Tom Cain - Carver

There were four small open tubes on the side of the newly formed canister. Schultz took the four plastic sticks from the bag and inserted them in the tubes. Now the canister had legs to stand on.

Schultz undid the wire tie holding the loops of the fuse wire together, and unwound it. Holding one end of the wire in his hand, he placed the canister on the ground, lining it up with the pegged string.

‘Oi, Crippsy! Wake up, you idle bastard!’ Schultz said.

There was a laugh in his ear. ‘What do you want, boss?’

‘Take a look out your passenger window. Can you see the Krakatoa?’

Cripps grunted as he shifted his position. ‘Hang about… Yeah, if I look for it I can see something through the grass, and obviously I know what it is, right? But no other fucker’s gonna have a Scooby.’

Schultz chuckled. ‘No, not till they get it right up the Aris. Then they’ll fucking know all about it.’

One thing you can count on in any combat situation is that nothing will go exactly according to plan. The ability to adapt to changing circumstances, and improvise accordingly, is therefore vital. Derek Choi was no soldier, but he was well versed in the need to think on his feet. Carver had slipped his original trap. But now he might have run right into another.

For Choi, too, had been studying plans and photographs of the All England Club and its surrounding area. When he saw Carver disappear into the media centre stairwell, and then take the stairs heading down, he knew exactly where he was heading. He snapped out a series of orders to his most trusted subordinate: a thickset, shaven-headed tough called Lin Zhuang. ‘You and the others will be the hunting dogs and I will be the hunter. Follow Carver and the woman. Drive them towards the unloading bay. I will be waiting to snare them. If you kill them first I will not be displeased. Understand?’

Lin nodded.

‘Then go.’

Lin and the other four agents raced away down the stairs. Choi turned on his heels and went the other way. He ran about a hundred metres, and then he, too, headed down into the depths of the earth.

There was a small landing at the bottom of the stairs, with a single, duck-egg blue door, which had a round glass porthole. Carver took a look through it, then pushed it open with his shoulder, glancing back up the stairwell as he did. The sound of scurrying footsteps was clearly audible, coming from above them. The Chinese were on their way.

Carver raised his gun to cover the stairs as he gestured for Alix to go through the door. He followed her into one of Wimbledon’s underground service tunnels. The door was positioned close to a right-angled bend, so that the tunnel ran away straight ahead of them and to the right. The concrete floor was shiny and slick from the constant passage of feet and wheels. The walls were made of bare breeze blocks. A couple of doors, painted in the same duck-egg blue, were set into the right-hand wall. The nearest one had a sign next to it that read, ‘Ball Boys and Girls’. The one beyond it displayed one word: ‘Pilates’.

On the left, two massive black pipes ran all along the bottom of the wall, with metal racks above them that were used to carry countless, loosely hung strands of multicoloured wire. A number of smaller red-painted pipes were suspended from the ceiling, along with yet more wires. They were all held in place by metal frames like horizontal ladders, from which hung a line of harsh white neon strip lights that ran as far as the eye could see.

‘Let’s go,’ said Carver, running down the tunnel up ahead.

Alix followed him, her heels clattering against the concrete floor. As they rounded a left-hand corner Carver gestured at her to stop and get to the side of the tunnel, just behind him. He took up a position by one of the pipes, wishing that Schultz were down in the tunnel with him, instead of sitting on a bench by Wimbledon Common. Give the two of them a couple of sub-machine guns and a bunch of grenades, and they’d have the Chinese sorted in no time. Doing it solo was a little more complicated.

Carver was as close as he could get to the angle of the corner, leaning slightly out into the tunnel to get a view of the door from the stairs. It opened and one of the Chinese stepped through it, holding his gun out in front of him. He stopped for a moment, saw no one else in the tunnel, and lowered his gun as he relaxed a fraction, and that was when Carver stepped out and fired the two shots that killed him.

Carver put another two rounds through the porthole to discourage the men waiting the other side, then immediately turned — and almost ran right into a squat, white, open buggy that was coming down the tunnel towards them. Thanks to its electric motor the buggy was virtually noiseless. In fact the loudest sound coming from it was the music seeping from the earphones of the skinny, acne-faced lad at the wheel. He seemed lost in what he was hearing, his attention long since dulled by the constant repetition of trips up and down the same stretch of tunnel. He barely registered Carver’s presence until he was two metres away, and then his dull working day suddenly got a whole lot more exciting. He slammed on the brakes and came to a halt within a few centimetres of Carver, who simply put a foot in front of the buggy, leaned forward, and used one hand to shove his gun in the young driver’s face, while the other ripped the earphones from his head.

‘Get out, now,’ said Carver. ‘That way.’

The driver nodded frantic agreement, then scrambled across the seat towards the wall where Alix was standing.

‘Now hold out your hands in front of you,’ Carver told him.

From round the corner came the sound of the door to the stairs being kicked open.

Carver pulled a pair of the yellow plastic handcuffs from his trouser pocket and gave them to Alix.

Now a voice could be heard barking out orders in Chinese.

Carver nodded at the wall and said, ‘Tie him to those racks.’

There were distant footsteps, getting fainter — men running down the tunnel in the wrong direction. Then more commands.

Alix nodded and slipped one of the handcuff loops around the driver’s left hand, tightening it hard enough to make him wince.

More footsteps, coming in their direction.

Alex passed the cuff around the back of one of the upright struts that supported the wire racks, then took the driver’s right hand and secured it.

As she did so, Carver got behind the wheel of the buggy and executed a quick three-point turn, so that it was facing back the way it had just come. He slid across the seat so that Alix could get behind the wheel.

‘Floor it,’ he said.

The buggy trundled away, gradually picking up pace towards its top speed of sixteen miles per hour. Carver turned around in his seat so that he was facing backwards, half-kneeling with one knee on the seat, his weight pushed forward so that his thigh was braced against the vertical seat-rest. He reached around to the small of his back and took out his gun. Then he held it out in front of him, sighting at a point in the middle of the corner round which the Chinese were about to appear.

The footsteps got louder.

The kid tied to the wire-rack was darting his head from side to side like one of the spectators on the courts up above them, staring with terrified wide eyes at Carver, then back towards the sound of the approaching footsteps. He started desperately trying to clamber up and over the pipes to give himself a little cover.

‘OK,’ Carver told Alix, ‘hit the brakes.’

The two fastest Chinese came racing around the corner. The first almost skidded to a halt as he spotted Carver up ahead, aiming a gun directly at him, and there was almost a touch of slapstick about the way the next runner crashed into him, nearly knocking him off his feet. But that comedy moment saved the first runner’s life. It meant that Carver’s first shot missed him, and the second hit him high on his right shoulder, smashing into the joint between the shoulder blade and the upper arm. The impact knocked him backwards. He screamed in agony and his gun dropped from his limp, useless arm. But he was still alive.