Exile

by James Swallow

  The tip went into Saito’s body just below his right clavicle, the force of his forward momentum making it sink in all the way to the hilt. He screamed in agony and struck out with hysterical force, slamming away his attacker with all his might.

  Marc reeled back as though he had been kicked by a mule, as the crowd let out an enthusiastic whoop. He struck the guide rail around the raised platform and rolled over it, colliding with the pirate hacker and knocking him sprawling.

  And then the thugs were fumbling to bring up their weapons again as Marc elbowed the rifleman guarding the steel case in the belly and he folded. Marc snatched at the device, hauling it up and around in front of him.

  He clutched the case to his chest like a shield, opened outward so everyone could see his hands gripping the shell of the detonator frame. ‘Back off!’ shouted Marc, retreating until he was flat against the steel wall of the compartment.

  ‘What . . .’ Saito was finding it hard to breathe with six inches of dagger stuck in him. ‘Are you . . . going to do?’

  Marc visualised the technical diagrams from the NATO Exile files in his mind’s eye and the fingers of his right hand splayed across the workings of the bomb, blindly feeling for a thick nest of wires connecting to the explosive detonator matrix. His left hand cupped the cylinder that contained the nuclear payload of the device, the hemispheres of enriched uranium that would be shot into one another to unleash the horrific fires of a fission detonation.

  No-one was shouting now.

  He heard Jalsa Sood’s dying words in the silence. Right cylinder. Nine rods. Marc’s fingertips brushed over the cold metal of the frame and he counted out the numbers as his thumb brushed over the tips of the rods.

  ‘Put it down,’ Saito ordered. ‘Before you . . . destroy us all.’

  ‘Piss off,’ said Marc, and he grabbed the bundle of wires in his fist. ‘I’m not sure what will happen if I rip these out. Who wants to see? I guarantee you won’t want to be this close!’

  From the far side of the compartment, Ramaas brought his hands together in a slow clap. ‘Very brave, policeman. How long do you think you can hold it?’

  ‘Not long,’ Marc admitted. The case was heavier than he expected, and he was gripping it awkwardly. ‘Better start swimming.’

  Some of the warlord’s gunmen were backing away, and Ramaas snarled at them in the local dialect.

  ‘Release the device,’ said Saito. He was pale and sweaty, but still unswervingly on-mission. ‘Turn it over to me.’

  ‘It belongs to the Russian Federation,’ said the GRU agent.

  The surviving North Korean delegate pushed his way forward. ‘It belongs to us!’

  ‘Policeman won’t pull the wires,’ snorted Ramaas. ‘He does not have the courage to go to God and take us all with him.’

  Marc sniggered, a sudden nervous urge to laugh fighting its way up out of his chest. Damn, this case weighs a ton! He grinned wildly at the room. ‘Here’s the thing, Ramaas. You’ve lied about everything, every time. Just hiding one lie underneath another. And I reckon this is no different.’

  He yanked hard on the bundle of wires. They came away in his hand with a fizz of electric discharge and Marc let the case drop to the deck.

  In that second, any sound would have been thunder.

  TWENTY-THREE

  The detonation would look like a second sunrise to the early-morning fishermen who had sailed from the coast of Puntland and Galmudug. Men looking toward it would be permanently blinded by the flash of nuclear fire out in the Gulf, and those on the shore would hear the echo of the explosion, the sound reaching as far north as Raas Casayr and all the way south to the streets of Mogadishu. Satellites in orbit would see it happen, a ball of sun-hot plasma engulfing the derelict gas rig in a millisecond, atomising thousands of tons of steel and concrete and seawater –

  The idea of it overwhelmed Lucy and suddenly she couldn’t breathe. She pulled the shemagh from her face, her disguise forgotten. Marc’s name was forming on her lips, but he was already doing it, he was already tearing out the detonator wires from the weapon.

  He let it drop and the case clattered loudly to the floor. No-one dared to utter a word, as if they were afraid a single breath would set it off.

  And then the tension snapped like a cord reaching breaking strain. ‘It’s a fake!’ Saito bellowed the words across the compartment, the Japanese mercenary’s emotionless exterior finally cracking. ‘Another lie!’

  The same hot second of terror Lucy had felt in Dubai during the highway pursuit briefly flared and faded in her heart, a voice in her head screaming that she was not going out like this suddenly swept away by the truth.

  Dane was right, damn him. Each fake-out Ramaas served up was the cover for the one after that and the one after that.

  She grasped the full truth of it; this whole charade had never been about the bomb or the money. It was about turning the screws on the first-world nations that had used up Somalia and thrown it away, and who wanted to do so again. It was about Ramaas’s vengeful need to humiliate and degrade them, publicly and violently.

  She remembered the boy Rio and the way the old doctor’s deeply buried hatred had boiled to the surface. Ramaas was speaking with the same voice. He had been all along, but nobody had seen it. Nobody but Marc, she reflected.

  The warlord’s dark face was like captured thunder and he roared the next, inevitable command to his men, furious that the Brit had put a sudden end to his game. ‘Kill them all!’

  Every gun in the room opened up, and anarchy erupted as cordite stink filled the air. The surviving delegates scrambled for cover or dived at the nearest riflemen to get weapons of their own. Time slowed as adrenaline flowed into Lucy, and the familiar, icy rush of an unfolding fight spread through her body.

  As she pivoted, she saw the Hispanic mercenary Ruiz fall to a torrent of bullets that ripped into him and spun him about before he went down. Lucy glimpsed Saito taking a hit in the torso before he vanished from sight behind the frame of an old generator unit. Across the compartment, Simonova and her comrade were fighting for their life against a gang of brigand thugs armed with AKs and machetes.

  Lucy let instinct take over and she dropped to one knee, flicking the selector switch of the AKM in her hands to fully automatic fire. She pointed the assault rifle’s muzzle at the ceiling and squeezed the trigger. Gripping the gun tightly so that its recoil didn’t jerk it away from her, Lucy sprayed an entire magazine of 7.62mm bullets into the corroded metal of the roof and the broken ductwork hanging beneath it. Yellow sparks cascaded from the rust-chewed steel as it came apart, and whole sections of the ceiling caved in. The collapse brought with it a flood of oxidised dust and pieces of corrugated iron that fell on the men on the suspended catwalks and the compartment floor alike. Amid the melee, some of Ramaas’s thugs began to panic and fire in all directions, fearful that a retaliatory attack had begun.

  Lucy vaulted forward, coughing as the metallic dust choked her. She discarded the AKM’s spent magazine as she moved, slamming in a new one by feel and pulling the slide to ratchet a fresh round into the chamber. She found Marc on the deck, in the middle of a tussle with Ramaas’s gangly hacker sidekick. Marc swung a punch that missed and the youth hit him hard across the face with the flat of his laptop computer. It sent him sprawling and she cursed, running to his side even as the youth sprinted away.

  ‘Get up,’ she snapped, grabbing for him.

  ‘Forget about me!’ Marc retorted, shrugging off her hand. ‘Get that tosser!’ He jabbed a finger in the direction of the fleeing hacker.

  Lucy spun around, leading with the rifle, in time to see Ramaas and the youth disappear through a hatchway, with a handful of his men following. He was bugging out, once again leaving nothing but chaos in his wake.

  ‘Go, go!’ shouted Marc.

  Her jaw set and she ran, moving and firing short bursts to clear their way. Marc came after her, and she heard him swearing with each quick, limping footfal
l he took.

  *

  They made it out of the killing room with shots chopping at their heels, and Marc gave a groan as he leaned on a hatch to shut it behind them and block the path, swinging it closed under his body weight. He dogged the latches as heavy blows rained down on the frame, and lurched away. The pain in his knee was a razor across bone, but he couldn’t falter, not now.

  ‘This way.’ Lucy pointed down a narrow, shadowed corridor with the blade of her hand. ‘Sure you can keep up?’

  ‘Easy,’ he said, through gritted teeth, going after her as she set off again.

  As they moved, Lucy had her rifle close to her shoulder to aim down the AKM’s iron sights. ‘I cannot believe that shit you pulled back there. Did you even think for one second what would happen if you were wrong?’ She almost choked on the word.

  ‘I wasn’t wrong,’ he replied.

  ‘You are either stupid or incredibly lucky,’ she retorted. ‘We get out of here alive? We’re gonna go to Vegas and find out for sure . . .’

  ‘Sod off,’ Marc retorted, and shook his head. ‘I’m not going to waste it on playing blackjack. I’ll save it up for the important stuff, thanks.’ He coughed out stale air. ‘Anyhow. I wasn’t lucky, I was right. That’s all there is to it. Soon as I saw the case, I knew he was playing us for fools.’

  Something clanked off the deck up ahead and both of them instinctively flattened themselves against the walls. The reaction saved their lives, as bright muzzle flares in the gloom up ahead briefly illuminated the snarling faces of Ramaas’s shooters.

  Lucy fired back and heard a strangled cry as one of them fell. ‘They’re running interference for Ramaas! He’s gonna rabbit, I know it!’

  ‘He doesn’t matter,’ said Marc. ‘That laptop, though . . . We have to get it! Anything else is secondary!’

  ‘Did you forget we still don’t know where the weapon is?’

  ‘And you reckon Ramaas will actually tell us? After all this?’ Marc shook his head. ‘Not gonna happen. But we take the computer and this ends.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because a machine can’t lie!’ Marc shot back, flinching as a bullet shrieked off the wall near his head. ‘I know why Rubicon didn’t pick up any cell chatter from Ramaas and his lieutenants . . . It’s ’cause they don’t use phones! They’re on voice-over-Internet comms, all digital. That’s how we track the bomb!’

  Lucy ducked down to take a breath. ‘When did you figure that out?’

  ‘A minute ago,’ Marc admitted. ‘When laughing boy clocked me with the laptop.’ The answer had literally smacked him in the face.

  Lucy’s eyes narrowed. ‘Okay.’ She launched herself out of cover with a yell and darted across the corridor, firing a long burst from the AKM on the run. There was another strangled scream and the heavy fall of a body.

  Marc raced after her, moving as fast as he could manage. He almost stumbled over the gunmen Lucy had taken out and blinked in the smoky dimness. Glancing around, he picked out debris-choked stairs, one set leading up toward the top decks of the old rig, another down toward the concrete support pillar and the lower tiers. The metal steps rattled and echoed, making it hard to be sure where the sound was coming from.

  Lucy aimed the rifle up, listening. ‘Someone there,’ she said. ‘Moving.’

  ‘Yeah . . .’ Marc crouched and pulled an AKMS – the folding-stock version of the rifle Lucy was carrying – from the hands of one of the dead men. The gun was dirty with salt-water corrosion and strapped together with threadbare wraps of duct tape, but it was better than being unarmed. He checked the gun and searched the corpses for ammunition clips, divided what he found with Lucy. Then he froze, holding his breath ‘You hear that?’

  Back along the corridor they had travelled down, the noise of rusted hinges sounded sharply. ‘They’re coming up behind us,’ Lucy told him, heading for the stairwell. ‘C’mon, we gotta go.’

  Marc held out a hand to stop her. ‘Wait. We go up, what’s there?’

  Even in the dimness, he could see the look on her face was saying, What do you think, idiot? ‘The helipad. Ramaas gets on one of the choppers and he’s gone.’ As she said the words, both of them heard a clanking noise from high above – a hatch closing.

  ‘And if that’s another fake-out?’ He leaned close. ‘Ramaas is a sailor, yeah? He’s under pressure . . . He’s going to go for a boat, go for what he knows.’ Marc pointed down the stairwell, in the direction of the docking platform below decks.

  ‘You sure about that? A helo would be the smarter option.’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ he admitted, and Lucy swore under her breath. ‘But we can’t chance it. You go for the helipad, I’ll go down to the dock.’ He scrambled over the debris and slipped down onto the descending staircase.

  ‘Do not get killed,’ Lucy called after him.

  ‘You and me both,’ he called back, heading into the darkness.

  *

  It was hard to move quietly. The metal stairs were choked with trash that had been left behind from when the drilling rig had been abandoned, and Lucy picked her way around slumped panels and sections where whole steps were missing entirely.

  Two levels up, she started to get a little more light leaking in from along the corridor, but the morning sun was still low and if anything it made the places where the shadows fell run deeper and darker. In the distance, she could hear the cries of the pirate gunmen as they argued with one another and scoured the decks of the platform for someone else to kill.

  She hazarded a glance at the glowing hands of her tactical watch. How long did they have before someone decided to come looking for their people? Lucy guessed that the militaries who had sent men in to meet with Ramaas would not wait for ever for their operatives to contact them. And with all their radios and comms gear at the bottom of the rig’s central shaft, that wasn’t going to happen any time soon.

  Metal clattered on metal, back in the direction of the machine room. Lucy whirled and aimed toward the source of the sound. A sliding hatch juddered open and two figures emerged. She was a heartbeat away from gunning them down when she heard a gruff male voice curse in coarse Russian.

  ‘Rada?’ She didn’t let the gun drop. ‘That you?’

  ‘Keyes?’ Simonova came into view, her taciturn comrade moving awkwardly behind her. ‘You got out of there. I shouldn’t be surprised.’

  ‘Same here.’ Lucy could see that Simonova’s associate was bleeding badly from a wound in his torso. ‘That looks nasty.’

  ‘No, Dmitry always looks that way,’ said the other woman. ‘Where is your friend?’

  ‘Around.’ Lucy wasn’t about to completely trust the GRU operative, but then again they had already come to something approaching a temporary détente. ‘Job’s not done yet.’

  ‘It is for us. Let me remind you of my earlier advice.’ Simonova pushed past her, dragging a liberated rifle of her own. ‘Don’t be here. A contingency is already in progress.’

  ‘Care to elaborate on that?’ Lucy asked the question, but she already knew the answer. Somewhere out there, the Russians were preparing to destroy the derelict rig. For all she knew, there could be a flight of ship-launched cruise missiles on approach, hugging the wave-tops to stay beneath the radar detection threshold. She shook off the worrying image. ‘Okay, fine. Follow me . . .’

  ‘Great minds think alike,’ said Simonova.

  *

  The deck plates beneath Marc’s feet creaked alarmingly with each footfall, and here and there he could see right through rusted holes in the metal plating and down to the sea a few hundred metres below. The lowest level of the rig was clamped to the underside of the platform’s engine-block silhouette, festooned with gantries that led down to the boat dock floating on the water’s surface, and conduits that had once held heavy-gauge pipes for transferring natural gas to waiting ships. Like a lot of Calypso XV’s structure, the rig was riddled with voids where valuable machine sections had been cut out and
removed for scrap after the site was deserted.

  The only ambient illumination was coming from the sullen reflection of the sunrise off the water, and right now Marc would have traded anything for a flashlight. Wind whistling up through the holes in the hull made everything creak and moan. It was impossible to be sure if someone else was walking around out there, with every grind of metal on metal the possible signal of an incoming attack.

  He was sweating, and an instinct he couldn’t fully articulate made him halt in place. Marc dropped quietly into a crouch and held his breath, listening. He laid a hand flat on the steel grid plates of the deck, feeling the irregular vibrations through the metal.

  He heard a sound, like a shallow intake of breath – and it was close, dangerously so. Marc’s splayed fingers touched something, a discarded bolt lying forgotten on the edge of the walkway. He gathered it up, and then with a quick dice-throw toss, he sent it skittering away over the deck.

  The bolt bounced off a section of wall and ricocheted. Twenty metres distant along the walkway, twin fountains of fire erupted out of the darkness as two guns opened up in the direction of the noise.

  Marc pointed the AKMS a few degrees back past the point of the nearest muzzle flare, aiming to where he hoped the shooters would be. Holding the rifle sideways, he fired, knowing that the sound and fury of his own weapon would immediately give away his location.

  More shrieking rounds flashed off the frames and the decking, and the first gun fell silent. Marc couldn’t see the man he hit, but the shooter was mortally wounded and screaming in horrible agony. The sound cut into Marc and made his gut twist, but he was already moving as the second shooter turned in place to fire back in his direction.

  The floor vibrated at he ran across it, and he felt a section lurch as it shifted under his weight. Marc vaulted forward and rolled away in time to see a sheet of corrugated iron and a length of decking fall and crash into one of the Zodiac inflatable boats moored down below.