The John Milton Series: Books 1-3 (8 page)

“It’s done.”

The unfinished room was full of the smell of burnt powder. Milton pushed himself backward on his toes and his forearms, moving away from the window. He swept the six spent shell cases into a pile. He scooped them into his hands and dropped them into his pocket. They were hot to the touch.

“How many?”

“Five,” Milton said.

“But you only shot six times. You hit five?”

Milton nodded.

“Extraordinary.”

Milton indicated the rifle. “I just point and shoot.”

“That is a painful lesson for them to learn. And in their own building.”

Milton said nothing.

“We must go,” Su-Yung said. “They will close down the area. We must not be here when that happens. Your cover will not stand up to scrutiny.”

Milton came to his knees and stood up. He closed the plastic sheeting again, feeding the ties through the corresponding eyelets and tightening them. There was no sign that he had ever even been here. He wrapped the rifle in the blanket again, and they made their way back down the stairwell. The garage was still deserted, gloomy and silent, although the sound of sirens was audible from outside. Su-Yung went to the van, but when she turned back to Milton, she looked concerned.

“What is it?”

“Kun was supposed to meet us here. He was going to drive you out of the city.”

“He’s been delayed?”

“No, he would not allow that to happen. My brother is a very dependable man. I am afraid that he must have been arrested.” She frowned, composing herself, and then set her face with a stern expression. “It is no matter. I know where you need to go. I will drive you.” She opened the door and pulled herself inside. “Quickly. We cannot wait.”

Milton tossed the rifle inside and got in after it, sliding the side door closed. Su-Yung reversed and, driving with particular care, drove them up the ramp and out onto the street. Milton risked a glance out of the window: the crowd from the square was beginning to disperse, hundreds of people choking the pavements, some of them walking in the road. There was no sign that anything was amiss. The noise of his six shots would have been absorbed by the clamour of the parade. Milton doubted that these people would ever know what had just taken place three hundred feet above their heads; the regime would suppress the news, replacement generals would be promoted to fill the spots vacated by the dead, and little would change. But those men would know, now, that they were not safe, not even in the redoubt of their own capital.

Milton sat quietly in the back, shielded from observation. He knew that if they were stopped, it would be almost certain that he would be seen, and if that happened, there would be more bloodshed. He laid down the sniper rifle and collected the M-4 instead. He popped the magazine free and checked the load. He slid it back into the port and punched it home with the heel of his hand. Then, he took the tracking device from his pocket. It was small, about half the size of a smartphone, and would transmit his location and receive the location of his destination via the American military’s GPS satellite network. It was accurate to a metre, and the battery was good for a week. That ought to be long enough. He thumbed the switch, and a red light glowed to signify that the unit was active.

Su-Yung drove on.

MILTON KILLED the engine of the boat and let it drift. He was two miles off the eastern coast, drifting through a thick blanket of sea mist. He had initially thought that the weather had been kind, shielding him from view as he put out from the tiny inlet near to Jungsan in Pyongyang Province. On two occasions he had heard the engines of old Russian-built MiGs overhead, and both times the jets had curved away with no indication that he had been seen. Now, though, the fog was less helpful. It blinded him, too, and he needed to see where he was going so that he could make his rendezvous.

It had taken him and Su-Yung two days to reach the coast. The first day was the worst, crawling through the city until they found quieter roads where they could travel more quickly without causing suspicion. They found a deserted barn near Taedong and sheltered there until darkness had fallen, and then set off again. They travelled only at night, driving carefully, the van’s lights off, the M-4 laid out across his lap and the 9mm thrust into the waistband of his jeans. There had been several moments where he had been sure they were about to be discovered. The worst was the army jeep that had bounded along the main road just as they had turned off it. The driver had stopped at the beginning of the bridge that spanned the creek they had just crossed, the spotter in the back scanning the landscape with a pair of infra-red binoculars. A big .30 calibre machine gun was mounted on the back of the jeep; if they saw them, he knew that that monster would chew them up. Su-Yung and Milton were quiet, hardly breathing, but the soldiers did not see them. They moved away after a long five minutes, and they did not come across them again.

The North Korean landscape recalled the black brushstrokes of Oriental paintings. They passed through areas that were strikingly beautiful, reminding Milton of the American Pacific Northwest, yet these gentle hills and plains were washed out, as if the colour had been bleached away by the poverty. There were the dark greens of the firs, junipers, and spruce offset against the milky grey of the granite peaks. The paddy fields were brown and insipid at this time of year. Everything was yellow and brown, the colour leached away and faded. There was no signage on the roads, and he saw only a handful of cars, just sickly oxen lowing in their pastures, the ploughs they were expected to pull waiting alongside.

The next night they reached Jungsan. It was a small fishing village, and they had found the boat that Kun had arranged for him without difficulty. Su-Yung waited at the jetty as he embarked, transferring his weapons into the wheelhouse. Her face was blank, austere, and he knew that she was thinking of her brother. She waved him off as he started the engine and put out to sea. Milton had tried to persuade her to head north, to China, but it was a pointless exercise. She had decided to go back to the city to look for Kun. She was determined, and she would not give him up.

Milton relied on the tracking beacon to guide him to the exfiltration point. It had been silent for the first few hours, but then it had started to chirp. It sounded regularly now, a low buzz every few seconds. He knew he was close, but he couldn’t see where he was supposed to be going.

He thought, then, that he saw a hulking shape to port, but the mist rolled in even thicker, and he doubted himself. The temperature was icy, and the journey had chilled him to the bone, his teeth chattering helplessly. He cocked his head, listening. All he could hear was the slow lap of the water against the prow of the boat, the buzzing of the beacon and, he fancied, the mournful boom of a foghorn in the direction of the shore.

A voice away to his right. He held his breath, listening hard. The voice came again, distorted in the mist, and he pulled on the oars, nudging the skiff around in the direction that he guessed it was coming from. He saw a dull glow, a bloom of fuzzy light a hundred yards to his right. He pulled on the right oar, turning the skiff again, and made for it. He heard his own name being called, loudly, and then the wind picked up, a gust of ten or twelve knots, the sounds blown away. He pulled the oars harder, increasing his speed. The fulgid glow was extinguished and quickly replaced by a powerful spotlight.

“I’m here,” he yelled out, his voice weak and unreal. “Over here!”

A long, low shape, the deepest black and enormously large, formed itself from out of the mist ahead of him. He saw the raised conning tower and the sleekly curved sides of the hull where they met the crashing waves. As he grew closer, he could discern the shape of the ship: a long, fattened cigar, three hundred feet from port to stern. HMS
Ambush
had been positioned off the coast for a week, waiting for its twin optronic masts to detect the telltale signal of his tracker. The skiff bumped up against the side of the submarine, and a rope was tossed down. Milton fished it out of the icy sea, fastened it to the gunwale and pulled himself up. He grabbed the mittened hand that reached down for him. He could see the gold leafing on the peak of a Navy cap beneath the fur trimming of a parka hood.

“Good evening, sir,” the man called as Milton clambered aboard the hull. “How was your trip?”

“I’ve had better. What’s the news?”

“It’d be fair to say you’ve created quite a stir.”

Milton negotiated the hatch and followed the officer down into the guts of the submarine. The steady pulse of the engines started, the anchor chain roared back into the aft main ballast tank, and the
Ambush
started to submerge beneath the waters of the quiet bay.

THE ROAD THROUGH THE FOREST was tranquil, the gentle quiet embroidered by the gurgling of a mountain rill and the chirruping of the birds in the canopy of trees overhead. The
route forestière de la Combe d’Ire
was potholed and narrow, often passable by just one car at a time. Evergreen pine forests clustered tightly on either side, pressing a damp gloom onto the road that was dispelled by warm sunlight wherever the trees had been chopped back. The misty slopes of the massif of the Montagne de Charbon stretched above the treeline, ribs of rock and stone running down through the vegetation. The road followed a careful route up the flank of the mountain, turning sharply to the left and right and sometimes switching back on itself as it traced the safest path upwards. The road crossed and recrossed the stream, and the humpback bridge here was constructed from ancient red bricks, held together as much by the damp lichen that clung to it as by its disintegrating putty. The bridge was next to a small enclosure signed as a car park, although that was putting it at its highest; it was little more than a lay-by hewn from the hillside, a clearing barely large enough to fit four cars side by side. Forestry reserve notices warned of “wild animals” and “hunters.”

It was a quiet and isolated spot, the outside world excluded almost as if by the closing of a door.

Milton had parked his Renault there, nudged against the shoulder of the mountain. It was a nondescript hire car; he had chosen it because it was unremarkable. He had reversed into the space, leaving the engine running as he stepped out and made his way around to the boot. He unlocked and opened it and looked down at the bundle nestled in the car’s small storage space. He unfolded the edges of the blanket to uncover the assault rifle that had been left at the dead drop the previous night. It was an HK53 carbine with integrated suppressor, the rifle that the SAS often used when stealth was as important as stopping power. Milton lifted the rifle from the boot and pressed a fresh twenty-five-round magazine into the breech. He opened the collapsible stock and took aim, pointing down the middle of the road. Satisfied that the weapon was functioning correctly, he made his way towards the bridge and rested it in the undergrowth, out of sight.

Milton had scouted the area and knew it well. To the north, the road eventually led to Saint-Jorioz, a medium-sized tourist resort that gathered along the shore of Lake Annecy. The descent to the south led to the small village of Chevaline. The village made its living from farming, but that was supplemented by renting the picturesque chalet farmhouses to the tourists who came for cycling and hiking. Milton had stayed in just such a chalet for the past three days. He had spent his time scouting the area, departing on his bike early in the morning and returning late at night. He had kept a low profile, staying in the chalet apart from those trips out.

Milton heard the engine of the BMW long before he saw it. He collected the rifle and slipped behind the trunk of an oak, hiding himself from the road but still able to observe it. The wine-coloured estate car was in second gear, struggling a little with the steep camber of the road. It emerged from the sharp right-hand turn, its lights illuminating a path through the gloom.

The car slowed and turned in towards the Renault. Milton held his breath, his pulse ticking up, and slipped his index finger through the trigger guard of the rifle. The driver parked alongside and switched off the engine. Milton could hear music from the interior of the car. The passenger-side door opened, and the muffled music became clearer: French pop, disposable and inoffensive. The passenger bent down and spoke sharply into the car, and the music was silenced. For a moment all Milton could hear was the crunch of the man’s shoes on the gravel, the rushing of the water, and the wind in the leaves. He tightened his grip on the rifle and concentrated on keeping his breathing even and regular.

The driver’s side door opened, and a tall, dark-skinned woman stepped outside.

Milton recognised both of them. The passenger was Yehya al Moussa. The driver was Sameera Najeeb.

He stepped out from behind the trunk and brought the HK53 to bear. He flicked the selector to automatic and fired off a volley of shots. The bullets struck Najeeb in the gut, perforating her liver and lungs. She put her hand to her breast, confusion spreading across her face, and then pivoted and fell back against the side of the car. Najeeb shrieked, moving quickly, ducking down beneath the line contour of the car. Milton took two smooth sidesteps to his right to open up the angle again and squeezed off another burst. The scientist was trying to get back into the car; the bullets tattooed his body in a line from throat to crotch.

The fusillade sounded around the trees for a moment. Frightened birds exploded into the air on wingbeats that sounded like claps. The echo of the reports died and faded away, and then, short moments after the brutal outburst of violence, all was quiet again: the wind rustled through the trees, the water chimed beneath the bridge, a nightingale called from high above.