Ratcatcher (32 page)

*

The space was small and cramped and Purkiss was bent so that his knees were almost against his chin, his feet pressed against the box that occupied half of the interior of the bench. There would be far more room if he just took the box out but it would be noticed and would immediately give him away. The bench he assumed was for troops to sit on during transport. Its seat doubled as a lid for an interior that could be used for storage, thus economising on space.

He knew something about helicopters, including the Black Hawk, but not enough to call himself an expert. He was aware, however, that the stub wings at the top of the fuselage were significant. Designed to carry extra fuel tanks, they were equally useful for supporting ordnance. And what he saw on the stub closer to him when he stepped nearer was certainly not a fuel tank.

It was a missile, the length of a man, perhaps a foot in diameter, its phallic shaft surmounted with a silver head. Four squared-off wings radiated around the shaft towards the back. Quickly he peered around it at all the visible surfaces, but there were no markings. He ducked round to the other side of the helicopter and saw a featureless metal rod attached to the other stub, similar in length and width, but a plain cylindrical shape, unadorned by wings or head. A dummy, he suspected. A counterweight, without any other function.

One missile. Which meant there was something special about it.

He called up the camera facility on the phone he’d taken, and snapped the helicopter and the missile from as many angles as he could manage. He tried calling up an internet connection. There was still no signal. From some distance away a sound rocked the night. He tensed and crouched, almost dropping the phone. A gunshot. Had they decided to kill Fallon?

In the corners of the hangar were old pieces of machinery, rows of collapsed shelving, a sea of canvas tarpaulins. He could easily have found somewhere to hide, but Purkiss knew there was only one course of action worth considering. He pulled open the door of the helicopter and stepped inside.

It was more spacious than he was expecting. He remembered the Black Hawk took three or four crew members, two pilots and one or two crew chiefs, and could carry around a dozen additional troops. He wondered how many would be coming on board on this trip.

Once inside the bench compartment he lay curled with the SIG Sauer in one hand and the phone in the other. He waited, the rasp of his breath sounding so loudly in his ears he imagined he felt the helicopter tremble.

*

Dobrynin and Leok dragged the stumbling Englishman across the gravel towards the hangar, Venedikt following behind. They hadn’t bothered hooding the man this time. Instead of going with them all the way into the hangar, Venedikt veered off down the slope towards the wall which separated them from the field beyond. Bobbing in the field were dots of torchlight.

He made his way to the shed door that served as a ladder and climbed to the top of the wall. He cupped his hands round his mouth and called, long and loud. One of the lights detached itself from the invisible string, began heading toward him. It was Raskov.

‘No sign, sir.’

‘There are trees over there.’

‘Yes. We’ve looked. Ditches, too, a network of them, which you can’t see so well from here. If he’s lying low in one of them it could take us forever.’

After a moment’s pondering Venedikt came to a decision. ‘All right. Tattar’s operational, I’ll send him over to help. You bring one of the men and get ready to leave for the boat. The rest stay here and continue the search.’

‘If we don’t find him in time…’ Raskov’s tone wasn’t defeatist, just curious.

‘We have to find him, but if it’s not before…. the
event
, it won’t be disastrous. There’s no cell phone reception, so he won’t be able to summon help. If he has taken cover he’ll have to stay there, he can’t risk an open dash across the fields with four men looking for him, especially as it’ll be getting light soon. Find him if we can, but as long as we can keep him pinned down until we’ve done what we’re going to do, it’ll be enough.’

*

His men had rolled open the doors of the hangar and inside Venedikt looked at his watch. Six forty-five. He itched to be at the location early, but recognised that the longer they were in the air, the greater the risk of their attracting unwanted attention. The Black Hawk had fuel enough for eight hundred kilometres of flight, plus the auxiliary tank. Eight hundred kilometres was nearly ten times the distance they would be travelling, especially now that the journey was going to be one way only.

Once again he was inwardly proud of his decisiveness. He strode over to the door of the helicopter. In the cabin the Englishman, Fallon, was seated on one of the benches, trying to keep his head from lolling. Lyuba was securing his feet together once more. She glanced up at his face. Venedikt saw in her eyes a hate so keen it almost made him grimace. A woman betrayed, if not exactly spurned.

Leok was seated in the pilot’s seat, Dobrynin standing by Lyuba, awaiting instructions. Venedikt made sure he looked each of them in the face in turn.

‘We go now.’

As they took their positions and a crackle of tension and excitement began to connect them in its web, he grabbed each one by the shoulder and squeezed.

His people. Together they were going to change history.

*

Through the lid of the coffin – Purkiss couldn’t help thinking of it as such – the words were indistinct. He knew from the heavy creak above him that someone was sitting on the seat above him. His face was inches from the wood. Claustrophobia began to grip him and he smothered it.

Something was pushing beneath him. After a moment he realised it was the movement of the fuselage below. He gained a sense of directional motion as the helicopter rolled forward, had an impression even of a change in the timbre of the sounds penetrating the box he was in, as the chopper emerged from the hangar into the expanse of the early morning. For want of something more productive to do he checked the phone. Still no signal.

Another noise began to seep through, one accompanied by a tactile dimension. A rhythmic sweeping thud was followed in each beat by a gentle but distinct shake in the body of the helicopter. The rotor was starting up.

The throb of the blades gathered pace until a steady state was reached. Then there was the pressing of the base of the cavity he was lying in against his side, as the machine began to rise and they became airborne.

Seven oh three.

THIRTY-SEVEN

The reporter had to raise her voice against the background surge, enthusiasm infecting her tone as she delivered more platitudes.

A real sense of camaraderie…

A feeling that the past is being let go…

This momentous day will be imprinted on our memories for years to come…

The Jacobin heard, yet didn’t hear. He was staring at the sky, where the shape, black against the lightening ceiling of cloud, was rising, buoyed by the thrumming of its rotors.

He pulled over quickly beside a hedge, killed the engine to get rid of the exhaust fumes. He peered upwards. The helicopter had stopped ascending and hung, raptor-like, before swinging away to the north.

He’d thought he would be too late. In a sense he was, because the helicopter had taken off before he’d got there. But didn’t that suggest Purkiss himself had failed to stop it? The Jacobin reached for his phone, into which he’d copied the web address of the tracking site. No internet connection.

A car was emerging in the distance through the gates of the airfield. It stopped beyond the gates and a man got out and closed them behind the car. The Jacobin started the engine of his car again. It wouldn’t do to be noticed sitting in a stationary vehicle this close to the airfield. Nor would it be a good idea to turn round immediately and drive away, in sight of the car. The Jacobin continued along the road that ran past the airfield.

As he approached the other car, which was heading towards him, he glanced at its occupants, as one would naturally do when passing another vehicle on such an empty road. Three of them. Although none was familiar, he recognised the type. Kuznetsov’s people, soldiers by background, grim faced. They wouldn’t recognise him, had never met him before. No sign of Purkiss in the car. They would be the backup, the Jacobin assumed. The crew who were to meet the chopper out at sea.

To follow them, even at a distance, would invite suspicion, and if they turned on him the odds were hardly in his favour, not just numerically. He punched the address of a location he knew on the coast into the car’s satellite navigation system. It directed him to continue the way he was heading. The Jacobin put his foot down, glancing every now and again at the display on his phone.

*

Through the windows of the cabin the sky was changing almost perceptibly to slate. Below, a light ground fog blurred the details of the fields and the sparse network of roads between them. The weather didn’t matter greatly, Venedikt reflected. The handshake would take place in anything short of a hurricane.

He sat on the bench facing Fallon, forcing himself not to prowl about the cabin. Dobrynin was leaning into the cockpit and asking something of Leok and Lyuba, the pilot and co-pilot. Dobrynin was as excited, as moved as he was, Venedikt knew. He was simply more reserved in his personality and therefore didn’t let it show.

Two missiles would have been ideal, one as backup for the other. The finances wouldn’t have been a problem. The haul from the hijacking of the bank vans would have stretched to a second one. Availability was the stumbling block, as the arms dealer had told him. The missile was one of the most sought-after pieces of weaponry in the world, and therefore the most closely guarded. Still, one would be enough.

The dealer had given Venedikt a choice of warhead. After consultation with Dobrynin he had gone for the Penetration/Blast/Fragmentation warhead rather than the High Explosive Anti-Tank round. There was no armour to be penetrated, and the PBF had bunker-busting capability and in terms of destructive power over a wider area it was the surer option. The War Memorial would be destroyed, of course. Had it not been for the context, Venedikt would have baulked at this. But the symbolic power of such an outrage… it was almost as important that the Memorial fall as that the President be sacrificed.

The window was a wide one. The handshake was scheduled to take place at eight a.m. precisely. Even if there were a delay – Venedikt doubted it would take place ahead of time, these things never did – he had a radio link to the memorial site to guide him. The handshake would last a good few minutes for the benefit of the world’s cameras. Then the two leaders would step up to their podiums and deliver their respective speeches of hope. Perhaps twenty, thirty minutes in total. The missile travelled at a velocity of one hundred and fifty metres per second. Over ten kilometres, that amounted to a little more than one minute from firing to impact.

A wide window, indeed.

The Black Hawk was capable of a speed just under three hundred kilometres per hour. There was no reason to hurry, and Leok and Lyuba kept it at well below a third of the maximum velocity. Beyond the smudged rim of the horizon, past the fields and the treetops, Venedikt began to catch the glitter and shift of the sea.

*

Encased in his crowded coffin, aware of the pressing down of at least one human body on the lid, Purkiss felt the claustrophobia ram its suffocating fist down his throat. All that stopped him from crying out, pounding on the wood inches from his face, was the knowledge of what would follow.

Instead he concentrated on his phone, staring at the backlit blue face as though by force of will he could summon a signal into being. By his watch they had been airborne for ten minutes. Assuming they were heading out to sea, as he suspected, they would by his estimate still be over land, and certainly potentially in range of a phone mast.

It was ingenious, he had to admit it, now that he understood what they were going to do. Purkiss was no expert on missile systems but he remembered reading something about the new Israeli development, a missile that could reach its target at a range of fifteen miles without the target’s having to be in sight of the person operating the launcher. The exclusion zone for air traffic around the War Memorial had a radius of ten kilometres, Elle had said. Fifteen miles was twenty-five kilometres. There’d be plenty to spare.

He blinked, moved the phone an inch back from his face to make sure of what he thought he’d seen. A single bar had crept into the upper left hand corner of the screen. Weak, but a signal.

He had already composed the text message a few minutes earlier. He pressed “send”. As he waited, the words that he assumed to be Estonian for “sending message” flashing at the top of the screen, their pulse almost mocking in its languor –
don’t get your hopes up, friend
– he reread the message.

It’s Purkiss. I’m hidden on board a Black Hawk heading out over the sea. They plan to use a long-range missile to make the hit. They have Fallon prisoner. I believe they have him on board & intend to leave his body in the wreckage of the chopper so it looks like SIS was responsible. You have to alert the authorities & they need to find us & shoot us down.