"Ken MacLeod - The Highway Men" - читать интересную книгу автора (MacLeod Ken)

to this. But you surely must remember the name of Jin Yang.

Jin Yang, right. The guy who started the whole thing. He was a rock
music promoter who’d just made his second visit to the Edinburgh Fringe.
Great success by all accounts. Real wheeler and dealer, signed up all kinds
of acts to play in Beijing. He was on his way home, on a plane just out of
Edinburgh Airport. Jumps up while the seat-belt sign’s still on, gets into an
argument with the trolley-dolly. Gets a wee bit physical. He doesn’t know
that she’s had martial arts training. Anti-hijack policy, see? She doesn’t
know that he is a kung fu master. Things get a bit out of hand and just as he
has her in a headlock he gets a soft-nosed bullet in the skull. Turns out
there’s this plain-clothes cop travelling undercover on the plane. More
anti-hijack policy. A sky marshall, as the Americans call them.

So the Chinese guy goes down, and they’re all kind of looking at each
other. There’s blood and bits of bone and brains splattered everywhere.
Kids screaming. Adults screaming. Total shock and panic. And the sky
marshall sees, right there sticking out of the pocket of the late Mr. Yang’s
seat, a couple of books. They’re in Chinese, but they have the titles in
English inside. One of them is the Koran. The other is the selected
speeches of some Chinese leader.

The sky marshall’s relaying all this to his bosses on the ground, using
the plane’s own radio. Everybody’s hearing him. Then another Chinese
passenger a few seats back jumps up and starts yelling. The sky marshall
turns to him, with his gun levelled. By this time, half the passengers are
telling their folks, using their own mobile phones. They all think they’re about
to die, and they’re right.

Because yon wee sign that used to warn you not to use mobiles or
computers or games while the plane was taking off or landing was there for
a reason. Your gadgets really can interfere with the aircraft’s controls. Well,
they did this time anyway. The plane’s been called back, obviously. But
something goes wrong on its approach. There was a heavy fog that day
over the Firth of Forth. Pilot’s flying blind. Flying by instruments.
Instruments that have been knocked out of kilter by some computer geek’s
fancy new mobile phone, while he’s telling his girlfriend he loves her or what
have you.

Controlled flight into terrain, it’s called. In this case, the terrain is the
naval dockyard at Rosyth. Where Britain’s top aircraft carrier is in dock for a
refit before a mission to the South China Sea. And in the South China Sea
there’s been a bit of bother over Taiwan—a breakaway big island that the
Chinese are very touchy about.

Kaboom.

A headline the next day says CHINESE AL QAEDA NUKES
ROSYTH. And that was The Guardian, man. My lecturer at Telford College
had it on his desktop. The Record just said bomb reds now.