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.
Forty
Keeping the speedboat circling, the Jacobin watched the sky, saw Purkiss dangling from the doorway like a marionette with all but one of its strings cut, saw the chopper tip nose-up in the firing position, then watched Purkiss haul himself back inside the aircraft. An instant later a woman’s body tumbled flailing, cracked against the water’s surface.
The smaller speed boat was veering away. The small-arms fire had stopped and one of the men in the larger boat was levelling something heavy propped across his shoulder.
The grenade left the launcher with a sucking sound. A second later the rear of the speed boat exploded, a black and orange ball splitting the grey of the water, the roar eclipsing even the after-effect of the gunfire. The Jacobin saw the man, Kendrick, lifted cartwheeling into the air to plunge amongst the debris. He couldn’t see Elle. The fibreglass front of the speedboat spun drunkenly before the waves claimed it.
From above, layered on top of the bulky sound of the explosion, came a whoosh and a prolonged hiss. The Black Hawk rocked slightly as the missile erupted from its cylinder on the stub wing.