by Andy Maslen
A scream brought her whirling round to her right, finger tightening on the trigger. A Revolutionary Guard, bleeding from a long diagonal cut on his forehead, was coming straight for her, a knife clenched in his right fist. She raised her rifle and shot him centre-mass. He tumbled over, arms outflung, his abdomen torn open and spilling blood and slithering intestines onto the ground.
Breathing heavily, she pressed on, looking left and right, waiting for a face matching her mental picture of Darbandi.
She came to a stop in the lee of the vast white sphere they had first seen while waiting for the drone swarm to do its deadly work. Up close, she could see that far from being a smooth, white ball, it was scabbed with rust and streaked with brownish, oily slicks that issued from the riveted joints between its steel plates. Intricate pipework enveloped its base, making her think for a second of an egg in a nest. One of the Mini-Spikes had hit the centre of an electricity substation hidden on the far side of the sphere. Blindingly bright, blue-white arcs fizzled and danced all around the huge transformers, occasionally leaping to a nearby set of overhead power lines. The ocean-smell of ozone was so intense it made her sneeze, twice.
That doesn’t look good , she had time to think, before moving on, deeper into the complex of buildings. You think? None of it does.
A roar above her head made her look up. Six jet fighters, in close formation, howled over the site. She ducked under a section of pipe so fat it totally obscured her body. She tried to raise Gabriel on the radio, but only heard the rush of static. Stay out of sight, Gabriel. They’ll be reporting an attack, but without a visible enemy they should return to base .
Sarvan Mansourian realised what he was flying into about five seconds too late. He pulled back hard on the control column, but not in time. As if controlled by some central intelligence, the drones shot outwards in all directions, increasing the volume of the cloud of whirring metal and plastic a hundredfold.
He fired his 30mm cannon, and may have hit one or more of the little machines, but then one burst through the fine wire mesh protecting the gaping square air intake of his port engine. Fifty milliseconds later, the fan blades ground it into fragments, which were sucked back into the compression chambers. The engine detonated with a huge bang, of which Mansourian only heard the beginning. Along with the $22 million-worth of the finest aero-engineering Mikoyan could supply, he disintegrated in a fireball.
The planes to his left and right banked away from the explosion, but the scattering drones caught them, too. The right-hand pilot panicked and hauled his control column hard over to port, thus ensuring his plane collided with his neighbour’s. Burning drones fell from the sky along with the wreckage of the three Iranian fighters. The other pilots, saved by their positions at the rear of the formation, were able to pull up into vertical climbs before rolling away from the mid-air carnage and heading back to Mashhad.
Once the planes had flown off, Eli emerged from her hiding place. Shading her eyes against the sun, she looked up, trying to find them. A series of bright flashes to the northwest, followed by hard-edged thumps, told her all she needed to know.
The Fire Goes Out
LONDON
The brunette mum in her late thirties pushed her stroller along the pavement opposite the headquarters of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service. The local council had thoughtfully provided a bench with an excellent view of the main exit, so from time to time, she parked up for a bit and read a book. The activity didn’t bother her baby, snug beneath a brushed cotton sheet and shaded from the sun by a white broderie anglaise clip-on parasol. Mainly because she was made out of plastic. Though she would wet her nappy and cry if asked.
The following day, a Lycra-clad blonde alternated sprints and more relaxed sessions of jogging along the same stretch of pavement.
The next, a dowdy figure of indeterminate gender shuffled past, hair a matted grey tangle, clad in a charity shop raincoat that reached almost to the pavement.
And each day, somewhere between 5.30 p.m. and 6.30 p.m., keeping well back, one of this motley crew followed a member of staff from the gate all the way to the tube station, where they passed him off to a colleague who boarded the same train.
On the sixth day, the brunette was back on duty.
While the young mum walked her baby outside, Blacksmith called Gul. He’d become twitchy over the last few days, so had dumped his first burner phone in the Thames and bought another. It was a risky move but he felt he was running out of safer options.
“It’s Blacksmith. Why haven’t you called me? Did you kill Wolfe and the girl?”
Gul paused before answering, and the silence told Blacksmith all he needed to know.
“You didn’t, did you? You screwed up. After I gave them to you on a plate!”
“It is not that simple. I need to see you.”
“Why? I have nothing more to give you.”
“Please. Indulge me.”
Blacksmith noticed a ragged fingernail and worried at it with his incisors before finally tearing it off down to the quick.
“Fine. The first park we met at. Six tonight.”
Stella closed the book. She’d read the acknowledgements, the foreword, the dedication, epigraph, about the author page and book club questions helpfully provided by the publisher. But now the book was well and truly finished. She huffed out a sigh of frustration.
Come on. A body could die of boredom here.
She checked her watch – 6.00 p.m. – and readied herself for the final half hour when the target was likely to appear.
And then she smiled a grim smile. Hello again, my treacherous little friend.
He’d appeared through the pedestrian door to the side of the main gate, nodding at the guard in the bulletproof glass cubicle. Looking both ways, he darted across the road and took a right, walking right past Stella, who at that moment was attending to her charge, leaning in so her face was obscured by the parasol.
As he passed her, she straightened, let him get thirty yards ahead and walked after him. He led her on a half-mile tour of the less busy streets of Vauxhall before entering Battersea Park through a black-and-gold, wrought-iron gate. Staying further back, she bent over the stroller again and this time muttered into the stem of the parasol.
“Rabbit has entered Battersea Park from Prince of Wales Drive. Repeat. Battersea Park from Prince of Wales Drive. Cover the other exits.”
Then she meandered her way past a duckpond and some swings as she tracked her quarry into the centre of the park. He was heading for a Victorian bandstand. An octagonal, wrought-iron construction of black, green and red. Standing off to one side, a man waited. His suit was smart, but not cut in the English style. And his high-collared shirt was buttoned to the throat without a tie.
She sat on a bench giving her an excellent view of the bandstand and pulled out her book again, opening it at random. The target approached the tieless man and they started talking. Arguing, she realised. The target pointed at tieless man, then jabbed a finger in his face. Clearly, this was a mistake. Tieless man responded by grabbing the target’s jacket lapels and hauling him close enough that their noses were touching. He said something, then he thrust him away so hard he stumbled, and fell. Tieless man turned on his heel, though not before Stella had taken a series of pictures of him talking to the target.
Stella stood up, and pushed her buggy towards the target, walking quickly and plastering a look of concern onto her face. He’d just got to his feet when she arrived.
“Excuse me, are you all right?” she asked. “I saw what just happened. Shall I call the police?”
His face was white with anger or shock, but he managed to stammer out a few words.
“No, thank you. I’m fine.”
“Oh, OK. Well in that case,” Stella reached under the blanket covering the doll and brought out a Sig-Sauer P250 fitted with a suppressor. She held the dinky little pistol close to her side and pointed it at his midriff, “I wonder whether you’d mind coming with me
instead.”
Something happened to the target. His shoulders slumped. He looked defeated. His blue eyes looked pleadingly into Stella’s.
The punch was amateurish. An analyst’s attempt at an operator’s move. As his fist moved through empty air to the side of her head, Stella coshed him on the side of the head with the pistol, catching him under the arms and letting him down gently as his knees buckled. Within seconds, his hands were cable-tied together behind his back and Stella was waving away a couple of curious bystanders who were already raising their phones.
“Police! Put those away or lose them! He’s a terrorist.”
Something in her voice persuaded them to comply. Or maybe it was the threatening couple of pounds of black metal in her right hand. She spoke into the parasol stem again.
“Rabbit in the trap. To me, everyone. At the bandstand.”
While she waited, she retrieved two smartphones and a simple feature phone from Rabbit’s pockets. Work, personal and burner , she thought. Got you.
Where Is He?
VARESHABAD
Gabriel looked up at two more Revolutionary Guards. Their rifles were aimed at the back wall of the lift. At head height. Simultaneously, they looked down at Gabriel. And simultaneously they fell backwards, blood spurting from the monstrous wound cavities blown open in their chests as Gabriel hit them with a burst from his two automatic weapons. Dying, one man squeezed the trigger and sent a spray of bullets into the ceiling and behind him. Gabriel heard a woman scream. He jumped to his feet, scanning the room, which was about the size of a school gym, and packed with equipment and computers. But there were no more Guards. Just a huddle of people in white coats, their eyes wide as they clutched each other. As he ran to them, a woman in the centre of the group collapsed sideways, blood pouring from a massive chest wound.
“Where is Darbandi?” he shouted in Farsi.
A man in his midforties answered in a trembling voice.
“They took him.”
“Who?”
“The guards.”
“When?”
“Just now. There is a stairway. Over there.”
Gabriel ran for the door. He tried to raise Eli on the radio but all he got on Channel 3 was static. He was too deep. Or the Iranians had installed electromagnetic shielding. He didn’t know which. He had no time to care. He took the stairs two at a time. He dropped the Kalashnikov. It was slowing him down and he wanted a free hand.
When he reached the ground floor, he kicked the door open, holding his rifle at waist height. But the reception area was as empty as it had been when he’d left. The Guard’s corpse was spreadeagled in a lake of congealing blood. Gabriel tried Eli again.
“Eli, come in. Over.”
“Yeah, I’m here. Did you get him? Over.”
“No. Just a bunch of frightened-looking scientists. They said a couple of Guards took him. Get outside. We need to stop them escaping. Over.”
“On it. Out.”
Gabriel ran for the exit.
According to the aerial photos he’d seen, there was only one road into the complex. If the Guards were going to spirit Darbandi out, that’s the way they’d have to go. He ran for the ruins of the gate and took up position beside a wrecked armoured car. The blackened torso of a Revolutionary Guard with one remaining arm clutching an AK-47 lay behind it.
A burst of automatic fire echoed off the side of the building he’d just left. Then an answering burst. And another. Single shots, too, so someone was using a pistol.
Gabriel’s mind whirred through his options.
Shit! It’s Eli! Do I go and help or wait here for Darbandi? She’ll be firing from cover. Wait.
He unclipped one of the high-explosive grenades from the webbing across his chest, flipped off the safety clip and pulled the pin, keeping his fingers tight over the spoon.
The firing continued. He tensed, holding the grenade at his side.
From the roadway between the buildings he’d watched Eli run for, a big, black car burst into the open. It was Darbandi’s Mercedes. The side windows were open and he could see the muzzles of a couple of AK-47s poking out.
Gabriel let the spoon fly from the grenade and tossed it into the path of the Mercedes.
With a sharp, percussive bang, the grenade exploded as the car sped over it. The car bucked, and Gabriel heard the frantic roar of the engine as the rear wheels lost traction as the grenade lifted them clear of the ground. Then it slammed down and kept coming.
Fuck! Armoured.
He stood directly in its path and opened up with his rifle, firing directly at the windscreen, hoping to scare the driver into a swerve. Head on, they couldn’t return fire, so he stood his ground and fired at the glass until the magazine was empty.
And, of course, his rounds had no effect beyond starring the toughened glass with dozens of silvery-white craters.
In the seconds remaining before the car reached, then passed him and escaped onto the road leading back to Tehran, Gabriel turned and grabbed the AK-47 from the outflung arm of the corpse by his side.
He jumped aside and fired as the car swept past, holding the trigger down and keeping the muzzle at the level of the side windows. Which were still open. The faces inside were a blur and the Kalashnikov bucked in his hands, spitting out hot brass cases with a loud rattle, but he held it steady as the Mercedes roared between the smashed gates. Now the car did swerve. It slewed off the road and careered through a patch of scrub, heading for open desert. Through the untouched rear window, he could see someone twisting to reach between the front seats to steer the car.
“Gabriel!” It was Eli shouting from behind him. “The bikes!”
He turned to see Eli running towards the two Tigers, rifle slung across her back, panic in her eyes. Realising in an instant what she meant, he raced back to meet her.
Major Esfahani propped himself up on his elbows. He was lying in a pool of blood that stretched from his hips to his feet. Yet he felt no pain. Adrenaline has a way of doing that to a soldier , he thought. Since time immemorial, men have fought on with horrendous wounds, unaware that they were missing limbs, internal organs or parts of their skulls. Realising that his own lack of pain was caused not by brain chemicals but by an absence of injuries, he looked left and right. And shuddered. Beside him, a headless corpse – a Second Warrior by the look of it – lay spreadeagled, its chest cracked open, broken rib-ends showing white through the ruined flesh.
Esfahani got to his feet and looked around for a weapon. A blood-smeared AK-47 lay just beyond the dead man. He grabbed it, checked the magazine, and ran towards the main gates.
He rounded the corner of the office building and stopped dead in his tracks. Two figures in camouflage were running towards sand-coloured motorbikes by the gates.
“Infidels!” he screamed, raising the AK-47 to his shoulder and pulling the trigger.
Death of a Patriot
Running to meet Eli by the Tigers, Gabriel’s attention was entirely on her and the need to get after Darbandi. It was only as he got within thirty feet that the movement from the roadway between the buildings caught his eye. At first, he couldn’t process what he was seeing and thought the staggering black figure was Smudge, putting in one of his increasingly rare visual appearances. Then reality reasserted itself. The soldier with the hairless head burnt black by an explosion, blood running down from lurid red cracks in the skin, was real, not a hallucination. And it – he – was raising a rifle to his shoulder.
“Get down!” he yelled at Eli.
Only amateurs look round. Eli was a professional. She dropped to the ground before rolling and reaching for her pistol.
The blackened soldier loosed off a burst but his aim was wild.
Gabriel’s was not. His own pistol drawn, he cradled the grip in both hands and shot the man in the chest. He fired again as the man staggered, hitting him in the right arm and tearing a chunk of muscle away with a spray of red.
Eli jumped to her feet and ran back, making
sure of the kill with two rounds to the head, blowing a bright pink hole in the blackened skull. The she turned to Gabriel and gave him the thumbs up before rejoining him at the bikes.
“Come on,” she said. “We need to catch him.”
Gabriel swung his leg over the Tiger’s saddle. In a single, continuous movement, he started it, kicked it into first and slewed it round in a tight circle.
Together, Gabriel and Eli raced after the Mercedes, which had a few hundred yards’ start on them. But as Gabriel raced after it, he realised the car wasn’t accelerating. Instead it was trundling along at barely more than 20 mph. In an instant he realised what had happened. He’d hit the driver, who’d slumped over the steering wheel. The figure he’d seen in the back seat was leaning forwards to steer but they had no access to the throttle pedal. The dead man’s foot could so easily have come down hard on the pedal, but instead it had clearly slipped to one side or simply been pushed back by the internal spring.
Within a few seconds, Gabriel had caught up with the Mercedes. With a bang from its underside, the car hit a huge flat rock protruding from the loose sandy soil of the riverbank. Its nose reared up for a second, then it plunged six feet down a steep incline into what would have been the main channel of the watercourse.
Gabriel rode after it, standing up on the footpegs and jumping the bike down onto the riverbed. He saw Eli’s bike flying out and down twenty feet to his right. The Mercedes trundled across the expanse of gritty sand before coming to rest with its wide, chromed grille munching at the sandy slope of the far bank. He jumped off the bike, letting it fall onto its side, unshouldered his rifle and ran towards the stationary car. Eli approached it from the rear, carrying her own rifle at the level of the rear screen. Bulletproof it may have been, but anyone sticking their head or weapon out of one of the open side windows would get a burst of fire that would either drive them back inside or kill them outright. Nobody moved.
