Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Copyright
H
IGH
R
OLLERS
Jack Bowman
To John Chandler – whether you like it or not
1
HALO JACKSON GRINNED at Chris Stern as the blades started to turn lazily in the fan casing of the CalSuperior Cargo 737.
He walked back into Hangar Six, put the snap-on wrench carefully back in its place in his roll cabinet, fastened the door firmly, then joined his friend squatting beside it. In the time it took him to perform those few simple actions, the sound of the jet had risen to alarming proportions. Half a dozen techs, who had been scurrying around the gleaming blue-and-silver giant, now dropped away from the unglamorous 737, grandly named Pride of Maine, pulled their Predator protectors from around their necks and dropped them securely over their ears. The triple layer of dense foam insulation with rubber seal deadened the rising howl to a stomach-wrenching roar but, still, an instinct for self-preservation made them back away, as though the few extra feet would protect them from the sound.
Under a large No Smoking sign, Chris pulled a Camel from his top pocket and put it between his lips without lighting it.
Cal Lemanski frowned at Halo and Chris and flapped his hands at his own ear protectors. Chris gave him the thumbs-up, and he turned away.
Kids. Cal was a bear of a man – big, bearded, barrel-chested. He was fifty-four and called anyone under forty ‘kid’.
Halo and Chris grinned at each other – an unlikely-looking pair of friends. Halo was black, skinny, toothy, and with a non-haircut that verged on an Afro; Chris was as broad, blond and pink-cheeked as a drunken Minnesota hunter.
The roar gripped them like something physical. Halo cracked first – he usually did. He grabbed his Predators and clamped them on. Chris held on for another split second, to make a point, his eyes screwed up, his cigarette flattened between his gritted teeth. Then he pulled on his ear protectors, holding them firmly, like Munch’s The Scream, crowing silently at Halo. He took a long fake drag on his cigarette – eyes narrowed, cheeks hollow – and breathed out luxuriously, as if he could still see the smoke leaving his nostrils in decadent trails.
Inside the huge engine the titanium-alloy fan blades – machined to a thousandth of an inch, in a feat as near perfect as makes no difference – sliced through the air at 5,500 revolutions per minute, a mere eighth of an inch from the lining of the engine casing, creating a diverse world of vacuum and violent turbulence.
Now, forty feet from Halo’s head – but far below the nearly unbearable roar of power – there came another sound. Light and delicate. A sound like a gentleman toastmaster calling for silence, with the silver tines of the best fork against the finest crystal. A single tone: so small that it was immediately sucked into the stomach of the engine, so genteel that it might have passed for imagination in a library.
And another revolution of the blades began.
Slowed a half-million times, a single blade swept past the tiny sound in a headlong suck of air and, safely cocooned by its neighbours’ shrouds, spun laconically around to meet that crucial point once more. The point where the rubberized lining of the fan casing was abraded above and beyond the call of duty. Like old friends, another tink of greeting. Was it louder this time?
Halo and Chris were engaged in a silent game of Rock, Paper, Scissors when the number-two engine of the Pride of Maine tore itself apart.
Thirty-eight titanium-alloy blades, each shaved to a cutting edge and exerting an escape force equivalent to the weight of a Mack truck, shattered from the fan casing and ripped free in a catherine-wheel formation at a speed approaching 700 m.p.h. Some gouged troughs in the reinforced-concrete apron; others ricocheted backwards, kicking off the ground and slicing through the hangar. Some found even softer targets, then continued their escape stained red.
It was as if the devil himself had reached up from Hell to spray Number Six Service Hangar at Los Angeles International Airport with a short burst from an apocalyptic Uzi.
