Tim Stevens - Ratcatcher

He seized the handles and twisted. Incredibly, the image changed, the shore on the horizon tilting away vertiginously as the missile swooped.

Then something hit the helicopter, a great fist out of the sky, and the handles were wrenched out of his grasp. He was thrown against the cockpit door. Across from him the pilot was yelling and hauling desperately at the controls.

Through the windows the world was spinning, the Black Hawk turning in a drunken pirouette, trailing black smoke from its tail, part of which, Purkiss noticed, had disappeared. Something hit the back, something big . He ignored it and lunged for the handles of the launcher. The missile had righted its course once more and the shore was rushing at the screen, terrifyingly close. As the chopper spun he pulled at the handles once more. Again the image changed.

One thousand metres to target.

Time to impact nine seconds. Eight.

The screen showed a stretch of the shore wild with rocks, spume geysering up over it, no shapes resembling human beings. As if it would help his aim, Purkiss roared through gritted teeth.

The rocks flung themselves to fill the screen. Then the screen went blank.

As the cockpit windows reached the part of the arc that took them past the shore, he saw for an instant the eruption, water soaring skyward like the pictures he’d seen of World War Two naval battles in the Pacific. By the time the heavy crump reached them the chopper had already spun through a hundred and eighty degrees.

Beside him the pilot was shouting, some sort of prayer or hymn in Estonian, his hands no longer attempting to control the aircraft. Purkiss left him and clambered back into the cabin. He stepped over Kuznetsov who lay glassy-eyed, dead.

On the floor Fallon slumped against the bench. ‘What…’

‘It missed.’

Fallon closed his eyes. Purkiss squatted to hook his arm around his back. He saw the blood: not the old, semi-dried stuff from his beatings but fresh, bright gouts, pulsing through a ragged tear in Fallon’s trousers near his groin.

The stray bullet, the one Kuznetsov had fired at Purkiss just before he’d got him away from the launcher. It looked like it had hit the femoral artery.

‘Get out,’ rasped Fallon.

‘You’re coming with me — ’

‘For God’s sake… it’s about to go down.’

His lips were moving and Purkiss wanted to shake speech out of him but all he heard was something like ‘Ask v — ’. Then Fallon lolled forward.

Through the cabin window Purkiss saw the sea in an impossible place, standing parallel to the glass. He rolled and scrabbled at the release handle of the door beneath him, dropped out like a hanged man through a trapdoor and managed to turn himself into a diving position so that when he hit the water it wasn’t side-on.

The shock of the impact, the cold, stoppered his breath. He plunged and crawled, kicking frantically, staying as deep as he dared while putting as much distance as he could between him and what was going to happen. When he found himself surfacing again, his head broke free into a terrific wall of sound as, behind him, the Black Hawk smashed into the boat. Almost before he had time to duck his head under again, the engines of both craft went up.

Beneath the water the explosions punched his body. Looking up, he saw a sheet of flame soar across the surface, black spinning fragments of debris swoop like bats. He crawled about, compressed by the cold, not wanting to emerge in the middle of a slick of burning fuel, until the blurred surface took on a grey hue once more. He burst clear, sucking in chestfuls of oily air.

From his position just above the surface the surrounding sea was barely recognisable as such. Wreckage, much of it still aflame, was strewn as far as he could see, like the contents of a night’s ashtrays dumped in a toilet bowl. Coils of dark yellow smoke rose and flattened shroud-like overhead.

Ten feet away, one arm hooked around a remnant of hull, his face streaked with smoke, drifted the bull-necked man from so many earlier encounters. His free arm was extended across the fragment from the boat, and he was sighting down a handgun, teeth clenched.

Purkiss had jammed the gun he’d taken from Kuznetsov into his belt. He felt for it now, treading water, and got hold of the grip. It was too late, the man’s finger was already bearing down on the trigger. At such close range he couldn’t miss.

The man’s face burst outwards, so unexpectedly that it took Purkiss an instant to realise he had to duck, head beneath the water again, because the man had been shot from behind by something high-velocity and his entire face had become an exit wound. When it sounded safe he lifted his face to the air again. The bull-necked man had rolled off the piece of hull, his head trailing a bloody slick.

Beyond him, Kendrick sprawled belly-down on his own makeshift raft of hull, looking absurdly like an armed body boarder..

‘Told you,’ he called. ‘These Soviet guns. Reliable as hell in all weather.’

Purkiss turned his head, feeling groggy with the movement. A short distance behind Kendrick, also buoyed by a scrap of debris, was Elle, hair plastered across her white face. He wanted to swim over to them — they were fifty feet away, no more — but suddenly he lacked the strength.

In the far distance, towards the shore, sound was rising. Purkiss thought he could see airborne shapes through the smoke and the gloom.

All he could do was tread water and call across one word: ‘Done.’

‘Better be,’ Kendrick answered. ‘Ammo’s out.’

Because of the ringing in his ears from the cacophony of the last half hour, Purkiss didn’t hear the engine until the speed boat was up close, and he turned and saw the keel hurtling across the water straight at his head.

From his position circling a couple of hundred metres away, the Jacobin had cursed, out loud, at the ineptitude of the man on the boat. Instead of striking the engines or the cockpit, the grenade from his launcher had blasted off the Black Hawk’s tail rotor. The damage would ultimately prove fatal, but it would be a slow death, and Purkiss would have time to abort the strike as long as the controls remained intact. Seconds later, the explosion in the distance confirmed the Jacobin’s fears. He couldn’t see it, but the hiss of water that followed it meant that the target had been missed.

When it became clear the chopper was going to land on the boat, the Jacobin had taken evasive action, speeding further out across the sea. By the time he’d circled back, he’d begun to believe Purkiss hadn’t made it out alive. But there he was, head dwarfed by the bobbing debris, and there were his friends, too.

The Jacobin felt no disappointment, only emptiness. That, and a professional’s urge to salvage what was possible from the situation, always with the future in mind. To clean up. On the horizon the cavalry was stirring, an awe-inspiring flotilla by the sound of it. It meant he had to work quickly.

With no time to turn and dive, Purkiss shoved his hands upwards against the water, the movement pushing him down. He ducked his head at the same time, resisting the urge to keep his eyes lifted to the arrowing point of the advancing keel. Once down as far as he could go he tipped on to his back to avoid the deadly churning of the propellors. He recoiled as they chewed the water inches from his face.

By the time he opened his eyes the hull had almost disappeared. He remained submerged, fire in his chest. In a moment he saw the dark shape loom into view again, turning for another pass.

He timed his move precisely so that he was rising to emerge on the side of the hull just as it passed overhead, before it could pick up enough speed to elude his grasp. His hands shot out of the water before his head did and he caught two fingers in a steel ring on the side, some sort of anchor for rigging. Although he felt as though his fingers were being wrenched out of their sockets he hung on, used his grip as a brace to swing his other hand up. He seized the rim of the boat, launched himself out of the water like a gymnast on a bar, and dropped hard into the boat. He was on his haunches, shuddering with the effort and above all the unimaginable cold.