Kill Four Page 16

  I spoke without feeling. “Relax, it’s in back of those hills up ahead.”

  “Don’t try nothing stupid. You don’t want make enemy of Pakhan.”

  “Chill, friend, don’t start throwing threats around. You’ve complicated things enough already. The last thing we need is a vendetta with the Russian mob. You’ll get your money.”

  He seemed to relax. I followed the track for a couple of miles around the back of the hills, then pulled into a narrow valley between two large rocks. There I killed the engine and climbed out. Njal climbed out the other side and the Russians clambered down after us, looking nervous. Gregor started to say, “Where is…”

  I interrupted him and spoke to Njal. “You want to get your laptop?”

  As I said it, I pulled my Sig from my waistband and put two slugs through Vlad’s two-inch brow. They erupted out the back of his head, spraying what brains he had over the pale sand.

  Gregor’s reaction took me by surprise. It was instant. He seemed to levitate and his right foot lashed out and kicked at Njal’s head. Njal weaved back and raised his arms, but it wasn’t enough. The kick connected and Njal went down.

  The Land Rover was between us. I took aim and fired, but he had already ducked and rolled toward the back of the truck. I ran to intercept him. As I got to the rear, he sprang at me in a roundhouse kick. I ducked. He landed and instantly spun into a back kick that caught my wrist and knocked the gun from my hand. He didn’t pause. He lashed out again in two front kicks that forced me back. Then he dropped and spun and knocked my feet from under me. I crashed onto my back, knocking the wind from my lungs, and my chest went into a spasm of pain. Gregor didn’t wait. He sprang up, dropped his right knee on my chest and drew his fist back for the death blow to my head.

  I didn’t think. Wheezing for breath, I grabbed a handful of the dry, gray dirt and threw it in his face. He snarled and his hands went to his eyes. I smashed my fist into his balls and as he staggered back keening, I struggled to my feet, drawing deep, painful breaths. He was still blinded, half running backward, trying to get the dirt from his eyes. I went after him. He heard me and as I drove my fist into his jaw, he weaved. I caught him a glancing blow. It didn’t put out his lights, but he went down on his back. I pulled my knife from my boot, stepped on his left hand and dropped my knee on his chest. But he wasn’t an easy kill. As I rammed the Fairbairn & Sykes through his esophagus and out through his jugular, he rammed his own hunting knife into my thigh. The pain was intense and I let out an involuntary cry. As he coughed and gurgled and the death spasm shook his body, I staggered to my feet and stumbled back, clutching at my leg.

  I wrenched out his knife and stood, with my right leg trembling violently, and hobbled back toward the Land Rover. The wound wasn’t spouting blood, so I knew he’d missed the major blood vessels, but twice I fell when my leg refused to hold my weight. Eventually, hopping and cussing, I made it to the hood of the truck and leaned my weight on it. Njal was on all fours, vomiting into the dirt. I watched him a moment as he tried to stand, feeling the dull agony of my wound throbbing up my leg and into my brain. I could not afford to lose consciousness. We had to get back to camp, and Njal was concussed and probably couldn’t drive.

  I said, “You need to kick dirt into that vomit,” and knew I wasn’t thinking logically.

  After a moment, he raised his head to look at me. “What?”

  “You need to degrade the DNA.”

  He nodded and pulled himself to his feet.

  I added, “Can you drive?”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know if I can use my right leg. He stabbed me.”

  His eyes were dull and unfocused. “You left any blood?”

  I shook my head. “No. I got the knife and so far it’s all sticking to my pants. But we need to get out of here. I’m not focusing. Not thinking straight.”

  “Yeah? I can’t see straight. Motherfocker had a hell of a kick.”

  “OK, I can drive. Get in, Njal. We have to go now.”

  He pulled open the passenger door and I limped around to the driver’s side. We hauled ourselves in and sat for a moment. I could feel myself going cold and starting to shiver and I knew shock was setting in. I could not afford that. I pointed at the glove compartment.

  “Get the whiskey.”

  He grunted and nodded, pulled the bottle out and handed it to me. I took a large slug and it helped. I pulled the cigarettes from my pocket with shaking hands and lit up. Then I took off my shirt, bound it around the cut and between us, we pulled it as tight as it would go, then knotted it. After that, shaking badly, I fired up the truck, turned it around and headed back toward the N7.

  We didn’t talk again until we’d left the road and we were approaching the camp. Then Njal said, “This complicates things.”

  “We can still do it.”

  “Of course…” But he didn’t sound very convinced.

  We got back to camp, hid the Land Rover and staggered out of the cab. Njal found the first aid kit, cut away my trouser leg and exposed the gash in my thigh. He inspected it and glanced at my face. “It is deep. You are lucky he missed any major veins or artery. Two inches down and you are dead.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Take some more whiskey. I’m gonna put some surgical spirits on it.”

  I took a swig and he poured the spirits on. It hurt like hell and he started wiping it with cotton wool. I swore violently under my breath and he pulled the sutures from the box.

  “I’m gonna stitch it. It’s gonna hurt.”

  “I know,” I said malevolently. “I’ve done this before a few times.”

  He worked fast and efficiently. I tried to keep my yelling under my breath and got through half the bottle of whiskey. When he was done, he smeared the wound with antiseptic cream and bandaged it. Then he gave me a handful of painkillers to take on top of the whiskey, and told me to go and sleep.

  “It is two thirty. You got nine hours. If you’re gonna live through the week, you godda be functioning tonight. So sleep. I’m gonna go get sick in a hole. Then I’m gonna sleep too. I’ll call you at twelve. Then we go do this, and go home.”

  I nodded. “Yeah, OK, thanks, Njal.”

  He walked away. I heard him digging, then I heard him retching, and after that there was nothing.

  * * *

  I was already awake when Njal came to get me at twelve. I was sweating and shivering, and by the way he looked at me, I must have been pale and sickly too. Before he could ask, I said, “I’m OK.”

  He handed me a flask of hot coffee and some chocolate, and we loaded the truck with all the stuff we were going to need and clambered into the Land Rover. My leg was stiff and I was getting powerful shooting pains that either meant I was healing or getting gangrene, but whining about it wasn’t going to help and I needed Njal focused on the mission, not on me.

  It was three miles as the crow flies from our camp to the site, but driving around the huge rock hills where we were hidden, some of which were two thousand feet high, turned those three miles into just over eight. And the going was slow, over deep sand and sudden rocky outcrops that meant taking further detours. The moon was already setting by then, and we dared not use the headlamps. So poor visibility was an added difficulty.

  After just over an hour of creeping, picking our way between the vast hulks of rock and grinding and sliding over loose, white sand and gravel, we finally came to the river. There we slowed and climbed down to inspect the terrain. We found to our surprise that there were fields of crops running along the riverbank, and, to our relief, there was a long, straight road of beaten earth skirting the fields. We followed the road for three miles east, keeping to a steady twenty-five MPH, and skirted two huge headlands—two black behemoths rising against the dark, turquoise sky—with the river glinting black and silver on our left.

  But after ten or twelve minutes, the road simply vanished into the river. We had a vast, black wall of stone on the right, and the river on the
left and in front of us. Our path was cut off. We climbed out again and walked to the river’s edge. The pain in my leg was excruciating and I could feel a warm trickle of blood on my thigh. I ignored it, knowing I had no choice but to hold it together until we were across the border, and tried to think.

  Njal walked on and waded out into the black, slow-moving water. The dying light of the moon lapped around his inky legs and the stars danced on the small waves. He looked back at me. “It feels solid.” He waded on a few paces more and the water swirled around his shins. It was less than knee-deep. He stood looking for a while, then turned and came sloshing back. The light of the moon was dull on his face, casting his eyes into black shadow.

  “Underneath the water, it is the road. The river is a little flooded, but the ground is hard. It is maybe half a mile, then we have road again. We take it slow and careful, we’ll be OK.”

  I nodded and we returned to the truck, climbed in and pulled the doors closed. He put it in gear and we rolled into the water. For ten or fifteen minutes, we proceeded slowly and carefully, sometimes as much as three feet deep in the river, but after about a quarter of an hour, it started to grow more shallow and the steep, rock face on our right began to recede. Then the path emerged again. Njal slowed to walking pace and we began to curl inland, around the massive, black headland. Finally the huge, sandy esplanade opened up on our right: two miles of flat, white dust, and at its center the eerie, half constructed form of the power station. But it wasn’t as we had expected to find it. Because the entire site was floodlit and the place was crawling with armed guards in pairs, patrolling the inside of the perimeter fence.

  Njal spun the wheel, pulled in close to the rock face and killed the engine. We both sat for a moment, staring. Outside the perimeter fence, the darkness seemed deeper, darker, by contrast with the spotlights inside the perimeter. This at least could be to our advantage. But once inside, there would be nowhere for us to hide. We would be spotted instantly.

  After a moment, Njal sighed and said, “We should have foreseen this. They increased security because of the hit on Knysna.”

  “We did foresee it, Njal, there was just fuck all we could do about it.”

  I glanced over at the river, then touched his arm and pointed. In the blackness I could just make out a form, darker than the darkness, resting on the water. “What the hell is that?”

  He frowned, squinting. “A boat?”

  “It’s a damn big boat. The river’s not deep enough for a boat that size… And how the hell did it get here? The river’s not navigable.”

  He shook his head. “I can’t make it out.”

  Then it dawned on me. I got a flash in my memory and saw it clearly, flying over my head, over the mansion and into the lagoon. “It’s a sea plane.”

  “A sea plane…?” He stared at me. “Shit, what does it mean?”

  “I don’t know. It flew into Knysna when I killed Pi and Ro. I don’t like it.”

  We watched it a while longer. Eventually, he shrugged. “It is not doing anything. Maybe it brought some of these guards. Either way, we got a bigger problem, Lacklan.” He looked back at the floodlit site. “It’s gonna be almost impossible. We are maybe six hundred yards from the reactor building. A mile from where you want to blow an entrance on the far side of the fence, half a mile from the buildings and the site office you want to burn. The whole goddamn place is floodlit and you can hardly walk. We need to rethink how we do this.”

  I stared at the enormous, illuminated area, surrounded by chain link fences and barbed wire, with the guards patrolling inside. I shook my head. “The time and place of our death was decided long ago by the Norn, remember? If it is tonight, then it will be tonight, whatever we do. So we man up and if we go down, we go down fighting.”

  He nodded. “I like that. But I also want to blow this fuckin’ place.”

  I nodded. “OK, we won’t go down easy. Here’s what we do. When this pair of guards passes, you crawl up to the fence and you place a whole two pounds of C4 against the vertical support. That’s going to be our point of ingress and egress, close to the truck. So we leave the rucksack here, in the truck, instead of on the south-eastern side as we had originally planned.”

  “OK…”

  “Then, between us, we take the C4 down along the riverbank, under the cover of the reeds, and we move in, behind the site office and the buildings, when we are out of view of the guards at the perimeter fence. You still with me?”

  “Yuh, makes sense.”

  “We place the charges and the gasoline at the back, out of sight, and return the way we came.”

  “OK, it might work.”

  “So, this is the sequence: we detonate this near charge at the fence and follow up with the RPGs and your TEA rockets, until we have blown a hole big enough in the fence—a few seconds—then we blow the buildings on the far side and set fire to them. It will look like the main attack is there and that will draw the guards; then we go in in the Land Rover…”

  He grinned and started to laugh. “I like this one. Yuh, that’s good. Come on, let’s do it.”

  So we did.

  SEVENTEEN

  It was slow, difficult and painful.

  The first step was for Njal to inch his way very slowly to the perimeter fence while I kept him covered with the 416. He was aided by the fact that the glare from the spots on the site made the darkness outside the perimeter almost impenetrable by contrast. And by the time he was within the area of light, he was concealed by the large rolls of barbed wire. He positioned the two cakes of C4 as best he could and managed to crawl back without being seen.

  Then we shared out the remaining twenty-eight pounds of explosive and two gallons of gasoline, and ran down to the river—Njal ran, I hobbled. The pain in my leg was intense, but I had no choice but to assimilate it and go with it. When we got to the riverbank, the going was a little easier, and we had the cover of dense bulrushes and what looked like thick sugar cane plantations.

  We covered about a mile in just over twenty minutes and approached the site office and the outhouses from the rear, with the cover of the rocks that rose up to about one and a half thousand feet behind them. There was a total of six buildings all together, all constructed of wood: the main, two-story site offices, and then a cluster of small office buildings, sheds, storehouses and one large, hangar-like construction which I figured housed machinery and perhaps fuel.

  We took a minute to rest, then we distributed the C4 to maximum effect. I placed two pounds against the back wall of the hangar, hoping it would ignite any fuel on the inside, and we placed the two gallons of gas against the wall of the office building, with enough charge to ignite it but not completely vaporize it.

  By the time we’d finished, I was exhausted and I could barely move my right leg, but we hobbled back under cover of the stone hills and back along the river, in the shelter of the cane and the reeds.

  Finally, we got back to the Land Rover and pulled the HK416 RPG launcher from the back of the truck. I felt I was going to pass out and took a minute to lean against the hood, feeling the cold night air on my face and listening to the ripple and splash of the river. The moon was gone. I wondered if I was going to die that night. It seemed likely.

  Njal appeared by my side, holding the M202 FLASH rocket launcher and a bottle of whiskey. I took a long pull and it seemed to help. I handed it back to him. He toasted me and said, “See you in Valhalla, my friend. It has been an honor.”

  “Yeah, you too, Njal.”

  He took a swig and put the bottle back in the cab. I took out my cell and we watched the brace of guards approach the corner of the perimeter fence. Njal got on one knee and took aim. As the two men drew level with the two pound charge, I dialed in the code and it exploded instantly, ripping a big hole in the fence, dismembering the guards, but hardly affecting the barbed wire at all. That was a problem. I heard Njal swear and pull the trigger on the launcher. The four rockets erupted from the box, scorched across the da
rkness and exploded in white-hot flames into the fence. He loaded another clip and fired again, and then a third time. Meanwhile, I kept up a steady bombardment of RPGs. By now the wire was incandescent with white-hot flames. He fired a fourth volley and stood, throwing the launcher into the back of the Land Rover.

  I dialed again and across the vast esplanade, beyond the building site, the wooden offices erupted. A fireball exploded through the office building, and a moment later the hangar erupted in a vast ball of black flames and smoke two hundred feet high that engulfed the entire row of buildings. I figured there must have been fuel there after all.

  Njal had the engine running. I swung in and slammed the door, and we thundered toward the incandescent hole in the perimeter fence.

  There was a flash of heat and the screaming, rending sound of steel and wire tearing against the chassis of the Land Rover. Then we were through, in the glare of the spotlights, tearing across the sand toward the fifty foot wall of the base of the pyramid. I had expected a hail of lead, a rain of fire, to be unleashed against us as we burst into the compound, but as we sped toward the eastern face of the building, toward the entrance, all we saw was two dozen guards running away from us, like all hell was breaking loose on their asses. But they weren’t running away, they were running toward the inferno that was the site office and the surrounding buildings. I snarled at Njal: “Slow down, keep behind them.”

  “I got it.”

  They had the gate open at the far end of the compound and were streaming out, shouting instructions at each other. Njal swerved right and rounded the corner of the building, accelerating toward the gaping entrance to the vast site. It was about twenty feet across and within the gap, on the inside, all I could see was acres of concrete, steel girders, cement mixers and all the chaos and paraphernalia of a building site. I heard the brakes complain and we swerved again, ducking inside the enclosed area.