Arkhangel : A Novel (2020)

by Brabazon, James

  Shit.

  The white faces of the dead pressed in on me. If you’re going through hell … keep going. So I breathed in and pushed for all I was worth against the walls. But my shoulders would not move.

  I was a dead man.

  Do something. Or do nothing.

  I tucked my chin in, squeezed my legs together, folded my arms across my chest. And dropped.

  The frozen faces fell away in a helter-skelter frenzy of bone-blurred descent. The minutes taken to inch my way up took seconds to reverse. As I landed hard, a man’s head poked into the opening. My feet found his shoulders, pushing him back and out, exiting at speed in a slimy skull-wave of broken bones that plunged us back into the charnel house together. I picked myself up. He was heavyset, black combats, tactical vest. Two twenty, two thirty pounds. And out cold. His body was half buried by the skull-slide, partly lit by the rifle light wedged tight beneath him. His face was covered by a military respirator. Could have been a cop. Could have been whoever the fuck else was after me.

  I got the M4 in my shoulder, laser on. The rest of the cave was clear. The blast had been a flash-bang, not frag. Pound to a penny they’d try and gas me out. I pulled the respirator off his face and on to mine and then I scraped a heap of bones over his rifle’s flashlight. The ossuary went darker, but not black. The lip of the arch under which we’d first entered the room threw a shadow back towards me. Then the whole edge of the roughly hewn doorway juddered as more light fell on it. It was being lit from the other side. I knelt and squinted down the passageway. Torches, not carbide lamps. Half a dozen of them, closing in.

  French GIGN assault team or Russian death squad? The motopsycho nightmare ride across the capital had floored a lot of policemen – but none had died by my hand. I intended to keep it that way for as long as possible. Fifteen metres. I took the sting-ball grenade out of my jacket pocket, and stepped back from the low archway. Ten metres. I pulled the pin, let the lever fly clear, and flung the little black ball down the passageway.

  A loud bang. Exploding rubber and CS gas. I heard a man fall. One screamed. They all stopped. I backed away, M4 up, facing the gateway, treading the hill of bones in reverse back to the escape hole. I imagined my shoulders grinding bone against bone as I tried to work my way up again. But there was no time to get clear.

  The men in the tunnel were already up and running, boots pounding on the passage floor. I squatted down, the stock of the damaged rifle braced to my right hip by my right elbow. In the half-dark I hooked the index and middle fingers of my left hand around the T-bar of the M4’s charging handle. A metal cylinder bounded through the archway, billowing white smoke. CS gas, most likely. Then another. There was a pause as the room filled with vapour, and then the first man came in at a crouch. I landed my red dot on the shooter’s left shoulder and followed it with a single 5.56 round. I was glad of the suppressor.

  ‘Blyat!’ he swore in Russian as he went down, twisting away from me. French cops got a second chance; Russian gunmen got no mercy. I put the next round through his back, the one that followed it in his ribs, racking the charging handle of the broken M4 to recock it after every shot like an old movie cowboy fanning a six-gun. The light on his dropped rifle fell away from me, illuminating an inverted skull by the foot of the door in a blazing halo. Despite the glare from the torch I could make out only shapes, not details, in the shadows it raked up around the door. The ossuary was entirely filled with gas. If they decided to play rough and lobbed in a hand grenade, the first I’d know about it was when it went off.

  I threw myself headlong down the pile of bones, landing hard on the floor three metres in front of the stone arch entrance. The M4’s laser reached through it, probing the shins, boots, thighs, of the men on the other side. There could have been a hundred men in that tunnel; a thousand. So narrow was the doorway that, as long as there were bullets to shoot with, it didn’t matter: they could only fight me one to one. So fought the Spartans at Thermopylae.

  I opened up before they could get into position. Bone shattered; muscle tore; ligaments sheered and snapped. I fired until first one and then another of the rounds from the M4 streaked out strontium red. The shooter in the bar had loaded tracer for his last three rounds. It was an old trick, and I wasn’t a fan: as well as telling you when you were about to run out of ammunition, it let the people who you were shooting at know it, too. It also let them know exactly where you were – although that was currently the least of my problems. I pulled the trigger for the last time on the M4 and sent a final crimson-glowing slug into the solid black mass of the nearest fallen man.

  In the silence following the shots, the deep, tearing screams of the wounded rang out.

  And then orders shouted in Russian: ‘Vyrubite svet!’ – Kill the light!

  They were down, but most – maybe even all – of them would still be alive. I’ve seen a man lose his leg at the knee and keep engaging the enemy until a medic prised the weapon from his hands. It was too dangerous to retrieve the rifle by the door. I still had the Glock and one grenade left – but an explosion in the tunnel risked another cave-in. I dropped the spent carbine, drew the pistol, and flicked on my own torch with my left thumb, covering the lens with my thigh. I got to my feet and stayed low, sending the lit LED arcing out through the entrance, above and beyond the bodies of the men I’d cut down: shots followed the swooping, spinning beam as it sailed past like an erratic lighthouse. Rifle reports thundered along the passage – their muzzle flashes giving their positions away as surely as the tracer had done mine. The torch landed on the floor, pointing down the tunnel. Its flight had distracted them for a second.

  And a second was all I needed.

  I came through the archway firing. The fallen torch cut the gloom enough to see to kill. I aimed shots into the outlines of the three men from whom points of light had flared a moment before. I worked smoothly, accurately, enjoying the feeling of the Glock, the precision of it. All the time Colonel Ellard’s words in my mind.

  If you want to win a gunfight, take your time.

  Some of the rounds connected with a dull, wet thud. Others crunched as copper clipped bone. Up close, bursts of light from the Glock illuminated faces on the floor, hands clutching wounds, mouths open, screaming, in split-second freeze-frame. Movement to the left. I dropped on my haunches as a bullet licked the air above me, scoring the stone wall behind. I fired two shots in return. The rifle fell silent.

  The four men I’d shot lay face down, unmoving – lower limbs wrecked, chests opened up with copper-coated lead. Among them, three wounded shuffled on the ground. Dying among the dying, they snaked around their wounds, darkening the chalk-slime of the passage floor with thick clots of blood. The taste of iron mingled with the bitter tang of cordite.

  I leaned over and shot the nearest survivor in the head. I stepped over him and moved to the next, shooting him in the same way. The third man was further off. He lay on his back, hands up and out towards me. There was enough light from the discarded torch to see that his face was bloodied, neck lacerated. His leg lay at right angles to his body – torn out of place by the M4. I aimed into his one, dying eye. His hands came together as if in prayer.

  ‘Ne ubivai menya!’ he begged, choking on the blood collecting in his throat. Don’t kill me. But when the killing starts, it doesn’t stop until the job is done.

  No one moved. I checked the magazine in the Glock. Empty. One round left in the breech. I looked around for a weapon to take – and then, at the far end of the tunnel, a long black shadow spread across the tunnel ceiling. I straightened up, raised the pistol and brought my left hand across to steady the grip. Picked out by the beam of the torch at my feet, a slight man in a long black coat emerged into the tunnel. He took a step towards me, head back, hands raised and empty. One shot, one kill. The crease beneath the pad of my index finger flattened across the trigger.

  ‘McLean,’ he shouted. I steadied my breathing. ‘You are a very hard man to help.’

  The cl
ipped vowels of his perfect English echoed off the stone corridor. It was the doctor from the ship. And he’d been reading the newspapers. Once upon a time no one knew my name unless I told them. Now it was on everyone’s lips. I settled the sight post of the Glock in the centre of his chest and exhaled slowly. But I wanted to talk to him. Not kill him. At thirty metres I could put him down. But I couldn’t guarantee he’d survive. A hair’s breadth of steel stopped the hammer from dropping, kept his heart beating.

  ‘I don’t need your kind of help.’

  ‘I think you do, Mr McLean. Look around you. Your own side has betrayed you.’

  ‘Keep walking,’ I said, louder than I expected. ‘And keep talking.’ He took another step forward. I lowered my aim a fraction, into his stomach. Whoever he was, he had guts.

  ‘General King hasn’t just left you out in the cold. He’s buried you.’ He’d most likely got King’s name from Lukov. But he was right. It was open season on Max McLean.

  ‘Step closer,’ I said. He did.

  ‘You have something that belongs to me,’ he said. ‘I’d like it back.’

  ‘Sure. Come and get it.’

  I might have been disowned. But I hadn’t been disarmed. The trigger crept a fraction of a millimetre. And then movement to my right. One of the gunmen was still alive. In his hand the hard lines of a Grach 9mm. The shot went wide of my leg. I returned fire reflexively. He dropped the pistol and breathed out a last, long death rattle. I looked up again as the shadow cast by the doctor slipped from sight along the passage.

  I dropped the Glock and took the pistol from the dead man’s hand, checking the magazine. Then I removed the remaining grenade from my jacket pocket and waited for the onslaught.

  But none came.

  So I picked up my torch and ducked back into the ancient ossuary, leaving the assault squad’s carbines where they’d fallen. They were too visible, their ammunition too hard to come by. But NATO 9mm – which the Grach’s magazine was loaded with – could be scavenged from any policeman’s belt. Why it wasn’t charged with the Russian armour-piercing rounds it was designed for could have been due to operational security or expediency – or because they weren’t serving military.

  I crouched and listened but my hearing was shot. There was nothing to do but get out while I still could. I stretched out on my back and craned my head into the bone-pipe. I flicked on the flashlight, checked the integrity of the boot-damaged walls, and started the ascent – forcing myself up, clinging on to the crumbling foot- and handholds that I’d already half-destroyed in my first attempted surge to safety. I pushed and braced and squeezed and kicked, and emerged back into the world choking on bone dust, spitting out fragments of femur on to the damp cemetery ground at the base of an elaborate stone tomb. I rolled clear and lay flat, swallowing deep breaths of clean, crisp, night air.

  The remaining grenade was the last thing that went down the chute after I came out – ensuring I’d be the last person to use it. Going off five metres underground, the blast hardly registered between the densely packed gravestones and mausolea around me. But I felt the vibration of bones and earth collapsing beneath me, and I knew that the entrance would be sealed.

  I sat up and got my bearings. Low cloud. No moon. And no movement. The soft sodium light thrown by the street lamps that ringed the graveyard settled on the ancient stonework like an orange blanket. It made everything look unreal, insubstantial. But at least I could see. I needed to head south. How, exactly, I’d be able to keep moving, where, exactly, I’d go – I just didn’t know. But then, as I got to my feet, one of the alabaster angels presiding over the tomb I’d emerged next to lurched forward, arms thrust out at me. I jumped back and raised the Grach reflexively, not knowing whether I was under attack or whether the grenade had caused a cave-in. Then I saw. Smeared with tunnel slime, clothes torn, eyes bright in the darkness, the figure reaching out for me wasn’t an angel – but it was a saviour nonetheless.

  I lowered the pistol and reached out, too, and clasped the muddy hand of Bhavneet Singh.

  18

  Zero eight thirty.

  I parted the blinds a fraction. The wind was picking up. Grey clouds piled up on the horizon. There would be rain later. I pressed the back of my fingers to the window glass. It was cold, too. Not far off freezing. The sun hadn’t yet risen, but the city was already seething. Monday morning and everyone was back to work. Me included. I’d been awake for hours. Waiting. Listening. Just because I couldn’t see them didn’t mean I wasn’t surrounded. The French army and the police, Russian hitman and random gunmen, snipers and bike riders, and, of course, the Russian doctor: they were all out there. Somewhere.

  I withdrew my hand and let the slats snick shut.

  The room was spacious and well heated, with high white walls that rose to a lofty, corniced ceiling. At either end stood a tall window covered with blinds. Beneath each window sat an iron radiator, adorned with my drip-drying socks, gloves and jacket. In between them, pushed up against the front wall, was a massive wooden table laden with three large flat-panel displays, a wireless keyboard, two laptop computers and sheaves of paper printed with what looked like equations and calculations.

  I picked up the nearest set of notes. They’d been crossed out with deep slashes of a blue biro. At the top of the page, written in the same blue ink: Shor is God.

  I pushed the papers to one side and made space among the mess to set out the remainder of my kit:

  Grach MP-443 pistol and fifteen rounds of ammo.

  Pepper spray.

  Pozidriv screwdriver.

  Lukov’s wallet, driver’s licence, credit cards and French identity card.

  Greek passport in the name of Maximilianos Ioannides.

  Waterproof watch.

  Two thousand euros in fifty-euro notes and a couple of hundred in smaller notes – courtesy of Lukov.

  A lighter and unopened packet of French smokes – also from Lukov.

  From the ticket pocket in my jeans I produced the tightly folded, damp hundred-dollar bill. A little battered and worn along the creases, but it was still in one piece. The scrawled Russian letters on the reverse that spelled out Arkhangel hadn’t faded, either. I spread it out to dry on one of the pages of equations.

  ‘Miraculous,’ I said out loud.

  ‘There are no such things as miracles.’

  I turned around to see Baaz backing in through the swing-door to the kitchen, which wafted a rich smell of fried onions and spices into the living room as it fanned shut. In one hand he carried a bowl of steaming beans, and in the other a plate laden with a stack of parathas, hot out of the pan.

  ‘Although my auntie’s tarka beans are pretty close to divine.’

  He went to set the food on the table, saw my things spread out, and motioned for me to move the laptops to one side. I did, and he put the food down, returning to the kitchen to fetch two mugs of hot tea and two squares of kitchen towel. We sat down on wooden stools that were tucked beneath the table and ate ferociously with our fingers.

  It was the first time I’d seen him clearly. He looked more substantial than he had done in the gloom of the tunnels – more like five-eleven, and a hundred and fifty pounds. It was the sniper’s curse to assess everyone as a potential target; mentally adjust every breeze for windage; scope every distance for elevation. His hair was bound up in a simple, neat black turban. Washed clean, his beard was still wispy, but at least looked a little more dignified. I hadn’t shaved. And my bullet wounds burned continuously.

  ‘That,’ I said, mopping the last of the spicy bean sauce from the bowl with the last of the parathas, ‘was grand. Thank you.’

  ‘They’re literally the only things I can cook. My mum’s sister taught me how to make them the day before I left the UK. She was worried I would starve. She was completely correct.’

  I took a slug of the tea. It was sweet enough to put my teeth on edge.

  ‘I thought you were from Chandigarh?’ I asked him.

  He
nodded. ‘I came to London first, to see my auntie and finish school. Then I came to France. To Saclay. The university,’ he clarified, gesturing towards the piles of notes and the bank of screens. ‘I’m doing an MA. Computer stuff. But the campus is miles away.’

  He looked around the living room as if to say, So here I am. I looked around, too. The apartment was large for Paris, never mind student digs.

  ‘Rich parents?’

  He looked taken aback, and slightly sheepish. ‘Oh, no. Not at all. I … the course is OK, but, ah …’

  ‘But what? It’s OK, Baaz, I’m not going to call your auntie.’

  ‘OK.’ He drew a breath as deep as I had done before my first confession. ‘I trade crypto. Digital coins. It’s going quite well.’

  ‘So I see.’

  There was a plain three-seater sofa in the room – which I’d slept on – with matching armchairs. The décor was simple, neutral: the walls were peppered with bland abstract art, the bookshelves lined with most likely unread classics. It felt more like a hotel room than a home – and would’ve had a rent to match. There were few, if any, personal belongings to be seen: hardware and notepads consumed his entire attention.

  The living room, bathroom, kitchen and Baaz’s bedroom were all connected to an L-shaped hallway, at the long end of which a bolted, double-locked door led on to a landing that fell away down a steep twisting staircase to the main, intercom-operated street door one floor below. Rue du Texel was a narrow road in Montparnasse with no visible CCTV cameras, south-west of the graveyard, sandwiched between an imposing police station and the church of Notre-Dame-du-Travail – though as things stood, I doubted either of them would respond positively to a call to save our souls.

  Downstairs there was a red-fronted café selling crêpes and sandwiches; opposite, half a city block had been levelled for development – affording a clear view from the living room of a swathe of dead ground. I’d rather have been higher – there were three floors above us – but otherwise it was as good a place to be holed up as any. Baaz wiped his fingers on the kitchen towel.