The birthday girl

by Stephen Leather

  She dropped the reins and walked back to the snowmobiles, where Vincenti was showing Kiseleva how to start the engines by pulling out the red cut-off toggle on the right-hand side of the handlebars and then pulling a large plastic D-ring attached to a rope, just like starting a lawnmower. Kiseleva pulled hard and the engine burst into life. At the front were two skis with independent suspension. The forward motion was provided by a thick caterpillar belt under the seats. The controls were simple – the throttle lever was on the right handlebar, the brake on the left. There was no clutch. Kiseleva sat down and tweaked the throttle. The snowmobile jerked forward, almost hitting Jenny.

  He slammed on the brake. 'That's all there is to it?' he asked.

  'Just remember to keep it at full throttle over loose snow,'

  Vincenti said. 'If you stop, you'll sink. Try to stay on trails wherever you can. And if you do run into any problems, just hit the red toggle – that'll kill the engine.' He sat astride the second machine and started it. He waved one of the riders over and told him to sit behind him. Ostrovetsky joined Kiseleva.

  One of the members of the ground crew was groaning and trying to crawl through the packed snow. He was leaving a crimson trail smeared behind him. Jenny admired the man's courage: there was nowhere for him to go, no one to save him, but still he didn't give up. He was using his elbows for leverage, dragging his useless legs behind him. Jenny walked up and stood in front of the crawling man, blocking his way. He looked up, his face contorted in agony. She shot him once, in the forehead. Blood and brains and bone splattered over the man's shoulders, and for a second he remained staring at her, the top of his head blown away, before dropping lifelessly forward. She undipped the transceiver from the dead man's belt and tossed it to Kiseleva. He caught it with one hand and shoved it into his coat pocket.

  'I'm going to take the Jeep over there and cut down to the road,' she said. 'There's another radio – I'll use it to keep in touch.'

  'What about the horses?' Kiseleva shouted above the growl of the snowmobile.

  'What, you want to blow away a few more witnesses, do you, Kiseleva?'

  'I just meant…'

  'Yeah, I know what you meant,' she interrupted. 'The horses can take care of themselves. You concentrate on following that bailoon and being there when it lands.'

  'Can't we shoot them down?' Vincenti asked.

  'I doubt it,' she said. 'They're sure to stay high. And unless you're lucky enough to hit the fuel tanks, the bullets will go straight through without damaging the balloon. It'll leak air, but you'd have to riddle it full of holes before you did any real damage. It's not like it's full of explosive gas like the Hindenburg. In fact, it's got a lot in common with Kiseleva.'

  'Huh?' Vincenti grunted, not understanding.

  'They're both full of hot air,'Jenny finished with a cruel smile.

  'Just get on with it, will you? If they get away, Utsyev will have your balls for breakfast.' She turned her back on them and went over to the Jeep to unhitch the trailer.

  Mersiha held on tightly to one of the rope grab-handles as the basket swung gently below the balloon. The snow-covered trees seemed to be miles away, picture-perfect like a Christmas card. If it wasn't for the far-off buzz of the snowmobiles and the men with the guns, she'd probably have enjoyed the flight. As it was, she couldn't stop her hands from trembling. Her father was standing on the opposite side of the basket, ashen-faced. She tried to catch his eye but he didn't seem to notice her. She had seen the same blank stare on the faces of men and women in war-torn Sarajevo when she was a child: faces that had seen too much. She reached over and squeezed his hand. He looked at her with unseeing eyes.

  'Dad, are you okay?'

  He nodded slowly, then seemed to snap out of it. He ruffled her hair and forced a smile. 'I'm fine, pumpkin.'

  'Yeah, we're three people hanging in the air, a sitting target for a group of killers armed with automatic weapons, but other than

  that, we're fine,' said the balloon pilot. He peered over the edge of the basket. The snowmobiles were having to skirt a rocky area and were driving at right-angles to the balloon's path. Mersiha could see that they'd only have to go a mile or so before they'd link up with a trail that would allow them to continue the chase.

  The pilot pulled on the lever that operated one of the burners and a tongue of flame roared into the neck of the balloon.

  'How fast can they go?' she asked.

  'Sixty miles an hour,' the pilot said. 'Maybe seventy.'

  'And how fast do we go?'

  'Depends on the wind. Just now we're doing about twenty.'

  It was like a mathematics problem, Mersiha thought, but the end result was that there was no way they'd be able to outrun the snowmobiles. 'My name's Mersiha,' she said, holding out her hand.

  The pilot stared at it with a look of surprise on his face, as if she were offering him a dead animal, then he grinned and shook it. His grip was firm, his hand totally encompassing hers. 'Tim,' he said. Tim held out his hand to Freeman, and they introduced themselves, the ice broken. Mersiha was standing next to an instrument panel with circular gauges, mounted on one of the three propane cylinders in the basket. One of them displayed the letters 'ALT'. She guessed it was an altimeter, though she had trouble reading its three needles. If she was doing it right, they were eleven thousand feet high, but the ground didn't seem that far away. She asked Tim how high they were. 'About fifteen hundred feet,' he said. Mersiha frowned at the altimeter and Tim smiled. He explained that it showed the height above sea level and the mountains below were more than a mile high. To work out how high the balloon was above the ground, she'd have to subtract the height of the mountains from the altimeter reading.

  Tim showed her how to read the remaining two instruments: the variometer, which measured the rate of ascent or descent, and the thermistor, which gave the temperature of the air at the top of the balloon. As a general rule, he explained, if ever it got below one hundred degrees, the balloon would start to descend.

  'So it's just like a plane, really?' Mersiha said.

  'Sort of, except unlike a plane we can't choose where we go. We have to go with the wind. And those guys down there know that.'

  'Have you got a radio?' Freeman asked.

  Tim shrugged. 'Sure, but it's back there with the ground crew.' He went quiet, turning his back on Mersiha and Freeman, his hands gripping the edge of the basket so tightly that Mersiha could see his knuckles whiten. She didn't know what to say.

  There weren't any words that would make it any easier for him.

  She looked at her father. He shrugged.

  'Why did they do it?' Tim asked quietly.

  'It's complicated,' Freeman said.

  'They killed my friends,' Tim said as he turned around. 'They killed my friends and all you can say is that it's complicated.'

  His voice rose and for a moment Mersiha feared that he was becoming hysterical.

  'I'm sorry,' she said. The balloon had started to drift down and so Tim turned on both burners, giving it a six-second blast of heat. The downward drift stopped and the balloon rose, the variometer showing a climb-rate of fifty feet per minute. 'They think I killed a member of their gang,' Mersiha said.

  Tim's mouth dropped open. 'They think you did what?' He shook his head. 'Really?'

  Mersiha nodded.

  'And did you?'

  'Like I said, it's complicated,' Freeman interrupted.

  'Are you running from the cops?' Freeman shook his head.

  'Because if we get out of this, I'm going straight to the cops.'

  Tim operated the burners again, keeping the balloon in a steady climb.

  'Tim, we'll be right there with you,' Freeman said.

  Tim ran a hand through his thick beard. The facial hair and impenetrable sunglasses made it difficult to judge his age.

  Mersiha thought he could be anywhere between twenty-five and forty years old. 'They're gonna follow us until we land, aren't they?' he asked.

 
; Mersiha nodded. 'I'm afraid so.'

  'And they're gonna kill me, too?'

  'It looks that way,' Freeman said. 'They don't seem to be over-worried about innocent bystanders.'

  Katherine sighed with relief as she drove down the track and saw the Cherokee parked in front of the cabin. 'Thank God, they're home,' she said. She tooted the horn. 'Thank you, God.

  Thank you.'

  She climbed out of her car, expecting to see Tony and Mersiha come dashing out of the cabin. The door remained resolutely closed. It was still early. Maybe they are still asleep, she thought.

  She yawned and stretched. Her whole body ached and she was bone tired. She climbed the steps to the deck and knocked on the door. There was no answer. She turned the handle. The door squeaked on its hinges. 'Tony!' she called. 'Mersiha! It's me!'

  It was only as she stepped inside that she remembered that Tony had hired a Ford Bronco, not a Jeep.

  The snowmobile bucked and kicked between Kiseleva's legs as if it had a life of its own. It was a hundred times worse than the horse, and unlike with a living animal there was nothing he could do to return the pain. The wind tore at his face making his eyes water, and every time the front of the machine dipped down, snow was thrown up over the windshield. He was cold, wet and as mad as hell. He squinted up at the balloon. It seemed closer, but it was hard to tell. The snowmobile's left ski hit a rock and he almost lost his grip. He jammed his feet under the metal foot-rests, and used them for leverage to keep himself on the seat.

  'Fuck you!' he yelled up at the balloon. 'Fuck you, and fuck the blonde bitch, too!'

  He was operating the throttle with his right thumb, which felt as if it was about to drop off. He shifted his grip and tried to use his palm to keep the throttle in the full-on position, but that made it harder to steer. Ostrovetsky was holding him tight around the waist. Both men had put their guns away. The balloon was way too high and the snowmobile was throwing them around so much they couldn't have hit an elephant at point-blank range. He took a quick look at the fuel gauge. It was over three-quarters full.

  He had no idea how fast the snowmobiles used up fuel, but the ground crew must have assumed there'd be more than enough to track the balloon throughout its flight.

  Kiseleva was looking forward to catching up with Freeman and the girl. He wanted to see their faces as he fired. Maybe he'd do it slowly so that he could hear them scream. A bullet in the leg first.

  Then an arm. Then the stomach. It took a long time to die if you were shot in the guts. He'd once pumped a slug into the stomach of a Jamaican drug dealer in Brooklyn and stood over him for almost an hour, listening to him beg for his life and watching him die. It was the first kill he'd really enjoyed. The girl would be a first, though. He'd never killed a girl before. He wondered how he'd feel shooting her. He smiled as he wrenched the handlebars to the left, hauling the snowmobile around a clump of pines. The other snowmobile was a hundred yards ahead of him and he pushed the throttle harder, not wanting to get too far behind.

  The last thing Kiseleva wanted was to be beaten to the kill.

  His ears had already gone numb with the cold and he was gradually losing the feeling in his lips. He ducked his head down behind the small windshield, trying to avoid the chilling wind, but that meant he couldn't see where he was going. He hit a drift, hard, and banged his chin on the handlebars. He cursed and sat up. Blood dripped down his chin but he couldn't take his hands off the controls to wipe it away. 'Fuck the bitch,' he screamed into the wind. The Freeman girl wouldn't be the last woman he'd kill.

  As soon as he got the chance he'd settle the score with the blonde whore. She had no right to treat him the way she did. Just because she opened her legs for Utsyev didn't mean that she could talk to him like that. He'd pick his time carefully, he'd wait until she was alone, he'd take her somewhere where they wouldn't be disturbed, where he'd have all the time in the world. He'd make her beg before she died. Maybe he'd even screw her first. Yeah, that'd be a real kick. Shoot her in the stomach and then screw her. See how she liked that. Kiseleva gripped the seat with his knees and the vibrations of the engine shivered through his groin.

  The two snowmobiles far below made buzzing noises like trapped wasps. Tim leaned over the side of the basket. 'Can you see them?' he asked.

  'Over there, to the right,' Freeman said, pointing. 'They just went behind that big rock.'

  'We're not going to give those guys the slip,' Tim said. He pulled on the burner lever and sent flames roaring into the balloon. 'How high do you think they can shoot those guns?'

  'Difficult to say. But they're machine pistols – they're not accurate beyond about a hundred feet.'

  'That's something,' Tim said.

  'How long can we stay up?' Mersiha asked.

  'Until we run out of propane. The problem is, we were only planning a short flight to test the envelope.' He gestured at the three metal cylinders. 'One of them is empty.'

  'How long?' she repeated.

  'Three hours, tops.'

  'What happens then?' she asked.

  'Then we go down,' Freeman said.

  Tim shook his head. 'We won't be up for three hours,' he said.

  'What do you mean?' Freeman asked, frowning.

  Tim gestured with his thumb at a mountain range in the distance. 'There's nothing but forest over that ridge. It's just trees and rocks and more trees. They'd rip the balloon apart if we landed there. Us too.'

  'Terrific,' Freeman said. Down below, one of the snowmobiles appeared from behind the rocky outcrop and headed across the snow-blanketed hillside. 'So what do we do?'

  Tim pulled the lever again and the burners roared as the balloon lifted. He looked at the thermistor. The needle was hovering around the one hundred degree mark, and according to the altimeter they were two thousand feet above the ground.

  'There's a map down there by that tank,' he said to Mersiha.

  'Can you pass it to me?'

  Mersiha knelt down and handed the folded chart to him.

  Tim opened it over the instrument pack and took off his sunglasses. He studied the chart and suddenly jabbed at it with his forefinger. 'I've got it,' he said, excitedly. 'I know what we can do.' Jenny drove slowly down the track, grateful for the Jeep's four-wheel drive. Several times she'd almost skidded into die trees, and in a less rugged vehicle she wouldn't have made it down the steep hillside. The forest was dense and the trail was so winding and tortuous that she could never see more than a few dozen yards ahead. She alternated between accelerator and brake, taking care not to skid as she slid the Ingram underneath the seat. If the trail opened up on to a main road, it made sense to keep the weapon hidden from view. She took off her fur cap and threw it on to the back seat, shaking her long blonde hair free so that it cascaded down her shoulders.

  The trail she was driving down wasn't shown on the map, but the position of the balloon's launch site was shown with a black cross, and a series of dotted lines marked its projected course to the east. Several roads intersected with the balloon's course, and a number of possible landing sites were marked on the map, all within ten miles or so of the take-off point. She couldn't see the balloon through the pines, but the map and the compass would allow her to keep track of it once she reached a road. She considered using the transceiver to call Kiseleva and check on his progress, but decided against it. She doubted that he'd be able to control the snowmobile with one hand, and she didn't want to be blamed for him running off the mountain. The way Kiseleva was operating, he wouldn't be on Utsyev's team for much longer. He'd been making a lot of mistakes recently, and Bzuchar wasn't a man who tolerated fuck-ups. She hoped that when Bzuchar decided that enough was enough, he'd let her be the one to pull the trigger. Bzuchar owed her one for the way she'd dealt with Lennie Nelson.

  Tim compared the chart with the terrain below and nodded to himself. 'Another four miles, okay?' he said. The snowmobiles were far off to the left, skirting an area of dense pines.

  'Are you sure about
this?' Freeman queried.

  'We don't have any other choice,' Tim said. 'If the three of us stay in the balloon we'll end up in the trees. If I drop you two off, I might just be able to make it. They won't be able to cross the ridge in the snowmobiles, so I'll be okay.'

  'But you said you'd crash in the forest,' Mersiha said, the concern obvious in her voice.

  Tim shook his head. He pulled on the lever and gently sent the balloon up another hundred feet or so. 'With three of us in the basket, that's true. But with the reduced load, I'll probably make it on my own.'

  'Probably?' Mersiha repeated.

  Tim smiled and scratched his beard. 'I'll be okay,' he said.

  'Probably. You said probably.'

  'And they'll see us go down,' Freeman said. 'If they see us leave the basket, we're dead.'

  Tim tapped the chart. 'Yeah, but if I can get us to this snowfield here, we'll be hidden by that.' He pointed to a rocky outcrop in the distance.

  Freeman looked at the chart, then at the terrain slowly passing below. The sound of the snowmobiles faded for a second and then restarted as the machines rounded the trees and headed up a gently sloping hill. They were maybe five miles away. How fast had Tim said the snowmobiles could travel? Sixty miles an hour?

  They could be directly under the balloon within five minutes.

  'We won't make it,' he whispered.

  Tim pulled the burner lever again, keeping the flame burning for a full fifteen seconds. He looked over his shoulder at the approaching snowmobiles. 'We'll be okay, if I can just get us to the other side of those trees there.'

  Freeman looked where Tim was pointing. A swath of snow-covered pines cut through the snowfield like a huge wedge. The trees were growing together so closely that it was hard to see the ground between them. There was no way the snowmobiles would be able to get through. They'd have to go around, and that would entail a detour of at least ten miles.

  Freeman frowned. Tim's plan depended on them getting the trees between the balloon and the snowmobiles, but wind was taking them away to the right of the woods. Down below, the snowmobiles were racing across the virgin snow at full speed.