The Veteran by Forsyth Frederick

Author:Forsyth, Frederick [Forsyth, Frederick]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Transworld
Published: 2002-02-08T23:00:00+00:00

THE CITIZEN

The home run was always his favourite. In more than thirty years driving large aluminium tubes around the world for British Airways he had seen over seventy major cities, most of them capitals, and the original appetite had long faded.

Thirty years ago, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, with the two rings of a Junior First Officer gleaming new on each sleeve, he had relished the far and foreign places. During the generous stop-overs he had explored the nightlife of Europe and the USA, taken the offered tours of the temples and shrines of the Far East. Now, he just wanted to get home to his house near Dorking.

Back then, there had been brief but torrid affairs with the prettiest stewardesses until Susan had married him and quite rightly put a stop to that sort of thing. Five thousand nights in hotel beds had long left only the desire to roll into his own and smell the lavender scent of Susan beside him.

A boy and a girl, Charles the honeymoon baby, now twenty-three and a computer programmer, and Jennifer, at eighteen entering York University to read History of Art, had given him stability and an extra reason for coming home. With two years to retirement the prospect of swinging his hatchback into the drive on Watermill Lane and seeing Susan at the door waiting for him far superseded any appetite for foreign parts.

Across the aisle in the crew bus his stand-in captain was staring at the back of the driver’s head. To his left, one of his two First Officers was gawping with still unsated curiosity at the bright neon sea of Bangkok as the city slipped away behind them.

Filling the rear of the crew bus, cool in the air conditioning, protected from the sticky heat outside, were the cabin crew: one Cabin Service Director and fifteen stewards, four male and eleven female. He had flown with them all from Heathrow two days earlier, and knew the CSD would handle everything from the door of the flight deck back to the tail fin. That was his job and he too was a veteran.

Captain Adrian Fallon’s task was simply to fly another Boeing 747–400 Jumbo with over 400 passengers who paid his salary from Bangkok to London Heathrow, or, as his log book would soon record, from BKK to LHR.

Two hours before take-off the crew bus swerved into the airport perimeter, was nodded through by the guards on the gate and headed for the BA office. It was a long lead-time, but Captain Fallon was a stickler and the word from the BA office was that Speedbird One Zero, out of Sydney at 3.15 p.m.

(local) would be landing bang on time at 9.45 p.m. Bangkok local. In fact it was already on final approach.

A mile behind the crew bus there was a black limousine. It carried one passenger, seated in comfort in the rear behind the uniformed driver. Both car and driver came from the exclusive Oriental Hotel where the impeccably accoutred senior executive had been staying for three days.

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