‘You don’t want to be rich, you fucking prick?’ Andre snarled. ‘I do! Who gives a damn if the Norks are the ones picking up the tab?’
‘They murdered Lex.’ Kara’s next words hit like a body blow, and no one had an answer for them. Saying it out loud felt weird. There was a peculiar flutter in Kara’s chest, a strange moment of dislocation. On the screen, she was into the root directory of the computer, searching for the handshake protocol that would allow her to talk directly to the Arquebus program. She was very close now. ‘Madrigal had Lex killed because of this.’
And for an instant, she wasn’t there anymore, not in front of the keyboard, staring into the cogs and gears of a virtual weapon. She was somewhere years ago, in time past and lost.
Lex, tentatively reaching a hand out to touch her face, somewhere secret where none of the rest could see them together. He smiled and she caught it too, the emotion pulling her along. It was real, it was true. No one had ever made her feel like he did. She had never wanted to share herself with anyone before him. He made sense to her.
She blinked, her gaze misting, and angrily pressed the heel of her hand into her eye, killing the tears.
‘Lex stole from us and he ran,’ Andre said doggedly, as if he was reading from somebody else’s script. But the fire in his defiance ebbed with each word. ‘He was going to rat us out to Interpol. The Greek mob got him—’
‘That’s what Madrigal told us,’ countered Billy. ‘I didn’t think . . .’ He trailed off, unable to finish the thought.
‘No. Lex is dead because he was going to blow this whole operation wide open.’ Kara looked up at them and her gaze turned fierce. ‘I destroyed everything I had to come back here and finish what he started. I think I loved him. I know Lex was right. So I have to make this right.’
Billy glanced away and she followed his look. The masked soldier standing guard at the cargo ramp had noticed them arguing and was coming their way. ‘They’ll shoot us,’ he said quietly.
‘That was always going to happen,’ Kara told him, a note of coldness returning to her words. On the screen in front of her, the search protocol had found what she was looking for, and she worked at rewriting the IP address for the attack program’s command and control site.
Weaponised virus software like Arquebus and its forbears Stuxnet, Duqu, Shamoon and countless others employed a control hub hidden in the recesses of the internet. Like an assassin contacting a handler for new targets, the programs would ‘call in’ and drop off reports of hacks completed or in progress, and listen for new orders. All Kara needed to do was redirect the program that had crippled Seoul to a new site, this one loaded with an ENDEX protocol – a shut-down command. It took a few seconds to upload the data from the USB drive, and as the progress bar filled, Kara felt the flutter again.
This was Lex’s legacy, his final act after abandoning Ghost5. There on the data chip he had hidden inside himself, concealed in phantom code where only she would be able to find it, he had left her the key to killing Madrigal’s grand plan. Undoing everything the woman had set in motion seemed like a fitting revenge.
She hit the execute command, and Pyne let out a low whistle. ‘Oh shit. You did it. It’s done.’ She dashed to the portal window in the Antonov’s fuselage and peered out. ‘I see lights going on. Oh man.’
Across the flat expanse of the airport apron, the bright indicators lining the runways began to reappear, and in the distance the dark blocks of the terminal buildings illuminated one by one, floor by floor. The digital switches in the power grid that had been jammed shut, halting the flow of electricity to the city and its surroundings, were reopening.
‘Arquebus is dead.’ Kara’s voice caught as she spoke again. She felt horribly drained and she wanted to weep. The storm of powerful, unfamiliar emotions threatened to overwhelm her. ‘You need to run. Because I’m going to kill the plane.’ She looked down at the smartwatch on her wrist. ‘Go. No time now.’
The soldier was at her shoulder, and he knew something was wrong. He snatched at Kara, grabbing the sleeve of her jacket to haul her roughly out of the chair.
Billy hit the man across his facemask with a tablet computer, the blow hard enough to smash the screen into splinters and knock the soldier aside, sending him stumbling into the airframe.
There was shouting and a frenzied blur of motion. Andre bolted toward the rear of the jet and the open cargo ramp, and others went after him. Panic shocked through the group and Billy almost knocked Kara to the deck as he fled before the soldier could react to his surprise attack. She staggered into Pyne, and the other hacker’s face was paler than it had ever been.
‘Stop them!’ A shout full of rage washed over her, and Kara turned to find Erik charging down the length of the cargo bay toward them. Two more of the soldiers ran out after the fleeing hackers, and gunfire crackled in the air.
Erik had a heavy pistol in his hand and the anger that constantly fuelled him ran high. ‘You,’ he spat, sparing Kara a hateful snarl before shoving her into the work bench. ‘You actually thought you could betray us again?’ His glared at the display on Madrigal’s laptop and his voice rose to a thundering roar. ‘I should have killed you at the start!’
‘But you didn’t,’ Kara said, in an accusing voice. ‘Because you’re Madrigal’s dog. And you do what mistress says, animal. Because you love her and you can’t have her.’
‘You’ve done nothing but get in the way,’ Erik hissed, showing no reaction to her words. ‘Wasted your effort. We still win.’
‘Erik,’ began Pyne, reaching out a hand to him. ‘Look, man, this is all wrong! You must know it—’
Without looking at her, Erik aimed his gun at Pyne and pulled the trigger.
EIGHTEEN
Marc could feel the layer of sweat on his back as he brought the Dauphin down toward the Halo, tilting the nose of the smaller helicopter until it was at a steep angle of attack. Trading altitude for speed, he was breathing hard as the distance closed between the two aircraft, acutely aware of the pressure of the situation.
But the fear running though him wasn’t panic. It gave him focus. Marc felt his senses sharpen as he let his reactions guide him. And in a strange way, it calmed him. Hand-to-hand combat with a lethal opponent, firefights and open battle, these were outside his comfort zone and it was always a struggle to hold on to his edge. Here, the collective and cyclic sticks in is hands, his eyes on the horizon, Marc Dane felt correct.
He balanced on that brink between fear and control, letting one fuel the other. There was old anxiety buried deep in him, strong, potent memory that would well up from the past if he let it. Marc knew if he closed his eyes that heart-stopping instant would replay, as real as if it were happening now.
Before Rubicon, before MI6. The storm over the South China Sea that had brought down the Royal Navy Lynx he crewed. The impact with the waves. The cold ocean filling the cabin. The first time in his life he truly believed he was going to die.
He forced it to fade, tuning it out like a radio channel that could only be dialled down but never silenced. Marc worked the controls, letting his senses extend out to fly the Dauphin as if it were a part of himself. His gaze fixed though the rain-spattered canopy, he aimed the helicopter at the larger Halo and poured on the power to catch up with it.
The cargo helicopter raced over the course of the Han River, doubling back along the same route it had taken to its target. Its whale-like bulk wallowed in the downpour, the aircraft’s centre of gravity grossly offset by the weight of the SCIF hanging beneath it. Marc saw the hatch in the side of the metal-walled cabin dangling over the water, wondering if Madrigal was still aboard the container unit. He could picture her in there, oblivious to everything else, poring over decades’ worth of unredacted files and covert reports on the worst excesses of the collaboration between the governments of the United States and South Korea. These were toxic secrets that trailed untold numbers of deaths behind them, and Marc briefly wondered if they were better le
ft buried and forgotten.
‘Hold us steady!’ Lucy shouted over the droning of the rotor blades.
He nodded, levelling out the Dauphin as they pulled alongside the big Russian helicopter. Marc chanced a look over his shoulder as Lucy pulled open the crew bay hatch again and dropped into a kneeling stance. She brought up the assault rifle and squinted down the weapon’s tactical scope.
The slower-moving Halo drifted off to port, and Marc saw movement in the cockpit as one of the crew caught sight of the Dauphin’s rotors whirling against the rain.
Muzzle flash from the rifle’s discharge reflected off the inside of the canopy as Lucy paced pairs of double-tap shots into the side of the Halo, leaving black marks punched through the fuselage where the rounds penetrated. She walked the shots toward the nose and a triangular cockpit window turned white as the glass cracked. The other helicopter abruptly rolled into a side-slip and sank as the pilot reacted in shock.
A square panel ahead of the Halo’s forward passenger hatch folded inward and Marc glimpsed a figure in black venture out to aim a rifle back at the Dauphin. More strobing blinks of yellow light flared across the canopy as the gun lit off at full-auto, and reflexively Marc stood on the Dauphin’s starboard pedal. The smaller helicopter pivoted hard into a yawing motion that swung the tail away and presented a smaller target. He heard Lucy curse at him as the unexpected motion threw her around in the back.
The Dauphin’s curved windscreen grew a trio of bullet holes before the nose lifted up and they passed over the Halo’s huge rotor disc. Wash from the cargo helicopter’s massive blades shuddered through the airframe, and Marc rode it out, gaining height, coming around.
‘What part of hold steady did you not understand?’ Lucy yelled.
‘Back-seater,’ he retorted, catching sight of a hollow in the empty co-pilot’s seat where a stray round had gone the distance and embedded itself in the cushion.
Off to the side, the Halo hunched forward, the rotors tilting to give it more forward momentum as it passed the riverbank, and rode over the roofs of bland residential blocks and garishly decorated mini-malls. Marc completed the pedal turn and then angled them after the bigger aircraft, his eyes narrowing as he saw what the Halo’s pilot was doing.
The cargo helicopter sped dangerously low along the lines of the city street, its rotors lashing at the air barely metres above the tops of the six-storey buildings that crowded in along the roadway. The SCIF swung like an enormous pendulum, level with the upper floors of offices and apartments.
It was a chancy ploy, risking the aircraft by putting it so close to the ground that any mistake would not only be fatal to the crew but also claim many civilian lives into the bargain. It was also a deliberate one, Marc realised. The Halo’s pilot gambled that his pursuers would not take a shot when the possibility of collateral damage was so high.
‘Bastard,’ muttered Marc, easing off the throttle to extend the distance. Every second they wasted tailgating the Halo instead of trying to stop it meant that Madrigal was one step closer to escape.
Rain and cold wind gusted into the Dauphin’s interior as Lucy hauled open the other crew hatch to give herself a clear line of fire in all directions. From the corner of his eye, Marc saw her find a tether and snap the D-ring on the end to her tactical vest. ‘We have to risk it!’ she called, and he knew she understood the danger at hand. ‘Marc, she can’t get away!’
‘Wilco,’ he replied, tensing against the straps holding him into the pilot’s chair. Twisting the throttle control on the collective stick, Marc put power to the Dauphin’s twin Turbomeca engines and started in on another approach.
The Halo’s crew were ready for them this time. Marc saw the bigger aircraft sway as the pilot shifted the controls. The smaller Dauphin dropped to blades-level with the cargo helicopter and Marc kept them in a nose-on position. Lucy went semi-prone, hanging her upper body out of the crew cabin and along the line of the fuselage as she took aim.
Then out of nowhere the Halo killed most of its forward motion with a hard flaring manoeuvre that kicked the nose up sharply. A less-skilled pilot would have back-slid into a terminal stall, but even with the unpredictable extra mass of the SCIF, the Halo performed a tight pivot that seemed to briefly defy the laws of physics. Marc had once seen a huge twin-bladed Chinook do a similar stunt, the big choppers the Army lads called ‘wokkas’ after the distinctive sound of their rotors moving in ways that seemed impossible. It seemed that the North Koreans had adapted the same dance moves for their bird.
As the Halo settled back, the SCIF cabin swung hard into the frontage of an office block, shattering a line of blue-tinted windows as it glanced off them and away. Marc pulled on the Dauphin’s cyclic stick to avoid a collision when Lucy shouted out the acronym that all military helicopter pilots dreaded. ‘RPG!’
He glimpsed the white flash of the launch as he heard the call. Lucy must have seen the soldier who had shot at them moments before, now leaning out of the Halo’s gunner hatch with a rocket propelled grenade launcher.
Residential buildings hemmed them in on both sides, and there was nowhere to veer off to that wouldn’t put the Dauphin right into someone’s living room. Pulling back or climbing would be too slow to save them. Marc rolled the dice on his own skill and accelerated toward the flash instead, hoping that the sturdy Eurocopter’s airframe would take the punishment.
He flicked the cyclic in a sharp lateral motion and the Dauphin briefly twisted into a half-roll, leaping aside like its ocean-going namesake in a bow wave. The unguided RPG spiralled under the belly of the silver helicopter and looped away, finally exploding against a billboard atop a nearby multi-storey car park.
Marc overcorrected, veering dangerously close to a chain-link fence around an apartment block’s rooftop garden, hauling back and away before the tips of the helicopter blades kissed the metal. Wrestling the Dauphin into a hover, he tried to recover, but more gunfire lanced across from the Halo, thudding into the fuselage. Rifle rounds pinged off the cabin interior, and Marc knew that the moment the shooter reloaded the RPG, another deadly rocket would be on its way.
Lucy was a step ahead of him, and the sniper took that option out of play with another double-tap from where she lay sprawled on the floor of the crew bay. Aiming with the assault rifle down the length of her body, she put her shots straight through the Halo’s open gunner hatch. Marc saw a figure in black tumble out into the air and fall, the rocket launcher going with him, deflecting off the hanging SCIF and on its way to the street below. With a hurricane roar of downwash, the Halo pulled away, evading.
‘We have to force them down!’ Lucy shouted.
He didn’t answer her. Crimson warning indicators flashed across the control panel in front of him. The shots they’d weathered had hit vital components, and unlike the over-engineered, boiler-plate heavy design of the Russian cargo chopper, the smaller Eurocopter wasn’t designed to operate under combat conditions. Marc smelled hot oil as the controls vibrated alarmingly in his hands.
‘No problem,’ he lied, aiming the Dauphin after the fleeing Halo.
*
The gun bellowed inside the close confines of the Antonov’s cargo bay, and Pyne was shocked backward by the force of the shot.
Kara grabbed her before she could collapse to the deck, her hands finding a spreading bloom of dark blood soaking through Pyne’s threadbare sweater. Her eyes were wide and streaming with tears of pain, her mouth open in a trembling, endless gasp. She shivered in Kara’s arms as she set her on a chair as gently as she could, guiding the stricken hacker’s hands to keep pressure on the ugly wound.
Erik raised the smoking muzzle of his revolver and aimed it in Kara’s direction. ‘You are going to be next,’ he told her, grinding out the words. ‘It does not matter what you did to the communications. Madrigal will be back soon.’
Kara was so close that she could see flecks of dark fluid on Erik’s knuckles and the barrel of the pistol, the blowback from where the bullet had en
tered Pyne’s belly. The shot had been a through-and-through, which meant the Polish girl was going to die from blood loss unless she received urgent medical attention.
All these details came to Kara in a stream of analytical thought, in the same dispassionate manner that she would have looked at a piece of computer code. She saw them like the IF and THEN logic statements in a data string. The burly German hacker could not get past the bond between Kara and Madrigal, and he hated it. Coming back to Ghost5 had made that worse, and now Erik was going to run his program to the only end condition that would satisfy him.
‘You were never part of this,’ he went on, barely sparing Pyne a look as she continued to die by inches. ‘Any of you. Tools. Nothing more.’
Kara gave him a questioning look, her words oddly calm and level. ‘Really? Because you are without doubt the biggest fucking tool I’ve ever met.’ She peeked at the smartwatch on her wrist, trying to factor time and survivability.
Erik put the bloodstained muzzle of the gun against the centre of Kara’s forehead and pulled back the hammer. ‘When Madrigal returns, I am going to kill you in front of her. She will see what you really are.’
‘Because that will fix everything for you?’ She stared blankly at him. ‘That’s what you want. To be the important one in her eyes.’
‘You keep talking and I won’t wait,’ he warned.
Kara leaned into the gun, pushing back against it. ‘So do it. If you aren’t afraid to be beholden to Madrigal. Do it. Shoot me. You didn’t hesitate with her.’ She waved at Pyne, bent forward in the chair and panting like a wounded animal. ‘You think you’re tough. That you have a strong will and a keen mind. You don’t. You’re just above average. All you can offer is the willingness to hurt people without hesitation.’ She glanced back at him, then away again. ‘There’s a transient electromagnetic device built into this plane.’ Kara pointed at the deck. ‘It’ll put out an electromagnetic pulse that will fry all digital hardware within two hundred metres, give or take. Madrigal’s doomsday protocol, in case Interpol or the NSA ever caught up with us.’
Ghost: Page 36
