Agent 21: Reloaded: Book 2

by Chris Ryan

  Cruz scrambled to his feet. Zak did the same. The SBS men had recovered from the wave. Even now they were getting into position.

  Ready to shoot …

  ‘HOLD YOUR FIRE!’ Zak roared. Brandishing the knife, he strode towards Cruz, positioning himself between his former friend and the gunmen who wanted to take him down. He heard shouting – ‘Stand down! Stand down!’ – but he ignored it. All his attention was on Cruz, who had his back pressed up against the railings and whose eyes were flicking between Zak’s face and the knife in his hand.

  ‘Give it up, Cruz,’ Zak shouted. ‘They’ll kill you if you don’t.’

  ‘They’ll kill me,’ Cruz yelled back, ‘even if I do.’

  Zak shook his head. ‘I won’t let them.’

  ‘Stand down! Stand down!’ The gunmen were advancing around him.

  Cruz sneered. ‘A guilty conscience, Harry?’

  ‘No, Cruz. But my fight was never with you.’

  The sneer became more pronounced. Cruz’s hair blew in the wind. ‘My father is dead because of you.’

  ‘And my parents are dead because of your father. Give it up, Cruz. You can’t win now. It’s over.’ Zak took a step towards him. ‘It’s over!’

  The sneer became a smile. An insane smile, but a smile nevertheless. ‘No, Harry,’ Cruz said. He didn’t shout this time, but Zak was close enough to hear. ‘You don’t decide when it’s over. I do.’

  It happened so quickly.

  Cruz suddenly pulled something from one of his pockets. At first, Zak thought it must be a gun. He quickly saw that it looked more like a mobile phone. Only not a mobile phone. Just a handheld device with a single switch.

  A detonator.

  ‘STOP!’ Zak roared. He dropped the knife and dived forwards to stop Cruz flicking the switch. But too late.

  There was a massive explosion. It came from the opposite end of the ship, but it sent shock waves all along the deck. Zak hit the ground just two metres from Cruz’s position. The force of the blast had knocked Cruz sideways, but he was still standing. Zak crawled towards him, but as he crawled he saw Cruz leaning back over the railings. His hair blew in the wind; his eyes shone.

  He was pushing himself back …

  Zak stretched out to grab Cruz’s nearest shoe. His fingertips touched the sole, but then slipped away as Cruz toppled backwards over the railings. Zak reached them just in time to see his body fall towards the boiling ocean.

  He shouted again – ‘NO …’ – and pushed himself to his feet just in time to see Cruz’s body hit the water and sink into the ocean. ‘Help him!’ he screamed. But he knew there was nothing anybody could do. Zak had already seen Eduardo fall into those treacherous seas. He knew Cruz’s body could never reappear.

  He knew his nemesis was dead.

  ‘Get down!’

  There was no time to mourn, even if he wanted to. Cruz had barely disappeared beneath the stormy water when a voice pierced the air. It was immediately followed by a shot. Zak hit the deck and looked back. It took a split second to process everything that was happening.

  The ship’s crew – seven of them – had reappeared. Clearly they didn’t know their boss was dead, because they were coming at the SBS ready to fight, guns aimed. One of them had already fired a shot, and that shot had found its target.

  Bea.

  She was hit.

  ‘Stay down!’ The instruction from one of the SBS men rang through the air, but Zak ignored it and ran towards her. She had fallen to the floor. The bullet had squarely entered her left shoulder and blood was pouring out through her sodden clothes. Her face was white with shock and she was trembling. The wound was so bad that Zak barely noticed at first that the deck was at an angle. The bow of the ship was sinking. Cruz had scuttled it with his explosion …

  Suddenly the air exploded with gunshots. The SBS personnel hadn’t hesitated. They outnumbered the crew members, and they out-skilled them too.

  Cruz’s men didn’t stand a chance.

  Zak watched with a mixture of horror and relief as the SBS’s shower of rounds hit them. There were no screams. No cries for help. Just a few seconds of fast, efficient killing. The men crumpled to the floor in a blur of blood and flesh. Another seven bodies to add to the day’s death count.

  But there was only one body Zak was interested in at that moment. Bea’s. She was a mess. Her eyes were rolling. Her blood loss was heavy.

  He looked up. The SBS unit leader was standing above him, his face as stormy as the sea. ‘What were you doing?’ he shouted angrily. ‘You should have let us take the Mexican kid out—’

  There was no time to explain. No time to tell the soldier that he’d been trying to save the life of an innocent girl thousands of miles away. Zak gritted his teeth. Nothing could now prevent Calaca catching up with Ellie. Anger and panic surged through him, but he put a lid on it.

  He had to keep focused. Professional. The ship was going down. They had to get off. Moreover, Bea needed medical attention. And if she didn’t get it quickly, the body count was about to grow even higher.

  19.00 hrs GMT

  A white van was parked up in the vicinity of 63 Acacia Drive. Some of the residents had noticed it, but none of them thought it was suspicious. They just assumed it belonged to a builder or an electrician parking in the street while they carried out some work in one of their neighbour’s houses.

  Certainly nobody suspected it was the hideout of an assassin.

  Calaca was not a naturally patient man. But he had been patient today. He had sat looking out of the tinted windows of his van all afternoon. At half-past four, he had watched Ellie Lewis return to the house with her parents after a trip to the local supermarket. And he watched her now, creeping furtively out of her house and walking quickly along the road. She had changed. Now she had on a fashionable pair of jeans, and a jumper interwoven with sparkling thread. She wore a colourful woollen hat, and Calaca thought she might even have applied a little lipstick and mascara, though these were not things he knew very much about.

  He didn’t know how to make faces beautiful. He knew how to make them dead.

  He smiled thinly. Ellie Lewis had clearly made an effort for her secret rendezvous. He wondered who the lucky boy was, and if he too had chosen his best clothes. How sweet, he thought to himself, that they would both be shining and well-dressed for the moment of their death. Because he would have to kill them both. Just to be sure.

  The girl turned the corner at the end of the street and disappeared. By then, however, Calaca was already getting ready. Laid out on the floor of the white van was his weapon. It was a Russian PP-93 sub-machine gun. Effective range, 100 metres. Very lightweight and easy to conceal, but deadly accurate in the hands of someone who knew how to handle it properly. Calaca was one such man. The barrel was silenced, so the retort of the gunshots would not echo around Hampstead Heath when the time came. The magazine contained thirty rounds. He would only be requiring two of them.

  Even with one eye, Calaca never missed.

  Next to the gun was a wig. It fitted his shaved head well, and suddenly he was no longer a bald one-eyed man; he had a thick head of brown hair, parted neatly at one side. He put on his glasses with the medical dressing on the blind side and checked his reflection in window of the van. Not exactly unremarkable, but the last person he looked like was himself.

  Calaca secreted the weapon inside his coat before opening the back of the van and stepping outside. He locked the van and then looked up. The night sky was clear. It made a change after the terrible weather of the past few days. He would walk to Hampstead Heath, he decided. It was a crisp and pleasant evening for an assassination, and the fresh air would do him good.

  23

  LIFT OFF

  BEA WAS SLIPPING into unconsciousness. The ship was slipping into the water. Not as fast as the Mercantile, which was now almost completely submerged, but fast enough.

  Zak’s hands were bloodied from where he was putting pressure on Bea’s wound.
He was aware of shouts from the SBS personnel as they prepared to disembark over the side and into the waiting boats; and of the unit commander, screaming instructions into his patrol comms radio. Zak didn’t know what he was saying, though. All his attention was on his friend.

  The unit commander knelt down beside him.

  ‘What’s your name?’ Zak shouted.

  ‘Frank.’

  ‘She’s in a bad way,’ Zak told him.

  Frank nodded grimly. ‘We can’t get her into our boats. We need to airlift her out.’

  ‘How?’

  Frank looked out to sea. ‘We’ve got a Sea King chopper on standby. It’s heading in now. We’ve got a frigate waiting five nautical miles from here. If we can get her to the medics back there, she might have a chance.’ He didn’t look too convinced.

  Bea shouted out suddenly – ‘Don’t leave me, Jay. Please …’ A cry of pain. Then she slumped more heavily into Zak’s arms.

  The SBS were disappearing over the side, climbing down their rope ladders into the waiting VNVs. ‘You need to go,’ Frank shouted. ‘My men will get you back to the ship. I’ll stay with her till the chopper arrives.’

  It only took Zak a couple of seconds to decide he wasn’t going to do that.

  ‘I’m staying,’ he shouted. ‘One of us needs to keep the pressure on that wound if she’s going to make it.’

  ‘No way! It’s too dangerous, and my orders are to keep you safe. The ship’s sinking. You need to get off while you can.’

  Zak shook his head. ‘Bea risked everything for this operation,’ he shouted back. ‘She deserves every chance now. And anyway, you’ll need some help getting her into a harness when the chopper arrives. We haven’t got time to argue about this, Frank – I’m needed here, and you might as well just accept that I’m not going anywhere till Bea’s in that Sea King.’

  Just like I might as well accept, Zak thought to himself, that Calaca’s going to kill Ellie. And if anyone thinks I’m going to leave Bea alone to die too, they’ve got another think coming …

  Frank frowned, but he didn’t argue – what Zak was saying did make sense. Instead, he stood up and started barking instructions at his men and into the patrol comms. The ship suddenly shuddered and Zak felt it sinking. He saw some of the bodies of the dead crew members roll heavily along the deck on account of the angle of the boat. Bea cried out again. All the remaining SBS members had disappeared over the side.

  ‘How long till the chopper gets here?’ he screamed.

  Frank pointed out to sea. Everything was grey – ocean, sky, the VSVs disappearing away from the ship – and a dot approaching from the horizon.

  ‘That’s it!’ Frank shouted ‘ETA three minutes. Maybe four in this weather. They wouldn’t normally fly in these winds.’ He crouched back down next to Bea. ‘We need to keep her stable while we wait!’ he yelled.

  ‘Roger that,’ Zak shouted. He pressed down on Bea’s wound again and felt the warm, sticky blood seep between his fingers.

  Frank handed him something from round his neck. It was a square tube of plastic, one end red. ‘Morphine,’ he shouted. ‘For pain relief. Get it in her, now.’

  Zak nodded. He raised the plastic shot casing and slammed it down on Bea’s upper arm. He felt a slight resistance as the needle punctured her clothes and then her skin. Bea didn’t respond. Zak wondered if she’d even felt the injection.

  It was windy on Hampstead Heath. Calaca wasn’t used to the sensation of his hair blowing around and he wondered how people put up with it. It was dark too. There were few people about. An occasional dog walker. A little crowd of young men sharing cigarettes and cans of beer. He was glad that he had recce’d the heath already in the dark. It meant he knew where he was going. He could almost have made his way blindfolded.

  He checked his watch. 19.45. Fifteen minutes until eight o’clock. The lake, where Ellie Lewis had arranged her rendezvous, was just a hundred metres away. He’d be early, which was good. It meant he could find himself a suitable firing point, and check the wind direction to ensure that his shots were on target. By one minute past, his victims would be dead. Calcaca himself would be on his way to Heathrow, where he would catch that evening’s flight to Mexico City. He was quite looking forward to telling the new Señor Martinez that he had been successful.

  Everybody likes a little bit of praise, after all.

  A dog barked in the distance. Calaca smiled and strode towards the water, his fingertips twitching and his mouth dry with anticipation.

  The Sea King was a hundred metres away, and it was struggling. Zak could tell just by looking at it. It was being buffeted by the wind, and seemed to wobble in the air as it approached. Zak had seen enough helicopters in his time. They’d never looked so precarious in the air as this.

  Lightning cracked in the air. Seconds later, a bellow of thunder. The sinking ship juddered as a wave crashed over the stern deck. ‘Hold on!’ screamed Frank. Zak just grabbed Bea’s body and hunkered down until the wave had passed. He looked up again. The Sea King was closer. Maybe fifty metres. It seemed strange not to be able to hear the rotors, but the howling of the wind drowned them out. ‘It’s got to be Force Ten,’ Frank shouted. ‘We’d better hope the chopper makes it here – it’s too rough for those VSVs to approach again now …’

  Bea’s lips had gone blue. Zak boxed away his panic and tried to check her pulse, but it was impossible because the ship was vibrating as it sank. The greasy smell of smoke wafted around him. ‘Burning fuel!’ Frank shouted. ‘We’ve got to get the hell out of here fast. The whole thing could blow at any minute …’

  Thirty seconds passed. The Sea King had reached them. It was hovering twenty metres above the vessel and appeared to be swinging like the end of a pendulum. Zak supposed there was some downdraught, but he couldn’t sense it because the wind was so strong anyway. He could see a black-clad figure at one of the open side doors. The figure threw out a rope, at the end of which was a harness. It swung all over the place as the Sea King’s crew member lowered it down towards the three of them.

  Frank turned to Zak. ‘She needs to go up first,’ he shouted. ‘Will you be OK if I take her? We can’t risk a three-man winch in these conditions. It could bring the chopper down.’

  ‘Do what you need to do,’ Zak replied. ‘I’ll be fine.’ He said it with more confidence than he felt.

  ‘Help me get her into the harness.’

  The harness was hanging at their level now, but swinging violently because of the wind and the movement of the chopper. It took Frank twenty seconds to catch it, while Zak stayed crouched down by Bea. ‘I don’t know if you can hear me,’ he said, his mouth close to her ear, ‘but we’re going to get you off this ship. You’re going to be OK.’

  Please, he thought to himself. Let her be OK …

  Suddenly Frank was there again. He was holding the harness in one strong hand, and five or six metres of slack rope were coiled on the deck around him. ‘Get her legs in,’ he shouted. ‘Like a pair of pants.’

  Zak nodded and lifted Bea’s legs. She shouted out in pain again, but gave no other sign of consciousness. Frank hurriedly pulled the harness up to her waist, then clipped the rope to the webbing around his drysuit. He pulled his patrol comms radio out and handed it to Zak. ‘This will keep you in touch with the chopper,’ he shouted. ‘We’ll send the harness back down as soon as she’s safely inside.’

  Zak nodded. ‘Go!’ he shouted, before looking up towards the Sea King and giving a thumbs-up.

  The slack rope started moving like a lazy snake. Then it suddenly became taut. Seconds later, Bea’s body jolted and, like a corpse rising from a coffin, she started to stand upright. Frank grabbed her round the waist and slowly the two of them started to rise.

  Zak found that he was holding his breath. Frank and Bea moved upwards so slowly, and yet they rocked to and fro like a feather in the wind. They were five metres up when he saw blood dripping from Bea’s wound. It disappeared into the rain and the spray. An
d though every cell in his body wanted to see Bea safely up in the body of the chopper, he couldn’t help feeling more and more alone the higher they rose. He grabbed the railings again, and another waft of greasy black smoke drifted in front of his nose. Half the vessel was underwater now. He didn’t know how much longer he had before it submerged completely. Half an hour? Forty-five minutes? Certainly no more. He looked over at the Mercantile. Only a few metres of its tip was now visible. The gruesome image of the sailors’ grave on the wreck of HMS Vanguard entered his mind, and with it the thought of Gabs and Raf.

  What would he give to have his Guardian Angels with him now? Not that they could have done much to help, but as he was fast finding out, there are few places more lonely than a sinking ship in the middle of the ocean, surrounded by nothing but the body of the dead, and no guarantee that you aren’t about to become one of their number.

  19.53 hrs GMT

  Calaca’s position was in the shadow of an old oak tree trunk. There was a stump to its side, about twenty centimetres high. The perfect firing position. He could remain unobserved, but the stump was an ideal platform on which to rest his gun arm when he took the shots.

  He removed his glasses. They made no difference, of course, to his aim, but he felt more comfortable with them off. Taking his PP-93 from the inside of his jacket, he lay down on the ground in the firing position and, with his good eye, looked through the scope. It had NV capability, and the edge of the lake was lit up in a green haze.

  He saw a family of ducks congregating at the water’s edge.

  He saw an urban fox scamper down to take a drink. It quenched its thirst, then looked up and seemed to stare almost directly at Calaca before hurrying away again. Something had disturbed it. Seconds later, he saw what it was.