Flying the Storm

2.





Altercations

Mohawk’s fingers dug into Fredrick’s throat and the meaty arm lifted him off the ground. His legs dangled pitifully now, twisting and kicking in vain as he was slammed bodily against the wall. His head slapped on the rough brickwork.

Help me, he mouthed.

But Aiden couldn’t get to him.

The other marine had seen to that: Aiden’s arms were pinned behind his back in a painful iron grip. He was frantic, on the edge of panic, looking on helplessly as his best friend’s life was crushed from him in ragged, gurgled breaths. He had to do something.

He wrenched forward desperately, ignoring the pain in his shoulders. With a shout of defiance, he kicked out like a mule, catching his captor in the groin. The marine grunted and eased his grip only a fraction, but it was all Aiden needed to get a hand free. He spun to face the doubled-over man, and deftly stole his knife.

The knife plunged deep into the marine’s unarmoured thigh, pulling out with a spurt of bright blood. The man grunted again, falling to his knees, hands clutching desperately at the pulsing wound. Aiden kicked him hard in the tattooed head, sprawling him on the pavement, unconscious.

It had happened so quickly that Mohawk hadn’t even let go of Fredrick. His eyes bulged with disbelief as he saw what had happened to his comrade.

Aiden tackled him. All three men tumbled together: the murderous grip on Fredrick had been released and he slumped at the foot of the wall as Aiden and Mohawk crashed onto the slabs of the alley floor by his feet. Aiden’s wrist was caught by the hand that had only a moment ago been strangling his friend: the bloody knife quivered barely an inch from the marine’s throat.

The marine’s strength was enormous. Even from below he was managing to turn the knife back on Aiden. The muscles that had so easily lifted Fredrick now slowly twisted the blade; edging it away from the throat that Aiden desperately wanted it to slash. Realising his dominance, the brute’s spittle-flecked face creased with a predatory smile.

Once more, panic. There was no help for Aiden now: Fredrick was still barely conscious, and the alley was otherwise deserted. He had to change his approach, and change it quickly, because this one was certainly going to get him killed. He shifted his weight slightly, lifting his centre of gravity.

Then he head-butted the marine, putting all the force he could muster squarely into the man’s face. He felt the crunch of bone.

Mohawk went limp, his face sagged and his mouth hung open senselessly. Aiden sprang to his feet, knife at the ready. Neither marine moved. Their bulky bodies were slumped as Aiden had left them. A pool of bright blood was forming around the legs of the one Aiden had stabbed, turning to a brown paste where it mixed into the limestone dust.

He turned to Fredrick, whose eyes had opened. “You all right?” he asked.

“Praise the Wings,” wheezed Fredrick, rubbing his throat and getting unsteadily to his feet.

Aiden laughed a short, shocked laugh. “It wasn’t the bloody Wings that saved you!” His hands were shaking. He threw the knife away.

“Let’s go,” he said, wiping a smudge of blood from his forehead with his sleeve. They ran, a little uncertainly, to the end of the alley and out onto the street leading to the harbour.

It had occurred to Aiden that they couldn’t stay in Sevastopol any longer. Slowed to a fast walk by the milling crowds on the main street, they cut as straight a path as they could towards the docks. There they could board the Iolaire, and make good their escape.

“Did you really cheat them?” asked Aiden. It was an odd question, given that neither of the marines had actually bet any of their own money.

“No. I beat them fair and square,” Fredrick protested, still rubbing his bruised throat as he edged past a heavily laden street-merchant’s cart.

The street ended suddenly as they crossed into the wide open of the landing plaza at the Pivdenna docks. The hot, slow breeze carried the rank odour of stale sweat and the alcoholic tang of aircraft fuel. Even though it was dusk, the heat hadn’t let up.

They stopped for breath, and Aiden took in the view.

Before him, aircraft of all shapes and sizes sat in two rows along a peninsula, which itself stuck out like a tooth in the mouth of the bay. A heavy transport was lifting off at the far end, its engines droning loudly with the strain of a full cargo hold. Fans swivelled and twitched as the pilot made adjustments to its ascent. Aiden watched as it slowly gathered momentum, folded out its wings and thundered off to the west, high above Sevastopol bay.

He itched to get airborne.

“There she is,” he said, spotting the Iolaire amongst the other craft. They moved off again, restraining themselves from running to avoid suspicion. “How long do we have, you reckon?”

“Until they find those two?” replied Fredrick. “Who knows? Not very long.”

“We’d better get into the air sharpish then.”

They moved along the rows of aircraft and the forklifts loading them, past fuel trucks and engineering crews, until the sound of running feet brought them up short. They stopped by a stack of food crates, and pretended to be inspecting a nearby clipboard as a squad of marines jogged past. The marines ran along the rows, heading for the street that Aiden and Fredrick had just left, their sergeant barking orders at them.

“It looks like they’ve noticed,” murmured Aiden, as a thrill of fear set his pulse racing.

They reached the Iolaire. It was a light transport, ex-military, salvaged from the North Atlantic union   after the Armistice. It had somehow worked its way to a scrap merchant in Denmark a couple of years back, which is where they’d found it. Square-jawed and streamlined: Aiden had always liked that.

Fredrick flipped open a panel by the cargo ramp and punched in the code to lower it. They hurried aboard, quickly checking the straps holding their cargo of cigarettes and alcohol by thrumming them as they passed. Fredrick closed the cargo ramp, and Aiden rushed up the steps to the cockpit.

“I hope you don’t mind if I fly this time, Fred,” he called over his shoulder. “No matter how much you pray to those Wings of yours, it won’t cure a concussion.”

“Hold k?ft, Skotske pik,” was the reply from the hold.

“If you’re going to swear at me, do it in English.”

“Shut up, you Scottish prick.”

“Better.”

He must have agreed on some level, though. “I’ll go to your turret,” he said. “We might need the tail gun today.”

“All right then,” Aiden mumbled as he strapped himself into the pilot’s seat. He pulled on the comms headset and began the start-up procedure. No time for air control clearances tonight, just up and out. Digital gauges sprang to life on the console, engine temperatures and fan rpm climbing. Quick visual check out either side of the cockpit: all good. Fans were spinning; wave-rotors were reaching power cycle. Perfect.

“Fred, you strapped in yet?” he asked.

“Tight. Are we ready?” was Fredrick’s reply, his voice as loud through the headset as if he’d spoken in his ear.

“Indeed we are. Lifting off.”

Aiden eased the throttles open a fraction and the Iolaire gently rose until it hovered twenty metres above the concrete plaza. Dust and debris were blasted in swirling vortices around the neighbouring aircraft, and people nearby ran for shelter from the unexpected take-off.


Almost immediately, Aiden’s headset crackled with a radio transmission.

“Aircraft Tango-Tango-Eight-Two-Seven, put down immediately. You are not cleared for departure, all aircraft are temporarily grounded. Return to Pivdenna air dock. Comply.”

Aiden switched the radio off. He angled the fans slightly and increased the throttle. The Iolaire surged forward with its wings folding out for conventional flight. Aiden was pressed into his seat.

Sevastopol bay glimmered in the low sun as Aiden and Fredrick accelerated across it, praying they would get away cleanly.

Fredrick’s voice crackled across the intercom once more. “Trouble,” he said.

Aiden’s stomach dropped. “Aircraft?”

“Yeah, just one so far. This could get messy, Aiden.”

“It’s already pretty bloody messy…just…just warn him off if he comes too close.”

“You know what these guys are like, Aiden. I’ll have to shoot him down before he’ll bug out.”

Aiden did know that, but saying it made it real. He scanned the horizon port and starboard of the cockpit for any other aircraft. None. Through the blue haze he could see the Gilgamesh warship itself, hovering ominously a long way inland. It was an awesome sight: the gigantic aircraft whose presence alone had conquered the Crimea.

Everybody’d heard of the Gilgamesh, and everybody knew the same few things about it: it was more than a klick from bow to stern, bristled with more guns than was worth thinking about and harboured its own fleet of aircraft. Some said it had flown for decades without refuelling, though exactly how it had was something of a mystery.

He could understand, however, why its crew had turned to piracy after the Eurasian War, when the superpower that had built it collapsed on itself. The crew had been left with nothing but the Gilgamesh, but someone had seen the profit in it: with a craft like that, they could be gods. Maybe once, they’d been the crew of the glorious flagship of the North Atlantic union  ; now they were nothing but an army of renegades and pirates. World-infamous pirates. And Aiden had quite possibly just killed two of them.

“He’s lining up on us, Aiden,” said Fredrick.

Aiden groaned. Make that three. “Let him have it then.”

“Right.” There was a pause before Fredrick opened fire. Aiden felt it through his feet as the heavy gun hammered out its opening salvo, hopefully mostly into the pursuing patrol craft. Then it stopped.

“You get him?”

A hesitation. “I did hit him, the gun’s jammed though.” Fredrick sounded remarkably calm.

“Can’t you un-jam it?”

“For fanden, Aiden! Do you never clean this thing?!” Fredrick’s calm had left in a hurry. “Lort, lort, lort, lort, lort!”

“What the hell’s jamming it?” Aiden demanded.

Fredrick yelled back something Aiden didn’t understand.

“Say it in English, you son-of-a-bitch!”

“I said I’ll be damned if I know!” yelled Fredrick. “Don’t fly straight you idiot! Break! Break!”

“Alright, alright!” Aiden shouted back as he swung the flight stick to the left, rolling the craft and banking high. A ripple of tracer bullets shot under the Iolaire’s belly; right where it should have been. He swung the craft back to the right and watched as the orange streaks slapped into the sea ahead, sending up plumes of white spray.

He tipped the nose down slightly, hoping that hugging the surface would make the Iolaire harder to hit. He knew his prop wash would be kicking up spray, but manoeuvring at such a height was incredibly dangerous.

“How do I un-jam this piece of shit?!” cried Fredrick.

“The crank handle in front of you, pump it backwards!”

“It won’t move!”

“Of course it’ll move! Yank it!”

“OK!” said Fredrick. “Lort, why won’t it shoot?!”

“What does it say on the HUD?”

“It doesn’t say anything! Break, Aiden!”

Aiden wrenched the Iolaire to starboard, narrowly avoiding another burst of tracer fire. The sea hurtled past, nerve-shreddingly close.

“On the console, push the reset button!”

“Which one is that?”

“The red button that says ‘reset’, you daft prick, push it!”

“Right.” Fredrick paused. “It’s running a diagnostic. How long will that take?”

“I don’t know, thirty seconds?”

“Great, so what am I supposed to do until then? Scare him off with curse words?”

“You can try!” replied Aiden. “Tell me what it says when it’s done!”

Aiden executed a series of course changes, keeping the Iolaire a hard target, while Fredrick hurled vicious Danish abuse at the aircraft following them.

“OK, it says that there’s a stoppage,” said Fredrick finally.

“Well we already bloody knew that!”

“It says to pull the cocking lever. Is that the-”

“Yes, that’s the crank I told you to pull earlier! Yank it as hard as you can!”

Fredrick let out a string of guttural curses as he tried the handle. “Yes! It moved! A shell fell out, I saw it!”

“Now shoot at that bastard behind us!”

A rattling burst from the gun. Fredrick whooped.

Aiden let himself breathe. “You hit him?”

“Yeah, he’s struggling! Hold it steady, I don’t think…” Fredrick trailed off as he loosed another blast. “I got him! I shot the bastard down!” There was a dull thud that shook the Iolaire as the stricken pursuer plunged into the sea.

The Iolaire was climbing steadily, accelerating further. Aiden knew for sure that they’d killed at least one person now and he felt a little sickened. It didn’t upset him on a moral level so much: all of those men were trying to kill them. No, in the space of twenty minutes, they’d made themselves wanted fugitives. They’d have to scrap their aircraft ID and keep checking over their shoulders for the next few months at least. He doubted the Gilgamesh’s commanders would allow such an insult to slide.

They certainly couldn’t trade within a thousand kilometres of the warship any more, and Sevastopol was the best port on the Black Sea. Aiden was furious. He’d lost his new home.

“So, where to?” he asked Fredrick.

“Need to keep a straight course away from the Gilgamesh for a couple of hundred kilometres or so, just until that radar detector shuts up. Then we should take a new heading, so they can’t just join up the dots and find us.”

Aiden saw the sense in that. Once the Gilgamesh couldn’t track them anymore, they could head where they wanted. Until then it’d be a fast, straight course to the west, high-tailing it away from the Crimea.

He hoped that the Gilgamesh didn’t send a fighter. The Iolaire wouldn’t stand a chance. It was fast, with a top speed of around eight hundred kilometres per hour at the right altitude, but it was no match for a jet. On the plus side, he doubted that either Fredrick or himself would know anything about it if a jet did have a pop at them. They’d be intact and healthy one second, then probably a very hot, pink, supersonic mist the next. There were worse ways to die, he supposed.

They had only been climbing for a few moments when a thunderous explosion shook the Iolaire. Aiden jumped against his straps. The game was up. He assumed he was dead.

Somehow, he wasn’t, and the Iolaire seemed to be fine. Craning to look, he saw a thin vapour trail ending in a huge puff of grey smoke, and far ahead of him a swathe of the sea was thrown up in shimmering towers of white spray.


“The bloody hell was that?” he cried.

“Vinger…I think that’s flak from the Gilgamesh!” replied Fredrick.

“But she’s got to be more than twenty kilometres away!” Aiden was incredulous. Missiles he could have accepted, but guns?

“Rail-guns or something,” said Fredrick, “Weave, Aiden! They won’t miss a second time!”

Aiden still couldn’t believe it.

“Break now, Aiden!”

Aiden complied automatically, pulling back hard on the flight stick, rearing the Iolaire up and climbing hard. A moment later, a second thunderclap erupted beneath them, precisely where they should have been. Rolling the craft over, he once again saw where the pieces of shrapnel had smashed into the sea a kilometre ahead. He swore softly to himself.

“Whatever that was, it’s bloody fast,” said Fredrick, “I only just caught a little trail against the sky.”

“I reckon we should hug the surface, the quicker we disappear over the horizon, the better.”

“It’ll waste fuel.”

“I’d rather waste a little fuel than get shot down. God knows what range they have on that thing,” replied Aiden.

“All right then.”

Aiden pushed the Iolaire low, and as the Crimea faded into the distance behind him, no more shots came from the Gilgamesh.

And when the little red radar notification light winked out on the control console, the Iolaire made a long banking turn to the east.