Absolute Zero

by James Patterson

  Hell, this might even be fun.

  CHAPTER 61

  THURSTON CAREFULLY OPENS one eye and then the other.

  It’s more difficult than it sounds – mainly because his eyelids have iced up while he’s been sleeping. Although the temperature inside the thermal sleeping bag is pretty good, inside the forest shelter, it has to be said, things are a little on the fresh side.

  He wriggles a hand up and rubs ice crystals from his eyes. He checks the illuminated dial of his watch: almost three in the afternoon. Without looking outside he knows something is different. The forest is creaking.

  Thurston wriggles to the entrance of his shelter and digs a hole in the protective packed ice. He pushes his head through and sees a changed landscape. Every branch of every tree groans under the weight of glaze ice, the lowest limbs connected to the snowbound forest floor by thick icicles. Thurston realises he’s slept through the arrival of an ice storm.

  He replaces the snow in the entrance and frees up his arms. He prepares more food and, leaning back against one of the fallen trees, considers his next move. He eyes his backpack and makes a mental list of his armoury. It doesn’t fill him with optimism. Thurston’s good but he’s not Superman. Even if the little show he put on with the Jeep worked, he doesn’t think many of the men at the compound will have been spooked enough to leave. He’s hopelessly outgunned and, even if they don’t try to find him, he won’t last too long out here. All Miller has to do is wait it out.

  Which means Thurston’s got to even up the odds. He thinks back to previous situations and comes up with one word.

  Lasqa.

  CHAPTER 62

  EVERY MAN’S GOT a breaking point. For Cody Thurston it came on 16 June 2007 in Lasqa, Orūzgān Province, southern Afghanistan.

  Along with neighbouring Helmand and Kandahar, Orūzgān stood right at the beating black heart of the Taliban.

  Bandit country.

  Thurston’s unit was there under Dutch command as part of the International Security Assistance Force during the battle for Lasqa, a town of some five thousand war-weary souls. The Taliban, seeing Lasqa as a key tactical access point, had taken control of the town in brutal fashion, commandeering civilian homes and farms and exacting brutal vengeance on anyone who resisted. The police commander of the Tander Station was forced to watch his wife’s hands being cut off before he was then beheaded. Civilians were given weapons and told by the Taliban: fight with us or be executed.

  Thurston’s team were instructed to establish a checkpoint a kilometre from town and not to engage. Radio chatter soon told the Australians that the Dutch and Afghani troops inside the town were in a dogfight.

  ‘This is fucked,’ said Dobbs, Thurston’s unit’s comms officer. Dobbs was exchanging intel with an interpreter with the Dutch forward force. ‘They want us in. It’s a bloodbath and we’re out here checking licence plates.’

  Thurston said nothing. What was there to say? Dobbs was right: this was another fucked situation in a fucked-up place.

  Later, the unit heard the Taliban had begun using a school as an ammo dump with the kids still inside so the Dutch and the Afghanis couldn’t call in air strikes. In the school, the Taliban beheaded children who attempted to escape as a lesson to the others. On his break, back in the Hummer, Thurston listened to the children’s screams for longer than he could stand.

  He checked his ammunition and left the Hummer, heading for the small rise that doubled as a field latrine before he cut back north towards the town. As he saw things, something needed to be done. A career soldier to his fingertips, Thurston simply could not sit back and wait as children were slaughtered. He knew that every step he took towards the school was a step away from his life as a soldier. There’d be no way back after this, even if he survived.

  Thurston came across a marketplace some three hundred yards from the school where eight Toyota pickup trucks were hidden under cover of the dilapidated stalls. He noted only two guards, one on either side, and he killed both by slitting their throats. He opened the gas tanks of all the vehicles and set them on fire.

  He ran back to the school and waited. Less than a minute went by before ten or so men exited. Thurston found a side window and slipped inside. In the main hall were four Taliban fighters at the windows with two or three more standing at the entrance to a back room. Eighty or so children sat in a tight knot in the centre, some of them sobbing. On the fringes of the hall were the discarded bodies of eight or nine executed children. Blood spattered the walls.

  Thurston opened fire and killed every man standing.

  He shouted and pointed at the door and the children ran without speaking. As they dispersed into the night to find whatever safety they could, Thurston took a grenade and lobbed it into a back room stacked with ammunition cases and weapons.

  He ran.

  Fifteen minutes later he was back at the checkpoint and his military career was over.

  CHAPTER 63

  DONNO–JAY DONOFRIO, ONE of Miller’s two remaining lieutenants – is in a room in a small office block tacked onto the rear of the main house. This office is the security hub at the compound and is where the CCTV monitors are housed. Half of Donofrio’s crew of twelve are actively patrolling the inner perimeter while the others rest. Donofrio is fighting a losing battle with the ice to maintain the security cameras. The storm has already knocked out more than a third and others are falling by the minute. He watches the screens go blank.

  ‘Shit.’ He picks up his radio and updates Carver. Carver’s in control of the area around the three sheds containing the fermentation tanks that combine the dextrose and benzaldehyde into pseudoephedrine. ‘If he comes in to you I can’t give you a heads-up,’ says Donofrio. ‘We’re blind down here.’

  ‘If he’s coming in through this shit, I’m a Chinaman,’ says Carver. ‘This storm’s kicking up a coupla notches out here.’

  Carver pockets his radio and turns the corner of shed 1 into the teeth of the wind. ‘Jesus H. Christ,’ he mutters as ice rattles into his face. He tightens his goggles and the hood of his parka.

  Up ahead he sees two of his crew on the facing corner. Carver looks out at the ice-bound forest beyond the fermentation sheds and wonders if the Australian can possibly still be alive.

  CHAPTER 64

  THURSTON, WEARING LAYER upon layer of high-quality thermal protection, huddles in the lee of a big pine and watches the guy near the closest shed put the radio back in his pocket.

  Thurston notes a fence post by the man with the radio that houses a security camera. The camera itself is covered in glaze ice and Thurston is betting most, if not all, of the surveillance cameras protecting the compound are out of action.

  Thurston steps out of his cover and walks towards the fence. Wearing white and in near-white-out conditions, he is a ghost.

  A heavily armed and well-trained ghost.

  By the time he’s reached the fence, Thurston is less than twenty yards from the corner of the shed. He’s watched the patrols enough to know two men are working each section, the first man some ten yards in front of the other.

  Which means that the corner of the shed is an opportunity. Thurston puts a bolt into the crossbow and readies the second.

  He waits, forcing himself to concentrate. When the first guy comes round he’ll only get a few seconds.

  After a couple of minutes, the first sentry comes into view. Thurston lets him come round the corner and puts a bolt into his chest. The guy slumps to the snow. Thurston pulls back the bow string and slots in the second bolt. As he’s coming up the second sentry comes into view, sees the body on the snow and begins to lift his weapon.

  Thurston shoots him in the head with the second bolt. The entire exchange has taken place in complete silence.

  Thurston runs back to the forest and prises a fallen log out of the snow. He hauls it back to the fence and throws it against the wire. As he suspected, the fence is no longer electrified. With the power at the compound probably now on a ge
nerator there’s not enough juice in the system to run what they need and keep the fence on. Thurston pulls out a pair of wire cutters and cuts a gap in the fence. He pushes through and runs to the corner of shed 1. From here he can see sheds 2 and 3 looking like blurred paper cut-outs through the ice storm. The wind is now coming in almost horizontally. Thurston battles his way across the open space to shed 2. When the sentries come round he kills them both – the first with the crossbow, the second with his hunting knife. At shed 3 he repeats the routine.

  According to his calculations there’s still one guy remaining: the guy with the radio. Thurston has him pegged as the boss of this crew but there’s no way of telling where he is now. Thurston can’t wait. He finds a door leading into shed 3 and slides it back on its track.

  Inside, Thurston pushes back his goggles and takes a breath. At first he thinks there is someone moving inside the vast space but realises it is the storm lashing the tin walls.

  Six gleaming steel vats stand in a row down the centre of the shed. A low electric hum sits under the sound of the wind.

  Thurston takes off his backpack, from which he takes three aerosols of hairspray and a small tin of lighter fluid. He places an aerosol each under three of the vats and opens the valves. An acrid stench begins to fill the shed. Thurston squirts the lighter fluid around the base of the aerosols. He flicks a lighter and moves down the shed, setting a flame to the lighter fluid.

  Thurston exits the shed and runs straight into the guard.

  CHAPTER 65

  ‘WE GOT A runner,’ says the Axe.

  Miller gets up off his chair and joins Axel Anders at the window overlooking the lake.

  One of the compound girls, wearing jeans and a parka, is slipping and sliding across the frozen lake, moving away from the house.

  ‘That dumb bitch ain’t gonna make it,’ says Miller.

  ‘You want me to fetch her back?’

  Miller shakes his head. ‘Fuck her.’

  He and Anders watch the girl get swallowed by the whiteness. It’s a two-hour hike across to East Talbot. In this storm, dressed like she is, the girl will be dead within the hour.

  ‘We shouldn’t be sitting back and waiting,’ says Anders. The big man lumbers across to the bar and pours out a bourbon.

  Miller taps out a line of coke on the marble and hoovers it up greedily. He’s been getting increasingly wired with each passing hour of inactivity.

  ‘I don’t like it any more than you, Axe,’ he says. ‘But we—’

  Miller stops mid-sentence as a gunshot sounds from somewhere outside. He looks towards Anders, and then three explosions come in quick succession, sending a shock wave rippling across the compound.

  ‘I guess he’s here,’ growls Anders. He smiles and reaches for his gun. ‘Rock and roll!’

  ‘You dumb shit,’ snarls Miller. ‘That bastard’s blown the sheds!’

  CHAPTER 66

  FOR A BIG guy, the guard moves quick. Almost too quick.

  The muzzle of his assault rifle cuts up towards Thurston in a vicious arc that would have broken Thurston’s jaw if he hadn’t managed to step inside the blow and drive the heel of his hand hard into the man’s nose.

  Blood flashes through the air and he howls like a bastard. Thurston snaps the rifle out of the man’s hands but it slips from his grasp and skitters across the ice, out of reach.

  Thurston takes a step back to give himself room and reaches for his knife. As his fingers close round the handle, the guard recovers his senses enough to come roaring back at Thurston like a grizzly with its tail on fire. He traps Thurston’s hand inside his parka and wraps a meaty forearm around the Australian’s throat. Thurston takes a step backwards that fractionally unbalances his opponent. Using his weight against him, Thurston dips a shoulder and in one fluid twist flips his attacker over.

  As the man tumbles through the icy air, a trailing boot catches Thurston a glancing blow on the side of his head. Both men slam to the ice.

  The guard is the first one to move.

  He rolls over and scrambles for his weapon. His gloved fingers close around the trigger as he sits up to bring the weapon to bear on the still dazed Thurston.

  Behind the two men, shed 3 explodes.

  The guard, his body forming a barrier between Thurston and the worst of the explosion, is sliced clean in two by a twisted sheet of flaming metal. Thurston feels a flash of searing heat before everything turns black.

  CHAPTER 67

  AFTER FINDING THE six dead from Carver’s crew and seeing shed 3 going up in flames, three of Donofrio’s crew have had enough. They take off in one of the compound Hummers. With the road to East Talbot impassable, they head across the lake.

  Donofrio is making his way across to the two remaining sheds when he sees the tail lights fading into the storm just as Miller and Anders emerge from the main house heading towards what’s left of shed 3. Donofrio stops in his tracks.

  He’s loyal to Miller – he’s got a slice of the action and, truth be told, it’s been pretty sweet so far – but this situation is way beyond messed up. Miller’s been holed up in the house snorting product for what seems like days. He’s acting like he’s running an army but the fact is his army is now down to less than six. As tight as Miller might be with the local cops, something on this scale will be investigated once the ice storm stops. Unless Miller gets very lucky there’ll be Feds crawling all over Isle de Rousse before the weekend.

  It’s time to call it.

  Donofrio gets out his radio and brings his three remaining guys in.

  Let Miller and Anders duke it out with whoever this guy is. The Australian might not be this supernatural Chenoo deal but Donofrio knows one thing: he ain’t normal.

  CHAPTER 68

  NICK TERRAVERDI MAKES it to East Talbot around five. If he wasn’t already in Hanover he wouldn’t have attempted the journey. As it was he skidded off the road more times than he cares to think about.

  Still, he had to come. If this is what he knows it is – that little adventure Cody Thurston told him about back in New York – then he needs to be there to stop this turning into another fucking Waco.

  In the entrance to the police station Terraverdi finds Bernie Slater, the robbery-homicide guy who called Boston about the three dead bodies at the Top o’ the Lake Motel. A friend at Boston who knows the Russians’ link to organised crime called the FBI. Since Delamenko and his boys crossed several state lines, this is a Fed case. Terraverdi pulled a couple of favours to be the one assigned.

  ‘So what’s the situation?’ says Terraverdi after the preliminaries.

  Slater’s a thirty-year vet. He moves slow but Terraverdi wouldn’t like to be on the wrong side of him. Like most state cops he’s not given to warmth when it comes to the FBI, but Terraverdi’s seen worse.

  ‘I was in the motel,’ says Slater. ‘With a friend.’ He looks at Terraverdi, who says nothing. ‘OK, well, like I say, I was there with a friend. Then this shit happened and I come out to see three bodies. Two in the corridor and one in the bedroom. The woman was shot – something automatic, large calibre. The first guy had a fuckin’ crossbow bolt through his fuckin’ head …’

  ‘Jesus!’ says Terraverdi.

  ‘That ain’t the kicker. The second guy? The one in 205? He’s taken one in the balls and one in the noggin from a nail gun.’

  ‘A nail gun?’

  Slater nods. ‘Uh-huh.’ He glances towards the station office where Riggs is sitting at a desk. ‘The asswipe there, Riggs: he’s the local sheriff. He told me these guys must have been passing through. Can you believe that shit? Three connected Russians from Southie take a fuckin’ winter break up here and wind up dead.’

  ‘Three?’

  ‘Oh,’ says Slater, ‘I forgot that part. There’s a wit who saw a third guy get whacked in the parking lot. From my experience? I’m saying he’s Viktor Delamenko. Anyway, this Delamenko was already wounded – I’m guessing nail gun – and jumped outta the bedroom window. Our wit
says another guy put one in Viktor’s head and took him away in the back of a Jeep. You ever heard anything like that?’

  He’s about to reply to Slater when a muffled boom echoes across Lake Carlson.

  ‘Christ Almighty!’ says Slater. ‘What was that?’

  Terraverdi sighs.

  Thurston, you motherfucker.

  CHAPTER 69

  THURSTON OPENS HIS eyes and sees nothing except white.

  He blinks a few times, raises his head and slowly the world reassembles. Light and sound and smell rush in.

  Behind him, shed 3 burns, the flames ripping diagonally away from where he is lying in the snow – a few degrees different and he’d be toast.

  Thurston pushes what remains of the guard off him and staggers upright. Thurston’s goggles are gone and parts of his weatherproof parka looks as if someone took a cheese-grater to it, but there doesn’t appear to be any major physical damage: a cut to his head and a ringing in one ear. Right now, he’s more concerned about his weapons.

  The Remington is screwed. The same goes for the crossbow, which lies in a tangled mess about three yards away. Thurston finds the guard’s weapon but it too is hopelessly damaged.

  Thurston starts moving towards the main house as fire takes hold of shed 2. Once that went it became only a matter of time before shed 1 completes the set. Thurston keeps to what cover he can find and makes his way down to the lake shore.