Exile

by James Swallow

  The man he shot continued to scream. Marc followed the path of the suspended walkway until he came to a blind corner with low headroom, choked by snarls of pipework. Feeling his way, he ducked down as random shots sizzled past him. The second gunman was close, but he didn’t know exactly where he was.

  In the near distance, the injured man’s screams changed tone and then suddenly ceased in the bellow of single heavy-calibre gunshot.

  Still low, Marc pressed himself into meagre cover behind a disabled switch box and aimed the AKMS in the direction he had just come. He picked out a shadow, bobbing and moving, as the second gunman tried to figure out where he had gone. There was too much pipework between them for a clean shot. Marc would have to wait for the man to come to him.

  He heard a shout in Somali, but no reply. Then a terse, exasperated sound. The shadow moved; the second gunman was walking into the trap.

  Marc waited for the man to emerge from under the pipes, close enough that there was no way he could miss. He pulled the Kalashnikov’s trigger and it rewarded him with a dull click.

  The gun was too heavy to be empty, but it had been poorly cared for and now the inattention of its last owner turned Marc’s makeshift ambush into a disaster. He yanked on the cocking handle, but it didn’t give a millimetre. Something in the gun was jammed solid.

  The shooter gave a cry of rage and came at him. Marc reacted without thinking, slamming the AKMS on the deck in a last vain attempt to get the corroded gun to work. The cocking handle suddenly slipped free and he pulled on it, just as the angry shooter tried to crack open Marc’s skull with the wooden butt of his own rifle.

  Two decades old and a Chinese knock-off of the Russian-manufactured original, the rusted AKMS performed its final service with a clatter of shots that went point-blank into his attacker’s chest cavity. Fluid and bloody matter burst from the other man’s back and he died instantly, folding into a twitching heap on the deck. Blood began to drip off the walkway and spatter on the iron weather shrouding beneath.

  ‘Fuck.’ Marc tasted copper and dragged his hand over his face, sickened by the brutality of the kill. He got shakily to his feet and forced himself to control his fast, panting breaths.

  Back in the direction he had come, Marc heard a heavy footfall and then a low growl of a voice speak a command in Somali.

  ‘Your boys are done,’ Marc managed, keeping his tone steady.

  ‘Policeman,’ Ramaas called from the shadows. ‘Why do you keep coming? When will you learn?’

  ‘I admit it,’ he said. ‘It’s a character flaw.’ Marc was moving, slowly and quietly, mentally gauging his position.

  His directional sense had always been excellent, and he knew that up ahead was the western end of the platform. Beyond that was an open-frame stairwell that descended the rest of the way down to the boat dock. He positioned himself with his back to the blank steel door that opened onto the stairwell, aiming into the gloom of the lower compartment. Thin razors of sunlight entered through the cracks around the door frame, cutting across the space before him.

  ‘You got no way out, mate,’ Marc called. ‘Give me the computer and you can piss off with your winnings, I don’t care. I’ve had enough of all your bullshit.’

  A deep, basso chuckle echoed off the walls. ‘Who wants money?’ said Ramaas. His loud, booming voice made it hard to be sure from which direction it was coming. ‘In the end, the greed for it only causes more problems. The money was just something to hurt you people with, you see? It was another kind of weapon. One you Westerners gave me yourselves.’

  ‘We never paid you a fucking penny,’ Marc shot back.

  ‘I am going to kill the men who brought ruin to my homeland,’ Ramaas said, after a moment. His tone became flat and matter-of-fact. ‘You know this. It has already happened.’

  Marc’s blood ran cold. Could that be true? While we’ve been out here playing games with this arsehole, has he set the nuke off somewhere? But the warlord’s next words suggested otherwise.

  ‘They will live the way I have lived. The way my people have lived.’ Ramaas sounded close enough to be standing right next to him. ‘The men who came before me? They loved only riches. They took money so your people could sink your toxic ships off our coast. You treated our home like your garbage dump, and it sickened our children. My children . . .’ The warlord fell silent and Marc strained to hear him. When he spoke again, he was distant, his words echoing. ‘I know the names of the souls who did this. The Combine, who let the money change hands without notice. The criminals who let it happen, who found the crooked men with their filth to be disposed of and sent the ships . . .’ His tone was a slow, steady burn of vehemence. ‘They ruled Somalia once. Then they poisoned it. But we don’t forget. We don’t forgive.’

  Marc ran his hand over the rifle’s frame and tested the cocking handle for play, but it remained resolutely stuck. Jammed solid. He needed to act fast if he was ever going to come out of this alive, never mind get the better of the warlord. The man was out there in the dark, stalking him, and if it came to a one-on-one fight there was no way he would be able to defeat Ramaas. Marc took a shaky breath, feeling the tension of every single pulled muscle, every abrasion and blossoming bruise he had accumulated over the past few days. Trading punches with Saito was bad enough. If he tried to fight Ramaas, the bigger man would end him.

  He remembered something that Franko Horvat had told him back in Croatia, in the casino. You are in trouble. You are out of your depth. In this moment, the corrupt cop’s words had never seemed more truthful.

  But I don’t get to choose when I tap out, Marc told himself. That’s not how this works. He took a slow step forward, trying to spread his weight on the deck, but the floor gave a grinding creak that betrayed him.

  He fought back a wave of fatigue. He was tired of chasing this man, tired of running down one blind alley after another. He was tired of asking the same question over and over. ‘Where’s the bomb?’

  ‘So many places it could be,’ Ramaas replied. He was moving closer. ‘Paris. London. Rome. Berlin. All the rest. I wish God had given me enough weapons to strike them all. But I will be satisfied with what I have. A city full of thieves will be burned to ashes and all who gave them succor will suffer for it.’

  A full city of thieves. Something about the phrase connected to a possibility in Marc’s mind and his thoughts raced, his analytical nature seizing on it. Suddenly, he was looking at all of Ramaas’s threats and boasts through a new lens, the truth just within his grasp if he could assemble the pieces correctly.

  But then without warning, the hard metal muzzle of a large-calibre revolver jammed itself in the back of Marc’s neck. ‘I keep seeing your face, policeman,’ said Ramaas. Somehow, the hulking warlord had managed to skirt around the edge of the walkway and blindside him, quick and silent. ‘No more. Make your peace,’ he continued.

  Marc heard the oiled click of the pistol’s hammer pulling back.

  *

  Lucy kicked the hatch that opened out onto the helicopter deck with enough force that it swung back as far as it could go and clanged loudly against the metal frame.

  Simonova’s comrade gave a furious snarl and surged forward, spraying fire from his rifle as he strode out onto the deck. He didn’t appear to feel the wound in his gut that was leaking red all over the shirt and jacket he wore, powered forward by a kind of mad endurance that set Lucy’s teeth on edge. The two women came out after him, as the first shots chewed up the deck at their feet.

  Lucy saw figures crouching in the cover of a parked Mi-8 helicopter, with only their feet and lower legs visible around the wheels of the aircraft. She threw herself at the deck and landed hard, rolling across into an untidy half-prone stance that brought her AKM up and onto target. Flicking the fire-selector to single shot, she lined up the iron ring-sight on the Kalashnikov and started shooting. The gun was poorly maintained and the aim was off by a couple of degrees, but she corrected automatically. With the Russians g
iving her supporting fire, Lucy picked off the men in cover by planting rounds in their ankles, through-and-through shots that blasted boot leather, bone and meat into a ragged mess.

  Simonova crabbed forward, finding anyone who was alive and making certain they didn’t stay that way.

  Lucy hauled herself up as another target flickered in the corner of her vision. She saw the hacker burst out of cover and run toward the drop ramp at the rear of the black Combine VTOL. He had a snub-nose revolver in his hand and he fired it blindly in her direction as he sprinted.

  She flicked the fire-select back to burst and drew a line across the helipad directly in the young man’s path, emptying the mag of its last few rounds. He stumbled and fell over his own feet in an effort to stop himself getting shredded, and she sprinted over to him. Lucy stamped on his hand so he couldn’t raise the pistol and poked him in his ribs with the AKM’s red-hot muzzle.

  ‘Where’s the king?’ she asked. ‘Tell me or you’re dead.’

  *

  ‘You won’t win this,’ said Marc. He gripped the inert rifle in his hands, tensing himself for the killing shot. ‘You won’t live to spend any of that money you stole. And your country and your people will be the ones who pay for what you’ve done.’

  Ramaas pressed the muzzle of the Python revolver deeper into Marc’s flesh. ‘I have already won. You don’t learn. You never do. Revenge is better than riches, policeman. Poor is poor . . . but dead is dead.’

  Marc turned slightly, the gun still against his throat. He could see Ramaas as a towering black silhouette against the weak light filtering through the door frame behind him. The warlord’s shark eye glittered in the dark. ‘God didn’t choose you,’ Marc told him. ‘You chose God as a way to excuse all you’ve done. You wanted a reason to justify it, but the truth is, you’re just an amoral thug and you’ll never be anything else.’

  Ramaas showed his teeth. ‘A day from now, the whole world will know my name. You won’t live to see it.’

  Marc forced out a rough snort of derision, planting his feet firmly against the deck. He would only have one shot at this. ‘What you’ve gotta understand, mate, is that you’re not the only one who knows how to set up a trick.’ As the last word left his mouth he twisted in place, jerking his head back and away from the barrel of the Python, bringing up the rifle like a club.

  The revolver spat fire and noise, the thunderous blast of the round deafening Marc in one ear. The hot exhaust gas from the muzzle seared his flesh, pain rippling across his skin, but the shot missed. Crying out, he smacked the jammed AKMS into Ramaas’s bicep, hitting the other man with all his might in the spot where Jalsa Sood had landed a bullet back in Dubai.

  Ramaas howled in agony and let something fall, spitting his fury. Marc was aware of the laptop dropping from the warlord’s grip, but he had no time to do anything about it as Ramaas fired again, the flicker of orange fire-light dazzling as another heavy round sparked off the rusted metalwork.

  The bigger man swatted at Marc and caught him hard enough to unseat the jammed rifle from his grip. He staggered and Ramaas grabbed him, crushing his shoulder with fingers like iron rods.

  In the hot, dusty dimness, Marc made out the shape of the revolver coming up again. Ramaas was going to bury it in his belly and kill him point-blank. He grabbed at the warlord’s collar and held on tight, then let his legs go slack.

  With no resistance to stop him, with the weight of Marc and his own momentum pulling him forward, Ramaas lurched across the walkway and the two of them crashed into the stairwell door. It whipped open beneath the force of their impact and they were suddenly outside on a creaking steel balcony.

  Inside the confined corridors of the rig’s under-levels, everything had been dark and filled with shadows; outside, the Western face of the drilling platform was bathed in the orange-yellow radiance of the rising sun. For Ramaas, with the damaged iris of his eye, stepping into the abrupt flood of harsh light was like a dagger being driven into his skull. Briefly blinded, he clawed at his face with one hand, flailing with the other.

  Marc tried to disengage, but the butt of the Python cracked him across the ribs, knocking the wind out of him. Then in the next instant, there was a sickening lurch as the rusted walkway beneath their feet tilted, corroded bolts popping out from support frames as the two men cannoned back and forth against the safety rails.

  Gravity snared them both. Marc and Ramaas spun over the edge of the collapsing stairwell balcony, and fell through a six-metre drop that landed them on a gangway beneath with a clatter and screech of tortured metal.

  *

  ‘Ramaas is gone! You won’t stop him!’ spat the hacker. He answered Lucy in American-accented English.

  Her heart sank. Marc had been right about this as well. Lucy grabbed the youth by the collar and dragged him up. ‘Forget your boss, then. Where’s the computer?’

  ‘I gave it to him. He will keep it safe.’ The hacker showed his teeth in a wide grin, and he pointed a hand at her like it was a pistol. ‘You have nothing, bitches!’ he added, spitting out the words in English.

  ‘Then he’s no use to us,’ said Simonova, as she walked up behind them. The Russian agent’s rifle barked and the hacker was blown back by a shot that caved in his chest. He toppled over the edge of the helipad and Lucy jerked forward, watching his body windmill down to the ocean below.

  ‘Shit!’ She shoved the other woman out of her way. ‘I gotta find Dane . . .’

  ‘No time,’ Simonova told her. She nodded toward Dmitry, and Lucy saw the other Russian standing half-in and half-out of the helicopter’s cockpit. He was talking animatedly into a radio handset. ‘Our pickup has arrived. You are going to come with us.’ Simonova’s rifle wasn’t aimed at Lucy, but the threat of what would happen if she did otherwise was clearly implied.

  Lucy fixed the other woman with a hard glare. ‘I won’t leave my guy here.’ She thought about Dane going through the same motions over her back in Mogadishu.

  Simonova’s tone cooled. ‘Do not mistake what I said for a request, Keyes.’

  Stalling for time, Lucy looked up into the cloudless sky. She searched for the sight and sound of an approaching aircraft, but there was nothing up there.

  ‘Not like that,’ Simonova corrected and she jutted her chin in the direction of the sea. ‘The orders were clear,’ she went on. ‘We are going to initiate damage control. Believe me, coming with us will save your life.’

  Far out beyond the shadow cast by the rig, Lucy caught sight of a sudden churning in the water.

  A squared-off conning tower made of matte black material burst through the calm surface of the ocean, rising to reveal a length of curved deck beneath it. The submarine rolled gently in the swell. It had to have been monitoring the rig for days, floating silently below the surface, waiting for the right moment.

  ‘Move,’ grated Dmitry, gesturing toward a deck elevator on the far side of the platform.

  Lucy let the empty AKM drop and held her hands out to her sides. ‘You’re making a mistake, Rada. If we work together, we can still pull this back from the edge!’

  Simonova shook her head. ‘It is already too late for that. All trace of this place and of Abur Ramaas is going to be wiped off the face of the earth.’

  ‘And when that suitcase nuke goes off?’ Lucy snarled. ‘What then?’

  ‘Those devices are a myth. Propaganda and disinformation,’ said the Russian. ‘That will be the truth from now on.’

  *

  Pain kept him from blacking out, great tidal surges of it that rolled over him in waves of pressure, gathering in the joints of his legs and his knees. Just the act of turning on to his side was an agonising experience, and Marc clawed at a support stanchion to haul himself up to a sitting position.

  He had hit the gangway straight on, landing on his right shoulder. The meat of it felt spongy and swollen, and when he tried to move that arm more than a little, a jab of fresh pain shot down the length of his nerves. Nothing was br
oken and he accepted that small mercy with gratitude. Pulling on the support again, he saw that the frame ended in the blunt rod of a half-dismantled safety rail, one of dozens spaced along the gangway. A half-metre to the right, and he would have fallen right onto it.

  Casting around, he found Ramaas lying sprawled further along the decking. Grimly, Marc saw that the warlord had not shared his good fortune.

  A bloody spar of corroded metal was protruding from Ramaas’s chest, just below his sternum. His shirt and gun vest were awash in dark fluid that pooled on his belly, soaking through his clothing.

  Each step was an effort, but Marc hobbled toward him. Ramaas’s chest rose and fell in stuttering jerks, and a wet gurgle escaped his lips with each breath. The metal rod had gone through his lungs and the colour of the blood suggested it had slashed into his heart.

  ‘You were right.’ Ramaas forced out the words, pink foam collecting at the edges of his lips. ‘I won’t . . . survive . . .’

  Marc sagged against the deck, breathing hard. ‘Where is it?’ He threw the question at the other man. ‘Don’t do this. Please don’t. Just tell me where the weapon is.’

  Ramaas turned his head to look at Marc, a moment of confusion on his face. ‘This is not the way it was supposed to end.’ He looked down at the spike through his chest and spat out a pain-filled laugh. ‘But God knows. The world balances . . . on the bull’s horns. I fell . . .’

  ‘Ramaas!’ Marc shouted his name in a rush of burning rage. ‘Answer me!’

  ‘Tomorrow,’ he began, and the big man shifted, pressing his hands down on the deck with one last, massive effort. ‘It will be over.’

  Marc only understood what Ramaas was doing when it was too late to stop him. The warlord cried out as he hauled himself up and off the rusted metal spar. With nothing to staunch the flow, his blood gushed out in a fatal rush and Ramaas rolled over, choking out a last gasp of air before he fell still. His blank eyes stared up at nothing.