But instinct told him his presence had been discovered.
He moved towards the door and heard the clatter of footsteps in the distance, and closer to, the cold click-clack of weapons being cocked. The sound bounced along the walls of the corridor, making his already stretched nerves jump alarmingly. There was no shouting, no sound of panic. But they knew he was here.
Word had gone out.
Kassim slipped out of the room with an armful of books. This could work to his advantage. He ventured along the corridor and peered round the corner just as two armed guards stationed themselves at the doorway to the basement. He ducked back and hurried to the washroom, where he stopped and listened outside the door. He could just pick out the echo of heavy footsteps pacing up and down inside.
Taking a deep breath, Kassim opened the door — and found himself face to face with a uniformed military policeman.
‘Who’re you?’ the MP asked, just as Kassim dropped the books he was carrying and thrust the Browning into the man’s stomach below his body armour. He pulled the trigger and felt the gun jump in his hand, the suppressed shot muffled further against the other’s body.
The MP staggered backwards and fell, blood spreading across his stomach. Kassim stuffed the gun in his pocket, locked the door, then bent and dragged the body across to the furthermost cubicle, where he heaved it on to the seat. Then he knelt between the dead man’s legs and ripped away the zebra-tape on the floor sealing the rim of an inspection hatch. He could already hear shouts coming from out in the corridor, and commands for the building to be evacuated and sealed off.
The hatch cover came away, revealing a narrow concrete shaft carrying waste and oil pipes for the heating system, with just enough space for a man to crawl along. It ran off in two directions, one to the rest of the building, the other towards the basement.
Someone banged on the washroom door and called out a name. Kassim cursed and dropped into the hole head first. He’d been intending to take the guard’s clothes, but it was too late. He began to pull himself along the shaft, scraping the skin of his elbows and knees as he brushed over the coarse cement bottom. He muttered a prayer, scrabbling desperately to propel himself to safety and ignoring the confines of the shaft, reliving nightmares of childhood in a small cave, hiding from his friends in a boyish game gone wrong.
But this was no game.
He heard a crash follow him down the shaft as the washroom door was kicked in, and redoubled his efforts. Already he could imagine a gun being poked down the shaft, a hail of bullets burning towards him.
He felt the shaft tilt downwards, and let gravity help his progress until he reached a dead end and the touch of soft, damp fabric on the floor of the shaft. It was the blanket he’d dried himself with earlier. He stopped and took a deep breath, then reached backwards and took the Browning from his pocket. One opportunity was all he had. If they were ready for him, he would die right here, in this suffocating little hole with barely room to curl up and meet his maker.
In the basement, the soldier who had earlier been guarding the door stood over the open hatch leading to the outside, where the man named Kassim had come in. He heard a faint sound behind him, and walked back through the connecting chambers. Probably one of the others, come to relieve him-
The grey uniform coats on the wall seemed to explode outwards, and a small metal door appeared, revealing a black hole where there should have been none. A figure tumbled into the basement, the dull glint of metal in his hand, and the guard felt a sick helplessness as he realized his own weapon was pointing away and it was too late to do anything but watch.
Kassim smashed the guard across the side of the face with the Browning. The man fell in a heap and Kassim leapt on him and dragged him out of sight of the stairs towards the open hatch in the floor. He quickly stripped him of his clothes and armoured vest, then took off his own clothes and dressed in the guard’s uniform. It wasn’t a perfect fit, but good enough. He dumped the unconscious guard down the hatch and threw the cover in on top of him.
At the top of the stairs he checked the mechanism of the guard’s submachine gun. It was loaded and ready. He placed his ear to the door. Heard shouted orders echoing along the corridor, and beyond that, the noise of a helicopter’s engines gathering power.
Kleeman was leaving!
‘He’s gone down the shaft!’ The MP who had broken down the washroom door levered himself up from the hatch in the toilet cubicle. Two of his colleagues had pulled the other soldier out and were checking for signs of life, but to no avail.
Harry walked in and looked at the hole. ‘Where does it lead?’
The MP pointed off towards the rear of the building. ‘Back that way. But it may change direction. . it’s too dark to see.’
Harry nodded. ‘Dump something heavy in there to seal it off.’ He beckoned to Rik. ‘Come on — I want to stick close to Kleeman.’
They could already hear a helicopter’s engines winding up to maximum pitch, and shouts as the CP team began to hustle Kleeman through the mass of journalists towards the main entrance.
Suddenly more cries echoed along the corridor, followed by the sound of a shot.
‘He’s down in the basement. . heading for the outside!’
Harry ran along the passageway and saw two soldiers disappearing down the stairs. Another was running towards the front, presumably to cut round the outside to where the tunnel came out.
‘Kleeman’s on board.’ Captain Rekker appeared, signalling to Harry. ‘We’re lifting off any — who the hell was that?’ He was staring at the soldier disappearing through the entrance. ‘Hey!’ he shouted. ‘He’s not one of ours!’
A volley of shots rang out, flat and puny against the thudding noise of the helicopter’s engines. Harry ran towards the main doors and barged aside a group of journalists, his MP5 held aloft. A sick feeling was already building in the pit of his stomach.
Kassim had outwitted them after all.
A windstorm of noise and movement hit them in the face as the rotors of a French military Super Cougar 725 blasted them with dust and debris. A UN policeman lay sprawled a few yards from the front entrance, and three of the CP team were bunched in a heap close by the helicopter’s main door, their weapons scattered. Elsewhere other soldiers and police had all dived for cover.
‘Where’s Kleeman?’ Harry asked a stunned guard.
The man pointed towards the helicopter. ‘In there. A guy started firing as he came out the door. They didn’t stand a chance!’
As if to confirm the guard’s words, two men appeared in the opening to the helicopter’s fuselage. One was Kleeman, looking stunned; the other, standing behind him, wore combat gear and an armoured vest. It was Kassim, calmly staring out at the dramatic scene.
Kassim ducked back and pointed his submachine gun at the loadmaster. He was holding Anton Kleeman by the throat and felt unnerved by what he’d just seen. Two more men in combat uniform had emerged from the library entrance, and he recognized Tate and, alongside him, the younger man he’d seen with him in the airport hotel near Fort Benning.
They’d been following him all along!
He felt a ripple of anger and was tempted to open fire. But he decided against it; he might need to conserve ammunition. Instead, he tapped the loadmaster on the head with the tip of the gun barrel and pointed upwards. The man swallowed hard, then flicked his intercom mouthpiece into place and gave instructions to the pilot.
The lumbering craft, capable of carrying up to thirty people, seemed to sink on its haunches for a moment, before gathering itself and lifting off the ground with a renewed down-blast of air, leaving the security guards on the ground staring helplessly into the sky.
FIFTY-FOUR
Harry turned to Captain Rekker, who was busy on his radio, his face taut with frustration at the disaster which had overtaken his team.
‘We need another helo,’ Harry shouted above the noise. ‘We have to follow him.’
Rekker nodded and held up
two fingers. ‘Coming in now. . a Black Hawk. The Super Cougar’s being tracked by ground navigation.’ The Dutchman walked away, his jaw clenched, and Harry let him go. There was little he could say to assuage his feelings, and he guessed the captain was now facing the prospect of a foreshortened military career.
The Super Cougar was already a dot on the grey afternoon horizon by the time another engine noise heralded the approach of a second helicopter. They turned to see a Sikorsky Black Hawk thudding down towards them, a crew member leaning out of the door to assist the pursuers’ entry.
The Black Hawk was slower than the Super Cougar, but not by much. They were already far behind and the weather was closing in. Harry knew there was every possibility Kassim might complete his murderous mission by simply throwing Kleeman out of the door, then forcing the pilot to ditch somewhere in the hills where he would be impossible to find.
But why hadn’t he already done that?
They leapt aboard and fastened themselves in. Apart from Harry, Rik and Captain Rekker, there were two other members of the CP team and an army paramedic. Two journalists trying to get on the flight were dumped unceremoniously out of the door.
The Black Hawk rose in the air like an express lift and heeled over to follow the distant Super Cougar, throwing the passengers about in their seats. The pilot had been briefed on what was expected of him and was responding with relish.
The centre of Pristina rushed by through the open door. Within minutes they were out over open countryside, dotted with houses and farm buildings and lots of empty space in between.
‘He’s heading north towards the hills.’ It was Rekker, holding an intercom earpiece, from which he could hear the exchange of conversation between the pilot and the ground-control operator following the flight of the other craft. ‘Where the hell’s he going? There’s nothing up there but open country.’
Harry shook his head. He doubted Kassim himself knew which way to go, only that he had a mission to complete. Even sitting on his tail rotor, there would be precious little they could do to stop him without putting the lives of Kleeman and the crew at risk.
North? Harry pulled a map out of a bracket by the door and found Pristina. He stabbed his finger on it so Rekker and the others could see. North of here was Mitrovica.
Kassim was taking Kleeman back to the compound.
It meant he had no walk-out plan; this was the end of the line for both of them.
The Black Hawk began to buck around as it hit wind turbulence coming off the hills and funnelling down the jagged valleys. The CP team members looked unconcerned, accustomed to such uncomfortable transport and bleak conditions, intent only, as Harry knew they would be, on retrieving their man.
‘We’re catching up!’ Rekker shouted, and pointed through the open door as the Black Hawk swung round a tree-covered hill. Ahead of them, about two miles away, the Super Cougar was dropping down into a valley with a river running along the bottom, a sliver of white against the grey-green landscape. Slopes rose sharply on either side, seeming to close in deliberately on the two aircraft, the engine noise hammering back at them.
‘He’s losing speed deliberately,’ Rekker commented. ‘Bleeding off gradually so Kassim doesn’t notice.’
Harry was impressed by the pilot’s courage. If he did it carefully enough, there should be insufficient change in engine noise to alert their captor. As long as Kassim didn’t think to take a look at the air speed indicator.
They followed the craft down, skimming in low over the river. Below them, white water foamed over gleaming rocks and coursed swiftly down a series of rugged falls, fed by incessant rain high in the hills. It was a cold and brutal scene, but possessed a coarse, natural beauty at odds with the wretched villages and towns nearby.
‘He’s going in!’ the crew chief shouted. The Super Cougar had dropped abruptly as if a string holding it aloft had been cut. It seemed about to hit the trees. Something must have happened on board. The machine’s rear rotor seemed to brush over the top of a giant pine tree as it crested a ridge, and there was a collective intake of breath. Then, at the last moment it dipped, and the rotor exploded with a flash and a puff of smoke.
Inside the lead helicopter, Kleeman and the loadmaster were huddled together under Kassim’s gun, desperately hanging on as the pilot tried to regain control of his craft. A trickle of blood was running down from inside his flying helmet, after Kassim had noticed the decrease in speed and fired a shot close to his head. He’d intended it as a warning, but the movement in the helicopter’s flight had thrown his aim off, the bullet ripping through his helmet and grazing his skull.
Kassim locked his arm through a section of cargo webbing and stared through the open door at the wildly undulating picture below. In the distance he caught fleeting glimpses of the following Black Hawk, which had gradually drawn closer.
The floor dipped as they rounded a tree-lined slope, and Kassim felt his stomach heave. Abused by bad food, irregular sleep and severe stress, he was now in a death-ride across the Kosovan countryside. Yet he felt almost serene.
He had done what he set out to do, and reached the man who was responsible for the murder and violation of Aisha, his beloved sister. Now that man would pay for his crime. He spat out a mouthful of acid burning his throat and stared at Kleeman, who had not taken his eyes off him since leaving Pristina. The Special Envoy was looking deathly pale, but beyond an initial protest, had said nothing. Kassim had seen in his silence a confirmation that the man knew who he was. And why he was here.
He stared out at the blurred scenery below, the hills and valleys, the houses and farms and rolling woodlands, and considered the wider reasons he had been chosen to do this: to bring shame and disgrace on the organization that employed this man, which would be a giant fist against the Americans and their Coalition partners. He had been eager to be useful in the struggle, even if not in his own country, which was spinning by below. Now he was home, he realized that all of that seemed to matter very little. All the teaching, the training, the mantras about killing Americans, the special lessons in the way of the west, the constant drip-feed of hate, which he knew had been carefully tailored to influence him in his moments of doubt; just as the teachings of the Koran were used to wipe away doubts in those chosen to give their lives along the back streets and patrol routes used by the hated invaders. That all now seemed unreal — a vague and misty dream. In the minds of the ones who had schooled him and brought him this far, it had been their plan, their dream.
Now it was all his.
‘Brace!’ the pilot screamed as the machine’s tail dipped. There was a loud bang and the helicopter was wrenched violently to one side, as if swiped by a giant hand. Electronic alert signals began sounding and lights flashing, and he heard someone scream. He hoped it wasn’t him.
So be it, thought Kassim, and raised his gun. And as the great machine tilted sideways and hung for a moment above the trees, defying gravity, he looked across at Kleeman and murmured a brief prayer for Aisha recalled from his childhood in the valleys below.
He pulled the trigger.
FIFTY-FIVE
The Black Hawk pilot was already dropping his machine towards the ground as the stricken Super Cougar plunged out of the sky, the fuselage turning lazily as the pilot fought vainly to keep it level. A heavy worm of black smoke from the remains of the tail rotor trailed the helicopter’s descent.
‘Brace for landing!’ A crew member shouted a warning through the intercom as the ground came up to meet them with dizzying speed. Three hundred yards away the Super Cougar rolled lazily on its side and hit some trees with a crash, debris arcing into the air and one of the five rotor blades spinning away like a giant boomerang. Then the fuselage sank out of sight into a large gully.
Harry and Rik were out of the Black Hawk before it touched down and running towards where a plume of black smoke was rising into the air. The tops of the trees where the helicopter had impacted were burning, emitting a crackling sound as oil-fed flames
ate into the wet branches.
Behind them, Rekker and his men broke wide to approach the crash site from the side and give covering fire, while the crew member and medic brought fire extinguishers in the hope that they might be of some use.
Harry arrived at the lip of the gully and stared down at a spot a hundred feet below, where the wreckage of the helicopter had finally come to rest. Held in place by two enormous pine trees above a series of waterfalls and a deep gully, it was lying on its side, the fuselage bent and torn with great gashes along the side.
For a moment nothing moved, save a piece of damaged rotor swinging in the wind and a renewed surge of dark, oily smoke from the remains of the rear assembly. Then the remains of a side window in the forward section popped out, and a figure in a flying suit emerged and rolled down the damaged fuselage. Another man followed and they both took off flying helmets. It was the pilot and co-pilot. Both appeared injured but mobile.
A third figure appeared in the main doorway of the machine, his face covered in blood. He wore combat gear and was holding a submachine gun.
Kassim.
There was too much vegetation in the way for a clear shot, and Harry began a cautious descent of the steep slope between the trees, aware that if he slipped, he wouldn’t be able to stop until he landed right in front of the helicopter. He kept his eyes on Kassim, who seemed unaware of how close the pursuers were, and was struggling to get clear of the wreckage.
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