Black List (19 page)

He held the weapon steady, his face a mask of calm self control that hid the conflicted emotions vying for dominance within him. He’d felt a momentary surge of excitement and anticipation at seeing Anya again, at having her in his crosshairs and knowing he had the power to put her down.

Only her quick reflexes, and the stupid fat bastard who had inadvertently acted as a human shield, had saved her life. She was still alive and somewhere inside the house, though he was confident she couldn’t escape without being seen. As well as this chopper and the ground team surrounding the house, he could also call upon a remote-controlled drone aircraft that had been tasked to the operation. Orbiting high overhead, unseen and unheard, its thermal imaging cameras were covering the entire area. Even Anya couldn’t compete with the technology arrayed against her.

He had her. And one way or another, he would take her down.

There would be no arrest this time. No handing her over to a foreign government only to see her escape later. Hawkins was out to finish what he’d started six years earlier.

‘Bring us around to the south-west side,’ he said, indicating to the pilot that he wanted to switch position, then quickly changed frequency to broadcast a message to his ground teams. ‘Alpha to all units. Tangos confirmed on-site. Hold the perimeter and don’t let anyone leave.’

His radio headset crackled. ‘Alpha, who’s shooting?’ a female, and very pissed-off, voice demanded. ‘We’re in position. Let us move in.’

Hawkins gritted his teeth. Mitchell, the woman who was rapidly becoming a pain in his ass. A pain he wasn’t prepared to tolerate much longer. She questioned too much, thought too much, saw too clearly. People like that were liabilities he could ill afford.

‘Negative, Charlie,’ he replied tersely. ‘Hold position. We have armed tangos inside.’

‘Copy that.’ Her own reply was equally hostile, but even she knew better than to start an argument in the middle of an operation. ‘Standing by.’

Spotting a sudden movement in one of the bedrooms overlooking the lake, Hawkins adjusted his aim, focussing in on the window. A curtain had been drawn to hide the interior from view, but the thin fabric could do little to disguise the heat emitted by a human body – heat that his thermal imaging scope was perfectly capable of detecting.

Pressing his eye to the scope, he could make out the flickering glow of a computer or TV screen, and the red outline of a figure leaning over it. Yates.

It would be the last mistake he ever made.

‘I have a tango!’ he called out. ‘Hold us steady.’

Tensing up, he took aim and pulled the trigger.

Alex was just leaning over the computer to check the download progress when he paused. The engine noise of the chopper outside had changed note, as if the pilot had made some correction to his course. He wasn’t circling the building any more in search of a target; he’d stopped.

He’d found his target. But who?

Anya was too clever to expose herself, and Landvik was already dead.

That only left…

Reacting on nothing more than gut instinct, Alex threw himself to the floor just as something punched its way through the window, tearing a hole in the curtain and impacting the computer he’d just been standing over.

‘Shit!’ he cried out, curling into a ball as sparks and fragments of broken plastic and metal flew outward from the ruined machine.

Keeping his belly flat against the floor, he crawled backwards towards the hallway even as more shots tore through the window, destroying what was left of Landvik’s workstation. And the files he’d been in the midst of downloading.

‘Tango in the upper bedroom,’ Hawkins reported. ‘Possible kill.’

It was hard to tell what had happened in there, given the sudden thermal bloom as a stray round destroyed whatever electrical equipment had been running. All he knew for sure was that the figure he’d been aiming at had fallen from sight.

No sooner had he spoken than another voice cut into the radio conversation. ‘Overlord has movement in the building. First floor window.’

Overlord was the call sign for the Reaper drone. Larger, faster and capable of flying higher than the Predator it was slowly replacing, the Reaper was the ultimate in pilotless aircraft. Its thermal-imaging cameras could pick out even the smallest movement, making it impossible to escape.

Some, like the one watching over them today, were even coated in radar-absorbing material, allowing them to operate in foreign airspace undetected.

Hawkins’s eye was back behind the scope in a heartbeat, muscles bunching and straining as he brought the cumbersome weapon to bear on a new target.

He was a moment too late.

Below, Anya sat crouched by the window of the upstairs bedroom, watching the chopper as it slowly moved past her line of sight. The bolt-action rifle pressed against her shoulder was of a type unfamiliar to her, but seemed to have been designed with big-game hunting in mind. The .270 Winchester cartridges it used, popular with hunters the world over, were lethal at up to a thousand yards, and powerful enough to take down elk and moose with a single shot.

It was just as well, because her chosen prey was almost forty feet long and weighed over 2,000 pounds.

Sighting the chopper, she adjusted her aim upward to the engine housing and the delicate mechanical systems contained within. She would have preferred to take out the gunner, but the chopper itself was likely fitted with thermal-imaging equipment that was being used to direct ground units to their position. One way or another she needed to put it out of action.

Taking first pressure on the trigger, she relaxed her arm slightly in preparation for the recoil, exhaled, and fired.

The report of the weapon in such a confined space was deafening, the blast reverberating off the walls until it left her ears ringing. She let out an involuntary grunt as the weapon slammed back into her shoulder with enough force to leave bruises, the foresight jumping upward despite her efforts to hold the weapon still.

Straight away her right hand was moving, working the bolt action to eject the spent cartridge and draw a fresh one into the breech. In just over a second she had chambered her second round, sighted the engine housing once more and loosed another shot.

Hawkins almost smiled as his sights came to rest on Anya’s head. With the power of the Barrett .50 cal, a hit just about anywhere on the body would cause catastrophic damage and deal a disabling if not a fatal injury, but he wanted a head shot.

He wanted to look into her eyes in that final moment before her skull disintegrated.

‘Bang, you’re dead,’ he whispered as his finger tightened on the trigger, taking first pressure.

Suddenly the helicopter shuddered as the round impacted above him. Before he had time to react, the aircraft yawed violently to port, pulling the barrel of the gun upward just as he squeezed the trigger.

The Barrett discharged with a thunderous boom, sending its projectile sailing harmlessly off into the woodland beyond the house. Abandoning the cumbersome weapon, Hawkins grabbed hold of a restraining harness to steady himself as the deck tilted beneath his feet, threatening to pitch him right out the open doorway.

‘What the fuck’s going on up there?’ he snarled as the surface of the lake lurched and swayed dangerously beneath them. It was as if the chopper had become caught in the funnel of a tornado.

‘We’ve been hit,’ the pilot replied, fighting with the stick as if it had a mind of its own. ‘I’m losing hydraulic pressure.’

Hawkins ground his teeth. No way was he abandoning the attack now. ‘Bring us back around and get me another shot at this bitch.’

‘Working on it, sir,’ he said, frantically trying to stabilize their erratic, lurching flight.

In the house below, Alex started at the sharp crack of two gunshots coming from the upper floor, followed moments later by a sudden change in the high-pitched whine coming from the chopper’s engines, as if they were labouring and straining somehow.

Chancing a look, he leaned out just far enough to see across the lake. And to his amazement, he watched as the chopper peeled away and retreated, struggling to maintain its course as wisps of smoke trailed from the engines.

In the comparative silence that followed, he could hear footsteps on the stairs. Turning with the weapon at the ready, he almost sighed in relief as Anya hurried over to him, clutching a heavy-looking bolt-action hunting rifle.

‘The chopper is out of action, for now,’ she informed him without emotion, as if it were no more than a minor inconvenience easily dealt with. ‘Get the file. We’re leaving.’

At this, Alex shook his head. ‘They fired on me when I went in there. The computer’s fucked. I lost the download.’

Anya said nothing for a moment or two, her jaw clenched, then shook her head and turned away. ‘Come on, we have to go.’

‘Fuck that. If we leave now, this is all for nothing.’ Alex was already moving towards the bedroom, seized by the desperate notion that he could remove the hard drive from the shattered casing and perhaps salvage the file later. Getting to it would take precious time, but it had to be worth a try at least.

Anya caught his arm and pulled him to a stop, spinning him around to face her. ‘We have no time for this.’

He tried to pull away, but her grip was surprisingly strong. ‘Let go of me!’

In response, she pulled him close and fixed him with a hard glare. ‘Listen to me, Alex. The file is no use to us if we’re dead!’

Releasing her grip, she moved over to a window overlooking the driveway and the woodland beyond. The evergreen forest created a dense canopy that virtually blotted out the sun, but also resulted in few bushes or other forms of ground cover.

With her keen eyes scanning the area, it didn’t take her long to spot movement in the shadows. Four operatives converging on the house in a loose skirmish line, armed with MP5 submachine guns and ready to support each other in the event of a pitched fight. An Agency fire team moving in to finish what the sniper had started.

‘They’re coming,’ she said, her voice low and urgent. ‘I can’t hold them off for long.’

Alex glanced at the long barrel of the hunting rifle. ‘What are you going to do?’

Her answer was simple. Her intentions weren’t. ‘Buy us some time.’

Reversing her grip on the weapon, she slammed the butt against the window, shattering the glass, then angled the barrel out through the jagged hole.

Hawkins clung on tight as the chopper’s deck pitched and rolled wildly beneath his feet, the pilot working hard to gain some altitude and stabilize their course, fighting the sluggish controls of an aircraft crippled by loss of hydraulic power.

The attempt to kill Anya with a clean, surgical sniper attack had failed. Hawkins was still seething over his failure, but knew that self-recrimination would have to wait. In any case, he had other means of taking Anya down.

Gripping a restraining harness with one hand, Hawkins keyed his radio with the other. ‘Alpha to Overlord.’

‘Go, Alpha,’ the pilot of the Reaper drone replied.

‘You are weapons-free. Authorisation Bravo, Zulu, Niner. Roll in strike package on previously identified coordinates.’

The Reaper wasn’t just there to observe the assault. If surveillance wasn’t enough and the situation warranted it, the drone’s payload of air-to-ground Hellfire missiles could reduce virtually any standing structure to rubble in seconds.

‘Be advised, Alpha. This is a civilian area,’ Overlord cautioned him. ‘Mission will be compromised.’

‘Understood. This is my call.’

There would be repercussions from this, of course. A single woman found dead in a remote house could be covered up, but a drone strike against a civilian target was a whole different level. Lies about terrorist activity would have to be spun. The Agency’s reputation would take a hit, but he knew it would be worth it. Cain would see to that.

‘Roger that, Alpha. It’s your call. Overlord is weapons free.’

Hawkins felt a fleeting sense of disappointment as he imagined the building disintegrating under the impacts of several Hellfire missiles. Such an impersonal way to kill someone.

‘Overlord to Alpha, be advised we have friendly units inside the kill area,’ the terse voice of the drone pilot informed him. ‘Aborting strike run.’

‘Say again, Overlord?’ Hawkins demanded.

‘We have friendlies in the vicinity of the house. Looks like ground teams are moving in to breech.’

It took no small measure of self control to stop himself yelling in anger. There was only one person he could think of who would have ordered the ground team to move in. Mitchell had taken matters into her own hands.

Unfortunately for her, she had no idea what she was getting into.

In an instant, he made his decision. ‘Swing us around, take us back toward the house,’ he called out to the pilot.

‘I can’t, sir.’ He glanced around at Hawkins, the fear in his eyes making it plain they were in serious trouble. ‘That shot took out our hydraulics. I can barely keep us level.’

Hawkins had heard enough of this shit. He hadn’t come halfway around the world to give up when he was mere yards away from his prize. Reaching into his jacket, he drew a Beretta automatic and jammed it against the pilot’s face.

‘You take us back around,’ he said through clenched teeth, pressing the barrel in a little tighter. ‘Now.’

Few men would argue about something like this with a gun to their head, and the pilot wasn’t one of them. Wrestling with the controls, he brought the stricken chopper around in a wide, clumsy arc, swinging the nose around towards the house.

‘I can’t hold it steady for a shot,’ the pilot warned.

‘You don’t need to,’ Hawkins replied, holstering his weapon and moving closer to the open doorway. ‘Just get us in low, close to the shore.’

Gathering herself up, Mitchell leapt over a fallen log as she pounded through the woodland towards the lakeside house. The MP5 submachine gun was a familiar, reassuring weight at her shoulder, and as she glanced left she saw Argento about twenty yards away, armed in the same fashion.

Two other operatives were also converging on the house from either flank, all armed and able to support one another in the event of a fire-fight.

She was under no illusions about the effectiveness of the Kevlar vest covering her torso, having seen similar armour easily defeated by the 7.62 mm rounds fired by Afghan insurgents. Of greater value to her was the GPS transponder fixed to the shoulder pads of the vest, which broadcast a coded signal identifying her as a friendly to the remotely piloted aircraft overhead, essentially allowing the operators to distinguish Mitchell and her comrades from whomever else might be in the area. Without it they would all appear as identical white blobs of heat on the drone’s thermal cameras, making it impossible to tell friend from foe.

Still, all this technology was nothing more than an aid; it could help them but it couldn’t protect them. Mitchell and her team still had to cross the open ground between the house and the treeline, and no drone or spy satellite could change that. Assaults like this always carried an element of risk, as she had learned from hard experience.

Her thoughts were interrupted by the sudden crack of a gunshot from the direction of the house. Instinctively she threw herself to the ground just as something whizzed by on her left side, burying itself in the trunk of a nearby tree in a shower of splinters and fragments of bark.

‘Contact front. Sniper!’ she called out, backing up against a low boulder surmounted by tangled tree roots.

Another gunshot echoed through the woods, followed by a third.

‘Anyone got eyes-on?’ she asked, reluctant to expose herself. She’d felt the slight change in air pressure as the first round zipped by dangerously close, and guessed the shooter had her position zeroed in.

‘I saw movement. Ground-floor window, second from the end,’ Argento replied. ‘They might have relocated.’

It made sense. No sniper worth their salt would remain in the same place after giving their position away. The question was what to do now.

Their own weapons were ineffective at such range. They could spit out a high rate of fire, but they were designed for close-quarters fighting. Advancing on the house might well cost them heavy casualties, and there was no telling how difficult it might be to clear the place out room by room.

Still, they would achieve nothing by sitting here waiting. The sounds of the brief gunfight would have been heard at other properties nearby, and it wouldn’t be long before local police arrived on the scene to investigate. They had to act now.

Reaching up, she pressed the radio microphone at her throat. ‘This is Charlie. Bravo, on me. Delta and Echo get ready with suppressing fire. We’re moving in.’

The only logical approach was the cover-and-advance method. With two operatives watching the house at all times while the others moved, they could at least respond if they came under fire again.

She was just getting ready to move when her radio crackled in response.

‘Delta to all units. I got vehicle noises coming from the garage on the west side.’

Catching her breath, Mitchell strained to listen. Sure enough, she could hear the deep rumble of a big engine echoing from the house’s integrated garage, revving hard as if someone was stamping awkwardly on the accelerator. The metal doors were still closed, however, prompting a quizzical glance from Argento.

‘What the—?’

Suddenly the noise rose to a crescendo, and the garage doors buckled and threatened to give way as something slammed into them from inside. A moment later the thin metal split and tore free, revealing a big civilian 4x4 that rocketed out of the garage, heading for the road leading away from the house.

‘Target dead ahead!’ Mitchell hissed, raising her weapon.

The windows were tinted, making it hard to identify the driver, but no way was she allowing them to leave. Sighting the driver’s side front wheel, she squeezed off a short burst of automatic fire.

The MP5’s 9 mm rounds weren’t powerful enough to cause much recoil, but a sustained burst nonetheless made the lightweight weapon difficult for novices to control. Mitchell however was well used to such submachine guns, and her aim was true.

At least three of her shots found their mark, tearing through the rubber tyre walls with ease. There was a loud pop and hiss as the tyre gave way, and suddenly the vehicle slewed off to the left.

Lowering the gun, Mitchell watched as it careened off the road, bumped over a drainage ditch and finally slammed headlong into the unyielding trunk of a tree, the wheels still spinning and clawing at the dirt.

‘It’s down!’ she called out, loud enough that she no longer needed the radio. ‘All units move in!’

Without waiting for acknowledgement she closed in on the wrecked vehicle, her weapon up and ready once more. The engine was still running despite the clouds of steam billowing from beneath the hood, the wheels throwing up clods of dirt and mud as they continued to turn.

‘Overlord has you covered, Charlie.’ The drone orbiting overhead would have fixed its cameras on the crashed vehicle.

She wondered if the driver had been knocked unconscious by the collision, and was perhaps lying slumped over the wheel with their foot pressed on the accelerator. Whatever, they were certainly making no effort to reverse or manoeuvre around the obstacle barring their path.

‘Charlie, on your nine!’ she heard Argento call out as she approached the driver’s door, having to yell to be heard over the noise of the engine. Mitchell felt a moment of relief that someone was there to back her up.

‘Cover me,’ she hissed, glancing at him to confirm he understood.

He nodded while keeping the weapon at his shoulder. ‘On it.’

Gripping the MP5 in one hand and the handle in the other, she took a single breath, tensed herself up, and hauled the driver’s door open.

‘Shit.’

Now she knew why the 4x4 wasn’t going anywhere. The accelerator had been wedged down by what looked like the snapped handle of a broom, the steering wheel tied in place with a length of bungee cord to keep the car on a roughly straight heading.

The car was a decoy. And she had fallen for it.

‘Trunk’s clear too,’ Argento said, having popped the rear door to check the car’s storage area, just in case their targets had hidden themselves away in there.

Reaching inside, Mitchell switched off the ignition and slammed the door shut.

‘All units be advised, the car is a decoy,’ she said, speaking the instructions into her radio through gritted teeth. ‘I say again, the car is a decoy.’

But the sudden silence had afforded her a moment or two to tune into the sounds of her surroundings. In the peaceful wooded glade she could hear the whistle of birds in the treetops overhead, the distant thump of Hawkins’ damaged chopper, and closer at hand, faint but unmistakable, the high pitched rattle of a small engine.

Her keen eyes surveyed the wooded area around the house, and in particular the lake beyond, its mirror-like surface reflecting the blue sky overhead. And standing at the shore not more than twenty yards from the house, was a small boatshed partially screened by trees and bushes.

‘Son of a bitch,’ she said under her breath, then reached for her radio again. ‘All units, tangos may be trying to escape by boat. Delta and Echo converge on the lake. Move!’

Her transmission complete, she turned to Argento. ‘Move in on the house. Let’s go.’

Yates and the woman might be making good their escape across the lake, but she wanted to secure the house before they moved on. It was only a matter of time before the Norwegian police arrived on the scene, and she wanted to gather what evidence she could before they showed up.

He nodded, and together the two of them advanced across the wide turning circle in front of the building, their boots crunching on the gravel as they sprinted across the open space. Here they split up, with Mitchell heading for the now open garage and Argento taking the front door. When they breached, they would go in from two directions simultaneously.