Jimmy Coates: Survival

Time to dive, he told himself, and thrust the flightstick to the side.

It was like tumbling off the back of a rodeo bull. The huge body of the airbus ploughed onwards, while Jimmy watched the distance between them growing. Soon the commercial flight was a smudged shadow soaring far above him.

Jimmy was in freefall. With hands blue from the cold, he punched two buttons and flicked two switches. The Falcon’s engines sputtered into life.

I’ll make it to France, he thought, triumphant, as his head began to clear. I’ll warn them about a British attack and I’ll ask to see Uno Stovorsky. He remembered Uno Stovorsky from his last trip to France – the agent of the French Secret Service. The man had been gruff, but he had helped Jimmy and his family. Jimmy was sure he would help again.

Then the engines died.

Jimmy felt a violent explosion of panic in his chest. It was immediately dampened by a huge inner wave of strength. Jimmy tried the ignition switches again. Nothing happened. Again and again he tried restarting the Falcon’s engines, but they wouldn’t even splutter. He watched his hands moving calmly around the controls, while inside he was frantic.

No fuel. No engines. He heard the words repeating like a drumbeat in his head.

Jimmy’s genetic programming had already changed tactics. It felt like someone else was routing messages through his brain, but so quickly he couldn’t understand what was being said. Then the knowledge came to him fully formed, as if he had always known it.

He manoeuvred the flaps on the wing and the ailerons until the plane was gliding through the air, not plunging downwards. The design of the Falcon was on his side here – in case of engine failure it wasn’t meant to just fall out of the sky. But Jimmy knew it couldn’t stay up forever either. He looked around for a parachute and the ejector mechanism. Then he remembered: every passenger and member of the crew had taken their parachute with them when Jimmy had taken over the plane in mid-air. He’d made sure of it – he didn’t want to be throwing anybody to his death. Jimmy knew that decision might now condemn him. He was gliding in a tiny plane, several thousand metres up, without any power and without a parachute.

Suddenly the left side of the plane dipped. This is it, thought Jimmy. A vertical draft sucked the aircraft downwards. Jimmy felt his whole body reeling. He plunged through the clouds and saw the stark, white snowscape below. The plane was nose-diving towards the side of a mountain somewhere in the Pyrenees.

Every one of Jimmy’s muscles tensed. The scream of the air rushing past the plane seemed to pierce straight to the centre of his brain, doubling his terror. But he didn’t freeze. In fact he moved so fast he could hardly keep track of where he was.

He rolled out of his seat and climbed up, towards the back of the plane, digging his nails into the carpet. The friction forced some feeling back into his fingers. When he reached the cabin he grabbed hold of the passenger seatbelts and heaved his legs at the emergency exit. It flew open with such force that the door snapped off its hinges and hurtled into the sky. The wind blasted into Jimmy, knocking him back against the seats.

He crunched his stomach muscles to swing his entire body out of the door. He tensed his arms to rip the seatbelts from the seats. He slammed against the wing of the plane and slid along it, the back of his head knocking against the metal.

Jimmy’s body strained against the wind and the G-force while his hands worked to save his life. He wasn’t even sure what he was trying to do and after a second he could hardly see because water was streaming from his eyes. He just had to trust that something inside him knew how to survive. He had to force his programming to take over from the terror.

He swung the two seatbelts over the lip of the wing, catching it with the buckles, then shifted into a crouching position, facing directly downwards, holding himself in place by gripping the straps at his sides. The wind in his face was so strong he thought the lining of his cheeks was going to tear.

Then he flexed his knees, rocking the wing. Over the roar of the wind in his ears, Jimmy heard a definite creak. The joint where the wing met the body of the plane was weakening. With the friction from the fall it wouldn’t take much more to snap the wing off completely. Jimmy rocked harder. He bounced on his haunches, listening to the creak growing louder. Then there was a massive splintering noise, like gunfire, then another. Jimmy kept rocking.

The ground charged towards him. He was close enough now to pick out the rocks and bare patches in the snow. He drove all his energy to his legs, frantically pushing against the end of the wing. Then, at last:

CRACK!

The wing lurched away from the rest of the plane. Jimmy was almost thrown off, but he squeezed hold of the straps and kept his footing. Then he threw his head and shoulders backwards, forcing his heels into the metal. The shift of his bodyweight pushed the wing underneath him. Now he was standing on a horizontal platform – and using the wind resistance of the wing to slow his fall.

All the time he felt the wing swaying violently beneath his feet. It wanted to flip on to its side again, but Jimmy wouldn’t let it. Now Jimmy was surfing again. But this time there was no slipstream to help him – just a vertical drop.

The side of the mountain loomed towards him. Then the rest of the plane crashed into the rocks. What little fuel was left in the tanks sent up a huge black and orange cloud. Jimmy felt the heat of it before he heard it. But he knew instantly that heat could save him.

The rush of hot air was like a cushion under Jimmy’s wing, but the updraft threw him off-balance. His feet slipped from under him and he pitched on to his front, smacking his chin against the front edge of the wing.

Then it was over. The wing slammed on to the snow with a cruel bounce. Jimmy clung to it as it raced down the slope. It was so steep Jimmy felt like he was still falling, but he could hear the fierce swoosh of solid snow and ice under him.

His surfboard had become a snowboard. Jimmy crunched his elbows straight, throwing his body upright again. He couldn’t see anything but a huge fountain of slush thrown up all around him. He shifted his weight from foot to foot, reading the undulations in the mountainside.

The wingtip cut through the ice, firing chips of it into Jimmy’s face and chest. But he didn’t care. He could feel himself gradually slowing down.

Then he hit a rock. The wing leapt into the air, catapulting Jimmy with it. He was thrown up with such force that he thought his bones would be ripped free from their joints. He heard his own voice crying out, distant and unfamiliar. The cold bit at his skin and all he could see was intense whiteness.

Then: THUD!

He hit something – and the total white turned to total black.

04 SEND THE ENFORCER

Eva watched the shadows shift across the turrets of the Tower of London to distract herself from the stifling air inside the car and the awkward silence. She and Mitchell had been parked there for at least half an hour, she guessed, with specific instructions not to get out. In that time, they had barely spoken. She was quite happy to keep it that way, but eventually Mitchell broke the silence.

“So your parents think you’re dead?” he blurted.

Nice conversation starter, thought Eva. She shrugged and turned to look out of the other window, across Trinity Square, to the sombre crowd around the Mercantile Marine Memorial. She couldn’t see anything that was going on, just a neat row of people’s backs about twenty metres away. She noted how unusual it was for so many people at a memorial service to be wearing bright colours. That was because a lot of them were military personnel in finest dress uniform. The civil servants and journalists were all in black though, making the overall effect like a mingling of peacocks and ravens.

“Don’t you mind that they think you’re dead?” Mitchell pressed. “They might, like, miss you or something.”

Eva sighed. “We didn’t get on that well, OK?” she explained. “My brothers know I’m fine. That’s all I care about.”

“You’re lucky you even know your parents,” Mitchell mumbled.

For a second, Eva felt a pang of sympathy. Mitchell never spoke about his own family. She felt the urge to explain that she knew all about what had happened to him: that his parents were killed in a car crash when he was a baby… that he’d escaped from his foster home… that his brother had beaten him… But she also knew what lay at the root of it all: Mitchell was the first child to have been genetically programmed to grow into the perfect Government assassin.

Eva shuddered and deliberately pushed away her sympathy. The boy next to her was the enemy. She had to remember that. Already he’d been sent several times to kill Jimmy Coates. The thought of it made her catch her breath. Jimmy’s sister was her best friend. It was for Jimmy and Georgie Coates that she risked her life every day, undercover at NJ7.

She reached forwards to the driver’s seat and turned the ignition one click so she could open her window.

“Hey,” Mitchell objected. “The windows are tinted for a reason, you know.”

Instinctively he tried to lean across her for the button. When he realised how close that brought them to each other, he froze. Eva glared.

“It’s just a couple of centimetres, OK?” she protested softly.

Mitchell pulled back.

“If anyone finds out the British Secret Service is employing two thirteen-year-olds Miss Bennett will go mental.”

“Who’s going to find out?” Eva asked. “Even if the press see us they can’t print anything about it, can they? Everything has to be approved by the Government press office.”

“I dunno. Miss Bennett said to stay out of sight. That’s all. Otherwise we’d be standing over there, wouldn’t we?” He nodded his head towards the throng of people. “And I should be out there. You know, paying respects, or whatever. I went on a mission with Paduk. I was partly trained by him.”

“You train yourself,” Eva snapped. “You went for runs with him, that’s all.”

Mitchell didn’t answer. He knew she was right. She was always meticulous about detail and Mitchell wasn’t in the mood to challenge her. He also wasn’t keen to dwell on the sort of training that went on in his body: his muscles developing as he slept, his programming sending thousands of signals through his synapses every second to give him new skills that he’d never guessed could be his. The skills of an assassin.

They were both glad to be distracted by the Prime Minister’s voice floating through the window on a waft of cooler air.

“Paduk died in the service of his country, trying to defend one of our most precious assets from foreign sabotage…”

They had to listen hard. Every time a car drove past it drowned out the words.