“Nu!” I yelled. Go on!
The stallion gave a buck and surged ahead, leading with his left leg, neck straining forward. The first soldier was within touching distance of the door. The Don mare had flung him backward. He swung his rifle toward me but overbalanced, falling sideways into the snow, loosing a shot above my shoulder. The second soldier—a barely visible ghost crouching in the winter whirlwind—brought his barrel to bear on me as I raised mine to him. But he was too slow, too far behind me. I fired. The bullet went high and hit him in the throat. The third soldier had been knocked flat on his back. Flailing in the snow, grasping for his weapon, he was out of sight within seconds.
I cantered northeast toward the lights of another farm, coming out on the lane a few hundred meters beyond the burning Lada. Although Boynou took the snow in his stride, hacking straight across country was a no-go: one buried rabbit hole and we’d both take a cropper. I’d have to stick to paths and ride like Fear na gCrúb—the Man with the Hooves—himself. The stirrups were too long, and I couldn’t get my heels down, but Boynou carried me, light-footed across the fresh powder. I shortened the rein and sat hard in the saddle, slowing him to a trot and then to a walk around the houses. Tactical torches flicked fingers of light into the falling flakes to my left. I patted Boynou’s golden flank.
“Easy, boy.”
We stood in the shadows of a frozen yard, steam streaming from his nostrils, front hooves pawing the ground.
If I turned onto the lane, whoever was behind those torches would have a clear shot: one round in Boynou was all it would take. But straight ahead, at right angles to the lane, there was another path leading back into the woods. It was clear enough of snow to try it. The stallion started to step sideways, tossing his head. I tightened the reins, bunching them in my left hand, threading them between my fingers. I squeezed gently and clicked my tongue, urging him to walk on. We edged around a barn and then I dropped my hand forward and pressed my heels into his ribs. My shoulder met his, unbalancing me for a moment. Then he leaped out into the road. Two strides and we were across, following the trail between the trees. The shooting started again immediately. Streams of tracer fire fanned out, first along the road and then through the trees. Branches cracked. Burning bullets ricocheted off tree trunks, zapping this way and that, filling the woods with a lethal green cat’s cradle. After a hundred meters I took a sharp right. The path ended. Boynou picked his way through the snow, cautious, lifting his hooves high, shaking his head.
We moved clear of the firing. The original RV was blown, but Nazzar would be able to follow the radio traffic—at least between the ground units. With any luck the chatter would lead him to me. I’d have to find my own way across the border, though. We threaded our way north. Even in the moonlight it was hard to see more than a few strides ahead. I kept inside the trees, parallel to a cleared path, and then stopped at the point where it converged with the main, Russian, road that had taken me from Krupp to Gorodishche. The route continued northeast for six klicks to the village of Kulisko at the source of a narrow inlet to Lake Peipus. The Estonian border was on the far side of what I hoped was a frozen-solid expanse of fresh water.
I leaned down and slipped the fingers of my left hand under Boynou’s girth. Too loose. I pocketed the Makarov and swung my right foot forward. I lifted the saddle flap and pulled the girth straps a notch tighter in their buckles. There was no time to shorten the stirrup leathers properly. I put two twists into each and stood up. It would do. It would have to do.
Akhal-Tekes are bred for speed and stamina. I’d dreamed of riding one since I was a boy. But if Boynou wasn’t shod in ice shoes, it would be a very short gallop. I broke a switch of birch from a branch beside me and nudged him out of the trees. The road ran ahead of us—a silver, snow-blighted ribbon of highway glinting under a recalcitrant moon. I listened hard, but heard only the beating of my heart and the deep nasal rasp of horse breaths in the frozen air. Snow fell. I checked the Makarov was secure and held the reins tight in both hands. I closed my fingers around the makeshift crop. They were stiff and painful, unresponsive from the cold, still bleeding from the cuts my grandfather’s knife had scored across them.
Leg on, heels down, back straight. Boynou went from a walk through a couple of strides of a sitting trot and then into a canter. The road beneath held his surefooted hooves. I urged him on, touching his shoulder with the birch. I shifted my weight and rose in the saddle, dropping my hands to either side of his withers, moving my arms forward to give him his head while keeping the rein short enough to control him.
He didn’t gallop.
He flew.
I hung on tight with my calves like a solo eventer riding the White Turf at St. Moritz. The road dissolved into a blur, a continuous frozen stream of white-water rapids. I looked up and over Boynou’s ears, focused on the way ahead. But I could see almost nothing. Snow spattered my face, filled my eyes. I blinked and was blinded, wind lashing my cheeks. I moved the crop and the reins to my left hand and wiped the ice from my vision. As I opened my eyes, the village lights of Yachmenevo sped past to the right. The frontier with Estonia was only thirteen hundred meters to my left—but there was no path through the thick forest, and I knew I couldn’t make it that way. I pressed Boynou onward, as far out of the saddle as I dared, my head sheltering behind his neck, my shoulders just above his. The trees on either side of us slipped past in the darkness—a white-crusted mass of shadows that flanked the road, giving it shape, form.
I twisted in the saddle and looked behind me. If anyone was on our tail, they were engulfed in the pale veil of snow kicked up by Boynou’s hooves. And then as I turned back around: headlights—dead ahead. Distance was impossible to gauge exactly. I kept going. It was too late to stop, and there was nowhere else to go. A third light appeared above the first two—brighter, cutting a focused beam toward me. Boynou galloped another two strides.
Snap. Snap. Snap.
Tracer fire arced out of the spotlight toward me, past me. Then more. A lot more. Bright green rounds whipped through the snow, streaming either side of Boynou’s head, zooming into the void behind. I dropped as low as I could, all the way down onto his right flank, every tracer chased by four invisible high-velocity rounds. I dug into my jacket pocket, frozen fingers fumbling for the Makarov. Then I saw them clearly.
Ten meters ahead, two soldiers manned an all-terrain vehicle. They were stationary. The driver was leaning into a PKM. Spent brass from the belt concealed in its magazine box spewed into the night. A bullet nicked Boynou’s neck. His blood sprayed across me. But the gunner had opened up too late, too high. He struggled to get his barrel around far enough, fast enough.
I pulled the pistol clear of my pocket and swung my arm up. The first trigger pull was heavy, cocking the semiautomatic as well as dropping the hammer. The pressure, the gallop, the cold—everything was against me. The shot went wide. I drew parallel and fired again. And again. The third shot hit home and the tracer leaped into the sky, sending a stream of green bullets into the ether. The ATV disappeared behind me in Boynou’s white wake.
It was another six minutes to the inlet. Now everyone knew exactly where I was and where I was heading. If there weren’t already Russian troops by the inlet at Kulisko, there soon would be. I rode hard, head down. For a minute I was in the clear. Then more electric green ribbons unwound themselves past me—this time from behind. I looked over my right shoulder. The ATV was back in service. I cracked the birch crop on Boynou’s flank and thrust my hands farther forward, giving him the rein to run as fast as he could. Ahead of me the road curved sharply to the right. I leaned into the bend as the driver behind me loosed another burst of 7.62. But he was firing one-handed, at speed, and his aim was way off, spitting the barium-bright bullets into the snow around us.
We took the corner fast and I sat back in the saddle. A soldier stood in front of me, chain saw in hand, turning toward the noise of Boynou’s hoo
ves thundering on the road. I passed him at arm’s length, firing point-blank into his chest as his snowsuit brushed the end of the Makarov’s barrel. He twisted and fell, the saw biting into him as he hit the ground. The semiauto’s top slide locked back. Out of ammo. I dropped the pistol and took the reins in both hands. As the lights of the ATV swung around behind me, I saw what the soldier had been doing. The road was cut, logs felled across it. Then I saw muzzle flashes—but they couldn’t get a line on me without shooting up the ATV on my heels. I pulled back twice on the reins, hard, to slow Boynou’s pace, and then released them, squeezing with my calves as I came up out of the saddle.
He jumped. The logs passed beneath us. Soldiers dived for cover. Silence. And then a terrific crunch as the driver plowed headlong into the barricade behind. The halogen headlight beams swiveled crazily in the snow-filled air. And then the only light was the weak silver sheen cast by the moon as it struggled to break through the re-forming clouds. The road forked. I bore left. Boynou’s hooves skidded on the ice. He stumbled, back legs faltering. But he steadied himself and carried on, sinews straining, nostrils flared, streaming sweat and steam and blood into the cold night air.
Kulisko swarmed with sweeping headlights. I pulled Boynou off the road and into a field. He slowed his canter to a trot, bouncing his way through the freshly settled snow.
Two hundred and fifty meters to the lakeside.
Searchlights combed the landscape around us, but their beams struggled to cut through the still-falling flakes. I brought Boynou to a walk with a low whistle and patted his flank, soothing him. The wound in his neck was superficial, the bleeding light, and he seemed hardly affected by the gallop.
A small creek opened up ahead of us. He stepped down one hoof at a time. The ice held. Four paces and then we were out again, onto the lakeshore. I turned us left and rode west for another three hundred meters at a sitting trot, picking my way as carefully as I could along the edge of the frozen water. The land bulged into the lake.
Another two hundred meters and that was it: the point of maximum vulnerability.
Estonia was a quarter of a klick to the west, Kulisko five hundred meters to the east—and there was nothing between me and either side except a flat, white sheet of ice. I stood up in the stirrups and faced Boynou toward the border. I prayed that Jack Nazzar was waiting on the other side and stepped out onto the ice.
I didn’t hear the launch charges go off.
But I heard the mortars land. First one, then another. The bombs fell onto the ice, fifty meters wide of us, detonating with a deep thud. Hard as iron, the ice topping the frozen lake absorbed none of the blast. Instead, shrapnel spread out from each explosion unhindered, thousands of searing-hot, razor-sharp shards spewing well beyond the usual kill radius.
A third round fell closer. Boynou spooked and reared. I leaned in and tried to calm him. It was a short, deadly sprint to freedom. I looked back toward Kulisko. More incoming. Not bombs, but bright white flashes that popped and burned on the ice. Five, ten, fifteen of them. Within seconds the inlet was on fire.
Flares. Fuck.
It was too windy to launch them over me, so they were firing them directly at the lake. The entire southern shore was burning with blinding white magnesium.
“No, poshel!” I shouted at Boynou. “Yah!”
His pent-up power unleashed itself into a massive leap forward. We rode out onto the ice, dangerously silhouetted by the flaming Schermulys. Another mortar round landed, spattering the ice with spiked steel. Boynou galloped on, legs, flanks cut by needle-fine splinters of shrapnel. The wind drove into my face. We were in the middle of the inlet now. I lashed Boynou on with the birch switch. As I did so, a mortar bomb landed in front of us, filling the air with a hissing swarm of killer metal. I felt a punch in my chest. I gasped as the impact winded me. My jacket was torn open, ripped by shrapnel.
Boynou rose.
A heartbeat.
Then pain.
I lost my grip on the reins and tumbled backward, falling free of the saddle but not the stirrups. My left boot caught fast as Boynou bolted. My head, hands hit the ice. I twisted onto my back. I put my palm to my sternum and burned my fingers on the steel stuck there. I’d taken a direct hit to the chest. Boynou dragged me, his hooves pounding inches from my head. I flexed my foot, but I was wedged tight.
I squinted at the snow-blurred sky. I was beginning to lose consciousness. All around me the lake whited out. I thought for a moment it was snow powder, whipped up by the wind, but it was too dense. All shape, substance dissolved. Above, the night sky disappeared beneath the white wings of an angel swooping down to engulf me. The wounds in my chest, arms, shoulder, thigh tore apart.
This is how it ended—dragged through a world stripped bare of everything I held dear, from Ireland to Arkhangel. Doc Levy shot in his chair; Rachel consumed by fire; all the dead laid out behind me, engulfed by an inferno of my own creation. I strained and looked up into the fog, searching in vain for Jacob’s Ladder. But there was nothing to see except an infinite emptiness. It was too late to ask for mercy. Whatever happened next, I had it coming. My eyes dimmed.
“I’m ready,” I said.
But my words were swallowed by the tattoo beaten out by the bombs and Boynou thundering across the ice. And then the strength went out of me and the bright white world went black.
36
I have to hand it to you, Mclean. It was a brilliant story.”
Major General Sir Kristóf King, Director Special Forces, leaned over and charged two glasses with red wine from a leaded-crystal decanter.
“Convincing that Bulgarian chap I’d sent you on some damned fool mission to shoot a terrorist who was already dead. Quite the ruse. No one gets hanged for killing a ghost, what? Least of all you or I.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“L’Chaim.” King raised his glass in a toast. “That’s what the Jews say, isn’t it? To life.”
“I believe so, sir.”
I nodded at him and drank deeply. He sipped from his own glass and set it down on the old oak table that separated us.
“Chateau Musar, 1988. So hard to get the genuine stuff from Lebanon these days. I remembered how much you liked it.”
“Thank you, sir.”
We were sitting in General King’s private dining room in Whitehall, all polished wood and oil paintings. His reflection glinted off the tabletop, white skin taut across his skull, black eyes lost in the beeswax shine. It was dark outside. The room was lit by a single chandelier.
It paid to be cautious with King. He was as much an outsider as I was, and his upper-class affectations just an act. Hungarian by birth, ruthless by nature; not even the chief of the Secret Intelligence Service could outplay him. Never mind aces and eights—to play at King’s table, and survive, you needed a fistful of jokers. One slip with him and you’d vanish without trace. I kept my mouth shut and my ears open.
* * *
—
BOYNOU HAD UNSEATED me fifty meters from the Estonian frontier, and then dragged me to the NATO front line. I came to in the helicopter, oxygen mask over my mouth, medics working on my chest. Then I understood that it had not been Azrael swooping down on me, but an altogether grumpier angel. Jack Nazzar had received my message and tracked my progress. The dense fog shrouding the final moments of my escape was not the wings of the Destroyer come to get me, but smoke pouring from canisters dropped inside NATO territory by the Wing.
The wind had carried a solid white blanket out across the ice long enough to get me clear. In the end Nazzar’s complaint wasn’t that I’d interrupted his weekend but that he’d not managed to “slot any Russkies.” His Revolutionary Warfare mob hadn’t fired a single shot.
On the Special Duties flight back to Brize Norton I’d given him a rundown of what had happened—and asked a favor: it was a straightforward breach of protocol, but I wanted to b
e taken directly to see King.
“I don’t fancy my chances in Ulster right now, Jack,” I’d explained.
I didn’t have to spell it out. Nazzar knew better than anyone the parlous state of my relationship with Frank. He knew, too, that General King’s displeasure cut both ways. If he was not against you, he was for you: the blessing of Director Special Forces, however hard-won, was a literal lifesaver.
“Aye, all right, son,” he’d agreed. “But your lifesaver’s right here, no’ in bloody Whitehall.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I owe you.”
“Aye, that, too. But I’m no’ talkin’ about me, ya daft prick. I’m talkin’ about this.”
He’d handed me Talia’s cell phone. I propped myself up on the stretcher and stared at it in the dim glow of the C-130’s cabin lights. It was pierced through by a piece of shrapnel—a two-inch chunk of steel, sides sharp as razors. The tip of it had broken the metal casing on the back of the phone, tearing a hole through my passport and gouging a lump out of my chest. But I’d been spared what otherwise would have been a fatal wound to the heart.
“I saw it once before,” he said. “In Bosnia. Some glaikit cameraman’s wallet stopped an AK round.”
“There was stuff on it. Stuff I need. Data.” I slumped back down. “Shit.”
“Christ, son. There’s no pleasin’ you, eh? Tech says he can save whatever’s on the drive. But I wouldnae try callin’ yer bird wi’ it.” He dropped the phone onto my stomach. “Luck o’ the Irish, ya Paddy bastard.”
* * *
—
I FINISHED MY wine.
“Commander Knight thought I’d be furious about that phosphorus grenade.” General King brought his face closer to mine and winked. “Not a bit of it. Burned all the evidence and got those New IRA yahoos in trouble. Two birds with one stone, eh? Best not make a habit of it, though. Scares Downing Street half to death.”
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