The Extinguisher & The Extinguisher (Revenge): Vanessa Platt, #2

Dedication.

This book is dedicated to my wife Janet,

and my family Russell, Nichola, Daniel,

Charlie & Ava. Who have helped me with

creation of the story line.

Chapter 1

She was being pulled roughly into the room by the man.  Inside the room she could vaguely see about four other people, although she could not be certain.  One of whom was being held, but she couldn’t see who that person was.  The figure was just a blurred shape.

Once inside the room the person dragging her held her arms together behind her back.  The more she struggled the tighter the man held her.  She tried to scream in protest, but no sound formed in her vocal cords.

Another man grabbed her legs, she tried to kick at the man holding them, but she had no strength in them.  It was like trying to move through water.

Roughly the man removed her jeans, and then tore at her tee shirt, ripping it from her body. She again tried to scream in protest.  No sound ensued from her lips.  She was wrestled to the floor.  She could still see the shape of the other person being held, but still could not make out the face, or even what sex the person was.  The man holding her legs forced them apart.  It was then she realised he was naked.  He got down onto his knees, and forced his erect member into her.  She again both struggled and attempted to scream still without response.

She could feel and smell the man who was forcing his sexual member into her.  His breath smelt heavily of garlic.  Then just as she had resigned herself to her fate of being forced into having sex in public, the man who was positioned between her legs, pulled her over onto her side.  She then felt her legs being forced wider apart, and then felt the excruciating pain as the other man forced his penis into her rear passage.  Through the mists of agony she again attempted to scream.  This time the sound came good and loud.

She sat bolt upright in bed, sweat pouring from her body.  The dream hadn’t changed for a year.  It always ended at that point, if only she could make out the other person, then it might help her to forget.  She got out of bed and walked into the en-suite bathroom, to splash her face with cold water.

She looked into the mirror; the image that she saw had a worried; no frightened look in the eyes.  As the cool water took effect, her eyes took on what had become their normal guarded appearance.  Gone had those happy, smiling eyes of a year ago.

Once she had calmed down she returned to her bed, to try to continue her nights sleep.  This dream returned four or five times a week.  For the last year she had not had a full night’s sleep.  It had been so long ago that she had almost forgotten what it was like to sleep solidly for five or six hours.  Looking at the clock on her bedside table she saw that the time was 2.03 am.  As Vanessa settled, she sub-consciously massaged her stomach.  She still had an empty feeling there.

Following her rape she had become pregnant, not being able to bring herself to have the growing baby removed, even though it had been offered.  She had resolved herself into bringing the unwanted child into the world, she knew that she would love the child as if it had been wanted.  Her body however took over, she suffered a miscarriage six months into the pregnancy.

Suddenly her phone jangled breaking her spell. ‘Hello’ She responded guardedly.  Wondering who could be calling at this time of night.  Whilst she still worked for Westfield Racing, her current role meant she didn’t need to follow the team around the world.  They at this time were away in Hungary preparing for the Hungarian Grand Prix that weekend.

‘Vanessa, its Anton’  Anton Abonovitz was her old boss from the crime bureau in Brussels.

‘Anton, do you know the bloody time’

‘Of course I do,’ he replied quickly and testily.  ‘look I need to talk to you urgently.  Meet me at Scotch Corner Hotel in one hour.’  At that he rang off before Vanessa could give her response.

Bloody typical she thought.  I don’t even work for him and he is still giving out the fucking orders.

10 minutes later saw Vanessa heading down the A64 towards the A1M in her Porsche.  She would have just enough time to make the rendezvous.  The roads were quiet at this time.  She accelerated the car up to a cruising speed of 120 mph.

Her eyes constantly scanned the mirror and the road up a head for police.

This was more out of habit than requirement.  She was confident that there wouldn’t be any patrols out at this time.

Anton looked constantly towards the entrance to the car park, waiting for Vanessa’s car to show.

Fifty five  minutes after the call, he saw her Porsche turning into the car park.  He stepped out into view and flagged her down.

As soon as the car had stopped moving he said ‘Pull back out head to the A66 towards Barnard Castle, following me.'

Vanessa looked at his face, she was about to question him when she took in the look on his face and realised that it was serious.  Words would wait, she did as instructed.  She spun the car on its axis and headed back out the way she had just come.

The road to Barnard Castle isn’t one to drive fast on, but using all of her driving talent she quickly accelerated the car up to 150 mph.

They were covering the ground so fast it only took a few minutes to reach the turning to Barnard Castle.  She left her braking to the last instant, braking hard and turning the car drifted on some loose chippings. Before she took the turning into the town, Anton said ‘pull in behind that building’, pointing towards an old garage building.

On stopping the car Vanessa turned to Anton, ‘ well’ she said, ‘what the hell’s all this for’.

‘All will be clear,’ Anton replied, ‘but first, I know you no longer work for me, but can I rely on you’  Anton no longer worked for the Bureau, he was dismissed following the incident with Vanessa and Fran Bennett.

‘Of course you can, just tell me what this is about’.

‘Lets go back a bit in time first,’ Anton said Looking around the area nervously.

Chapter 2

The President banged his fist hard down onto the Presidential table.  ‘You worthless morons’ he shouted at the top of his voice.  The very tone of his voice and the look in his eyes made the twelve men seated around the table shake inwardly with fear,

‘I can’t even trust you with a simple task’.  He pointed to his intelligence chief, ‘how did that bitch fail in her task to impeach Clinton, surely you gave enough evidence to plant with Starr.’

‘Yes, Mr President, but’

‘No fucking buts. You have failed me once again’

‘But she fell for him Mr President’

‘I don’t give a dam,’ he screamed, this made the men cower in abject fright.  ‘You failed me.  For that you will all pay my friends.’  His voice very low and cold.  ‘Since you failed to cause the USA President to fall into disgrace, I’ll tell you what to do next,’  he stood and walked to the right hand side of the room, where a large scale map of Serbia and it’s neighbouring states hung.  He hit the map on the district of Kosovo.  ‘You will assign our Army and Police to here.  Once there they will drive out every stinking Albanian from the state.  It is them that are causing all the dissent among our people.  It is them that want to drive me from power’.  He ranted, ‘Fail me again and I promise you this’ he paused for breath ‘you will all hang.  Every last worthless one of you.  You will be hung by the neck in public view.’  At that he stormed from the room into an anti room next door.  There he selected the closest object, it happened to be an 18th Century ornate carved chair.  He picked it up and threw it with great force against the wall of the chamber.  Age and the delicate nature of the chair caused it to shatter into hundreds of pieces.

The ministers gathered in the room next door heard the sound of the shattering chair, and quickly cleared the room.  Not one of them wanted to be the remaining one to feel any further wrath from their leader. What they didn’t see or know about was the other person in the room with the President. The stranger wasn’t dressed in uniform or western clothing. He was bearded and dressed in traditional Arabic clothing of an Arab Sheik, all be it a lowly one. Rather strange given the plans that had just been laid before the ministers in the next room, for atrocities to be levied against Muslims in Albania. 

Within hours of the meeting both the Army and Police were mobilised.

In the centre of Pristina, at the police headquarters lists were drawn up.  Much the same as the lists drawn up 65 years earlier by the Nazis.  Only this time it wasn’t the Jews who were being persecuted, it was the Albanians.  The lists documented all citizen’s lineage.  If any strain of Albanian was found in a person, then the guards were dispatched to deal with the entire family.

If those that were unlucky enough to be included on one of those lists got a knock on their door, then they could only pray that they were lucky enough to be granted a few minutes to pack and leave.  Those were the ones that would see another dawn.  The others would only see the flash from a gun barrel, then they could only pray that the bullet would dispatch them quickly from this earth, and not leave them lingering in pain to die slowly.

The destruction raged against the ethnic Albanians for weeks before the West stepped in.  At one point almost one million people were made homeless.  The largest number of homeless people in Europe for over sixty years.  They were either in refuge camps scattered through out the neighbouring states.  Some were still within the Kosovan border hiding in the surrounding mountains, in mortal fear of their lives, but unable to bring themselves to leave what was their homeland.

All had but one hope, that the west would send troops into Kosovo to relieve them from their terror, and then on into Serbia to rid them from Milosevic.

The facts were however, the west did step in, but no ground troops were sent, only aircraft.

As the air war built up and NATO systematically destroyed Serbia’s defence mechanisms, it became clear to Milosevic and through him his Generals that they needed to further deflect the world from the true facts of the crisis.  Even though through careful censorship of Serbian news and more importantly Western journalists.  Word was starting to leak out to the Serbian people of the atrocities that were being carried out in the name of Serbia in Kosovo.  Once again within areas of Serbia there was the smell of an uprising.  Even within his own Ministry opposition was rising.

Milosevic called his most trusted General, and in a secret meeting they hatched out a plot to attempt to disgrace the West.

From an airfield in Northern Serbia 2 aircraft took off late into the evening.  Their heading was to the south, towards the Serbian capital Belgrade.  Instead of climbing immediately after take off they both maintained an ultra low altitude of 100 feet.  This would give the aircraft some protection from detection by the high flying AWACS aircraft of NATO.  Their radar echo would be lost in ground clutter, at least for the early part of their flight.  Eventually the computers on board the AWCS would identify the return as a hostile.  Both pilots hoped that by then they would have reached their objective and be returning to the safety of their base.

At 100 feet and travelling at 450 knts in the dark the pilots couldn’t relax for an instant. Any loss in concentration would spell disaster.  Even a blink at the wrong time could send them into the ground before the fact had even registered in their brain.  The only way the pilots could cope with flying at that speed and altitude was to use the latest head on radar from Russia.  This gave the pilots 5 seconds notice of any obstacles in their flight path.

As the flight approached the outskirts of Belgrade the lead pilot narrowly missed a high tension pylon. His radar warning system suddenly came to life with a high intensity bleep and a warning light identifying an obstruction to his left.

His wingman who was flying in echelon formation to his right and slightly behind, was distracted by a warning light on his console flashing, indicating his starboard engine temperature had increased above the first threshold level.

As he cancelled the warning he caught sight of his leader’s tail pipes glowing and turning into his flight path.  He reacted to the turning aircraft by banking his own sharply to the right.  His intention was to turn at a steeper angle than his leader to keep within his flight path.  As the turn increased his pressure suit inflated to counter the G force.  He grunted into his face mask as the pressure increased around his legs.

Outside the cockpit his right hand wing dipped so that the aircraft was now flying at ninety degrees to the ground.  Almost immediately the wing hit the high tension wires.

In a hale of sparks from the wing shorting on the cable, the nose of his aircraft dipped sharply, less than a second later it impacted with the ground, driving the nose and the cockpit thirty feet into the soft earth.  His flesh being torn by the tangle of metal being forced backward.  What was left of him being almost absorbed by the earth.  The rear section of the projectile, that was all it could be described as now, exploded into a fire ball.

High above the Adriatic at an altitude of 45000 feet one of NATO’s AWAC’s aircraft was on it’s monitoring patrols.  It’s main purpose was to help protect the aircraft on bombing runs into Kosovo and Serbia.  It does this by using it’s look down radar to detect all airborne traffic.  Transponders on friendly aircraft identify themselves to the patrolling AWAC’s.  any other response is then assumed to be hostile.

Before the Serbian wingman’s aircraft had impacted with the power lines one of the controllers aboard the AWAC’s had been following a series of responses.  They were consistent with those from a jet fighter, but due to ground clutter the computers were only giving him a ten per cent probability.  They had higher probabilities to respond to at that time, so they were ignored for now.

As soon as the wingman’s aircraft exploded an alarm sounded on the operators console telling him that the infrared detectors had picked something up over and above the normal background images.  Almost immediately he then got a positive response from his normal look down radar.

The shock wave from the exploding aircraft hit the leaders airframe like a solid wall.  The rushing blast of super charged air threatened to toss the airframe around like a leaf in a breeze.

As the pilot struggled with the controls, he feared that the back rush of air into his engines would cause aflame out.  To over come this he instantly went to full after burn.  He also elected to go safe by gaining some altitude, he pointed the nose of his aircraft to the sky.  With full after burn the airframe rocketed forward, in an instant it broke through the 500 foot mark.  It was this gain in altitude that created the positive response from the AWAC’s.

The AWAC’s controller responded immediately by vectoring one of the circling fighter patrols towards the encroaching aircraft.

As the American fighters raced towards the Serbian Jet, the Serbian pilot realising his error quickly selected his target.  He was at that time at the maximum range for his missiles, but since the selected target was the largest mass in that area, he was confident that the attack would be effective. His head up display changed from navigation mode, to attack mode.  He saw the radar activated targeting zone in the display change from red to green. As his attack computer and radar located and locked onto his objective.  As it turned to green he pressed the firing button on his joy stick twice to release the two air to ground missiles.

Once both missiles left their pylons on his aircraft the pilot immediately broke away from the attack.  Diving and accelerating towards the ground in an effort to once again hide in the ground clutter.  At the same time he changed his head up display back to navigation.  In this mode he could use his low level forward looking radar.

Once down to one hundred feet he took a northerly heading, retracing the route he had taken from his air base.  This broke all the normal rules of combat in that he was using the same way out as he took going into the battle zone.

Minutes later he flew over the burning wreckage of his wing man.  As he did so he cursed the fool.  Shortly after once again an alarm clamoured for attention.  In an instant he realised it was a radar lock warning, both of the pursuing American F-14’s had got a radar lock on him.  However they were still at maximum range for their air to air missiles.  At his current height he had no chance of escaping.  He could easily get himself trapped at ground level.  His only option was to gain height and speed.

He at once pulled his stick back with his right hand, and pushed the throttle lever forward passed the first indent to full after burn.  With a grunt, which came naturally to overcome the pressure now being exerted on his body by his G Suit, he could feel the immediate acceleration as his MiG shot towards the blackness of the sky.

Then the pitch and frequency  of the warning changed, he knew this meant the Americans had fired their weapons.  As the speeding missiles steadily closed on him from over his left shoulder the tone increased in frequency.  This gave him an indication of just how close he was to oblivion.  However his fighter pilot training would never allow such thoughts to enter in his mind.  He allowed the missiles to close.  As the range reduced his radar screen showed him that each of the two pursuing aircraft had only fired one missile each.  The training he and the rest of his comrades had received had been to fire two each, this would increase the probability of one missile reaching its target.  He pulled the throttle back to reduce his speed marginally, this would enable him to drop to a speed where he would have better manoeuvrability.  As he did he started to throw his stick from left to right, causing his aircraft to jinx from left to right in a series of unpredictable manoeuvres.  He allowed the missiles to close right up on to his aircraft.  As they did the warning noise instead of being intermittent was now continuous.  At the last instant he shut the throttle, and pulled his aircraft in a tight diving turn to his left, towards the missiles.  As his aircraft dove down towards the ground he also rolled the aircraft.  As he did he saw both missiles fly past his fuselage.  He then pushed his throttle fully open and pulled the diving MiG into level flight.

Just as he breathed a sigh of relief the radar lock warning clamoured once more.  This time however the range had closed the F-14’s could now deploy there much more lethal Aim-12 AMRAAM missiles.  These missiles had a speed of 2600kts they carried a 22kg warhead.  If this alone struck his aircraft at that speed he would be dead.  He knew that the maximum range of these missile was 24.6 nm.  He could see from his radar the pursuing aircraft were now well within that range.  He had fallen into the trap.  They had then accelerated to maximum speed before launching their more accurate weapons.

Again he went through the motions to try to avoid the rapidly approaching flying death.  Again the warning changed from a clamouring to a continuous high pitched tone.  As it did, with a sigh he reached up with both arms above his head.  There they grasped a yellow and black stripped handle.  He immediately pulled the handle down sharply.

It was as if everything went into slow motion.  The straps over his thighs tightened pulling his legs tightly into the seat.  Simultaneously the cockpit cover above his head exploded away from the aircraft.  He could feel the sudden rush of air entering the cockpit.  The locking bolts holding his seat into the aircraft exploded, and finally the twin rockets attached to his seat fired.  He got out of the aircraft into the slip stream.

As he reached an altitude of 500 feet above his stricken MiG he saw it explode into a ball of flame as the missiles found their target.  He watched as the fire ball raced up towards his feet.

The next morning the worlds journalists were gathered together and bussed to a smouldering building in the centre of Belgrade. This had been the main hospital serving the city. But apart from the sight of the shell of the building, and what was left of a large green cross, it would have been impossible to say what it had been. A press officer told the mass of journalists, that during the night American war planes had fired on the building, completely destroying it and killing the medical staff and patients who had unfortunately been inside at the time. Due to the high impact explosives used by the Americans no there had been no survivors.

The was however some evidence, they were shown fragments of casings from the missiles used. Some of the fragments had parts of words or numbers stamped onto them. These were claimed to have been traced to American serial numbers.

The journalists were then taken by bus to 2 crash sites some way outside Belgrade. The first a large crater, with sections of a fighter jet showing, this could be seen to be part of a MiG fighter. The 2nd site showed wreckage strewn over a large area. This they were told was a 2nd MiG fighter from the Serbian air force. These fighters had scrambled when the Americans had attacked the hospital, unfortunately for the pilots they had not succeeded in protecting the people in the hospital, but had paid with their lives. 

For the journalists it was difficult for them to understand the reasons why the Americans who until now had only been patrolling the skies, protecting the borders with a no fly zone, should turn and attack a soft target such as a non military  hospital. This raised a furore in the press, especially those countries in the east who already had a hatred for the Americans.

Chapter 3.

A nton, that’s all very interesting Vanessa said, but have you dragged me out of bed to tell me this.

That’s some back ground for you. Remember the mystery man I told you about in Milosevic’s office.

Yes.

I have found out he was part of Al-Qaeda, maybe even Osama Bin-Laden himself.

Isn’t that the Muslim extremist organisation.

Yes, they were responsible for the attack on the US embassy in Nairobi. I have some intel that they are planning a number of other attacks around the world, especially in parts of the world where the Brits or the Americans are.

Just a minute Vanessa said, The Albanians they were Muslims as well, are you saying that this Bin-Laden caused or sponsored an attack on people of his own religion.

I believe so, but not as a direct attack, this was done to bring NATO into the conflict, to show the world how the Americans behaved in the theatre of war. The attack on the Serbian Hospital wasn’t carried out by NATO. Yes the Migs were shot down by the Americans, however we think it was the Serbs themselves who fired at their own hospital.

Why

Shhh Anton uttered, again scanning the area.

What’s wrong?

Just me, Thought I saw something moving Said Anton, the he carried on, Again to fuel anti American feelings around the world.

But why attack his own religion? Asked Vanessa.

Don’t forget there are many sects within Islam. And like many religious sects they hate each other as well.

So why come out to this place to tell me all that?

Since I left the crime bureau, I have been pursuing a number of leads, all pointing towards terror cells, but I think they are now onto me as well. I have had a number of things happen, so much so I fear for my life. Out here I think we are safe.

Ok, so what is it you want me to do?

You are still attached to Westfield aren’t you?

Yes, I just don’t travel with them much now, Not for over a year.

"Well it would help me if you started to travel, with them. Keep your eyes and ears open. Also I