Agent 21: Reloaded: Book 2 (26 page)

‘
NO!
’ Zak shouted. He ran towards Cruz and Bea. He didn’t even know what he hoped to achieve. Was he trying to stop Cruz slicing that knife into Bea’s neck; or was he putting himself between the SBS unit and their target, in an effort to stop them opening fire.

Either way, he was unsuccessful.

The wave that crashed over the stern deck as Zak was running was the biggest yet. It totally engulfed
them. Zak was knocked to the ground. He felt himself sliding along the deck, but he couldn’t see anything for all the water in his eyes. The wave receded, sucking back into the ocean and dragging Zak with it. He tried to fight against it, to scramble up the deck, but it was impossible. He slid towards the railings, hitting them with such force that the wind was knocked from his lungs. But at least the railings had stopped him. He gripped them firmly with one hand, wiping the sea water from his eyes with the other. And then he looked round.

The wave had scattered everyone. The deck was littered with figures pushing themselves onto their feet. Zak’s eyes quickly sought out Bea. She was holding onto the railings too, about five metres from Zak. She looked OK.

And a couple of metres beyond her, he saw Cruz. He looked bedraggled, but he still had his knife and he was advancing on Bea once again.

Zak sprinted towards him, past a shocked-looking Bea. Cruz looked shocked too as Zak threw himself against his former friend, sending them both hurtling towards the floor. Cruz tried to slash at him with the knife, but Zak was too fast. He grabbed Cruz’s wrist and smashed it down on the deck. The knife fell out of his hand and slid a couple of metres from where they were fighting. Zak rolled away from
Cruz. Seconds later he had the knife in his hand.

Cruz scrambled to his feet. Zak did the same. The SBS men had recovered from the wave. Even now they were getting into position.

Ready to shoot …

‘
HOLD YOUR FIRE!
’ Zak roared. Brandishing the knife, he strode towards Cruz, positioning himself between his former friend and the gunmen who wanted to take him down. He heard shouting – ‘
Stand down! Stand down!
’ – but he ignored it. All his attention was on Cruz, who had his back pressed up against the railings and whose eyes were flicking between Zak’s face and the knife in his hand.

‘Give it up, Cruz,’ Zak shouted. ‘They’ll kill you if you don’t.’

‘They’ll kill me,’ Cruz yelled back, ‘even if I do.’

Zak shook his head. ‘I won’t let them.’

‘
Stand down! Stand down!
’ The gunmen were advancing around him.

Cruz sneered. ‘A guilty conscience, Harry?’

‘No, Cruz. But my fight was never with you.’

The sneer became more pronounced. Cruz’s hair blew in the wind. ‘My father is dead because of you.’

‘And my parents are dead because of your father. Give it up, Cruz. You can’t win now. It’s over.’ Zak took a step towards him. ‘
It’s over!
’

The sneer became a smile. An insane smile, but a
smile nevertheless. ‘No, Harry,’ Cruz said. He didn’t shout this time, but Zak was close enough to hear. ‘
You
don’t decide when it’s over.
I
do.’

It happened so quickly.

Cruz suddenly pulled something from one of his pockets. At first, Zak thought it must be a gun. He quickly saw that it looked more like a mobile phone. Only
not
a mobile phone. Just a handheld device with a single switch.

A detonator.

‘
STOP!
’ Zak roared. He dropped the knife and dived forwards to stop Cruz flicking the switch. But too late.

There was a massive explosion. It came from the opposite end of the ship, but it sent shock waves all along the deck. Zak hit the ground just two metres from Cruz’s position. The force of the blast had knocked Cruz sideways, but he was still standing. Zak crawled towards him, but as he crawled he saw Cruz leaning back over the railings. His hair blew in the wind; his eyes shone.

He was pushing himself back …

Zak stretched out to grab Cruz’s nearest shoe. His fingertips touched the sole, but then slipped away as Cruz toppled backwards over the railings. Zak reached them just in time to see his body fall towards the boiling ocean.

He shouted again – ‘
NO
…’ – and pushed himself to his feet just in time to see Cruz’s body hit the water and sink into the ocean. ‘
Help him!
’ he screamed. But he knew there was nothing anybody could do. Zak had already seen Eduardo fall into those treacherous seas. He knew Cruz’s body could never reappear.

He knew his nemesis was dead.

‘
Get down!
’

There was no time to mourn, even if he wanted to. Cruz had barely disappeared beneath the stormy water when a voice pierced the air. It was immediately followed by a shot. Zak hit the deck and looked back. It took a split second to process everything that was happening.

The ship’s crew – seven of them – had reappeared. Clearly they didn’t know their boss was dead, because they were coming at the SBS ready to fight, guns aimed. One of them had already fired a shot, and that shot had found its target.

Bea.

She was hit.

‘
Stay down!
’ The instruction from one of the SBS men rang through the air, but Zak ignored it and ran towards her. She had fallen to the floor. The bullet had squarely entered her left shoulder and blood was pouring out through her sodden clothes. Her face was white with shock and she was trembling. The wound
was so bad that Zak barely noticed at first that the deck was at an angle. The bow of the ship was sinking. Cruz had scuttled it with his explosion …

Suddenly the air exploded with gunshots. The SBS personnel hadn’t hesitated. They outnumbered the crew members, and they out-skilled them too.

Cruz’s men didn’t stand a chance.

Zak watched with a mixture of horror and relief as the SBS’s shower of rounds hit them. There were no screams. No cries for help. Just a few seconds of fast, efficient killing. The men crumpled to the floor in a blur of blood and flesh. Another seven bodies to add to the day’s death count.

But there was only one body Zak was interested in at that moment. Bea’s. She was a mess. Her eyes were rolling. Her blood loss was heavy.

He looked up. The SBS unit leader was standing above him, his face as stormy as the sea. ‘What were you doing?’ he shouted angrily. ‘You should have let us take the Mexican kid out—’

There was no time to explain. No time to tell the soldier that he’d been trying to save the life of an innocent girl thousands of miles away. Zak gritted his teeth. Nothing could now prevent Calaca catching up with Ellie. Anger and panic surged through him, but he put a lid on it.

He had to keep focused. Professional. The ship was
going down. They had to get off. Moreover, Bea needed medical attention. And if she didn’t get it quickly, the body count was about to grow even higher.

19.00 hrs GMT

A white van was parked up in the vicinity of 63 Acacia Drive. Some of the residents had noticed it, but none of them thought it was suspicious. They just assumed it belonged to a builder or an electrician parking in the street while they carried out some work in one of their neighbour’s houses.

Certainly nobody suspected it was the hideout of an assassin.

Calaca was not a naturally patient man. But he had been patient today. He had sat looking out of the tinted windows of his van all afternoon. At half-past four, he had watched Ellie Lewis return to the house with her parents after a trip to the local supermarket. And he watched her now, creeping furtively out of her house and walking quickly along the road. She had changed. Now she had on a fashionable pair of jeans, and a jumper interwoven with sparkling thread. She wore a colourful woollen hat, and Calaca thought she might even have applied a little lipstick and mascara, though these were not things he knew very much about.

He didn’t know how to make faces beautiful. He knew how to make them dead.

He smiled thinly. Ellie Lewis had clearly made an effort for her secret rendezvous. He wondered who the lucky boy was, and if he too had chosen his best clothes. How sweet, he thought to himself, that they would both be shining and well-dressed for the moment of their death. Because he
would
have to kill them both. Just to be sure.

The girl turned the corner at the end of the street and disappeared. By then, however, Calaca was already getting ready. Laid out on the floor of the white van was his weapon. It was a Russian PP-93 sub-machine gun. Effective range, 100 metres. Very lightweight and easy to conceal, but deadly accurate in the hands of someone who knew how to handle it properly. Calaca was one such man. The barrel was silenced, so the retort of the gunshots would not echo around Hampstead Heath when the time came. The magazine contained thirty rounds. He would only be requiring two of them.

Even with one eye, Calaca never missed.

Next to the gun was a wig. It fitted his shaved head well, and suddenly he was no longer a bald one-eyed man; he had a thick head of brown hair, parted neatly at one side. He put on his glasses with the medical dressing on the blind side and checked his reflection
in window of the van. Not exactly unremarkable, but the last person he looked like was himself.

Calaca secreted the weapon inside his coat before opening the back of the van and stepping outside. He locked the van and then looked up. The night sky was clear. It made a change after the terrible weather of the past few days. He would walk to Hampstead Heath, he decided. It was a crisp and pleasant evening for an assassination, and the fresh air would do him good.

23

LIFT OFF

BEA WAS SLIPPING
into unconsciousness. The ship was slipping into the water. Not as fast as the
Mercantile
, which was now almost completely submerged, but fast enough.

Zak’s hands were bloodied from where he was putting pressure on Bea’s wound. He was aware of shouts from the SBS personnel as they prepared to disembark over the side and into the waiting boats; and of the unit commander, screaming instructions into his patrol comms radio. Zak didn’t know what he was saying, though. All his attention was on his friend.

The unit commander knelt down beside him.

‘What’s your name?’ Zak shouted.

‘Frank.’

‘She’s in a bad way,’ Zak told him.

Frank nodded grimly. ‘We can’t get her into our boats. We need to airlift her out.’

‘How?’

Frank looked out to sea. ‘We’ve got a Sea King chopper on standby. It’s heading in now. We’ve got a frigate waiting five nautical miles from here. If we can get her to the medics back there, she might have a chance.’ He didn’t look too convinced.

Bea shouted out suddenly – ‘Don’t leave me, Jay.
Please
…’ A cry of pain. Then she slumped more heavily into Zak’s arms.

The SBS were disappearing over the side, climbing down their rope ladders into the waiting VNVs. ‘You need to go,’ Frank shouted. ‘My men will get you back to the ship. I’ll stay with her till the chopper arrives.’

It only took Zak a couple of seconds to decide he wasn’t going to do that.

‘I’m staying,’ he shouted. ‘One of us needs to keep the pressure on that wound if she’s going to make it.’

‘No way! It’s too dangerous, and my orders are to keep you safe. The ship’s sinking. You need to get off while you can.’

Zak shook his head. ‘Bea risked everything for this operation,’ he shouted back. ‘She deserves every chance now. And anyway, you’ll need some help getting her into a harness when the chopper arrives. We haven’t got time to argue about this, Frank – I’m needed here, and you might as well just accept that I’m not going anywhere till Bea’s in that Sea King.’

Just like I might as well accept
, Zak thought to himself,
that Calaca’s going to kill Ellie. And if anyone thinks I’m going to leave Bea alone to die too, they’ve got another think coming
…

Frank frowned, but he didn’t argue – what Zak was saying
did
make sense. Instead, he stood up and started barking instructions at his men and into the patrol comms. The ship suddenly shuddered and Zak felt it sinking. He saw some of the bodies of the dead crew members roll heavily along the deck on account of the angle of the boat. Bea cried out again. All the remaining SBS members had disappeared over the side.

‘How long till the chopper gets here?’ he screamed.

Frank pointed out to sea. Everything was grey – ocean, sky, the VSVs disappearing away from the ship – and a dot approaching from the horizon.

‘That’s it!’ Frank shouted ‘ETA three minutes. Maybe four in this weather. They wouldn’t normally fly in these winds.’ He crouched back down next to Bea. ‘We need to keep her stable while we wait!’ he yelled.

‘Roger that,’ Zak shouted. He pressed down on Bea’s wound again and felt the warm, sticky blood seep between his fingers.

Frank handed him something from round his neck. It was a square tube of plastic, one end red.
‘Morphine,’ he shouted. ‘For pain relief. Get it in her, now.’

Zak nodded. He raised the plastic shot casing and slammed it down on Bea’s upper arm. He felt a slight resistance as the needle punctured her clothes and then her skin. Bea didn’t respond. Zak wondered if she’d even felt the injection.

It was windy on Hampstead Heath. Calaca wasn’t used to the sensation of his hair blowing around and he wondered how people put up with it. It was dark too. There were few people about. An occasional dog walker. A little crowd of young men sharing cigarettes and cans of beer. He was glad that he had recce’d the heath already in the dark. It meant he knew where he was going. He could almost have made his way blindfolded.

He checked his watch. 19.45. Fifteen minutes until eight o’clock. The lake, where Ellie Lewis had arranged her rendezvous, was just a hundred metres away. He’d be early, which was good. It meant he could find himself a suitable firing point, and check the wind direction to ensure that his shots were on target. By one minute past, his victims would be dead. Calcaca himself would be on his way to Heathrow, where he would catch that evening’s flight to Mexico City. He was quite looking forward to telling
the new Señor Martinez that he had been successful.