Tom Cain: Assassin

The cockpit had a short roof, immediately above the driver and co-driver’s seats, but was then open all the way back to the stern where there was a shallow transom above the frothing white water churned up by twin stainless steel propellers. Carver landed hard on the transom, half in and half out of the boat, driving all the air from his lungs. His head was hanging over the steps that led down on to the aft deck and the lower half of him dangled terrifyingly close to the propellers. If his legs touched those flashing blades they would be pulped into a flesh smoothie, like a banana in a food processor.

Damon Tyzack’s head peered round from the high, carbon-fibre driver’s seat. He coughed, put his hand up to his mouth, flashed his most disarming smile and shouted over the roar of the engines, ‘Welcome aboard.’

The Type 45 destroyer is an air-defence specialist. It does not carry any anti-ship missile systems. But it has a little friend that does, the Lynx HMA8 helicopter that it carries in a hangar amidships, which is armed with four Sea Skua guided missiles. The radar on HMS Daring had spotted the two hand grenades on their brief journey between Tyzack’s drone and the presidential stage. The information had been relayed to Manners and from him to Tord Bahr, confirming Carver’s story and making Damon Tyzack the prime suspect. The moment Tyzack got into his boat, HMS Daring’s Lynx was ordered to intercept him. The only question now concerned the rules of engagement. Would the Lynx be allowed to use deadly force? That was a decision that would have to go right to the very top.

Tyzack ordered Carver forward over a deck littered with broken glass. His right hand was grasping the steering wheel. His left was covering Carver with a gun that still had ammunition in its magazine.

‘Take the co-driver’s seat,’ Tyzack said, his gun gesturing towards the empty seat to his left. ‘Do up the safety harness. Now place your hands between your legs and the seat. Don’t move, or I’ll be obliged to shoot.’

As they passed the Bristol docks and the Floating Harbour, Tyzack leaned forward and used the palm-heel of his gun hand to push the twin throttles, opening up the engines and making the boat leap forward with a new surge of speed, a blast of cool air racing in through the broken windscreen. For a second, more of Tyzack’s upper body was visible, exposing the ragged scarlet hole in his upper chest, just beneath his right collar-bone.

Tyzack caught Carver’s eye. ‘You got lucky,’ he said and coughed again, spattering the pristine white leather around the steering wheel with a fine spray of blood.

‘For God’s sake,’ said Carver, ‘give up. You can’t get away. There’s a bloody great destroyer sitting out in the Bristol Channel and a squadron of Typhoon jets up top. One way or another, they’re going to blow you out of the water.’

‘Won’t be the Typhoons,’ Tyzack said. ‘Technical problem. They can only hit ground targets if they’re given warning and prepped before take-off. They were up there to protect Air Force One. They won’t be able to get me.’

‘The destroyer then…’

‘Yes, that could. Probably will, in fact.’

‘So stop. Get that lung fixed. You’ll live.’

Tyzack’s smile was almost melancholy now, in its recognition of his inevitable fate. ‘No, I won’t. Doesn’t matter where they put me. Visar will get me. I’m a dead man in jail.’

Carver could not hide his surprise. ‘Visar? Christ…’

It took Tyzack a couple of seconds to make the connection. ‘The hit on his brother – that was you?’ He broke into a hacking, blood-spraying laugh. ‘Oh, that’s priceless, that really is!’

‘For God’s sake, man,’ Carver implored him. ‘Hasn’t this gone far enough?’

‘No,’ said Tyzack, with definitive certainty. ‘It hasn’t. You’re right, I’m going to die very soon. And the one thing that makes that prospect even remotely bearable is the sure and certain fact that you’re going to die with me.’

The Prime Minister had been complicit in decisions that sent his country to war. He had happily signed off on defence cuts whose effects on equipment procurement condemned scores of inadequately protected servicemen and – women to needless, avoidable deaths. But when it came to giving the order for a specific use of military force, he suddenly lost his appetite for decision-making.

On the one hand, he did not want a man who had tried to kill Lincoln Roberts to escape the grasp of justice. On the other, he led a party that was viscerally opposed to capital punishment and had little natural sympathy for US presidents, no matter how charismatic. Besides which, he was the leader of a European Union state, and the EU forbids capital punishment. Indeed, many of its nations virtually forbid their armed forces to fight.

It took a pollster to put the PM out of his misery. The British people, he suggested, would not take kindly to a leader who let a would-be assassin get away with it. On the other hand, the vast majority of the population would have no trouble at all with the idea that such a villain had been blown to shreds by the Royal Navy. This was still, after all, a country whose biggest-selling daily newspaper, at the very height of its circulation, had greeted the sinking of an Argentine battleship with the single word: ‘GOTCHA!’

‘Gotcha it is, then,’ said the Prime Minister morosely. ‘But wait till the target reaches open water. I don’t want a pleasure-boat full of pensioners or a family taking a river cruise getting caught by the blast. That would not be good for our ratings.’

‘No, not very,’ the pollster agreed.

The speedboat flashed under the Clifton Suspension Bridge and headed for Avonmouth, where the river met the sea, roughly six miles away. With the engines at maximum power they would cover the distance in under four minutes. Off to the west, the Daring’s Lynx was now airborne, aiming for a position offshore, directly in line with the river.

‘How does it feel?’ asked Tyzack. ‘Confronting your death?’

‘I wouldn’t know,’ Carver replied. ‘I’m not planning to die.’

His earpiece burst into life again. The words that followed were barely audible over the engines, the wind and the slamming of the hull against the water, but ‘barely’ was enough to get the point.

‘Carver, this is Manners. Don’t know if you can hear me. If you’re on that boat, get off it. The PM’s given the order. The moment you reach open water, the Navy’s going to take you out… Good luck. Out.’

‘You’re right,’ said Carver. ‘It’s the Navy. For God’s sake, for once in your life, do something sensible and stop the bloody boat.’

Tyzack turned and his blood-caked lips cracked into a leering smile below eyes that now burned with a feverish intensity. ‘Now you’re confronting it,’ he cackled.

‘Look out!’ Carver shouted.

Immediately ahead, the river made a dogleg turn to the left. Tyzack did not slow the boat at all, hurling it around the bend with such abandon that Carver thought they would capsize. For a second, the sheer force of the turn unsettled Tyzack and he began coughing again, even more violently than before, the blood now gushing from his mouth. Carver was working out when to make his move when the river swung again, this time to the right, shaking him so violently that he was for the first time glad Tyzack had forced him to strap himself in.

But that was the last of the turns. The bows were now pointing directly down a final, almost dead-straight stretch of river that ran under the brutalist concrete span of the M5 motorway bridge. Carver could see one final, relatively innocuous kink in the river and ahead of that the open sea.