Exile

by James Swallow

  ‘What did you tell him?’ Marc asked.

  ‘We showed him the runner’s identity card,’ explained Lucy. ‘He said the guy’s name was Eddie. And apparently, he – or someone who looked like him – took a work crew down into the lower levels of the station several hours ago. Our pal over there was about to call it in. They’re overdue for clocking out.’

  ‘Eddie gave his Metro ID to someone else.’ Marc frowned. ‘The person on the other end of that radio.’ He briefly considered trying to draw out the intruders by initiating contact with them, but then discarded the idea. If they had a code in place, it would alert Ramaas’s men that they had been compromised. The only advantage in play right now was the element of surprise.

  The station was sparsely populated at this time of the day, in the lull between rush hours, and the team moved quickly toward the lower levels. Brash, brightly coloured murals and artwork covered the walls of the crossway, leading down to wide platforms where boxy trains liveried in silver and yellow pulled in to deposit or gather up groups of tourists.

  The safety gate at the top end of the southbound platform was unsecured, and Simonova ordered them into a single-file formation. They moved into the semi-darkness of the train tunnel, hugging a narrow maintenance walkway.

  ‘We’re going in here with you, Rada,’ Marc heard Lucy say quietly. ‘How about you equip me and Dane as well?’

  ‘I gave you a vest,’ said the Russian operative. ‘That’s all. You are here to observe and assist. I hope this time I have made it clear enough.’

  The younger guy with the close-cropped hair was leading the way, panning around with a powerful Maglite torch. He saw something and held up his hand to halt them.

  Marc crouched along with the rest of the team as another Metro train screamed past them, less than half a metre from his face. The suction of the train’s passage plucked at his jacket as it vanished into the station, and as the noise of it died away, the GRU agent moved forward to highlight a hatch sunk into the side of the rail tunnel.

  The oval of light from his torch passed over the remains of a cut padlock lying on the ground, the ends of the metal bright and shiny. Their quarry had come this way and breached the door.

  ‘What’s on the other side of that?’ Lucy voiced the question forming in Marc’s mind.

  Simonova looked at her tablet screen. ‘The older tunnels beneath the Metro network. There are kilometres of them down here.’

  The other GRU agent cracked open the door and slipped through. ‘It is clear,’ he called back.

  One by one they followed him, and as Marc stepped across the threshold, his surroundings changed from newer poured concrete slabs to a narrow conduit sliced out of the yellow ‘tuff’, the dense volcanic sandstone rock that underpinned the entire city.

  The Metro system was just one more network of tunnels built amid those of previous generations. From what Marc knew about Naples, there were underground passages below its streets that had been cut in the 1950s, which threaded among others dating back to the fifteenth century and ancient reservoirs cut by the Greeks more than a thousand years before that. It would take days, weeks even, to conduct a full survey of the tunnels, and that was time they didn’t have.

  The conduit was steep, with steps fashioned from the stone, and the air became moist as they descended. At the end of the passage, it opened out onto a wider tunnel filled with ankle-deep water. Beams from the point-man’s flashlight swept over the curved ceiling and the far wall, revealing the mouths of other passages across the way.

  ‘We keep moving,’ said Simonova. ‘Watch your step.’

  ‘How we gonna find these guys?’ Lucy said quietly. ‘You got a radio direction finder in your pocket?’

  Marc shook his head. ‘We narrow it down. Think like them. Where would you want to put the weapon so it did the maximum amount of damage?’

  ‘Somewhere that’d cause the biggest cave-in . . . ?’ She stopped and frowned. ‘Think like Ramaas. The question we gotta ask is, what was he angriest about?’

  ‘The poison.’ The word floated to the top of Marc’s thoughts. They ruled Somalia once. Then they poisoned it. But we don’t forget. We don’t forgive. Ramaas’s words came back to him. ‘Destruction won’t be enough. He’d want to salt the ground, make it totally unliveable.’

  ‘A nuke will do that,’ she agreed, ‘for a couple hundred years at least.’

  ‘Yeah . . .’ A bleak possibility occurred to him. ‘But if the weapon went off in an aquifer below the surface, it would irradiate the water table for the whole region. It wouldn’t just destroy Naples, it would get into the underground rivers and poison everything for miles around.’ He rushed forward and grabbed Simonova’s shoulder, splashing across the shallows. ‘I need to see the map.’

  The Russian operative gave him a searing glare of irritation, but she handed over the tablet device and Marc looked down at the illuminated screen. He saw immediately what he was looking for. ‘There! That’s where they’re going to be. This dead-end tunnel is right above one of the largest natural reservoirs, and it’s close enough for them to have a clear line of escape once they kick off the timer.’

  ‘Assuming their master has not told them to perish in the holy fire,’ muttered Simonova.

  ‘Stoi!’ The point-man called out a warning and everyone froze. His torch beam was glistening off a tripwire suspended above the waterline. It led away into the gloom, and Marc could make out a dark box lying on the far side of the tunnel. A claymore mine or something equally unpleasant, he guessed, a booby-trap set to neutralise anyone who might come after the men with the weapon.

  The point-man produced a multi-tool to cut the cable and let it fall harmlessly into the water, then resumed moving forward. Simonova and the pair of GRU operatives fell in step, but Marc saw Lucy hesitate.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Everything so far, what’s it been?’ she whispered. ‘One fake-out after another. Misdirection, every single time.’

  Marc’s blood chilled. ‘You reckon –?’

  As he spoke, the point-man’s right foot touched on a pressure-pad switch that had been hidden on the bottom of the silt-choked tunnel. Seated ahead of it beneath the surface of the shallow water was a single OZM-3 anti-personnel mine, a nasty piece of Russian military surplus that Ramaas’s men had smuggled into the country for just this purpose.

  The mine triggered, ejecting a charge canister that burst out of the water, spinning up to chest height, trailing a spool of wire behind it.

  Marc and Lucy both reacted without conscious thought, diving into the water as the mine’s charge detonated in the confines of the stone tunnel. The echoing crack of the blast threw out a storm of razor-edged shrapnel that sliced through armour, flesh and bone.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  The thunder of the landmine’s detonation rumbled through the tunnels and into the chamber, making Zayd’s head snap up.

  The other men scrambled for their weapons, looking his way for guidance. He jabbed his hand in the direction of the sound. ‘Go! Whoever you see, kill them!’

  ‘If it is police –’ began one of them.

  ‘I told you what to do!’ Zayd shouted, and his snarl was like a starting gun. The men sprinted away into the shadows, leaving him alone in the echoing gloom.

  The steel case was where he had left it, resting atop the black sports bag he had used to carry it down here. Zayd kicked away the covering and hauled the case up, dragging it behind a low stone wall. His hands shook as he fingered the locks and unlatched the lid.

  My hands do not shake. It was a frightening sensation for him. The sniper had been afraid to think about the weapon, to really consider what it would do, as if the device was like a mythic demon that could drive him mad with a look. Just to say the name of it was to invite the worst fortune.

  And yet he couldn’t stop himself from wanting to stare the monster in the eye. Zayd opened the case and revealed the complex mechanism within. The thick steel cylinder inside,
webbed with wires, reminded him of a giant, blunt-headed bullet. A kill-shot that can end thousands of lives. He ran his fingers over its surface and it was warm to the touch.

  To prepare during the journey to Italy, Ramaas had given Zayd papers to read and memorise. The documents showed how to arm the weapon. A simple matter of entering a code seven letters long and then activating a preset countdown. Those papers were ashes, burned and destroyed days ago, but the process was indelibly etched in Zayd’s memory. As if he were being controlled by a force outside himself, the sniper flipped up the safety switches and slowly input the code, letter by letter.

  He could hear shouting and gunfire, but the acoustics of the cavern made it difficult to be sure of how close it was. The enemy was here, that was all he needed to know. And if that was so –.

  Then Ramaas has failed. But he would not fail . . . So he is dead.

  The impact of that possibility shocked through Zayd. There could not be any other explanation. The warlord would never have willingly given up the location of the device, Zayd believed that with all his heart and soul. No price would ever be high enough to assuage the blood cost the West had taken from their people.

  Revenge is better than riches. Ramaas had said those words to him the first time they had met, when Zayd was still a stringy teenager with a sharp eye and the will to do violence. Ramaas had not been a warlord then, just a gifted and brutal pirate working his way up through the ranks of the clan. Zayd had been isolated and alone, constantly belittled by an elder cousin who always took credit for the youth’s kills and shorted him on his share of the prize money each time they took a ship.

  Ramaas, clever and insightful, had seen through the cousin’s lies. And one dark night, on a hijacked car carrier out of Indonesia, it was he who gave Zayd the impetus he needed to free himself from his inferior status.

  Zayd remembered it, as if it had happened a day ago. Ramaas handing him a gift; the Russian-made SVD marksman rifle. ‘You have a good eye.’ His words wrapped around a wide, predator’s smile. Showing Zayd the guard post at the distant stern where the cousin who made his life a misery stood taking a piss into the ocean. Smiling again. ‘Try it. See how it feels.’ Zayd made the mark with one clean shot, and his cousin did not come home from that sortie.

  Ramaas had been right. Money was good, but vengeance was without price. Zayd owed it to the warlord to make sure that his revenge was complete. He finished typing in the code and looked at the preset timers. Ramaas had told him to set the weapon for two hours and then escape, knowing that it would be enough to get the sniper beyond the kill zone.

  But now Zayd was thinking about how many would die from this, how many souls would go to the next world because of a trigger that he alone would pull. The part of him that wanted to see it happen was reaching forward, enrapt by the idea of being at the heart of such chaos and destruction.

  He activated the timer’s reset function and slowly dialled the numbers downward.

  *

  Lucy burst from the acrid water with a gasp, rolling over and taking a wet breath.

  Light from the torches flashed off the yellow stone walls. She glimpsed shadows moving here and there, and struggled to right herself. The mine detonation had set her ears ringing, but the blast hadn’t injured her. Her fast reactions and the attenuating effect of the water had saved her life.

  The point-man wasn’t so lucky. He had taken the brunt of the explosive force and it had ripped him open, shredding his Kevlar vest and the body beneath. The man looked as if he had walked into the blades of a propeller, his face an unrecognisable mess of red, his torso a ruin. Blood was misting the water around him where his corpse lay half-in and half-out of the murk.

  She looked away and found Marc dragging himself out of the silt and shaking off the water. ‘Are you all right?’ Her voice was woolly and thick behind the ringing in her ears.

  Marc nodded, breathing hard. He had cuts on his cheek and his hands but he appeared unhurt. ‘I’ll manage. The others . . . ?’

  Simonova had collapsed against the far side of the tunnel, and by the way she moved to pull herself up, Lucy knew that the Russian had taken a glancing hit from the shrapnel scattered by the mine. Another GRU agent was helping Simonova stand, but the last man in her team – an older guy with a salt-and-pepper beard – was limping painfully, barely able to stay on his feet.

  Lucy moved to offer him a hand and the bearded man warily accepted the support. They managed two or three steps between them before Marc shouted out a warning.

  ‘Contact right!’ Four figures burst from the mouth of the service tunnel on the opposite side of the flooded passageway, men in the dark jackets of the Metro company uniform with semi-automatics in their hands. They came out firing, and once again the tunnel was filled with a roaring turmoil. The bearded agent brought up his SRS pistol and managed to get off a shot, but the round keened off the stone wall and only served to make him a target for two of the gunmen.

  His last act was to shove Lucy behind him, out of the line of fire, before a staccato drumbeat of rounds hit him in the throat and chest. He fell back against her, becoming a dead weight as she caught him by reflex. Lucy grabbed at the SRS before the silenced weapon could drop from his nerveless fingers, and aimed it back toward the gunmen. She pulled the body of the GRU agent to her chest and used him as a shield, firing back.

  The pistol chugged, ejecting empty shell casings into the water, and despite her off-balance aim, Lucy caught one of the gunmen across the shoulder and heard him cry out in distress.

  She glimpsed Marc ducking low as the operative with Simonova – a narrow guy with a severe face – tracked and shot dead another of the gunmen. The man he hit toppled off the ledge on the far side of the tunnel and crashed face-first into the shallow water.

  Lucy let the bearded man drop, unable to hold on to him any longer, and pulled his pistol into a two-handed grip as the gunman she had winged drew a bead on her. She fired first, a bullet penetrating his nasal cavity and blasting a jet of blood and brain matter up the stonework.

  The other two shooters fell back the way they had come, firing as they retreated. As the echo of the brief gunfight died away, Lucy took up the grim task of searching the bearded man’s body for more ammunition, before reloading the weapon as she waded to the far side of the tunnel.

  Marc was already there, turning over the dead gunman’s weapon in his hand, checking the magazine. ‘Czech CZ 75,’ he said, squinting at the gun’s frame. ‘Serial numbers have been taken off with acid. I’d swear this was from the Kurjaks’ stocks.’

  ‘Likely,’ she told him. ‘How long was Ramaas dealing with them before he iced those two? They would’ve sold his boys guns . . .’

  Simonova refused her colleague’s help and hauled herself painfully up onto the raised stone bank. In the glow of the flashlight, Lucy could see she was pale with shock. ‘Don’t wait for me,’ she snapped. ‘Get after them. Go!’ She barked the order again in Russian and the other agent nodded, reloading his weapon.

  ‘Your men . . .’ Marc started to speak.

  ‘We’ll all be as dead as them if you don’t stop this,’ Simonova said tersely. The Russian was pale and shaky, her legs covered in lacerations from the mine blast. ‘Dane. Wait.’ She reached inside her collar and came back with an abstract metal key on a chain, pulling it hard enough that the links broke. She glared at Marc. ‘You told me you are familiar with the device’s mechanism.’

  ‘More or less,’ he admitted.

  Simonova pressed the key into his hand. ‘Use this. Do not let them succeed.’

  *

  The shouting and the gunfire were getting closer.

  Zayd pushed the steel case away from himself and dropped into a crouch beside the black fishing rod bag he had been carrying with him since he left Mogadishu. It had been difficult to get the bag all the way here without some security man or police officer taking too close an interest in it, but the effort had been worth it.

>   Zayd unzipped the side and folded it open, revealing the long, skeletal shape of his ‘dragon’, the Dragunov SVD marksman’s rifle.

  The gun was rake thin and lethal, the mirror of the man who used it, and he knew it as well he did his own body. The rifle was a part of Zayd, in a way. He had an almost symbiotic relationship with the weapon, knowing intimately the action of every moving part and its unique quirk. By feel and muscle memory, he loaded a box of 7.62mm bullets into the magazine well, running his hands over the careworn wooden stock and handguard. His cohorts in the clan would sometimes make fun of him when they thought he couldn’t hear them, talking about the rifle as if it was his wife instead of his weapon, mocking the care and painstaking attention he gave it. But Zayd ignored them, and said nothing when their ill-maintained guns jammed or took off their fingers with a misfire. He unrolled a leather pouch containing the rifle’s bulky PSO-1 scope and attached it with quick, economical movements. Dropping into a prone position, he aimed down the length of the tunnel as it extended away from him and proceeded to adjust the sights.

  It was right that he should have his dragon with him, now when death was close at hand. How many lives had he ended with it? The notches etched on the stock told that story.

  Zayd put his eye to the scope. They would be coming, very soon.

  *

  The tunnel narrowed and then widened again, becoming an open area that reminded Marc of the bottom of a vast well. Sullen light leaked in from high up above, and supporting ribs cut out of the rock cast shadows and provided cover as he kept close to the walls. Lucy moved out the other way around the edge of the chamber, while Simonova’s agent came up through the middle.

  The Russian saw something in the same moment that Marc heard the scrape of a boot on the sandy floor, and he shouted a warning.

  A man came out of the dark, firing as he moved, unaware that his enemy was only a metre away. They saw each other and the gunman’s eyes widened in shock. He twisted, but Marc yanked the trigger on his stolen CZ and sank two rounds centre-mass in the man’s torso. The gunman fell with a cry.