Red Strike

by Chris Ryan

  ‘Please,’ Lansbury begged. ‘No.’

  ‘Tell us where Volkov is going.’

  Lansbury hesitated, weeping and sniffing. Porter held the cigarette lighter, ready to give the guy another hit.

  ‘Do it,’ Bald growled.

  ‘No!’ Lansbury cried. ‘Jesus, I’ll tell you! But I need some assurances first.’

  Bald looked at him. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The minute I tell you about Volkov, the Russians will realise I’m the one behind the leak. They already have their suspicions, after that bug they found on me this morning. If you want me to talk, you need to get me out of here. Take me back home.’

  Bald and Porter swapped a knowing look. Both of them reaching the same conclusion. There was no time to lose. They couldn’t afford to sit in the wagon for much longer, torturing Lansbury until he spilled his guts. Soon enough someone at the gathering would start wondering where the guy had gone. And go looking for him.

  We need answers. Now.

  ‘Sure,’ Porter said after a pause. ‘Me and Jock will help you escape.’

  ‘You promise?’

  ‘You have my word. But you need to tell us what you know about Volkov.’

  Lansbury swallowed and took a breath. Nodded. His right hand holding the wrist of his fucked-up left hand. ‘Look, all I know is, he’s being taken to a private airfield.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Near a place called Békés. In the east of the country. A hundred miles away. Some old Soviet base. The Russians are sending over a jet to meet him there.’

  ‘The Russians?’ Porter repeated.

  Lansbury nodded. ‘He’s being taken back to Moscow ahead of the press conference. The Kremlin is going to parade him in front of the British Embassy at ten o’clock tomorrow morning. All the world’s media are going to be there. It’s a big event.’

  Bald puffed out his cheeks. ‘Kolotov ain’t shy about rubbing our noses in it. He’ll be asking Robbie Williams to perform at this thing next.’

  ‘He wants to make a big deal out of the event. He’s going to have Volkov walk out on a stage for maximum impact. This is a major coup for Kolotov,’ Lansbury said. ‘He’s got big plans for Volkov, apparently.’

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘Volkov. He was bragging to me at our meeting earlier. Reckons that he’s going to be a star in Russia. A returning hero. He kept making demands of the FSB agents, asking them for a bigger jet to fly back in, an apartment in a nicer area of Moscow, that sort of thing. The agents told him that he’d get his reward at the airfield. He seemed excited about that.’

  Porter frowned. ‘What reward?’

  ‘He didn’t say. But Volkov was adamant that he wasn’t getting on the plane before he got his reward. He seemed very insistent on that point. That’s all I know.’

  Porter said, ‘What time is that jet coming in?’

  ‘Ten o’clock, I was told.’

  ‘How many guys has he got with him?’

  Lansbury thought for a second. ‘Six FSB agents. The same ones he arrived with earlier. That’s all.’

  ‘Anyone else?’

  ‘Not as far as I’m aware. I’ve told you everything. I don’t know anything else, I swear.’

  Bald scratched his stubbly jaw, glanced at the dash clock. Twenty twenty-two hours. Twenty minutes since Volkov had bugged out with his FSB heavies. A hundred-mile drive would take them around two hours, he guessed. They wouldn’t be taking it slow, not with a high-value package in the back seat. The Russians would be going flat out all the way to the airfield. Which meant they would arrive at around 22.00 hours. The jet wouldn’t take off immediately. There would be a delay before they could get underway again. Logistics. Routine checks and procedures. Maybe fifteen minutes.

  If we leave now and floor it, we’ve still got a slight chance of catching the Russians before they can make good their escape.

  Lansbury looked at him expectantly. ‘Well? What’s the plan?’

  ‘Plan?’ Bald repeated.

  ‘For getting me out of here.’

  Lansbury waited for them to elaborate.

  ‘About that,’ said Bald.

  He sprang open the passenger side door, slid out and dragged Lansbury from the Volvo, throwing him to the ground. Lansbury cried weakly as he collapsed to the loose gravel. He struggled to his feet, glowering at Bald.

  ‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing?’

  ‘We’re leaving. You’re staying put. End of.’

  ‘But you gave me your word!’ Lansbury hissed.

  ‘Porter did. But he’s unreliable. As for me, I couldn’t give a fuck. Now piss off back to your big bash.’ He jabbed a finger at Lansbury. ‘Mention this to your Russian mates, and we’ll make sure they know who was behind the recording.’

  Lansbury’s facial muscles were twitching with fury. ‘You can’t leave me! We had a fucking deal!’

  ‘Here.’ Bald tossed Lansbury the challenge coin. ‘Souvenir. Next time we see you, we’ll buy you a pint of bitter.’

  Bald closed the rear door and slipped into the front passenger seat. Porter stared at him. ‘What’s going on? We’re just leaving the bastard?’

  ‘Just drive,’ Bald said.

  Porter fired up the engine and pulled away from the garage, leaving Lansbury in the shadows, clutching his SAS coin. He wheeled the Volvo clockwise around the carriage circle and bowled down towards the front gate. The guards let them roll right through, no questions asked. They didn’t give a shit about anyone leaving the gathering. They were only worried about people trying to get in.

  Porter hooked left on the main road, pointing the Volvo in the same direction the Russians had gone. When they were a hundred metres clear of the castle he said, ‘That was a mistake. We should have taken him with us. What if he spills the beans to his mates?’

  ‘He won’t,’ Bald replied. ‘He’s got too much to lose.’

  ‘You don’t know that, Jock.’

  ‘Yeah, I do.’ He tapped the side of his head. ‘Think about it. If he fesses up to the Russians, he’ll be automatically signing his own death warrant. They’ve got doubts about Lansbury anyway. That’s why they honey-trapped Jansen into spying on him. If he spins them a story about us working for MI6, they’re going to assume he was in on it from the beginning.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘It’s a fucking certainty, mate. Besides,’ Bald added. ‘If we had slotted him or lifted him from the party, that would have made the Russians suspicious.’

  Porter cracked a half-smile. ‘For a moment back there,’ he said, ‘I thought you were going soft in your old age.’

  ‘Me?’ Bald laughed. ‘Not a fucking chance.’

  Porter kept his foot to the pedal while Bald brought up the encrypted screen on his iPhone. As he pulled up Strickland’s number he glanced over at the fuel gauge. The needle was slanted past the half-full mark. They had just enough gas in the tank to reach the airfield before heading on to a second RV. But running out of fuel was the least of their problems, Bald realised. They had only the slightest possibility of reaching the airport before the Russians left with Volkov on the private jet. He put their chances of success at somewhere between five and ten per cent.

  Better than nothing.

  He dialled Strickland. She answered on the first ring. Bald imagined her in a windowless room in Vauxhall, sitting by the secure phone, waiting anxiously for their call.

  ‘Well?’ she asked breathlessly.

  ‘The FSB are taking Volkov to an airfield. Two hours due east of here, some place called Békés. They’re flying him back to Moscow.’

  Bald told her everything they’d learned from Lansbury. He told her about the planned press conference, and the reward waiting for Volkov once they arrived at Békés.

  ‘Where are you now?’ she asked.

  ‘We just left the castle. On our way to the airfield. We’re going as fast as we can, but we’re gonna need some backup when we get there. Volkov has got
six heavies with him, armed with compact rifles.’

  Bald sketched out the rough plan he’d formed inside his head. He told Strickland that they would need to RV with the reinforcements somewhere near the airfield, put the drop on the Russians and leg it with Volkov to a friendly environment. It would be a close-run thing, but it was their best hope of foiling the Kremlin’s plot.

  Strickland listened in silence. Then she said, ‘I need you to turn around.’

  Bald felt his chest hitch. ‘What the fuck for?’

  ‘We need you to head to Kalmár. I’ll text you the precise coordinates.’

  ‘Kalmár?’ Bald vaguely recognised the name from his study of the area around Budapest, back at the briefing room. A small town, a dot on a map. ‘But that’s west of here. Towards the river. That’s the wrong fucking direction.’

  ‘What’s your point?’

  ‘This is a load of bollocks,’ Bald said. ‘We need to be heading east, not west. This is our only chance of getting to Volkov, and you’re sending us back the way we came.’

  ‘You have your orders,’ Strickland replied sternly in her Glaswegian accent. ‘Hurry there now. Someone will meet you at the RV at 21.00 hours. You’ll receive a full briefing then.’

  She clicked off the call. Bald was left staring into the black void of the road ahead. Three seconds later his phone vibrated with a new text message, from an unknown number. A link to Google Maps. Bald tapped on it, brought up the maps screen. He switched to the satellite view and pinched out with his thumb and forefinger, zooming in on the location. There was a red pin over the end of a dirt track, approximately two miles east of Kalmár. Nothing there, as far as Bald could tell. Just a wide circular clearing flanked by dense woodland. The pin-drop was twenty-four miles from their present location. A thirty-minute drive away.

  He relayed their orders to Porter while he punched the details into the Volvo’s built-in satnav.

  Porter kept his eyes on the road and said, ‘Why would they send us in the opposite direction? That makes no bloody sense.’

  Bald said, ‘I can think of one reason.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Strickland’s lost her nerve. She doesn’t want to risk a noisy attack in a friendly country. We’re not being sent to an RV, mate. We’re being sent to a fucking debrief.’ He shook his head in bitter frustration. ‘They’re sending us home.’

  THIRTY-ONE

  They turned the Volvo around and drove east in angry silence.

  Heading away from Volkov.

  Towards the new RV.

  Bald kept a cautious eye on the satnav, tracking their progress. The on-board computer estimated their time of arrival at 20.59 hours. A full hour before the Russians would reach the airfield to the east. Bald felt a rage firing inside his guts. Sixty minutes from now, the FSB was going to extract a major target from the country. They would deliver Volkov on a plate to their paymasters at the Kremlin. President Kolotov would hold his press conference and chalk up another PR victory over the West. And Six was going to let them get away with it.

  The voice inside his head wondered if there was something else going on. We’ve learned all this top-secret stuff about a populist conspiracy with Russia to break up NATO. And we know that Six covered up the story about Volkov being lifted from the safe house.

  Me and Porter are loose ends, the voice said.

  Maybe this isn’t a debrief.

  Maybe Six is planning to knock us on the head.

  Bald tried to rationalise it. Told himself that Strickland didn’t seem the type to screw them over. He’d believed her when she had promised to watch their backs no matter what. But then again, she wasn’t the one calling the shots. Moorcroft was. And Bald trusted him about as far as he could spit a grenade.

  His head started to throb. The migraine prodded at the sides of his skull, kneading his temples. He clamped his eyes shut, teeth clenched, riding it out. When he opened his eyes again he saw that they had returned to the crossroads three miles due west of Koman Castle. Porter pointed the Volvo left at the crossroads, taking them south. Deeper into the Great Plains.

  The velvet sky darkened as they continued towards the RV, the land around them faintly visible beneath the wan glow of the crescent moon. They rolled on through the flattest landscape Bald had ever seen. There were acres of farmland and telegraph poles and one-house towns that hadn’t changed in a hundred years. They passed hardly any traffic. The occasional delivery truck or rattling old Dacia pickup, hauling farming equipment and supplies. They passed grain silos and remote farms and fenced-off timber yards strewn with rusting machinery and tin-roofed shelters. The people in these parts lived a hardscrabble existence, Bald thought. Long hours of backbreaking work, grinding poverty supplemented by state handouts. The forgotten masses. They were only sixty miles from Budapest, but they might as well have been on another planet.

  Porter finally broke the silence. ‘Why would Strickland take us off the op?’

  ‘Maybe they think they don’t need Volkov after all,’ said Bald. ‘Maybe they reckon they’ve got enough with the audio of the conference.’

  ‘But Strickland told us that getting Volkov back was a matter of national security. That can’t have changed. So why tell us to turn around?’

  ‘Trying to understand how them lot at Six think is a waste of time. Might as well read the tea leaves.’

  ‘I thought you’d be pleased, Jock.’

  Bald shot him a hard look. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘The sooner we’re sent home, the sooner you can piss off and get your cosy corporate gig. Thought you hated working for Six anyway?’

  ‘Professional pride,’ said Bald. ‘I don’t give a shit about the Firm. But I didn’t put in the hard yards just so some Russian prick can go home and get a pat on the back from his great leader.’

  ‘You sure there’s not more to it than that?’

  Bald gazed out of the side window. The migraine was scurrying like ants across his skull. He thought back to Playa del Carmen. The two hitmen sent to put the drop on him.

  The president ordered the hit himself.

  ‘Let’s just say I’ve got a vested interest in wiping the smile from Kolotov’s face,’ he said.

  Porter glanced inquisitively at Bald, but the latter said nothing more. Bald hadn’t shared the story about the Russian hitmen back in Mexico with his mucker, and he wasn’t about to confess now. He didn’t want to give Porter the satisfaction. It would just give the guy an excuse to launch into another one of his moralising sermons. You can’t go on like this forever, Jock, sooner or later it’s all going to catch up with you. All that shite. So he kept his mouth shut and turned his mind to thoughts of revenge. Kolotov and his cronies had been prepared to put him six feet under. Bald had been looking forward to returning the favour; lifting Volkov would have gone a long way towards levelling the scores. Now he wouldn’t get the opportunity.

  They lapsed into silence again. Another mile passed.

  20.48 hours. Eleven minutes to the RV.

  Porter said, ‘Something doesn’t make sense. Why would Volkov be working with the Russians? They’re the ones who poisoned him. They wanted him dead.’

  ‘Simple,’ Bald said. ‘They’re paying him off, and threatening to kill him if he doesn’t cooperate.’

  Porter chewed on the thought, shook his head. ‘But Volkov has been on Moscow’s shit list for years. He’s given up hundreds of undercover agents to the Brits, and now he suddenly turns around and cuts a deal with the Kremlin? It doesn’t add up.’

  ‘He’s a double agent,’ Bald reminded him. ‘Bastard has got no loyalty. Doesn’t know the meaning of the word. He’s only in it for himself.’

  ‘Sounds like you, Jock.’

  ‘Fuck off, mate. I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve done some bad shit in my time, but I’ve never sold out my own mates to the bloody enemy. I’m telling you, this bloke would sell out his own gran if there was a few quid in it for him.’
/>
  Porter wasn’t convinced. ‘Volkov wouldn’t go back to Moscow willingly. Too much heat. There has to be something in it for him.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘I don’t know. But whatever it is, it’s got to be something big.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter,’ said Bald. ‘We’re off the op. A week from now I’ll be making the big bucks in my new job, and this will be someone else’s problem.’

  Porter studied his mucker closely. ‘You’ll hate it. Working in a cubicle for some big fuck-off multinational. You’ll be climbing the walls before long.’

  ‘Rather be doing that than working for Moorcroft and his gang. Anything’s better than that. They’re a fucking cancer.’

  ‘Strickland isn’t so bad.’

  ‘She’s a good lass,’ Bald agreed. ‘But she’s one person in a building full of back-stabbing twats. You want my advice, you should get out of there.’

  ‘I can’t quit,’ Porter said. ‘This is all I’m good at. It’s all I’ve got.’

  ‘Bollocks. That’s just a lame excuse. You’re happy playing it safe, taking bullshit orders, being kept under the thumb. Should engrave that on your gravestone.’

  ‘I’ve got my daughter to think about,’ Porter replied tetchily. ‘Sandy’s raising a kid by herself. She needs her old man around to help out. I can’t just chuck my job and go on some big fucking adventure like you.’

  Bald laughed drily. ‘Your life is tragic.’

  ‘That’s rich, coming from the bloke who lost a million in gold and ended up on his arse in Mexico.’

  ‘Minor setback. Temporary blip. I’ll get that big money sooner or later.’

  ‘Keep telling yourself that, mate. But I’m the one with the steady career, the family. All that badness you’ve done, and what have you got to show for it? Fuck all.’

  ‘Better than being a Vauxhall stooge,’ Bald said.

  ‘I’m serving my country.’

  Bald laughed again. ‘Jesus, you sound like a green army recruitment ad. You’ll be telling me it’s okay to be emotional next.’

  ‘I’m still an operator, at least. I get to do what I do best.’