Chase tossed his pistol beside a fallen log as Nina reluctantly took out the piece of electronic gear and placed it on the car’s roof. They walked further into the clearing. Another few seconds as the man concluded his radar scan, then the helicopter touched down in a miniature hurricane of dust and leaves, the rotors still whirling at takeoff speed.
Holly stepped out fearfully, Mitchell lurking behind her. ‘Uncle Eddie!’
‘Holly, are you okay?’ Chase shouted.
‘She’s fine,’ Mitchell said. ‘Nina, walk toward me. I’ll send the girl. Careful, now.’
Nina took a step, then paused and looked back at Chase. ‘Eddie . . .’
‘I’ll find you,’ he said softly. Then, with a not entirely convincing attempt at a casual smile: ‘By the way, you doing anything next May? Maybe around the fourteenth?’
Her answering smile was entirely genuine. Loving. ‘I am now.’
‘Don’t miss it.’
‘Don’t let me.’
‘Enough with the schmaltz,’ Mitchell’s amplified voice snapped. ‘Nina, get over here, now.’
With a last glance at Chase, Nina walked towards the helicopter. Holly came the other way, desperate to break into a run. As they passed each other Nina whispered, ‘Do whatever Eddie tells you.’
She reached the helicopter and looked back. Holly had just met Chase. ‘Get in,’ Mitchell shouted from the cabin. Trying not to show her fear, Nina climbed inside. The radar operator grabbed her wrists and handcuffed them, then shoved her down beside Mitchell.
The engine noise immediately rose, the helicopter ascending. Nina stared out of the window at the two figures on the fringe of the headlight beams as they fell away. ‘Get us to the jet,’ Mitchell ordered the pilot. ‘I want the other helo fuelled and ready by the time we reach Scotland. We’ve got a lot of work to do - I want a full test of the system by tomorrow night.’
‘What about Eddie and Holly?’ Nina demanded.
‘I said I’d release Holly unharmed,’ said Mitchell with a hard expression. ‘After that . . .’
Nina’s eyes narrowed hatefully. ‘You son of a bitch.’
‘I do what I have to do.’ He sat back as the helicopter picked up speed over the dark forest.
The sniper was less than two hundred feet from Chase, but at thirty feet away he would still have been invisible, even in daylight. Draped in multi-textured layers of mottled camouflage, he blended perfectly with the scrub and bushes of the forest floor. Even his rifle looked more organic than manufactured, the brown-painted barrel and its fat suppressor wrapped in twigs to break up its shape, the telltale reflective lens of the scope concealed beneath drooping leaves.
He flicked them away, taking in the full view through the sights. The crosshairs were almost perfectly centred on Chase’s head. He raised himself higher on his elbows as he adjusted his aim and prepared to fire. Chase was moving slightly, talking to the girl, but not enough to throw off the shot.
With the helicopter gone there was hardly any wind, and at such a close range the effects of the suppressor and ballistic drop on the bullet would be negligible. He took them into account anyway, lifting the crosshairs fractionally to just above Chase’s eyeline. The bullet would hit the dead centre of his skull, and blow it apart.
After Chase, he would move on to the girl, who would be so shocked that she would be paralysed, easy prey. Two targets, two shots, two seconds.
Two deaths.
He braced himself, holding his breath to minimise the movement of his body, making the final delicate adjustments to his aim, finger caressing the trigger . . .
Firing—
As Chase ducked.
The silenced shot hissed over Chase’s head and thumped against a tree. The faint click of the sniper rifle’s action told him the direction from which the shot had come, but he already knew.
‘Jesus!’ said Peter Alderley’s tinny voice in his right ear as he threw Holly to the ground beneath him. ‘Could you leave that any later?’
Chase didn’t reply, rolling into the partial cover of the log and dragging Holly with him. ‘Stay here!’ he hissed as he grabbed his gun and crawled on his belly through the leaves and mud to the other end of the fallen trunk. If the sniper were any good - and Chase didn’t doubt it - then he would already have reloaded and be seeking to reacquire his target, surprised by his apparent precognition or not.
‘He’s still in place,’ Mac said over the earpiece. ‘Tracking left, looking for you.’
‘Wait, he’s doing something with his gun,’ Alderley added. ‘He just switched something on, maybe night vision or thermographics.’
Chase didn’t need to see the radar image the two men were viewing somewhere inside MI6’s London headquarters; he could picture it perfectly in his mind’s eye. The sniper would be lying behind cover, a log or a tree stump, somewhere with direct line of sight through the trees to the original position of his targets. He wouldn’t move unless he absolutely had to.
Which meant Chase had to make him move. The synthetic aperture radar satellite orbiting some three hundred miles above could see through tree cover and even the ground, but it could only keep its unnatural gaze on one particular spot for a limited amount of time before its trajectory carried it out of sight. If he hadn’t located his enemy by the time the satellite passed out of range, he would be left blind.
And then dead.
‘One minute to range limit,’ said Alderley. ‘Come on, Chase, nail the silly bastard, he’s just lying there!’
‘Never faced a sniper, have you?’ Chase growled as he reached the end of the log. The next available cover was behind a tree maybe ten feet away - ten feet in which he would be completely exposed. ‘Talk to me, what’s he doing?’
‘Switching aim between each end of the log,’ Mac told him. ‘Waiting for one of you to move.’
‘Which end’s he aiming at now?’
‘Yours.’
Chase hated himself for what he was about to do, but knew it was the only chance of saving himself and his niece. ‘Holly,’ he said in a loud whisper. ‘When I say now, very quickly stick your hand out from the end of the log and then pull it back again. Okay?’ Although confused and scared, she nodded. ‘Okay! Ready, set, now!’
Holly thrust her hand out into the open.
Chase was already moving even as she pulled it back into cover, bursting out from behind the log towards the tree. The thwack! of the bullet striking wood and the soft clack of the rifle reached him simultaneously. Holly screamed as smashed bark rained over her.
‘Stay down!’ Chase yelled. Even the best snipers in the world needed a moment to reacquire a target after the jolt of firing, and the flash of his movement between the trees would force the other man to change his aim, slowing him further.
But not by much.
Chase slammed against the next tree a split second before a bullet did, broken wood spitting at his face.
‘Forty seconds,’ Alderley announced, voice tense.
‘Where is he?’
‘Five o’clock from you, about forty metres,’ Mac told him. ‘Aiming at your cover.’
‘Left or right side?’
‘Left.’
Gun raised, Chase jerked to the right, exposing his arm and shoulder and drawing the sniper’s aim, then immediately lunged back to fire two shots round the left side of the tree. Another rifle bullet smacked into the trunk, his adversary thrown off by the return fire, just as Chase had hoped.
He sprang from cover once more, this time not stopping. The undergrowth crunched beneath his feet as he ran between the trees, curving round towards the sniper’s position—‘Thirty seconds!’
‘He’s moving, you’ve spooked him!’ Mac cried at the same moment. ‘Going right from his original position, crawling - no, he’s up, he’s on his feet.’
Chase reached another tree, throwing himself against it. ‘Position!’
‘Four o’clock from you, still moving right, still moving - shit! Eddie, he
’s going for your niece!’
‘Twenty!’ Alderley said. ‘Chase, move it!’
Chase risked a look. He could see nothing moving in the unreal half-light from the car’s headlamps. ‘No visual! Where is he?’
‘Coming up to your three o’clock, still moving - no, he’s dropping, taking aim—’
‘Shit!’ He ran directly for the still unseen sniper, gun held out ahead. ‘Guide me in!’
On the radar image, his outstretched arm would act as a pointer, letting Mac direct him towards his target - if he was fast enough. ‘Left!’ snapped Mac. Chase turned slightly, trees flicking past. ‘Left, left - straight, straight!’
‘Ten seconds!’
Chase fired, and kept firing into the undergrowth ahead.
No hits, and he was running out of bullets and time—
‘He’s moving!’ Mac said. ‘Changing aim, changing aim!’
No need to ask who the new target was. Chase was down to three bullets, two, one—
‘He’s hit!’ shouted Mac. No triumph, just an immediate warning. ‘Gun, gun, gun!’
At close range a sniper rifle was a liability, but it wasn’t the man’s only weapon. Chase saw a flicker of movement ahead, a bush that wasn’t a bush shifting, a glint of light catching dark metal—
He fired his last shot.
‘Contact lost!’ Alderley almost gasped. ‘Chase! Did you get him, did you get him?’
‘Yeah, I got him,’ Chase announced, kicking the pistol out of the sniper’s hand. But there was no threat: his last bullet had hit the man in the neck, tearing out a ragged chunk of muscle and tendons that now hung gelatinously by a flap of skin, blood gushing blackly over the camouflage. He was still moving weakly, but he would be dead within a minute or two even if Chase had been inclined to do anything to save him.
There was an audible exhalation of relief through the earpiece. ‘In that case,’ Alderley said after a moment, ‘you can expect a bill from Her Majesty’s Government for the satellite time. Should only be about, oh, a million pounds or so.’
‘They can knock it off the reward for recovering Excalibur,’ Mac said. ‘Eddie, are you all right?’
‘Fine,’ Chase replied, turning his back on the dying sniper and hurrying back to the clearing. ‘Holly, are you okay? Holly?’
He found her still lying by the log, trembling. ‘Holly,’ he said, crouching to take her hand, ‘it’s okay. Are you all right?’
She slowly looked up at him, tears running from her wide eyes. ‘Uncle Eddie?’
‘Hi.’ He managed a smile. ‘Come on, love. Let’s get you back home to your mum.’
He lifted her carefully to her feet. She hugged him and pressed her face into his chest, sobbing.
‘It’s all right,’ he assured her. ‘It’s over.’
But he knew it wasn’t.
‘I take it the sniper’s not talking,’ Mac said in his ear, following the same line of thought. ‘Peter and I can deal with the local police for you, but how are you going to find Nina now?’
Chase guided Holly to the car, face set. ‘There’s still someone else. I’m going to have words.’
Hector Amoros jolted awake, sitting upright and reaching across to switch on a lamp.
‘Ay up, Hector,’ said Chase coldly from the chair he had pulled up beside the bed. He had a gun in his hand, not aiming it directly at the director of the IHA, but needing only the smallest movement of his wrist to do so.
‘Eddie!’ Amoros exclaimed. ‘What are you - how did you get in here?’
‘Ways and means. I wanted a chat while you were still in London. About your mate Jack Mitchell.’
Amoros’s expression tightened a little at the name. He looked more closely at Chase as his eyes adjusted to the light of the hotel room. ‘My God! What happened to you?’
Chase indicated the cuts and bruises on his face. ‘Like I said, Jack Mitchell. Turns out he wasn’t what he said he was.’ Now the gun pointed at Amoros. ‘But you knew that, didn’t you? Right from the start.’
‘I don’t know what you—’
‘Don’t! Don’t even fucking try to deny it. Jack set this whole thing up, getting the IHA involved so that he could find Excalibur before the Russians did. And with him being a navy man, and you being a navy man, you were great mates right off the bat. You’d do anything to help each other out, right?’
‘That’s not what happened,’ Amoros said firmly. ‘I might be retired from the navy, but if the Pentagon asks for something it’s still my duty to give it to them. Most of the IHA’s funding comes from the United States. You know that.’
‘He who pays the piper, right?’ said Chase with a sneer. ‘Well, you know what tune he’s playing now? It’s called “I’ve kidnapped Nina and stolen Excalibur so I can build a big fuck-off WMD”.’
Amoros sat straighter, shocked. ‘He’s kidnapped Nina? What are you talking about?’
‘Kidnapped Nina, tried to kill me - and my niece. Because he didn’t want to leave anyone alive to talk about this black-ops superweapon he’s built.’
‘And you think I had something to do with it?’ Amoros asked.
Chase regarded him with flint-hard eyes. ‘If I did, you’d already be dead.’ Amoros tensed, knowing he meant it. ‘But you know more about Jack than you’ve let on. I want to know where he is.’
‘All I knew about Mitchell was that he was ex-Special Forces intelligence, now supposedly working for DARPA, and that I’d been told to give him total co-operation in the interests of national security. That came from the highest level at the Pentagon.’
‘Well, it seems Jack doesn’t take his orders from the Pentagon. Seems he doesn’t take them from anybody. He’s got his own little black operation, and he tells the Pentagon what to do.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘He got picked up from Russia by a sub. An American sub, inside Russian territorial waters.’ Amoros reacted with clear surprise. ‘I saw the hull number,’ Chase went on. ‘I looked it up - SSN-23, Seawolf-class attack sub, USS Jimmy Carter. Mitchell’s old boat. And funnily enough, it’s been modified for Special Forces operations. Be a bit of a coincidence if it just happened to be there.’
‘There’s no way he could have that kind of authority,’ protested Amoros. ‘Even black projects report to somebody.’
‘Doesn’t seem to bother him much. He had a little rant about what he was doing being too important to leave to politicians. The bastard’s gone rogue, Hector - and he’s got Nina, and the sword, and everything he needs to make his weapon work. I’ve seen one like it in action; it’s pretty fucking nasty. So I need you to help me rescue her - and stop him.’
‘How? I don’t know where he is.’
‘Someone does,’ said Chase, leaning back in the chair. The gun drifted away from the former admiral, very slightly. ‘He might be running a black project, but he’s using regular military assets as well. Intel and civilian ones an’ all. The sub, helicopters, jets, cars, even the weapons he’s requisitioned - there’ll be a paper trail, somewhere. Somebody at the Pentagon knows how to find him. You must still have lots of old mates there. Get on to them.’
Amoros shifted uneasily. ‘That would mean I’d be revealing knowledge of a black project I wasn’t cleared for. I wouldn’t just lose my post for that - I could go to prison for it.’
The gun moved back. ‘At least you’d still be alive to go to prison.’
Amoros stroked his beard, considering it. ‘I’ll . . . make some calls.’
33
The Norwegian Sea
Nina jumped from the bunk as the cabin’s steel hatch was unlocked and swung open.
‘Whoa, now,’ said Mitchell, his open palm snapping up to intercept her fist just before it smacked into his face. He closed his fingers round it and forced her arm back down. ‘Guess it’s true about redheads having a bad temper.’
She narrowed her eyes in pain as he squeezed her hand; then she lashed out with one foot at his kneecap. He jerked back, he
r heel barely missing him. ‘I’m going to kill you,’ she promised.
‘No you’re not,’ Mitchell replied, unconcerned. ‘Let’s go.’
‘Go where?’ The initial helicopter flight the previous night had been short, transferring to a private jet at Southampton airport that then flew the length of the country to Wick, on the north-eastern tip of Scotland. Another, larger helicopter was waiting for them there, quickly taking off and pounding northwards over the dark wastes of the North Sea, the flares of oil platforms below the only markers of the passage of hundreds of miles. Eventually even these fell behind, nothing outside except blackness.
Until a ship appeared ahead, a blazing beacon of lights in the void. It seemed to be a cargo vessel, the main deck loaded with stacked containers. The chopper landed on a pad overhanging the stern, and Nina was bustled through the ship to the windowless metal cabin. After being released from the cuffs, she had been left by herself.
Her fear for Chase and Holly gradually gave way to a simmering fury. Despair would get her nowhere. What she had to do now was stop whatever Mitchell was planning, and make him pay for everything he had done.
‘To Excalibur,’ said Mitchell. ‘It’s in place, the system’s ready . . . there’s only one thing we need.’
‘Me.’
‘Yup. Let’s go.’
There were two large men accompanying Mitchell, one with a pair of handcuffs attached to his belt, but they weren’t needed; Nina was all too aware that even if she broke away from her escorts, there was nowhere for her to go. Instead, she examined her surroundings for anything that might help her as they descended through the superstructure. A momentary glimpse through a porthole told her it was again dark outside, a whole day having gone by.
They passed below the level of the main deck and continued to descend. ‘So I’m guessing this isn’t a regular container ship,’ she finally said, faux-conversationally.
‘You got that right,’ Mitchell answered. ‘By the way, this is the Aurora - I didn’t get a chance to welcome you aboard last night.
The Secret of Excalibur Page 39