I twisted right and caught his arm above the cuff. His left wrist in my left hand. I pulled his forearm into my chest. I slid backwards. The whole weight of my body pulled him across me. I twisted his arm and pushed downwards. He stretched out in front of me, doubled over, neck extended. My right hand came down hard. The side of my palm bit into his spine. The vertebrae beneath the base of his skull fractured with a crack. Beneath the skin his spinal canal imploded, severing the delicate cord within. He dropped, dead. I went down with him, close to the wall, diving headlong towards his feet. The AKS was strapped across his chest, trapped between his body and the floor. The doctor had drawn, and began shooting around me – not at me. Pistol rounds sparked off the metal walls. He was trying to keep me down, not kill me.
But opening fire in a massive metal box guarantees two things: deafening noise – and ricochets. One nicked my left elbow, the others took off every which way but loose on a 9mm pinball game from hell. Rounds bounced off the ceiling, the walls, even the guard’s flak vest. I got my head down, squirming myself small against the lifeless barricade, facing the door. His shots went nowhere near me, but they were potentially lethal nonetheless – if only accidentally. Spent brass cascaded to the floor as the lead swarm screeched through the forty-foot cavity. Halfway through the tirade the second guard arrived back on the scene, carbine up, followed closely by another man, pistol drawn. The guard stepped into the open container at precisely the right moment to stop one of the doctor’s pistol rounds from leaving it. His nose exploded in a thick red spray as the mangled bullet blew lead and cartilage back through his brain. He fell instantly, lights out. The man behind recoiled out of sight.
My ears rang with a flat, high-pitched whine. My limbs throbbed as blood surged back into them. I’d counted eighteen shots.
On your feet, sunshine.
I got my head up. The doctor stood six feet in front of me, deafened, disorientated, staring in mute disbelief at the empty Grach in his hand – though whether at the fact that every bullet had missed me, or him, I couldn’t say.
I stepped over the dead guard who’d shielded me and twisted the Russian pistol out of the doctor’s hand. No resistance. I hit him with it, hard across the right temple. His skin split across his skull with a wide, red tear. He fell with a grunt, clutching his head, blood spilling through his fingers.
Movement at the door.
Bang. Crack. Zip. More shots. More ricochets.
Whoever the second guard had gone to fetch was firing high and wild into the container, emboldened by the doctor’s decision to start shooting. Out of sight, hidden behind the halogen glare and the lip of the steel door, only his gun arm was visible – firing pistol rounds into the roof and walls around me. I stuffed the Grach into my jeans and hit the deck again. I rolled the dead guard over. Working fast, I unhooked his carbine’s tactical sling, and freed the assault rifle. The fire selector was set to single. There was probably a round in the chamber – but I wasn’t taking any chances. I snapped back the charging lever with my left hand as I brought the muzzle up. An unspent round spun out to my right.
Ready to go.
As the butt went into my shoulder and my cheek made contact with the stock, I fired. Out of the doorway the bullet ripped the guard’s hand off at the wrist. Arterial blood arced out across the opening. Another one gone.
I turned to the doctor on the floor, rifle still in my shoulder. He was sitting on the floor, face smeared with blood.
‘No, don’t!’ he said, the look of disbelief on his face morphing into a horror-mask of understanding, red hands held out in supplication. ‘Please. I’m just … I tried to save you …’ My shot-blasted eardrums distorted his voice like an over-modulating microphone. He sounded more machine than man.
‘Where am I?’
‘Please. I tried to save you.’
‘Save me? You tried to shoot me!’
I took a step towards him, and fired a shot close enough to his ear to nick it and draw blood. The round bounced off the floor and hit the rear wall with a spark. He screamed a deep, guttural yell.
‘Who are you?’ I shouted at him. I glanced at the dead guard. ‘Who are they?’
His right hand moved from his ear to his bleeding temple and back again. Tears welled in his eyes, snot bubbled under his nose. I settled the front sight post between his eyes.
‘Please! Please don’t. The guard. I tried to shoot the guard. Not you. Please …’
But he was right: he had saved me, or at least had allowed me to save myself. And the last thing I needed was another dead doctor on my conscience. The microsecond it takes to pull the trigger is the same hair’s breadth of time you have to decide not to. Instead of drilling a neat hole just below where his eyebrows joined, the little steel-core bullet stayed in the breech. He was breathing hard, covering his bloody face with his bloody hands.
Stressed, shocked – he wasn’t going to give me anything coherent. Depending what I found outside, I could come back for him. At least getting shot by him didn’t seem likely. I took another step towards him, delved into his coat pocket and removed his cell phone. I stuck it into my jeans, frisked him quickly and looked inside the portmanteau. No weapons. I moved out of the container. Immediately to my right the man whose hand I’d blown off was sitting up in a pool of his own gore clutching his wrist. I shot him twice in the chest. He toppled sideways and I shot him again, at point blank, in the left ear.
I looked around. Wall-mounted tungsten lights illuminated the interior of an almost-empty green-painted steel hall, twice as long and three times as wide as the container itself. A row of metal drums – of diesel, most likely – sat along the near wall, two deep, one high. At either end heavy bulkhead doors covered the exits. Steep metal ladders climbed to a gallery twenty foot above, running the length of the wall. Realization dawned. My gut tightened. I was in the hold of a ship.
Fuck.
Down the passageways, heavy footsteps were coming for me.
I slung the assault rifle across my back and made for the nearest companionway, lurching sideways, my bare feet slipping in a pool of oil. I caught hold of the rail before I fell and hauled myself up, climbing as fast as I could. But as I clambered on to the narrow ledge of the gallery, three men in tactical vests and combat boots stomped into view thirty feet to my left, cutting me off. I rolled, bringing the rifle around again, looking over the iron sights with both eyes open. I fired low. The rounds tore through the leader’s thigh, groin. He made a half-turn, arms flailing, blocking the men behind him, who swore in Russian. I kept firing. The leader staggered backwards and fell over the guard rail on to the metal deck below. The other two were exposed now. I shot centre mass. Two rounds each. Their vests caught the bullets, but the shock of the impact gave me enough time to get to my feet.
Neither returned fire. I closed on them, firing rapid single shots. Both were dead by the time I’d covered the distance to where they lay. I reloaded my AKS from theirs and took a pistol from a thigh holster strapped to the nearest body – a 9mm Grach, like the doctor’s: standard Russian military sidearm. I stuck it in the back of my jeans.
I stopped and listened, straining to hear above the rounds still ringing in my ears. Metal creaked against metal. Buried deep in the warren of passageways, an engine pulsed on. No shouts. No shots. Blood seeped through the metal grate of the gallery deck, dripping into the chasm beneath. I stepped around the bodies and over the lip of the metal door leading off the walkway and emerged on to the freezing upper deck of a cargo ship.
Waves detonated against the hull beneath me. Everywhere was darkness. Black sky above. Black water below. A point of light flashed above the waves – a single star glinting in a firmament of one. And then behind, above and closing in on each side of me, the thundering of boot heels. I dropped the carbine. I could hear orders in Russian amplified above the drone of the ship’s engines by a loudspeaker.
‘Ostanovite ego!’ Stop him.
I flexed my shoulders. Death by drowni
ng: my mother had chosen water as her way out. Now it was mine. But I had no intention of following her all the way. At least not yet.
And then they were on me.
Tic. Tic. Tic.
Contact left.
I stepped up on to the handrail as the first rounds of my pursuers skipped and skidded off the ship’s metalwork. Braced, bent at the knees, arms out, I pushed forward and fell through the pitch black down into the waves.
7
A deep, penetrating chill wrapped around me, went through me, sent spikes of pain shooting through my fingers, between my temples, down my legs. What bits of me didn’t hurt were numb, unresponsive. Spray soaked me. Wind lashed me. The tearing sea-song of water slapping shingle ripped across me and filled my head with the roar of the flood tide.
Water.
I was still in the water.
I opened my mouth, my eyes, gasping, gulping in air and brine under the grey sky and the gulls wheeling beneath low, rain-heavy clouds.
Still alive.
I got my head up and sat and coughed hard into the white-tipped waves that ran up my legs and broke against my chest. I put my right palm down on to the stones, turned over and forced myself up on my knees. I tried to stand, but I could feel neither my hands nor my feet. Instead I lay prone, face down, propped up on my forearms, still rinsed by the rising water. Hand over hand, elbows down, legs dragging, I hauled myself out of the surf. The beach rose steeply. Stones tumbled past me as I clawed my way above the tide line. Seaweed clung to me. The skin on my chest, arms, feet, chafed on chalk-smeared shards of flint. The dressings Doc Levy had wrapped me up in worked free, exposing raw, bloody flesh.
I looked left and right, casting about for any landmark, any sign of where I’d come ashore. But my eyes stung and my vision blurred, and I was shaking uncontrollably. I forced my hand behind my back and touched my jeans at the base of my spine. The Russian doctor’s cell phone was gone, the Grach too. Half-blind and desperate I ran my hands over the pebbles, searching for it.
‘It’s here,’ I chattered to myself. ‘Damn you, McLean. It’s here.’
But the pistol wasn’t there, and I collapsed back on to the stones. I stopped fighting then, and the light ebbed out of my eyes, colouring the world solid, silent black.
Beep. Beep. Beep.
The patient lay still. No fluids. No plasma. She faced away from me, hidden, partly covered by a blanket.
‘Rachel?’
She didn’t move, but I knew she could hear me.
Beep. Beep. Beep.
‘You can hear me, can’t you? Rachel?’
I wanted to touch her, but she was so far away I couldn’t reach. The more I stretched out to her, the further away she seemed.
‘Rachel, it’s me. It’s Max.’ I pulled back my hand and then she turned towards me. But something wasn’t right. It wasn’t Rachel. The woman turned and looked at me. Wet blonde hair clung to her face, pale blue eyes stared at me, unblinking. She was gaunt. Drawn. Changed but unmistakable. ‘Mamka?’
I put my hands out towards her again, but she smiled and shook her head. My mouth opened to shout, scream her name, to beg her to come back to me, but she put her fingers to her lips and whispered.
‘Bayu-bayushki-bayu, nye lozhisya na krayu …’ Rock-a-bye baby, don’t lie on the edge …
I looked down and saw I was standing waist deep in water. My mother wasn’t lying down. She was floating, drifting away, murmuring the lullaby that soothed me as a child.
‘Pridyot serenkiy volchok I ukusit za bochok …’ Or the little grey wolf will bite your side …
She slipped beneath the surface. And then blackness again.
Beep. Beep. Beep.
‘So what have we got?’
Bare skin on dry sheets. I kept my eyes shut and my ears open.
‘Dover uniform brought him in this morning. Dog walker found him on the beach near Kingsdown. No ID, no nothing.’ Male junior doctor. Mid-twenties. Smoker. Biddable. ‘Superficial scratches on his forearms and knees. Bruising on the wrists and ankles.’
‘So there are.’ A woman’s voice. ‘Restraints of some kind? Unusual, anyway. Looks like his hands were bound. Penetrating trauma to his left shoulder and right thigh. Gunshot wounds, possibly.’ Consultant. Forty something. ‘That would explain why there’s a copper outside. Never a dull moment at the William Harvey.’ I squinted into the low light of the isolation room. Brunette. Five-ten. Hardcase. And handsome with it. I dozed off and came back mid-sentence.
‘… bear with me, I …’ While young buck struggled with his notes, I struggled to stay conscious. ‘Right, OK. Yes … this is really interesting because – sorry, hold that for a sec, would you? – his wounds have already been treated. You see here, just below the clavicle, and here, above the knee.’
‘Pretty tidy.’
‘Whoever patched him up changed his clothes, too.’ He pointed to a plastic bag on a chair by the bed. ‘There was no bullet hole in his jeans.’
‘Quite the sleuth, aren’t we, David?’ I felt the hands of the consultant on my chest, right arm, lower legs. ‘Whoever he is, he’s been in the wars, all right.’ She was talking to herself more than her sidekick. ‘Scar tissue all over him.’ She pressed her thumb into a depression in my left calf. ‘I bet that one tells a story.’ And then to me: ‘Soldier, are you?’
I wanted to tell her that, if I’d been a soldier, someone would have been looking out for me. As it was, General King and whichever queen bee was now running MI6’s hive at Vauxhall Cross wouldn’t even bother to disown me: you can’t deny knowing someone that doesn’t exist. I said, did, nothing, except pretend to sleep.
‘X-ray?’
‘Came up clean – no drugs, no bullets, nothing up his bum.’
‘Thank God for small mercies. Bloods?’
‘Normal.’
‘Lucky us. GCS?’
‘Thirteen. Spark out since he got here. The paramedic said he came to briefly en route. Fought like hell when they tried to cut his jeans off. Kept muttering a woman’s name. “Rachel”, he thought. Next of kin, maybe?’
My heart jumped involuntarily. Pause. They were both distracted by the ECG trace.
‘Right, well, while the inestimable intelligence that is Kent Police untangles that little riddle, let’s make sure Mr Mystery here doesn’t shuffle off this mortal coil on our watch, shall we? Though, given everything, he’s in good shape. Let’s keep him that way.’ She dropped her voice. ‘And keep those vultures out of here. I don’t want anyone questioning him till he’s fit to talk.’
‘Yes, Rose.’
There was a long pause.
‘What are we missing here?’ She spoke quietly, distractedly almost.
‘Sorry?’
‘I said, “What are we missing?” Head, abdo and pelvis CT, please. Let’s make double sure there are no bullets in him. Admit him under the medical team until he’s less drowsy.’ I heard her heels make for the door. ‘Oh, and David?’
‘Yes?’
‘The monitor. Switch that bloody beep off.’
I closed my eyes completely and their voices morphed and merged into a blur of undifferentiated data. The room pressure shifted as nurses came and went. I realized in a passing moment of lucidity that I’d been asleep for hours and then drifted back in and out of consciousness, clinging only to one certainty: it wasn’t a question of if they would come for me, but when.
The room was dark.
Above and behind me, the medical monitor hummed and clicked. A crack of green fluorescent light escaped from the bathroom and picked out a jug of water and a plastic beaker on a trolley by the bed. Apart from that the room was bare. It looked like I’d been moved to a new ward. I closed and opened my eyes. The beaker disappeared and reappeared. It was definitely there. I was definitely awake. And I was alone – inside the room, at least. Outside, a policeman would be sitting in the corridor trying not to doze off, no doubt cursing his luck to his mates at being put on a babysitting detail while
secretly being relieved at the warmth it offered.
I untangled the observations in my dreams from the observations of my doctors and began to weave myself back into reality. Thread by thread I knitted myself into Frank’s knot garden. The container. The doctor. The killing. I couldn’t recall hitting the water, but memories of the swim washed over me: head down; front crawl; lifting my face just enough to suck in the black air before the next wave broke across my back. The beacon I’d been aiming for had been ripped out of view within seconds, torn away from me by the running tide.
I was in hospital in Kent. The ship could have sailed south through the Irish Sea and through St George’s Channel, or cut out into the Atlantic before moving east along the English Channel. In my condition, in that water, there was no way I could have swum more than a thousand metres – which meant that when I’d dived we’d been coming into Dover or looking for anchorage in the Downs. There was no other way we would, could, have been that close to shore, heading in that direction, in a ship that size. If I’d embarked at Dublin Port – or anywhere on the east coast of Ireland – it would mean I’d been at sea for two or three days, and then possibly in hospital for a day more. And that meant that whoever was on that ship was likely only a day behind me.
I sat up in bed fully awake. I’d been disconnected from the drip, but the three pads of the ECG trace were still stuck to my chest and abdomen, and the sats probe was still attached to my left middle finger. I couldn’t move away from the bed without triggering an alarm: where it would sound was a risk I wasn’t yet prepared to take. I rolled my shoulders and stretched my legs out. The consultant was right: although I looked a mess, I was in reasonable shape. My thigh was stitched; my left shoulder packed and wrapped. If I wanted, I could get up and run, albeit painfully. But to, or from, whom? Kent wasn’t exactly home turf, either, although a decade earlier I’d spent a week at the Shorncliffe base outside Folkestone with the Gurkhas. The William Harvey hospital was in Ashford – which was twenty miles from the barracks, and two miles from the Eurostar station to Paris.
Arkhangel : A Novel (2020) Page 6