Exile

by James Swallow

  THIRTEEN

  The Bearcat lurched into a jackknife skid to avoid a rank of tyre-shredding spikes and Malte accelerated into the wooden prefab guardhouse, losing only a little momentum as the APC smashed it down and rode on through the main gate in a shower of sparks.

  Marc felt himself leave the floor of the crew compartment and bounce off the wall as the vehicle listed on its shock absorbers. The APC’s heavy off-road tyres screeched, leaving black commas of rubber on the highway as Malte turned the vehicle westward and they shot away.

  Amarah was crouching low between two folding chairs attached to the bulkhead, cursing as he rocked back and forth. ‘Is he trying to kill us?’ He shouted to be heard over the roar of the engine.

  ‘Sit down and shut up.’ Marc grabbed a handhold to steady himself and squinted through one of the armoured-glass windows in the back of the Bearcat, still clutching the HK45 pistol he had taken on the way out of Strefa G. They were already accelerating away from the grounds of the black site, but the Aleph guards were not going to let them go easily. He saw movement behind them, the spindly shapes of riders on motorcycles in pursuit.

  The Bearcat swayed alarmingly again and there was a blare of horns as Malte threaded across the wrong lane, barely missing a tanker truck coming the other way. A wall of metal flashed past with a droning roar and then it was gone.

  ‘This is your plan?’ snarled Amarah.

  Marc ignored him, hesitating as a squad of four ZiD bikes closed in on them. They were coming around in a line, rapidly eroding the APC’s lead. For a moment, he thought about firing at the riders. There were small armoured doors in the flanks and the rear of the Bearcat, like arrow slits on an ancient castle, through which he could aim the HK’s muzzle. But he quickly discarded the idea; Marc’s scores on the firing range were good, but it would be a waste of ammunition trying to draw a bead on one fast-moving vehicle from the back of another. He needed a smarter solution.

  As he cast around the interior of the Bearcat, looking for something he could use, the leading Aleph rider showed no compunction in using his own weapon. Marc recoiled as a burst of bullets sparked off the back of the APC in yellow flashes. Guiding his ZiD with one hand, the lead rider had a compact submachine gun on a wrist lanyard in the other, and fired it toward the Bearcat’s shielded wheel wells in hopes of blowing out the rear tyres.

  The attacker was close enough for Marc to recognise the distinctive shape of the firearm; a Swiss-made Brügger & Thomet MP9 machine pistol. Marc had an innate tech-nerd talent for absorbing and retaining hardware specs that proved invaluable in his analyst duties, but that was usually less helpful when being shot at. It was a kind of stress-level coping mechanism. Immediately a scorecard unfolded on the twitch-level of his thoughts – the gun had a thirty-shot magazine of 9mm ammo and it was capable of discharging over nine hundred rounds per minute. While that wouldn’t be enough to chew through the Bearcat’s reinforced bodywork, the vehicle’s tyres would be shredded if the bikers could land a few hits.

  The pursuit took them through the middle of a small town in a blaze of noise and speed as desperate onlookers fled out of their path, but within moments they were back on the highway again. Malte put the APC into a swerving weave back and forth across the two lanes of the highway, but the other riders were coming up fast and all it would take was for one of them to draw a bead.

  ‘We have to thin them out,’ Marc said aloud, and he grabbed at one of the folding chairs attached to the wall. Heavy plastic butterfly clamps held the chair in place, and he stuffed the HK pistol onto his waistband so he could undo them two at a time.

  ‘What do you plan on doing?’ demanded Amarah. ‘Lighten the ship so we float away?’

  Marc jerked his head at the van’s twin rear doors. ‘Open them.’

  ‘Are you mad –?’

  ‘For crying out loud, stop running your bloody mouth and just do it!’ The chair came away in Marc’s hands and then he repeated the action with a second one.

  ‘You’ll kill us all, Britisher,’ said the terrorist, but he did as he was told. Crouching to keep himself out of the line of fire, Amarah turned the latch on the left-hand door and gave it a sharp kick as the Bearcat took a wide corner.

  The door flew open, swinging back to crash against the side of the APC, and for a split second the leading ZiD rider had to pivot into the bend to make the same turn. Marc threw the folded chair out the back of the APC in a spinning-toss motion, aiming it right into the biker’s path.

  The chair flipped up in the slipstream and cracked the rider across the face with enough force to unseat him. At such high speed, motorcycle and rider were instantly parted, the uncontrolled bike rocketed away into a roadside ditch and the Aleph mercenary slammed into the icy asphalt.

  The other bikes slowed momentarily, but none of them stopped to check on the status of their comrade. Bullets spanked off the open door and a hot round ricocheted inside the Bearcat, drawing an angry howl from Amarah.

  Marc grabbed the other chair and tried his trick a second time, but his throw was off and the metal seat bounded across the road. One of the two trailing bikes juddered over it, almost skidding into a crash, but the rider was good and he recovered. Marc reluctantly drew the HK and blind-fired a couple of shots at the chasers, before retreating back into cover around the door frame.

  He shouted toward Malte. ‘This isn’t working, man. We need to lose these creeps!’ Low hedges dusted with snow flashed past on either side of the road, and beyond them were grey, fallow fields and dense stands of trees. In his mind’s eye, Marc recalled the local map he had pored over prior to the mission and something occurred to him.

  He dashed to the front of the crew compartment, to the grille that opened into the driver’s area. ‘Take a short cut!’ Marc yelled, jabbing his finger at the fields. ‘Get us off the road!’

  Malte saw the logic in it and gave a nod. ‘Hang on,’ said the Finn, and he spun the APC’s steering wheel ninety degrees, putting them into a hard turn that was just on the right side of an uncontrolled spin.

  Something heavy and metallic crunched against the rear quarter of the Bearcat, and Marc saw that one of the ZiD riders had been coming up on the outside, only to be slammed aside when the APC pivoted.

  Malte aimed the heavy 4x4 at the hedge and the vehicle burst through it onto the frost-hardened earth of the field on the other side. The ground was rough and uneven, enough that the Bearcat’s speed bounced it high on its wheels. As the vehicle briefly caught air, Amarah lost his balance, falling back toward the open doors.

  Marc dove at him and barely caught the terrorist before he could be bounced right out of the APC, seizing fistfuls of his orange prison jumpsuit. Pain lanced through Marc’s muscles as he over-extended to haul Amarah back into the APC’s rear cabin, and the man flailed, smacking him away once he was safe. ‘Get off me!’

  ‘Next time I’ll let you faceplant in the dirt, eh?’ Marc belatedly noted that he had lost the HK45 in the heat of the moment, but for all the good it would have done he didn’t miss it.

  The last two bikes were still coming, kicking up divots of loose dirt and snow as they snarled across the field. They harried the APC like dogs trying to bring down a bigger beast, parallelling the vehicle and spraying gunfire along the armoured flanks. Malte said something that Marc guessed was a Finnish swear word, judging by the venom behind it, and then the driver put the APC into another wide turn that brought them around in a rough circle. The ZiD riders were expecting a chase, and Malte’s abrupt about-face caught both of them looking the wrong way.

  The driver aimed the APC at the closest bike and pushed the pedal to the firewall. The Aleph merc made the mistake of skidding to a halt and he grasped his machine pistol in both hands, wasting the last of his ammo in an attempt to puncture the bulletproof windscreen. Malte’s forward visibility was cut sharply by the spiderweb fractures over the toughened plastic, but he still had enough to bear down on the shooter. At the last second, the mercenary
gunned the throttle and tried to race away, but he was too slow to avoid the Bearcat’s front left quarter from slamming into his rear tyre. The bike broke in two and the rider was thrown from his saddle in a tangle of limbs.

  Marc saw movement back toward the highway. The merc he had used his improvised weapon on was still in the game. The man had lost his helmet in the crash, and Marc could make out his blood-streaked face as he came surging toward them.

  Malte didn’t wait around to play more bullfight games with the riders, and he put the APC back on course. They crashed through another hedge before speeding over a strip of fallow land and past a low, white-walled farmhouse, a blink of shocked faces at the windows as they zoomed by. The next field became a woodland and trees closed in around them, but still the chasers kept with the APC.

  Marc glanced at his watch. If their timing was off, this would fall to pieces quickly. He knew that Aleph had to be scrambling other ground units to the area at this very second, and most likely they were calling in air-support backup as well. If they had help from the Polish military, Marc and Malte would most likely find themselves in cells next to Amarah’s back in Strefa G before the day was out.

  Up ahead, the woods abruptly terminated in a high, rusting fence but by now Malte had become adept at using the Bearcat’s blunt, angular prow to make an entrance wherever he wanted it.

  They crashed through and the APC churned up mud over a stretch of grass before hitting a broad expanse of tarmac. As wide as two country roads side by side, the runway extended from the fence line and into the middle distance. The landing threshold marks and designation numbers were bright against the tarmac, and to the west Marc could see the black shadow of an airport terminal building framed against the treeline.

  Like the base at Stare Kiejkuty, the landing field that was now Olsztyn-Mazury Regional Airport had been built for the Second World War and decades later tainted by its use in unlawful renditions. Now the airstrip was open for commercial, civilian business and those darker days had been airbrushed out of its history. We’re about to give them a reminder, Marc thought grimly.

  A twin-engine propliner was nosing off the runway onto the taxi apron as the Bearcat sped past, picking up speed toward the far end of the tarmac. With nothing but level ground between them and no obstacles in their path, the remaining pair of ZiD motorcycles opened their throttles and ate up the gap between them and the fleeing APC. Malte had the Bearcat going flat out, but the bikes were still gaining on them.

  Marc looked at his watch once again, and wished that he was still hearing Lucy’s voice through the concealed comm in his glasses; but she and Kara had to be long gone by now. Following the protocol they had planned for back in Monaco, the two women would have left the area the moment Marc had thrown away the script and called for exfiltration.

  He looked up into the sky, seeing only dull clouds. Ari is super-punctual, Kara had told him. Like, he’s genetically predisposed to being on time, every time.

  ‘Hope so –’ Marc began.

  ‘There!’ Malte stabbed a finger at the treeline, and belatedly Marc saw that Ari Silber had chosen the low approach rather than the high one. A very low approach, in fact.

  The blue-and-white fuselage of a T-tailed private jet hopped the top of the trees with barely a metre between its extended undercarriage and the leafy canopy. Less than ten metres off the deck, the aircraft moved like a fighter plane on a strafing run, screaming down toward them in a blur of metal. Malte saw it coming and stamped on the brakes, slowing the Bearcat into a juddering halt. The ZiD bikes shot by, coming around to race back toward them as the jet thundered over the heads of their riders. In that moment, the pilot flared the aircraft, briefly bringing up the nose to aim the jet’s engine exhausts down at the tarmac. A searing plume of thrust blasted the bikes away like discarded toys and the APC shook as the tail end of the hot, fuel-stink gust washed over it.

  Marc couldn’t help but crack a grin as he watched the jet perform the kind of wing-over such aircraft weren’t supposed to be capable of. ‘Actually, I was wrong before,’ he said aloud. ‘Now our ride is here.’

  Malte slammed the APC into gear and raced the rest of the way to the far end of the runway, while Marc and a stunned Amarah stood at the back doors to watch the jet come back around and execute a point-perfect touchdown.

  The aircraft – a HondaJet HA-430 sporting a fake tail number and broadcasting no IFF transponder code – taxied easily up to the APC and turned, engines still idling. A hatch just behind the cockpit dropped open and Ari Silber stuck out his head. ‘We should be going,’ he said, and tapped the headset draped around his neck. ‘I’m listening to a lot of angry people.’ He grinned, his face flushed with the adrenaline of a combat landing.

  Amarah took a step toward the plane and then halted, as if he had thought better of the action. ‘Where are you taking me?’ he demanded.

  ‘You’re asking that now?’ Marc resisted the urge to smack the guy and reminded himself of the part he was playing. ‘By all means, start walking if that’s what you’d prefer. Then perhaps the Combine can break you out of another prison at some later date.’

  ‘I don’t trust you,’ Amarah said coldly. ‘We are not allies!’

  ‘Believe me, the feeling is more than mutual. But we both have something to trade, and we can’t do it here.’ Marc turned toward the jet. ‘So make up your mind. Khadir worked with us and we were not allies either. Just people with common goals.’

  Mentioning Omar Khadir’s name was enough to shock Amarah into motion and he gave a grim nod. ‘Very well.’ He pushed past Marc and climbed aboard the aircraft.

  Alone on the tarmac for a moment, Marc allowed his mask to drop and blew out an exhausted breath. He looked away and saw Malte staring at him from the driving seat of APC, expressionless. The Finn beckoned, and then scrambled aboard the jet after Amarah.

  Twenty minutes of heart-pounding, low-level, nap-of-the-earth flying later, they were racing over the Gulf of Gdansk beneath the radar-detection threshold, bearing west out of Polish airspace toward Scandinavia.

  *

  Bidar escorted the bomb-maker’s grandson onto the sun deck, but to Ramaas’s eyes the youth was acting as though he was there as his servant and not his jailer. Bidar ran a hand over his hairless scalp and glared at Kawal Sood’s back in a way that showed he wanted to bury a knife in it.

  Ramaas looked up from the maps and charts scattered over the low table in front of him, then back toward the mansion’s swimming pool. ‘What do you want?’

  Kawal gave a guarded smile. ‘I was wondering if I could get my phone back? I know security is a big deal and all, but I have my people I gotta stay in touch with . . .’

  ‘No.’ Ramaas sighed inwardly. ‘It is important no-one knows we are here. Guhaad made that clear to you.’

  ‘Well, yeah.’ Without being asked, Kawal took a seat across from the warlord. ‘But he doesn’t get it, does he? How business is done?’ Grinning, the youth leaned in, as if he was bringing Ramaas into a confidence. ‘It’s not all about guns and shit.’

  Ramaas turned slowly to face Kawal. The younger man didn’t seem to be aware of the true dynamics of the relationship between them, talking as if he was an equal, a comrade-in-arms. Kawal’s manner was copied wholesale from the bluster and swagger of the American rappers whose music the youth so admired.

  ‘Your grandfather’s work is progressing well,’ said Ramaas, watching the immediate emotional shift on the younger man’s face as he mentioned Jalsa. ‘But then he has been well motivated.’ Ramaas gestured toward the pool. The most recent addition to the bodies drifting in the tainted water was a gardener who Guhaad had selected from the staff a few hours earlier and shot dead. Apart from that daily crack of a single gunshot, the entire estate remained virtually silent.

  Kawal didn’t appear concerned by the bloated, floating corpses, his gaze turned inward to his own anger. ‘You gonna put that old bastard in there when you’re done?’ He hissed the ques
tion through gritted teeth. ‘I’d do it myself, if . . .’ Kawal drifted into silence before he accidentally admitted to his own weakness.

  ‘You have such hatred for your grandfather,’ said Ramaas. ‘And yet he is doing everything for you.’

  ‘Fuck him!’ Kawal snarled furiously, the outburst coming from nowhere. ‘He’s the one who drove my mother away when I was just a little kid!’ Abruptly, it all poured out of him. ‘And my father? He’s dead because of him!’

  ‘Indeed?’ Ramaas prompted. He already knew this story – Neven Kurjak had explained it to him on the ship from Croatia, held it up as the way through which they could get to Jalsa Sood – but he wanted to hear the youth say it.

  ‘Fucking terrorist asshole,’ Kawal went on, his eyes shining. ‘My dad blew himself up working on one of that old bastard’s bombs. And he never said he was sorry about it!’ The youth looked away, rubbing at his face, and when he spoke again there was a note of deep sorrow in his words. ‘There was nothing left to bury.’

  ‘A tragedy,’ offered Ramaas. Neven explained how the death of Jalsa’s son had been the catalyst for the bomb-maker’s retirement from the game. He cashed out soon after, maintaining few contacts and very rarely taking on blind commissions from the Kurjaks – but the choice came too late for Kawal. Sood’s grandson hated his grandfather with a directionless, white-hot fury.

  Kawal stood up suddenly, abruptly enough for Bidar to drop his hand to his gun. The youth didn’t notice. ‘I don’t care no more. Once he’s gone, all this belongs to me.’ He took in the mansion with a sweep of his hand. ‘Then I get the money and I am in charge!’

  Ramaas eyed him. ‘There are more important things than money.’

  ‘Oh, right?’ Kawal turned on him, gesturing aggressively. ‘Ain’t you a pirate? What’s that if not for the money, man?’

  ‘I have a cause.’ Ice formed on the words and suddenly Ramaas was bored with the youth and his conceits. ‘What I am doing is for my God and my nation.’