Dark Horizon, page 26
Up ahead, another door banged open and two men in grubby fatigues came racing through. Hamid met them with a burst of fire that threw them off their feet and down into a jumble of limbs. Without hesitation, he moved up and put single rounds through their heads to be sure they would not rise again.
‘Cover me,’ he called, bending to search the dead for ammunition.
‘If we make it outside,’ puffed Breeze, leaning close, ‘what’s the plan?’ Her breath was hot against Kate’s bare neck, and it had an unhealthy, metallic reek.
‘Get to the plane and get away.’ In her mind’s eye, the pilot visualised the Hawker where they had left it behind. As long as Nasir’s men hadn’t messed around with anything, she’d be able to taxi it on to the runway and put the jet back in the sky. Past that point, she was still hazy on the details. One step at a time, she told herself.
In the air, even running the risk of another drone, another missile attack, it would be better odds than waiting around on the ground for sun-up and certain death.
‘Two more behind!’ Breeze yelled suddenly, as Kate heard another door crash back in the direction they had come. The American lurched away, off Kate’s shoulder as she spun in place and blind-fired the rifle at the source of the sound.
A dagger of yellow cordite fire leapt from the muzzle of the weapon and brass casings streamed from the ejector port, pinging off the wall. The gun’s report was horribly loud, and Kate had no idea if she hit the men trying to flank them, but in the aftermath there was no movement in the shadows.
‘Move!’ Hamid shouted from the other end of the corridor. ‘Follow me!’
Taking Breeze with her, Kate marched after him as quickly as they both could manage, over the cooling corpses of the dead men and out through creaking double doors.
They emerged inside one of the airstrip’s wide, high-ceilinged hangars, a broad arc of corrugated metal patched with rust. In the middle of the gloomy, shadow-filled space sat the sorry remains of a Russian-made Mi-8 transport helicopter, an aircraft Kate immediately recognised as a ‘Hip’, using its NATO codename. The Hip was a gutted shell of its former self – engine gone, panels missing, rotor blades gathered on the ground beside it like warped planks of wood. Crates and oil drums sat around it in clumps. The whole scene had the air of a job that had been abandoned mid-way.
‘That ain’t gonna fly,’ muttered Breeze.
One whole side of the enclosure opened to the runway, and off at the closer end of the apron, Kate caught sight of the Hawker’s ghostly silhouette. The navigation lights on its wings were still blinking steadily, and it appeared intact, but Nasir’s men hadn’t moved the thing. It seemed miles distant.
Metal clanked against metal somewhere on the other side of the abandoned helicopter’s fuselage, and Kate saw bits of shadow break apart. Figures were moving towards them. She pulled the rifle’s trigger, barely aiming the weapon in their vague direction, and another braying howl of fire leapt from the muzzle. Ricochets punched through the thin hull of the Hip and sparked off the oil-stained concrete floor, scattering the would-be attackers.
Hamid was already behind the cover of a heavy tool rack, picking his moments to pop up and lay down kill-shots. He emptied another sickle-shaped magazine in short order and let it fall, seamlessly jamming a fresh one into his rifle’s frame. Three-round bursts lanced through the hangar’s dusty, unmoving air, drawing fire from the men who had failed to ambush them. Gunpowder flares lit the hangar in yellow strobes.
Grateful for the distraction, Kate let Breeze slip down to relative safety behind a crate, then pushed herself over to the side of four oil drums clustered on a wooden pallet.
She pulled out her rifle’s magazine and weighed it in her hand before reinserting it. Half left, she estimated. Kate’s marksmanship training in the Air Force leaned toward pistol shooting with a Browning semi-automatic, and even then she had been average at best. With the assault rifle, she knew she was out of her depth.
A fresh salvo of rounds clanked into the oil drums at her back, and Kate flinched, drawing in to make herself as small a target as possible.
This was the worst possible situation to find themselves in. If they couldn’t keep moving – if the three escapees remained here, pinned down – every man Nasir had on the base would eventually surround them, and that would be the end of it.
The shrieking chorus of gunfire was never-ending, but then someone shouted a command in Arabic and the shooting abated. Kate thought the voice was a familiar one, and when it came again, the words were in English. ‘You can’t get away, you must know that!’
‘Hipster?’ Breeze coughed. ‘That dickweed can go short-stroke a rhino.’
She heard the traitorous MI6 agent snort with derision. ‘I won’t waste time talking to anyone else. Kate Hood, I know you can hear me. Surrender. Toss out your weapon and stand up. Hamid and Breeze, they’re the ones with value, not you. You are going to die, but I can make it quick and clean. That’s more than the others will get, believe me.’
‘Tempting offer, Finn,’ Kate yelled back, her words bouncing off the tin roof. ‘You go first.’ She sounded more defiant than she felt.
‘Why would I do that? I’m not the one with something to lose, like you.’ Finn’s voice had an echoing quality that made it hard for her to be sure where it came from.
Hamid gave a dull whistle, attracting Kate’s attention. ‘Ignore him, he is trying to distract you.’ He checked his weapon, then looked in her direction. ‘I need more ammunition. Your rifle, throw it to me.’
‘Sod off,’ she replied, ducking low as she crabbed her way to another piece of cover.
‘Do not listen to him!’ hissed Hamid. ‘Give me the rifle!’
‘No.’ Kate moved out of Hamid’s line of sight, staying in the depths of the shadows.
‘If I can interject,’ Finn was saying, ‘I have a phone here, with a man on speed-dial quite capable of committing cold-blooded murder on my say-so.’ Kate’s gut twisted with fear as she anticipated what would come next. ‘I’m going to call him up. I’ll tell him to wring little George’s neck, and I’ll put it on speaker so we can listen in. Is that what you want, Kate? Do you want that poor lad’s screams to be the last thing you hear?’
‘You are scum.’ Kate said the words into her chest, clutching the rifle to her. She hid behind a gear locker, crouching low behind it.
‘The boyfriend, what’s his name? Alex, isn’t it? He’s dead already, most likely.’ Finn continued. He sounded closer now, and Kate raised her weapon, aiming down its iron sights into the jumping shadows. ‘That’s because of you, Hood. Give up now and at least the kid will survive.’
‘Kate!’ Breeze rasped, fighting for breath. ‘He’s right there!’
‘I am.’ Finn’s voice came from directly behind her, and too late Kate realised he had been working his way round the helicopter wreck, closing in on her position.
The hard edges of a pistol barrel pressed against the back of Kate’s head, and she heard – as much as felt – the resonant click as he thumbed back the hammer.
‘Offer expired,’ he whispered. ‘Lose the rifle. I won’t say it again.’
Kate threw the weapon away, letting it skid across the floor and into the darkness.
Alex waited until Matvey and the other thug were on board the trawler before he bolted from the shadows that were keeping him concealed. He dashed to the back of the BMW, pausing to catch a breath, then slinked forward, staying as low as he could.
There had been another moment earlier when the other man had looked directly at him, and Alex froze, convinced that the Russian was staring him in the face. But then he turned away, and Alex knew that the darkness had shrouded him.
He didn’t have that advantage any more. All it would take was someone catching sight of his movement and he’d be done.
The fishing boat’s engine grumbled and caught, the chug of it bringing a gust of diesel fumes over the quay as Alex drew closer. He could see the lanky one, Luka, moving around inside the wheelhouse, the man’s attention on the trawler’s controls. Matvey had gone inside the vessel and the third man moved around the bow, pulling ropes off the mooring cleats. Any second now, the boat would be floating untethered and free to move off.
I have to chance it. Alex broke into a full-tilt run, covering the last few metres to the stern. Just as the sea behind the boat began to churn as the propellers bit into the briny water, he threw himself over the widening gap between the end of the concrete pier and the trawler.
He landed badly, one foot clipping a guard rail, throwing him face-down on the wet and oily deck. Chewing on the shock of the fall, he hoped that the noise of the engines had covered the sound of him boarding. Alex rolled over on to his back as the trawler kicked out through the shallow waves, heading into the estuary. The pain in his chest and his arm seethed.
Boots clanked on the deck plates, and he realised that his ‘run and jump’ hadn’t gone unnoticed after all. The third man – the once called Stepan – came his way, advancing along the line of the guard rail with a heavy wooden oar in his hands, searching for the source of the noise.
There was little light around the boat’s stern, so the thug had to be close to see Alex where he lay, but Alex had nowhere he could go, backed up against the arching gantries where nets would be deployed overboard on the trawler’s usual voyages.
Then he remembered the blocky lump of plastic inside his jacket – the extra edge that Grace had given him back in the lay-by. Alex fumbled for the police-issue taser as Stepan came into view, looming over him with the brutal mass of the oar.
The thug swore and swung up the wooden paddle, intending to bring it down like an axe blade on Alex’s head.
Alex pulled the taser’s trigger and a light blinked on the front of the plastic pistol. With a metallic crackle, two darts trailing wires leapt into Stepan’s chest, and the powerful voltage from the gun’s battery pack flowed into him.
The man’s body locked up, the muscles in his body going into spasm. He trembled and shook, powerless to move, and Alex kept the trigger pressed down, suddenly unsure what to do next.
The shallow pitch and roll of the trawler’s deck decided for him. Unable to let go of the heavy oar, the weight of it cost Stepan his balance, and he teetered backward over the guard rail, pulling the taser out of Alex’s grip as he went. The thug slipped into the water with barely a splash, and Alex didn’t see him come up again, briefly catching sight of the oar bobbing in the trawler’s foamy wake before it too was lost.
He hesitated, straining to hear over the chugging engine, listening for any sign of alarm. Nothing.
Alex took a deep, shaky breath and started forward.
Kate slowly raised her hands as the steely mass of Finn’s gun pressed against her skull.
From across the hangar, the rattle and bang of weapons continued unabated as Hamid waged his one-man battle against his former comrades, but for Kate the melee had contracted down to the distance between the pull of Finn’s trigger and the fall of his pistol’s hammer.
She felt a colossal pressure building inside her head, like the mother of all migraines, as if the catastrophic power of the bullet in the pistol was struggling to burst out and turn her face into red mist.
‘You’ve been a pain in my balls from minute one,’ Finn told her, punctuating each word with a blunt nudge from the pistol barrel. ‘If that idiot Price had done as he was told, none of this would have happened. I had a plan, a simple plan. You messed it up.’
‘Sorry not sorry,’ she managed.
He grabbed her by the shoulder and spun her round, glancing left and right into the shadows. ‘Where’s Breeze?’
‘Slipped away,’ she lied. ‘So you won’t get your bonus, will you? That’s if you ever would have seen any money. Nasir strikes me as the type who would rather deal in lead instead of silver.’
A flicker of doubt crossed Finn’s expression, but then it vanished under a crushing scowl. ‘Doesn’t matter. I’m finished with you.’
He pulled the pistol’s trigger and Kate flinched, ready for the world to explode, but the semi-automatic gave out an oily click as the mechanism jammed solid. Finn swore and pulled at the gun’s slide.
Kate remembered back on the plane – when Finn had used his gun like a hammer to smash their phones and the tracking device Breeze had secreted on herself – and she recalled something else, a truism that her firing instructor had drilled into his trainees back in the day.
Use your sidearm for making the other bloke fall down and nothing else. You bang it about like some pillock and, I promise you, it’ll let you down right when you need it the most.
She kicked Finn as hard as she could in the crotch, her foot connecting with his bollocks with a satisfyingly solid impact. As he recoiled, Kate burst into motion to flee across the hangar.
Finn finally unjammed the gun and hobbled after her, firing as he moved. Bullets zipped past her head and Kate swore in fright.
Then, ahead of her, a stocky figure slumped beside a crate raised the rifle she had tossed away moments before and let off the rest of the clip.
Kate ducked as Breeze fired past her, cutting down Finn in mid-run. The bearded man spun and crashed into a pile of oily tarpaulins. He didn’t move again.
The echo of the rifle discharge faded and the hangar sizzled with spent gunpowder and the moans of the wounded. But for the moment Kate forgot that and rushed to the woman who had saved her life.
‘That asshole.’ Breeze coughed wetly. ‘Did I ever tell you? I hate hipsters.’ Breeze let the weapon drop. ‘All that artisanal, organic bullshit they love. I just want a cheeseburger.’ She gave a weak sob. ‘Oh man, I really want a cheeseburger before I die. How dumb is that?’
Kate helped her up, to sit atop the crate. ‘You’re not done yet.’
‘Optimist,’ she managed. ‘Shoulda had that knocked out of you by now.’
‘Oh, you know me, I’m a ray of bloody sunshine,’ Kate retorted. ‘Wait here.’
She returned to Finn’s corpse and rolled him over, grimacing as she searched his pockets. Hamid emerged from the shadows, still clutching at his rifle, and his wolf-like gaze found her. ‘I killed the others. We cannot delay. More are coming.’
Kate couldn’t hold his gaze for more than a second. He was somehow transformed by the act of the kill, and it was chilling. Aboard the plane, before they left Ridley Hill, the man called Yusuf had appeared to be a weak, fragile soul. Someone terrified of their own shadow.
And then he had changed right in front of her, dropping that persona like a snake shedding its skin, becoming Hamid, the cold-eyed and clinical terrorist.
Now she saw something new, perhaps the final layer that hid beneath that version of himself. Kate saw a murderer in his element, splashed with blood, teeth bared. ‘What are you doing?’ he demanded.
‘Re-arming,’ she told him. Kate recovered Finn’s pistol, working the slide to make sure it was fully clear, then helped herself to the dead man’s spare ammunition. Unseen by Hamid, she found and concealed the sat phone Finn had brandished earlier.
‘We have to get to the aircraft,’ said Hamid. ‘I need you to fly it, but not her.’ Once again, he aimed the rifle at Breeze.
‘I won’t leave her here,’ insisted Kate. ‘Non-negotiable.’
Hamid spat angrily on the ground and strode away, without waiting to see if they followed.
Kate put Breeze back on her feet again, and they supported one another, limping out into the cool, dry night. Off toward the main block of buildings, Kate heard men shouting and saw flashlights moving against the dark. Nasir’s men had been caught unawares but they were not fools. They would quickly figure out that there was only one place the escapees could be going.
The American’s head lolled against the pilot’s shoulder, and she whispered in her ear. ‘Hamid has nothing to lose. Don’t lose sight of that.’
‘I know.’
Breeze looked at her through watery, distant eyes. ‘Can you kill a man in cold blood, Katie?’
TWENTY SIX
The trawler’s name was the Margaret III, according to a weather-worn wooden plaque on the hull, and she motored along at a steady clip, staying out from the shore but following the line of it, rolling every few moments as a low wave brushed her hull.
Alex moved up from the stern, planting each foot carefully, well aware that his cheap off-brand trainers didn’t have a good grip to them, and one wrong move might cause him to slip on the wet deck.
Above, the vault of a cold, dark night ranged from horizon to horizon, dotted with the bright pinpricks of stars. Alex looked and found Polaris, getting his bearings. The boat was sailing east across Tankerton Bay, in the direction of the yawning black void that marked the beginning of the English Channel. Behind them and to the northwest, he could see the retreating lights of Southend-on-Sea, and to the south along the coast was the seaside edge of Whitstable town. Across the water, the distances were hard to judge.
He kept his eyes fixed on the wheelhouse in front of him. Raised up on a platform in front of the trawler’s main cabin, the little flying bridge was no larger than a garden shed, glassed in on all sides with grimy windows. Luka, the man at the wheel, stood hunched forward, scanning the black horizon intently. If he decided to abruptly take a look over his shoulder, he would see Alex immediately. There was no real cover on the open deck, just a few yellow plastic barrels and rusting metal lockers.
Alex could see a marine band radio up in the wheelhouse mounted on the control panel. If he could reach it, he could use it to contact the Coast Guard and help would come quickly. But to do that, he would need to deal with Luka first, and the only weapon he’d had on him – Constable Grace’s borrowed taser – now lay at the bottom of the bay.
He sucked in a breath of damp air and stiffened. His son George was somewhere on the boat, and every instinct in him told Alex to abandon everything rational and go charging in after the boy. But what would that get him?
