Arkhangel : A Novel (2020)

  Boom. Boom. Boom.

  The shots hit him in the chest. He staggered backwards and dropped the grenade, but raised his rifle. Body armour. I fired again. A single shot to the head. He fell on to his knees and then keeled over. I stepped around the remains of the bar and stooped over his body, keeping the Glock on him until I was certain he wasn’t getting back up. I tucked the pistol in my jeans and picked up the discarded M4. The rig mimicked classic US Special Forces specification: suppressor, holographic sight, magnifier, laser–torch combo and a forward grip. His arms splayed out, cruciform. On the inside of his right wrist a line of gothic script read: The only easy day was yesterday. If I’d have stripped his shirt off, I’d most likely have found an ink trident, too – both tattoos beloved by US Navy SEALs.

  The tactical vest under his coat was lined with spare magazines and hung with grenades: one frag, two smoke and another that matched the canister he’d just dropped: a nonlethal sting-ball grenade, which exploded with rubber balls and CS, not shrapnel. I loaded my jacket pockets with the lot. I dropped the used magazine out of the M4 and reloaded with a fresh one, stuffing two more inside my jacket for good measure. Finally, I plucked a pair of Oakleys off his vest and hung them off the neck of my pullover. For an instant: silence.

  And then, far off, the old-fashioned nee-naw of French police sirens filtered into the blasted cavern of the little bar. The distorting effect of the maze of city centre streets meant it was hard to tell where they were. I thought of the young squaddies I’d seen patrolling the Gare du Nord. There were ten thousand troops deployed across France, protecting against terrorist attack – two-thirds of them in Paris alone. Of the many ways I thought I might go out over the years, being cornered à la Butch Cassidy by the Foreign Legion wasn’t one of them.

  I edged around the bodies on the floor. Glass cracked underfoot. I caught a glimpse of my face in a shard of mirror and did a double take: blood-smeared, tired, hollow-eyed. I barely recognized myself. Voices came through the kitchen door behind me. Distressed, frantic, the trapped customers were arguing among themselves about how best to escape. Enough people had been hit in the crossfire already. I racked the charging handle on the M4 and fired a shot at the doorway to keep them inside. They fell silent instantly. I squatted down next to Lukov and quickly went through his pockets, extracting a tightly rolled wad of fifty-euro notes, a calfskin wallet and an unopened packet of Gauloises. I crammed everything into my overloaded jacket, with the grenades.

  Time to run.

  Judging by the angle of the shot that killed Lukov, the sniper had most likely been working in one of the apartments on Rue Basfroi. In the time it had taken me to kill the phoney cop and the SEAL gunman, he could have relocated anywhere. I pulled the pin on one of the smoke grenades and took a chance, lobbing it through the shattered windows upwind and into the middle of the crossroads outside. A thick grey plume billowed in its wake, an expanding snake filling the junction with an impenetrable dirty haze.

  As I emerged into the street, the sound of the police sirens grew immediately louder. To my left the smoke had temporarily cut off the south-eastern stretch of Rue de la Roquette and Rue Basfroi. To my right the rest of Rue de la Roquette was clear for three blocks. But what I needed was parked dead ahead. The phoney motorcycle cop’s Yamaha stood propped up on its side-stand outside the bakery, nose pointing north-west out of the crossroads.

  I hovered in the café doorway with the M4 in my shoulder – right index finger on the trigger, left hand around the forward grip on the Picatinny rail. I scanned sight lines and doorways, shopfronts and rooftops. Nothing moved. No civilians, no cops, no shooters. Not even a cat. But the window panes around me flashed with the blue lights of approaching police cars. And above the windows came the drone-whine of an inbound chopper. I combed the bodies of the three men wearing keffiyehs through the magnified sight. No movement. I edged out further into the street.

  And then, a couple of hundred metres to the east, a swarm of blue and white police motorbikes and vans led by unmarked saloon cars – single blue lights flashing inside their windscreens – poured into the wide traffic circle where Rue de la Roquette met Boulevard Voltaire. I crouched and looked in the opposite direction. A red laser sight strobed through the swirling smokescreen. Then another, fragmenting and strengthening and dying back again as the beam formed and dissipated in the billowing, choking cloud. And then a dozen electric-vermilion death-fingers clawed at the fog – probing, reaching, searching for a solid human target.

  I pulled the pin on the second smoke grenade and flung the canister towards the police fleet approaching to the right. It bounced along the middle of the street, a fresh spiral of dense smoke expanding in its wake. The cops ground to a halt, dismounted immediately, and fired a salvo of shots directly at me as the grey cloud expanded between us. I pressed myself to the pavement. Bullets snapped past my head, shoulders, smacking against the brickwork further down the street behind me.

  I balled up in the gutter and the buildings, street, sky vanished. Visibility was close to zero. But as soon as the chopper came overhead, the downdraft would leave me exposed. I dragged myself on my elbows across the street. The bullet wound in my shoulder tore and burned. The tear in my thigh pulled and pulsed, sending hot flashes of pain down into my knee and up into my groin. The smokescreen twisted sound. The guns behind the lasers to the left began firing in reply to the police rounds coming from my right. It looked like the opening salvo of a horrific blue on blue tirade.

  Stray bullets ricocheted off the shutters and street lamps. Window glass imploded. Shouted orders in French bounced off the buildings. Radios crackled. Distance, time, perspective – everything was confused in the swirling mist until, stretching out my hand, I gripped the back wheel of the police motorbike. I slung the carbine over my shoulder and climbed on, head low, hugging the chassis. Key in. I pinched the clutch, revved the throttle. The four-cylinder engine roared to life. I kicked the stand away and shifted down into first. I had no idea what was in front of me. But it had to be better than whatever was behind.

  I gunned the bike and dropped the clutch and leapt out of the fog into the unknown.

  14

  For an instant the cloud clung to my shoulders and limbs – the ragged wings of a dirty grey angel curling out into the slipstream behind me. And then I cleared the smoke in a rush of grey-white winter light, pushing a quarter-tonne of Japanese metal out of the kill zone. A police van had stopped dead centre in the street. Thirty metres and closing. Fast.

  Ten.

  Five.

  Two.

  One.

  Brake.

  Officers in tactical gear spilled out, weapons up. I pulled a hard right, jumping the kerb on to the pavement between a row of metal bollards, ploughing through a brace of parked scooters.

  Shouts.

  Shots.

  Blue-black uniforms scattering behind me in my wing mirrors.

  I broke contact, gulping lungfuls of ice-cold air, adrenaline surging, raging. I turned left on to Rue Sedaine. The rear wheel of the heavy bike slipped right, but I held it and came around on top. I slowed down. Ahead: more blue lights. Above: the chopper closing in. I needed to get out of the chokehold of the side streets and find space and speed. The Yamaha was built for touring, not racing. But it had guts. I hoped it had balls, too. I pinched the clutch and opened the throttle. The tachometer touched red. A hundred metres ahead, patrol cars pulled up side-on, blocking the little lane by a car park entrance to my right. Uniformed cops swarmed up steps. Roofs came alive with sharpshooters. Paris in lockdown. On the left a rubbish skip blocked the pavement, fed rubble by two long wooden planks from the building site adjacent.

  I was cornered, but not trapped. But if I didn’t get over the river before they cut the bridges, I was fucked.

  I revved harder. And then I let it go. I felt the pull in my chest as I took off. I kicked up through neutral into second and up again. I hit sixty in three seconds and dropped my head low, just
like I had done hacking horses under woodland branches with Rachel back home.

  The pop and snap of incoming rounds barely registered above the rush of air and growl of the engine. But come they did. Three punched through the windshield. One sparked off the engine block. Another scraped the toe of my right boot. But I was too fast, too close. My front wheel hit the improvised ramp dead straight, pushing seventy. I held hard and kept the revs high and felt the ground slip away. The plank came up behind me, flying up with tatters of cardboard and sheets of old newspaper caught in the draft.

  Airborne.

  I held my breath and counted slow.

  One thousand.

  The police passed to my right, the barrels of their assault rifles tracing my arc in the air, unable to shoot for the faces in the apartment windows opposite.

  Two thousand.

  I cleared the skip and a police Yamaha identical to the one I was jumping. A flash-bang went off behind me, ineffectual.

  Three thousand.

  The pavement raced up to meet me. I kept the front fork steady; its wheel lifted higher.

  Four thousand.

  The back tyre hit the tarmac, squashed by the impact. The fork twisted an inch to the right. The rear wheel slid sideways a fraction and reformed. I corrected the front wheel and brought it down straight. I braked, released, and took a left past a Carrefour supermarket and punched on, dog-legging back over Rue de la Roquette and then due south against the traffic to Rue de Charonne. The chopper was as low as it was safe to fly, banking overhead, shadowing my movements. Police motorcycles roared in pursuit. I snapped my right wrist down. The LCD speedometer raced like a stopwatch. Eighty. Ninety. One hundred klicks per hour. French police 1300s are limited to a hundred brake horsepower. Not this one. Wherever the rider with the Glock had come from, he knew where he was at with his bike. And if he’d fitted it with a tracker, his handler would know where I was at, too.

  Fancy shopfronts, chic cafés, parked cars … all reduced to a smudge of sound and colour. Faces blinked past, pressed to plate glass. No one was on the street. I kept my face behind the peppered windshield and carried on – straight, steady. Speeding. My jacket billowed in the slipstream. Freezing cold air whirled around me. My ears stung; my knuckles went white on the grips. The rifle magazines I’d stashed in my jacket worked free of the overfilled pockets, clattering to the ground behind me.

  I swung right but came off the brake too late and felt the rear wheel drifting me into a lowside crash. I held my nerve and the rubber held the asphalt. Just. I sat upright and pulled a left, skirting bicycles and bollards, and rolled under a garret into a cobbled alleyway. I thundered through a courtyard, hooked left under a wide, bare tree, then roared under another building and out into a wider passage. I put on the sunglasses I’d taken from the dead SEAL. There was no time to put my gloves on, too. My eyes were already streaming. I blinked and checked my mirrors. Four uniformed cops followed on Yamahas, and, behind them, a plainclothes rider on a BMW rig. Pistol shots blew lumps out of the walls, shattered my left mirror. Two children dived for cover, their father shouting, colouring the air blue in my wake. I pushed right. Then right again, nosing out on to Avenue Ledru-Rollin.

  Make or break. Five engines growled behind me. The chopper circled around in front. I touch-checked the Glock in my jeans and the M4 across my back. All good. As my mate Roberts in Freetown would have said: Come on, old girl. Let’s be ’avin’ ya.

  Revs up. Clutch out. Rock and roll.

  I kicked through the gears, keeping the throttle wide open and my head down, counting the seconds as the speedo climbed again. The chopper banked to my left. I checked my right mirror. The five bikes were hot in pursuit. The avenue curved a kilometre south-west all the way to the River Seine.

  The city strobed past. Trees. Lamp posts. People. I leaned left and right with my shoulders, weaving through the Sunday-chicane of cars and tourists. Car horns and police sirens screeched past, harmonics distorting, mutating, whining, whizzing, fusing as I rode faster into one long wailing corridor of noise. Cortisol coursed through my brain, shutting down everything unnecessary to surviving that moment, blanking out everything behind me. One hundred kilometres per hour down an unknown Parisian street. The slightest miscalculation will kill you, or stay with you for ever. I saw the river ahead, the bridge, and the main road across me.

  The drive down Ledru-Rollin had taken thirty seconds. I braked and kicked down into second and looked fully over my shoulder. The pursuit bikes had kept pace behind me, one hundred metres, slowing but closing – the rider of the BMW hung back, sun glinting off his visor, no weapon visible. I faced front again. The junction ahead was open, but a military unit from the Gare d’Austerlitz on the left bank had made it over the river and cut the bridge at its summit. Legionnaires sprinted to take up covering positions, green berets bobbing in the winter light. The chopper caught up with me. The sirens grew louder.

  Think.

  If I ran the roadblock it was a short blast south-west through to where I needed to get. But they’d cut me to ribbons before I cleared the first fifty metres. I could try the Pont Charles de Gaulle, one over to the east, though the chances were they’d make it there before me, too – and I’d be driving against the traffic. West was best. I risked getting lost in the maze of city centre streets, but if you’re in a tight squeeze, the thing to do is get smaller. As long as I had room to ride, the more people around me the better. Colonel Ellard would have approved. Use everything to your advantage – human shields included. I accelerated right and buzzed on north-west, river to my left, police bikes on my tail. They appeared to hold all the cards. But I had an ace up my sleeve: they didn’t know where I was going. If I could get over the river, I could disappear.

  I took off right along the Quai de la Rapée and over the Arsenal Basin. The window glass of the van to my right exploded into tiny crystal cubes. A squaddie had opened up from the bridge. On a busy street in London they’d shoot you only at point blank. Hit and you’re a hero; miss and maybe you’re a murderer. I’d been there myself. In France they didn’t fuck about. More lead skidded off the asphalt around the tyres and I felt the tic-tic-tic of bullets hitting the panniers. But I was away and out of range in a couple of seconds, dodging round to the right before he could line up on my back. The river forked around Île Saint-Louis. Pont de Sully slipped past to my left, a blur of blue flashing lights through a gap in the bare winter trees. I tipped to my left and opened up harder, the quayside flitting past in a mess of booksellers and tourist-trappers selling everything from peanuts to Picassos.

  Then I was on it. Pont Louis Philippe. No room for error driving against the one-way system. I came in as tight as I could to the kerb on the left and let the brake go, left knee skimming stone. The back wheel held. A patrol car handbrake-turned parallel to me, the officers inside shouting, weapons drawn. But they were too slow and I outpaced their pistols as they fought with windows and door frames. I checked over my shoulder as I straightened up. The motorcycle cops were still on me, but one of them oversteered. Another gave it too much front brake and their bikes collided – fibreglass fragmenting as the frames skidded side-on into the patrol car. One rider hopped clear; the other catapulted over the handlebars, walking first on air and then turning somersaults into the windshield of the stricken patrol car. Two cops and the plainclothes pursuer stayed on me.

  My tyres hit cobbles and the timbre of the road changed to a fast rip as the little square stones shook the Yamaha’s suspension. Either side of the road the bridge’s stone balustrade was punctuated with apertures, capturing the bateaux mouches plying the river in dozens of frozen images juddering past like a reel from an old movie camera. Ahead and close, the red awning of a café on the south-west corner of the bridge; far distant, the colonnaded dome of the Panthéon crowning the urban horizon.

  I twisted the throttle, leaning right and low, cutting the corner off the little island and burning over the pedestrianized Pont Saint-Louis on to the Île d
e la Cité. The M4’s suppressor hung down behind me, scraping for an instant on the road as I stooped into the turn. Water flashed to the left of me and I was beside Notre-Dame, rising above the winter-dead gardens that spread out beyond the cathedral’s iconic east end. In seconds I was back on to Pont de l’Archevêché, which I’d crossed the day before on the way to Lukov’s apartment.

  I was far enough away now from the gunfight in La Fée Verte for pedestrians to be ignorant of the shootout. People fell back. Couples grabbed each other. Near-misses swore and flipped me out – but I heard nothing except the rattle-roar of the engine on cobbles and stone and asphalt; that, and the thump-thump, thump-thump of my own heart pounding a metronomic pulse in my ears. From the moment the Bulgarian had bitten the dust until I crossed Boulevard Saint-Germain and came screaming out on to Rue Monge, less than ten minutes had passed. I got my face down behind the Perspex that remained intact in the battered bike’s windshield and gritted my teeth, eyes half-closed, squinting through the sunglasses against the hurricane breeze blown back by the surge forward.

  The two bikes were still with me, a steady pistol shot behind; the visored BMW rider let them keep pace, a constant twenty metres further back. Another kilometre. South-east. Due south. And then, in seconds, on to Avenue des Gobelins. From there it was a direct, wide run south-east to Place d’Italie, along a street I’d first walked with my father as a teenager. Now I gunned it at ninety, straight towards the 13e arrondissement. Past a supermarket, over a broad junction – weaving through unsuspecting traffic crisscrossing me on their green light. A blacked-out police van, a blue light flashing on the dashboard, swerved to hit me but missed, T-boning a garbage truck exiting Rue Le Brun with a bone-cracking bang.

  And all the while the chopper shadowed me. I jumped the kerb, dropped the revs and zapped down the pavement. At my three o’clock one of the police bikes shadowed me along Avenue de Gobelins. I dodged Sunday strollers who unfailingly dived in the wrong direction, and zoomed over the zebra crossing at Rue du Banquier, sticking to the sidewalk.