
“We’re losing control!” Froy screamed, above the rattle of the metal struts. They were barely holding the cabin together.
“OK,” Bligh yelled at last. “You’re right—I need to tell you. But not to survive—to complete the mission.” He frantically punched some keys on his display station. “God, I hope this CPU is still working. Can you see that?”
Jimmy looked at his own screen. Aerial photographs flashed up in front of him, one after the other. Jimmy was amazed at their detail—he knew they must have been taken from thousands of metres up and with the plane travelling at speed.
“This is Neptune’s Shadow,” Bligh announced, rushing to get the words out, “the second-largest oil rig in the world.” His voice shook with the vibrations of the plane, but Jimmy wondered whether it was fear as well. “It’s 250 kilometres off the east coast of England, in the North Sea.”
Jimmy watched the images flash up, faster and faster, desperately trying to hold on to any of them in his head. Still the plane shook and rattled. Jimmy could barely hear what Bligh was saying.
“This is your precious package?” Froy bellowed. He was furious. “This is what was so important you couldn’t divert to pick us up? A damn oil rig?”
“It’s not an oil rig,” Bligh snapped back. “That’s what I found out. And NJ7 will do anything to stop me getting back with this intelligence. Neptune’s Shadow is a secret missile base disguised as a massive oil rig. And these pictures show that its rockets are trained on France. The Brits are preparing a strike on Paris.”
Jimmy felt his gut twisting into a rope.
“Does anybody know about this?” he gasped.
“Just us three and the Government of Great Britain,” replied Bligh. “We’re too far out of range for me to radio it. The only place this information is stored is on the CPU of this aeroplane and inside our heads. And to be honest, it doesn’t look like this plane is going to be around much longer. If something happens…” he paused and cleared his throat. “If we go down…Whoever survives…you have to take this information back to Colonel Keays. He has to know. He has to stop them.”
CRASH!
Suddenly, it felt like being in a toy plane whacked by a sledgehammer. A direct hit. Jimmy was thrown to the side, slamming his head against the wall of the cockpit again. If it hadn’t been for the helmet, his skull would have been crushed.
Then the plane went into tailspin.
Jimmy saw every colour blend into every other. The universe whirled around him, like he was trapped in a tumble dryer—one that was falling to earth at over a hundred metres a second.
Only one thing went through his mind—Bligh has lost control. The man was shaking the flight stick frantically and clawing at the switches on the flight panel.
Jimmy looked up, straight ahead out of the cockpit. What he saw numbed the feeling in his entire body. The sea was rushing towards them. Even in the split-second that he stared, the froth on the surface became clearer. He was close enough to see the debris that bobbed on the waves.
Then he looked to the control panel. It was like the most complicated games console in the world. Suddenly, it was as if Jimmy could see through the metal, into the workings of the plane. In a single flash of thought, he could trace the wires behind every button and switch—thousands of them all at once.
“Do exactly what I say!” Jimmy yelled, fighting hard to stop himself blacking out.
“What?” Bligh shouted back in disbelief.
“Kill the engines!” Jimmy ordered. There was such authority in his voice that Bligh did as he was told. The two Pratt and Whitney P450 turbojets fell silent, leaving only the intense scream of the air rushing past the cockpit.
Jimmy’s hands tore at his strap. He unclipped his parachute, heaved it off his back and strapped it round the display station of the empty seat next to him. Then he engaged the seat’s ejector mechanism. Almost instantly, a section of the cockpit screen popped open and the seat was hurled from the plane. Jimmy saw it slam into the wing as it rotated around them. He was relieved that neither Bligh nor Froy had panicked and tried to eject themselves.
“What are you doing?” screamed Bligh.
Jimmy didn’t respond. Instead, he pulled the ripcord on his parachute. The black satin canopy billowed into the sky behind them. The resistance would only slow their fall by a fraction—the ’chute was designed to carry a single human, not a fighter jet. But it would grant them an extra split-second, which could be enough. The canopy behind them would also serve a second purpose.
“Release the internal fuel supply!” Jimmy commanded. Bligh didn’t hesitate. A trail of black liquid streamed behind them, making the plane lighter by the second, and filling the parachute canopy with petroleum fumes.
There was no time to issue another order. Jimmy reached over to the controls himself, flicked the safety cover from the missile switch and jammed his thumb on the orange button.
He didn’t need to take aim. He knew that without a specifically programmed target, the AGM-99 would automatically seek out the largest solid object within its scope. He just hoped that one of the logs in the water would be big enough to register.
A single missile flamed through the sky ahead of them, twisting in the direction of its target. Ten centimetres either side and the missile would have plunged hundreds of metres beneath the waves before exploding. But it hit the log right in the centre. Up came a blast of red and black flame, heating the air immediately around it by hundreds of degrees and igniting the fumes caught in the parachute.
The updraft was enough to push the Growler out of its spiral.
“Now!” Jimmy yelled. Bligh knew exactly what Jimmy meant. That moment he re-ignited the engines. The roar returned. The silk canopy behind them was incinerated instantly and they swooped along the surface of the water.
Jimmy couldn’t help smiling.
“Good flying, kid,” Bligh gasped, lifting them back into the clouds at hundreds of kilometres an hour. “But it’s not over.” He tapped his display unit. The red flashing dot was still on the screen and it was closing in. Jimmy was amazed that the man still sounded so calm.
“We’d better eject,” said Jimmy, constantly manoeuvring the plane so they couldn’t be shot at. “The plane’s damaged and we’re out of fuel. If we’re not hit first, we’ll crash anyway.”
But then Bligh looked across at Froy.
“Froy!” he cried, shaking his CIA colleague by the arm. “He’s unconscious, Jimmy! I’m not ejecting without him.” Bligh reached across to check the other CIA man’s pulse. “Here, you take this.” He unclipped his parachute and passed it back to Jimmy.
Jimmy pulled the straps of the parachute pack over his arms.
“I’ll fasten myself to Froy,” Bligh went on, feeling for one of the hooks on his belt. “I’ll get us both out and I’ll pull the cord on his ’chute.”
Jimmy was about to follow the agent’s instructions, but his hand hesitated over the eject mechanism. He glanced again at the red dot on his screen. Come on, he told himself. Get out of here. But there was a dark force inside him, stopping his muscles going through with action.
“They’ll see me,” Jimmy gasped