The Pride, page 33
Her pounded, bruised body protested and she drew on every last reserve of strength she had to stay afloat. The light came past her again. As it did, she saw, for a fraction of a second, a head above water. When the beam had passed she swam slowly, much of it underwater, towards where she’d seen the other person.
‘Kelvin,’ she hissed.
The young man’s head spun around. ‘Hey . . .’
‘Shh.’
He swam towards her.
‘What the fuck is going on?’ Sonja said.
‘That crazy Irish woman . . .’ Kelvin’s head went half under water and he sputtered sea water.
‘Fiona.’
‘Yes,’ he coughed. ‘She said she’s a British spy, but she executed Wu, the gangster, in cold blood, then killed one of his men. I just heard more gunfire and a splash, so maybe she killed another one. That would leave Fiona and one other man. I took this from the first man Fiona killed.’ Paddling with one hand and both legs, he held up a Heckler and Koch MP5.
‘Give that to me.’ Sonja swapped Johnsy’s pistol for the machine gun. It was harder to tread water with the heavier weapon, but she felt better equipped. ‘I need a diversion.’
‘I’ll call out to them, ask her to take me back on board,’ Kelvin said.
Sonja saw the light coming towards them again. ‘Down!’
They both let themselves sink, then kicked back to the surface once the spotlight had passed them.
Sonja spat. ‘You know they might just open up on you – use you for target practice?’
‘If it will give you a chance to get on board and save Emma then I’ll take that risk. I was just waiting for dark in any case, to try and get to her.’
Sonja looked him in the eyes. Whatever else he might be, he was certainly no coward.
‘Give yourself a fighting chance. Swim to a point about two hundred metres from the bow of the boat before you start making a noise. If they do try and shoot you then you’ll be a smaller target at that range.’
‘Thanks.’
Sonja checked her watch and made sure Kelvin had one as well. ‘Start making a racket in ten minutes.’
‘Will do. Ms Kurtz?’
‘What?’
‘I think I might be falling in love with your daughter.’
Sonja shook her head and swam away into the darkness.
*
‘Help me! Help me!’
Fiona sat on a leather-upholstered couch on the rear deck of the cruiser, pistol pointed at Emma, who sat opposite her. Emma had been staring at her, saying nothing. If Emma thought she could unnerve Fiona, she was wrong.
‘It’s the boy,’ the captain called in Mandarin.
‘Kill him,’ Fiona called back, then translated the brief conversation for Emma.
‘Please, what do you want?’ Emma said. ‘I don’t understand. It was you who killed Denzel, at Silver Sands, and that hunter in Victoria Falls, and the guy driving the truck full of drugs in Botswana, wasn’t it?’
Fiona smiled. ‘I told you – it’s your mother I want. I expect she’ll be coming up here, at the rear of the boat, any time now. Sending Kelvin to the front is a classic diversionary tactic, but also fairly predictable. Won’t be long now.’
Shots rang out, from the boat’s captain, and incoming rounds.
Emma got up. Fiona stood and grabbed her by the shoulder. Emma swung around, but Fiona dodged the wildly thrown punch. Fiona clubbed Emma on the side of the head with the butt of her pistol. The other woman sank back into the couch. Fiona was surprised – Emma had risked being shot to go and see what had happened to her young man.
‘You didn’t shoot me,’ Emma said, rubbing her head.
‘I need you alive, at least for the short term. But if you try that again, I’ll just have to kill you.’
‘Madam!’ the captain called out. ‘Lee is dead. His body is floating in the water.’
Fiona stood. The captain was still unaware Fiona had killed his two shipmates, so she at least had him on her side – for now. ‘How annoying.’
Fiona grabbed Emma by the arm and pressed the pistol into her back. ‘This time I will shoot you if you try anything foolish.’ She propelled Emma ahead of her.
A burst of three rounds, fired from an automatic weapon rather than a pistol, sent the boat’s captain sprawling back onto the deck. Fiona realised that Kelvin, rather than fleeing for his life, had followed Wu’s loyal foot-soldier over the railing into the water and had taken his MP5. But where was Sonja? Had she been wrong?
*
Sonja knew that anyone with half a military brain would expect an attack from the rear of the boat if a diversion was created from the front. For that reason, she had swum to the pointed bow and waited there, hiding, until Kelvin started yelling.
She had heard Fiona give the order to kill Kelvin and waited until the last living crewman showed himself. She knew she was risking the boy’s life, but it was the last ordeal she would put him through, hopefully.
When the man began shooting at Kelvin – she had been correct, at the range he was aiming at it would be very hard for him to hit Kelvin with pistol fire – Sonja had quietly kicked out from under the front of the boat in a backstroke. Looking straight up, she had dropped the Chinese man with a single shot from the MP5.
There was no sign of Fiona, so Sonja had then fired a burst on full automatic to draw her out. Kelvin, bravely or stupidly, thought this was a signal for him to swim closer to the boat. Now, Fiona appeared in a pool of light on the side deck, Emma in her grasp. Sonja seethed at the sight. Fiona took aim at Kelvin and fired. The boy yelled out, then disappeared under the water. Emma screamed.
Sonja slung the MP5, dived, and swam the length of the cruiser underwater. She bobbed up at the aft end and hauled herself up onto the diving platform. She unslung her weapon and advanced, silently, on Emma and Fiona from behind.
Emma was gripping the boat’s railing, looking out to sea. Fiona was next to her, close, but far enough away for Sonja to take a clean shot with no risk to Emma. Sonja brought the folding stock of the machine pistol up into her shoulder, flicked the selector to single shot and took aim through the sight. She placed the crosshairs over the rear of Fiona’s heart, then took up the slack on the trigger.
With one little squeeze, this would all be over – not just the chase, but years of torment. So many problems in her life had been solved with a gun; a bullet would end this one, too.
Sonja drew a breath. She gritted her teeth, her hands tightening on the stock and pistol grip.
As if sensing her presence, her hesitation, both the girls turned as one. It was the first time she’d seen them standing next to each other, the first time she’d seen them close, in twenty-eight years.
‘Hello, Mum,’ Fiona said.
Chapter 27
‘Twins?’ Emma said, looking at her sister. ‘What the absolute fuck?’
Sonja kept the MP5 trained on Fiona though she knew, in her heart, she could not and would not pull the trigger. ‘Fraternal twins, but, yes.’
‘How . . .?’ Emma began.
‘Yes, how, Sonja?’ Fiona said. ‘How could you do what you did?’
Fiona’s words pierced her more painfully than any bullet or shrapnel ever could. She could carry the burden of her terrible secret no longer, and now there was no taking it back.
‘I slept with the target, Danny Byrne, an IRA quartermaster, as part of an undercover operation in Northern Ireland,’ Sonja said. The words spilled from her, now the dam was finally breached. ‘Danny wanted out of the struggle; his heart wasn’t in it; and the fact that the last lot of explosives he had sourced was used to blow up a bus-load of schoolkids did his head in. I was working with the British SAS, and they were using me to lure Danny into a meeting with his brother, Patrick, who had ordered the bombing. Danny drew a gun during the raid and was about to shoot a soldier I’d been working with – so I shot your father in the back, killed him.’
Emma and Fiona were both looking at her now and though they obviously knew versions of this story, just hearing it in all its sordid details was as shocking for them as it was bitter on Sonja’s tongue. ‘I was twenty-two and pregnant. Word soon leaked out that I’d slept with the enemy, probably aided by my bastard of a commanding officer who had manipulated me into having sex with him. I’d seen enough death by then, so I couldn’t bring myself to have an abortion.’
‘So, you gave us up for adoption instead,’ Fiona said.
Emma looked to her twin sister. ‘Us?’
‘There’s nothing special about you, Emma,’ Fiona said. ‘She was as ashamed of you as she was of me.’
Sonja shook her head. ‘My mother pushed me to have you both adopted. I was confused. I was kicked out of the army for assaulting a sergeant; my head was a mess. When you were born I became depressed. I changed my mind almost every day about what I should do, but in the end I listened to my mother. I put you both up for adoption. I went away for six months, backpacking, to try and drink you both out of my mind, but I couldn’t.
‘When I came back to the UK, I found out that you, Fiona, had been adopted by a couple in Northern Ireland, but they only wanted one baby. In those days, unlike now, there was no rule that twins had to be taken together. I was able to get Emma back, but as you, Fiona, had been legally adopted, I had no right to change my mind. I got a lawyer, but it was hopeless. The law was the law. No one else knew, not even my CO – he disappeared and didn’t come back into our lives until Emma was three. I never even told Sam, my late husband, Fiona. Only my mother and I knew, and I know she regretted forcing my hand. When I brought Emma home we tried to pretend the whole thing never happened, and at my request my mother took that secret to her grave. I’m sorry.’
Fiona laughed. ‘Sorry?’
‘Bloody hell, Mum,’ Emma said.
Emma reached out to Fiona, but her sister raised her pistol, pointing it between Emma’s eyes. ‘Don’t you dare touch me.’
‘You’re X, aren’t you, Fiona?’ Sonja said.
Fiona said nothing.
‘Fiona told me you were X, Mum.’
Sonja shook her head. ‘I spoke to Jed Banks, from the CIA. He said the Americans did pick up some online chatter, some disaffected Taliban complaining about warlords dealing with a foreign woman who had served in Afghanistan and was now dealing arms and drugs. They said she had been in the British Army, but there was no word of her serving in the 1990s – you made that part up, Fiona, in order to point the investigation towards me, and away from you.’
Fiona sneered. ‘You fit the profile well enough.’
‘Did you have Johnsy try to kill David Rafferty just to cover your tracks?’
‘What?’ Emma said.
‘Johnsy shot David twice,’ Sonja said to Emma, ‘and tried to make it look like part of a firefight by opening up straight after with his machine gun. I took Johnsy’s pistol from him and noticed two bullets missing from the magazine, even though he had supposedly not used it.’ She turned her attention back to Fiona. ‘We’ll have to see what Johnsy tells the police. Was he supposed to hijack the chopper and come for you – kill all of us on board?’
Fiona gave a small smile. ‘I didn’t want him to kill you, or the pilot. Are you trying to make a deal with me?’ Fiona asked Sonja.
‘I want you to tell me what you did, and why. What happened to Wu?’
‘Fiona shot him, Mum,’ Emma said. ‘He was wounded. She was . . . with him.’
Fiona gave a laugh. ‘Don’t be a tattletale, Emma. I was sleeping with the target. I had to keep him alive long enough to get his bank account details. After that, the world was well shot of him. Shooting the enemy after screwing him – sound familiar, Sonja?’
Sonja ignored the taunt. ‘You were playing Wu off against Hendricks. Why? Was it all about money, is that what you got from Wu before you killed him? Access to a bank account or something like that?’
‘I owe you nothing,’ Fiona said.
Sonja nodded. ‘True. I watched you grow up, Fiona, as often as I could. I knew you were with good parents – the Stewarts were lovely people. I, on the other hand, was a crap mother. Emma will tell you that.’
‘Mum,’ Emma said, trying to be brave though her voice was wavering, ‘this is not the time for jokes.’
‘No joke, and you know it, Emma. Fiona, I was so proud of you – your achievements at school and at Sandhurst. I followed your military career. We were even in Afghanistan at the same time at one point. It was so hard for me not to come and find you and tell you, but I knew, under the law, that when you turned eighteen you would have the right to find me, assuming the Stewarts did the right thing and told you that you were adopted.’
Fiona turned on her, the gun now pointed at Sonja. ‘The right thing? What would you know about that? Yes, they told me, because they are good people, but I was not a good person. Oh, I achieved the marks and the prizes all right, but I always knew, from a young age, that there was something wrong with me. It wasn’t until I learned for myself who you were, what you did for a living, how I’d come into the world, that I realised what my problem was. Some of the old hands still talked – joked – about you and your methods, and when I reached a high enough security clearance in the intelligence corps, I was able to access your old case file.’
‘Any problem you have is my fault,’ Sonja said, ‘not yours. I lost track of you after you left the army – no wonder, since you went to MI6. Let’s put the guns down and talk.’
‘No way,’ Fiona said, her pistol still pointed at Sonja, even as Sonja lowered her MP5. ‘I was attached to the Americans for a while, in Afghanistan. As an intelligence officer I helped with interrogations. The things I did, to humiliate those men . . . were even worse than anything one of the CIA or US Army guys could do, because I was a woman.’
‘I’m sorry you had to do that,’ Sonja said.
Fiona shook her head and smiled. ‘I fucking loved it.’
‘Fiona . . .’
‘No, hear me out, Sonja. If Six hadn’t recruited me, I would have transferred to the infantry when they started accepting female platoon commanders, or signed on to be a contractor, like you. Guess why, Mum?’
‘Please . . .’ Sonja said. She wanted to open her arms to her poor, broken daughter. What hurt her, especially in that moment, was that she knew what Fiona was going to say next.
‘Because I wanted to be like you. I wanted to know what it was like to kill someone, to watch them take their last breath and know that I’d been responsible. The Americans didn’t shock me with their renditions – flying terrorists to countries that allow torture and waterboarding, Sonja! They had to hold me back. I wanted to kill those bastards for what they were doing to women and little girls in Afghanistan, to people around the world.’
‘So, what,’ Emma interrupted, ‘you, like, killed all these people here in Africa just to set me and Sonja up?’
Fiona turned to Emma. Despite her cold demeanour and words, Sonja could see now that Fiona’s lip was trembling. ‘How do you think it felt, when I saw Sonja step in on the beach and punch that abalone poacher, to protect you? How do you think it felt when I saw each of you, time and again, risking your lives to save each other? I put you in half those situations, just to watch, just to . . . feel.’
Sonja let go of her weapon so that it hung from her shoulder by its sling. Nearly three decades of pent-up, poisoned emotions threatened to burst from her. So much of what she had done, how she had led her life, how she had struggled in her relationships, was tied to the decisions she had made when the twins had become part of her. Right now, she didn’t care what Fiona had done, or who she had killed or robbed. For the first time since their birth Sonja finally, truly . . . felt. She opened her arms and took a pace forward. ‘Fiona, my love . . .’
Fiona squeezed the trigger.
*
Emma kept Sonja afloat, one arm around her, as the blood flowed out of her and into the warm water of the Indian Ocean. Sonja had fallen backwards into the sea and Emma, not caring if Fiona opened fire on her as well, dived in after her mother.
Kelvin swam to them, and Emma saw that he, too, had been shot.
‘It’s not much more than a scratch,’ he said. He took off his T-shirt, ripped and stained from where the bullet had grazed his upper arm, balled it up and pressed it against the wound in Sonja’s chest. The two of them held her.
The motor cruiser accelerated away into the night, its navigation lights becoming dimmer and more distant as each long minute dragged by.
‘Mum, stay awake, please,’ Emma said, tears running down her cheeks.
‘I’m . . . sorry, Emma. I love you.’
‘Shit, you must be delirious,’ Emma said.
Sonja tried to smile. ‘Tell Fiona . . . I’m sorry . . . and that I love . . .’
‘That bitch,’ Emma said.
‘No,’ Sonja said. ‘She let you live.’
‘We have to try for shore,’ Emma said.
‘Too far,’ Sonja said. ‘Leave me.’
‘No way, Ms Kurtz,’ Kelvin said.
She tried another smile. ‘You hurt my daughter, I’ll come back and haunt you.’
‘Mum!’
Emma held her mother close, clinging to her tighter than she could ever remember, even as a child, as Kelvin trod water to keep them all afloat.
‘Tell Hudson, I do love . . .’ Sonja began.
A light appeared from above, and its beam raced towards them, across the still waters. Emma heard the rotor blades and thought it the sweetest sound ever. The Alouette settled into a hover above them. A man was waving to them from the open hatch, and another was dangling from a winch cable, being lowered down to them.
‘Mum!’ Emma yelled over the noise. ‘It’s your friend Steve; he’s come back for us.’
