Nemesis

by Tim Stevens

  NEMESIS

  Tim Stevens

  Copyright 2015, Tim Stevens

  ***~~~***

  Licence Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. If you would like to share it with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you for respecting the work of this author.

  Cover by Jane Dixon-Smith at JD Smith Design

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  Twenty-eight

  Twenty-nine

  Thirty

  FROM THE AUTHOR

  BOOKS BY TIM STEVENS | John Purkiss series

  Martin Calvary series

  Joe Venn series

  Shorter stories and novellas

  One

  Stepan Vodovos gazed at the hill that rose through the mist in the distance like a hump-backed prehistoric behemoth with its dense bristling spines of pine trees, and thought: this could be home.

  Ahead of him, the path narrowed as it curved leftwards. Once, the path had been coated with a neat layer of gravel, but the years and the grinding impact of feet and hooves and wheels and weather had ground it into just another rough dirt track.

  Ten yards in front, the vanguard spread out, four men alongside each other. They were hard men, every one of them, though they weren’t in military dress. Their bulky duffel coats expanded their silhouettes almost grotesquely. Underneath the coats, Vodovos knew, they wore slim-fitting para-aramid textile vests augmented with titanium plates, designed to withstand the impact of any handgun projectile and those delivered by most rifles.

  Each man was armed with a GSh-18 pistol and a Kizlyar fighting knife. Both weapons were standard issue for the armed services of the Russian Federation, the knife a particular favourite of the spetsnyaz, the special forces.

  Each man was a trained killer.

  Behind Vodovos was the vanguard. It consisted of six more men, all of them similarly steeped in the art of death. In addition to the small arms borne by the men in front, they carried AK-12 semi-automatic rifles.

  Vodovos walked with two other men abreast.

  On his far left was Sergei Malykhin, a fellow officer of the Federal'naya sluzhba bezopasnosti Rossiyskoy Federatsii. The Russian security service.

  Technically, Malykhin was of the same rank as Vodovos in the FSB. But Vodovos knew that the man had a status which went beyond his title. Malykhin was the equivalent of the NKVD officers who’d accompanied the troops to the front lines during the Great Patriotic War. He was a political commissar, there to ensure that the correct procedure was observed at all times.

  He was there to keep an eye on Vodovos.

  Vodovos knew of the man’s role, and had known of it since before they’d left Moscow. He understood it was standard procedure during an operation of this magnitude. Even somebody with a proven track record like Vodovos’s couldn’t escape the scrutiny of the FSB’s legendary internal monitoring apparatus.

  All the same, he resented it. Resented the intrusion, and resented Malykhin himself. The commissar was small and bland and humourless, with a short man’s pomposity. He made a point of hovering near Vodovos at all times, like a jailer. At the airfield outside St Petersburg, while they were waiting for the plane, Vodovos had deliberately gone to the bathroom more often than he needed, just to annoy Malykhin. Each time, he’d found the little man loitering outside the bathroom door afterwards, as if he’d been eavesdropping.

  The cloud cover across the distant hills parted momentarily as the wind came up, and the crescent moon showed itself, a sharp sickle in the sky.

  This could be home, Vodovos thought, because of the cold and the crisp smell of pine and the sporadic cries of owls and other denizens of the night in the surrounding forest. He’d grown up in the countryside north of Moscow, and for the first twelve years of his life the vastness of wild woodland had seemed normal to him, with cities a bizarre anomaly.

  Between Vodovos and Malykhin, the prisoner walked with a steady stride, matching the rhythm of the feet behind him and in front of him as they crackled on the ice-slicked, pine-strewn track.

  Vodovos knew the identity of the prisoner, but he didn’t understand his significance. All he was aware of was that he must be of high value. Because he was being exchanged for a man whose value to the Russian state was immeasurable.

  The moon emerged once more, and with it came the shock of awareness that Vodovos had first experienced a few minutes earlier, when they’d disembarked from the plane.

  He was part of an armed Russian force, and he was walking on British soil.

  The implications were colossal, almost ineffable, like trying to peer into the soul of God. The operation was precisely timed, with no room for error. If it went wrong, if the slightest detail wasn’t observed correctly, the consequences would be catastrophic.

  And, as the skein of cloud obscured the moon again, so Vodovos pushed his fear and awe into a deep, hidden, contained place within him.

  The man in charge of the vanguard slowed, the others following suit. He raised a hand silently.

  Fifty yards ahead, the track broadened as the trees thinned, becoming more of a clearing. Against the sky, Vodovos saw the silhouettes of human heads.

  Torches blazed all at once, like silent gunfire.

  The vanguard of Vodovos’s party turned on their own flashlights.

  The head of the vanguard called out the code phrase.

  After a heart-stopping pause, which probably lasted no longer than three or four seconds, the counter-phrase sounded, low and clear.

  Contact had been established, and the mission moved into its next phase.

  *

  Vodovos stepped forward. They’d closed the gap and were now standing in the clearing, five yards from the other group.

  The British had sent a larger contingent. Vodovos counted fourteen men. Ten of them were clearly military, and carried carbines, though like his own men they weren’t in uniform.

  Three of the men were civilians. MI6, no doubt.

  The fourth man stood in the centre of the group, an armed man on either side. He was of medium height, and stocky. He wore some kind of prison garb, dull grey or blue - it was impossible to tell in the scanty light.

  His wrists were manacled together, and the chain connecting the shackles on his feet was just long enough to allow him to walk at a shuffling pace.

  His head and face were covered with a canvas hood.

  One of the civilians, a man whose natural pallor was accentuated by the play of the torchlight that threw the hollows of his face into sharp relief, stepped forward at the same time as Vodovos and extended his hand.

  ‘Singer,’ he said.

  ‘Vodovos.’

  They shook.

  The man glanced at the prisoner, behind Vodovos and to his left. He looked back at Vodovos.

  In fluent if slightly accented Russian he said: ‘Any obstacles on the way?’

  ‘No.’ Vodovos and his party had flown first to the airfield outside Petersburg and then caught a light aircraft across the North Sea to the even smaller airfield just inland
from the coast. There was no sign of habitation for miles around. Vodovos knew the airfield was several miles from the mouth of the Moray Firth, but otherwise he was unfamiliar with the geography of the area. He’d visited London before, many times, but the remoteness of the Scottish Highlands made them feel like another world.

  Vodovos looked past Singer at the shackled, hooded man. He stood quite still, his weight balanced evenly on each foot, as though he was experienced at waiting for long periods.

  Behind Vodovos, the commissar, Malykhin, edged nearer. Vodovos felt a flare of irritation.

  To Singer, he said: ‘Take off his hood, please.’

  Singer made a motion with his hand, without turning round. One of the armed men angled his torch so that the light shone on the hooded head. Another reached over and pulled at the drawstring beneath the captive’s chin. Then, in a smooth movement, he removed the hood.

  Vodovos made a conscious effort to breathe, so that he didn’t embarrass himself by gasping. His adrenal glands released their product, and it was like a sudden intravenous bolus of a narcotic.

  He gazed at the exposed face, keeping his own expression neutral, as his training and his experience had taught him.

  Yes. This was the man.

  Vodovos struggled to ignore the elation that rampaged inside him like a madman in a cage.

  He, Stepan Stepanovich Vodovos, was the first among his countrymen to come face to face with the man whom the Motherland wanted more than anybody else in the world.

  The eyes gazed back at him, indifferently. Their colour wasn’t distinct in the semi-darkness, but Vodovos could see they were pale. The head was close-cropped, the stubble grey as steel.

  He watched the man for a full six seconds. Then his eyes returned to Singer’s and he gave a curt nod.

  Singer said briskly: ‘On the count of three, each man starts walking forwards and doesn’t stop.’

  He took a step back, and Vodovos did the same, as if they were conducting some weird, ritualistic dance.

  He took the prisoner gently by the arm. He was elderly, in his early seventies, and although he was spry and thus far had displayed a dignified courage, it was possible he would falter at this late stage.

  With a gesture of his other hand, Vodovos signalled the prisoner to begin walking.

  He watched the shackled man take his first step forward, the chain binding his feet clanking softly on the scrabble of the clearing’s floor.

  Subtly, on his side and theirs, Vodovos noticed the armed men tensing, their grips on their weapons tightening.

  They were united, Vodovos and his counterparts and the military men on each side, by their shared experience of this performance. They were privy to an event very few other human beings would ever hear about.

  And, united as they were, they reacted to the approaching sound as a single entity, each one of them turning his head at the same time.

  The sound resembled repeated strikes on a bass drum, except the noise of each beat was choppier and ended more abruptly. Vodovos felt the pulse of the sonic assault in his chest.

  He stared at the ridge of the hill to his right. Saw the beginnings of light seeping over the edge, like a rapidly approaching dawn.

  The monster rose, insect-like, over the ridge, black and transfixing and terribly close, looming over them, its eyes glaring down, blazing.

  Vodovos felt pinned by that glare, like a butterfly collector with the tables turned.

  He tore his eyes from the hovering apparition to look at the Briton, Singer, and his entourage. He thought he’d see triumph, there, or at least no expression at all.

  But Singer himself was staring wide-eyed at the helicopter. The men around him swung their guns to bear.

  The prisoner, the old man, blinked up at the chopper in confusion, reaching for the glasses on his nose as if not trusting his eyes.

  Only the other man, the shackled one, appeared unsurprised.

  The firing began an instant later, a yellow burst of flame exploding from the helicopter and the ground around Vodovos erupting as the invisible projectiles smashed into it. At almost the same moment, the guns on either side of him opened up, the noise somehow more shocking because of its closeness.

  Vodovos leaped for the prisoner and collided into his back and knocked him prone, feeling the stiff and sinewy frame hit the frozen ground hard. He raised his head and saw the shackled man backing away at an unhurried pace.

  ‘Stop him,’ he yelled.

  His cry must have gone unheard, lost in the cacophony of gunfire, but one of the men on the British side ran to the shackled man and grabbed him by the back of the neck and hurled him to the ground, crouching over him and swinging his rifle back round to train it on the helicopter.

  The impact of the stream of high-velocity bullets lifted the soldier almost into a standing position once more, throwing him off the man he was covering and sending him sprawling on the hard earth.

  A blow to Vodovos’s back startled him, in a detached way. His first thoughts were: I’m shot. I’m numb. Let the end come now, before the pain hits. He felt relentless, though not uncomfortable, pressure across his body, driving him downward against the prisoner’s own prone form.

  Vodovos felt the wetness on his shoulder and craned his head round. He saw the horrible, grinning face inches from his, the mouth distorted in a toothy leer where the lip and cheek had been shot away.

  It was one of the soldiers. One of his soldiers.

  He’d been hearing the screams around him for a few seconds at least, he realised, but only now was he registering them. By swivelling his head he could make out another body a few feet away, and a man stumbling aimlessly nearby, his injuries impossible to judge in the near darkness.

  It’s just one helicopter, Vodovos’s mind shouted. Why don’t they shoot it down?

  He saw movement from the corner of his eye.

  A black shape moved swiftly from the left. Another appeared a few yards away.

  More of them, thought Vodovos. More men, at ground level.

  Pain arrowed up his leg without warning, cold and clean and burning.

  The flash of the guns lit up the clearing brilliantly in a succession of strobe images, each offering a snapshot from hell. Bodies twisted and spun, and the cries offered a high counterpoint to the roaring of the weapons.

  Vodovos’s primitive brain, the part deep below the more modern cerebral cortex, the area that was vestigial to an era before the mammals had separated from their reptilian counterparts, took control.

  He flopped onto his back, rolling the dead man off him.

  He allowed his eyes to remain open, staring at the night sky.

  He brought his breathing under control, so that his respiratory intake and output produced only the minutest movement of his chest. It was difficult, because the pain he’d felt in his leg had returned, and was clamouring for his attention, and he wanted to gasp.

  He’d learned the technique during his training. It was seldom used, and it seldom worked anyway.

  But, sometimes, playing dead was one’s only hope of staying alive.

  The gunfire had stopped. The high-pitched ringing in Vodovos’s ears was all that remained.

  Beyond that, faintly, he heard the low whup-whup of the helicopter’s rotor.

  A single shot made him almost flinch, but he lay dead still.

  Two figures loomed on the periphery of his vision, the forced perspective making them seem huge, with grotesquely enlarged boots.

  He continued to stare at the sky, resisting the urge to look at the men. His eyes prickled and itched, the urge to blink almost intolerable.

  He felt the tackiness on his face and in his hair, realised the blood from the man who’d died on top of him was providing camouflage of a sort.

  One of the looming men bent down. Even on the edge of Vodovos’s vision, the man’s face appeared blurred. He was wearing a balaclava.

  Vodovos stopped breathing entirely. He could hold his breath long enough, he d
ecided, that the man would lose interest in him.

  He had to.

  As the seconds ticked by, the burning in Vodovos’s chest swelled to an inferno.

  He was wrong, he realised. He wasn’t going to be able to hold out.

  A burst of air escaped from his nose just as the man straightened.

  The man moved almost beyond Vodovos’s vision. The second man had disappeared entirely.

  Vodovos heard grunting noises, the sounds of men hefting a mass.

  He risked an infinitesimal twitch of the muscles that controlled his eye movements.

  The two men had hauled the old man, the prisoner, to his feet. Expertly, with their arms under his to support him, they were moving him away.

  He saw the old man reach the other, the one Vodovos had been tasked to bring home.

  Something happened, then. Something Vodovos couldn’t process immediately.

  It didn’t make sense.

  Vodovos lay still.

  The voices - there’d been several of them, though he couldn’t make out what they were saying, or even the language they were speaking in - receded.

  At last, the hammering of the helicopter began to rise. It faded into the distance.

  Vodovos expelled the air in his lungs in a screeching gasp.

  He gulped fresh mouthfuls, again and again. Tasted the copper aroma of blood. It seemed to have infused the very air.

  Even now, he didn’t dare turn his head.

  Because he didn’t know how he was going to face what he’d see around him.

  The death. The carnage.

  The evidence of his desolate, horrifying failure.

  Two

  Even before Purkiss had descended the steps from the plane’s door, he saw Vale standing on the tarmac.

  It was unusual. Normally Vale contacted him by phone to arrange a rendezvous. Unexpected meetings like this weren’t his style.

  Vale was a tall black man, skeletally thin, and tending towards a stoop as if sixty-plus years of life were finally getting the upper hand. He watched Purkiss as he disembarked, but didn’t raise his hand in greeting. The late March air was chilly, winter seguing sluggishly into spring, but Vale wore a heavy overcoat. Purkiss supposed a man as bony as he was felt the cold more than most.