The man who had run at Eddie cried out in relief as he found a handhold. He clung to it as his teammates skidded past and dropped from the ramp, howls of raw terror receding into the darkness. Gold bars clattered after them, one almost hitting him. He jerked aside, then looked up to see Nina and Eddie higher up the sloping floor.
North Korean military training was brutal, the punishment for a soldier who lost his weapon severe, and the man had taken the harsh lessons to heart. He was still clutching his rifle in his other hand, and now he swung it towards them—
Nina yanked at the quick-release buckles on the straps securing the gold crate, grabbing one of the floor rings as the heavy wooden box fell away behind her.
It hurtled down the hold straight at the soldier. He fired, but the bullets hit only wood and precious metal—
The crate hit him with a bone-breaking crack and swept him away. It flipped over and its contents flew out, dozens of gleaming golden bricks cascading from the Antonov’s rear doors.
Jet engines thundered overhead as the North Korean soldiers who had returned from the muster point closed on their fleeing quarry. The slave workers from Facility 17 had existed on a starvation level, given barely as much food as they needed to perform their back-breaking tasks; now only the adrenalin of fear kept them moving through the dark woods.
But the hunt was almost over, stumbling figures picked out by their pursuers’ flashlight beams. ‘Stay where you are!’ the squad commander yelled. Several prisoners reacted with fearful obedience to his voice, halting and cowering. The braver ones kept going. ‘If you surrender now, you will live! If you run, you will die! This is your only warning!’
More of the exhausted fugitives stopped. ‘Round them up and kill them,’ the commander told his men quietly as they advanced—
One of the soldiers beside him burst apart as something fell from the sky and hit him like a meteorite.
The commander had just enough time to register the gleam of gold in the bottom of the crater that had erupted where the man had been standing — before he and the rest of his troops were obliterated by a hard rain of bullion.
The multi-million-dollar downpour ceased just before it reached the slave workers. They stared in bewilderment at the carnage, still afraid… but the fear gradually evaporated to be replaced by jubilation as they realised that not only were they now armed, most of the soldiers’ weapons still intact, but they were also very, very rich.
Even in North Korea, gold could buy freedom.
The metal hill from which Nina and Eddie were hanging flattened out as the pilots regained control and pushed the Antonov back to a level attitude. The missile slipped in its cradle, metal grinding on metal.
Eddie stood and looked around. Nina was still gripping a cargo ring where the gold crate had been. A couple of spilled bars had ended up wedged behind the second container next to it. He turned to see how many of the North Koreans had escaped plunging out into the void—
A soldier hurled himself over the rocket at the Yorkshireman.
Eddie fell on to his back. The man straddled his chest and clamped his hands around his throat, snarling in Korean. Eddie tried to force him away, but the pain from his cracked rib was like a red-hot spearhead. The man squeezed harder—
A shadow swept over the pair. The Korean looked up — as Nina clapped his skull between two gold bars. The crack of bone was loud over the ringing thud of the double impact. He slumped on top of Eddie, his clutching hands going limp.
The Englishman gasped, then shoved the unconscious man away. Nina dropped the gold and crouched beside him, seeing the bloody cut across his chest. ‘You’re bleeding!’
‘It’s not as bad as it looks,’ he wheezed. ‘Least I hope it’s not, or I’m in trouble! Are there any more of ’em?’
Nina checked the hold’s other side. Nobody was in sight. She looked beneath the cradles to see if anyone was crouching behind the missile. The deck was clear. ‘Can’t see anybody.’
‘Okay, help me up.’ She brought him to a sitting position. ‘Ow! God, that hurt. I’ve cracked a rib. As if I wasn’t in a bad enough way already.’
‘We’ve got to bandage that cut. There must be a first-aid kit somewhere.’
‘Probably in the cockpit, and I doubt they’ll just let us in if we knock politely.’ Another pained groan as he used the cradle to lever himself upright. Nina stood as well. ‘We’ll have to—’
He saw movement behind her, someone coming around the stacks of cargo at the front of the hold.
Sek.
Eddie shoved Nina away as the captain fired. The bullet tore into his upper thigh. She crashed against the damaged plutonium case, her husband collapsing beside the fallen soldier.
Sek advanced on them. With Eddie down, he turned his gun towards Nina—
She remembered how he had acted in the particle accelerator’s control room — and threw open the case’s lid to expose the plutonium sphere inside.
He recoiled like a vampire from a crucifix. The ingrained secrecy and compartmentalisation of the activities at Facility 17 and the North Korean military in general meant that all he knew about nuclear materials was that anything marked with the black-and-yellow radiation warning symbol was dangerous, an invisible killer. It took a moment for him to overcome his fear and realise that Nina had not melted or burst into flames—
A moment of which Eddie took full advantage.
The unconscious soldier’s sidearm was still in its holster. The Yorkshireman snatched it out and fired three rapid shots into Sek’s chest. The Korean fell back against the crates, blood spouting from the closely spaced entry wounds over his heart.
‘Oh, Jesus!’ Nina cried as she saw Eddie’s own bullet hole. She scrambled back to him, pressing her palm over it. He roared in pain. ‘I think the bullet’s still in there!’
‘Leave it, leave it,’ he rasped, clenching his jaw. ‘Get the gun and go up to the cockpit. We can’t let ’em land back at the airbase, or anywhere else in North Korea. If they do, we’re dead.’
She took the pistol. ‘You’re giving up on the kamikaze mission, then?’
‘We survived hanging from the back of a fucking jet in a truck, so I’m not going to let some malnourished little cock-end in a stupid hat kill me after all that!’ He glanced towards Sek’s corpse. ‘I’ll get his gun and follow you up.’
‘Will you be able to climb the ladder with a bullet in your leg?’
‘I’ll have to if I don’t want a bullet in my head. Go on.’
‘Okay. Oh, and by the way?’ She kissed him. ‘I love you.’
He smiled. ‘Never doubted it for a second.’ Nina grinned back, then waited for him to put his own hand over the wound before starting towards the rear ladder.
She had just passed the missile when a voice boomed through the hold. ‘Attention! Attention!’ said a man with a strong Russian accent. ‘The cockpit is locked, and we will not let you enter. We will land at Tonyong airbase as soon as the runway is clear. You cannot escape. Drop your guns and surrender.’
Nina spotted a loudspeaker mounted on a ceiling beam, a closed-circuit camera beside it. Other cameras covered the rest of the cavernous space. ‘You think he’s bluffing?’ she called back to Eddie.
He supported himself against the cradle, wincing as torn muscle pressed against the bullet in his leg. ‘This used to be a military plane, so the cockpit door’s probably bulletproof. Shit!’ He slumped back, defeated. ‘Maybe we should just blow up the missile after all, make sure nobody gets it. Or chuck the warheads and the plutonium out of the back. We might get lucky and have ’em land where nobody can reach—’