Shredder (22 page)

There
.

A black shape shifted against the fence, a shadow darker than the other shadows. I checked the street out front again and this time concentrated on those patches of black I'd ignored before.

Another
.

That made two men at least, dressed in black, wearing goggles.
There
—a third, crouching in a deep doorway directly opposite. Holding something
pointed upwards, a stubby pole…no, a submachine gun, fitted with a noise suppressor.

This wasn't the Turk's crew. This was an Armed Response Team, in full combat gear, and they were closing in.

Now I understood exactly what this place was.

I had ninety seconds, maximum, to decide what to do, and it had to be the right decision. I'd seen enough reconstructions and played enough combat sims to have a good idea of what would happen next: the cops would kill the power to the building, then fire flashbangs and tear gas through the windows. Except these windows didn't break….

Footsteps on the roof, soft as a cat, but distinct, heading for the ventilator panels I could see on either side of the apex.

I scrambled down the stairs again, but when I got to the bottom I still had no idea what I should do. Come out through the front door with my hands in the air? They'd either shoot me or arrest me…most likely they'd shoot me
and
arrest me. Afterwards they'd make sure the ambulance took its time getting through the cordon so I'd bleed to death and spare the NHS the expense of treating me. The same
thing would happen if I lay down on the floor and waited for them to storm the place—they'd shoot me twice in the head, just in case I had a detonator in my hand.

Because this place was a bomb factory, and the cops were on to it. Anyone inside would be considered a terrorist and a live threat, and when terrorists get shot nobody objects, except the usual human-rights cranks everyone ignores. Any awkward questions would be washed away in a flood of speculation and misinformation—that I was a loner, a psycho, another alienated underachiever who'd become a religious fanatic—

Without a sound the lights went out. There was only one thing I could do now and one place I could go, but I couldn't see a thing—my eyes hadn't adjusted to the darkness and there was no time to let them. Those inspection pits were somewhere dead ahead of me, so I shuffled to my right, then forward as fast as I dared, knowing that at any second stun grenades would blow me off my feet and blind me. I stretched out, flailing with my hands—my target was right there, I had been looking at it two seconds ago….

I tripped on something hard and unyielding and
went sprawling, half expecting to find empty air and go tumbling into the gaping darkness of a pit, but my hands hit concrete, and groped at the greasy dust. A bent nail dug into my right palm—I was shuffling along the floor now on my knees and my right hand, with my left up in front, swinging left to right and left to right—had I missed it, gone past it? How? High above me I heard a faint screech of bent metal as a door or flap was forced open, and at that moment my left hand brushed something smooth. I scuttled forward, and now my right hand felt it too—the bumper on the front of the tanker. Scrambling to my feet, I fumbled my way down the side of the cab, fingers scrambling along the door—that was the wing mirror strut—this was the window—then the handle had to be—yes—

In one movement I pushed the latch down with my thumb, pulled the door open, and heaved myself up into the cab, and as I did I heard a hiss, a clatter and a rattle, and I slammed the cab door shut, and the bang shook the teeth in my head and made my ears ring. A stun grenade. The flash didn't dazzle me—it just lit up the inside of the building, and showed me the roller shutter door, dead ahead. The grenade must have fallen into one of the inspection
pits, but I screwed my eyes shut, expecting a second, and there was—another deafening detonation, almost too loud to hear, and a light so bright I could count every vein in my eyelids. I found the gearshift and gripped it, twisted the key in the ignition and floored the brake pedal. The engine roared into life, and beyond it I heard shouts, but I ignored them. Lights, lights—I tugged and twisted the levers protruding from the steering column—
there!

The instrument panel blazed into life, and the lettering on the automatic gearbox. Keeping the brake pedal pressed, I pulled the gear lever back to D, found the parking brake and released it, lifted my foot off the brake and slammed the accelerator to the floor.

The truck leaped forward, its engine roaring, and the motion threw me back against my seat. I gripped the steering wheel with both hands and pointed the tanker straight at the roller door, bracing myself for the impact, half expecting the truck to stop dead on impact and hurl me through the windscreen. The nose of the cab was a flat wall of glass and steel and it hit the roller door like a giant hammer, ripping it clean off its hinges and knocking it outwards and upwards like a tin cat-flap that rattled and scraped
along the roof of the cab. Black-clad figures ahead of me dived to right and left and I hunched down in my seat, waiting for a shower of bullets to shatter the cab windows, but none came. Of course—they didn't dare open fire in case the entire tanker went up.

The engine was still screaming, but I was heading for the fence, not the gate, so I eased back on the speed and hauled at the wheel, turning it to the right. I was amazed I'd made it this far—all I knew about driving I'd learned in one drunken night four years ago, in a stolen hatchback that my mates and I had trashed on wasteland. That had been an automatic, like this, and they were a piece of cake to drive as long as you didn't care what you crashed into.

The gates were dead ahead now, and I accelerated again, just as an unmarked police car roared forward from the right to block my exit. I pulled the wheel to the left, aiming the tanker for the shrinking gap, but I misjudged it and sideswiped the gatepost, skewing it sideways and ripping off my wing mirror. The tanker slewed to the right and slammed into the front corner of the cop car, spinning it aside with a thunderous crunch, the tinkle of shattering headlights, and a scream of metal scraping on
metal that set my teeth on edge. The right window exploded and crazed, but not from the impact—one of the armed response guys had opened fire—and even as I ducked down in my seat again and hauled the wheel counterclockwise I could hear yells and screams over the roar of my engine. Someone was getting an earful.

I was out of the yard and clear, but I'd pulled the wheel round too hard—now I was driving half on the pavement, heading straight for the concrete post of a streetlight. When I wrenched the wheel clockwise the truck swerved wildly, bounced down off the left curb and headed for the right. I eased off on the accelerator but the vehicle barely slowed—it was far heavier and slower to respond than that car we'd nicked. I could hear its chemical load sloshing wildly about in the tank behind me, and feel the truck tilt and sway with its momentum as I wrestled with the wheel. I was almost getting the hang of it. The road ahead of me was clear—all twenty meters of it. The cops hadn't sealed it off because they didn't need to—it was a dead end, a turning circle for trucks, empty apart from one abandoned van sitting rusting on flat tires. Beyond that van was the curb, beyond that curb was a foot or so of tarmac pavement, and
beyond the pavement was a metal crash barrier that I hoped was less solid than it looked.

There was no way to tell how close the Armed Response Team was behind me—my right-hand window was a vertical mass of glass crumbs, and I'd knocked the mirror on my side clean off. But it made no difference either way. Uttering a silent prayer to a god I didn't believe in—he'd never believed in me—I floored the accelerator again and hung on for dear life. The engine roared and the tanker surged forward and I felt myself being thrown back in my seat a second time. I glimpsed the speedometer, and the needle was heading towards forty when I hit the curb, and the cab bounced so hard I flew vertically upwards out of my seat and nearly let go of the wheel. A split second later the cab slammed into the crash barrier, which warped and burst asunder like wet cardboard, and now I was bouncing down an unlit slope, veering and swaying wildly, the wheel thrashing in my hands. I had to hold it straight or the whole thing would topple over and take me with it. Under the tortured howl of the engine I could hear a slashing hiss of plants being plowed up and pushed aside.

There was another teeth-rattling jolt upwards as
the tanker's front wheels hit the towpath, and for an instant my windscreen was filled with the dark, gentle outline of trees against the orange night sky; then the cab plunged downwards and hit the canal, throwing me forwards over the wheel, my forehead bouncing so hard off the windscreen I saw stars. I blinked and shook my head to clear it, and when I opened my eyes again the gray slimy water of the canal had nearly reached the top of the windscreen and was gushing into the cab around and under the doors. An instant later the crazed window to my right exploded inwards under the pressure. As the cab filled with stinking lukewarm water the lights of the dash faded into gray gloom, leaving me in darkness. I started to breathe, long and hard, long and hard, keeping it up as long as I could, feeling the water soak my jeans as it climbed up my legs to my crotch and then my belly, until my head started to spin and throb and I knew I was hyperventilating. I tugged off my hooded top, levered my right trainer off with my left, but I couldn't get my left trainer off. I ducked under the water to pull it free and when I straightened up I was still underwater, but now my head was brushing the roof of the cab. It was time to go.

I blew out as much of the air in my lungs as I dared; the bubbles glinted silver in the dark, and they were all I could see. I'd filled my blood with oxygen so I wouldn't need any in my lungs. With my chest full of air I'd be pulled upwards, and as soon as my head appeared above water someone would put a bullet through it. I could taste the canal swilling about in my mouth, and I tried not think of what was in it—the rat piss and essence of corpses—while I fumbled at the door beside me for the window winder, found it and cranked it, fast, until it would go no further. Then I grabbed the frame of the open window, pulled myself out through it, and forced myself down, and further down, till I touched the mud and slime and broken glass of the canal floor. I drove my hands forward and swept them back, kicked my legs, and propelled myself downriver, into the dark.

It was the searchlight that nearly killed me.

I stayed under as long as I could, swimming downstream along with the feeble current, but eventually my chest started to burn and my muscles to weaken for want of oxygen. With no air in my lungs I had to force myself up towards the surface, and I tried pushing off the bottom, but my foot just sank
into sticky sludge. I kicked with my legs and flailed my arms to break free and rise, and I was half a meter from the surface when the water above me lit up like a football stadium, and through the roaring of the blood in my ears I could hear the high whine of a chopper overhead—a police helicopter fitted with a high-intensity searchlight, sweeping the canal. Somehow I forced myself down again, every last cell of my flesh screaming for air, and struck out for the bank, hoping if I surfaced up against it I'd be less visible. I felt the interlocking metal plates of the canal's sidewall before I saw them. I knew there'd be no overgrowth here to conceal me, just a hard clean metal edge, but I couldn't stay under any longer. I pushed myself up, scrabbling at the coarse metal with my fingers, desperate to pull myself clear of the water and breathe.

I felt the night on my face, opened my mouth wide and dragged in air, coughing and spitting and hawking, gulping down more oxygen before I shook the water out of my eyes and looked upwards. Now the clatter of the helicopter's rotor blades and the whine of its engine was deafening; it couldn't have been more than fifteen meters overhead. But directly above me was the high metal arch of that last bridge
I'd crossed on the way here, and for a few precious seconds I was sheltered in its shadow. I watched the hard beam of light from above flick and swivel, pausing for a few seconds on a punctured football floating in a patch of litter ten meters away, and in those few seconds I took three more breaths, blew the air out of my lungs and dived again. The searchlight was bad enough, but that chopper would have heat-seeking cameras too, which would pick out my shape as soon as I surfaced. I had to keep diving and swimming downstream—it was the only way to stay concealed.

Just as my lungs started to burn again I saw an orange flush on the water above me and recognized the scattered glare of a streetlamp. It threw into silhouette a patch of floating garbage—water bottles, crisp packets and rotting leaves—piled up in the twigs of a severed branch that had snagged on the bank. I pushed upwards and surfaced underneath it, trying to tread water without splashing or scattering the litter. The clattering of the chopper overhead was deafening, and the searchlight dazzling, but now it was focused on the white hull of the half-sunk boat I'd passed earlier. A member of the Armed Response Unit was crouching on the far bank peering
in through the slimy glass of the cockpit, but after a second he shook his head and looked up—straight across at me.

Surely he could see me, or hear my labored breathing? I clamped my lips shut and tried to breathe through my nose, but my sinuses were full of filthy water and I had to splutter it out, wheezing and retching with my hand over my mouth. The copper didn't react: the chopper's racket must have drowned me out—and the dazzle of the searchlight was throwing mad dancing shadows over everything outside its beam. The cop paused a moment, listening to a voice in his earpiece, then set off back upstream at a run. I took another three deep breaths and dived again, and behind me the glow of the light in the gray water faded and slid away.