Her Majesty's Western Service (49 page)

He’d
once killed a Royal heir from three times that distance.

Joseph Kennedy, Junior’s shattered brains blew through the back of his head.

Marko refocused his scope on the helpless man in the wheelchair. He looked to be struggling to get up.

“Oh,
no
chance, oligarch,” Marko murmured under his breath. “
No fucking chance
, oligarch.”

Another trigger-pull smashed Joseph Kennedy, Senior’s brains into leaden jelly.

And now
, Marko thought,
to get out of here.

For the first few seconds after the shot, he’d known
perfectly well since childhood, you stayed motionless. The immediate temptation was to bolt, but the fact was that the victims’ surviving friends would now be scanning around for movement.

Instead, you didn’t move at first. Then you moved slowly enough to not draw immediate attention.

Outside line of sight, of course, you bolted.

It was actually halfway up the external fire-escape that Marko encountered Kennedy’s men – dressed in street clothes, but the
ir alert demeanor and the fact that they were ascending a fire escape at 11:30 am would have alerted Marko if their half-drawn handguns hadn’t.

He slashed the first man’s throat with a left-handed knife swing.

The second had time to draw his gun.

Good, are we?

Marko killed him anyway, slashing his throat open in a backhanded swing from his first thrust. A second slash practically removed the goon’s gun-hand, blood fountaining from the severed wrist.

A third stab would have ended
Kennedy’s goon’s life for good right away, but Marko didn’t have the time for mercy. Or much interest in the concept.

He shouldered the already-dead fucker aside and
continued his dash down the fire-escape, heading for the airship park.

“Lift!” Marko shouted, jumping through the bridge door of the
Ruby Red Robber.
“Lift, damn you!”

Jebediah Judd, on the bridge, knew better than to argue.

“Lift, my men!” he shouted. “Ditch ballast and lift, boys!”

The
Ruby Red Robber
jumped.

“Stop immediately, lifting airship!” came a powerfully-amplified voice that could only have been Port Control.

“Evade `em,” Marko ordered.

“Harder than it looks,” Judd shot back.

Shit
, thought Marko.
I blew away both of the top Kennedys.

“Just do it!”

Perry still wasn’t drunk, although Ahle was probably close to it, when Joseph Kennedy Junior wheeled Joseph Senior back into the personal office where Lynch had been attempting to pump him for knowledge. This time, a half-dozen-strong squad of khaki-clad escorts came with the two pirate kings.

As usual – damn it – Lynch was the unsurprised one.

“So it happened? I warned you they’d try,” she said.

“Fuck you, Markell,”
said Joseph Kennedy Junior. “Thanks to you, both Felix and Marv are dead.”

“Better your body doubles than you,” Lynch said.

“
And
we’re out half a million in pension endowments to their families,” Senior hissed.

“Be glad,” Lynch replied evenly, “that you’re alive to write the checks.
Where
were
you anyway?”

“Attending to paperwo
rk in the other offices,” Joseph Junior said. “There’s always notices to review, checks to sign, so on. You’ve been there.”

“Sir, a report,” said one of the khaki flunkies.
He handed Joseph Kennedy, Junior a handset on a cord.

“Yes. Kennedy Junior. Uh-huh. Roger that. Acknowledged,” Junior said, and
gave the handset back.

“What was that?” Perry asked.

“That was Port Control,” said Kennedy Junior. “The man believed to have been the attempted assassin – who killed two of our bodyguards as well; they were moving to anticipate him before he got
into
position – escaped aboard a ship. Weapons were fired at him; too late. They missed.”

“They get a picture of him?” Perry asked.

“Nobody who got close survived,” said Junior.

“A tall, broken-toothed murderer,” said Lynch.
“The same man who wiped out my organization in Louisiana. As I
did
warn you he might try here.”

“The same man who stole 4-106,” mut
tered Perry. “
That
bastard.”

“Trotsky’s troubleshooter, no doubt,” said Lynch calmly.
“I wouldn’t have realistically expected that man, given the scale we’re dealing with here, to use any but the best.”

“Dispassionate, aren’t we?” snapped Junior.
“For a woman who lost her organization due to machinations she didn’t realize she was messing with.”

“Realistic,”
Lynch glared back. “Given circumstances. My hard lesson was your free information, Kennedy.”

“Two good men died because of that data,” snarled Joseph Senior from his wheelchair. “Given our pair of bodyguards,
four
. But we’ll continue in Lynch’s ‘realistic’ vein and stay on-point. Vice-Commodore.”

Three pairs of eyes focused on Perry.

“Your enemies just proved their seriousness,” Joseph
Senior went on. “They – he – beat the precautions we’d have taken had it been ourselves, and not just body doubles.”

“If you thought they were fucking around before,” said Joseph Junior, “they aren’t now.”

“Those people were competent to begin with,” said Lynch. “It was my mistake for thinking they were Hoover’s amateurs.”

“So do you want your
airship back or not?” Joseph Senior asked Perry,

“Any time, pirate. Any damn time.”

“The company’s ready,” Senior snapped back. “Go fetch it. And keep your part of the deal we made.”

“If your men get me my ship back” – Perry glared at the elder pirate king – “th
en I’ll do my part of your deal.”

“John Francis is back,” said Kennedy Senior. “We have three airships ready, and a company assembled. He’ll be leading the
recovery operation.”

“
They’re your men so he can lead it,” Perry said, “but I insist on accompanying. This is
my
airship. Ahle and Rafferty too, if they wish.”

“Tha
t’s fine,” Senior said.

“When do we leave?”

“The men are boarding the ships now. They’ll be ready to leave as soon as you join them. We have a car ready.”

“Let’s go,” Perry said to
Ahle. “It’s time to take my ship back.”

Chapter Twenty

We, of course, were not the only ones who had somewhere to go; the Russian royal family could follow others disdained by their own people into the frozen wastelands of Siberia.

Unlike previous dissidents, however, the Tsar and his court did not have the good manners - ‘courtly manners’, of course, having been oxymoronic in those times - to stay there. The Tsar’s son, Nicholas II, crowned in 1890 in Vladviostock, began gathering strength from Siberian clans and Cossack factions.

Backed in the cities by firebrand young reactionaries such as Lenin, Bukharin and Trotsky, the Russian court returned in February of 1917 in what is generally known as the Russian Restoration.

This is not generally considered to have been a good thing for Imperial interests.

From
Events in a Cynic’s Lifetime
, Baron Oscar Wilde, 1930.

“I have your money,” Marko said to Ferrer, handing him a wallet. There was a sick grin on his face. “We’re heading
for Amarillo. Don’t bother me until we’re there.”

Marko spun o
n a heel and went into his cabin.

Ferrer, relieved, went into the cabin he shared with Rienzi, unfolded his bunk and sat down on it.
It was good to have the money; five thousand Imperial pounds, enough in itself to buy a decent farm. That was twenty-five thousand United States dollars at the present exchange rate – enough for a couple dozen acres, a small house and to get a start on furnishing the workshop. The other half would get him a
good
workshop and leave enough for a comfortable retirement.

No more running from pirates. No more shooting people. This is my one blow against the System. I’ll have done my part.

He opened the wallet.

Inside there was money, yes.
A five-thousand pound Exchequer note – that had been shredded to the point where it was barely recognizable.

What the fuck?

He flipped the shredded mess out onto his bunk, examined it closely. Maybe if he carefully glued it back together? Was this some kind of a challenge?

No. It was some kind of a sick joke. Marko had clearly cut up at least
two
Exchequer notes; there were double pieces, pieces missing.

What. The. Fuck?

Part of Ferrer wanted to go out into the corridor and pound on Marko’s door
right now
, demanding an answer. But the terrorist had specifically ordered that he wasn’t to be disturbed until Amarillo. And a confrontation would get him shot, or worse.

What. The. Fuck?

“The other half the same way as this!” Marko had said.

Sick bile rose in Ferrer’s throat. He wasn’t going to be paid for the operation. Maybe he wasn’t even going to survive it. People like Marko, that sick
bastard
, enjoyed killing people.

Another sick bastard came into the cabin right now; Pete Rienzi.

“Killed four men, he did,” Ferrer’s assistant giggled. “Wish I could have been there. What’s going on?”

“I’ve been paid,” Ferrer growled.

Rienzi glanced at the shredded mess on Ferrer’s bunk, and laughed.

“Knows how to do a joke, don’t he?”

Ferrer kept his mouth shut.

You bastards.

Perry stood with Ahle, Rafferty and the Kennedys’ handsome, boyish-looking second son on the bridge of a family-owned airship called the
Viking
, as it lifted from Red Cloud’s park. The hold and the cabins of the airship were crowded with men; forty of them, another eighty on the two other airships coming with them.

They were escort-class fighting craft; this one, Perry identified as a
Fuego del Gato
class, built in quantity across the Spanish Empire from about 1950 until a few years ago. Not a top-line ship, unless the Kennedy engineers had made substantial modifications to it, but certainly serviceable.

“Captain, Mr. Kennedy,” reported one of the signalmen. “Other two say they’re ready to head out.”

“Tell them to follow,” said the ship captain, a slender ponytailed woman named Ahle. She glanced back to Kennedy, who nodded in confirmation.

“Helm, you know what to do.”

“Let’s do this thing,” Rafferty said.

“Yeah,” said
Ahle. “Let’s finally fucking do this thing.”

Pratt Cannon sat in the captain’s cabin of 4-106, which he’d appro
priated for his own use after Marko had left. On a fold-out table in front of him were the guns he’d just finished cleaning; there was also a watch, which said it was three minutes to eight. Almost time for him to supervise the change of guard shift.

The Ranger platoon had their own schedule, and their prickly asshole of a first lieutenant had
stubbornly refused to obey Cannon’s orders, or even to coordinate very much. Cannon had considered shooting the fucker – that was usually his first reaction when someone bothered him, kill the bastard and see if the platoon sergeant would be more reasonable – but Marko had specifically ordered him to behave himself around the Texans. Plus, Texas Rangers were hard men, not to be fucked with lightly.

They were being useful enough anyway. Running patrols around the local area on the ground, although so far they were yet to encounter anything. The others had removed six of the
nine-inch rocket launchers and set them up around the edge of the canyon.

Cannon’s own men, the fifty-two crew, had been divided into three guard shifts. By the unstated agreement with the Texans, the Texans were essentially handling area security while Cannon’s men were in charge of the ship itself. All fifty-two slept aboard it – there were more than enough
cabins – but at any given time, a third of them were stationed in the rig house on top, the bridge of the ship – that was where Captain Caine liked to hang out – the aft station and a few of the missile bays along the side.