Betrayal (32 page)

Still, it was done now. The rest was up to her.

The thunderous detonation had been followed by a few seconds of stunned silence as the analysts, support staff, planners, intelligence experts and soldiers throughout the compound tried to process what had just happened. People are slow to react to things they don’t expect, particularly when that thing happens to be a car bomb that’s just destroyed a good portion of their security perimeter and blown out every window within half a mile.

Moving with swift, confident strides, she hurried down the corridor and into the stairwell leading up to the third floor, her heels clicking on the hard concrete steps. It was far from an easy climb in her uncomfortable new shoes, but it was the only way – the elevators would likely have shut down already.

Anya had made it up the second flight of steps before the first alarm started blaring.

Masalsky’s ears were ringing, his head throbbing from the explosion that had just engulfed the building. He could feel the warm wetness of blood on his cheek, neck and arms where slivers of glass had peppered one side of his body, shredding clothes and skin. None of the injuries seemed to be life-threatening, and he was too dazed to feel much pain yet.

The air was thick with dust and smoke, stinging his eyes and throat. Coughing and retching, he managed to push himself up from the floor and staggered over to the window.

In the open area below, chaos reigned.

Some kind of explosive had detonated near the outer wall, obliterating a large section of it and leaving behind a smoking crater the size of a bus. Nearby vehicles had been turned over and hurled aside by the force of the blast, and God only knew how many people had been killed. A pall of smoke hung over the entire area.

And then faintly as if from a great distance, Masalsky heard the unmistakable sound of automatic weapons fire. Hardly able to comprehend, he squinted through the smoke in search of the source. And sure enough, he spotted muzzle flares lighting up the murky gloom below.

This was no random car-bomb attack, he realised in a moment of gut-wrenching panic. It was a coordinated strike, using the blast to breach the outer defences and allowing an armed strike team to storm the compound.

He had to do something. Turning away from the window, he lurched and staggered across the remains of his office, his sense of balance destroyed as surely as the perimeter wall outside.

Emerging into the smaller secretarial office beyond, he looked around for Katarina. A soft moaning directed his attention left, where the young woman was curled up in the corner, a bloodied hand pressed against one side of her face.

She certainly wouldn’t be called beautiful after today, he realised with a lingering sense of revulsion. A shrapnel fragment had opened up her face from chin to ear, peeling back skin and muscle to reveal the obscene whiteness of bone beneath.

He could do nothing for her, just as she could do nothing for him. Abandoning the injured woman, he stumbled through the debris of her office and into the corridor beyond. He didn’t even know where he intended to go or what he would do when he got there; only that he couldn’t just sit here and wait for armed gunmen to fight their way up to him. There was no telling how many there were, or what their ultimate goal was.

He had barely managed to wrench the door open when a female agent came running towards him, emerging like a wraith out of the smoke. Unlike him, she seemed to have escaped injury. Perhaps she’d been on the other side of the building when the bomb went off.

She was saying something, but with his ears still ringing from the blast he was unable to discern the words.

‘Speak up!’ he growled, one hand pressed against a cut at his neck.

‘Are you all right, sir?’ she repeated, practically yelling right in his face.

‘Of course I’m not fucking all right! What the hell is going on out there?’

‘Your guess is as good as mine, sir,’ she admitted. ‘The radio net’s down. But we have to get you to the shelter.’

Like any field station, the FSB compound in Chechnya had its own secure panic room in the very core of the building, built for senior executives to take shelter in during emergencies. With reinforced walls, armoured doors and its own air and electrical supply, it was as close to impregnable as any room could be.

‘Sir, do you hear me?’ she asked. ‘We have to go now!’

Masalsky thought about Katarina and what would happen to her if the insurgents managed to fight their way up here. For a moment he actually considered sending the agent in to get her, but the boom of a grenade explosion outside was enough to forestall such thoughts.

Masalsky nodded grimly. ‘Fine. Let’s go.’

With the female agent leading the way, they hurried down the corridor, their eyes watering as smoke from various small fires began to fill the air.

Halting beside the elevator, Masalsky hit the call button.

‘Forget it, sir,’ she called out, physically dragging him away from it. ‘The power’s out. They won’t be running.’

He frowned as she led him onwards, throwing open a door to the stairwell. It was lit only by the dull red glow of emergency lighting. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Sherkova,’ she replied over her shoulder. ‘Anya Sherkova.’

Masalsky shook his head as he hurried to follow her down the stairs. ‘I don’t know you.’

‘I only transferred in three days ago, sir. Makes my last posting seem quite dull.’

He was starting to wish he had more people like her. Despite the chaos around her, Sherkova thought and acted with clear, logical decisiveness. It was almost as if she wasn’t even fazed by what had happened …

No sooner had this thought crossed his mind than she stopped, watching as the door at the bottom of the stairwell flew open and two agents hurried through. Both male, both in their forties, and both clutching automatics. Masalsky recognised them as agents from the base’s protective services division, and felt a surge of relief at their arrival.

Anya, however, was harbouring very different thoughts.

These two men represented a serious obstacle that had to be overcome quickly if she expected to get out of here alive. Still dazed and confused by the blast, they hesitated on seeing her, their weapons drawn but not pointed. They were trying to work out whether she was a friend or foe.

‘I’m taking Director Masalsky to the shelter,’ she said, drawing on as much authority as she possessed. She pointed back up the way she had come. ‘But there are a lot of casualties upstairs that need your help.’

The one on the left, probably the more senior of the two, shook his head. ‘The director’s our responsibility. We’ll take it from here,’ he said as he tried to shove his way past her.

It was a fatal lapse of judgement. Just as he moved by, her right arm lashed out, striking him squarely in the throat. There are few more vulnerable places in the human body; a single good strike to the throat with either a blunt object or a fist can drop even the most hardened operative like a stone.

This man was no different. Temporarily stunned and unable to breathe, he let out a sharp grunt of pain and fell to his knees, choking and gasping. The weapon fell from his grasp, clattering to the concrete floor.

She wasn’t going to give him time to recover. A knee to the face sent him sprawling at the foot of the stairs, his glazed eyes and limp body confirming that it would be several minutes at least before he recovered enough to pose any threat.

Such was the speed and ferocity of her attack, his comrade was only now starting to process what he’d just witnessed. Without breaking stride, Anya drew the M1911 from her suit jacket, took aim at the second agent and squeezed off a single round. There was a loud thud as the round discharged. Even with a silencer, the .45 made a lot of noise in the confined space of the stairwell.

The thud was followed a heartbeat later by a soft wet crunch as the round obliterated his skull, along with the fragile organ it was supposed to protect. He went down, leaving a splatter of blood on the concrete wall behind.

She allowed herself but a fleeting moment of regret for what she’d just done. He had died out of necessity, not desire. But it couldn’t be helped, just as she couldn’t allow emotions like that to intrude on her thoughts. If they did, she was as good as dead.

Masalsky stared at the scene before him in blank shock, as if failing to understand what had just happened. Then, a moment later, survival took over.

In panic he turned and tried to flee back up the stairs, thinking to take refuge in one of the offices up there. It was a vain hope, and quickly dashed.

He hadn’t managed to stumble more than a few feet before he felt something sharp fired into his back. There was a click, and suddenly white-hot pain filled every part of his body. His legs gave way beneath him and he collapsed to the floor, convulsing as thousands of volts surged through his nervous system.

When it stopped at last, he was barely conscious, unable to move. He looked up through bleary eyes and saw Anya throw aside the taser she had used to incapacitate him; then his vision swam and he blacked out.

Anya holstered her pistol and knelt down beside the unconscious man. With Masalsky down and the two FSB agents neutralised, now came the hard part – getting him out of the compound without being killed in the process.

If everything had been prepared as expected, there would be a vehicle waiting for her downstairs. All she had to do was get Masalsky down there and into it, which was easier said than done. Carrying an unconscious man weighing upwards of 170 pounds was a daunting task even for her.

She kicked off her shoes, knowing they would do her no favours now, and took a few deep breaths to prepare herself. Doing her best to distribute his weight across her shoulders, she heaved him on to her back, took a deep breath and forced herself up from the floor. Her muscles burned with the effort but somehow she managed to pick her way between the two fallen agents and through the stairwell access.

She emerged into the ground-floor corridor in time to see an overweight man stagger past clutching a bloody wound on the side of his head. He didn’t even glance at her as he passed, intent only on helping himself. That suited her just fine.

Anya knew there was a fire escape about halfway along the corridor that opened out into a small parking lot sandwiched between two wings of the office complex. Breathing hard and with a sheen of sweat coating her brow, she forced herself onwards with the heavy bulk of Masalsky pressing down on her with each step.

The door was already standing ajar when she reached it, apparently having been used already. With her strength waning she staggered through into the cold, smoke-filled world beyond.

As she’d hoped, this side of the building was largely untouched by the blast, as were the half-dozen cars in the small parking lot.

Her eyes flicked from car to car until she found the one she wanted. It was a GAZ-2330 ‘Tigr’, the Russian military’s standard multipurpose all-terrain vehicle, and one which also saw heavy use by the FSB.

Ignoring the scattered groups of injured and shell-shocked office workers who were milling around trying to decide what to do next, Anya staggered over to the Tigr and felt beneath the driver’s side wheel arch. Sure enough, a key had been secured there.

In short order she had unlocked the rear door and heaved Masalsky inside, unconcerned about how rough she was being with him. He’d live. For now, at least.

Pausing only to secure his hands behind his back with a pair of plastic cable ties, she returned to the driver’s cab and leapt up into the seat. With his weight no longer on her shoulders, she felt light as a feather despite the burning pain in her muscles.

The engine fired up first time, and Anya wasted no time pulling out of the parking lot, having to honk the horn to get a couple of stunned-looking men in bloodstained suits to move aside.

Rounding the main building, she headed straight for the vehicle checkpoint, not bothering to slow down as she approached. No way was she giving anyone time to start thinking and questioning the situation. She spotted the two soldiers cowering behind the concrete blocks that formed part of the guard position, saw one of them scramble to raise the barrier to make way for her.

These men were concerned only with stopping enemies getting in, not hindering the passage of FSB vehicles trying to get out. For all they knew, the armoured Tigr might have been part of a counter-attack to drive the enemy back.

She caught Yerzov’s eye as she roared through the checkpoint, saw the fleeting look of recognition and dawning comprehension on his face, and then in a flash he was gone. The compound, the checkpoint, the firefight – it was all behind her now.

Allowing herself to experience a fleeting moment of elation, she reached for the cellphone in her pocket and dialled Atayev’s number while fighting to keep the big vehicle steady as it rumbled through potholes and patches of mud.

‘I’m clear,’ she said as soon as the ringing stopped.

‘Do you have him?’ She could hear the anticipation, the anxiety in Atayev’s voice.

She glanced in her rear-view mirror at the unconscious man bumping around in the cargo area. He was a mess, and he would undoubtedly be far from his best when he regained consciousness, but he was alive. That was their agreement.

‘I do.’

There was a moment of silence, broken only by the roar of her engine and wind whistling past the windows. But Anya could have sworn she heard a faint exhalation of breath over her radio.

‘Good,’ Atayev said at last. ‘Get yourself to the rendezvous. We’ll be waiting for you.’

As the phone clicked off, Anya turned hard left on to the main drag. The road surface was a little smoother now, and she pressed down harder on the gas pedal, eager to put as much distance as possible between herself and the FSB compound.

The diversionary attack mounted by the rest of Atayev’s group would have been called off by now, the gunmen retreating under cover of smoke and darkness before the FSB could organise a counter-attack and bring in air assets. As some semblance of order was restored, it wouldn’t take them long to figure out their director of operations was missing.