Red Strike

by Chris Ryan

  ‘Hands in the air!’ Spider shouted. ‘NOW!’

  Flowers and Jagielka hesitated for a beat, assessing the situation. But the facts were staring them right in the face. They were outnumbered. No point trying to fight back. The oldest rule of the jungle. Don’t pick a fight with someone bigger than you. They reached a mutual, unspoken decision and threw up their hands in surrender.

  Spider shouted something at Jagielka. The Scouse didn’t respond. Spider took a step towards the officer and swept his AK-47 round, slamming the wooden stock into the latter’s midriff. The officer folded at the waist, gasping for air. In the same instant Mr Hulk struck Flowers clean on the jaw. The force of the blow stunned Flowers, his head snapping back, legs buckling before he fell away and crashed to the dirt. In the next moment Spider grabbed hold of Jagielka and threw him to the ground beside Flowers. The two gunmen yelling at the stupefied Brits, rifles trained on their backs.

  The next two gunmen swept forwards.

  Heading straight for McKinnon and Bentley.

  They were forty metres away. The nearest guy was tall and wiry, built like a greyhound, with a pair of battered white trainers and a gold necklace dangling from his neck.

  The fourth gunman was a step behind Greyhound. He was heavyset and bronze-skinned, with peroxide-blond hair moulded into a flat top. He looked like a Soviet villain in an eighties action film.

  Both Greyhound and Flat Top had already lined their weapons up with their targets. Shouting at McKinnon and Bentley to surrender.

  McKinnon froze. Bentley stood at his side, feet rooted to the spot, a look of fear etched across his youthful face.

  McKinnon was thinking clearly, in spite of the AK-47 pointing directly at his chest. At a range of thirty-something metres, the two gunmen could hardly miss their targets. If we disobey or resist, he thought, they’ll kill us. And McKinnon had no intention of becoming a martyr. He was a police officer, on a public servant salary, with a family to think about. They didn’t pay him enough to risk his life in a firefight. Not by a long fucking measure. He made no attempt to go for his gun.

  Neither did Bentley.

  We’re done for, McKinnon thought.

  But there was still time for the Russian to escape.

  He glanced quickly over his shoulder. Volkov was next to the rear Discovery, six metres away. With the front door to the safe house a further ten metres to the west. The door was still ajar, McKinnon noticed. He had been about to set the alarm when the gunmen had rocked up.

  Volkov was sixteen metres from the front door. Which meant he had a fifty-metre head start on the two nearest gunmen. If he made a run for it, the Russian could reach the house before Greyhound or Flat Top could close on him. Seal himself inside the strong room and wait for reinforcements to show up. The gunmen wouldn’t risk sticking around here for very long, McKinnon presumed. They were in the middle of the British countryside, dangerously exposed. If Volkov made it to the strong room, he would safe. The gunmen would have no choice but to abandon their plan.

  A long shot.

  But better than nothing. Better than allowing a key witness, to be captured, or worse.

  ‘Run!’ McKinnon shouted. ‘Inside the house! Get to the strong room!’

  The Russian didn’t move.

  He just stood there, staring dumbly at McKinnon, eyes blinking rapidly.

  McKinnon figured the guy was suffering from sensory overload. He’d seen it before, when civilians were confronted by sudden acts of violence or life-threatening situations. Everything shut down. Too much information to process. Better to stand still than run into potential danger.

  Only Volkov wasn’t a civvy. He had more than twenty years of experience in Russian foreign intelligence.

  McKinnon tried again. ‘Run! For fuck’s sake, go!’

  The Russian still didn’t move.

  McKinnon had just enough time to wonder why Volkov didn’t try to escape. The guy was forty metres away from men who had been sent to kill or capture him. Probably the same men who had poisoned him two months ago. His worst enemies. All he had to do was turn and dart inside the safe house, and he might survive.

  So why isn’t he legging it?

  Then McKinnon was out of time.

  He heard Flat Top roaring at him in broken English. He spun round and saw the gunman a few metres away, screaming at him at the top of his voice. Black hole of his AK-47 muzzle trained on McKinnon’s chest, his index finger taut on the trigger.

  ‘Hands in the fucking air, bitch!’ he shouted. ‘Do it!’

  McKinnon raised his hands. Slowly. He didn’t want to make any rapid movements and give the guy a reason to plug him. Bentley held up his hands too. McKinnon saw him out of the tail of his eye. The kid was bricking it. Hands quivering, the colour dropping from his face.

  ‘On your knees!’ Flat Top ordered them.

  McKinnon did as he was told. He dropped to his knees, keeping his hands raised, his heart pounding inside his chest.

  Bentley did the same.

  Flat Top turned and barked an order at Greyhound. The latter peeled away and swept past McKinnon and Bentley, moving swiftly towards the rear Discovery. Towards Volkov.

  McKinnon glanced behind him. He could just about see Volkov, standing next to the wagon. The guy hadn’t moved. Hadn’t shifted an inch. Like he was in some sort of trance.

  Greyhound approached the former spy, AK-47 sights lined up with the latter’s face. He shouted at Volkov in a strange foreign tongue that McKinnon assumed was Russian. A threat of some kind, probably. Greyhound was offering Volkov a choice. The same one the officers had been given. Surrender or die.

  Volkov didn’t move.

  Greyhound repeated his threat. Louder this time. There was a long pause. Then Volkov’s arms went vertical.

  Greyhound kept his weapon raised. For a moment McKinnon thought the guy was going to execute Volkov. A quick three-round burst to the chest, problem solved. But then Greyhound took a step closer and grabbed hold of the Russian by the bicep, dragging him forwards and shouting at him, gesturing frantically with his rifle at the police van.

  McKinnon couldn’t understand a word that Greyhound was saying. But his hand actions and tone of voice were easy enough to interpret. Get over to the van.

  The gunmen aren’t here to kill the Russian, he realised.

  They’ve been sent to snatch him.

  Volkov got the message. He broke out of his stupor and stumbled on ahead of Greyhound, hands above his head, whimpering incoherently as he staggered towards the Crafter. Greyhound stalked behind him, occasionally prodding Volkov in the back with the tip of the rifle barrel.

  Flat Top kept his rifle fixed on Bentley and McKinnon. Muzzle flitting between the two officers, ready to drop either of them if they tried to fight back. He called out at the two other gunmen, thirty metres away. Mr Hulk and Spider. They were busy restraining Flowers and Jagielka. The two officers were lying flat on their chests, their hands bunched behind their backs. Mr Hulk had his knee planted on Jagielka’s spine, pinning him down while he tied the guy’s wrists together with a pair of white plasticuffs. Spider was doing the same to Flowers.

  As soon as they had secured the two men Mr Hulk sprang to his feet and hurried over to Flat Top, leaving Spider to pad down Flowers and Jagielka, seizing their tactical radios and mobile phones. The guy took each handset, flipped out the SIM cards and then stamped on the devices as if he was crushing bugs.

  Flat Top said something to Mr Hulk. The latter fished out two more pairs of plasticuffs from his pockets, manoeuvred so that he was directly behind McKinnon.

  ‘On the ground,’ he ordered. ‘On your front. Both of you.’

  McKinnon obeyed, lowering himself until he was flat against the damp, cold gravel. His heart was beating steadily faster now. He tried to reason with himself. There was no point in the gunmen killing McKinnon and his fellow officers. Executing the police would be counter-productive. It would elevate a kidnapping into a multiple homicide. Thes
e guys wouldn’t want that kind of heat on them, especially if they were planning on bugging out of the country.

  But that didn’t make his situation any less terrifying.

  McKinnon felt a pair of gloved paws clamp around his forearms as Mr Hulk braced his hands behind his back. He felt the plastic loops slide up past his knuckles until they were cinched tight.

  Mr Hulk stood up. He left McKinnon lying face down on the ground and shifted across to his right, dropping down beside Bentley, plasticuffing him as well. Once he had finished he said something to Flat Top. The latter lowered his weapon and knelt down next to McKinnon, frisking him. He retrieved the Galaxy and his police radio, along with his wallet and the keys to the Discovery. Flat Top gathered up the items, tossed the wallet and keys aside and handed the phone and radio to Mr Hulk. The huge gunman had retrieved Bentley’s own comms units. He took all four handsets and went through the same ritual as Spider had done, prising out the SIM cards from the phones, then stamping on the devices until they were shattered beyond repair.

  Now we’ve got no way of contacting HQ, McKinnon realised.

  No way of sending for help.

  Which was actually good news, in a weird way. McKinnon considered it unlikely that the gunmen would go to the trouble of trashing their comms kit if they were planning on slotting them.

  They’re trying to give themselves enough time to get clear before we can call for help.

  Thirty metres away, Greyhound manhandled Volkov towards the rear of the Crafter. The Russian was begging with his captors, pleading loudly with Greyhound, tears glistening on his cheeks. The gunman ignored his desperate pleas as he unlocked the door leading to the tiny metal cage built into a separate compartment at the back of the Crafter. He stepped back, grabbed hold of Volkov by his shoulder and shoved him head first into the cell. The Russian was still begging for mercy as Greyhound slammed the outer door shut, locking him inside. He thumped his fist twice on the door and whistled.

  A moment later, the Crafter engine roared into life.

  McKinnon looked on helplessly.

  We had one job to do. Protect Volkov.

  And we fucked it up.

  Greyhound cupped a hand and shouted at the other three gunmen, waving them over. Mr Hulk and Flat Top sprang into action. They snatched up their assault rifles and raced back across the driveway to the waiting van, clambering inside the main passenger cabin. Greyhound swung round from the rear of the Crafter and followed them.

  Spider was the last of the four to return to the van. He was halfway to the Crafter when he stopped in his tracks, as if remembering something. He did an about-turn and raced over to the Land Rover Discovery parked next to Flowers and Jagielka. Hiked up his trouser leg, unsheathed a black boot knife strapped around his ankle and slashed the front and rear tyres, plunging the nine-inch blade deep into the tread line. He repeated the trick for the second Discovery a few metres away from McKinnon and Bentley. Both SUVs had run-flats but driving on slashed tyres would slow them down, giving the gunmen more time to escape before the alarm was raised.

  The ambush had been cleverly worked, McKinnon knew. The gunmen were professionals. They had correctly foreseen that the police officers would call in to HQ and report the strange encounter with the delivery driver. They had even known that the team would be compelled to abandon the safe house as soon as they had been alerted to the security breach.

  All they had to do was wait for their targets to emerge through the front door and launch their assault.

  But that led to more worrying questions.

  As in: How did these guys know where to find us?

  And how did they know exactly when to attack?

  The second question troubled McKinnon the most. If the gunmen had rocked up sixty seconds later, they would have been too late. Volkov and the team would have been on the road down to Leeds. Instead, they had arrived just in time.

  Spider sheathed his boot knife, snatched up his assault rifle and scurried back across the driveway towards the police van. Hopped inside the main cabin, wrenched the sliding side door shut.

  A moment later the driver gunned the engine. The Crafter growled, throwing up a tyre spray of loose gravel, stones and mud as it backed out of the driveway and steered down the path. Ten seconds later, the Crafter hit the main road.

  Twenty seconds after that, the van disappeared from view.

  Volkov was gone.

  FOUR

  Four minutes later, Vasin hung a left off the main road, arrowed down the narrow lane and pulled up in front of the field gate behind the delivery van. The track leading into the wooded area was empty and so were the surrounding fields. It reminded Vasin of the penal colony he had once spent time in, deep in the forests of the Urals, barren and grey and windswept.

  He tore the keys out of the ignition, flipped open his side door and hopped out of the wagon.

  ‘Everybody out,’ he ordered. ‘Into the Sprinter. Make sure you leave nothing behind.’

  The four guys wrenched the side door open and jumped down, boots pounding on the gravel. The Sprinter driver swung out of the front cab, paced round to the side of the vehicle and pulled back the sliding door on its metal tracks. Then the guys piled into the Sprinter cabin.

  Two banks of folding seats had been installed in the panel van by the team’s specialist mechanic. Four seats for Vasin’s guys, plus another for Volkov. A tight squeeze, for a two-hundred-mile journey. But better than risking it in the Crafter. Thirty minutes from now, every cop in the country would be on the lookout for that van.

  While the others bundled inside the Sprinter, sliding their weapons beneath the seats, Vasin hooked around to the back of the Crafter. He dug out the set of spare keys from the side pocket on his 5.11s, popped open the rear doors and located the lock on the outside of the cell door, an inch or so below the handle. Vasin shoved the key into the lock and gave it a clockwise twist. There was the grinding and clanking of bolts shifting, a distinct click as the lock released. He grabbed the metal door handle, heavily scuffed and scratched from years of overuse. Levered the handle. Wrenched the cell door open.

  Nikolai Volkov was sitting on a metal bench inside the tiny cell, hands dangling between his legs. Vasin grinned. ‘You can come out now, Nikolai Ivanovich. There’s no one watching you.’

  Volkov paused for a beat and peered outside, as if suspecting a trap. Then he rose from the bench and climbed out of the cage with as much dignity as he could muster. Which wasn’t much.

  The former double agent was much smaller than Vasin had pictured in his head. And physically weaker, too. His shoulders were slouched. He moved with considerable pain and difficulty. But some of the old steel was there in his grey-blue eyes, Vasin noted. They were intense and alert, taking in every detail. Possible escape routes, allies, potential threats. They were the eyes of a man used to calculating his every move, watching his back, with an allegiance to nobody but himself. Vasin could hear the warnings of his superiors ringing in his ears.

  Don’t trust him. Watch him carefully. He betrayed us once. He might do so again, if it’s in his interests.

  Volkov straightened up and said, ‘You took your time. You were nearly too late.’

  ‘We came as soon as we could. What else were we supposed to do?’

  ‘That wasn’t part of the plan. You were supposed to get there as soon as I sent the message.’

  Vasin felt his temper rising. ‘Put in a complaint with our boss. I’m sure he’ll be sympathetic. Now get in the fucking van.’

  Vasin waved a hand at the Sprinter. Volkov stood his ground, a flicker of defiance in his eyes.

  ‘My daughter. When do I get to speak to Nadezhda?’

  ‘Soon. Once we’re out of the country.’

  ‘I want to speak to her now. Let her know I’m safe.’

  Vasin shook his head. ‘There’s no time for that. We’ve got to get on the road.’

  ‘We had a deal,’ Volkov said. ‘My cooperation, in exchange for seeing my
daughter. I want to hear her voice.’

  ‘And you will,’ Vasin said. ‘You’ll talk to her very soon, my friend. But right now, we have to get the fuck out of here.’

  Volkov pursed his lips. He stared levelly at Vasin, as if trying to decide whether it was worth pursuing the argument any further. Decided against it, nodded and followed Vasin towards the panel van parked just ahead of the Crafter.

  The delivery driver was kneeling beside the Sprinter’s rear bumper, peeling off the stolen reg plate. He had already ripped off the plate for the front end of the vehicle. Most manufacturers fitted licence plates with tape these days. Vasin didn’t know why. Budgetary reasons, perhaps. Maybe double-sided tape was cheaper and more convenient than drilling holes in the car. Marginal savings.

  The driver tore off three strips of double-sided tape from a roll and applied them to the plate frame, forming a wide ‘H’. He peeled off the top layer from the tape strips. Then he took the original rear plate and pressed it against the frame, rubbing the surface with the bottom of his bunched-up fist to stick it down.

  Vasin stopped beside the Sprinter and turned to Volkov, indicating one of the empty seats. ‘Get in.’

  Volkov looked at him. ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘South of here. Two hundred miles. There’s another car waiting for us. We’ll switch motors and head straight for the airport.’

  ‘And then I’ll see my daughter?’

  There was a pathetic look of optimism in Volkov’s eyes that Vasin found mildly amusing. ‘Yes. Then you’ll see your daughter. Now get in the fucking van.’

  The former agent clambered inside the Sprinter, squeezing himself into one of the empty seats. Vasin tugged the sliding door shut.

  Almost ready to roll.

  Vasin signalled to the driver. ‘Ready?’