Tim Stevens - Ratcatcher

‘That speed boat approaching you,’ said Venedikt. ‘He’s friendly, I think. See what he wants. Don’t attack him unless he attacks you first.’

‘Understood.’

Seven fifty. In ten minutes’ time it would be done.

Still he heard only Kuznetsov’s voice, the words unclear. The tinny patter of radio sound he identified as constant background cheering, like that at a sports match. Purkiss assumed they had the radio on and were using it to monitor events at the site of the meeting.

Close by his ear, through the wood, came two distinct sounds. Taps, rather than creaks.

He held his breath again, waiting.

Just as he decided he’d misheard, they came again.

Two . Fallon was signalling him. Two men, obviously excluding the flight crew.

He didn’t dare tap back to indicate he’d understood.

It was useful information. Even if he didn’t know the precise locations of the two men, having a clear idea of the number of one’s opponents always improved confidence and speed. He’d have surprise on his side, too. The problem was, paradoxically, Fallon. He was seated directly above Purkiss, no doubt still bound. With his weight bearing down, Purkiss had no way of lifting the lid of the bench.

Another bluff was needed, another faked seizure or faint of some kind similar to the one Purkiss himself had pulled off in the basement. If Fallon managed to slide off the bench onto the floor of the cabin, Purkiss would be able to emerge quickly enough that he might get the drop on Kuznetsov and the other man. But he had no way of communicating this to Fallon, no way of knowing if Fallon might think of it himself.

The screen of the phone, nearly forgotten on the periphery of his vision, lit up, jolting him.

We see you.

Elle and Kendrick. And suddenly he knew what they had to do.

The Jacobin stood at the wheel of the boat, his free hand raised in a gesture of non-aggression. The men in the approaching boat were watching him with curiosity rather than hostility. He glanced across and up at the distant helicopter, now side-on as it swung in its long arc to face the shore, and raised his hand in that direction. Kuznetsov would have spotted him, notified the men in the boat.

A hundred metres or so separated him from the boat. He let go of the wheel and cupped his hands around his mouth, called, ‘You have to warn Kuznetsov. Tell him Purkiss is on board the helicopter.’

His voice came out more weakly than he’d expected. The rumble of the water and the larger boat’s engine drowned him out. One of the men on the boat cupped a hand to his ear and shook his head. Frustrated, the Jacobin sat and applied acceleration.

His engine was racing more noisily than it should have, until he realised the noise wasn’t coming from his boat but from another, a similar size to his, approaching from the south. The men in the larger boat were beginning to shout and point.

The Jacobin felt the tilt of disorientation: no fleet of military vehicles, just a speed boat like his own, with what looked like a two-man crew. Through eyes filmed with fatigue and pain and salt air he focused on the faces behind the arc of windscreen. One was a woman’s, Elle’s.

Through the front cockpit windows between Lyuba and Leok, Venedikt saw the lights of the city, awake for several hours by now, ten kilometres away. From the east, sunlight was leaking through the cloud cover and spilling glittering tendrils across the surface of the water. The sea below the helicopter was roiling, bewildered and furious at the sudden conjunction of three interlopers.

Venedikt had been distracted by the Englishman’s approach and hadn’t noticed the advance of the second speed boat until Lyuba had called out. He’d taken his eyes away from the binoculars, then immediately reapplied them. The woman was steering while the man, Purkiss’s crony, had lifted his assault rifle over the top of the windscreen. In the larger boat the men were already hefting their own weapons into position across the back rail of the craft.

It took Venedikt a moment to realise that Purkiss’s man was levelling his rifle not at Raskov and his men in the boat, but upwards at the Black Hawk.

The helicopter was perhaps sixty metres above the surface of the sea, the approaching speed boat almost half a kilometre distant. It meant that the Black Hawk was at the limit of the AK-74’s effective range, but Venedikt flinched as the characteristic clatter of the rifle cut through the whap of the rotors even at this distance and tiny streaks of noise whispered past the fuselage. Leok banked the chopper to the left and upwards. Venedikt struggled to keep his feet, gripping the back of the pilot’s seat while with his other hand he swung the binoculars. He saw that Raskov and his men had opened fire themselves, no longer caring about the range now that the Black Hawk had come under fire. Crazily, Purkiss’s man wasn’t returning their fire, but was still aiming at the Black Hawk, now impossibly beyond reach, a modern Don Quixote tilting at his own particular windmill.

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.