The Blind Spy (44 page)

Now she ran up the remaining steps on to the top of the quay. It was a piece of luck that they’d exploded the vessel now. There would be pandemonium and, in the confusion, it would make her task more easy. Immediately, sirens tore through the low hum of the city and klaxons began to scream their message here, inside the Russian fleet’s highly protected zone.

She looked up along the quay towards the high steel gates that shut her in on the inside of the protected zone and unwanted visitors out. There she saw the train on its tracks that led along the quay and, at the end of the quay where the tracks ended, she saw the aircraft carrier
Moskva
, broadside on, its towering superstructure dead in line with the train tracks.

There were uniformed men running along the quay pointing at the stricken ship, shouting orders. She heard a man shout at her but she ran past and shouted an order in return. She kept running and was concealed in her speed by the desperate reactions of the few people left inside the protected zone. She reached the engine of the goods train and saw the twenty goods vans trailing behind it and carrying three hundred submarine batteries, most of which weighed half a ton each. With the weight of the train itself, there would be well over two hundred tons of weight.

She climbed into the cab. She heard shouting, but it wasn’t directed at her. Not yet. She started the engine of the train and released the brake. Slowly it ground into action and began to rumble along the quay the quarter of a mile before the quay ended at the
Moskva
. Once it had reached nearly thirty miles an hour, she jammed the accelerator into place, crossed to the other side of the cab and flung herself out on that side where there was no one. All the people on the quay were on the other side of the train, watching the aftermath of the explosion.

Anna rolled hard on the unyielding concrete and got to her feet. Beside her the twenty goods vans were gathering speed and she heard the engine roaring with the strain of reacting to the jammed accelerator. She ducked down and ran to the far side of the quay, away from the train and the burning ship. She wanted to be far from the train when the last of the vans passed her so that she and the train’s catastrophic run towards the
Moskva
were dissociated as far as possible. When the final van passed she saw that all the military personnel were now turned from the burning ship and watching in horror as the train reached forty, then fifty miles an hour and still kept adding speed.

She didn’t watch but kept moving at a fast walk now towards the steel gates that protected the quay from intruders. She heard the smash as the train broke through the concrete buffers at the end of the track and then the squeal of tortured metal as it swung itself clear of the tracks and on to the bare concrete of the quay. It must be going at seventy or eighty miles an hour now, she thought, and increasing all the time. When she did stop so that, like all the others now on the quay, she was looking at the impending disaster, what she saw was two hundred tons or more of roaring steel crash into the superstructure of the aircraft carrier
Moskva
and keep on going. The train was like a massive bullet, the thickened steel of the ship’s superstructure no match for its onslaught. It sheared the side of the superstructure away completely on the quayside and kept on boring into the ship until by the time it stopped half of the train was hanging into the harbour on the far side of the carrier and the engine finally exploded with the unrewarded effort of forward propulsion. The entire superstructure toppled and swayed and crashed over itself and on top of the train. Then a sheet of flame erupted from the bowels of the ship.

Anna turned away. She ran towards the steel gates, her right hand arming one of the Semtex tubes, her left waving the Contender. She hurled the explosive at the centre of the gates and rolled away to feel the flash of the explosion on her back and the searing pain of the heat that tore off the back of her uniform. She kept rolling behind a watch hut and gathered her breath. Then she leapt to her feet and ran through smoke and falling debris out of the protected zone. Behind her a ton of steel from one of the gates crashed to the ground and she was through.

The approaches to the gates were now a mass of troops and security personnel, military vehicles and fire trucks that raced towards the gates from the land side. She dodged in and out of them, losing herself in smoke and terrified humanity until she reached the embankment. There was the Ukrainian military ambulance, exactly where Taras had told her it would be. She ran towards it and stepped into the cab, discarding the jacket of her Russian GRU uniform and slipping on the jacket of a Ukrainian military medic. As she turned the ambulance she saw the aircraft carrier
Moskva
heave a huge sigh that released another wall of flame, then it keeled over to one side and rolled into ten metres of water.

F
ROM A WINDOW of a house in the foothills behind the city, Laszlo watched the pyrotechnic disaster unfold in the harbour below. First a rust bucket of a ship exploding in the main lane of the harbour, then the train hurtling towards the
Moskva
and the carrier’s total destruction. In the moments before the train’s impact with the carrier he focused on the train itself as it began its apocalyptic race to mutual destruction and from the window of the engine’s cab he saw a figure hurl itself and land hard on the concrete quay. He saw the GRU cap roll away as the figure itself expertly went into a crouch and a roll to lessen the brutal impact. Then he saw the figure rise up, temporarily dazed and scraping her hair back under the cap and he knew it was her. His face twisted in fury and he shouted at Eric to get another set of binoculars from the table behind them and train it on the figure, running now, swerving along the quay towards the steel gates of the exit from the protected zone. Then Laszlo saw the explosion at the gates and furiously trained the binoculars on to the swirls of smoke billowing outside them to see in a patch of clearer vision, and still running through falling debris, the figure still there, and escaping.

When Eric had her in his sights, Laszlo told him to keep her there and to radio her movements. He unlocked a door into a back room, summoned Logan from the bed he was lying on and reading a newspaper, and half dragged him from the chair. Then he took a spare gun from his coat pocket and jammed it into Logan’s hands.

‘What’s happened?’ Logan said laconically. ‘A nuclear attack?’

‘This is your moment of glory, Logan,’ Laszlo snarled. ‘We have her. Follow me.’

The two men ran down the stairs to a Cherokee jeep outside. Claude started the engine, looked in surprise at the gun in Logan’s hand, checked with Laszlo for instructions, and revved the jeep through the gears as they hurtled down the hill.

‘To the harbour,’ Laszlo screamed at him.

His radio crackled and Eric’s voice came clear over the headpiece. ‘Follow it as far as you can,’ Laszlo shouted in return. ‘Then follow us.’

The jeep raced around two curves in the steeply falling street to see the embankment ahead.

‘It’s a Ukrainian military ambulance,’ Laszlo said, quieter now. ‘And it’s heading west.’

Once they were on to the embankment, Claude drove the jeep up on to pavements and on to the wrong side of the road, past oncoming military and fire vehicles until, at a distance of some four hundred yards, they saw the rear of the ambulance travelling at a steady speed towards the end of the harbour where the sea finally ended and abutted the city. It followed the curving road around towards the north side.

‘Bring the other car,’ Laszlo shouted into the radio to Eric again. ‘She’s going to the north side. Cut off the route from the top of the city if you have time. Keep your radio on.’

But by the time Eric had got the second car on to the road that descended at an angle above the embankment, the ambulance was round the corner of the harbour and heading at greater speed along the north side. Behind it, the jeep travelled fast enough to gain a little without alerting Anna to the fact that she was being followed.

Halfway around the north of the harbour, the ambulance took a sudden right turn, up a street that climbed away from the sea. The jeep followed and Laszlo radioed again to Eric, giving him the track of the ambulance.

The jeep was now two hundred yards away from the ambulance and Anna caught it in her mirror.

‘She must be heading for the military hospital,’ Logan said, bemused. ‘Why do you think it’s her? Why would she be driving an ambulance to the military hospital, for Chrissakes!’

‘Never mind why. It’s her. Eric saw her getting into it.’

‘Unless there are two ambulances,’ Logan replied.

But then, as the jeep began to gain again on the ambulance, he saw her hair free from the cap and knew it was her.

‘Load up,’ Laszlo said quietly. ‘But shoot to wound, to disable, not to kill. The Russians want her alive.’

Ahead of the jeep, the ambulance swung to the left up the incline of a hairpin bend and suddenly it was broadside on to the following jeep. Logan saw Anna level the barrel of the Contender on to the ledge of the door and fire. There was an ear-splitting crack in the jeep. The bullet made a neat hole in the windscreen, the jeep veered violently to the right across the road and bounced against an earth bank, ricocheting back and twisting on itself so that by the time it reached the bend it was facing in the opposite direction to that in which it needed to go, the rear tyres squealing against tarmac and the smell of rubber rising into the car. Claude screamed at the wheel. His left arm hung uselessly by his side and he was fighting the spinning steering wheel using only his right hand.

Laszlo grabbed the wheel and steadied it, the tail-spinning slowed, and Claude gunned the accelerator up the hill.

‘The bitch! The bitch shot me!’

Ahead of them the ambulance swung up and around another bend and in the rearview mirror Laszlo saw the black Toyota truck right behind them, Eric at the wheel, his face gripped with a stone rage.

‘Wrap this around his arm,’ Laszlo shouted at Logan in the back and handed him a white silk scarf.

‘Jesus!’ Claude bit his lip and the blood ceased pumping where the scarf tightened around his bicep. The jeep had fallen back after the encounter but now they were gaining again when they saw the grim façade of the military hospital on a rise in the hill above them.

In the ambulance Anna reloaded the Contender. Ahead of her she too saw the hospital and prayed that Larry and Taras and the others had made it. But still, when she was five hundred yards below the hospital, she knew the ambulance wasn’t going to make it. In the mirror, she saw the jeep and another car behind it gaining all the time. And from the windows of both cars she saw gun barrels levelled at the ambulance and she knew now that her only chance was to fight.

As she swung the ambulance sharply to the right she spun the wheel back until the vehicle screamed on its rear wheels and suddenly it was facing the way she had come up and the two cars slowed to a halt, one beside the other, blocking any route to her from above or to anyone coming up from below. She saw the doors swing open on both sides of the cars for some slim protection and a man from the second car dipped below the sill and ran into the cover of an earth bank. And then she saw Logan.

At the sight of him, Anna was gripped by the cold anger of revenge, but she was enraged not just by him but by Burt too, for allowing Logan to jeopardise everything and all of their lives. At some point, they’d all warned, cajoled and almost threatened Burt on the subject of Logan. She couldn’t believe that Burt – out of some uncharacteristic generosity of spirit – really wished to give him every chance at redemption, or that in some way he even saw much in Logan worth redeeming. She was distracted now at the sight of him and the first bullet from a pistol in the jeep thwacked its way through the dashboard of the ambulance and missed her by an inch.

Anna rolled on to the floor of the ambulance cab and reached up to open the connecting door to the back. She crawled through and cautiously opened the rear doors. The first thing she saw was Larry and Adam, who had heard shots from higher up the road. Their short machine pistols were drawn. She silently motioned them with her hand to take cover and held up four fingers to indicate the number of assailants. The two of them fanned to either side of the road and, once away from the cover of the ambulance, rolled behind earth banks and began to crawl down the hill.

Logan slid painfully out of the jeep below the window, knowing that the car’s panels would offer little defence against Anna’s Contender. He began to retreat to the rear of the car, crouching and facing forwards all the time. He saw Laszlo indicate to Eric to move up behind the earth bank towards the rear of the ambulance. Then he saw Laszlo himself drop over the other side of the road, taking advantage of the lull in any sight of Anna. And as he stopped now, seated on the road and with his back pressed against the bumper of the jeep, his gun cradled and loaded in both his hands, and a bead of sweat making its way between his eyes, his mind took one of its revolutions that had always – as long as he could remember back to childhood – spun his senses from confusion to clarity or clarity to confusion. But this time it was the former. Through the turmoil and resentments of the past, through the unnameable grief at the waste of his existence, and from the depths of his self-tortured soul, emerged a clear vision of what he had to do.

His eyes blurred for a brief moment, but he knew he could rely on the cold and deadly killer inside him that had got him into Russia two years before when he had killed the KGB-trained Moscow mafioso who had butchered Anna’s husband, Finn. His hand was steady, his heart was still and hard and the clarity that now burned in his mind was like a drug that swept conflicting thoughts from his head and left one clear and conscious sliver of knowledge remaining. All that he had done – from his years in the CIA and then his abandonment by them, from his days as a mercenary collector and seller of secrets and his original betrayal of Anna, from his restless and inconclusive sojourn at Cougar under Burt’s eye – all his confused and hopeless past, in fact – could be wiped away by this sliver of knowledge. The confusion that had led him to even think – let alone suggest and act upon the suggestion – of betraying Anna a second time, to Laszlo and the Russians, was swept away. The only thing that remained in Logan’s mind was that he had to save her.