by Jack Heath
Wolf wasn’t surprised. As soon as she had told Noelein about Maschenov’s strategy to steal the briefcase, this had become the new plan. ‘How soon?’
‘As soon as the warheads are repaired, President Grigieva will go to her bunker and give the order,’ Noelein said. ‘Nine am at the latest. All our agents are returning to home base. You have to get out of Besmar right now.’
Wolf looked at all the buildings, soon to be rubble and dust. She watched Maschenov scurry through the distance, an ant to be crushed.
‘You’re coming home,’ Noelein said. ‘Is that understood?’
‘I’m on my way,’ Wolf said, and hung up.
She felt a moment of guilt for lying to a superior officer. A tightening of the throat, as though she had swallowed something to which she had a very mild allergy. But if she left now, Troy Maschenov might succeed in crossing the border. Even after Besmar was wiped out, there would be a wanted Besmari national on the loose in Kamau. That was unacceptable.
She had to stay. If she died in the nuclear explosion, that was unimportant. Besmar would no longer exist, so Kamau would be safe. She would have fulfilled her duty and could die with honour.
She put her eye back to the scope, and waited for Maschenov to reach the open road.
Dessa Cormanenko dug through the equipment locker. She grabbed the chauffeur’s uniform, the vest, the syringe, the scuba gear – and the gun. It was a desperate and risky plan. She prayed that Maschenov would do what he was supposed to.
She stripped off her clothes and started pulling on the uniform. It was tight – the driver she had stolen it from was smaller than her. Hopefully no one would notice until it was too late.
She heard Haypen enter the room behind her.
‘I’ve finished clearing the warehouse,’ he said. ‘No sign we were ever here.’
It wasn’t the same warehouse the Librarians had shown up at, but that didn’t mean they didn’t know about it. Cormanenko could only hope they had never followed Xin here.
‘Good work.’ Cormanenko buttoned up the jacket. ‘Is your camera ready?’
‘It’s ready. Are we really doing this?’
‘We’re really doing it,’ she said. ‘I can only give you a couple of seconds, so make them count.’
Haypen scratched his beard. ‘You know this is a long shot, right?’
‘Use a zoom lens.’
Haypen laughed nervously. ‘I wasn’t talking about the photo.’
Cormanenko forced a smile. ‘I know.’ She turned around and kissed him on both cheeks. ‘If all goes well, I’ll see you in Turkey.’
‘And if it doesn’t, I’ll see you in paradise.’
Cormanenko wasn’t religious, but she wasn’t surprised that Haypen was. She had seen the crescent moon on a chain around his neck. Everyone had joined her team for their own reasons.
‘I doubt you’ll find me in paradise,’ she said. ‘Let’s settle for Turkey.’
Haypen let it go. He looked around at the dark, dusty office.
‘We’re done here,’ Cormanenko said. ‘You get to the apartment building. I have a president to abduct.’
Twenty minutes later she was driving the stolen limousine to the Royal Babyeska Hotel in Towzhik. The drive would have taken an hour on most days, but nuclear alarm klaxons were wailing all over the city. The streets were deserted, but for the occasional abandoned car.
Another presidential limousine was already parked in the U-shaped turning bay in front of the hotel. The driver was standing beside the door, his back straight, eyes forward, ready to salute as soon as President Grigieva emerged. This was good. Cormanenko hadn’t missed her – and the rest of the motorcade hadn’t yet arrived.
Cormanenko parked her limousine behind the other one. She left the engine running as she got out, but the motor was so finely tuned it made hardly a sound. She nodded to the other driver. He nodded back as she approached.
‘I’m very sorry about this,’ she said.
The man looked puzzled for a split second – and then Cormanenko slipped the needle into his armpit. He tried to twist away, but it was too late. The paralytic, derived from tick venom, had already taken hold. He let out a startled groan.
‘Easy,’ Cormanenko said, holding his arms by his sides. ‘Easy.’
Beads of sweat appeared on the driver’s forehead. His lips twisted into a snarl, but he couldn’t make a sound.
When she was sure he couldn’t move, Cormanenko leaned him gently against the wall behind a pillar so he didn’t fall over. He glared at her.
‘If it’s any consolation,’ she said, ‘in two hours you’ll be fine, and I’ll probably be dead.’
She stood beside the doorway, ready to salute the president.
Something was wrong.
Fero slowed to a walk so he could listen. He was still in the city – the border was a couple of kilometres away – and the street was quiet but for the drone of distant traffic and the footsteps of early morning joggers. He glanced in the shop windows as he passed them, using the reflection to scan the street. There were a few people around – a woman pushing a pram, an old man leaning on a cane, a teenage girl with headphones on. No one who looked like a cop.
But this didn’t mean anything; cops often didn’t look like cops, especially in Besmar. Someone was watching him. He could feel it. He glanced back again. The teenage girl was moving in the same direction as him but not as quickly. Her bulky clothes would make it hard to move fast. Not smart attire for a spy.
Perhaps it was the old man. The white hair could be fake, but his limp was very convincing. And he was ahead of Fero, which was an unlikely position to be following him from.
The woman with the pram, then. She was on the other side of the street, a little way behind him. It was unusually early to take a baby for a walk. Maybe she was tailing him.
Fero was still considering this when the woman reached under the blanket and pulled an assault rifle out of the pram. ‘Freeze!’ she roared, pointing the gun at him.
He didn’t freeze. He tried to run, but the old man had already moved to block his way. The cane had separated into two halves with a blade protruding from each. Two Tellers.
Fero turned in the other direction, but the teenage girl behind him had a gun too. Three Tellers. She was older than she had looked at first glance. She held the pistol with confidence and stood close enough to Fero that she wouldn’t miss, but far enough away that he couldn’t grab the weapon. They had cornered him.
A four-wheel drive mounted the kerb and screeched to a halt. The back passenger-side door was open.
‘Get in,’ said the woman with the assault rifle.
Fero hesitated, looking for other options.
They didn’t wait for him to find one. A big man in a grey suit reached out of the car and dragged Fero inside. The thug slammed the door and Fero heard it lock. The four-wheel drive lurched into motion again, leaving the three covert agents behind, their job done.
Fero found himself sitting next to the thug on a soft leather seat. Facing him was a man with hideous fresh burns covering most of his face and neck.
‘Hello, Troy,’ Ulrick Vartaniev said.
CHAOS THEORY
‘I didn’t know about the bomb,’ Fero said.
Vartaniev cupped his ear. ‘You’ll have to speak up,’ he said. ‘The blast ruptured my right eardrum. It will take months to heal, and the doctors say my hearing will never be as good as it was. It’s like someone is ringing a bell in my head all the time. Even with the drugs, the pain in my ears is awful.’
The thug was patting Fero down. He found Cormanenko’s burner phone, wound down the window and threw it out onto the street.
‘It was Noelein,’ Fero said. ‘She tried to kill me as well as you. I’m not your enemy.’
‘My skin, though.’ Vartaniev acted as though Fero hadn’t spoken. ‘That’s the worst part. It feels like overcooked bacon. It tears constantly. I can’t even move enough to apply my own lotion. I need a nurse to do it. It’s l
ike I aged a hundred years in the space of a few terrible seconds.’
He clearly wasn’t interested in hearing Fero’s side of the story. ‘I found you, though,’ he went on. ‘Because I know you. I made you. As soon as I woke up, I said that you would be trying to flee the country, probably by plane. Now here you are, right near the airfield.’
It didn’t sound like he knew about the briefcase. ‘Where are you taking me?’ Fero asked.
The thug pulled the cash out of Fero’s pocket and handed it to Vartaniev.
‘A private clinic,’ Vartaniev said. ‘While they can’t do much for my ears, the doctors had better news about my skin. Apparently a transplant is possible. I don’t understand the science, but I gather they can just take the skin off someone else and graft it onto me.’
Fero’s blood ran cold. ‘Please,’ he said. ‘I didn’t do this to you.’
‘My eye, too,’ Vartaniev continued. ‘The blast wrecked my right cornea. But the doctors say they can use someone else’s eyeball for spare parts.’ He grinned. Fero saw that the blast had taken some of his teeth and turned the rest into jagged ruins, like Stonehenge. ‘My sight will be as good as new.’
Fero’s mind was racing. He couldn’t talk Vartaniev out of inflicting his punishment. Nor could he overpower the thug. How would he get away?
‘The real question is,’ Vartaniev said, ‘what shall I do with the rest of you? The doctors tell me it’s possible to keep you alive almost indefinitely, even without one of your eyes and most of your skin.’
‘Kamau is about to drop nuclear weapons on Besmar,’ Fero said. ‘You can’t launch your missiles – I stole and destroyed the prime minister’s nuclear briefcase. But I can stop them.’
Vartaniev cocked a hairless eyebrow. ‘No, no. You’re supposed to pretend be someone else. If the interrogator persists, then you make up a story. Have you forgotten everything I taught you?’
‘The codes at Parliament House won’t work,’ Fero said. ‘One of Dessa Cormanenko’s agents swapped them out for fakes.’
‘I’m not interested in your lies,’ Vartaniev said.
Fero was about to say more when the first sniper round punched through the windscreen and thudded into the back seat, narrowly missing him and the thug beside him. Shocked, the driver swerved off the road; the four-wheel drive clipped a lamppost and spun out of control.
Fero ducked down. Another bullet smashed a side window. The floor glittered like a mirror ball.
‘Who’s firing?’ Vartaniev bellowed, showering Fero’s head with spit. ‘Who’s shooting?’
Wolf found me again, Fero realised.
The four-wheel drive continued to slide until it hit a wall. It rocked violently, the movement throwing Fero against the door. A third gunshot hit one of the tyres, and the vehicle listed sideways. It wasn’t going anywhere.
The thug next to Fero had a handgun in one hand, peering fearfully out the window. Vartaniev reached over, snatched the gun out of his grip and pointed it at Fero. ‘One more shot,’ he screamed out the window, ‘and I kill your friend!’
Fero doubted that Wolf could hear him, and he wasn’t stupid enough to think that this was a rescue. He had served his purpose, so she wanted him dead. But he couldn’t let Vartaniev know that. ‘If you let me go, they’ll let you go,’ he said.
‘Shut up,’ Vartaniev told him.
The Besmari police had reached the scene. Fero saw two officers approaching the crashed vehicle. Two others stood back, scanning their surroundings and waving guns around. Terrified civilians cowered in doorways.
Cops, Tellers and a murderous Librarian. This was getting out of hand.
‘They’ll kill you,’ Fero told Vartaniev. ‘You have to let me go.’
‘Shut up!’ Vartaniev pressed the gun barrel against Fero’s forehead.
It was a stupid mistake. Fero grabbed the gun, simultaneously twisting his neck to the side. The gun went off beside his head, shattering the rear windscreen. The muzzle flash stung his face and left his right eardrum singing. At the same time, Wolf fired another shot. The sniper round punctured the bonnet. The engine died and the smell of burning petrol filled the air.
The cops backed away as smoke filled the street. Fero ripped the gun from Vartaniev’s hand and pointed it at the thug. ‘Stay back.’
He could feel Troy Maschenov in his head, telling him it was safest to shoot both unarmed men. He ignored Maschenov’s advice and shifted back towards the smashed window.
Vartaniev lunged forward and grabbed Fero by the throat. Fero dropped the gun and gripped Vartaniev’s wrist, squeezing the burned skin. Vartaniev howled and released him. Fero pushed him back with one foot. The thug dived for the fallen gun, but Fero was already scrambling out the window.
He dropped to the road and ducked out of sight. The vehicle was between him and Wolf, but he couldn’t use it as cover; the petrol tank could explode at any moment. Hopefully she wouldn’t see him through the smoke.
He sprinted across the street towards a narrow alley between two buildings. ‘Halt!’ someone yelled. Fero kept running.
He heard the pop, pop of a police pistol. A ricochet shattered a shop window, but nothing hit him. The graffiti was a blur on either side as he ran through the alley. He could feel Wolf swivelling her sniper rifle, looking for him in her scope.
He emerged from the alley into another street just as a convoy of military vehicles was passing. Four big trucks, loaded with steel crates. Fero recognised the coat of arms of the Besmari air force and remembered that Vartaniev had said there was a base nearby. He hoped it was the one that had been catapulting napalm barrels across the border. If he could get to it, he would be almost at the wall – and the second tunnel Wolf had told him about.
He ran up to the last of the trundling trucks – a big grey rig with armoured sides and tractor tyres – and grabbed hold of the towbar. Then he leaned back on the wheels in his shoes and let the truck drag him away. He looked back as the police vanished from sight. One of them had been talking on his radio. Fero wondered how long it would take for the cop’s superiors to get in touch with an air force liaison and warn the convoy of his presence. Two minutes, maybe three.
Fero had a more immediate problem. The shoes weren’t designed to roll this fast. The wheels hummed at an anxious pitch, and he fought for balance. His toes kept touching the road, leaving scrapes of rubber behind.
The convoy rumbled up the street, turned and turned again, taking Fero further and further from the firefight. But it wouldn’t take long to catch up with him. It was only a matter of who would reach him first – Vartaniev’s backup, the Besmari police or Wolf.
A minute later the convoy left the last of the buildings behind. Soon the air force base was visible in the distance, a huge compound, flat and desolate. A chain-link fence topped with razor wire surrounded the airfield.
The first truck in the convoy trundled up to the front gate. Fero could hear shouted orders and thumping boots. Every few seconds there was the clank and shudder of a giant catapult, launching barrels of napalm over the Dead Zone and the rampart into Kamau.
An airman climbed down from a small guardhouse and shone a torch through the window, examining some ID. He circled the truck and looked under it with a mirror on a stick, checking for explosives. Then he hauled the gate open and motioned for the truck to go through.
The second truck stopped at the same spot for inspection. Fero figured he had perhaps twenty seconds to decide what to do. He was on the fourth and last truck in the line.
He heard the thumping of helicopter blades, and it wasn’t coming from the airfield. Looking up, he saw a police helicopter approaching, a searchlight cutting through the dawn light.
With a screech of tyres a four-wheel drive turned onto the road and started racing towards the trucks. It looked like an intact version of the one Vartaniev had been riding in. More Tellers after Fero.
There was no cover on this road. If he ran towards the border, the four-wheel drive or the
helicopter would chase him down. The air force base was the only place to hide. But he had less than two hours to get to Coralsk, on the other side of the Dead Zone.
Fero’s truck pulled up beside the guardhouse. He didn’t wait for the airman to appear with the mirror. Instead he let go of the truck and sprinted past it through the open gate.
The airman noticed him almost immediately. ‘Hey!’ he yelled. ‘Halt!’
Fero didn’t halt. He dashed across the tarmac towards the nearest cover, a massive aircraft hangar. He had almost reached it when the gunfire started. First a warning shot over his head, then another near his feet. Then a round whistled past his arm so close that he felt the heat. He dived behind the hangar, out of sight.
A personnel door stood ajar. Fero ran inside and found himself in a supply room, surrounded by metal shelves full of medkits, uniforms, weapons, dried food, communication devices, parachute packs and more. Where had all this stuff been when Fero needed it?
He had trapped himself. The airmen would find him in a matter of minutes. He would never make it to the rendezvous with Cormanenko now. There was no way he was getting out of Besmar alive.
It was infuriating. He had come so far. The Dead Zone was right there. He was so close to Kamau that he could hear the catapults literally throwing things across the border—
Fero froze. An idea struck him. Perhaps it was insane. But it was his only shot.
He snatched up one of the parachute packs and ran back out the door towards the sound of the catapults.
HASTY EVAC
Fero had expected to see two or perhaps three catapults, but there were at least ten, each with a rack of napalm barrels ready to launch. Some loomed close by, as tall as the aircraft hangar, their massive counterweights dangling high above him. Others were barely visible in the distance, pointed in different directions so as to cause widespread destruction. At the far end of the airfield, a maintenance crew stood around one of the loading mechanisms, doing some kind of repair work.
Fero watched as the nearest catapult automatically reloaded. The counterweight clicked up and up through a series of notches as an enormous steel beam lowered. When the beam hit the ground it dislodged a barrel from the rack, which rolled into the ladle-like tip of the beam. There was a pregnant pause, and then: wham! A hidden clip disengaged, the counterweight dropped like a lift with snapped cables, and the beam whipped upwards so fast Fero didn’t even see the bomb vanish into the sky.