Ratcatcher

THIRTY-NINE



The Jacobin stood at the wheel of the boat, his free hand raised in a gesture of non-aggression. The men in the approaching boat were watching him with curiosity rather than hostility. He glanced across and up at the distant helicopter, now side-on as it swung in its long arc to face the shore, and raised his hand in that direction. Kuznetsov would have spotted him, notified the men in the boat.

A hundred metres or so separated him from the boat. He let go of the wheel and cupped his hands around his mouth, called, ‘You have to warn Kuznetsov. Tell him Purkiss is on board the helicopter.’

His voice came out more weakly than he’d expected. The rumble of the water and the larger boat’s engine drowned him out. One of the men on the boat cupped a hand to his ear and shook his head. Frustrated, the Jacobin sat and applied acceleration.

His engine was racing more noisily than it should have, until he realised the noise wasn’t coming from his boat but from another, a similar size to his, approaching from the south. The men in the larger boat were beginning to shout and point.

The Jacobin felt the tilt of disorientation: no fleet of military vehicles, just a speed boat like his own, with what looked like a two-man crew. Through eyes filmed with fatigue and pain and salt air he focused on the faces behind the arc of windscreen. One was a woman’s, Elle’s.



*



Through the front cockpit windows between Lyuba and Leok, Venedikt saw the lights of the city, awake for several hours by now, ten kilometres away. From the east, sunlight was leaking through the cloud cover and spilling glittering tendrils across the surface of the water. The sea below the helicopter was roiling, bewildered and furious at the sudden conjunction of three interlopers.

Venedikt had been distracted by the Englishman’s approach and hadn’t noticed the advance of the second speed boat until Lyuba had called out. He’d taken his eyes away from the binoculars, then immediately reapplied them. The woman was steering while the man, Purkiss’s crony, had lifted his assault rifle over the top of the windscreen. In the larger boat the men were already hefting their own weapons into position across the back rail of the craft.

It took Venedikt a moment to realise that Purkiss’s man was levelling his rifle not at Raskov and his men in the boat, but upwards at the Black Hawk.

The helicopter was perhaps sixty metres above the surface of the sea, the approaching speed boat almost half a kilometre distant. It meant that the Black Hawk was at the limit of the AK-74’s effective range, but Venedikt flinched as the characteristic clatter of the rifle cut through the whap of the rotors even at this distance and tiny streaks of noise whispered past the fuselage. Leok banked the chopper to the left and upwards. Venedikt struggled to keep his feet, gripping the back of the pilot’s seat while with his other hand he swung the binoculars. He saw that Raskov and his men had opened fire themselves, no longer caring about the range now that the Black Hawk had come under fire. Crazily, Purkiss’s man wasn’t returning their fire, but was still aiming at the Black Hawk, now impossibly beyond reach, a modern Don Quixote tilting at his own particular windmill.

In his ear Dobrynin yelled, ‘Now.’ Venedikt looked at his watch. Seven fifty-eight.

He stepped forward into the cockpit, shouldered Ilkun aside, and crouched at the controls.



*



Close as he was to the engines, Purkiss couldn’t at first be certain that he was hearing the remote noise of automatic fire. Above him, Fallon thumped hard several times on the lid of the bench and he knew it was happening.

He felt the Black Hawk veer and yaw, felt rather than heard the ping of something off the undercarriage. Kendrick had hit it, he thought, even though he was probably too far away to do any damage. With the swinging of the chopper came a sudden creak in the bench lid and the thump of a body hitting the floor. Purkiss knew it was Fallon.

He released the breath he’d drawn and exploded upwards, flinging the lid up and out. He registered shock on the face turned towards him. A familiar one, Dobrynin, the man with the claw hand with whom he’d had such an urbane discussion in his office just the previous afternoon. Purkiss had the SIG Sauer up and levelled. He fired twice, catching Dobrynin in the chest with both shots, slamming him back against the partition that separated the cabin from the back of the pilot’s seat. At Purkiss’s feet Fallon rolled and gasped, hands fastened behind him. Purkiss stepped over him.

In the cockpit Kuznetsov squatted at some sort of apparatus that looked like it had been added to the basic design of the craft. A launcher. The launcher. Kuznetsov glanced round. Purkiss raised the pistol.

The chopper rolled then, to the right, almost through ninety degrees. Purkiss was flung off his feet and crashed against the cabin door. The world tipped as the helicopter was righted again, and somebody came charging through into the cabin. Not Kuznetsov but Lyuba Ilkun.

Her foot pistoned into Purkiss’s abdomen. He doubled and twisted to protect against another blow, but she was reaching past him for the release on the door. The blast of air was torrential and terrible in its cold suddenness. She shouted and the craft gave a jerk again, expert handling by the pilot, he had to admit in a detached, crazy way.

Then he was tumbling through the gap out into the grey whipping void, away from Ilkun’s triumphant, yelling face.



*



The Jacobin pulled on the wheel, taking the boat acutely to the right, away from the melee ahead. Kuznetsov’s men were answering Kendrick with artillery of their own. It appeared he had given up on his ambition of bringing down the Black Hawk, was ducking low beneath the screen of the speed boat while Elle held it steady, no longer accelerating, keeping a distance. The cacophony was unbearable, a hammering magnified by the immense body of water beneath it.

The Jacobin paid little attention to the gun battle. He was looking up at the helicopter. Something was happening there. It had shaken and twitched even after it had stopped being fired upon. He didn’t think it had been seriously hit, so why the acrobatics? The missile hadn’t been fired yet.

His watch said three minutes past eight. There was time, but it was running out.



*



Lyuba yelled, ‘He’s gone.’ Venedikt let out an inarticulate grunt of acknowledgement. Nothing was going to stop them now, nothing.

He huddled over the launcher and studied the screen where the co-ordinates had been pre-programmed. The missile was designed for use against tanks. As such, the gunner had the ability to reprogramme the co-ordinates after launch, as the target moved. There was no such need in this case because the target was stationary.

Beside him, Leok had tilted the Black Hawk’s nose upwards to provide lift for the missile once it had been fired so as to counteract the pull of gravity during its flight. Venedikt raised his head, sighted for the last time across the expanse of water towards the distant city lights, seeming to hear the roaring of the crowds across the kilometres and the walls of noise in between. It sounded like destiny calling.

He lowered his gaze to the launcher.



*



Purkiss fell, and with him fell Claire, her body sliding to the floor from Fallon’s grasp, and Abby, flung tumbling by the seam of gunfire.

He was cold, colder than he’d ever been before. He could see they were cold too, and lonely in death. He reached out to them, flung his arms to catch them. He felt unimaginable pain, but only in one arm.

He opened his eyes. The pain was in his left forearm just above the wrist where it had struck the lower lip of the doorway. Blood from the lacerated skin sleeved his arm almost to the elbow. There was no deformity, no suggestion of a break. His fingers gripped the edge.

He hung swinging beneath the helicopter, the roar of its engines trying to shake him off, its undercarriage immense at this angle. The wind whipped up by the rotors was furious. He felt as if the machine were trying to prise his left shoulder out of its socket.

He didn’t look down. To do so would be to be lost. The chopper was tilted very slightly to its left which meant that he couldn’t see up through the open doorway. He knew that at any minute Ilkun was going to close the door. His fingers would be pared loose. It would be the end.

Purkiss clenched his teeth, swung his other arm up and round so that his right hand gripped the edge of the doorway. For an instant the air beneath him took on the solid, springy character of a trampoline. He pulled upwards. His torso made it over the lip of the doorway.

Ilkun was reaching for the door. He heaved himself so that his centre of gravity was on the right side of the doorway, got an arm around her legs. Using his knees as a fulcrum, he rose.

He sent her over his left shoulder with almost balletic grace, through the open door. Her enraged shout dwindled into the storm of noise behind and below him as the sea received her.



*



In a corner of the cabin Fallon had hauled himself into a sitting position and was trying to stand, handicapped by his secured wrists. Purkiss charged forward into the cockpit. Kuznetsov was hunched over the launcher.

Purkiss moved in, but Kuznetsov half-turned and the gun in his hand fired. Purkiss ducked away. The bullet sang past into the cabin. He kicked at Kuznetsov’s wrist, caught it. The gun spun in the air. Purkiss caught it and followed up by grabbing Kuznetsov by the collar and hauling his bulk backwards. The man didn’t resist as much as Purkiss had expected.

He caught a glimpse of the big man’s face. He was smiling. His lips moved.

‘It’s done.’

Purkiss stared through the front window of the cockpit, saw the smoky contrail of the shape that was streaking away, and understood he was too late.

The missile was launched.





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