He ran for the machine even as it bounced over the decaying carpet, the unknown operator trying vainly to right the thing with buzzing surges of power to the flickering props.
‘Not this time!’
Marc stamped down on the rotors and felt the plastic snap beneath his heel. He scooped up the damaged device and wrenched off its radio antenna, severing any remote control, then held it up at arm’s length. An unpleasant thought occurred to him: what if it had a self-destruct mechanism?
Behind him, boots crunched on the broken glass. Marc spun about, still clutching the drone, grasping for his rifle – and then he froze.
A figure in matte-black tactical gear, nearly identical to his own, moved around the edge of the moonlight falling through the light well.
She was aiming a Glock semi-automatic at his head, a long sound suppressor extending the silhouette of the pistol, staring fixedly at him through a fringe of short black hair. Laughing eyes turned cold measured him impassively.
She was a ghost, scarred by fire, staring him down.
Before he could stop himself, Marc raised the NVGs so he could look at her in the real light. The pale wraith he saw through the goggles became someone wrapped in shadows, but the lines of her face were unmistakable. That girlish aspect hiding a toughness that refused to be broken, that familiar confidence with which she held herself – all of it was Samantha Green. Standing right there in front of him.
Alive.
‘Sam . . . ?’
The name slipped out of him in a gasp. He remembered stale water and fire smoke, and her body drifting away from him. The body they had never recovered.
She cocked her head, the motion so true that for a second he couldn’t breathe. It was her, but some ruined and broken version of the woman he had cared for. The moonlight made the burn scarring on her face look like tattooed tribal patterning.
Sam, Grace, the woman – she looked him over, the pistol never wavering as she decided what to do next.
There were a million things Marc wanted. To go to her, to hold her, to ask her why, to call out for help. But in the end, there was only one question that mattered, right now in this moment.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Give me the drone,’ she replied. There was no humanity, no connection in the words.
‘I . . .’
For an instant, he looked away, down at the ruined machine he still held in his hand.
Blinding pain exploded across the bridge of his nose as she smashed the butt of the Glock into Marc’s face. It came with such unexpected force that he dropped the drone and stumbled backwards over his own feet, skidding on the ruined carpet, down on one knee.
Bright stars of pain blurred his vision and he clamped a hand to his face as blood streamed from his nostrils. She snatched up the fallen drone with a sweep of the arm and made a tsk noise at the damage he had done.
‘I’ve got it.’
‘What?’
Then Marc realised she was speaking into a throat mike around her collar, to someone else out in the gloom of the humid night.
He blinked and saw her smile. It was exactly the expression Marc remembered, but stripped of the daring and the warmth that had made him feel so much for Samantha Green.
‘Time to go,’ she said to the air. ‘Finish it.’
Marc pushed himself up off the floor, finally shaking off the inertia of the confrontation. Everything Lucy had warned him about was happening; the moment was here and he was going to let it slip away.
This had to stop. He had to stop her.
‘Sam, no—’
The pistol dipped and she shot him in the chest at point-blank range.
*
‘Drop your weapon and turn around!’
Lucy had chased the shooter across the rickety floors of the mezzanine level, leaping over gaps where the age-warped boards had broken and given way. She paced him as he tried to escape her, dodging around webs of old, corroded barbed wire left in place to fence off parts of the run-down terminal. She heard shots sound in the middle distance, back where she had left Marc, but she didn’t dare stop. Lucy trusted the Brit to take care of himself.
Now she had her quarry, and he had nowhere to go but over a sheer drop, down to an abandoned departure lounge filled with rotting furniture.
The shooter came to a halt, balancing on the edge where a rusting guide rail had fallen away. He obeyed the first part of her demand, turning to face her. As he did, she heard the faint burble of a radio voice coming to him through an earpiece.
In the dimness, Lucy could make out his gear and his gun. Just as Lane had surmised, Grace’s accomplice was carrying a M4 carbine. But that wasn’t all. The man’s clothing matched hers – the same generic tactical vest, and an identical black jumpsuit. The only strange thing was the mask. A peculiar hood that completely covered his head, coloured in a translucent shade of emerald. It had no gaps for eyes or mouth and it gave the shooter an unsettling, alien appearance.
‘Do it,’ she insisted, taking aim, ‘and lose the Halloween get-up.’
The shooter’s radio muttered something and he nodded, the blank head turning to study her. He moved his arm so Lucy could see that he was holding something in his free hand.
It was a slim silver cylinder ending in a stubby antenna, with a spring-loaded grip bar held shut by his fingers. Without a word, he let the bar snap open and dropped into a crouch.
‘Shit!’
She had time enough to utter the curse before the first of a series of remote-triggered C-4 charges exploded.
The initial blast peeled a wedge of concrete and metal away from the building and down to the roadway outside, carving a huge ragged-edged hole in the upper floor. The shooter didn’t wait, and seized his escape route, throwing himself over the drop, down into the lounge and across towards open space.
Lucy fired, but as she pulled the trigger a second charge blew and the floor beneath her feet vibrated.
Move or die, she told herself, and followed the shooter down as nearby support columns cracked and split.
*
‘Abort and exfil!’
Farrier’s shout echoed in the wake of the thunder, dragging Marc back from the cusp of unconsciousness.
His chest was on fire. The raw kinetic energy of the bullet had spent itself on his tac vest’s armour weave, but that velocity had transformed into heat, melting the polymer strands that made up the protective layer. Marc smelled the hot stink of molten plastic, burnt cotton and coughed. The air was full of choking dust.
He was half on his feet when a hand grabbed his forearm and pulled him up the rest of the way. Blinking away the pain, he came eye to eye with Tracey Lane.
‘You hit?’ she snapped.
‘Yeah,’ he managed. ‘Vest took it.’
‘Then you can move your arse!’ Lane shoved him, making him grunt with agony as she pushed him forward. ‘This place is coming apart!’
The next charge blew right above them, detaching a complete piece of light well and accompanying roof in one solid mass. Marc saw the flash of detonation and reacted without thinking, shoulder-charging into Lane to shove her bodily out of the path of the falling debris.
Both of them stumbled across the throughway as bricks and steel crashed through the floor and into the basement level below, striking with the force of a wrecking ball.
The effort made Marc howl, and he feared that the old break in his ribs might have snapped again. He fought through the cloud of concrete dust, and Lane stayed close, the two of them supporting one another as they rushed to get out.
‘I warned you . . . it was a set-up . . .’ she managed, between ragged gasping breaths.
Marc could only nod and keep moving.
*
Lucy emerged into open air to the sounds of gunfire and the long, drawn-out rumble of collapse.
Ahead, she saw the white blur of a UN pickup speeding away across the overgrown runway in the direction of the main road that par
alleled the base’s northern perimeter. Suresh and Pearce were chasing the vehicle with rifle rounds, but nothing hit the mark and it was quickly out of range.
She limped towards them, pain lancing up through her leg where she had landed badly on one ankle, as waves of displaced dirt rolled up and over her. More muffled chugs sounded the triggering of the last few charges, and the airport terminal imploded, caving in on itself.
Metal screeched and glass pealed as the old building buckled and fell. She put a hand to her face as the night wind picked up the dust and drew it away.
Over the radio net, she could hear overlapping voices, and from the haze came lumbering shapes that formed into people. Marc and Lane pushed towards her, both of them pale and sweaty with effort.
‘You okay?’ Lucy offered a hand, but Marc waved it away.
‘She shot me,’ he managed, and that pretty much answered a whole bunch of questions.
‘Where’s Farrier?’ Lane looked around, rising panic in her eyes. She tapped her radio. ‘Paladin One, respond. Do you read me, over?’
‘Oh hell, is he in there?’ Pearce stared bleakly at the mass of settling rubble behind them.
‘Look!’ Suresh shouted and pointed, drawing their attention to another figure, shuffling towards the group from out of the choking dust.
Farrier walked slowly, planting one foot in front of the other, his head down and his hands clasped around his gut. The grey dust covered him, gummed to a mask of blood over his face, and to her horror Lucy saw that he was leaving a trail of wet red boot-prints over the cracked, debris-strewn asphalt.
‘John?’
Marc took a step towards his old friend, and it was as if the sound of his own name was the signal for Farrier’s body to give out.
The other man collapsed into Marc’s arms. Lucy saw a length of metal rebar protruding from his gut, run through Farrier like a short-sword in the gap between the pads of his armour vest.
Over the radio, a voice from Hub White was calling for them to leave the area. They were already running, carrying their wounded back to the van even as UN vehicles raced towards the ruins of the airport terminal.
*
In the hills above Bastia, a light and summery rain fell from the night sky, streaking the windows of the old mansion house.
Glovkonin didn’t notice it. The Russian stared into the projector screen erected in front of the leather couch where he sat.
He was there, but his mind was miles away, watching the live feed of the terminal building collapsing through the digital eyes of a drone. The video signal was clean and crisp. The little machines had performed perfectly.
A subsection of the screen was frozen in time on a single frame in the corner of the display, the moment just before the other drone had been downed by the Englishman. The still image had captured Marc Dane’s face in all its detail, trapping him in a moment of determined resistance.
Glovkonin allowed himself a sneer. Such wasted effort. He hoped that the former MI6 officer was still alive, if only because it amused him to imagine Dane witnessing what was to come next. This common and unremarkable man, the lucky fool too clever for his own good, the irritant that lodged in his plans like a stone in his shoe.
Any victory would not taste as sweet without Dane understanding how completely he had failed. Once, on a rainy London street, the Englishman had shown the temerity to challenge Glovkonin, threaten him even. The Russian had not forgotten, and he would not forgive.
The men in the committee, they would have told Glovkonin that such musings were unproductive and unprofessional. But what is the point of this, he wondered, if I cannot wring some enjoyment from it?
The point of view on the main display came about, leaving the obliterated building behind as the drone sought out and pursued a white pickup truck that bounced across the rough ground, away from the chaos. He watched the truck smash through two layers of perimeter fencing and leap a gulley, skidding onto a public highway. The vehicle grew larger as the drone dived towards it, and at the last second the remote-controlled machine landed in the pickup’s flatbed. The image feed turned dark. The sortie was over.
A moment later, there was a hesitant knock at the door, and Glovkonin nodded towards Misha, who stood silently nearby. His bodyguard opened the door to allow a tanned young man to enter, one of the technicians toiling away around the clock in the hall across the way.
The Russian eyed him, waiting for the man to speak. Normally, he paid little attention to the minor players in his dramas, but he knew something of this one. The man’s name was Andre, a cybercriminal of French extraction. He came begging the Combine for gainful employment after his mercenary hacker cadre had been destroyed during an ill-fated operation in South Korea. Andre was eager to please his new employers and unencumbered by morals, both useful traits to have at one’s disposal.
‘The drones are secure,’ he began. ‘We’re downloading their memory caches now. The footage will be on our servers in thirty minutes, ready to be processed.’
Glovkonin gave an encouraging nod. ‘And after that? How long will it take for the first package to be ready?’
‘It’ll be done before dawn.’
He considered the reply for a moment. ‘Nine p.m. on the east coast of America. That will be ideal.’ He waved the man away, already forgetting him. ‘Get back to work.’
When Misha had closed the door again, Glovkonin retrieved an encrypted Blackphone handset from his jacket pocket and woke the device. After a cursory series of security checks, he made a call to another node on the Combine’s protected network.
‘What is it?’
Lau answered promptly, and the tone of his voice made Glovkonin’s lips stiffen. The other man’s manner was changing day by day. The gratitude and reticence he had first exhibited after his liberation was long gone. The Russian liked him better when he was grateful, like Andre.
‘Do you ever sleep?’
‘Thirty years of prison life eroded the need,’ he replied. ‘You are calling me because there is a problem, or because you wish to gloat. Which is it?’
‘You seem bad-tempered, my friend.’ Glovkonin smothered his annoyance with a fake smile. ‘Perhaps rest is precisely what you require.’
‘I will rest when we are finished. What do you want of me?’
He settled back on the couch, the old leather creaking agreeably.
‘To make you aware. The second stage of our endeavour has been a success. Work on the next phase is under way.’ Glovkonin paused. He refused to allow the other man to sour this moment. ‘Tomorrow, we fire the shot that will end Rubicon. You’ll have your long overdue reprisal and I will secure my victory.’
‘An army of falsehoods has little substance,’ said Lau. ‘I remain unconvinced.’
‘That prison time really has put you out of step with the real world,’ said the Russian, unable to keep the acid from his words any longer. ‘People will believe what we tell them to believe.’
‘If you say so. But the sharpest blade is always the truth, and I have something with a very keen edge.’
‘I enjoy your elegant turns of phrase,’ Glovkonin allowed. ‘Make that work when you have Ekko Solomon on the ropes.’
He cut the call and tossed the phone aside.
Lau had his uses, and a great deal of money and effort had been expended in order to bind him to the Combine’s cause. But the longer he lives, thought the Russian, the more the man he once was emerges.
Once that investment had paid off, he decided, it would be time to discard everyone who did not know their place in the new order.
NINE
The RAF medical team carried the stretcher from the military ambulance and up the ramp into the back of the Atlas. Marc stood on the turning apron, watching the transport plane’s crew secure their precious cargo in place, and the airstream from the aircraft’s multi-bladed props pushed at him as they spun up to full power.
His last glimpse of John Farrier was an ashen and bloodless face be
neath a breathing mask, his old friend reduced to a faded, pale copy of himself. The iron bar that speared through him had torn organs and ripped open intestines, causing serious internal bleeding. A blunt and uncompromising doctor from the base hospital told Marc in no uncertain terms that Farrier’s odds of survival were slim at best, and as adequate as RAF Akrotiri’s medical facilities were, he stood a better chance elsewhere.
The Atlas would fly him back to the UK, to the dedicated trauma unit at Queen Elizabeth Hospital. And hopefully, the doctors there would be able to pull Farrier back from the edge.
The cargo ramp closed and the ground crew signalled to the pilots. Marc backed away as the prop wash grew stronger, and the Atlas rolled into the predawn light.
He watched the aircraft set itself up at the end of the runway, listening to the humming skirl of the engines as it throttled up. Marc felt rooted to the spot, an unpleasant and familiar sensation stiffening his legs. He had to keep watch; he had to see the plane off and follow it until it vanished. If he looked away, that would be a kind of betrayal. He would be letting his friend down.
It was a foolish, childish thing to believe, but he couldn’t break away from it. As the Atlas thundered past, wings tilting back to climb skywards, Marc was caught on the jagged edges of other moments, other memories of friends and loved ones clinging to life.
His mother, slowly fading in a featureless hospital ward. Lucy, wreathed in sweat, behind inches of polymer glass in a bio-containment room. Farrier’s pallid face smothered by an oxygen mask.
Sam, drifting through dark waters and into the black.
Each time he hadn’t looked away, hoping that force of will would help bring them back. But it didn’t matter. He couldn’t stop it.
Eventually, the transport plane was lost in the clouds, and beyond it, the glow of sunrise crawled up over the horizon. Released from his self-imposed vigil, Marc began the long walk back to the hangar.
It was impossible to miss the change in tempo at the airbase. They had returned to find the facility on high alert, the local warning state posted at SEVERE. They were met by armed members of the RAF Regiment, who escorted them into cover as quickly as possible. Now, hours after the chaotic events at Nicosia, the after-effects of the disastrous mission were still shaking out and the prognosis was grim.
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