Stephen Leather - The birthday girl

You've just killed three people for no good reason.'

Kiseleva's horse stamped its feet and he pulled back on the reins. 'You killed the cowboy back there,' he said defensively.

Jenny fought to control the burning anger that was welling up inside her. 'If you'd held your fire, the pilot wouldn't have panicked. He'd have stayed put. We'd have caught the girl and her father and then we could have dealt with the witnesses.' She looked up at the balloon, high in the air. She could just make out the girl, her black hair blowing in the wind. One of the ground crew moaned and then went quiet. Christ, thought Jenny, this was turning into a massacre. She looked around, wondering what to do next. What she really wanted to do was to put a bullet in Kiseleva's guts, but she'd leave that to Utsyev. There were two metallic-blue snowmobiles at the edge of the clearing. She clicked her tongue and her horse walked towards the machines.

They were both two-seater Polaris models. The ground crew had obviously been planning to use them to follow the balloon. Both had ignition keys in place. 'You ever ridden a snowmobile?' she asked Kiseleva, who was still having trouble getting his horse to stand still.

'It's gotta be easier than one of these things,' he said. He pulled back on the reins and the horse tossed its head from side to side.

Vincenti walked his horse over to Jenny. 'I've been on one,' he said.

'How fast will they go?'

He shrugged. 'Sixty in good conditions. Depends on the trail.

A darn sight faster than a horse, that's for sure.'

Jenny nodded. 'Show Kiseleva and then go after them.'

Vincenti climbed down off his horse and tethered it to a tree.

Kiseleva did the same while Jenny walked her horse along the treeline. The crew could have followed the balloon on the snowmobiles, but there was no way they could have used them to transport it up into the hills. They'd have needed a vehicle, and a road. Through the trees she noticed a flash of red, and as she rode closer she saw a Jeep Wrangler and behind it a trailer. She slid down off her horse and led it over to the vehicle. There was a large-scale map on the passenger seat, along with a compass and a transceiver. The Jeep was parked on a trail that was little more than packed snow, which wound down the hill through the trees. Only a four-wheel-drive could have made the journey.

She dropped the reins and walked back to the snowmobiles, where Vincenti was showing Kiseleva how to start the engines by pulling out the red cut-off toggle on the right-hand side of the handlebars and then pulling a large plastic D-ring attached to a rope, just like starting a lawnmower. Kiseleva pulled hard and the engine burst into life. At the front were two skis with independent suspension. The forward motion was provided by a thick caterpillar belt under the seats. The controls were simple – the throttle lever was on the right handlebar, the brake on the left. There was no clutch. Kiseleva sat down and tweaked the throttle. The snowmobile jerked forward, almost hitting Jenny.

He slammed on the brake. 'That's all there is to it?' he asked.

'Just remember to keep it at full throttle over loose snow,'

Vincenti said. 'If you stop, you'll sink. Try to stay on trails wherever you can. And if you do run into any problems, just hit the red toggle – that'll kill the engine.' He sat astride the second machine and started it. He waved one of the riders over and told him to sit behind him. Ostrovetsky joined Kiseleva.

One of the members of the ground crew was groaning and trying to crawl through the packed snow. He was leaving a crimson trail smeared behind him. Jenny admired the man's courage: there was nowhere for him to go, no one to save him, but still he didn't give up. He was using his elbows for leverage, dragging his useless legs behind him. Jenny walked up and stood in front of the crawling man, blocking his way. He looked up, his face contorted in agony. She shot him once, in the forehead. Blood and brains and bone splattered over the man's shoulders, and for a second he remained staring at her, the top of his head blown away, before dropping lifelessly forward. She undipped the transceiver from the dead man's belt and tossed it to Kiseleva. He caught it with one hand and shoved it into his coat pocket.

'I'm going to take the Jeep over there and cut down to the road,' she said. 'There's another radio – I'll use it to keep in touch.'

'What about the horses?' Kiseleva shouted above the growl of the snowmobile.

'What, you want to blow away a few more witnesses, do you, Kiseleva?'

'I just meant…'

'Yeah, I know what you meant,' she interrupted. 'The horses can take care of themselves. You concentrate on following that bailoon and being there when it lands.'

'Can't we shoot them down?' Vincenti asked.

'I doubt it,' she said. 'They're sure to stay high. And unless you're lucky enough to hit the fuel tanks, the bullets will go straight through without damaging the balloon. It'll leak air, but you'd have to riddle it full of holes before you did any real damage. It's not like it's full of explosive gas like the Hindenburg. In fact, it's got a lot in common with Kiseleva.'

'Huh?' Vincenti grunted, not understanding.

'They're both full of hot air,'Jenny finished with a cruel smile.

'Just get on with it, will you? If they get away, Utsyev will have your balls for breakfast.' She turned her back on them and went over to the Jeep to unhitch the trailer.

Mersiha held on tightly to one of the rope grab-handles as the basket swung gently below the balloon. The snow-covered trees seemed to be miles away, picture-perfect like a Christmas card. If it wasn't for the far-off buzz of the snowmobiles and the men with the guns, she'd probably have enjoyed the flight. As it was, she couldn't stop her hands from trembling. Her father was standing on the opposite side of the basket, ashen-faced. She tried to catch his eye but he didn't seem to notice her. She had seen the same blank stare on the faces of men and women in war-torn Sarajevo when she was a child: faces that had seen too much. She reached over and squeezed his hand. He looked at her with unseeing eyes.

'Dad, are you okay?'

He nodded slowly, then seemed to snap out of it. He ruffled her hair and forced a smile. 'I'm fine, pumpkin.'

'Yeah, we're three people hanging in the air, a sitting target for a group of killers armed with automatic weapons, but other than

that, we're fine,' said the balloon pilot. He peered over the edge of the basket. The snowmobiles were having to skirt a rocky area and were driving at right-angles to the balloon's path. Mersiha could see that they'd only have to go a mile or so before they'd link up with a trail that would allow them to continue the chase.

The pilot pulled on the lever that operated one of the burners and a tongue of flame roared into the neck of the balloon.

'How fast can they go?' she asked.

'Sixty miles an hour,' the pilot said. 'Maybe seventy.'

'And how fast do we go?'

'Depends on the wind. Just now we're doing about twenty.'

It was like a mathematics problem, Mersiha thought, but the end result was that there was no way they'd be able to outrun the snowmobiles. 'My name's Mersiha,' she said, holding out her hand.

The pilot stared at it with a look of surprise on his face, as if she were offering him a dead animal, then he grinned and shook it. His grip was firm, his hand totally encompassing hers. 'Tim,' he said. Tim held out his hand to Freeman, and they introduced themselves, the ice broken. Mersiha was standing next to an instrument panel with circular gauges, mounted on one of the three propane cylinders in the basket. One of them displayed the letters 'ALT'. She guessed it was an altimeter, though she had trouble reading its three needles. If she was doing it right, they were eleven thousand feet high, but the ground didn't seem that far away. She asked Tim how high they were. 'About fifteen hundred feet,' he said. Mersiha frowned at the altimeter and Tim smiled. He explained that it showed the height above sea level and the mountains below were more than a mile high. To work out how high the balloon was above the ground, she'd have to subtract the height of the mountains from the altimeter reading.