Joe Craig - Jimmy Coates - Power

Now Jimmy’s senses prickled, heightening his awareness in a way he’d never experienced before. Every tiny ripple of air tingled the hairs on his forearms. His eyes flickered hundreds of times a second, his night-vision illuminating his path in a faint blue haze, giving his reactions precious extra split-seconds to guide the machine.

He could feel the grip of the assassin on his muscles, holding them steady, guiding his limbs. The power of the Tiger Hellfire surged through the mechanism around him. It was as if his body had a direct connection to the 1200 kW turboshaft engines. His slightest thought impacted on his flight path before he even knew what he was doing.

He crossed a motorway, the helicopter low enough for the runners to whoosh over the car roofs. He dodged between two lorries expertly. Still he could sense the presence of the planes holding a position above him, like hovering eagles waiting to swoop on a vole.

Even in the darkness Jimmy could see the animals in the fields scampering away. He dipped beneath every telegraph wire, leapt over every fence and swung past the front door of every farmhouse. Meanwhile, the engines rumbled, straining to push the chopper beyond its supposed maximum velocity.

The planes kept pace with him. Their two floodlights danced across the fields with Jimmy, sometimes catching him in their glare, but only for tantalising glimpses. Jimmy was making it impossible for them to fire at him, but he still wasn’t getting away. It was no good, he thought. Even if he reached London, he would never be able to land.

Then he realised that NJ7 had no intention of this chase ever making it that far. Rising up from the horizon ahead of him were more than a dozen black dots. A cluster of state-of-the-art military helicopters. Each one held steady, just above the land. Then, as one, a dozen sets of floodlights flashed into life. Jimmy squinted in the glare and felt the sweat break out on his forehead. And NJ7 could see every drop.

There was nowhere to hide. Jimmy wanted to throw up his hands, or brace himself for the explosion of the missiles, but his body wouldn’t let him. The lights from the enemy choppers had shown the assassin in him a new way out. They lit up a track that crossed directly between them and Jimmy. And approaching slowly from the right, like a worm across a battlefield, was a train.

Instead of turning his helicopter around, or even slowing down, Jimmy charged straight ahead. The helicopters confronting him did the same, moving towards him as a pack. They were hunters, designed and built to complete a mission with total efficiency—and a zero failure rate.

But so was Jimmy. His eyes locked on to the train. His muscles relaxed when he should have been growing more tense. It was as if some chemical had been injected into his system to make his limbs more supple and give him greater control. But it all came from within.

He was nearing the tracks now, winning the race with the choppers ahead of him. The planes overhead fired two rockets, but Jimmy was already into his defensive manoeuvre. He dodged so quickly that he didn’t have time to be afraid. The explosion rocked the cabin, but it was the ground behind him going up in flames, not him.

At last he reached the tracks and turned. The detour to avoid the rockets had worked in his favour. It had given the train time to reach him. Jimmy slowed to keep pace with it and once again brought the chopper as low as it would go, gliding past the telegraph poles, wires and signals, sheltering alongside the last carriage of the train.

The fleet of NJ7 helicopters circled over the top, then wheeled round to follow, just behind the train. Jimmy could almost feel himself smiling, against his will. Something inside him was revelling in the danger and the furious pace, responding to it with a detached fury of its own.

Jimmy switched his display system back on. The lights didn’t matter now, and he needed to keep track of his pursuers. What he saw surprised him. They were pulling back. When Jimmy looked up, he realised why. Only a few hundred metres ahead, the track went into a tunnel. Jimmy was hurtling directly towards the side of a hill.

Pull up , he pleaded with himself. But his body flicked away his fear. Please , he begged, battling his own instincts. His body wasn’t responding. The ground loomed towards him. Was this part of his programming, he wondered. Perhaps he was destined to destroy himself to avoid capture.

The world seemed to slow down around him. Every clump of mud in the hillside was cast into sharp relief by the floodlights behind. The sharp outline of his own helicopter’s shadow grew rougher and rougher, larger and larger. There was nowhere to go. Above and around him was a net of military firepower controlled by NJ7. Ahead of him was solid earth, with no way through.

Through , Jimmy thought. Of course. At last he realised what his programming was planning. With split-second timing, Jimmy’s hands heaved on the controls. The helicopter slowed momentarily, darted sideways, then charged along the track, directly behind the train.

Jimmy plunged into the tunnel, but the rotors of the chopper were too wide. They snapped off with a powerful crunch and shattered in every direction. Jimmy knew he had no control now. All he could hear was the piercing screech of his runners scraping along the track. In the fountain of sparks, Jimmy saw that the nose of his cabin was pressing against the back of the train.

This was only half the plan. For the rest, he had to move faster than he ever had before. He swung himself out of his seat and around the side of the helicopter. The metal casing was burning hot to the touch, but he wasn’t holding it long enough to care. The friction of the tracks was slowing the chopper, while the train powered ahead. Before a gap could open up between them, Jimmy flung himself forwards, pouring all of his strength into stretching for a safe landing.

The back of the train seemed to jump up and smack him in the face. The impact knocked all the wind from his chest. The tips of his fingers caught a metal rim of some part of the carriage, but he couldn’t even see what he was clinging on to. Somehow he managed to claw his way round to the side of the train for a firmer grip and closed his eyes against the rush of wind and dust in his face.

The train burst out of the tunnel with the body of the chopper bouncing behind it. Jimmy opened his eyes to see that the whole airborne fleet was there waiting for him. Within a second, the sky was lit up with the blast of rockets. Jimmy gasped and clenched every muscle. He couldn’t believe it—NJ7 were actually going to blow up a train full of innocent passengers just to kill him.

But they weren’t. Instead, the rockets slammed into the broken and battered helicopter he’d just left. The rotorless body of the chopper erupted into a huge ball of flame. It tumbled along the track, spitting fire and debris in a huge circle around it.

Jimmy rattled on towards London, untouched.

The Cavendish Hotel on London’s Jermyn Street offered five-star accommodation from a past era. It was one of the city’s oldest remaining independent hotels, but everybody knew it wouldn’t survive for long. Hardly any tourists were allowed into the country these days, and there was no reason for British people to come and stay, even if they could afford it. That left only wealthy foreign businessmen, and most of them had better taste than to stay within the Cavendish’s sprawling corridors, with its peeling paintwork and lights dim enough to hide the stains on the walls.

More importantly to Zafi Sauvage, the service was erratic. For example, the management team didn’t care enough to ask each other about her—the pretty twelve-year-old girl who had recently appeared on the cleaning staff. As long as her uniform was tidy and she appeared busy with something, successive managers each assumed she was on work-experience for somebody else. It was an assumption Zafi nurtured through artful manipulation.