Dark Horizon, page 21
Alex hesitated, and Matvey called out, seeing the movement. ‘There you are,’ he said. ‘No more running.’
Not bloody likely. The same choice was laid out before them, as it had been back at the house. The simple equation remained unchanged – for George to escape, someone had to get in the way, to give Matvey something else to deal with while the boy ran for his life. Before, Alex had been determined not to let his son go through this alone, but now he realised the cost of his choice might make that impossible.
‘Run, George!’ He called out to the boy. ‘Don’t wait for me, run!’
‘Dad . . .’
‘Run from the fire!’ Alex shoved his son hard in the back, propelling the skinny boy away from the police car, and his shout had the desired effect. George stumbled into a wild, scampering sprint across the road, feet splashing through puddles as he broke away from cover.
Matvey saw him and came racing around the rear of the car, but Grace was already up and lurching toward the gunman, swinging her baton at him. Alex tore his gaze away from his son and rushed up behind her. He briefly dared to hope that together, the two of them would be able to put this creep down and stop him for good.
The grey-haired man took a step back and did not hesitate. He pulled the pistol’s trigger, releasing a fan of shots that emptied the weapon in less than a second. Alex saw white pulses of discharge flash from the silencer, he heard the heavy double thud as Grace was hit twice more by rounds at close range, her vest soaking up the sizzling hits.
As she fell back against him, the near-miss of a bullet droned wide of Alex’s head and he flinched. But then another followed, a savage, burning bolt of agony that struck him in the bicep. His body resonated with the aftershock and he fell against the police car’s bonnet.
I’ve been shot.
The realisation came over him in a searing wave, his nerves catching alight. It was like no pain he had ever experienced before, as if a piece of his arm had literally been ripped from him.
‘Chort.’ Matvey swore, standing his ground as he worked the slide of his gun. He ejected the now-empty magazine and scowled at it, then reluctantly pocketed the pistol.
Alex fought down the waves of pain from his wounded bicep, dragging Grace as best he could toward the front of the police car and out of Matvey’s line of sight, pulling her into the white blaze cast by the Volvo’s headlights by the collar of her stab vest. He could smell the reek of burnt plastic curling up from the impact holes in Grace’s body armour, where the hot rounds from the gun had lodged themselves in the material. Grace was still alive but she trembled with pain, and a foam of pinkish spittle drooled from the corner of her mouth.
She locked eyes with him and he saw her fear. Grace tried to speak, but she could only let out stuttering gasps.
Then a shadow fell across them both, and Alex looked up. Matvey had the ASP in his hand, and he used the police officer’s baton to strike Alex across the head, sending him reeling.
Alex crashed down on to the wet ground, lights and fire pin-wheeling around inside his skull. His body wanted to shut down but he held on, reaching into a well of stamina.
Whenever his crew were called out to fight a blaze that went beyond all expectation, Alex had to dig deep for that energy, and he dragged it up now. He refused to submit. Every second he could keep going was a second more for George to get away. Nothing else mattered.
He shifted position, hands pressed flat against the road, struggling to push himself up. Matvey hit Alex again before he could rise, and the blow echoed through him. Ignoring the pale, semi-conscious policewoman, the Russian came in with kicks then, landing one after another in Alex’s torso.
‘This sranyy country,’ growled the Russian, in between blows. ‘I am sick of it and sick of all of you. Nothing but problems.’
And then, through the ringing in his ears, Alex heard the high-pitched scream of a child and his blood turned to ice. It took all his effort to roll over and look in the direction of the sound.
The black BMW was on the far side of the road, windscreen wipers flashing back and forth, a pennant of fumes coiling from the exhaust pipe. He saw the man called Luka dragging his son by his throat, hauling the boy toward the car’s open door.
‘No!’ Alex tried to shout. ‘You animals! Let him go!’
‘Dad!’ George managed a cry for help before Luka backhanded him hard enough to make the boy go limp. The thug forced Alex’s son into the back of the car and climbed in after him.
The grey-haired man looming over Alex spun the police baton around and hit him again, this time hard enough that he blacked out for a moment.
‘Just. Die.’ Matvey snarled with each strike. Panting, he took a last moment to spit on the road before striding away from where Alex lay in a heap, towards the waiting BMW.
Enraged and bloody, Alex was so racked with pain that he couldn’t move, his body hurting in dozens of places. Dimly, he heard the BMW’s driver shout something in Russian, and Matvey climbed inside the vehicle. They were taking his son and leaving him for dead along with the two police officers.
With a skirl of tyres, the black car shot away and roared off into the rain.
The Hawker juddered as Kate put the jet into the turn for the final approach to the desert airstrip. It moved sluggishly, taking twice as long to do whatever she told it, and she had to compensate to keep on her line.
As Finn had promised, a terse and thickly accented man on the radio had granted her landing clearance, setting her up on the single runway, warning her not to deviate from his orders.
The pilot ignored him. She didn’t need help to put the aircraft down – all she wanted to do was make sure that it would be able to get back in the air if the moment came. Out through the canopy she could see a skeletal control tower, a pair of decrepit hangars with curved metal roofs, a block of concrete buildings and what looked like a cluster of jeeps and technical trucks gathered around a set of portable floodlights. Beyond the airstrip perimeter was nothing but dust and darkness. The place was worryingly remote. Anything could happen out here and the rest of the world would be none the wiser.
Not much difference to where I was taking Hamid, she thought. A black site by another name. But this time, it’s me who won’t be leaving.
Kate shook off that bleak thought. Despite everything that had happened to Kate in her past, she had vowed that she wouldn’t die on some nameless patch of dirt, and the pilot had no intention of reneging on that promise to herself. She toggled on the ‘Fasten seatbelts’ sign in the main cabin as a matter of course and calculated the vector for landing.
The runway was shorter than she would have liked, but the Hawker would be able to handle it. The markings on the ground were dulled with age to the point they were barely readable, so she used the flickering approach lights to gauge the distance.
Placing the dull strip directly off the nose of the Hawker, Kate set the ailerons to landing configuration and put down the undercarriage. Her fear that the hydraulics had been too badly damaged for the landing gear to deploy proved unfounded, and the wheels locked into place with three green indicators. Compensating for a slight cross-wind over the valley floor, she let the jet sink on to the glide path.
All thoughts of where she was and what would happen next went away. For the next few moments, Kate was only a pilot, existing second to second as she guided the Hawker back to earth.
‘Three hundred.’ A recorded announcement from the jet’s automated reporting system counted off the descent. ‘Two hundred. Hundred above. One hundred.’
Kate dropped the flaps and drew back on the throttles, catching a glimpse of two pick-up truck technicals off to the right as they jerked into motion, to race along parallel with the airstrip. From the corner of her eye she could see the long lances of heavy-calibre machine guns bolted to the flatbeds of the trucks, the weapons turning to train on them as the Hawker descended.
‘Fifty. Forty. Thirty. Minimum.’ The call from the auto-voice told Kate she was at the jet’s decision height. From here, she could only commit to landing or put power back to the engines and climb away again.
Her knuckles whitened around the throttles and she considered putting the Hawker into a power ascent, leaving Hamid’s people in the dust. Would they open fire on us if I tried? Kate couldn’t risk it.
The jet sank into the embrace of gravity and the wheels smacked the sand-scarred runway with a hard crunch, the nose coming down smartly a heartbeat later. Kate automatically chopped the throttles and opened the air brakes, the aircraft rocking as she reversed thrust as firmly as she dared, slowing it down before it rolled off the end of the short strip.
Normally a rough-and-ready, hard-jerk touchdown like this one would have thrown her usual kind of passengers around the cabin, spilling whatever caviar and Champagne they might have been consuming, earning Kate an earful of reprimand from Brian Teller after the fact. Here and now, though, she didn’t give a damn.
The Hawker slowed to a crawl and she angled the jet around in a lazy one-eighty. The technicals came racing up to flank them as the nose shifted back to aim past the hangars and the clump of low buildings. Hand-held flashlights flickered down the side of the fuselage, briefly flooding the cockpit with yellowy illumination.
‘Park it,’ said a voice, and Kate looked back to see Finn standing by the open security door.
‘Please remain seated until the aircraft has come to a complete stop,’ she replied, mimicking the tone of an in-flight announcement on some commercial airliner. Worryingly, crimson warnings were blooming again on the control panel, and Kate grimaced as she checked the systems. It wasn’t just the hydraulics now; there were problems with the oil pressure and possibly the fuel pumps. Whatever fragmentation damage the Hawker had taken from the missile’s near-hit, it was starting to make itself obvious.
‘Are you listening to me?’ Finn’s temper snapped. ‘Shut it off, now!’
‘Roger that,’ she said, with deliberate insolence, setting to the task of closing down the engines and the fuel lines. As the whine of the Hawker’s twin engines ebbed, Kate became aware of the shouts from the armed men outside.
An open-topped jeep raced up from the hangars and slewed around in front of the aircraft. She caught sight of a man in the passenger seat sporting classical leonine features and a heavy beard. His broad shoulders were lost in the volume of a grubby, sky blue thawb – the traditional Arabic male long robe – and his hair was grey, shoulder-length and wild. She saw the family resemblance to Hamid immediately. The man dropped out of the jeep before it had stopped moving and he strode over to the jet with a commander’s confidence.
Behind her, Finn watched the new arrival. He leaned in, lowering his voice. ‘Some advice, Ms Hood? Keep your mouth shut from now on, and you might live a little longer.’
‘I was going to say the same thing to you.’
He glared at her. ‘The plane is on the ground. Your usefulness as a pilot is now spent. You’d best concentrate on convincing these men you still have some value.’
TWENTY ONE
Hamid didn’t wait for the others to come to him. He cranked the lever that released the jet’s passenger door and let it drop open, allowing the dry night air to meet him as he stepped down.
He took a deep breath as his bare feet slapped the black runway, the surface beneath his soles still holding some of the heat of the day. It should have tasted like freedom but instead it was arid and stifling, no better than the metallic, processed atmosphere inside the airplane.
‘Little brother.’ Nasir flashed a smile that did not reach quite to his eyes and drew Hamid into a firm embrace. ‘I thought you might never return.’
‘We will not perish easily,’ he replied, and this time Nasir’s smile became true and real.
The response was something from their past, something the old imam had told the two orphan youths soon after taking them into his stewardship. You will not perish easily. He had seen it in them, even at that young age: the lion hearts that beat in the breasts of a pair of ragged street urchins. The shared will between them to survive against the odds, and to make their enemies pay ten times over for every harm inflicted upon them.
His brother looked him up and down. ‘What did they do to you?’ Nasir guided him away from the aircraft, searching his face. ‘Torture? Or worse?’
Hamid’s lip curled. ‘They might have done worse, had they known my real name.’ He shook his head. ‘I will not lie. A part of me always dreaded capture at the hands of the Westerners. But now I have experienced it . . .’ His derision grew. ‘They are idiots. They had me and they never even knew! Their monumental arrogance makes them slow. I told them I was Yusuf and they believed it.’
‘The lion masqueraded as the lamb, eh?’ Nasir let his arm drop from Hamid’s shoulder and something about the action rang a wrong note. ‘You have always known the right lies to tell, in the right moment.’
Hamid was unsure how to respond to that, but before he could say more, Nasir’s attention returned to the jet as his men removed the people on board. The Englishman complained loudly, and Hamid made a terse gesture, telling the soldiers to let Finn have his freedom. The traitor had made good, after all, and it appeared that whatever deal he had forged with Nasir in return for rescuing Hamid would be respected.
Next off came a stocky man with a shouldered rifle, dragging the body of the dead co-pilot down the steps. The corpse, shrouded in a blanket, was dumped unceremoniously in the back of one of the technical pick-ups and then ignored. Last, the two women deplaned, the sharp-faced pilot helping the wounded American as she laboured her way off the aircraft.
Pale and sweating, the CIA agent grimaced with each movement she made, but she still had enough defiance in her to throw Hamid a brittle smirk. ‘I distinctly recalled requesting the limousine service. What kind of resort are you people running here?’
The pilot turned toward Finn, indicating Hamid with a nod. ‘He’s here. He’s safe. I did what you wanted. Now you keep your end of the bargain.’ She jabbed a finger at the turncoat MI6 agent. ‘Make the bloody phone call! Tell them to let—’
Finn cut her off with a shake of the head. ‘Later.’
‘No!’ The pilot’s voice rose to a shriek. ‘Not later, now, you bastard!’
The Englishman gave an exasperated sigh and spread his hands, as if to say, ‘She doesn’t get it.’
‘Keep them both quiet!’ Nasir spat the order at one of his riflemen, and the younger man strode up to point an assault rifle at the pilot’s head. The English woman fell silent, but her eyes were full of rage.
With savage shouts, the rifleman forced the women into the back of the other pick-up, and the vehicle grumbled away toward the concrete buildings.
‘The American is an intelligence agent,’ Hamid told his brother, watching the truck go. ‘The other one is British. A former military aviator.’
‘A blood value for both, then.’ Nasir considered that. ‘Have no doubt, Zameer will find a good use for them.’
‘Zameer.’ Hamid repeated the name of the absent man. ‘Since when are you allowing that old goat to take the lead?’ He chuckled dryly. ‘How long was I absent?’
‘Long enough.’ Nasir’s expression turned stony. ‘And you should show him some respect. He was a fighter when you were still an itch in Father’s balls.’
Hamid’s smile faded. ‘Oh, I remember. I’ve heard him say such things a thousand times, just like the other war stories he loves to fill the hours with. But respect must be earned.’
Despite Zameer’s record as a fighter of repute, his tales were long on personal heroics and short on specifics. Hamid suspected the old man of padding his part, but he had always let it pass.
There were few real veterans in their calling. Zameer’s age made him a representative of the old ways, a touchstone for al-Sakakin to be noted, but not emulated. He played a valuable role in the group, and he could be entertaining in his own manner, even capable of the occasional insight. But he was not meant to command.
Age did not make one superior, something Hamid had proven time and again, the young lion’s bold actions eclipsing those of his elder brother and the long-toothed grey beards. Zameer frequently made clear his displeasure at that, but only when he believed he was beyond Hamid’s earshot.
‘You are speaking,’ said Hamid, ‘but I hear the old goat’s words in your mouth.’
‘Zameer is wiser than you give him credit for.’
‘Is he? Or does he just say what others like to hear?’
An unpleasant possibility began to form in Hamid’s mind. He knew that Zameer wanted to reconnect with their old allies, to make alliances with the same cadres they had broken away from. Of course, if they did that, in those places a revered old veteran’s words would carry far more authority than those of a younger lion.
Had the elder used Hamid’s capture and absence to drive that agenda forward? He studied Nasir’s face. There had always been friction between the brothers. It was human nature that siblings fought one another as much as they loved their kindred, but now Hamid pondered on what seed of resentment Nasir might have been nurturing against him. A seed that Zameer could have given ample water in his absence.
He looked back at the airstrip buildings, seeing the red flicker of the technical’s tail lights, and the pilot’s warning words came back to him in a rush. You’re in trouble with your pals, and you know it.
When Nasir spoke again, his brother’s aloof manner made it clear how much had changed while Hamid had been in captivity. ‘The British and the Americans will be searching for you,’ he began. ‘It would be best if you remained somewhere safe for the time being. You can gather your wits and rest after this ordeal at the hands of our enemies.’ He glanced down at Hamid’s bare feet and prison garb. ‘I will have fresh clothing brought for you.’
‘I do not need to rest,’ Hamid was saying, but Nasir spoke over him.
