by Alex Dryden
Laszlo grabbed the wheel and steadied it, the tail spinning slowed, and Claude gunned the accelerator up the hill.
“The bitch! The bitch shot me!”
Ahead of them the ambulance swung up and around another bend and in the rearview mirror Laszlo saw the black Toyota truck right behind them, Eric at the wheel, his face gripped with stone-cold rage.
“Wrap this around his arm,” Laszlo shouted at Logan in the back and handed him a white silk scarf.
“Jesus!” Claude bit his lip and the blood ceased pumping where the scarf tightened around his bicep. The Jeep had fallen back after the encounter but now they were gaining again when they saw the grim facade of the military hospital on a rise in the hill above them.
In the ambulance Anna reloaded the Contender. Ahead of her she, too, saw the hospital and prayed that Larry and Taras and the others had made it. But still, when she was five hundred yards below the hospital, she knew the ambulance wasn’t going to make it. In the mirror, she saw the Jeep and another car behind it gaining all the time. And from the windows of both cars she saw gun barrels levelled at the ambulance and knew now that her only chance was to fight.
As she swung the ambulance sharply to the right she spun the wheel back until the vehicle screamed on its rear wheels and was suddenly facing the way she had come up; the two cars slowed to a halt, one beside the other, blocking any route to her from above or to anyone coming up from below. She saw the doors swing open on both sides of the cars for some slim protection and a man from the second car dipped below the sill and ran into the cover of an earthen bank. And then she saw Logan.
At the sight of him, Anna was gripped by the cold anger of revenge, but she was enraged not just by him but by Burt, too, for allowing Logan to jeopardise everything and all of their lives. At some point, they’d all warned, cajoled, and almost threatened Burt on the subject of Logan. She couldn’t believe that Burt—out of some uncharacteristic generosity of spirit—really wished to give him every chance at redemption, or that in some way he even saw much in Logan worth redeeming. She was distracted now by the sight of him, and the first bullet from a pistol in the Jeep thwacked its way through the dashboard of the ambulance and missed her by an inch.
Anna rolled onto the floor of the ambulance cab and reached up to open the connecting door to the back. She crawled through and cautiously opened the rear doors. The first thing she saw was Larry and Adam, who had heard shots from higher up the road. Their short machine pistols were drawn. She silently motioned them with her hand to take cover and held up four fingers to indicate the number of assailants. The two of them fanned to either side of the road and, once away from the cover of the ambulance, rolled behind earthen banks and began to crawl down the hill.
Logan slid painfully out of the Jeep through the window, knowing that the car’s panels would offer little defence against Anna’s Contender. He began to retreat to the rear of the car, crouching and facing forwards all the time. He saw Laszlo indicate to Eric to move up behind the earthen bank towards the rear of the ambulance. Then he saw Laszlo himself drop over the other side of the road, taking advantage of the lull in any sight of Anna. And as he stopped now, seated on the road and with his back pressed against the bumper of the Jeep, his gun cradled and loaded in both his hands, and a bead of sweat making its way between his eyes, his mind took one of its revolutions that had always—as long as he could remember, back to childhood—spun his senses from confusion to clarity or clarity to confusion. But this time it was the former. Through the turmoil and resentments of the past, through the unnameable grief at the waste of his existence, and from the depths of his self-tortured soul emerged a clear vision of what he had to do.
His eyes blurred for a brief moment, but he knew he could rely on the cold and deadly killer inside him that had gotten him into Russia two years before when he had killed the KGB-trained Moscow mafioso who had butchered Anna’s husband, Finn. His hand was steady, his heart was still and hard, and the clarity that now burned in his mind was like a drug that swept conflicting thoughts from his head and left one clear and conscious sliver of knowledge remaining. All that he had done—from his years in the CIA and then his abandonment by them, from his days as a mercenary collector and seller of secrets and his original betrayal of Anna, from his restless and inconclusive sojourn at Cougar under Burt’s eye—all his confused and hopeless past, in fact—could be wiped away by this sliver of knowledge. The confusion that had led him to even think—let alone suggest and act upon the suggestion—of betraying Anna a second time, to Laszlo and the Russians, was swept away. The only thing that remained in Logan’s mind was that he had to save her.
He looked carefully round the side of the Jeep to where Eric was crawling up the hill behind the bank, then to the other side where Claude was similarly ascending the hill at a painfully slow speed, and decided that he would kill Laszlo first. Then he would take cover and shoot whoever put his head above the earthen banks. Laszlo was ahead, crouching, then rolling, crouching again, and all the time his eyes were on the spot where they’d last seen Anna. He was now ten feet from the ambulance.
Logan gripped the pistol in both hands, got up into a crouch, and then, with a swiftness that would have momentarily dazzled any normal observer, he whipped his body around from the rear of the Jeep, arms locked in a V shape with the gun in his hands at the end of them, and levelled directly at Laszlo’s back.
But Anna was no ordinary observer. She had emerged from the rear of the ambulance and then crawled back underneath it towards the front. She’d seen Laszlo’s progress towards her, but couldn’t get a fatal shot from beneath the ambulance, only a wounding blow to a shin at most. But as she saw Logan’s sharp movement, only his feet and lower legs visible, she decided to act instantaneously. She rolled over twice and emerged on the right side of the ambulance, totally exposed, and, without a pause, shot Logan through the heart.
At once, two short bursts of automatic fire that burst from behind the earthen banks crashed into her consciousness. She saw Laszlo, confused by the sound of weapons he knew his people didn’t possess, turn for a second to the right, just as he’d seen her prone form on the road. Her second shot entered the side of his head, just in front of the ear and, travelling upwards from her position on the ground, blew his brains out.
“Anna?” It was Larry’s voice. “All dead?”
“If you got two, yes.”
“All dead,” he said and was suddenly beside her.
“Where’s Taras?” she asked him.
“He’s waiting.”
They left the two cars blocking the road from below. Their exit route was in the other direction. They left the bodies splayed on the road or contorted in death behind the earthen banks as Anna turned the ambulance and headed the remaining five hundred yards up the hill, with Larry, Lucy, Adam, and Grant in the back.
Taras had heard the gunfire. He was already inside the hospital where there was sufficient mayhem from the sight of the ships ablaze and sinking down below in the harbour. His message had already been relayed to the guards inside. “A terrorist attack. Get down to the harbour.”
Some went, others refused to leave their posts without orders from a direct superior. As Taras emerged onto the front steps, he saw the ambulance approach, then swing around to the side of the hospital to the bay where the dead or wounded were admitted.
He tore back inside, shouting that he needed all the men they could get who remained to guard the front of the hospital. He himself went to the rear, down three corridors and across an instant surgery room, and swung the lever that raised the metal curtain between the emergency bay and the hospital’s rear entrance. The ambulance doors were open, and he saw all five of them, Anna putting a new clip into the Contender. The others had reloaded, he half-thought, with the dim, professionally automated subconsciousness born in extreme moments of action. The ambulance was backed up right to the ledge where a trolley could be wheeled straight into it.
The six of
them took the service lift. Anna led, the only one of them with a silenced weapon. As the doors opened on the fifth floor, she shot dead two of the guards of the prison wing. Taras took the keys and they entered, racing through the empty ward. The other two guards were bemused. One began to raise his gun.
“Don’t shoot!” Taras said. “There’s a terror attack down below.”
But the guard armed his gun and Anna had dropped him with a single shot by the time Larry punched the second guard and then struck him hard on the back of the head with his pistol butt.
They unlocked the second door, and this time only Taras ran down the corridor of cells. The others began to take up stations staggered outside the cells, in the ward, outside the lift, and along to the end of the corridor, where another corridor joined it.
Taras fumbled with the keys, trying first one then a second. He’d gone through five keys and the sweat was pouring off him by the time the sixth slid into the lock and he pushed the door open. He crossed the room. Masha lay staring in horror at him from the cot.
He scooped her up.
“It’s all right. It’s all right, Masha. It’s me.”
Then he heard a firefight erupt from somewhere beyond the ward. He guessed it was from the end of the corridor. Adam and Grant were holding off a concerted attack. He lifted the emaciated body of his cousin from the cot and ran out of the cell, past the others and into the ward.
The lift was waiting, its doors jammed open with a trolley. Taras saw a body at the far end of the corridor. It was Adam’s, he thought fitfully. Suddenly a loud explosion ripped the plaster from the walls of the corridor and splintered shrapnel at four hundred feet per second into the body of Grant. He fell immediately.
They couldn’t risk the lift now and they began to run down the stairs, Anna ahead, Taras in the middle holding his cousin, while Larry and Lucy brought up the rear. They cascaded down the steps rather than ran. It was a pell-mell hurtling of bodies broken only by Larry, who crouched at each turn and trained his gun back up the stairs, firing at will at their pursuers. They reached the bay, descending five floors in under a minute. By the time the ambulance pulled away, they were all present apart from their two dead comrades, and the metal curtain had been jammed shut behind them.
37
THREE AND A HALF MILES offshore from the flat coast north of Sevastopol, the navigation lights of the ancient, twenty-six-foot wooden fishing vessel Lyubimov were comfortably anonymous among the lights of a pack of other small commercial fishing boats strung out along a two-mile stretch of water. On the fourth night after the full moon, the red and green and white lights bobbed in the lazy current that drifted along the coast and the swell was gentle, unremarkable.
Balthasar leaned against a guardrail on the starboard side of the vessel facing northwards, the boat’s prow pointing out towards the Black Sea. A small sail at the stern kept the fishing boat pointing up-wind. Already he sensed that things were moving as they should. But he knew, too, that people had been lost. He felt Anna on the wind and in the salt smell of the sea. He felt her approach. He felt the invisible lines that linked him to her. The darkness was his favoured time. He felt the darkness as much as he felt the light, though neither made any difference to him. For the benefit of the rest of the world, in the pocket of his fisherman’s jacket, he held his orders from Department S that were the proof the world needed. He also kept in the same waterproof package the minutes of meetings that had started at the Forest back in January, the last time he’d seen—or would see—his father, as well as the notes from his briefing sessions with both his father and the GRU boss. The rest of the world needed to see, he thought with amusement. They needed to see because that was their impoverished version of knowledge.
He turned away from the rail and walked along the deck to the wheelhouse. A nineteen-year-old boy was reading a rock magazine in the thin light from the ceiling and listening to the radio.
“We need the channels open now,” Balthasar told him, and he heard the music stop as the boy tuned the radio to the open channel. “Start the engines,” Balthasar told him. “We’ll be heading farther out in a short while.”
This time he walked to the stern of the vessel and heard the steady hum of an engine half a mile away. It was them. But he’d sensed that, too, long before the sound became audible.
The small motorboat nudged alongside the Lyubimov and Balthasar already had the gate open in the guardrail to receive them. There were five of them, two were missing, as he’d known.
Larry lashed the motorboat to the side of the Lyubimov, Taras carried the inert form of Masha into the wheelhouse and laid her on a thin bed, while Anna and Lucy walked to opposite ends of the vessel and leaned against the rails. Anna stood next to him at the stern. They didn’t speak. Behind them they heard Larry ordering the boy to set a course of 180 degrees. Then he took the wheel and they heard the old engines grind up to full throttle.
The Lyubimov pushed through the black swell for another three miles towards the open sea where the lights from the fishing pack were left behind them and finally lost. Nobody spoke. Anna and Balthasar stood at the stern, Lucy and Taras with her now, at the bow, while Larry pulled back the throttle and cut the engines again. The silence was complete. Only Larry’s footsteps as he came out of the wheelhouse broke it briefly before he, too, stopped and scanned the sea.
It seemed a long wait to the tense party, but it was no more than twenty minutes at most. Only Balthasar seemed completely at ease. He didn’t even turn when the submersible emerged four hundred yards off their port bow and wallowed sluggishly in the rolling water. Larry walked back into the wheelhouse and called for him.
“What about the boy?” he said.
The nineteen-year-old was staring at the black shape in astonishment, then fear. He looked at Larry now and decided it was finished with him. Larry’s face was set in grim determination. But Balthasar smiled at the boy and put his hand on Larry’s shoulder.
“We leave him with the motorboat,” he said. “No radio, enough fuel to get to shore. And some money,” he added, and took out another waterproof package from a pocket of the jacket. “You did well,” he said to the terrified boy. “If we hear you’ve kept your mouth shut, in a week you’ll receive the same amount again.”
“We can’t let him go,” Larry said through gritted teeth.
“I already have,” Balthasar said.
Larry started the engines and took the Lyubimov with great care a hundred yards from the submersible and downstream from the current and the swell, while Lucy untied the motorboat and held the lines tightly so that it still kept closely to the sides. Taras carried Masha first into the motorboat then the others climbed in, Larry keeping hold of the boy’s arm tightly. He frisked him to make sure there was no hand-held radio concealed anywhere, found nothing, and cursed under his breath at Balthasar’s methods.
Balthasar descended to the engine room of the Lyubimov, opened the seacocks, and heard the seawater slowly flooding the scuppers and felt it overlap his feet. Then he climbed back up the ladder and down into the motorboat. By the time they reached the submersible the Lyubimov was wallowing low in the water and would disappear altogether in half an hour. On the submersible a hatch was opened and, to the astonishment of everyone, Burt’s bare head appeared.
“Reminds me of Cam Ranh Bay, 1969,” he said cheerfully. “But that time it was the Russians under our ships.”
Anna smiled at him despite her low-level anger. She didn’t believe that Burt had ever been anywhere near Cam Ranh Bay. But Burt’s mythologising of himself was, as ever, for his own personal entertainment. He required nobody to believe it.
Inside the submersible there was room for six, eight maximum. Burt’s presence didn’t exactly help the seating arrangements, but at least he seemed to have realised that it wasn’t de rigueur to smoke on submarines. Balthasar was the last to descend. He pushed the boy away from the submersible and told him not to start the engine for twenty minutes after the sub di
sappeared.
“Remember what I told you,” he said. And he felt the wave of relief in the boy’s smile. “We’ll look after you well,” he said. Then the hatch was shut and the chambers began to fill with water for the descent.
The sub was based on an old model, but reworked by Cougar’s scientists into a piece of equipment Burt proudly stated was a stage beyond anything any nation possessed. It was designed for infiltrating frogmen onto enemy shores and for small-scale assaults into enemy territory. Data systems took up nearly all the space, there was real-time imagery and advanced sonar, high-precision echo sounders, as well as optronic masts carrying thermal pictures of their surroundings. The sonars could listen up to a thousand miles.
“Even the U.S. Navy has nothing quite like this,” Burt boasted. And then he frowned briefly, like an actor remembering his lines. He said, “The others?” He was looking at Anna now.
“They’re not coming back,” she replied. “And neither is Logan,” she added.
Burt seemed uniquely stumped by this information. But there was nowhere to pace in the confined space and, for once, he had to face an unpleasant situation without covering it with any histrionics.
“How do you know Logan isn’t coming back, Anna?” he said finally.
“Because I saw my shell going into his heart,” she replied brutally.
Burt suddenly looked stunned. He was speechless. His thick, pudgy hands flickered at the fingertips and finally came to rest at his sides as if he was trying to stand at attention. His face was white.
