Andy McDermott - The Midas Legacy

A soldier hurled himself over the rocket at the Yorkshireman.

Eddie fell on to his back. The man straddled his chest and clamped his hands around his throat, snarling in Korean. Eddie tried to force him away, but the pain from his cracked rib was like a red-hot spearhead. The man squeezed harder—

A shadow swept over the pair. The Korean looked up — as Nina clapped his skull between two gold bars. The crack of bone was loud over the ringing thud of the double impact. He slumped on top of Eddie, his clutching hands going limp.

The Englishman gasped, then shoved the unconscious man away. Nina dropped the gold and crouched beside him, seeing the bloody cut across his chest. ‘You’re bleeding!’

‘It’s not as bad as it looks,’ he wheezed. ‘Least I hope it’s not, or I’m in trouble! Are there any more of ’em?’

Nina checked the hold’s other side. Nobody was in sight. She looked beneath the cradles to see if anyone was crouching behind the missile. The deck was clear. ‘Can’t see anybody.’

‘Okay, help me up.’ She brought him to a sitting position. ‘Ow! God, that hurt. I’ve cracked a rib. As if I wasn’t in a bad enough way already.’

‘We’ve got to bandage that cut. There must be a first-aid kit somewhere.’

‘Probably in the cockpit, and I doubt they’ll just let us in if we knock politely.’ Another pained groan as he used the cradle to lever himself upright. Nina stood as well. ‘We’ll have to—’

He saw movement behind her, someone coming around the stacks of cargo at the front of the hold.

Sek.

Eddie shoved Nina away as the captain fired. The bullet tore into his upper thigh. She crashed against the damaged plutonium case, her husband collapsing beside the fallen soldier.

Sek advanced on them. With Eddie down, he turned his gun towards Nina—

She remembered how he had acted in the particle accelerator’s control room — and threw open the case’s lid to expose the plutonium sphere inside.

He recoiled like a vampire from a crucifix. The ingrained secrecy and compartmentalisation of the activities at Facility 17 and the North Korean military in general meant that all he knew about nuclear materials was that anything marked with the black-and-yellow radiation warning symbol was dangerous, an invisible killer. It took a moment for him to overcome his fear and realise that Nina had not melted or burst into flames—

A moment of which Eddie took full advantage.

The unconscious soldier’s sidearm was still in its holster. The Yorkshireman snatched it out and fired three rapid shots into Sek’s chest. The Korean fell back against the crates, blood spouting from the closely spaced entry wounds over his heart.

‘Oh, Jesus!’ Nina cried as she saw Eddie’s own bullet hole. She scrambled back to him, pressing her palm over it. He roared in pain. ‘I think the bullet’s still in there!’

‘Leave it, leave it,’ he rasped, clenching his jaw. ‘Get the gun and go up to the cockpit. We can’t let ’em land back at the airbase, or anywhere else in North Korea. If they do, we’re dead.’

She took the pistol. ‘You’re giving up on the kamikaze mission, then?’

‘We survived hanging from the back of a fucking jet in a truck, so I’m not going to let some malnourished little cock-end in a stupid hat kill me after all that!’ He glanced towards Sek’s corpse. ‘I’ll get his gun and follow you up.’

‘Will you be able to climb the ladder with a bullet in your leg?’

‘I’ll have to if I don’t want a bullet in my head . Go on.’

‘Okay. Oh, and by the way?’ She kissed him. ‘I love you.’

He smiled. ‘Never doubted it for a second.’ Nina grinned back, then waited for him to put his own hand over the wound before starting towards the rear ladder.

She had just passed the missile when a voice boomed through the hold. ‘Attention! Attention!’ said a man with a strong Russian accent. ‘The cockpit is locked, and we will not let you enter. We will land at Tonyong airbase as soon as the runway is clear. You cannot escape. Drop your guns and surrender.’

Nina spotted a loudspeaker mounted on a ceiling beam, a closed-circuit camera beside it. Other cameras covered the rest of the cavernous space. ‘You think he’s bluffing?’ she called back to Eddie.

He supported himself against the cradle, wincing as torn muscle pressed against the bullet in his leg. ‘This used to be a military plane, so the cockpit door’s probably bulletproof. Shit!’ He slumped back, defeated. ‘Maybe we should just blow up the missile after all, make sure nobody gets it. Or chuck the warheads and the plutonium out of the back. We might get lucky and have ’em land where nobody can reach—’

‘The plutonium,’ Nina interrupted with inspired urgency. ‘The plutonium!’ She ran back — not to her husband, but to the open container. The sinister grey sphere squatted within.

‘What about it?’ Eddie asked, puzzled. ‘You going to blow the door open with a nuclear bomb?’

‘Not quite.’ She went to one of the other metal cases and unlatched it, revealing a second sphere inside. ‘But I did some research about nuclear weapons on the flight to China.’ She gave him the dark smile of someone who had exhausted all other options but the desperate — or demented. ‘You know how much plutonium you need to achieve critical mass? Because I do.’

The freighter’s whole crew, including the loadmaster, were now sealed inside the cockpit. ‘I can’t tell what they’re doing,’ said one man, watching his CCTV monitor intently. ‘Why the hell didn’t we get this upgraded to HD?’

‘Take over,’ Petrov told his co-pilot, leaving his seat to see for himself. The other man continued to guide the An-124 on its long, slow circle of the airbase; the last update from the control tower maintained that the wreckage would be cleared from the runway within minutes, and troops were working flat out to fill the hole in the concrete with earth. Landing would still be risky, but if the North Koreans packed it firmly enough, there was a good chance that the Antonov — built to operate from battle-damaged runways — would make it over the crater with minimal damage.

Minimal extra damage, at least; the aircraft had already suffered plenty, one landing wheel all but wrenched off and the rear doors and ramp jammed open. His clients would be paying through the nose for all the repairs…

He put financial reparations to the back of his mind as he studied the screen. It showed the front of the hold, looking towards the nose. The bald man appeared injured, bloody patches on his chest and thigh, but he had moved to hunch against the remaining wooden crate. The woman, who seemed somehow familiar, had opened up two other cases.

‘Oh, shit,’ he whispered. He didn’t need high definition to identify the warning trefoils on them. ‘She’s messing with the nukes!’

The co-pilot, like all the crew a Russian air force veteran, looked around in alarm. ‘She can’t set one off, can she?’

‘I don’t think so, but…’ He watched as the woman lifted out one case’s contents and placed it on the deck. It looked like a ball, but from her strained movements it was much heavier than its small size suggested… ‘Fuck me!’ he said, suddenly afraid. ‘It must be uranium, or plutonium — it’s the only thing that could weigh so much.’

‘She won’t blow anything up that way,’ said the crewman, mystified, as she wrapped the sphere in a cargo strap, then tied it to one of the rings in the floor.

‘I still don’t like it. We should try to take them out ourselves before landing.’

‘The bald guy’s still got a gun,’ the loadmaster pointed out. The stowaway was in a good position to cover the ladder, and even wounded seemed fully capable of defending himself.