And then his blood turned to ice as he realized Kuan hadn’t been bluffing — the timer was real. It said sixty seconds and was counting down right in front of him.
Kuan saw him and steered a hard right. The three-wheeled rickshaw tipped up on its right rear wheel for a second and Riley crashed to his knees in the rear footwell, his face now only inches from Madan’s prototype doomsday weapon.
Fifty seconds.
He heard Kuan laugh and looked up to see the Chinese Triad boss steering the rickshaw straight for the river. At Varanasi, the Ganges was wide and filthy. Human waste in the river was hundreds of times above the Indian Government’s safety laws, and if the bomb when into the water he would never find it.
Using the crash bar above his head, the Australian swung into the cab and launched his left fist into the side of Kuan’s face. The impact was hard enough to knock the Chinese drug baron clean out of the Sazgar, and Riley stomped on the brakes with his left boot and brought the tiny vehicle to a skidding halt just a few yards from the river.
A crowd had gathered now, but Riley had no time to waste. He looked at the unconscious heap of Lee Kuan on the road behind the Sazgar and wanted to finish him off for good, but he knew there were only seconds left before the entire city of Varanasi and everyone in it was blasted to pieces.
Rushing around to the back of the rickshaw he stared with wide, disbelieving eyes at the readout on the Yama prototype: forty seconds. Beside it was a small button marked: ABORT.
“I hope this abort button isn’t a massive piss-take, my friends…”
He pushed the abort button, but nothing happened. Had he made some sort of mistake? He hit it again but the clock continued to run down — tiny red numerals counting down in a digital blur to the destruction of millions.
“What the..?”
Twenty seconds.
He pushed his finger down again, but the timer continued.
Ten seconds.
Then he shook his head and sighed a breath of relief. “Riley, you fuckin’ idiot!”
He brought his finger up and hit the enter button, and the digital timer beeped and stopped dead: three seconds.
“Fuckin’ computers!” he said, and turned to see half a dozen armed policemen encircling Lee Kuan.
“Guess what, Diana?” he said through the headset.
“What?”
“Am I the best or am I the best?”
“You did it?”
“What do you reckon, mate?”
39
Hundreds of miles to the east, John “Mitch” Decker and Professor Selena Moore ran across the flat grass airfield of the Svarga Space Center and closed in on Rakesh Madan.
The Indian billionaire ordered Kaleka to stay on the airfield and keep them at bay while he sailed away into the night, but his loyal servant had other ideas and started to climb into the trike.
“You’re too heavy!” Madan said.
“I’m coming with you!”
“No, you’ll slow me down.”
Madan fired his gun into Kaleka’s heart and propelled him off the trike. His second-in-command collapsed in a screaming heap on the runway as his boss rammed the throttle forward and sped off along the tarmac.
Decker and Selena wasted no time worrying about the mortally wounded Kaleka, and climbed into a two-seater trike parked up beside the one Madan had taken.
“You do know how to fly one of these things, I take it?” Selena said.
“I could fly a diamond safe, lady,” Decker said as he placed his hand on the throttle and released the brake. “Hold on.”
“Hold on to what?”
“To anything you can find.”
He pushed the throttle to full-power and placed his hands on the control bar in front of his face. They gained airspeed surprisingly fast and Decker pushed the bar forward to raise the aircraft into the air. Selena gasped as they raced away from the ground and the American responded by pulling the bar back a little to maintain an even airspeed. She had flown too many times to count, but never in anything as small as the trike, and it felt more like a fairground ride than an aircraft.
“Pretty choppy up here,” Selena said.
“This is nothing,” Decker said. “Wait till we go through that thermal column over there.”
“How do you know there’s a thermal column over there?”
“Because Madan just flew through it — look.”
She looked ahead and saw the Indian’s trike bouncing around violently a few hundred yards ahead of them. “He’s being thrown all over the place!”
“Thermal column,” Decker repeated, slower this time.
“And we’re going into that thing on purpose?”
“You want to catch this guy or not?”
Selena was quiet for a few seconds. “Carry on, Mr Decker.”
“Thought you might say that.”
When Decker throttled up the trike and turned it into the thermal column, Selena felt the difference immediately. What had been a smooth flight was now choppy and violent, and she felt her stomach turning as the tiny microlight bobbed up and down like a cork on the ocean.
The Rotax engine just a few inches behind her head whined louder as Decker increased power and fiddled with the trimmer control. Because they’d had no time to find helmets, the wind rushed over her face and whipped her hair around. Looking below she gulped as she realized there was only one safety belt between her and a six hundred foot drop all the way down to the airfield far beneath them. She didn’t exactly feel safe, and Decker’s love of flying seemed even crazier at this precise moment in time.
Decker’s greater experience as a pilot meant he was able to manipulate the thermals to gain a speed advantage over Madan, and now he shot towards the Indian’s trike with only one thing on his mind.
Ahead of them, Madan turned in his seat and saw they were gaining. His response was to draw a handgun and fire it at them indiscriminately.
“Holy shit!” Decker yelled, and pushed the control bar hard to the left. Their trike responded instantly and pulled over to port as the bullets traced past them with inches to spare.
“I’ve had just about enough of this arsehole,” Selena said.
Decker raised his eyebrows. “And I thought you were a lady.”
“Even a lady can be pushed too far,” she said. “And that just happened. Now, which of these is the safety catch and which is the trigger?”
Decker narrowed his eyes and turned his head to see the Englishwoman pulling the gun from his holster. “Woah!”
“What? You wanted me to be more assertive, didn’t you?”
“Sure but…”
“But nothing. As you Americans say, Madan’s arse is grass.”
Decker winced. “That’s not exactly how we say it.”
Selena’s reply was a very loud and inaccurate shot from the handgun.
Decker scowled and pulled his head away from the deafening gunshot, and then he realized Madan was going into a dive. “Dammit!”
“What’s the silly bugger doing now?”
“He’s trying to gain some speed by putting the thing into a dive.”
“Are you sure he’s not just trying to kill himself?”
“Pretty sure — he’s pulling up. Look!”
Far ahead of them now, and well below, she saw Madan’s trike pull up at a sharp angle just a few hundred feet from the ground and level off as he steered it over the top of the airfield.
“Where’s he going?” Selena said.