Chris Ryan Extreme: Hard Target: Mission Four: Fallout

by Chris Ryan

  This last comment made Kruger laugh. Not because it was funny, but because Margitz had made the mistake of so many others. He saw a false limb and assumed weakness. Whereas the opposite was true.

  Kruger’s was no ordinary limb. While the standard-issue prosthetic was designed to look like and perform the tasks of the one that had originally been lost – essentially a replacement – Kruger’s arm actually enhanced his capabilities.

  Three years earlier he’d been the subject of a cutting-edge Pentagon programme. Targeted Muscle Reinnervation (TMR) involved connecting his prosthetic limb directly to the nervous system and motor cortex of his brain, using a cyberware gateway implanted in his spinal column. This cyberware allowed Kruger to control any network or machine that used a computer processor. He could remotely operate machinery, drive cars from a kilometre away and even access the internet just by thinking about it.

  The geeks at the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) didn’t stop there. They built him an arm that was practically indestructible. His arm was bulletproof, flameproof and fitted with special bionic muscles that had fifty times the force and stopping power of a human arm. Kruger could crush a man’s neck with one quick clip.

  So Kruger laughed, because really, Margitz didn’t know shit.

  ‘What’s so funny?’ Margitz asked.

  ‘This,’ Kruger said.

  He let go of the barbell.

  The barbell crashed down ten centimetres onto Margitz’s chest. Then it drove several more into his pectorals. His ribs cracked, splintered, snapped. His diaphragm made a dull squelching sound as the bar squashed it. Kruger heard the hiss of air escaping. Which was appropriate, he reckoned, because his chest looked like a fucking punctured American football. Blood gurgled in Margitz’s mouth as he pawed at the barbell.

  His face turned a shade of frozen blue.

  Then he stopped pawing.

  Kruger quit the gym.

  Out on the backstreet, he lit a cigarillo. Kruger wasn’t a cigar kind of guy. Used to be. Until the ban. But fucked if he was going to spend thirty minutes outside working his way through a Cohiba. Cigarillos were smaller, lighter, quicker to smoke.

  He was tapping through his contacts list when the guy called him. Not the guy on the Margitz assignment; someone else. A job he was sitting on. Kruger smiled. He liked these periods when work was easy to come by.

  ‘We have the girl,’ said the voice. He spoke slowly and mauled his words. They all did. It was a Russian thing.

  ‘Sweet,’ Kruger said.

  ‘She will be at the premises in three hours.’

  He checked his watch. It was five-thirty, exactly an hour behind Greece. ‘Sweet.’

  ‘The soldier – the Englishman,’ the Russian sneered, ‘he thinks he can save the bitch.’

  ‘Aww,’ said Kruger, puffing on his cigarillo. ‘Sweet.’

  7

  Athens. 0556 hours.

  Four hours and no fucking word from Land. Gardner tried getting through for the fourth time in forty minutes. Engaged. Again. He threw the phone against the dashboard and swore at the windshield.

  Back to Athens. Back to streets of unfinished buildings and empty store units, a legacy of the tanked economy.

  Gardner rested the BMW on a sidestreet in the Plaka district, in the centre of the city. While driving he’d thought about renting a cheap hotel room but decided against it. He was down to his last €60. He might need that money for an emergency. And whoever had waited in ambush at the airstrip would surely be looking for him. Besides, it was a hell of a lot easier to ring around hotels and get a name than chase a guy in a car.

  He had to clean his wound. Regiment operators were required to have a better understanding of treatment and medicine than the average squaddie. They were expected to survive months in hostile terrain with no recourse to professional medical care, with the result that Gardner knew pretty much everything there was to know about bullets and the damage they caused. For a start, bullets were not sterilized, nor were the guns they were fired from. Ditto the air they travelled through. Which meant they carried bacteria into the flesh. Clothing fabric was also riddled with bacteria. And Gardner’s flesh had been exposed to a large dose of both.

  He rooted around the BMW. Found what he was looking for in the glove compartment. A bottle of fresh mineral water. Gardner unscrewed the cap on the bottle with his right hand. Then he gripped the bottle in his fake left, awkwardly tipping the contents over the open wound. The water was lukewarm. It flowed through the gouge of his wound, carrying bits of grit and dirt with it. When he was done, Gardner chucked the bottle and tried moving his arm. Stung like fuck, and the smell was rotten. But at least he could flex it.

  Then he tried Land again.

  This time he answered.

  ‘Call you back,’ he said before Gardner could get a word out.

  Gardner waited for several minutes. His heart was beating fast. He felt its beat fluttering at the top of his throat. Whoever’s snatched Aimée, he swore to himself, they’re going to pay. With their fucking lives.

  Ten minutes later his phone sparked into life.

  ‘Yes?’ Land said.

  ‘It was an ambush. We got attacked at the plane, we—’

  ‘I heard. The pilots have both turned up dead in a hotel room in Kalamos. Had their throats slit.’

  ‘Someone was waiting there for us,’ Gardner replied. ‘They shot at me and nabbed Aimée.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

  ‘Spare me the bullshit, Land. Who the fuck were those people?’

  ‘Calm down, Joe.’ Land’s voice was steadying now. ‘And listen carefully. I’ve this very moment come out of a meeting with our top field agents. You say they took Aimée?’

  ‘I couldn’t get to her.’

  ‘It was the Russians.’

  ‘Sotov?’

  ‘This goes higher than Sotov. The Russian government is involved.’

  ‘What about Aimée?’

  ‘One of our agents in Moscow says two particularly unpleasant individuals have been hired to take care of her.’

  Matchsticks lit under Gardner’s chin.

  ‘Who are they?’

  ‘They’re called the Kazan Twins. A man and a woman; brother and sister, allegedly. They specialize in torture for the mafya and the federal security services. The man skins people alive.’

  Gardner’s world shrank. You promised, he reminded himself. You said you’d protect her.

  And now this.

  ‘But what do they need to torture Aimée for?’ Gardner wondered aloud. ‘They’ve got the laptop and the flash drives.’

  ‘That’s not the way Russians think, Joe.’

  Gardner rang his tongue over his teeth. They were stained with dirt. ‘Where is she?’

  ‘An apartment block on Kapsis Square, in the Marousi district. About twenty minutes from your present location.’

  ‘How long until these fucking torturers get there?’

  ‘Spot of bad news for you, I’m sorry to say,’ Land said, his voice now sibilating with stress. ‘Our agent says the Kazan Twins boarded a private flight to Athens nearly three hours ago. It takes around three hours from Moscow by plane. Say another thirty minutes to reach Aimée.’ Land paused. ‘If you hurry, you can just about make it. You have to stop them, Joe—’

  The mobile lost its signal. Gardner removed the battery pack, gave it ten seconds and reinserted it. When he turned the phone on, he had a weak signal. One measly bar. But he also had a new message. A brief video clip. No more than five seconds. It was grainy and heavily pixellated. A face was set against a grey-brown background. The expression was fear. The person’s lip was cut and one eye bruised.

  Aimée.

  8

  0609 hours.

  Gardner thundered east down Alexandras Avenue for five kilometres, then banged a left on the dual-lane and shuttled north along Kifisalas Avenue and past the graffitied shell of the old Panathinaikos football s
tadium. The fuel gauge indicated that the tank was half empty. The tachometer needle was in the red zone. Gardner put the BMW into fourth gear and watched the speedometer climb to ninety-five.

  The Marousi neighbourhood was moneyed up and extravagant. It housed the financial district and the Olympic Stadium was visible in the distance. Kapsis Square was sandwiched between two small hills. Gardner pulled into the side of the road, killed the engine and rested his hands on the wheel. Daybreak in Athens and the wild dogs were retreating.

  He double-checked the address Land had given him: 10 Kapsis Square. He scoped the square. Hotel to the right, a three-star job trying to front up as a five-star and falling way short. High-rise building on the left, apartments stacked on top of each other, each floor smaller than the one below it, like a mountain of shot glasses. Half the apartments had ‘For Sale’ signs tacked to the balconies. The road was slick from a burst of rainfall at three o’clock that morning. Gardner’s eyes settled on the offices at the bottom of the apartment block.

  That’s where they are, he thought. His pulse quickened. Torture was a fucking speciality dish in Russia, and the Kazan Twins were about to make Aimée the main course.

  Gardner climbed out of the BMW. The grain of the Glock 17’s stippled-surface grip pressed into the small of his back. The square was deserted. He noticed a Mercedes-Benz E550, arsenic black, outside the apartments. A car that swish looked out of place here. Raindrops on the bonnet and windshield told Gardner the car had been sat there since at least three that morning.

  He paced the thirty metres to the building, scanning his peripheral vision. At the main door he pressed the handyman button. There was a buzzing, then a click. He was in.

  The corridor was empty. Gardner dug the Glock 17 out of his jeans, gripped it by his side. The lino floor smelled of bleach. His footsteps echoed in the cool corridor.

  He climbed two flights of stairs, his shoes squeaking on the polished lino treads. At the door to apartment 10, Gardner raised his right leg, dragged his foot back and delivered a front-kick directly onto the lock. People only shot door locks in the movies. In real life the shooter was more likely to blind himself from the metal splinters flying off the lock plate, or even have the round rebound on him, than actually bust it open. A simple kick was twice as effective and half as loud.

  The lock cracked. The door swung open. Gardner hoisted the Glock to shoulder level and edged into the hallway. Three doors ahead. Two on the left, one on the right. Doors on the left closed, door on the right open, sunlight spilling like honey into the hallway from an unseen window. He felt his bowels constricting. His breathing was fast and light.

  Gardner smelled cigarette smoke.

  He heard the slam of a door and the shudder of a wall. Coming from your ten o’clock. From beyond the open doorway, twelve metres away.

  Now he was inside the room, Glock nosing ahead of him. He was hyper-alert. The room was L-shaped. He arced the pistol in a clockwise direction. The room was bare. Totally fucking spartan. No furniture to speak of – just an ashtray on the floor, thin smoke rising from a dozen filter tips. Next to the ashtray was a box of crumpled Mayfairs. Who the fuck smokes Mayfairs in Greece?

  Then he spied movement at his three o’clock.

  At the far wall.

  The wall had a door that led out onto the northern face of the apartment block. As Gardner walked towards it he caught the hurried clank-clank of shoes treading on metal. He burst through the door and found himself on the platform of a fire escape. He scanned the area below. A metal staircase spiralled down into an alleyway a universal shade of brown. Two figures were sprinting out of the alley and into the square. A man and a woman. Too far away and too grainy still to make out their faces. All he could see was that the woman’s hair was ginger. The guy was scrawny, had a bald patch and wore a grey suit.

  The fucking Kazans.

  He thought about firing off a shot. Decided against it. The twins didn’t have Aimée with them. He needed to capture them alive and find out where she was being held.

  He cleared the bottom step of the fire escape five seconds after the pair had disappeared from view.

  Back in the square, he clocked his BMW. The chassis was sitting a few inches lower than normal. They’d slashed his fucking tyres before hightailing it. Gardner figured they could have only gone one way out of the square, and thundered into a street backing on to an American-style mall. And there was the woman, the guy just ahead, both sprinting hard.

  Gardner’s own running style was pretty solid. He had a lot of calf and quad muscles to compensate for his average stride, and his lungs put the average guy’s to shame. But the Kazans were tall and skinny, with long legs, and for every stride they took Gardner needed to take two to stop them widening the gap.

  If I can just get to her, he thought. He was thirty metres from her. Thirty-five to the guy. He felt an elevator of pain shoot up from his right oblique to his ribcage. Don’t lose the pace, he urged himself. Beads of sweat dripped into his eyes, salting his vision.

  The street ended where the mall ended, and there the twins took a right into a narrow sidestreet that served the backs of restaurants on both sides. Outdoor chairs and tables were stacked up against the walls on either side of the road. Waste food formed a sludge river that flowed from one end of the street to the other.

  Twenty metres to the woman.

  Then she tripped on her ankle.

  Gardner dug deeper. The pain took a return route down his left side, but now he was just ten metres from the woman. She was scraping herself off the pavement. He glanced ahead towards the man as he hit the end of the street. The guy paused, head darting back and forth, uncertain whether to leave her or come back.

  The woman spared him the choice. She shot to her feet with a renewed agility that caught Gardner off guard. She grabbed the leg of the bottom chair in a tall column and pulled hard on it. The chairs toppled, their metal frames clattering against the ground. Then she ran off. Gardner kicked the chairs aside.

  The man, then the woman, catching up with him, spun left, out of view.

  Gardner hit the corner and saw them racing down a gentle slope. Pigeons squawked and flapped as they fled. The road flattened out forty metres down and led into a junction. Gardner saw the nose of a car shoot out like a spear across the junction, thought it was going to slam into the twins.

  The car, a Focus, stopped dead, but the bumper hit the man’s legs and he fell onto the bonnet. The woman grabbed him by the lapels and pulled him upright and they took off again.

  Gardner sprinted down the slope. He passed the junction, where drivers were yelling at the guy in the Focus for braking so hard. He chased the twins as they ran past a row of kebab houses and souvenir shops and up a set of concrete steps.

  The steps led into a ticket office, and Gardner saw a sign on the outside: they were heading into a suburban railway station.

  He was just ten metres from them now, his superior stamina and strength kicking in. In a sprint, Gardner didn’t have the pace, but put him in for the long haul and he’d hunt down anyone, eventually.

  The twins vaulted over the ticket barriers. Gardner likewise. A train pulled into the adjacent platform, shining grey, all moulded plastic and futuristic design. An announcement on the Tannoy. A dozen people got off; plenty more boarded. Gardner searched among the throng for the pair. Couldn’t fucking see either of them. Maybe they’re not on the train, he thought.

  The doors beeped. They were about to close.

  You need to call it. On or off?

  Gardner ducked into the corridor of the nearest carriage. He scanned the platform through the window as the train gently eased forward, got a long, hard look at the faces bobbing towards the station exit. There were twenty humdrum faces, bored faces, angry faces, the kind he’d seen on the Tube a million fucking times. Commuters who looked like their lives needed a reboot. Twenty faces, but none of them matched the man or the woman.

  That means they’re on this train
.

  The platform shrank from view.

  An automatic door slid open and he dipped his head and steamed through the doorway into the carriage itself.

  9

  0700 hours.

  Cool air greeted Gardner as he made his way along the carriage. The train was packed. Men and women, most of them middle-aged and stressed, sat and fiddled with their BlackBerrys and iPhones. Others stared out of the window at the ticker-tape landscape: trees, roads, cars, houses, fusing into a granite blur.

  At each seat Gardner checked out the faces. The commuters either ignored him or eyed him suspiciously. Hardly surprising: he looked like shit. His T-shirt was torn at the sleeve and his right arm emitted a pungent aroma. He didn’t exactly blend in. At least my Glock’s hidden away, he thought. He’d stuffed it back into his jeans, covering the pistol grip with the bottom of his T-shirt.

  He cleared the first carriage. No luck. He paused at the next sliding door separating the carriages. A soft female voice made a pre-recorded announcement just before the train slowed and pulled into the next station.

  Gardner peered through the window of the automatic door. Saw a couple of guys dragging themselves out of their seats, going through the same rituals as workers the world over: straightening the tie, pin-locking the mobile, reaching for the briefcase from the overhead storage rack.

  One of the guys shuffled down the aisle.

  Gardner spotted a knot of ginger hair at the next seat.

  He hung by the door, waiting for the right moment. The train eased into the platform. Some place called Pallini. Then the train stopped. As soon as the lights blinked and the doors slid back like some kind of robotic curtain call, Gardner stepped through the automatic door and used the departing crowd to obscure his profile from the Kazans. The ginger-haired woman remained seated. They weren’t getting off. The guy was on his feet and making his way to the toilet at Gardner’s end of the carriage. He hadn’t spotted him in the throng.

  Gardner retreated into the previous carriage and peered back through the window. The man slipped into the toilet. Now Gardner rushed back into the next carriage and in a second he was blocking the closing toilet door with his left arm and using the force in his shoulder muscles to push it back. The door whirred, clicked, conceded defeat.