by Will Jordan
Anya stepped back a pace, allowing the blade to sail past her throat by mere inches. From her perspective it was a clumsy swing, lacking speed or finesse, and easily evaded.
For a fleeting moment, Frost glared at her enemy in the flickering red light. Anya made no move either to advance or retreat. She was just standing there, waiting for Frost to attack. Only her eyes glimmered in the light of the flare, cold and blue and utterly without mercy.
Maras – a goddess of war.
‘You fucking bitch,’ Frost hissed, tightening her grip on the weapon. ‘I should have killed you on the plane.’
With aggression born from simmering resentment and anger, she came at Anya, thrusting and swiping the blade, aiming for any vulnerable spot she could find.
But her target proved as elusive as she was intimidating. Twice Frost swung, and twice Anya dodged aside with infuriating ease, the blade slicing nothing but air. When a third unsuccessful attack left her overextended and vulnerable, Anya at last went on the offensive, catching Frost’s arm and twisting it behind her back.
The young woman cried out in pain and fear, bucking and kicking with desperate strength to try to free herself, but Anya’s grip was unrelenting. The pressure increased, stretching sinews and tendons. The knife fell from her grip, her fingers numb and tingling.
Nearby, Drake caught movement out of the corner of his eye. It was Dietrich, struggling to rise after being knocked down by Anya. The sight of the two women locked in combat was enough to revive him, and he snatched up the MP5 that the woman had taken from him.
Rushing forward, Drake grabbed the long silencer protruding from the end of the barrel. Dietrich’s instinctive reaction was to squeeze the trigger. Drake jerked the weapon upward as a burst of automatic fire scythed the air, pattering into the roof overhead.
But the superheated gases inside the weapon caused the barrel to heat up almost immediately. Drake winced as the hot metal seared his skin, and wrenched the weapon aside. He was stronger than his adversary and he had surprise on his side.
For an instant, their eyes met. Dietrich’s held a mixture of shock and anger. A hard cross to the jaw sent him down for good.
Wasting no time, Drake threw the red hot weapon aside. Adrenalin was masking the pain for now, but he would feel it later, he knew.
Anya almost felt sorry for her adversary. Young, proud and arrogant, she possessed both speed and aggression, but little skill. Her actions were predictable, her movements easy to read. Anya could have disarmed her at any time, but she had waited for the right moment, wanting to minimise the risk of injury to herself. Even an amateur could sometimes get lucky, and she couldn’t afford to get injured tonight.
Now she had Frost at her mercy. The young woman who would have sliced her throat without a second thought, who would have put a bullet through her skull without hesitation. She could kill her in a heartbeat.
Anya felt the familiar thrill of victory, of having pitted herself against an enemy and prevailed. She should kill her now and get it over with.
‘Anya!’
She glanced up, and saw Drake standing before her, the barrel of his AK levelled at her head.
‘Let her go.’
In an instant, she weighed up the odds and made her decision.
Leaning in close, she whispered in the woman’s ear. ‘Remember this moment. Remember what I could have done.’
Exerting downward pressure, she forced Frost to her knees, raised her arm up and brought an elbow down on her shoulder. She heard the telltale pop as the joint gave way and felt the arm go slack, followed immediately by an agonised scream. Frost was out of the fight. Grabbing her by her webbing straps, Anya hurled her aside, out of the path of the Hilux.
‘Jesus Christ!’ Drake yelled, appalled.
Anya looked at him, exasperated. ‘She’ll live. Get the shutters open.’
Turning away, she pulled open the driver’s door of the Hilux and clambered in. As she’d expected, the keys were laid beneath the seat.
Drake by contrast stood rooted to the spot, staring at the injured woman who was now curled into a ball and moaning in pain.
‘Drake! Come on,’ she yelled, turning the engine over. It spluttered once then roared into life. ‘Get the shutters.’
Shooting her a vicious glare, Drake hurried over to the shutter control and pressed the button to retract them.
He was visibly shaking with anger when he returned to the vehicle. ‘This didn’t have to happen. They would have listened to me.’
‘Were you willing to bet your life on that? And your sister’s?’ Anya shot back. As the shutters ground upward, she turned to look at him, her eyes shining with baleful fire in the glow of the dashboard light. ‘And unless you plan to pull the trigger, don’t ever point a weapon at me again.’
With that, she turned her attention back to the road ahead and gunned the accelerator. The big vehicle lurched forward out of the garage and took off down the street in a spray of dust.
Chapter 59
‘GODDAMN IT! THIS was supposed to be a clean takedown,’ Franklin raged down the phone. ‘What the fuck happened?’
Dietrich winced, holding the phone with one hand and an ice pack against his head with the other. The medics had told him he might have a minor concussion, which did little to improve his mood.
‘They had help. They bailed out of the house before we could secure it. We tracked them to a garage nearby, but Maras ambushed us.’ He clenched his jaw. ‘She blew through us like we weren’t even there. I’ve never seen anything like her.’
‘So people keep telling me,’ Franklin observed sourly. ‘What’s your status now?’
‘I’m hanging in there. Frost is hurt, though.’
That changed his attitude. ‘How bad?’
The young woman was being attended by a pair of medics. With one man holding her steady, another gripped her dislocated arm and pushed upward to reset her shoulder, eliciting an angry cry of pain.
‘Ow, goddamn it! Son of a bitch!’ she yelled, pushing the first man away. He stared at her open mouthed, too surprised to respond.
Defiant to the end. Dietrich couldn’t help but smile. ‘She’ll live.’
‘Good. Now what are we doing to find them?’
‘It seems logical to assume they’re heading for Iraq. We’ve alerted all border guards and put out an APB on the vehicle, but we’ve got six hundred miles of largely unpatrolled desert to cover. That’s a big search area.’
‘Just do what you can, Jonas.’
Great advice. Dietrich was about to hang up, but thought better of it. ‘There’s something else …’
‘Well, spit it out, for Christ sake,’ Franklin snapped.
It took a great deal of self-control not to voice the first thought that came to mind. ‘Before the lights went out, Drake said something about Anya being the only one who could help him.’
Silence greeted him for several seconds. ‘What are you getting at?’
‘Something else is going on here, Dan.’
‘Like what?’
‘I don’t know,’ he admitted.
‘Damn it, Jonas. I need more than vague theories and cryptic hints. Don’t you have anything useful to tell me?’
Dietrich bit his lip. ‘I’ll get back to you.’
Closing down the phone, he walked over to talk with Frost, doing his best to hide his limp.
‘How are you feeling?’
The young woman’s shoulder was heavily strapped up, the right side of her face discoloured by dark bruising along her jawline.
‘Like I just lost a fucking fight,’ she spat. ‘How do you think?’
The physical injuries would heal, but there was no tonic for wounded pride. ‘We’ll get you on a flight home soon.’
She looked up at him, her grey eyes blazing. ‘The hell you will. If you try to take me off this op, I swear to God I’ll kill you, Dietrich.’
‘You’re injured.’
‘So are you,’ she reminde
d him, then lowered her voice. ‘And not forgetting your … “condition”. Wouldn’t want anyone to find out about that, would we?’
Dietrich glared at her, torn between anger, frustration and a certain grudging respect for her determination. ‘If you slow us down …’
‘I won’t,’ she assured him.
He shook his head in dismay. ‘Fine. Have it your way.’
If she was determined to get herself killed, he wasn’t about to stop her.
Leaving her to it, he walked away in search of Rahul. The man was on the other side of the street outside the garage, a couple of plastic sutures holding together the cut on his forehead. Anya had struck him with a wrench; checking her force so as not to deal him a fatal injury.
Another man she could have killed, but hadn’t.
‘Are you going to survive?’
The Saudi lieutenant offered him a pained smile. ‘I’m beginning to wish I had not volunteered for this job.’
‘You’re not the only one,’ Dietrich assured him before turning to more practical matters. ‘Where are we on leads?’
‘We have found nothing so far, though with such a big search area, it will be almost impossible to box them in. We are trying to tie in with local Army commanders to help with the search, but they are not being cooperative.’ He offered a lopsided grimace. ‘Apparently their units are tasked to “other operations”.’
He had expected as much. ‘What about Khariri?’
‘We have him at an interrogation centre not far from here. He continues to deny any involvement with or knowledge of the woman.’
‘He gave them food and shelter, and helped them escape,’ Dietrich reminded him. ‘He must know something.’
‘No doubt, but I do not think he will break easily. He is former Saudi Army, trained to resist interrogation.’
Everyone could be broken. Dietrich knew that much from experience. All you had to do was find the right buttons, and push them.
‘We have his family in custody, don’t we?’
He had an idea. It wasn’t an idea he would have contemplated under normal circumstances, but at that moment he could think of nothing else.
‘Yes.’
He looked at the younger man, his expression hardening. ‘Better bring them in.’
Chapter 60
WITH THE POWERFUL engine rumbling away, they raced northward on Highway 50, their speed never dropping below 70 miles per hour. There was little to stand in their way at such a late hour.
Drake said nothing, but Anya could feel his silent, brooding anger as he worked to bandage his burned hand. He had injured himself to save her life, she realised. She could have used Frost as a human shield, but she was glad it hadn’t come to that.
Still, he was angry with her. She understood why, yet what else could she have done? If she hadn’t fought to defend herself, they would both be in custody now, or dead.
She had seen the look in Dietrich’s eyes just before Drake intervened. He would have happily killed Frost to get to her.
‘How is your hand?’ she asked, hoping to concentrate on something practical, something she could deal with.
Drake said nothing.
‘Look, I know those people were your friends.’ She was groping for a way to express herself. ‘You would not want to see them hurt, but—’
‘Spare me the lecture, all right?’ he bit back. ‘I’m not in the mood.’
She fell silent, feeling oddly contrite.
There should have been something she could say, some way to reach out to him and rebuild the trust he had shown in her, but she didn’t know how. She wasn’t used to dealing with people in this way.
So she kept her eyes on the road and drove, watching the miles slowly creep by. Relationship problems would have to wait for now. Survival was their priority.
That at least was something she was good at.
Their first goal was to put as much distance between themselves and Hussam’s house as possible. The assault force would be confused and off balanced by their escape, but that wouldn’t last. Soon they would regroup and resume the hunt.
She hoped the old man was all right. He had put himself in great danger by helping her. The Saudi police didn’t have much of a reputation for respecting human rights.
You can’t think about this now, she scolded herself. You have to concentrate on yourself and your mission. That’s all that matters now.
The silence was broken by the buzz of Drake’s cellphone, though he made no move to answer it.
‘It must be Munro. Aren’t you going to take it?’
He shrugged. ‘Fuck him. Let him wait.’
The seconds passed and the phone kept buzzing. Anya was on the verge of reaching for it herself when Drake at last fished it out of his pocket.
‘What do you want?’
‘So you made it,’ Munro concluded. ‘Well done.’
Drake was in no mood for congratulations. ‘How did you know they were coming for us?’
The older man chuckled. ‘Drake, really. A good spy never reveals his sources. You should know that.’
‘I’m not a spy.’
‘That’s a pity. You play the game pretty well,’ Munro cut in. ‘Speaking of which, is your partner in crime there with you?’
Drake glanced at the older woman. ‘She is.’
‘Put her on speaker.’
‘He wants a word with you,’ Drake said, switching the phone to speaker mode.
‘Hello, Anya. I’d ask how you’ve been, but I have a pretty good idea …’
‘What do you want, Dominic?’
‘Now, is that any way to talk to your old friend?’ Munro chided her.
Her grip on the wheel tightened. ‘We haven’t been friends for a long time. Not since you tried to kill me.’
‘I did what I had to do, Anya. It was never personal.’
‘It was always personal,’ she hit back. ‘You were jealous, Dominic. You wanted what I had, and you didn’t care what you had to do to get it.’
‘Fuck you,’ he snarled. ‘I was trying to save our unit, not destroy it. You were hell bent on fighting the whole fucking Agency yourself … You would have got us all killed. I had to stop you.’
The woman smiled a little, knowing she had found a chink in his armour. ‘But you couldn’t stop me, could you? All your scheming and planning came to nothing. You failed, Dominic. I could have killed you that day. I should have killed you, but I let you live. I took pity on you. That was my mistake.’
Munro was silent for several seconds, though they could both hear his breathing on the line. He was struggling to hold years of rage and anger in check.
‘Well, it seems we’re both in the habit of sparing each other’s lives,’ he remarked at last.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I broke you out of that Russian shithole you were rotting in, Anya. You owe your freedom and your life to me,’ he reminded her. ‘If it wasn’t for me, you’d still be pacing that tiny cell, feeling the walls slowly close in, waiting for the next group of guards to come. Waiting for the next beating, the next interrogation, the next rape.’
Drake watched Anya intently as Munro’s words sank in, watched the tiny changes in her facial muscles, the clenched jaw, the gritted teeth, the tightening in her arms and shoulders.
‘Or was it really rape?’ he taunted. ‘Didn’t you tell me once that you can learn to accept anything in time? Was that just another thing you learned to accept? Or did you learn to enjoy it?’
‘Go fuck yourself,’ Drake snapped.
‘Stay out of this, Drake. This is none of your fucking business.’
Anya’s voice was icy cold, devoid of emotion when she spoke again. ‘I did not enjoy it, Dominic. I was wrong. There are some things you can never learn to accept.’
‘Then we agree on something at last,’ he remarked with grim amusement. ‘You have until tomorrow to deliver your source. Don’t disappoint me.’
The line went dead.
&
nbsp; Anya said nothing, though her eyes burned with cold fire as she stared off into the night.
Hussam sat with his eyes closed, breathing slow and heavy as he waited for what was coming. His hands were bound behind him, the ropes cutting into his flesh. He paid it no heed. He was no stranger to pain.
Blood flowed from his cut lip, and his left eye had swollen almost shut. He’d been roughed up by the Saudi interrogator already, but had said nothing. Beatings he could endure. The more serious stuff would come sooner or later.
Anya must have escaped, otherwise they wouldn’t be working on him like this. He smiled a little. They would never catch her. She was too good.
His smile faded as the door swung open and a man walked into the room. He was no Saudi police interrogator. This was a white man, tall and lean, with dark hair and a stern face. Remorseless grey eyes looked him up and down.
Behind him, another man was busy setting up a laptop computer on the metal table opposite. Hussam frowned, wondering what they were planning.
‘Mr Khariri, I know you can speak English, so don’t insult me by pleading ignorance,’ the white man said. ‘I want to know where the two fugitives you were harbouring tonight were planning to go. If you give me the information I want, I’ll make sure you’re treated fairly.’
‘I don’t know what you are talking about,’ Hussam replied.
The man looked unperturbed. ‘I had a feeling you’d say that.’
Moving aside, he allowed Hussam to see the laptop that was now up and running. It was displaying a video feed.
His eyes opened wide in shock and horror at what he saw. ‘No!’ he screamed, straining and twisting against his bonds.
His wife, his daughter and his son were lined up on chairs one after the other, gagged and bound. They were surrounded by several armed men in black masks. He could see abject terror in their eyes.
‘You get the picture,’ the white man said. ‘Tell me what I want to know or watch them die one after the other. Your son will be first.’
‘I … I don’t know anything!’