‘Look!’ said Nina. Flashing lights on the runway turned out to belong to the jet that had brought them to North Korea as it accelerated to take-off speed. Seconds later it was airborne, banking hard to turn north. ‘Dammit! There goes our ride.’
‘I wasn’t really expecting they’d give us a lift home,’ said Eddie before returning his focus to the rapidly approaching checkpoint. ‘Oh, bollocks.’
‘What is it?’
‘The unwelcoming committee!’ Armed men were dragging concrete blocks in front of the gate, a dazzling searchlight turning towards the TEL.
Nina raised a hand to block the glare. ‘I don’t suppose this windshield is bulletproof?’
‘Nope, found that out the hard way.’
‘So what do we do?’
Eddie dropped down through the gears. ‘This thing’s got sixteen wheels — so it’s a four-by-four-by-four!’
He swung the transporter hard to the right, cutting diagonally across a patch of rough open ground towards the fence. Realising their target was going to avoid the roadblock, the soldiers opened fire. Nina and Eddie ducked as bullets clanged against the truck’s side. The rear door’s window shattered behind the Englishman. He winced, but held his foot on the accelerator. More rounds struck home, but now the fence loomed in the headlights. ‘Hold on!’
The transporter crashed through the barrier, mowing down support poles and shredding the chain-link. Coils of razor wire lashed like whips at the cab, the windscreen cracking — then they were clear. Eddie turned the vehicle towards the runway’s end. Bullets were still plunking off its flank, but the checkpoint was already falling away behind them.
He sat up, seeing the white-and-blue Antonov in the distance. The other TEL had now moved away from it, ground crew doing the same. ‘The bloody thing’s getting ready for take-off.’
‘How can we stop it?’ Nina asked. ‘Block the runway?’
‘If we stop, we’ll get shot, and they’ll just drive the truck away. We’ve got to take out the whole plane.’
‘How?’ She held up one of the dead crew’s Type 58 rifles. ‘Shoot it with this? It’d be like a mosquito trying to take down an elephant!’
Eddie stared at the freighter, a memory of a similar situation coming to him. ‘Take the wheel,’ he said, opening his door.
‘What are you doing?’
He waved for her to move into his place. ‘Something really stupid.’
‘Oh, so business as usual, then?’
He grinned, then clambered out on to the top step to make his way around the front of the cab.
Kang looked on as the missile was lowered, with agonising slowness, into its waiting cradle. Two other spaces sat empty alongside it. The various cases containing the three warheads and their plutonium spheres had been secured at the front of the hold along with numerous crates of equipment and spare parts — and the gold. The two wooden boxes formed a miniature barricade beside the missile’s nose. He gave them a greedy look before turning to the loadmaster. ‘How long? Hurry!’
‘Soon, soon,’ the nervous Russian assured him. He called out to another crew member at the winch controls, who responded with a helpless shrug. ‘Very soon.’
A soldier hurried into the hold. ‘Sir! The transporter just smashed through the fence. It’s coming straight at us.’
The colonel ran to a side hatch and looked out. Headlights were visible in the distance. ‘Shit!’ he growled, hurrying back to the loadmaster. The missile was now in its cradle, the chains going slack. ‘We take off now!’
‘No, no!’ protested the Russian. ‘Not safe! Have to fix straps, chain down—’
‘Do it on the move.’ Kang shouted an order. The other soldiers in the hold instantly responded by snapping their rifles to firing position, all aiming at the loadmaster. ‘Tell the pilots to take off now, or I kill you.’ He switched to Korean to issue another command to Sek. ‘Take three men and get up to the cockpit. I want this plane moving in the next sixty seconds.’
The captain saluted, then he and three of his team raced for the ladder to the Antonov’s upper deck at the rear of the hold. Kang faced the loadmaster again. ‘Well? Do it!’
The Russian licked his dry lips, then shakily drew a walkie-talkie from his belt.
Eddie reached the winch. He let out a few feet of steel cable and supported the hook on one shoulder, then looped the line around its shank. Once it was secure, he started up the winch again, unspooling more cable and collecting it into long coils.
‘What are you doing?’ Nina shouted over the engine’s roar.
‘We’ve got to make sure the warheads never get out of here!’ he yelled back.
‘How?’ One terrifying solution came to her. ‘You… you want to crash into the plane?’
‘We could, but that’d be a bit bad for us too! And we might not even do enough damage; it’s a big-arse plane. But if it gets into the air and then comes straight back down again, really hard…’ He stopped the winch, estimating that he had enough slack in the cable to work with, then glanced over his shoulder. ‘Buggeration and fuckery!’
Nina saw the cause of his alarm. ‘It’s setting off!’ The Antonov had left its parking position, heading for the taxiway. It was apparently leaving in a hurry, the aft clamshell doors open and the rear ramp still being raised.
Eddie quickly clambered back to the driver’s side of the cab, hanging the heavy steel loops from one of the roof’s spotlights and signalling for Nina to move over. She slid sideways, her husband climbing in to take her place. ‘Whatever you’re planning, it might be a good time to rethink it,’ she said nervously.
‘Same plan, just a bit more dangerous. And by a bit, I mean loads. If I can lasso the landing gear before it takes off, it’ll drag the transporter with it. It might be a big plane, but this truck’s pretty chunky too; having it hanging off the wheels’ll seriously fuck up its aerodynamics and hopefully make it crash. I was going to put the cable across the runway and try to catch it as it went past, but now we’ll have to chase it.’
‘Which means,’ Nina said unhappily, ‘we’ll both have to be in the transporter when the plane takes off.’
He gave her a look of grim resignation, putting one of his hands on hers. ‘Yeah. I know.’
She stared sadly ahead, seeing not the aircraft but an indelible image from her own mind. ‘Goodbye, Macy,’ she whispered, a tear trickling down her cheek.
There was nothing he could say in response to that. Instead he angled the TEL to intercept the aircraft, the transporter jolting over the rough expanse of grass. ‘Okay, you take over again,’ he said. ‘I’ll climb out and get ready to chuck the cable. Come alongside the plane, and get as close as you can to the wheels.’
They hurriedly made another seat swap, Eddie clambering back on to the step and closing the door behind him. The plane grew ever larger. ‘Damn, that thing is big,’ Nina said.
Eddie couldn’t disagree. The An-124’s high-mounted wings and broad belly gave it a hulking, overbearing appearance, a towering bully straight from the Cold War. Adding to the impression was its undercarriage; rather than separate sets of landing gear spread out beneath the fuselage, as on an airliner, the Antonov went for brute strength, five massive double-tyred legs in a row on each side of its hull. It even had two sets of nose wheels rather than just one.
All the better, as far as he was concerned. The more wheels, the more chance he had of snagging one. ‘Okay!’ he shouted as the transporter bounded over a drainage ditch on to the taxiway. ‘Catch up with it!’
Nina swung the TEL around — discovering that its twelve-wheel steering system turned it more sharply than she’d expected. Eddie yelped as centrifugal force threw him outwards, the looped cable shimmying around the spotlight. ‘Careful!’