Ice Islands, page 6
‘Get down,’ he ordered Sara.
She didn’t move.
‘Right, down.’
Sara turned sharply to look at him. ‘We can’t.’
‘DOWN.’
A police public address flared up with a warning to stop, but the wind covered most of the words. Rake grabbed Sara roughly by the neck and pushed her head below the dashboard. Electric vehicles were better than gas ones on acceleration. Rake hit the pedal. Four seconds later, almost at the blockade, the Volvo was traveling sixty miles an hour. He began by heading for the right edge, glimpsing the police following his line. Except he wasn’t going there. He spun the wheel into a sharp left turn, misjudging the cold damp on the road. He felt the back wheels launch into a corner skid and corrected with the front wheels as they hit the meridian strip. The vehicle pitched into the air. He eased right, aiming the hood at the first barrel spaced just three feet from the trunk of a police sedan.
A gunshot blew out the right headlight. Sara gasped. Rake braced himself for a wrong judgement, the dead-weight impact of smashing into a half-ton rusting metal drum that would tear through his fender, wrench the engine from its bolted sockets and throw him and Sara forward against seat belts and airbags with a force they might not survive. He tightened his grip on the wheel and guided the speeding vehicle to the edge of the drum, which it hit like a fist going into a curtain. Empty. Yes. He’d calculated right. As it flew away, the left side of the vehicle struck the second drum, which skidded into the third. The drums rolled and scraped and slid. Rake swung the wheel to the right to stop going into the water and straightened up.
His foot stayed down, taking them up to seventy, eighty, ninety. Muzzle flashes appeared like firefly dots in the rearview mirror, pistol rounds going nowhere. The police ran toward their vehicles. Visibility was skewed by sea mist from the water. On the dashboard, emergency lamps lit. He was a hundred miles an hour as they left the causeway. The road stayed straight. There was a superstore on the right and a rotary ahead. There was no traffic.
‘Ozenna?’ said Lucas.
‘We’re through, sir. Twenty minutes out from Berghamn.’
‘Casualties?’
‘None. Can you straighten this?’
‘It’s straightened. You’ve got a clear to the ferry. Messages hadn’t got through.’
As Rake slowed for the rotary, a single police sedan entered from the right. Its blue light started up. The siren yelped to life. The driver pulled up, blocking Rake’s carriageway. A uniformed cop got out the other side, shielding himself behind his open door. He signaled Rake to stop.
‘Message still not through,’ Rake told Lucas. ‘We’re being flagged down,’
‘Ignore.’
Unlike the causeway, this would be a straightforward run with plenty of space on either side. One police car. No traffic. A wide road. No need to hit anything. He guided the Volvo to the left, then saw the cop raise a weapon that wasn’t a pistol, but an assault rifle with a long curving magazine, at least thirty high-powered rounds, enough to stop the soft-skinned rental in its tracks.
He pressed his hand on Sara’s shoulder to keep her down and picked up speed. He swerved left to right to throw off the aim. The first rounds slammed through the door into the back seat. By then, Rake was past him, a smaller target. The rear window shattered. Bullets tore into the soft white fabric on the roof. The cop was a controlled shooter. His range would be around 300 meters and Rake was traveling at sixty miles an hour; he had less than ten seconds to stop Rake and only thirty rounds, no time to change magazines.
‘We’re through,’ Rake told Lucas. He took the speed to just above ninety along a smooth, straight road. There was no answer. Trembling all over, Sara pushed herself back into her seat.
‘Are we safe?’ Her voice quivered.
‘Are you OK?’
‘Who are they? What’s happening? Why are we running away?’ Her eyes were filled with fear, looking to Rake for answers he didn’t have.
‘What the hell is going on?’ Rake snapped at Lucas, knowing he was going way above his own rule not to question orders. ‘We need to get a grip, Harry. You need to rein it in.’
‘Your orders stand, Ozenna.’
Rake said nothing.
Sara leant sideways against the door, one hand on the seat belt, the other on her bag on her lap. ‘What do we do now?’
‘We catch a ferry.’ Rake’s voice reflected the uncertainty he felt.
ELEVEN
The route to the ferry terminal showed a wide highway, a handful of houses, no towns, nothing that looked like a police station. The weather cleared, enabling Rake to keep to between ninety and a hundred miles an hour. The GPS put him in Berghamn in fourteen minutes.
Sara pulled a black woolen hat from her bag. examined it and unrolled it over her head. She tucked loose strands underneath. Shifting in her seat, she put her hands back to where they were, one on her canvas bag and one holding the seat belt. She was badly shaken. But Rake sensed something else. She was not civilian scared, not an innocent bystander. She knew things she hadn’t said. Or hadn’t had time to say.
‘Why are they after you?’ he asked.
Sara adjusted her woolen hat again and didn’t answer.
‘Fifteen minutes from now we could be safe and on that ferry,’ Rake said. ‘Five minutes from now we could be in another shit-storm. Share anything you might know that can help you.’
‘I don’t know.’ Her voice was soft, defensive. A freezing draft blew through the smashed back window. She tensed her knuckles as if he were about to attack her.
‘Finding Yuri dead was bad, really bad.’ Rake turned to look at her, trying to reflect the empathy of his words in his face. ‘Any idea why he was killed?’
‘I don’t know. Really, I don’t.’ She squeezed her fingers around her scarf.
‘Why did you choose to bring him to this conference?’ Two saloon cars, one white, the other blue, passed from the opposite direction.
‘Because …’ She lowered her eyes. ‘No. It’s complicated. You’re a soldier. This is not for you. Follow your orders and I’ll be gone. You’ll never see me again.’
Two trucks passed them and a mix of vehicles behind. The ferry must have been in. They had opened the road. Behind, there was nothing. No sirens, no racing police cars, no helicopter as far as he could see and hear. On this single highway, they could not have lost the cops. The police must have been called off.
‘Is there anything I need to know that will help keep you alive?’
‘Nothing.’ Her voice was a whisper. She tightened the cord around her bag. She didn’t question why her own life might be in danger.
Rake let his hands hang loose on the wheel, moving to a relaxed, casual tone. ‘Where’d you get that accent?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘English. Like the royal family.’
She gave him half a smile, a fast mood-switch. ‘I was sent to boarding school in England. They all talk like that there.’
‘Your brothers and sisters, too?’
‘No sisters. My brothers went to Gakushūin. It’s a posh school in Tokyo.’ She turned to him again. Her eyes stayed shot through with worry. ‘Thank you. But you don’t need to small talk with me. I’m fine. I wasn’t expecting … I mean, it’s been a horrible morning.’
A black SUV cut out in front to overtake a truck. A blue sedan followed, causing him to brake. There was only one carriageway in each direction. Sara brushed her right hand over the fake brown leather of the glove box, like she was making a decision. Trauma triggered a need to talk while her sense of survival told her to keep her mouth shut. They passed a golf course and a roadside café. The SUPO agent should be waiting to usher them on board. Or the way things were going down, they could be driving straight into a trap, Sara and he taken in. Rake charged with attempted murder of a cop, Sara with killing Mishkin. Rake had never known Lucas to operate with so many contradictions.
The weather was clearing, blue sky, settled white clouds, no wind, and a flat, snow-laden landscape. Steady traffic headed east from the ferry terminal. ‘Five minutes out,’ Rake told Lucas.
‘Ozenna?’
‘Five minutes out, sir.’
‘Ozenna?’
‘Here, sir.’
‘You need to abort. Repeat. Abort.’
Fuck you, screamed through Rake’s head. Enough. Get your fucking act together. Gears of options spun through his mind. He could not go back. Abort meant he could not go forward. Rake replied calmly, ‘Confirming, sir, that we change our plan.’
‘Sorry, Rake. It’s a shit-show here.’ Lucas rarely called Rake by his first name and only when things were bad. Lucas had no back-up plan. If he had, they would be on it by now. The problem must be in Washington, not Finland. That didn’t make it any less dangerous. He had less than four minutes before he reached the ferry terminal. The rental would have trackers which exposed them, as would Sara’s phone. They had hours of daylight ahead of them, good weather, and Lucas, his controller, the guy running the mission, far away in Washington and out of options.
‘What do you mean change of plan?’ said Sara.
‘That was my boss. The ferry terminal is out.’
‘Why? How?’ Sara bit her bottom lip hard.
Rake didn’t answer. He followed the gradual curve of the road and saw the opening of a track off to the right. He braked to a crawl, waiting for a gap in the oncoming traffic. He turned. There was a pile of snow-covered logs on the verge, and up ahead trees and a single farmhouse. He drove past the farmhouse, saw another ahead, kept going until he was clear of both and stopped. ‘You need to do exactly as I say without question. Do you understand?’
Sara nodded.
‘Take out everything you have that’s electronic. Put it on my seat.’ Rake got his rucksack from the back and brought out a slim steel case covered with black leather skin. Inside was a device that located trackers. He got out and stepped back far enough for the scanner to cover the whole of the Volvo. It took ten seconds to locate a tracker in the rear fender, one on the battery and one in the GPS. There could be more. Whoever they were up against could easily have put extra ones on the rental.
He took a flashlight from his jacket and slid under the chassis, feeling the cold of the snow and the hard edges of ground ice. The thin beam picked up a black magnetic tracker on one axle casing. Another silver circular one was on the other. He plucked off both, checked more of the chassis, saw nothing and slid back out. At the rear he felt around the fender and found an oblong tracker.
Sara laid two phones, a tablet and a watch on the seat. She pulled each apart, separating casing, battery, SIM card. She knew what to do. Rake took the SIG Sauer from his holster and smashed the butt through the screen of the dashboard GPS and kept smashing until the electronics were pulverized. The scanner picked up no more. It was far from conclusive. There could be trackers in the roof, under the hood, anywhere; ones that only gave out a signal once they had been motion-activated. He took his earpiece and the phone which was encrypted but not hardened. He slipped out the SIM card and battery, exactly as Sara was doing. He swept up Sara’s stuff and placed everything behind each of the four wheels. He drove back and forth, crushing them into the ice. He smeared dirt and ice over the plates, back and front, to avoid detection by automatic plate recognition.
He drove back a quarter-mile the way they had come, dropping the destroyed equipment and shattered electronic pieces out of his window like a trail of confetti. Then, he made a U-turn and headed fast toward the ferry. The first track where he stopped was now compromised. The GPS had shown another side road, just over a mile ahead, which would be better because it led to coastline where there would be boats.
A container truck was coming toward them and, like before, a black sedan pulled out to pass, causing Rake to brake. A second green sedan stayed behind the truck. By the time they passed, Rake was at the intersection which led off a rotary. He drove through a village of low-rise houses, mostly red with black roofs, a school, a sports center, and further along a campsite and a full-blown holiday resort with flags and cabins.
‘Is this right?’ asked Sara.
‘It’s right.’ Rake didn’t know. But he needed Sara’s trust. He didn’t want houses and people. He needed emptiness and forest, a place to figure things out, a shelter that wasn’t a vehicle. He needed to avoid whatever video surveillance was in the village. He wanted a situation that didn’t exist.
The metal road turned to a gravel track covered in overnight snow and ice. The Volvo slipped and Rake righted it and slowed. This was better. There were trees stretching back from both sides, and a couple of miles on they crossed an old bridge over a fjord. Another mile and the coastline came into view. No houses. No people. Just forest, harsh rocky landscape, and the sea.
TWELVE
Sara’s coat was only light. The temperature outside showed minus five Celsius. Wind-chill through the blown-out window felt colder. They needed to be under cover and get warm. The track toward the sea was more like a skate rink, thick ice packed like solid rock on which the tires had little grip. He pulled up.
‘Keep watch,’ he instructed Sara. ‘Directly behind us.’
Sara walked the few steps to the intersection and looked back the way they had come, exactly as Rake had asked. He scoured the ground for tracks. There were fresh animal prints. One had two small round marks for the rear of the hoof and a pair of long curved oblong ones for the front. A deer. Nearby, a fox had crossed, two large front paws, two smaller side ones and a triangular-shaped heel. That was it. No evidence of recent human movement, no footfall, no vehicle, no motorcycle, no snowmobile.
He collected a black Gortex bag from the vehicle with two yellow snow chains of hard, durable rubber. He laid them flat on the ice, clearing knots and tangles, then wrapped the chains around the wheels, fastened the clips and tested tension.
From his rucksack, Rake took out a military-standard satellite phone inside a hardened steel case that made it undetectable. Its signal was encrypted and shielded. He turned it on. The signal was 5G. Of course. This was Finland, the home of Nokia. He unpacked a small, basic surveillance kit of six cameras which, with 5G, would not need a Wi-Fi hotspot. Each measured barely an inch square and had dual use of a wide-angle lens and rudimentary thermal imaging. He secured one to a tree branch, concealing it as best he could. He turned on the phone which activated the camera, giving him a wide-range view far down the track.
He beckoned Sara back. As they moved off, the chains cracked and crunched and held well. He kept the speed slow, barely ten miles an hour. Sara took a long, gray woolen scarf from her bag, wrapped it around her neck and tucked it down inside her jacket. Harry Lucas would know Rake’s satellite phone was turned on. If Lucas were compromised, he wouldn’t use it. But Rake needed to get Sara off the Åland Islands. As of now, he couldn’t see a way to do that, not without Lucas’s help.
A clump of snow fell loudly from a tree onto the roof. Sara flinched. Rake flipped on the wiper to clear the windshield. He eased the vehicle through a gaping pothole. Sara’s gaze concentrated on the white-speckled wooded landscape ahead. The track was straight. There was forest on the left and, on the right, a mix of pine trees and iced-over rock and still no markings of anyone else there. Rake glimpsed the sea less than half a mile away. Sara traced her finger over the door of the glove box. She seemed to be assessing, not in a hostile way, something practical. She took off her hat, pushed up her hair, put it on again and flattened her hands against the side of her head. ‘That might have killed me.’ She turned to look at the hole in the back window, the jagged glass at its edges, the torn fabric in the roof.
‘It might have,’ agreed Rake.
‘Who?’ A tremor ran through her words.
‘I’m hoping you might help me figure that out.’
‘Will it happen again?’
‘My job is to make sure it doesn’t.’
To his right, through a gap in trees, about a hundred yards off track, he saw a small weatherboard hut with a corrugated metal roof and a circular steel chimney. There were no footprints or tire marks. Rake got out and walked toward it. The ground was thick with freshly fallen snow, flat, treeless, sloping up. There was a pile of logs, a bench under a window where glass was cracked and taped over. Icicles hung from a rope stretched between the gutter and a stake, like a washing line. Down toward the shore lay a wrecked cabin cruiser and a rusted steel rowing dinghy. There was an uninterrupted view from all sides, which was good and bad. They would be less hidden, but he would see anyone long before they got there.
He told Sara to get out with her gear. He drove two hundred yards back down the track and swung to the right into thick forest. He fixed a camera onto a tree at an angle that would pick up anyone coming up the track to the vehicle.
He walked back. The unlocked hut door swung open, solid on oiled hinges. Inside, the air was damp, cold and stale. There was a concrete floor and a wood-burning stove with a flue going up through to the roof. Dry logs were stacked on either side. There was a wooden table with four metal folding chairs around it. A steel workstation was fastened to the wall with hooks for cleaning fish and fixing gear. There was no running water, no sanitation, no power. A torn leather three-person sofa was pushed against a wall. Yellow stuffing protruded from the tears. It was dry.
Rake put his rucksack on the floor and pulled out a thermal survival blanket, white-gray camouflage pattern that would retain body heat while allowing the skin to breathe. In cold conditions, sweat turned dangerous if it froze. He wrapped it around Sara like a cape. ‘Curl up and get warm,’ he said.
‘Is this safe?’ she asked.
‘For now.’ Rake set up three cameras outside the hut, clamping them over gray plastic guttering. Even in half an hour, the weather had changed from the bright winter’s day; now a strong westerly wind was bringing cold rain with the strong, harsh salt taste of the Baltic. High wind and lower visibility would obscure smoke. They could safely light a fire. Back inside, he tested the cameras, 360-degrees of protection around the hut, back up from the camera at the start of the track and from the one by the vehicle. He adjusted thermal imaging to 37° Celsius which would trigger an alarm for humans, but not for fox and deer which have a higher body temperature.
