One last push, Max.
I had to get clear, and fast. Depending on who had picked up the emergency beacon signal—and what they could see with their eyes in the sky—a cruise missile strike could be imminent. I was in danger of being killed by my own plan. I figured the airstrip at Soron was my best bet. If there was no plane there, then I could jump the border into Guinea. Without orders to follow or an enemy to kill, I hoped the Sleepers would stay still long enough for me to figure out what to do with them—or to them—if no strike came. None were nearby now.
The cutlass had been knocked out of my hand. As I stooped down to look for it, the ground rose up to meet me, and I fell to my knees, retching.
Come on, man. Get a grip.
I spread my hands out on the ground to steady myself and looked around for something—anything—to drink. I needed water more than I needed a weapon, but there was none to be had. As I perched on all fours, summoning the strength for the last stretch, a shadow crept up behind me.
“You made it, then?”
Her voice had lost the hard edge of the interrogation room. In its place was that familiar sadness. I turned around and tried to stand but collapsed back into the dirt. I looked up at her, but the sun was bright behind her. There was blood on her face and a pistol in her hand.
“Yeah,” I said. “Seems so.” There was nothing but death around us. Already a gyre of vultures twisted up into the sky above. I looked at the hut. The blast door was still closed, but I could hear movement. The Sleepers trapped inside were trying to get out.
Whoever Ana María was, and however handy she was with a semiautomatic, it seemed inconceivable that she could have survived the onslaught.
“How?” she asked.
“I swam. You?”
“The same way Vladislav went down.” For a moment I was lost. And then I remembered. Colonel Proshunin, Colonel Vladislav Proshunin. When my father was shot, Proshunin’s hands were empty. No pistol. My father’s body would have taken the brunt of the blast. I looked closely at her fatigues. They were torn, and she bled from shrapnel wounds in her arm and shoulder.
“You,” I said. “You were in the room.” She stepped to the side, and I was blinded by the sun. I shielded my eyes with the back of my hand. “You shot him. You shot him in the back.”
“He was a traitor. Faithless. Like father, like son.” I opened my eyes and squinted at her silhouette. She pointed the barrel of the pistol at my chest. I spat into the dust. Blood and saliva clung to my unshaved chin. “But he delivered to us what we need. What you both would have destroyed.”
“You think Moscow gives a fuck?” I laughed. “They tried to start a war. They failed. They’ll try again somewhere else. So it goes. No, you’re on your own, sweetheart. I turned them, and you can’t escape them. They’ll find you. And they’ll kill you. It’s over. Whatever this was, it’s finished. You’re finished.”
“Oh no, Max. We’ve only just begun. Colonel Proshunin was a patriot, a true Russian martyr. You didn’t stop him, Max. And you never could have.”
She was starting to sound like my father. I wasn’t going to be able to reason with her any more than I could with him.
“Bullshit,” I sighed. “The science is blown to bits, and those fucking monsters will tear you to pieces. We’d make it, you and I. You don’t stand a chance on your own.”
“You and I?” She rolled her shoulders and adjusted her grip on the pistol. “¡Coño! You were right about one thing in Caracas. It was you I’d been waiting for all these years. Your father’s work is pumping around your veins. Your blood is the price of our victory, Max. A life for life. Your life.”
“But why here, why now? Why not in the room, in the chair?”
She laughed then. A sad, arrogant laugh that evaporated in the gathering heat of the morning.
“You understand so little about something for which you have risked so much. The code, Max. The code. With your blood we can create the virus and the vaccine. But we can’t control them. We couldn’t control them—not when they first awake. He would never have told us how, and you didn’t even know that you knew it. Colonel Proshunin released the Sleepers to fulfill his mission. And now that I have fulfilled mine, you will die like the mercenary dog you are.”
“I am what I am.”
“Your father created the greatest weapon the world has ever known. And you gave us the trigger. Remember that, Max McLean, when you stand before your God.” She cocked the hammer on the 9mm. I clenched my fists.
“You know,” I said, “Frank’s mate was right,” and turned my eyes up toward the heavens. “Next time, shoot the bitch.”
I blinked as the whip-crack of the pistol report lashed across me. I felt no impact, no pain, just the echo of the shot in my ears. I opened my eyes to see Ana María fall, toppling to earth in a graceful sweep of bloodied curves.
From beside the hut a figure stepped into the heat of the day, pistol in hand.
“Is she dead?” Roberts’s voice shook with fear and exhaustion.
“In your own fucking time.” I smiled at him and reached up. He grasped my wrist and heaved me to my feet, staggering backward as he did so. Sweat ran freely from his braids. He was breathing hard. I pulled him toward me, and we embraced in the heat and the dust, arms locked hard around each other’s necks, steadying each other there on the killing ground.
When we separated, he looked immediately at Ana María’s body. I prized out of his fingers the little Glock I’d taken off Micky’s dead body in Freetown. His hands were trembling.
“I said you’d know when to use it.” I smiled again, but his expression was lost in a mess of anxiety. “Roberts, how . . .” I began to ask the inevitable question, but there was no point. Not then. He was there. I’d learn the why of it soon enough. What it meant was clear: if Roberts could get into Karabunda, I could get out. But first I needed him to concentrate on me, not on her.
“Is she dead?” he repeated. He was straining for breath, struggling to take in the enormity of what he’d done. I saw that his cheeks were wet not only with sweat, but with tears, too.
I knelt beside Ana María and rolled her onto her back. I pressed my ear to her lips, and my hand to her chest. Nothing at all. I chased the memory of the person I’d held, whom I’d felt something for. But all I saw was another body.
“Yes,” I said, straightening up. “She is.”
He covered his mouth with his palm. Words failed me, and then I understood what to say. I put my hand on his shoulder, and he focused on me.
“You did well,” I said. “Your father would be proud of you.”
In the distance the familiar whump-whump-whump of an inbound chopper sliced the air; from inside the hut came the sound of buckling. The blast door was being wrenched free.
“Roberts,” I barked at him, “if we don’t get out of here, we’re dead, too.” He froze, trying to calculate what he’d done; what could not be undone. “Now, man. We have to go now.”
I made to move. He blinked and seemed to remember where he was as his mind made room for anything other than the consequences of killing.
“But you have the code,” he said frantically. “She said you have the code. I heard her say it.”
“Yeah, but I don’t have the sword.”
“Sword? What fucking sword? You need a sword?”
“I don’t know,” I said, “and I’m not going to find out.” The growl of the chopper grew louder. “Move,” I shouted at him. “Now!”
I grabbed Roberts by the back of the neck and propelled him into cover under the trees. We ran through the human remains the Sleepers had left in their wake, pounding blood into the dry dust.
“Down, down, down.” We fell to the ground as the chopper cleared the ridge, the rotor roar suddenly deafening in the clearing. It was a Russian Mi-24, loaded with rocket pods.
“What a
re you doing, man?” Roberts wrestled free of my grasp. He was coming back to himself.
“Saving your ass,” I barked back, picking up a discarded AK. “And mine. We can’t outrun a gunship any more than we can those freaks underground. Now shut up and get small.”
But Roberts didn’t get down. He got up and ran back into the clearing.
I made a grab for his ankle and missed. Within a moment he was out by the huts again, standing near Ana María’s body, waving his arms. I shouted a warning after him, but my voice was lost in the din of the helicopter’s motor. The big metal bird turned to face us, nose down, blades flaring. The twin cannon on the front would shred him as surely as the Sleepers. I checked my flanks and looked behind me and sprinted at him. I caught him around the waist and brought him down hard. His face hit the ground; his lip split; bloodied soil from the ceremonial ground matted his dreads.
Bundled up together on the ground, we yelled at each other simultaneously.
“What the fuck?”
The rotor wash fanned us. Flying grit stung my face, temporarily blinding me. The sheer force of the downdraft turned even the smallest stone into bruising shrapnel. Huge swirls of dust fanned out behind the fuselage, spreading into the ragged wings of an angel of death. Roberts picked himself up and lunged forward, bent double.
“Come on!” he mouthed, beckoning me on. “It’s OK!”
I got up, too, and ran behind him, head down, into the dust storm. The pilot brought the chopper round. The side door was already open. Standing there, one hand outstretched, the other holding his AK, was the unmistakable figure of Ezra Black.
He hauled us up, and Roberts rolled onto the deck of the flying metal tank, suddenly jabbering from the adrenaline rush and the sheer relief of survival—though about what exactly was impossible to hear over the din of the rotor.
I looked up at Ezra, who was scanning the landing site as the bird pulled skyward. He pointed to a headset. We lurched to the side, but I managed to stand and steady myself by the open door. I put the headset on.
“This is costing some serious money, my friend.”
I laughed, and he looked at me, eyes wide with sincerity.
“Seriously, eh? These South Africans are meod expensive.”
“Hey, bru, you fly with the best, you pay like the rest.” The pilot’s voice crackled through the headphones. I spoke into the comms loop.
“This is Max McLean.”
“Howzit, Mr. McLean?” The pilot’s hard-edged Afrikaans accent was tempered by the detachment of combat concentration. Underlying the nonchalance of most pilot chopper chatter was a razor-sharp focus. “Flight Captain Jan Van Vuuren at your service. Good to have you on board, hey.”
“Thanks for the ride, Captain. Her Majesty’s government is good for the money.”
“Ja, the way I hear it, you owe a little Scotsman a lot of whisky.”
I looked at Roberts. But Ezra spoke.
“When you make this call to London from my base, it stirs up a lot of shit, eh? Six of Micky’s CIA idiotim try their luck. Roberts gave me the number for Nazzar. He’s a good guy. We fucked up a lot of rebels together during Barras.”
“Ja, we gave those clowns a moering for sure,” Van Vuuren cut in. “But now hier kom groot kak!”
Down below, the remaining half-dozen Sleepers had made it through the blast doors and were sprinting out of the hut. Bereft of orders, they sniffed the air and ran to the trees. “Fuckin’ zombies, man, actual fuckin’ zombies.” Roberts had got his headset on, face pressed against the viewing port, transfixed. “This is insane.”
I looked at Ezra.
“What can I say?” Ezra shrugged. “I had him covered. He was supposed to stay with the chopper. But even me, I couldn’t shoot him twice. He knows the terrain. And no one knows this terrain, not even my guys in Freetown.” He looked at Roberts. “Next time someone gives you a gun, maybe you tell me, eh?” But Roberts was too absorbed in the tableau playing out beneath him to pay attention.
“Yeah, well, we’re not clear yet,” I said. While Roberts marveled at the walking dead on the ground, I braced myself for what was to come. I hoped Van Vuuren was up to it. I pressed the mic to my lips. “There’s unfinished business on the deck, Captain.”
“It’s your show, McLean. We’re on auxiliary tanks. Enough juice for one pass, no BDA. Are there civilians down there?”
“That’s a negative, Captain. This is a rebel area.” I scanned the bush below.
“Negative on civilians copied. Just like the bad old days, hey, Colonel Black?”
The Israeli smiled and stowed his AK.
“What’s in the tubes, Captain?” I asked.
“Eighty-mil frag and fuel air good to go.”
He banked wide over the hillside, lining up for his run. Fresh air pulled through the vortex of the open door. Ezra moved to the port door gun and racked a round into the GPMG. Roberts strapped himself in, stunned and fascinated by turn at the horror unfolding around him. As we gained height, the reality of the country below receded. The Mong River kept on rolling, a slight swelling at the breach the only sign of the havoc her green waters had wrought below. The broken corpses of the doctors and technicians, soldiers and scientists looked surreal—scattered stick men thrown from the little rondel huts, dotted between the circular blooms of perfect little trees. Ana María lay still in the dust, fatigues ruffled by the mechanical breeze of the Russian gunship.
The Sleepers stood motionless, clustered together, necks craned skyward, salvaged weapons hanging ineffectually by their sides. Their mission completed, their enemy vanquished, they simply waited. They had been ordered only to wreak vengeance, nothing more, nothing less. And that is exactly what they had done. The headset buzzed back into life. It was Van Vuuren again.
“Fire control order.”
I looked at Ezra, and Roberts, and then out the door at the ground. This would be the only chance to stop them. Caught out in the open, they would not survive the barrage. The fragmentation rockets would cut them to pieces, render them immobile. The fuel air explosives would vaporize everything in their path. As the accelerant ignited, the firestorm would create vacuums on the savannah. Bodies would implode; the blast doors sealing the bunker would be ripped clear. The tunnels and corridors and lift shaft near the entrance would collapse. Scant trace aboveground that anything had ever happened would remain, except for the black scar of a bushfire. And deep below, unseen and untouched, my father would be entombed, sharing an underwater mausoleum with Colonel Proshunin forever.
The men that my father had condemned stood listless in the African sun, waiting. There was nothing left for them now but betrayal and obliteration. And whether they were monsters or men, I knew at that moment their deaths would be on my conscience until the day I died.
“Code Zulu,” I replied into the headset. “Kill them all.”
33
“Where have you traveled from today, Mr. Schwartz?” I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes and managed a smile. Say what you like about him, but Ezra Black had a sense of humor.
“From Tel Aviv,” I replied, and then after an expectant pause added, “Via Brussels.”
The UK Border Force officer entered more data into the console in front of her and scrutinized the Canadian passport. Unlike the documents I’d flown out on, it was a fake; unlike the British, the Israelis were expert forgers. She sized up the unshaven and unsmiling deadbeat in the photograph against the unshaven and unsmiling deadbeat in front of her. My hair was brown now; my beard, too. I did a double take every time I looked in the mirror. Fortunately the immigration officer didn’t.
“And have you visited West Africa in the last forty days?”
I shook my head. “No, I flew from Toronto to Tel Aviv direct.”
MI6 had put out a phony Ebola alert via the FCO—screening for me, I guessed, while appearing to look for the n
onexistent virus. Jack Nazzar had sent Ezra enough Bitcoin to buy me a new identity; Ezra had pulled enough strings to bring it to life. Over a secure line in Freetown, Nazzar had made one thing clear: he was as angry about Sonny Boy’s death as I was.
He’d agreed to help bring me home on my terms because he knew it was the only way he could learn the truth of who sold out whom, and why. Ultimately, I was expendable—even to Jack Nazzar. One man always is. Sonny Boy had been, too—which was why we’d been sent in the first place. But as units, E-Squadron and the Increment—and the UKN they supported—weren’t. The cock-up in Benghazi had proved that much. If we were being betrayed from the inside, it was his men who would suffer most.
If Mason was hanging me out to dry—and that was a big “if”—it hurt Nazzar as much as it did me. Until I knew for sure one way or the other, I wasn’t just on the run; I was on the loose.
“And you’re on holiday, sir?”
Nazzar had made something else clear, too. If I was for the high jump, so was he. “Fuck it up, son, an’ it’s no just ma pension that’ll go bang.” He’d given a dismissive snort and hung up. There was nothing more he or Ezra could do for me. I was on my own.
“Mr. Schwartz?”
“Uh, yes, sorry,” I replied. Focus, Max. Focus. “Just for a few days. I’ve always wanted to see Westminster Abbey.”
“A pilgrim, then?” She smiled.
“Yeah, you could say that.” I smiled back, and she stamped the passport.
“Welcome to the United Kingdom. Enjoy the sights.”
I had no bag to reclaim, no taxi arriving—and, I hoped, no one waiting for me. I pulled down over my eyes the baseball cap I’d bought at Ben Gurion and headed out of the airport into a cold spring day. The ground was wet from a recent shower, and the tarmac flared bright white in the low sun. I stared at my feet and took a series of buses into central London.
No one stopped me. No one spoke to me. No one tried to kill me.
The Break Line Page 27
