On the Edge - First Chapter - By Michael Ridpath

	Author of bestsellers - published in 36 languages On the Edge\| Fatal Error \| The Predator \| Final Venture Free to Trade\| Trading Reality \| The Marketmaker \| See No Evil
	*On the Edge* New thriller - published in UK April '05 First Chapter/ Prologue

About On the Edge > Prologue

Flying Officer Alex Calder watched as the Tornado flew itself at five hundred miles an hour two hundred and fifty feet above the Herefordshire countryside. His left hand rested on the throttle and his right on his lap as the aircraft made tiny corrections to heading and altitude prompted by messages from the Terrain Following Radar in the nose. Farmland sped by in flashes of greens, golds and browns and in the sunshine the lone Tornado's shadow trickled along the ground a few yards to the right, like a loyal but ghostly wingman.
    A chimney approached, rising two hundred feet above a cement works, a white sore on the landscape. `Waypoint B,' announced Jacko, the stocky Scouser navigator in the rear cockpit, and the Tornado lurched to the left, obeying the instructions on the cassette that Jacko had carefully programmed back in No 13 Squadron's Personnel Briefing Room at RAF Marham. `Nothing on the RHWR'.
   There were five reconnaissance targets programmed on to the cassette, and Calder and Jacko were also expecting a visit from a pair of fighters somewhere along the way. The Radar Homing Warning Receiver would give them some indication that the fighters were up there looking for them with their own radar, if the fighters chose to switch it on of course. Otherwise they would have to rely on their eyes.
   The brown flanks of the Wesh hills lurched towards them, guarded by a bank of slate grey clouds. Calder conveyed a warning to his navigator as the Tornado surged and bucked over the first ridge. Despite his five years service as a navigator, Jacko still suffered from airsickness, and the movement in the back played havoc with his stomach, especially when flying on the TFR.
    Now the aircraft was ducking and weaving, hunting the contours of the Welsh hills and valleys, the on-board computer instructing it to skip over each obstacle as it showed itself on the TFR. Even after a year of flying Tornados, Calder still found it difficult to restrain himself from giving the aircraft a helping hand.
   Over the crest of a tree-covered hill, and the first target appeared - a dam at the end of a narrow lake. Calder took control of the aircraft, approaching the dam with an offset of about a hundred yards or so to get the best picture possible for the photographic interpreter back at base. The Tornado's infra-red video system was running, and as they flew past the dam Jacko called out a description of the structure. On the flight back to Norfolk he would edit the video tape, and this together with the cockpit voice recording would be given to the photographic interpreters as soon as they landed.
   The dam behind them and on to the next target, deeper in the Welsh mountains. This was the flying Calder loved, the high mountain sides providing a ground rush even at three hundred feet. Calder's concentration was focused on the hills outside the cockpit, seen through the little green markings of the Head-Up Display, with only an occasional glance inside at the moving map.
   `Buster! Kick sixty left!'
   Instantly, Calder jammed the throttle forward as far as it would go and threw the aircraft sixty degrees to the left, his g-suit gripping his legs and abdomen to counteract the gravitational pull from the turn and the acceleration. He kept low, hugging the mountains.
   `Bogey four o'clock high, descending, about five miles.'
   Calder glanced at his RHWR and could see a trace of the fighter's radar. It would be an F3 from RAF Coningsby, the fighter variant of the Tornado, attempting to close near enough to fire its heat-seeking missiles. The F3 was much faster than the GR.1A that Calder and Jacko were flying, and in open country they wouldn't have stood a chance, but in the mountains they might just be able shake the fighter before it reached the stern range needed to fire its missile. Despite the wonders of modern electronics, the scientists hadn't invented anything yet that could see through rock.
   `There's a valley that runs perpendicular to this one just over that ridge on the left - we'll lose him there!' Jacko called. With his greater experience Jacko knew these mountains better than Calder, so Calder turned the aircraft hard left, banking it all the way to inverted as he crossed the mountain ridge into the next valley, trying to keep the minimum height and time above the crest of the ridge where the fighter might make visual contact with them. The heather shot by above his head. Flying upside-down, he pulled the stick back to push the nose of the jet down into the valley. He rolled out. As the world righted itself, he saw in front of him a narrow green strip of pasture, dotted with sheep, following a winding river downhill. A road led down to a tiny grey slate village with a chapel. And in front of the village, suspended as if stationary, was an aircraft. A high-winged, single-engined aircraft: a Cessna.
Of course the Cessna wasn't really stationary, it just looked that way to Calder. Which meant the two aircraft were on course to collide.
   'What the hell is that doing there!' Calder shouted. It was madness for a civilian aircraft to fly that low anywhere, but especially here, in the middle of the Tornados' playground. It takes ten seconds for the pilot of a fast jet to spot an aircraft, identify it as a potential collision risk, choose a course of evasive action, and allow time for the aircraft to respond to the controls. At a closing speed of six hundred miles an hour, ten seconds is the time it takes to travel nearly two miles. The Cessna was less than a mile away.
   Calder rammed in the throttle and pulled back on the stick. The Cessna seemed to explode in size as the two aircraft closed. The Tornado's nose rose, but too late. Calder flinched as the Cessna hit them, just to the left of the cockpit. There was a bang, and the Tornado bucked.
  'We're on fire!' Jacko shouted.
   Calder looked out to the left. There was a chunk missing from the wing and flames engulfed the left engine. Red warning lights flashed and sirens sounded as the Tornado told its crew that they were in trouble. They knew that already. The controls were listless in Calder's hands and the aircraft, which had been about to climb, was levelling off prior to entering a dive. Outside the fire was spreading.
   There was only one decision, it was a decision he had been trained to make and Calder made it.
   'Prepare to eject! Prepare to eject!' He reached down for the black and yellow handle between his legs. The nose of the Tornado was already beginning to point downwards. `Three, two, one ... Eject! Eject!'
   But just as he was about to pull the handle, he looked up. Ahead, growing alarmingly in size, was the village. His eyes focused on a playground, small figures scattered over a square of tarmac in front of him. Directly in front of him.
   He removed his hand from the handle and pulled hard back on the stick. He heard the pop of the canopy as Jacko banged out behind him. The air roared past the now open cockpit. At first there was no response from the Tornado to his commands, but he pulled back as hard as he could, almost ripping the stick out of the cockpit. Movement, just a bit of movement, then, miraculously, the nose of the Tornado rose. Now, instead of the schoolyard, there was the flank of the mountain, perhaps a mile away. It took six seconds to travel a mile.
  Calder held on for two of them, until he was sure that if he let go of the stick the aircraft wouldn't plummet into the village. Then he pulled the handle.
   The straps around his body tightened. Then nothing happened. For the next half a second, half a lifetime, Calder feared he had left it too late. Then there was a flash of light as the rockets under the seat exploded, the restraints dragged his arms into his sides and he was thrust upwards, into the jet's slipstream, a wall of air moving at five hundred miles an hour. As he tumbled he heard the explosion of the Tornado hitting the mountain, and then the small drogue parachute opened and stopped the whirling.
   A moment later he was stable and drifting downwards under the main parachute. He became aware of a twinge in his back. A couple of hundred yards away, the Tornado was burning strongly. He saw the flames licking around the squadron insignia, a lynx's head painted on the giant tailfin. He glanced across at the school, still in one piece, and then beyond that to another smaller fire in a field on the other side of the village, where the Cessna burned. That poor bugger didn't have an ejector seat he thought. There was definitely something wrong with his back.
   The ground rushed up at him in the shape of a steep slope strewn with rocks. Surprised by the speed of his descent after the brief calm following the opening of his parachute, Calder barely had time to pull his ankles together for landing when he smashed into a large rock.
   And that was all he remembered.