by Craig Thomas
‘Slowly!’ Vorontsyev cried, still in pain, clutching his ribs.
Lubin steered the Mercedes forward. Lock glanced through the rear window. The driver’s unconscious form was clearly visible, lying in the snow between the two hangars. They passed the GRU soldiers, clustered around a truck painted olive-drab.
They were drinking coffee or vodka, oblivious to the passage of the car. Lubin turned onto the taxiway behind the self-propelled passenger steps that had followed the Learjet. Turgenev was going to get off the airplane before it took off, and his Mercedes would be waiting for him.
The aircraft reached the end of the taxiway and turned onto the runway. The main passenger door, behind the flight deck, opened as a dark gap. Lock could only snatch at his next breath.
‘Slowly,’ Vorontsyev insisted, his breathing less ragged.
The passenger steps were twenty yards ahead of the Mercedes.
The Learjet was poised at the end of the runway. Lock heard his own sharp intake of breath as a tall, fur-hatted figure in a well-cut, dark overcoat appeared in the gap of the open passenger door. Turgenev. The name filled his mouth with saliva, like the anticipation of food. The terminal building was a wall of dull glass against which the tank and the self-propelled gun were posed. The passenger steps drew up beside the plane and their hydraulics jiggled the top step into alignment with the open door. Everything seemed slowed down and made distant; the effect of the car’s tinted windows or perhaps his own anticipation.
Vorontsyev was watching him anxiously. The Mercedes drew to a halt near the bottom of the steps.
‘Just me,’ Lock said. ‘When he’s halfway down the steps. Not till then, not ‘
‘Don’t kill him, Lock.’
Lock made no reply, his hand poised on the door handle. They watched him like an audience, each one of them still, tense.
Turgenev waved a hand’back into the passenger cabin of the plane, then stepped onto the short flight of steps.
‘Look!’ Marfa breathed, pointing back towards the hangars.
‘They’ve found the driver!’
The GRU uniforms were clustered in a tight knot between the two hangars, small as a gathering of ants around a dead fly. A UAZ jeep was pulling up beside them. Lock turned back to the steps and saw, to his horror, that Turgenev had paused near the top, one gloved hand on the metal handrail. He was unalarmed, merely curious, squinting towards the hangars. The familiar car, parked beside the steps, reassured.
The Iranian would be armed, Turgenev probably not…
… now.
He thrust open the door, climbed out, skidded on wet slush, then pushed himself towards the bottom of the steps. As he looked up, he knew at once that Turgenev had recognized him. The Russian turned quickly to regain the aircraft. Lock’s boots pounded on the metal steps as the man retreated. His breath was laboured, his feet slippery beneath him. Turgenev was quicker than he, having passed through shock into action in an instant.
Other boots on the passenger steps. Turgenev, turning in the doorway, his hand reaching into the breast of his coat. The distance too great, the time too short, his sensation of being slow, old, hardly moving —
— released as he blundered into Turgenev, catching the scent of his cashmere overcoat, and his aftershave. Then he collided with a locker’s metal, dizzying himself, his head shrieking with pain. His hands fumbled for Turgenev, who slipped them with a matador’s grace and was gone, through a drawn curtain into the forward passenger cabin. Lock held his head, something wet on his gloved fingers. Lubin and then Dmitri loomed in the doorway, Marfa’s head bobbing behind them.
Lock pointed forward, then staggered through the curtain.
Turgenev was at the other end of the small cabin, at the door to the flight deck. And turned to watch him. Hunted, alarmed
— and strangely aloof. The Iranian was on his feet, on the starboard side, rising from his seat, staring wildly at them. Armed.
Gun in his hands, held out stiff-armed, no shock-delay, pure professionalism.
Lock fired twice and the Iranian’s blood splashed the cabin ceiling and the wall behind his head. Lock’s left arm almost torn from its socket by the impact of the single shot the Iranian had had time to fire. He staggered, sat heavily on the arm of a chair.
A terrified, middle-aged face stared up at him from behind thick glassed spectacles.
‘Stop him!’ Lock groaned.
The flight deck door had closed behind Turgenev. Foreboding.
There was no way the man would allow himself to be taken hostage, allow the airplane to ‘Christ, stop him—!’ he bellowed.
Dmitri had reached the door, his hand was on the handle, his face careless of his own safety, when Lock heard the first shot.
Dmitri threw back the door. The second shot echoed in the cabin. Someone whimpered in terror. Through the open door, Lock could see Turgenev standing between the two pilots’ seats, each of which held a slumped, still form. He’d shot the pilot and copilot. They couldn’t, now, fly anywhere.
Then Turgenev turned away to shut down the engines. Dmitri seemed startled into rage at the movement and struck at Turgenev’s arm with his gun. Turgenev’s pistol clattered to the floor of the flight deck, his features expressing a snarling anger for an instant. Then he shrugged, rubbed his arm, and raised his hands in a mockery of surrender. Dmitri wore ashen shock on his round features. Turgenev entered the passenger cabin and Dmitri closed the door on the bodies.
Someone screamed, as high-pitched and alien as a siren.
Vorontsyev turned, “to see Marfa slap the stewardess across the face, then hold her tightly against her. The woman’s shoulders heaved, her face buried in dark hair and the stuff of Marfa’s coat.
Lock looked down at his wounded arm. There was blood on the sleeve of his coat. There was hardly any pain, surprisingly.
His arm was still in traumatic shock. He let his hand rest on his lap, oblivious of the stunned imprinted fear on the face of the bespectacled man in the seat beside him. He coughed at the tickle of burned powder from the gunshots. A gout of blood splashed down onto his hand. Blood ran from his lips, down his chin. He gingerly opened his topcoat. The breast of his check shirt was darkened with blood. He felt a numb terror — the salty blood on his tongue, filling his mouth again.
The Iranian’s one shot had passed through his arm — and his lungs.
Vorontsyev was looking at him in horror, even as Turgenev announced:
‘It seems, gentlemen, our flight has been delayed indefinitely.’
Vorontsyev raised his pistol in his left hand, but did not strike Turgenev. Instead, his imagination sensed the isolated aircraft, the runway, the fleeing passenger steps, the tower, the terminal, all spreading out around them. The game was lost. The aircraft had been sabotaged.
‘It hasn’t worked — Major.’ Turgenev was smiling. ‘You’re stuck. Dead stop.’ His eyes, as he spoke, were studying Lock with an intense, hot anger; and growing satisfaction. He seemed unconcerned by their numbers, his own situation.
‘Your friend Bakunin can get us another pilot,’ Vorontsyev replied. ‘In exchange for you.’ He sensed his words like soft hands pushing at a great door he could not hope to open.
Turgenev shook his head.
‘I don’t think so. Besides, this time the hijackers have to negotiate with the hostage, isn’t that so?’ Casually, he removed his gloves and, wrapping his coat around him as neatly as a woman might have done, he sat in the one empty seat in the forward cabin.
‘Lubin, Dmitri — check the other cabin — close the passenger door,’ Vorontsyev said mechanically, gesturing with the useless pistol.
Dmitri glanced almost angrily at him, then abandoned the silent, pale-featured Lock and passed through the curtain behind Lubin. They heard the noise of the door being closed and locked.
Marfa pocketed her gun and moved towards Lock, who hunched away from her on the arm of the seat. It was obvious to Vorontsyev that she was making a great effort to k
eep her features inexpressive as she saw Lock’s wound. The American growled once like a dog suspicious of further harm, then allowed her lo unbutton his shirt, inspect the wound. Vorontsyev, in the strained, heightened silence of the cabin, distinctly heard the small, ugly noises of the bloodsoaked shirt against Lock’s skin.
He turned to Turgenev, who seemed distracted by memory or reflection. Marfa moved quickly to the lockeTS, opening and slamming them shut, until she found the first-aid box. She glowered at one of the scientists until he abandoned his seal as nervously as a sheep, then helped Lock into it. The man’s face was grey with pain. Vorontsyev turned away, unwilling to witness the extent of the wound, to acknowledge that Lock was, effectively, Turgenev’s prisoner — the man needed an emergency operation, transfusions … might even be dying. He ground his teeth in impotent rage.
Then, surprisingly, Turgenev moved to stand beside Marfa, as if to supervise her attentions to Lock.
As Dmitri re-entered the forward cabin, Vorontsyev said: ‘Get these two back with the others — they can sit on each other’s laps if they have to. Lubin can keep an eye on them.’
‘I’ll start finding out who and what they are.’ It was as if Dmitri, like himself, had stumbled upon a piece of defensive play-acting, the role of a clerk or customs official which would keep reality at bay, at least for some moments.
Vorontsyev picked up a briefcase which had slipped to the floor from the Iranian’s seat. The dead man sat hunched like an abandoned doll against the bulkhead. Vorontsyev tossed the briefcase to Dmitri. ‘It’ll be in here. Terms and conditions of employment, previous experience, the lot-‘ He tried to smile, knowing it was at best a sickly, defeated expression. Dmitri merely nodded, tapped the two passengers on the shoulder and herded them through the curtain to the four-seat rear passenger cabin.
Marfa had completed her bandaging of Lock’s arm and chest.
Turgenev, hypocritically, shook his head. ‘Hospital, very soon or not at all. Maybe not at all, anyway.’ Maria’s quivering lower lip confirmed the callous, detached diagnosis. Perhaps Lock was dying anyway, but delay would kill him for certain …
… as surrender would Hill them, his people who had followed him into this prison. He could not bargain anything for Lock’s life, for the only counter he had was Turgenev himself. The scientists, whoever they were and however eminent and valuable, were mere goods. Turgenev and Bakunin would be indifferent to their survival. There was only Turgenev, the hostage and the negotiator.
He turned at a voice from beyond the flight deck door, startled.
Saw Lock’s ashen face, and snapped at the still distraught stewardess, who seemed obsessively afraid at the imminent opening of the door:
‘Give him some brandy — hurry up, girl!’
The young woman scuttled to obey her orders. He opened the door of the flight deck to the smell of blood, even in the cold air, and Bakunin’s voice, tinnily irrelevant, from the radio.
Turgenev had followed him, and the man flinched at a defensive jab of the pistol in his direction. Turgenev again mockingly held up his hands, then fiddled with the radio, handing a headset to Vorontsyev, who motioned him into stillness against the door.
Half-turned in the small, awkward space, leaning over the pilot’s head with its drying leak of blood, he growled:
‘Yes, Bakunin, what do you want?’ It was as if he had been interrupted from important work.
‘Vorontsyev, what the hell do you think you can achieve by this?’ Bakunin barked. ‘You’re not going anywhereV
Vorontsyev saw the flash of Turgenev’s confident grin, and the black, flylike dot of a helicopter through the windows. It was closing slowly, traversing a surveillance rather than attack course.
‘Listen to me, Bakunin. Prince Turgenev — ‘ Turgenev snorted with suppressed amusement. ‘— the local tsar, is here with us.
He thinks he can bargain his way out of here, but he can’t do it unless we go, too. OK?’
After a pause, Bakunin said: ‘Then why haven’t you taken off? You don’t really need my permission, do you?’
The helicopter minced back and forth across the windows.
The clouds seemed lower, a darker grey. The airfield stretched away around the isolated Learjet, a slow, hesitant fog seeming to cling just above the blank snow. The runway gleamed blackly ahead of the aircraft like a taunt.
Turgenev leaned beside Vorontsyev.
‘Bakunin,’ he said, ‘it’s me. I’m all right. But there is an evident shortage of pilots aboard the plane at the moment,’ Bakunin chuckled. ‘You understand? Our friend here doesn’t seem to know what to do-‘ Vorontsyev listened, without making any effort to interrupt Turgenev. ‘- but that makes him doubly dangerous. We’ll be in touch.’ He switched off the radio.
Immediately, Vorontsyev flicked the radio back on. ‘Bakunin, unless you want to see the money tree cut off at the roots, arrange a pilot for us!’
Turgenev shrugged, then announced imperiously: ‘Now you’ve told him what he should have been allowed to realise in that slow, saurian brain for himself. We are all helpless out here ‘
Vorontsyev pushed Turgenev through the door into the passenger cabin, the pistol prodding the back of the man’s cashmere overcoat. ‘Why should that be?’
‘What choice does he have? If this aircraft takes off, if any of you managed to get away, he is ruined. Do you think he has houses round the world and their accompanying bank accounts?’ Turgenev laughed. ‘He probably keeps it under the mattress, everything I’ve ever paid him!’ He paused, then added: ‘Something of a problem, mm?’ Turgenev seated himself once more, his smile fixed. Vorontsyev inspected Lock’s sick, hanging face, then Marfa’s distress.
A snowflake, large as a jellyfish it seemed, appeared on one of the porthole windows of the cabin. Then a second and a third.
Vorontsyev closed his’eyes in anguish. When he opened them, the stewardess had retreated from the forward cabin. Dmitri was standing between the two cabins, revealed like an actor by the drawn-back curtain. Maria was attempting to read a file. He glanced at the digital clock on the bulkhead. It had been less than ten minutes since they had boarded the plane.
Ridiculous …
He bent over Lock’s seat and the American’s eyes fluttered open. Vorontsyev was appalled at the violence of his decline.
He touched the American’s hand.
‘Christ, this hurts, and it’s strange …’ Lock muttered, blood at once dribbling from his lips so that he snatched his hand away from Vorontsyev and wiped the side of his mouth with a bloodsoaked handkerchief. There was almost nothing left of Lock, apart from the hot, burning eyes, reddened and blinking in and out of focus. Lock wanted nothing, nothing but to kill Turgenev. There was no gun near his hand, Vorontsyev realised with relief, then immediately wondered whether Lock still had the gun somewhere. He hoped not. He patted the hand that had returned to his and stood up. His arm and ribs seemed a long way from him, their jolts and naggings of pain undemanding.
‘They’re top people,’ Marfa whispered, leaning towards him and offering the file. ‘Two from Semipalatinsk, one from that newish place south of Moscow — two top-grade technicians.’ She swallowed. ‘They’re bomb builders, Alexei.’ She was strangely animated. ‘They could have made a real difference.’ She was flicking the files like cards in an illusion. He saw two heads crowned by military caps. He turned to Turgenev.
‘Nothing but the best,’ Turgenev said. He withdrew a cigar case and lighter from his pocket. ‘The sign’s not on, is it?’ he mocked, and puffed at the Cuban cigar contentedly, a paradigm of the capitalist.
The windows behind his blond head were streaked with melted snow running like tadpoles. The telephone embedded in the arm of Turgenev’s seat blurted in alarm. Turgenev gestured at it, and Vorontsyev nodded.
‘Yes? Ah, Bakunin —’ He smiled at Vorontsyev, as if in apology for the unwelcome interruption of their conversation. ‘No, I don’t think that’s necessary. I think the situa
tion’s realities are sinking in—’ He broke off, attracted by the violent, blood foamed coughing from the seat across the narrow aisle. He turned to face Lock, who was holding the Makarov pistol quiveringly towards Turgenev. ‘Just a moment’
Ugly swallowing noises, the soughing of Lock’s breaths, and their uncertainty.
‘Pete — ‘ He paused, but managed to still the threatened coughing fit. ‘Tell the guy I’m dying, uh? Tell him I’m the wild card, unre — liable…’ He paused again, for a longer time. His eyes glared briefly in Vorontsyev’s direction. Tell him there isn’t a lot of time. If I — think I’m going to — black out … you’re coming with me. OK?’
He fell back against the seat, exhausted. Turgenev moved to a more upright position, as if to spring, his eyes enlarged with adrenalin like those of a cat. He glared at Vorontsyev -
who grinned. Turgenev appeared momentarily unnerved.
It was out of the question that Lock should be allowed to kill Turgenev, their only letter of credit, their passport … Yet, Lock’s last desperation frightened the man.
Vorontsyev had to use it.
‘I’ll get back to you, Bakunin … What? No, nothing’s wrong!’
Lock was wearing a beard of blood, but his mouth was smiling with a luxurious, impervious satisfaction. The Makarov was rested heavily, almost numbly, along the arm of his seat, pointed unwaveringly at Turgenev.
‘Well?’
‘Well what?’ Turgenev snapped.
‘Do we get a pilot?’
‘I only have to wait — what? Fifteen minutes, maybe half an hour, and the only man in the room who poses the slightest threat will be dead!’ He was leaning towards Vorontsyev, whispering savagely. ‘What is there to concern me?’
The, Pete,’ Lock announced faintly, with a detached, fey amusement. The. Get the guys a pilot. They won’t stop me killing you — but you know that, uh?’
Vorontsyev maintained his stony expression for a moment, then shrugged. ‘Up to you.’
Snow flew past the windows behind Turgenev. The fuselage quivered infinitesimally in the increased wind. The slight tremor seemed to transfer itself to Turgenev’s frame.