‘Let’s get out of here,’ Yoyo whispered in his ear.
‘Then he’ll get us,’ Jericho whispered back. ‘We won’t get away from him another time.’
They couldn’t escape for ever. Eventually they would have to finish off the blond guy, particularly since Jericho had no doubt that they would have to deal with Zhao sooner or later. If that was the man’s name. One of the hitmen had called him Kenny.
Kenny Zhao Bide?
His gaze darted around. Right below them gaped the maw of the third converter, wide open as if the steel pot were waiting to be fed. A baby dinosaur, Jericho thought. That was what the pot looked like to him. Little birds crouched in the nest with their beaks wide open, greedily demanding worms and beetles, and what were birds if not miniaturised, feathered dinosaurs? This one was massive. With an appetite for something bigger. For human beings.
A moment later the blond guy’s bike approached and obstructed his view of the converter. The machine was hovering right above the smelting pot, so close that Jericho could have touched the killer’s head with his outstretched arm. A glance at the ceiling would have been enough for the blond guy to see them, but he seemed to have eyes only for the abyss where he assumed the fugitives were hiding.
He bent forward, reached into his arsenal of weapons and pulled out another hand grenade.
‘Hold on tight,’ Jericho said as quietly as possible. Yoyo pressed his upper arm to indicate that she had understood.
The blond guy pulled the pin from the grenade.
Jericho turned on the engine.
The airbike jumped forward and plunged down at the hitman. For a heartbeat Jericho saw him as if in a flash from a camera, his arm raised to throw the primed grenade, head thrown back, eyes wide with amazement, frozen.
Then they crashed straight into him.
Both turbines screamed to life. Jericho boosted thrust. He relentlessly smashed his opponent’s bike against the converter, wrenched the handlebars around and escaped back into the air. The blond guy’s machine plunged still further, somersaulted, crashed against the rim of the opening, was slung up in the air and clattered, dragging its rider with it, into the stygian abyss of the pot. A hollow clank and rattle followed them as they climbed. Desperately trying to get away from the hell that was about to break out, Jericho put his bike at top speed, sending prayers up to the hall ceiling.
Then came the explosion.
A demon rose from the depths of the cauldron, stretched roaring above it and fired out incandescent thermal waves. Its hot breath gripped Jericho and Yoyo and slung the bike through the air. They were dragged upwards, they turned and plunged. A quick sequence of explosions like booming cannons drowned out their cries as the blond guy’s whole arsenal went up, one piece after another. The volcano spat fire in all directions, set half the plant ablaze in an instant, while they hurtled spinning towards the ground and Jericho tugged wildly on the handlebars. The bike looped, scraped along a column and crash-landed onto a platform. Jericho was breathless. Yoyo screamed and almost broke his ribs for fear of being thrown off. Raising sparks, they dashed along the platform, straight towards a wall. He braked, went into reverse thrust. The machine careened violently, altered course and clanged against a balustrade, where it hung vertical for a moment as if he had suspended it neatly from a hook, then it gave a groan and tipped over.
Jericho fell on his back. Yoyo rolled over next to him and hauled herself up. Her left thigh didn’t look great, her trousers in shreds, the skin beneath it torn and bloody. Jericho crept on all fours to the balustrade, grasped the railings and got unsteadily to his feet. All around him everything was on fire. A smell of tar billowed to the ceiling and began to fog the hall.
They had to get out of there.
Yoyo bent double beside him and moaned with pain. He helped her up, as he stared into the thickening wall of smoke. What was that? Something was vaguely taking shape in the roiling clouds, they were brightening. At first he thought it might be another source of fire, but the light was white, spreading evenly, growing in intensity.
The fishlike rump of an airbike pushed its way out of the smoke.
It was Zhao.
As he set his foot on the bottom step of the zigzag stairs, Ye tried to control the trembling of his knee. His glance wandered along the tower of scaffolding to the platform on which the control room rested. All of a sudden he was afraid of what he might see there, so frightened that his legs threatened to give way.
He looked around.
A battered old car, a Toyota, was parked crookedly just below the girderwork, and two motorbikes a little further along. That surprised him. Normally they rode the machines into the adjacent empty building before going up.
He couldn’t take his eyes off the bikes.
One of them was Tony’s. And the other? He wasn’t sure, but he thought it might be Ziyi’s.
Tony – Ziyi—
What were they to expect up there?
Mak was trotting upstairs like a shadow in Xiao-Tong’s wake. Ye cleared his throat.
‘Wait, I’ve got to—’
‘Let’s not hang around,’ she growled. ‘You’ve got us out of bed now—’
‘Terrible time of day,’ Xiao-Tong complained.
‘—so you can bloody well come too.’
Ye wrung his hands. He didn’t know what to do. It was time to tell them Daxiong had mentioned corpses. That something terrible had happened in the control centre. But his tongue clung to his palate, his throat hurt as he swallowed. He opened his lips, and a croak issued from them.
‘I’m coming.’
Daxiong hadn’t come via the old rolling mill. There was a shortcut, at least he hoped it was still possible to get through it. Trains had once criss-crossed the grounds of the plant, shunting-engines with torpedo-shaped wagons that were filled with liquid pig iron after the blast furnace was tapped. From there they had driven their 1400-degree cargo to the converter hall, where the iron was poured into huge pans and from there into the steel smelting pots.
Daxiong followed the tracks. They led at least two kilometres across the open field and disappeared into a tunnel, more of a covered passageway, really, that opened right into the converter hall. Shots were ringing out from there now. He put his foot right down, caught his front wheel in one of the tracks, slipped. The motorbike threw him off. He skidded along on the seat of his trousers, dumbfounded by his own stupidity, jumped to his feet, cursed. He had got off lightly, but the accident had cost him time.
His eyes scoured the sky.
No trace of an airbike. He righted his toppled motorbike and tried to start it. After several attempts and encouraging words, the most frequent of which was Merde!, the machine finally sprang to life, and Daxiong plunged into the darkness of the passageway. What he saw was less than encouraging. A shunting-engine rested, broad and sedate, on one of the two parallel tracks; another was coupled to two torpedo cars. He wouldn’t be able to get by on either side, only the space between the trains was wide enough – but there was something blocking it.
He should have gone through the rolling mill!
Forced to stop, he got off his bike and walked over to the obstruction, which turned out to be a twisted metal frame. Bracing his three-hundredweight bulk against it, he tried to shift it from its position. Further ahead he could see the dim opening beyond which the hall lay. It couldn’t have been more than twenty metres away.
He had to get there.
At that moment there was a third explosion, a salvo this time, much louder than the others. The passageway lit up, something burning flew into it and crashed to the ground. Further explosions followed. As if possessed, Daxiong rattled at the metal frame until at last, with a great creak, it started to give. The thing wasn’t heavy, just hopelessly stuck. He tensed his muscles. All hell must have broken loose through there, flames were blazing. Daxiong panted, pulled and tugged, pushed and shoved, and all of a sudden the metal frame yielded and twisted a little to the side.
Still. Just enough of a gap for him to squeeze through.