by Tim Stevens
As they lugged him up the steps, the slumped Fallon and the basement receding through the doorway, Purkiss made his move.
Thirty-Four
The hangar echoed with the clang and scrape of tools, the footfalls of the men. They moved about, checking fluid levels, the pressure of the oxygen system, all things that had already been investigated but needed reviewing now that the move from the farm had taken place, in case there had been any changes in transit. Dobrynin with his technical knowledge took charge.
Venedikt walked slowly round the Black Hawk, keeping out of the men’s way, gazing at the low-slung structure in something approaching rapture.
He hadn’t pressed the arms dealer, the man of obscure nationality and ethnicity, on the detail of where he had procured the helicopter. It was none of Venedikt’s concern. But the man had at one point spoken of a contact in Turkey, and Venedikt knew the Turkish Army was one of the international clients to whom the Sikorsky company exported its most famous chopper. Dobrynin had confirmed it was a basic UH-60A model, with the crucial modification of wing stubs.
Venedikt had examined the helicopter already, had twice seen it in flight when Leok, his pilot as well as driver, had taken it from the site of purchase to the farmhouse and again when he had taken off from the farmhouse en route to the current backup location. Now, with no pressing problems to distract him, Venedikt was able for the first time fully to appreciate its beauty, the terrible power that seemed contained in its silent length and beneath the canopy of its rotor like a demon trapped in an amulet, awaiting release.
The Black Hawk was far and away the more expensive of the two purchases he had made from the dealer, but if anything it was less important, less of a catch, than the other.
Leok, seated in the cockpit, conferred with Dobrynin, who stood alongside. Squatting and examining the front wheel was Lyuba. She’d been a helicopter pilot and mechanic in the unit, and had come recommended to Venedikt on this basis. She had, he acknowledged, delivered them the prize of Fallon, even if inadvertently. She was to be afforded the honour of being included in the final leg of the operation. The mission. The word was better, gave a sense of the purpose driving their plans.
There had been those among his men – and he counted Lyuba as one of his men – who’d wanted Fallon and Purkiss despatched with a bullet each. It was their bodies that were necessary, they’d argued. But bullet wounds would raise suspicions. Far better to allow the two men to perish in the conflagration that was to follow. Venedikt had prevailed, of course. None of the arguments had been meant as serious challenges to his authority. But he understood the fury of his men. Purkiss had reduced their numbers to the current rump of a dozen. It was natural that vengeance should be sought.
Vengeance would be theirs, he’d assured them. All they could do themselves was kill the man, but far worse was the fate that history would inflict upon Purkiss: the death of his very name under the curses of a thousand million spitting tongues, day after day, for ever.
*
Purkiss waited until the man at his legs paused to adjust his grip, then flexed his knees and his hips, the sudden movement pulling his shins free from the man’s arms. He pistoned his legs so that both his feet caught the man full in the abdomen just below the ribcage, the force of the kick driving the man backwards and upwards. His head cracked against the frame at the top of the low doorway hard enough that flakes of plaster broke adrift. The impact against the man’s torso had pushed Purkiss back against the man holding him under the arms. The man stumbled back against the steps. Purkiss landed on him and jerked his head backwards, trying to connect his skull with the man’s face, but missed. The man recovered quickly, writhing out from underneath. Purkiss twisted his head round and got his teeth into the man’s right ankle above his low-topped boot. He clamped his jaws tight around a mouthful of choking sock and yielding flesh.
The man yelled and jerked his leg loose, the movement making him lose his balance. Still on his back, Purkiss braced his feet on one of the steps and heaved back and up, launching his head into the man’s exposed groin. With a shriek the man fell on his backside. Purkiss turned and found his feet. The man was already trying to stand but Purkiss brought a knee up under his chin and heard teeth gnash and shatter. The man sprawled and slid down a step before coming to rest.
Wrists still fastened behind his back, Purkiss squatted beside the man. With the fingers of his right hand he grabbed the grip of the pistol protruding from the man’s belt and prised the gun out. As the man he’d kicked down the steps rose in the doorway below, weaving, his own pistol out and aimed, Purkiss turned side-on and fired twice.
The first shot went wide and the ricochet whined off the door jamb, making him half-duck. The second took the man in the chest, sending him back once more through the doorway. From below, he heard Fallon hiss, but there was no time to go back, they’d agreed on that. Purkiss crouched again and searched the pockets of the man sprawled on the steps, duckwalking awkwardly around him until his trussed hands found what they were looking for inside his jacket. A mobile phone.
Purkiss straightened and pushed the phone in his back pocket. He took the remaining stairs at a run, horribly aware that he had no sense of spatial orientation and had no idea what he would find at the top or which way he should head once there. Another door stood closed at the top in the left-hand wall. He pushed it open with his knee, didn’t pause because there’d be no point, but charged through. He found himself in a narrow corridor, impersonally painted and uncarpeted – he was in some kind of office building – with no lighting of its own, but faint illumination coming from each end, a doorway limned in light to his left. To his right, a window looked out onto the exterior, swatches of rain flicking against the glass.
He ran at the window. Behind him came noise as the door opened and the shouting began. The window looked double glazed and wouldn’t therefore yield in time. He glanced back over his shoulder where two figures were crowding into the corridor. He aimed backwards and fired a salvo, one of the men howling and twisting away. The other crouched and was taking aim and Purkiss fired again, dropping and rolling as the shots sang by and chipped into the wall. One of them hit the window and it starred and shattered. From the ground, Purkiss fired back, a low and sweeping volley. The man at the other end danced to keep his legs out of the way, ducked back inside the door. Purkiss was up and tucking his head as tightly as he could into his chest.
With as fast a run-up as he could achieve in such a short distance he launched himself at the jagged remains of the window and into the wet dark.
The shock of cold air and rain clutched at his breath. He landed hard on his shoulder and rolled, keeping the momentum going, tumbling over and over down a soggy slope of dirt and gravel, resisting the screaming urge to stop and look back. Somewhere far off he heard shouting again and the firing started. Dimly he registered that the bullets were relatively low-velocity because he heard the crump of the shots before the stinging whine as they sang past him.
When the ground stopped sloping and ran level he rolled once more and peered around at a crouch, taking a moment to aim, and releasing three shots at the window he had come through. It was almost hidden behind the hump of the ground he’d rolled down but he saw a figure twitch away. He kept low, below the hump, and ran along the edge of it, away from the building, which he saw was a broad two-storey office block of some kind.
The squall was surging again, sheets of rain lashing and cracking at the mercy of a puckish wind. Ahead of him was a concrete wall that enclosed the property. On the other side of it was a field. He reached the wall and tried to leap it, but without the use of his hands it was impossible. He fell back, gasping.
Purkiss looked back. From this distance the building he had vacated suddenly had a context, slotting in among the other parts like a piece from a jigsaw puzzle. On the other side of the building was a row of large, squat, oblong structures that receded away, floodlights illuminating the nearest one. A series of hanga
rs.
He was in an airfield, and a largely disused one by the look of it. Off to the left, far behind the office block and the hangars, an assortment of aircraft shells sat and rusted, their incomplete, gutted state visible even in the silhouettes that were all that was visible of them against the night sky. To the right, disappearing into the shadows thrown by the floodlights, was what looked like a runway.
Figures were emerging from around the building, three, four, their shouts carrying faintly through the rain, their faltering gaits suggesting they didn’t know exactly where he was. He strained eyes and ears for the first evidence of dogs, but there was none. Purkiss thanked Kendrick silently. He’d disposed of all of them back at the farm.
On either side of him the wall stretched as far as he could see. The other side wasn’t visible from this close to the wall, but on his approach down the slope he’d seen the flat field stretching some distance before clusters of trees began to appear. Purkiss scrambled along the base of the wall to his right, where it was darker, and peered at an approaching shape. A shed of some kind.
It was dilapidated, and the wooden door gave easily despite the awkwardness with which he was forced to pull at it, tearing around the padlock. Inside, tools and mechanical equipment mouldered, red with rust. He found a hacksaw that still showed some silver in its blade. Squinting over his shoulder, he clamped its handle in a vice on the edge of a workbench and began to rub the plastic tie around his wrists rapidly against the teeth, feeling the serrations bite through his flesh. His arms sprang free and he flexed them, revelling for an instant in the sensation. Then he picked up the pistol again – another SIG-Sauer, perhaps standard issue with this outfit – and looked out through the door. He saw the figures, blurred through the rain, running towards the wall further back in the direction he’d come from. He stepped out, tested the door of the shed with both hands, and with a sharp tug wrenched it off its hinges.
He lugged the door over to the wall and propped it at an angle, thankful that it reached the top and that the holes punched in it by time and neglect looked as if they would serve as footholes. Instead of running up it, he headed off along the base of the wall on the other side of the shed, the way he’d been going.
His wrists were sticky, the blood black in the darkness. He thought, hysterical laughter rising and threatening to erupt: you’ll need a tetanus shot.
They’d left him his watch, a sports model. He pressed the button for the backlight, saw the time. Five forty-nine.
Two hours to go.
Thirty-Five
The first sharp noise had been equivocal, a far-off echo like something falling, and none of his men reacted so Venedikt disregarded it. The second could not have been interpreted as anything other than a gunshot, muffled to some extent by the intervening walls and the rain, but unmistakeable in character. It was followed rapidly by a volley of gunfire.
Venedikt was already running toward the doors of the hangar when Dobrynin began to move. Venedikt shouted, ‘Stay here,’beckoned with his fingers to two of the others – he needed Dobrynin and Lyuba unharmed – and drew his gun as he ran. The shots had come from inside somewhere. The office building was the most likely choice.
He saw it immediately, the broken window in the office building with the glass on the outside. As he approached, one of the men, Raskov, appeared in the frame and gasped, ‘One of them’s loose, Purkiss, he’s armed.’ Venedikt didn’t pause to ask if the man was hit, if any of the others were down, just set off at a sprint down the slope in the direction of the far boundary of the airfield.
The cloud cover was absolute. The absence of starlight together with the haze of rain made Venedikt falter, so that the other three men, the evidently uninjured Raskov and the two from the hangar, caught up with him. There was no point blundering into an ambush.
‘Spread out,’ he said. They spaced themselves ten feet apart, began to make their way across the sodden dirt and grass towards the wall. He took out his phone and hit the key for Dobrynin’s number, wanting to tell him to send somebody into the office to make sure Fallon was still secure in the basement. There was no signal. This was something he hadn’t planned for, the poor phone reception at the backup base, made worse by the weather.
Raskov found it, the shed door propped against the wall. On Venedikt’s signal he scrambled up it and peered over.
‘No sign.’
Venedikt said, ‘Was he injured?’
‘I don’t think so. Not badly enough that he couldn’t run, and he wasn’t leaking blood.’
If Venedikt had been on his own he would have put his hand to his forehead, roared even. The loss of Purkiss in itself wasn’t disastrous. He hadn’t been a factor in the original plan and it could proceed without him. But although he wouldn’t know where he was, and would find it extremely difficult to flag down transport to take him the eighty kilometres back into Tallinn at this hour of the morning, he still had over two hours to alert the authorities to the presence of a disused airfield somewhere out of town. By process of elimination Venedikt and his men would be found, eventually.
Two hours. Was it long enough?
The more men he dispatched to look for Purkiss the more likely he was to find him, but the higher the attrition rate was likely to be. For a moment he considered taking the Black Hawk up over the field to hunt for the man. He dismissed the idea. It was tempting fate, using his prize piece of equipment for a purpose it hadn’t been intended for.
He made his decision. He, Lyuba, Dobrynin and Leok, the core personnel for the remainder of the mission, would remain at the hangar and proceed as before. The rest of his men would find Purkiss.
*
The wall led him away from the office building and the hangars. Purkiss followed it, stopping only to make out the vague shapes and sounds of men clustering where he’d propped the makeshift ladder. He satisfied himself that they weren’t continuing their search along the wall, that they assumed as he’d hoped that he’d gone over to the other side.
When he reached the corner of the wall where it bent rightwards, and judged he was far enough away that it was unlikely sound would carry, he stopped again and took out the phone he’d lifted from the man on the basement steps. The signal icon had a defiant slash across it. When he tried to dial Elle’s number a low repeated tone confirmed that he was out of range.
Purkiss took deep breaths through his mouth – his nose was swollen closed and he was afraid that the slightest attempt to force air through it would unplug a geyser – and prepared himself for what he was going to do. The treatment by Kuznetsov’s men after his capture, the effect of seeing Fallon again, the head butt to his face, the escape, all contributed to the overpowering nausea that churned in his stomach. It would make matters easier.
He bent over near to the wall, put two fingers down his throat, and did it as quietly as he could. After two or three dry heaves it came, clots and ropes of swallowed blood mainly, but also the remnants of the sandwiches Elle had made. Bile stung his throat and his stoppered nose, and his eyes streamed. When he was sure he was finished he wiped away the tears and knelt. With his fingers he began to probe, disgust twisting his face.
He found the SIM card immediately, even in the dark, had in fact felt its sharp edges as it came up. He wiped it on his shirt tails until it felt as clean as it was likely to get. He didn’t know how long a card could be exposed to stomach acids before it was rendered useless, but he supposed his education was about to be furthered. He swapped the card for the one in the phone. It was a long shot. Abby was no longer around to access the website from which she was tracking him, and he didn’t know if Elle had the facilities to hack the site or in some other way locate the phone that held his SIM. He didn’t know if Elle was even still alive, come to that.
From his corner he watched a figure detach itself from the group at the wall and move rapidly back up towards the buildings. The tableau was eerily still for a few moments, the fossil aircraft separating Purkiss from the hangars whi
ch brooded like great ancient megaliths in the gloom. Purkiss didn’t have a clear view of the area between the floodlit hangar and the office building, but he saw the odd flicker of movement there. In time, two figures appeared and ran down the slope to join the others at the wall. He watched them clamber over. Five, then, on the other side. How many did that leave in the buildings?
He was at the back of the hangars, and none of the office windows were lit on this side of the building. He took a breath and began making his way back towards the structures, between the hulks of the abandoned planes, the SIG-Sauer in his hand.
*
A scream jerked him awake. He cried out with pain and fought to keep himself upright, looking about in panic before orientation settled in.
The Jacobin was at the kitchen table, had dozed off slumped across it. Six fifteen. He’d been out for three quarters of an hour. He hadn’t intended to fall asleep but it had done some good, he could feel it.
The scream had come from the television on the wall. It hadn’t been a scream, rather a shout from a female reporter at a crowd scene, somewhere along the coast road on the way to the War Memorial. The rain seemed to have dwindled. Through the window the Jacobin saw smudges of grey beginning to streak the darkness.
The reporter pattered away: perhaps the easing of the rain is significant in other ways. Just as the choice of eight o’clock – sunrise – for the timing of the handshake was no coincidence. The Jacobin appreciated the power of symbolism, but as far as he was concerned this was nothing more than sentimental claptrap.