The History Book

by Humphrey Hawksley

  “The rules are simple, Kat,” says Yulya. “I will know if you do anything at all, which includes sending data to low-level satellites, chatting with Bill Cage, anything, then I will order your father to kill Max. If he doesn’t obey within five seconds, Viktor will kill Liz. Once that’s done, we’ll start again. Do you exactly understand the rules?”

  SEVENTY-THREE

  Saturday, 10:03 a.m., BST

  Luxton smokes, sitting on the hood. Kat walks up and down next to the car.

  “Take me through it again,” she says. “From us all leaving the paddock.”

  “Max left first. Alone,” says Luxton. “Then we left in two cars, and Yulya stayed behind. Liz was at Media Axis, a hundred miles away. Liz and your father are the real hostages. We don’t know about Max and Sayer. They could be decoys.”

  “Max is real, I think,” says Kat. “Yulya tried to kill him with the bomb in his apartment, and he’ll always be a threat to her control of RingSet.”

  “Makes sense,” agrees Luxton. “And Max worked with Cranley.”

  “But then again, so did Tappler,” Kat argues against herself.

  “Tappler needed money, but Max is a millionaire.”

  “Which leaves Nate as a possible decoy. He could have had Liz taken at Media Axis. He calls Yulya the minute we leave him with my father.”

  “What about Roth, the other marine? What happened to him?”

  “They killed him straight off. They didn’t need him. They only needed Mason to make a point.”

  Kat replays the short film. She freezes the frame on Sayer’s face. He’s looking down, his hair a mess, showing baldness on the crown that’s usually covered. “Whoever he’s working for, would Nate really let Yulya kill Liz, my dad, and Max in cold blood?”

  “Go on,” says Luxton.

  “Whatever the situation, Nate’s a hostage. Everyone who works for RingSet is. They all work under a shadow of violence.” Ideas rush into Kat’s mind. “How many airfields does RingSet own?”

  “Byford’s the big one.”

  She zooms into the picture, making it even more grainy, and jabs her little finger at the screen. “Hard floor, corrugated steel wall. Could be an airplane hangar. Yulya hasn’t gotten so far without being careful. She’s not worried about us knowing where she is. She’s more worried about getting out quickly when she needs to. I’ll bet you she’s at Byford. As soon as the CPS is signed, she’s flying out with her mother. She’ll either kill her hostages or take them with her and dump them at Voz Island.”

  Luxton says nothing. He packs up the light machine gun, lays it in the back of the car, draped with the blanket. He opens the trunk, brings out a Remington 870 pump-action shotgun for blasting open doors, and lays it on the backseat. He keeps one small M72 disposable antitank rocket launcher in the trunk and moves one to the backseat, together with four loose grenades. He wedges two more grenades between the passenger and driver’s seats. He lays an AK-47 on the passenger floor side, and checks and chambers rounds in the handguns and the 9mm automatic and puts them on safety.

  “We go?” asks Luxton.

  “Yes.”

  As soon as Suzy’s ring links with the satellite, Yulya will know. If Kat speaks to Cage, Yulya will know; anything electronic, Yulya will know. The only element of surprise they have is to kill Yulya at the base. Kat’s been there before. She has a plan.

  She sets the laptop and three phones a foot away from the right tire and covers them with light earth and damp leaves. She hesitates on the fourth phone. If she uses it to neutralize the car’s tracking system, Yulya might know. If they use the car without it, chances are, no one’s tracking it. She slips the SIM card with Liz’s edited films into Suzy’s ring, closes the lid, and makes sure the tiny button is in the Off position.

  “Am I right?” she checks with Luxton. “Yulya will know where we are from the phones. But she doesn’t know which vehicle we’re in.”

  “Yes, but no way of knowing for sure.”

  “We’ll have to risk it,” says Kat.

  “So we have no communications at all?”

  “That’s right.”

  “It’s two hours away,” says Luxton. “You drive.”

  SEVENTY-FOUR

  Saturday, 11:47 a.m., BST

  It took less. Kat drove fast. There were no checkpoints.

  Kat and Luxton are on a patch of high ground in thick, overgrown grass, watching the entrance to the Byford airfield. When she drove in on Thursday night, it was dark. Today is bright, under a huge blue sky, and security has been ramped up. A sliding antiterror barrier is across the entrance. Two watchtowers have gone up just inside the gate.

  For a hundred yards each way from the gate, an extra layer of fencing has been built. You’d have to cut through four sets of wire, each alarmed and at least one electrified. The central fence is topped with concertina wire.

  Four guards are at the gate, two patrolling, two inside the control room. The main TV screens are turned off. A bank of monitors is on.

  Beyond the fence, a passenger aircraft is parked at a stand, with steps running down from the rear and front doors. Another is taxiing down the runway toward the central area. Kat’s just watched it land. To its left are four aircraft hangars, three huge, oblong buildings and one long and narrow, with a roof that curves almost all the way to the ground. Yulya’s unlikely to be in there. The curving roofline doesn’t fit with the picture Yulya transmitted. That leaves three hangars to choose from.

  Civilian traffic on the road is light. The last car came more than ten minutes ago. The RingSet trucks are steady, the same type as Kat hijacked. But some have an extension on the driver’s cab to make room for a sleeping bunk behind the seats. That’s the type Kat’s looking for.

  Kat and Luxton slip back farther into the undergrowth and walk half a mile back to the junction where Kat intercepted Lancaric. The Mini is parked 200 yards farther on. Some of the weapons they left in the car. Some Luxton’s loaded onto the car seat and pinned the blanket across them.

  Kat stays off the road, lying in a culvert with fast-flowing water soaking into her. It gives her a direct line of fire into the place Luxton’s walking to.

  He’s wearing the yellow jacket with POLICE and the insignia of the Port of Felixstowe embossed on the back, the RingSet logo on the sleeve. He carries the car seat and sits with it on a bank at the side of the road. He picks a stem of grass and chews it.

  Kat is 75 yards away. The MP5 is good up to 200 yards.

  She hears a truck. It has the bigger driver’s cab. Luxton stands up, lifts the car seat with both hands, and begins walking. As the truck nears, he flips out his right thumb to hitchhike and points to the jacket’s logo. On Thursday, Lancaric was by himself. This truck has a passenger, a man in a dark jacket, tie, and shirt.

  The truck slows and stops. The passenger lets down his window.

  Kat’s trying to cover Luxton. Her angle to the windshield means she wouldn’t be guaranteed to hit the driver. And it’s better to have him alive. She adjusts her aim to the head of the passenger, but the wheel is in the way. She goes for the central torso of the passenger. The decision takes less than a second.

  Luxton puts the car seat on the ground, turns, and points back toward the Mini, hood up, broken down. The driver refers to the passenger, who’s shaking his head.

  The exchange lasts fifteen seconds.

  Then something happens. Kat thinks it’s in the conversation, but she can’t be sure because she can’t hear what’s being said. Luxton climbs up on the step of the cab, draws the Colt, shoots the passenger, and holds the weapon to the driver’s head.

  Kat scrambles up, crosses the road, and stands right in front of the truck’s windshield, weapon on the driver. Luxton runs to the passenger side, drags out the passenger’s body, carries it to the ditch. As Luxton rolls it in, Kat glimpses the face. It’s Lev, the man who tore down her pants on the marshes, whom Luxton swore to kill.

  Luxton lifts the weapons in the blanke
t from the car seat, puts them on the passenger seat, climbs in, shifts himself and the weapons to the bunk space behind, and puts the Colt to the back of the driver’s head.

  Kat climbs into the passenger seat and sees how cleverly Luxton shot Lev. No round went out through the chassis or the window.

  “Wait,” she says.

  Luxton keeps the gun on the driver. Kat runs to the ditch. Her hands are in the water underneath Lev’s bloodied torso, where she is searching for his cell phone, and finds it in his pants pocket.

  She bloodies her hands getting to it, but the phone’s stayed dry. She rinses off in the water, jogs back to the truck, and crawls into the bunk. The roof’s just high enough to sit. Luxton is hunched up against the cab wall. They are hidden from outside view, but Luxton’s breath would be warm on the driver’s neck.

  Luxton glances at her. Kat’ll do the talking, calm and in control.

  “You get us inside, and you’ll be fine,” says Kat softly.

  “They’ll kill me,” whispers the driver. He’s no Lancaric. Or he knows about Lancaric. His eyes dart everywhere. His hands tremble. A man has been shot dead next to him. It’s one of the most effective forms of persuasion.

  Kat scrolls through Lev’s call register. She stops at an entry labeled “YG.” Is that Yulya Gracheva?

  SEVENTY-FIVE

  Saturday, 12:05 p.m., BST

  No one’ll kill you if you drive normally,” says Kat. “You’ve done this before, so when you get to the gate, look straight at the iris scanner, and lower your window for the palm print.”

  The driver pulls out and accelerates slowly. The empty road ahead has a heat haze on it, which spreads through the fence onto the surface of the airbase.

  “What’s your name?” asks Kat.

  “Sam,” he whispers, so quiet that Kat can’t tell his accent.

  “Good, Sam. Now just relax. Who’s going to win the soccer match?”

  Sam doesn’t answer.

  “Your kids’ll be watching it, I bet,” says Kat.

  Sam stays quiet.

  “That’s okay, Sam,” says Kat. “Not nice to think of the family at times like this.”

  Sam’s hands grip the wheel. His wrists are taut. Sweat gathers under his hairline.

  “Are they expecting Lev? Or did he hitch a ride with you?”

  “I don’t think so. I just gave him a lift.” He’s English, with an accent like the farmer’s, Margaret, who drove her to Tappler’s house. His eyes flip up to the rearview mirror, meet Luxton’s, and flip back again. His face shows total terror. Any guard worth his salt will detect it.

  “I’m for Brazil,” says Kat. “But I’m an American, and I’ve got a bit of a crush on Laja.”

  In the mirror she sees him smiling quickly to please her. “Yeah. Brazil,” he says.

  Sam downshifts and indicates a right turn into the base. A red sedan is coming toward them, an England flag flying from the roof. Sam stops to let it pass.

  “I’m lying down now,” says Kat. “Just go through the gate like you have a hundred times before.”

  She covers herself with a blanket and curls like a fetus. Her right thigh has a grenade pressing into it. She slips the MP5 beside her. It’s too big to use in her cramped position. Her hand wraps around the Glock 18 handgun instead. If she uses it, she’s dead anyway.

  Luxton pulls a driver’s protective screen up between himself and the back of Sam’s head. He can’t be seen from outside. He stays sitting, pressed against the cab wall.

  The sun swings around, its warmth magnified by the window glass. The air brakes kick in, and the truck jolts to a halt. Sam doesn’t speak. The guards say nothing. A machine bleeps. Metal scrapes on metal as the antiterror barrier moves down. Sam edges the vehicle forward, then stops. Another antiterror barrier comes up from behind, boxing the truck in.

  A phone in the guard booth rings. It’s answered.

  Fifteen seconds pass. Nothing moves. No one speaks.

  Kat looks through a crack in the blanket. Luxton looks toward her. His expression is unexcited.

  Thirty seconds pass, then a rap of a hand on the door. “Lev Chichagov? He’s down as traveling with you,” says a voice. It’s accented, probably Russian, like Lev.

  Christ. She closes her eyes. What would Kat have done in Sam’s position? Try to jump the cab, see if she could get the door open before Luxton fires, and take her chances among the four guards.

  Sam doesn’t. He lifts his right hand off the wheel and jerks his thumb backward. “He was held up at the port,” he says. “Said he’s getting the next one.”

  “There’s no ‘next one’ listed here.”

  “Then he was wrong, I guess. Here,” says Sam. “Check my phone. Here’s the message from him.”

  Ten seconds pass. Kat can’t see what’s happening. She imagines Sam’s hand hanging out the window, offering up his phone.

  “Okay, go ahead. The aircraft’s loading now.”

  The front barrier slides down. The truck moves ahead slowly. Breathing again, Kat levers herself up enough to look out the side window onto a vast expanse of airfield. Four hundred yards to her left, she sees one of the hangars. Beyond that are the other three.

  “What was the plan with Lev, Sam? Where were you to drop him?”

  “He didn’t say. Just a lift to the base, that’s all.”

  Sam’s eyes skit up to the mirror. They’re losing their fear. He’s calculating Kat’s vulnerability. He’s concluding they won’t shoot him inside the base.

  “Slow down and give me your phone,” says Kat.

  Sam keeps driving. Luxton responds by noisily rechambering a round.

  “Slow the fuck down, Sam,” says Kat, “and give me your phone, or he’ll kill you and toss you onto the tarmac.”

  The truck jerks to a halt and starts up again. Sam passes his phone to Kat. She dials Bill Cage. “You got a caller ID on this?” she asks when Cage picks up.

  “Yes.”

  “You hear that, Sam? That’s my boss in Washington. This base is illegal, and in the next hour, it’s going down. Your choice whether you spend the rest of your life in jail or become a national hero. If you don’t believe me, press redial when I’m done.”

  Sam says nothing.

  Kat speaks to Cage. “Do you have my location?”

  “Byford airbase.”

  “What visuals?”

  “0.3 meter resolution.”

  “You see four aircraft hangars?”

  “Correct. You’re in the truck fifty yards inside the gate.”

  “Right. Forget about the narrow hangar. East to west number the others: one, two, and three.”

  “Got it.”

  “What signals from the hangars?”

  “Mixed. Nothing specific.”

  “Thermal imaging.”

  “Negative.”

  “Shit,” whispers Kat. “I’m calling a number now. I need an immediate location ID when it picks up.”

  She presses the Send button on Lev’s phone for the address book ID marked “YG.”

  It rings.

  “Triangulating,” says Cage.

  It keeps ringing. The truck is crawling. Sam turns so Kat sees the tail of the aircraft, then the steps leading down from the plane’s tail door.

  It keeps ringing.

  “Nothing yet,” says Cage. “If it picks up—”

  “The gatehouse is watching us,” says Sam.

  Still ringing.

  “If it goes to voice mail, we lose it,” says Cage.

  A figure at the top of the aircraft stairs beckons Sam to drive toward him.

  “Go,” says Kat, “as slow as you can.”

  The hangars disappear from view. They’re heading in the wrong direction, now perhaps 300 yards from the aircraft and closing. Even going at ten miles an hour, they’ll be there in less than a minute.

  It goes to voice mail.

  “Sorry,” says Cage.

  “She’s got my dad,” says Kat before she can
stop herself.

  A fuel tanker pulls up under the wing of the plane. Two guards step out to meet the truck. Lev’s phone rings. The caller ID says “YG.” Kat picks up, but doesn’t speak.

  Yulya’s speaking angrily, in Russian.

  Kat says nothing, keeps the line open. Cage is still there on Sam’s phone.

  “Number two,” he says. “She’s in the middle hangar.”

  SEVENTY-SIX

  Saturday, 12:14 p.m., BST

  The hangar doors are open, showing a wide, gaping entrance through which Kat can make out the shape of a smaller aircraft inside. Against the midday sunlight, it’s too dark inside to see more.

  Luxton taps his yellow Port of Felixstowe jacket. Kat nods.

  “Sam,” he says. “Stop thirty yards from the plane on the apron. Then turn around one hundred and eighty degrees, so the back doors face the aircraft. Then unlock the back roller door.”

  “You need manual unlock as well.”

  “Then give it to me.”

  A glint of silver on the plane wing sends the sun straight through the windshield into Sam’s eyes. He puts his hand up. “I don’t have one.”

  “You do,” says Luxton quietly. “If there’s an accident, you have to get them out, don’t you, before the police come.”

  Sam says nothing, just hands Luxton an electronic key.

  “Slow and stop now,” says Luxton. “Keep the engine running.”

  He turns the truck in an even curve. Luxton slips into the front seat. As Sam stops, Luxton opens the door and jumps out. He’s carrying the Colt and takes the submachine gun that Kat’s been using. Kat climbs over into the passenger seat. In the side mirror, she sees Luxton run around the back of the truck.

  There’s a beep when he tries the door, but it doesn’t open. Luxton’s exposed to the guards by the plane. His jacket will give him a few seconds’ protection. He slaps his hand on the roller door. Kat glances at Sam, who’s staring straight ahead.

  She hits him with a vicious blow to the face. “Unlock it!”